The Stories Of Mary Gordon Part 30

She was very interested in the picture of the heart and she put it under her pillow to sleep with, since no one she knew ever came to put her to bed anymore. Her mother came and got her in the morning, but she wasn't in her own house, she was in the bed next to her cousin Patty. Patty said to her one night, "My mommy says your daddy suffered a lot, but now he's released from suffering. That means he's dead." Lucy said yes, he was, but she didn't tell anyone that the reason she wasn't crying was that he'd either come back or take her with him.

Her aunt Iris, who owned a beauty parlor, took her to B. Altman's and bought her a dark blue dress with a white collar. That's nice, Lucy thought. I'll have a new dress for when I go away with my father. She looked in the long mirror and thought it was the nicest dress she'd ever had.

Her uncle Ted took her to the funeral parlor and he told her that her father would be lying in a big box with a lot of flowers. That's what I'll do, she said. I'll get in the box with him. We used to play in a big box; we called it the tent and we got in and read stories. I will get into the big box. There is my father; that is his silver ring.

She began to climb into the box, but her uncle pulled her away. She didn't argue; her father would think of some way to get her. He would wait for her in her room when it was dark. She would not be afraid to turn the lights out anymore. Maybe he would only visit her in her room; all right, then, she would never go on vacation; she would never go away with her mother to the country, no matter how much her mother cried and begged her. It was February and she asked her mother not to make any summer plans. Her aunt Lena, who lived with them, told Lucy's mother that if she had kids she wouldn't let them push her around, not at age seven. No matter how smart they thought they were. But Lucy didn't care; her father would come and talk to her, she and her mother would move back to the apartment where they lived before her father got sick, and she would only have to be polite to Aunt Lena; she would not have to love her, she would not have to feel sorry for her.

On the last day of school she got the best report card in her cla.s.s. Father Burns said her mother would be proud to have such a smart little girl, but she wondered if he said this to make fun of her. But Sister Trinitas kissed her when all the other children had left and let her mind the statue for the summer; the one with the bottom that screwed off so you could put the big rosaries inside it. n.o.body ever got to keep it for more than one night. This was a good thing. Since her father was gone she didn't know if people were being nice or if they seemed nice and really wanted to make her feel bad later. But she was pretty sure this was good. Sister Trinitas kissed her, but she smelled fishy when you got close up; it was the paste she used to make the Holy Childhood poster. This was good.

"You can take it to camp with you this summer, but be very careful of it."

"I'm not going to camp, Sister. I have to stay at home this summer."

"I thought your mother said you were going to camp."

"No, I have to stay home." She could not tell anybody, even Sister Trinitas, whom she loved, that she had to stay in her room because her father was certainly coming. She couldn't tell anyone about the thorn in her heart. She had a heart, just like her father's, brown in places, blue in places, a muscle the size of a fist. But hers had a thorn in it. The thorn was her father's voice. When the thorn pinched, she could hear her father saying something. "I love you more than anyone will ever love you. I love you more than G.o.d loves you." Tfa'nf went the thorn; he was telling her a story "about a mean old lady named Emmy and a nice old man named Charlie who always had candy in his pockets, and their pretty daughter, Ruth, who worked in the city." But it was harder and harder. Sometimes she tried to make the thorn go thint and she only felt the thick wall of her heart; she couldn't remember the sound of it or the kind of things he said. Then she was terribly far away; she didn't know how to do things, and if her aunt Lena asked her to do something like dust the ledge, suddenly there were a hundred ledges in the room and she didn't know which one and when she said to her aunt which one did she mean when she said ledge: the one by the floor, the one by the stairs, the one under the television, her aunt Lena said she must have really pulled the wool over their eyes at school because at home she was an idiot. And then Lucy would knock something over and Aunt Lena would tell her to get out, she was so clumsy she wrecked everything. Then she needed to feel the thorn, but all she could feel was her heart getting thicker and heavier, until she went up to her room and waited. Then she could hear it. "You are the prettiest girl in a hundred counties and when I see your face it is like a parade that someone made special for your daddy."

She wanted to tell her mother about the thorn, but her father had said that he loved her more than anything, even G.o.d. And she knew he said he loved G.o.d very much. So he must love her more than he loved her mother. So if she couldn't hear him her mother couldn't, and if he wasn't waiting for her in her new room then he was nowhere.

When she came home she showed everyone the statue that Sister Trinitas had given her. Her mother said that was a very great honor: that meant that Sister Trinitas must like her very much, and Aunt Lena said she wouldn't lay any bets about it not being broken or lost by the end of the summer, and she better not think of taking it to camp.

Lucy's heart got hot and wide and her mouth opened in tears.

"I'm not going to camp; I have to stay here."

"You're going to camp, so you stop brooding and moping around. You're turning into a regular little bookworm. You're beginning to stink of books. Get out in the sun and play with other children. That's what you need, so you learn not to trip over your own two feet."

"I'm not going to camp. I have to stay here. Tell her, Mommy, you promised we wouldn't go away."

Her mother took out her handkerchief. It smelled of perfume and it had a lipstick print on it in the shape of her mother's mouth. Lucy's mother wiped her wet face with the pink handkerchief that Lucy loved.

"Well, we talked it over and we decided it would be best. It's not a real camp. It's Uncle Ted's camp, and Aunt Bitsie will be there, and all your cousins and that nice dog Tramp that you like."

"I won't go. I have to stay here."

"Don't be ridiculous," Aunt Lena said. "There's nothing for you to do here but read and make up stories."

"But it's for boys up there and I'll have nothing to do there. All they want to do is shoot guns and yell and run around. I hate that. And I have to stay here."

"That's what you need. Some good, healthy boys to toughen you up. You're too G.o.dd.a.m.n sensitive."

Sensitive. Everyone said that. It meant she cried for nothing. That was bad. Even Sister Trinitas got mad at her once and told her to stop her crocodile tears. They must be right. She would like not to cry when people said things that she didn't understand. That would be good. They had to be right. But the thorn. She went up to her room. She heard her father's voice on the telephone. Thint, it went. It was her birthday, and he was away in Was.h.i.+ngton. He sang "Happy Birthday" to her. Then he sang the song that made her laugh and laugh: "Hey, Lucy Turner, are there any more at home like you?" because of course there weren't. And she mustn't lose that voice, the thorn. She would think about it all the time, and maybe then she would keep it. Because if she lost it, she would always be clumsy and mistaken; she would always be wrong and falling.

Aunt Lena drove her up to the camp. Scenery. That was another word she didn't understand. "Look at that gorgeous scenery," Aunt Lena said, and Lucy didn't know what she meant. "Look at that bird," Aunt Lena said, and Lucy couldn't see it, so she just said, "It's nice." And Aunt Lena said, "Don't lie. You can't even see it, you're looking in the wrong direction. Don't say you can see something when you can't see it. And don't spend the whole summer crying. Uncle Ted and Aunt Bitsie are giving you a wonderful summer for free. So don't spend the whole time crying. n.o.body can stand to have a kid around that all she ever does is cry."

Lucy's mother had said that Aunt Lena was very kind and very lonely because she had no little boys and girls of her own and she was doing what she thought was best for Lucy. But when Lucy told her father that she thought Aunt Lena was not very nice, her father had said, "She's ignorant." Ignorant. That was a good word for the woman beside her with the dyed black hair and the big vaccination scar on her fat arm.

"Did you scratch your vaccination when you got it, Aunt Lena?"

"Of course not. What a stupid question. Don't be so G.o.dd.a.m.n rude. I'm not your mother, ya know. Ya can't push me around."

Thint, went the thorn. "You are ignorant," her father's voice said to Aunt Lena. "You are very, very ignorant."

Lucy looked out the window.

When Aunt Lena's black Chevrolet went down the road, Uncle Ted and Aunt Bitsie showed her her room. She would stay in Aunt Bitsie's room, except when Aunt Bitsie's husband came up on the weekends. Then Lucy would have to sleep on the couch.

The people in the camp were all boys, and they didn't want to talk to her. Aunt Bitsie said she would have to eat with the counselors and the K.P.s. Aunt Bitsie said there was a nice girl named Betty who was fourteen who did the dishes. Her brothers were campers.

Betty came out and said h.e.l.lo. She was wearing a sailor hat that had a picture of a boy smoking a cigarette. It said "Property of Bobby." She had braces on her teeth. Her two side teeth hung over her lips so that her mouth never quite closed.

"My name's Betty," she said. "But everybody calls me Fang. That's on account of my fangs." She opened and closed her mouth like a dog. "In our crowd, if you're popular, you get a nickname. I guess I'm pretty popular."

Aunt Bitsie walked in and told Betty to set the table. She snapped her gum as she took out the silver. "Yup, Mrs. O'Connor, one thing about me is I have a lot of interests. There's swimming and boys, and tennis, and boys, and reading, and boys, and boys, and boys, and boys, and boys."

Betty and Aunt Bitsie laughed. Lucy didn't get it.

"What do you like to read?" Lucy asked.

"What?" said Betty.

"Well, you said one of your interests was reading. I was wondering what you like to read."

Betty gave her a fishy look. "I like to read romantic comics. About romances," she said. "I hear you're a real bookworm. We'll knock that outa ya."

The food came in: ham with brown gravy that tasted like ink. Margarine. Tomatoes that a fly settled on. But Lucy could not eat. Her throat was full of water. Her heart was gla.s.sy and too small. And now they would see her cry.

She was told to go up to her room.

That summer Lucy learned many things. She made a birchbark canoe to take home to her mother. Aunt Bitsie made a birchbark sign for her that said "Keep Smiling." Uncle Ted taught her to swim by letting her hold on to the waist of his bathing trunks. She swam onto the float like the boys. Uncle Ted said that that was so good she would get double dessert just like the boys did the first time they swam out to the float. But then Aunt Bitsie forgot and said it was just as well anyway because certain little girls should learn to watch their figures. One night her cousins Larry and Artie carried the dog Tramp in and pretended it had been shot. But then they put it down and it ran around and licked her and they said they had done it to make her cry.

She didn't cry so much now, but she always felt very far away and people's voices sounded the way they did when she was on the sand at the beach and she could hear the people's voices down by the water. A lot of times she didn't hear people when they talked to her. Her heart was very thick now: it was like one of Uncle Ted's boxing gloves. The thorn never touched the thin, inside walls of it anymore. She had lost it. There was no one whose voice was beautiful now, and little that she remembered.

Eileen.

"There's some that just can't take it," Bridget said. "No matter what they do or you do for them, they just don't fit in."

"You certainly were good to her, Kathleen," said Nettie, "when she first came over. No one could have been better when she first came over."

"That was years ago," Kathleen said. "We never kept up with her."

Nora thought of Eileen Foley when she had first come over, twelve years ago, when Nora was eleven and Eileen, twenty-one. They'd had to share a bed, and Kathleen had apologized. "There's no place for her, only here. I don't know what they were thinking of, sending her over, with no one to vouch for her, only the nuns. The Foleys were like that, the devil take the hindmost, every one of them. You'd see why she wanted to get out."

But Nora hadn't minded. She liked Eileen's company, and her body was no intrusion in the bed. Her flesh was pleasant, fragrant. Though she was large, she was careful not to take up too much room. They joked about it. "Great cow that I am, pray G.o.d I don't roll over one fine night and crush you. How'd yer mam forgive me if I should do that."

And they would laugh, excluding Nora's brothers, as they excluded them with all their talk about the future, Eileen's and Nora's both. It was adult talk; the young boys had no place in it. It was female too, but it was different from the way that Nora's mother and aunts, Bridget and Nettie, spoke, because it had belief and hope, and the older women's conversation began with a cheerful, skeptical, accepting resignation and could move- particularly when Bridget took the lead- to a conviction of injustice and impossibility and the inevitable folly of expecting one good thing.

They talked every night about what had happened to Eileen at work. She was a cook at a school for the blind run for the Presentation sisters. It was in the Bronx. In Limerick, she'd worked at the sisters' orphanage; she was grateful they had recommended her over here. She was proud of her work, she liked the people, wors.h.i.+pped the nuns that ran the place. She said she would have loved to be a nun, only for her soft nature. She was right about herself; she had a penchant for small luxuries: lavender sachets to perfume her underclothes, honey-flavored lozenges that came in a tin box with a picture of a beautiful blond child, a clothesbrush with an ivory handle, a hatpin that pushed its point into the dull black felt of Eileen's hat and left behind a b.u.t.terfly of yellow and red stones. She would take these things out secretly and show them first to Nora, so that Nora felt that she possessed them too and considered herself doubly blessed: with the friends.h.i.+p of one so much older and with the pa.s.sion of her observation of these objects she could covet, and could prize but need not own.

The nuns, Eileen told Nora often, had a terrible hard life. They slept on wooden pallets and were silent after dark; they woke at dawn, ate little, and were not permitted to have friends. Not even among each other; no, they had to be particularly on their guard for that. "Particular friends.h.i.+ps, it's called," Eileen told Nora proudly. "They're forbidden particular friends.h.i.+ps." She told Nora she'd learned all this from Sister Mary Rose, who ran the kitchen. It was not her praise that mattered to Eileen, though, but the words of Sister Catherine Benedict, the superior.

"She came up to me once, that quiet, I didn't know she was behind me. I was cutting up some cod for boiling, you know the blind ones have to have soft foods, as they can't cut, of course- and Sister must have been watching me over my shoulder all the time. 'You are particularly careful, Eileen Foley, and the Blessed Mother sees that, and she will reward you, mark my words. A bone left in a piece of fish could mean death for one of the children, so to cut up each piece with the utmost care is like a Corporal Work of Mercy for the poor little souls.'"

Eileen said that Sister Catherine Benedict had come from Galway city. "You could tell she comes from money. But she gave it up. For G.o.d." At Christmastime, Sister had given Eileen a holy picture of her patron saint, Saint Catherine of Siena, and on the back had signed her name with a cross in front of it. Nora and Eileen would look at the picture; it seemed to them a sign of something that they valued but could not find or even name in the world that they inhabited; excellence, simplicity. One day, Eileen promised, she would bring Nora to the home so that she could meet Sister Catherine for herself. But it never happened, there was never time.

Because, really, Eileen hadn't lived with the Derencys very long, six months perhaps. Nora tried to remember how long it was; at twenty-three the seasons of an eleven-year-old seemed illusory: what could possibly have happened then to mark one month from another, or one year? Each day of her adulthood seemed like the dropping down of coins into a slot: a sound fixed, right, and comforting accompanied her aging, the sound of money in the bank. Childhood was no gift to a cripple, she'd often thought, with its emphasis on physical speed, with those interminable hours which required for their filling senseless, interminable games of jumping, running, catching, following, scaling, s.h.i.+nnying, those various and diffuse verbs that spelled her failure. Even now, in her well-cut suit, her perfumed handkerchief shaped like a fan tucked in her pocket, the gold compact she had bought herself with her first wages, even now she could think of those childhood games and bring back once again the fear, the anger, the thin high smell that was the anguish of exclusion. Even now, though her success at Mr. Riordan's law office was breathtaking, even now she could bring back the memory of her body's defeat.

Even now, at twenty-three, as she stood in the kitchen drinking black coffee while her mother cooked and her aunts lounged over their boiled eggs, even now Nora could feel the misery. She thought of Eileen and of the pleasure it had been to have her; one of her few physical pleasures as a child. She thought about Eileen's abundant flesh that seemed to have much more in common with a food than with an object of s.e.xual desire: the white flesh of an apple came to mind or milk, a peach in its first blush of ripeness, the swell of a firm, mild, delicious cheese. Nothing dark, secretive, or inexplicably responsive seemed to be a part of Eileen's body life. And Nora prized Eileen because it seemed to her that Eileen was as definitely cut off from coupling as she, although she could not quite say why. For it was Nora's body's brokenness that always would exclude her from the desiring eye of men, whereas with Eileen it was excessive wholeness that would turn men's eyes away: nothing could be broken into, broken up.

Six months it must have been, thought Nora, that she lived here. After that she moved into the convent. She felt embarra.s.sed, she'd confessed to Nora, to be living with the family. She'd offered money for her board, but Kathleen had refused it. And she hated the remarks that Bridget made about her family. Family pa.s.sion and its underside, the family shame, could make Eileen's high color mottle and her perfect skin appear sickish and damp. She knew what her family was, but after all, she said, they tried their best, their luck had been against them.

"You make your own luck," Bridget had said when Nora tried, just after Eileen had left them, to defend the Foleys. She'd mentioned their bad luck. "Every greenhorn in America came here through nothing but bad luck. If it was good luck that we had, we'd be back home in great fine houses."

"Still there's some like the Foleys that G.o.d's eye doesn't s.h.i.+ne on," said Kathleen.

"G.o.d's eye, my eye, 'tis nothing wrong with them but laziness and drink, the same old song, and no new verses added," Bridget said.

"But what about the mother?" Nettie said. The two sisters looked sharply at her, warning her to silence.

"That was never proved," said Kathleen.

"What was never proved?" eleven-year-old Nora had asked.

"Time enough for you to be knowing that kind of story. Hanging about the way you do, you know far too much as it is," Bridget said.

I know more than you'll know when you're a hundred, Nora wanted to say to her aunt, whom she despised for her bad nature and yet feared. She felt that Bridget blamed her for her leg, as if, if she'd wanted it, she could be outside running with the other children. There was some truth in that, there always was in Bridget's black predictions and malevolent reports. It was the partial truths in what she said that made her dangerous.

It was only recently that they'd explained about Eileen's mother. Nora tried now to remember what the circ.u.mstances might have been that would have made the sisters talk about it. She could not. It wasn't that they'd seen Eileen, they hadn't, not since Nora's high school graduation, which was six years ago now. They had known the Foleys' house, so it was real to them, the news, when it came from her cousin Anna Fogarty, who had stayed on at home. Mrs. Foley, Eileen's mother, who everyone had thought was queer, had burned the house down and she herself and her youngest baby, a boy of six months, had both perished. Everyone believed that she had set the fire. Nora felt she saw it, the fixed face of the mother as her life burned up around her, the green skeleton of the boy baby, left to be gone over like the ruined clothes, the spoons, the pots and pans.

Eileen's father had married again, which just showed, Bridget said, the foolishness of some young girls. All the sisters thought of marriage as a sign of weakness: they made only partial exceptions for themselves. But the young girl who'd married Eileen's father seemed to prove the sisters' point. She'd left her family where she had considered herself unhappy, thinking she was moving out to something better. The parish had helped Jamesie Foley build a new house: that had turned the young girl's head. But what she got for her pains was a drunken husband and a brood of someone else's children whom she tormented until Eileen couldn't bear to see it and left to work in the orphanage in Limerick, where the nuns, knowing her wishes, got the place for her in their house in New York.

The sisters in both convents knew her dreams were for her brother Tom. Tom was twelve years younger than Eileen, the youngest living child. He was wonderfully intelligent, Eileen told Nora, and had an angel's nature. Every penny of her salary she could she put into the bank to bring him over; that was why she took the sisters' offer of her living in the convent instead of with the Derencys, she could save her carfare. That was what she said to the Derencys, but Nora knew there was more to it. Her pride, which couldn't tolerate Kathleen not taking any money. Nora could tell that Eileen wors.h.i.+pped Kathleen. And it troubled her that there was nothing she could do for Kathleen when Kathleen did so much for her.

As Kathleen's life had blurred, Nora's had been pressed into sharp focus. She had wanted to become a teacher, and her teachers encouraged her. Austere and yet maternal Protestants, romantic from the books they read, they treasured the pretty crippled girl with her devotion to the plays of Shakespeare and to Caesar's Gallic Wars, to anything, in fact, that they suggested she should read. Nora had been accepted at the Upstate Normal School on the basis of her grades and of her teachers' letters. But none of them had mentioned Nora's deformity; she'd been born with one leg shorter than the other. She realized they hadn't known, the moment she arrived, nervous to the point of sickness, driven by her nervous mother. How shocked those men were, in the office of the dean, when they beheld her with her high shoe and her crutch. They blamed the teachers. "No one has informed us ... You must see, of course, it's quite impossible ... We must think first about the safety of potential children who might be in your charge. Imagine if there were a fire or a similar emergency..." They talked as if they were reading what they said from a book. They did not look at her. They said that it was most regrettable, but they were sure she understood, and understood that it was no reflection- not-a-tall- on her. They were just sorry she had had to make the trip.

She drove back with her mother in shamed silence, as if she'd been left at the altar and in all her wedding finery was making her way home. That was the way her father behaved, as if she had been jilted. He said he and some of his friends whose names he wouldn't mention would drive themselves up there and teach a lesson to those Yankee b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. It was a free country, he said; you didn't get away with that kind of behavior here. He was very angry at his wife.

"Did you say nothing to them, Kathleen? Did you just walk out with your tail between your legs like some bog trotter thrown off the land by an English thief? Was that the way of it?"

Nora saw her mother's shame. She knew her father was just talk; he would have done no better. She herself had remained silent, and she bore her own shame in her heart. She would not let her mother feel the weight of it.

"I think, you know, Dad, it's a blessing in disguise. I'd make three times the money in an office. You were right, Dad, all along. I should have taken the commercial course."

"I was not right. You went where you belonged, there in the academic. You've twice the brains of any of them. Reading Latin like a priest. French too. I'm that proud of you."

She wanted to tell him that her education had been nothing, foolishness, Latin she was already forgetting, French she couldn't speak, history that meant not one thing to her, plays and poems about nothing to do with her life. She felt contempt, then, for her teachers and the things they stood for. She felt they'd conspired against her and made her look a fool. They could have fought for her against the men who sat behind the desks there in the office of the Normal School. But they did not fight for her, they kept their silence, as she had and as her mother had. And they had counted on that silence, those men in that office; it gave them the confidence to say the things they said, "regret" and "understanding" and "upon reflection." They had counted on the silence that surrounded people like Nora and her family, fell upon them like a cloak, swallowed them up and made them disappear so quickly that by the time Nora and her mother stopped in Westchester for a cup of tea they could forget that they had ever seen her.

She determined that she would be successful in the business world. She finished senior year with the high grades she had begun with: she owed her parents that. But her attention was on the girls she knew who worked in offices: the way they dressed and spoke and carried themselves. She would be one of them; she would be better than any one of them. She would take trains and manicure her nails. Every muscle in her body she would devote to an appearance of efficiency and competence, with its inevitable edges of contempt.

Her one regret was that she had to ask her father for the money for her business-school tuition. He was glad to give it to her, she could tell he felt that he was making something up to her, making it all right. She was first in her cla.s.s in every subject. Easily, within a week of graduation, she was hired by the firm of Macintosh and Riordan, where she thrived.

She almost became the thing she wanted. She grew impatient with home life, in love with the world that required of her what she so easily, so beautifully could give. The years of all the anger which her family had not acknowledged or allowed she put into a furious, commercial energy. Soon Mr. Riordan had only to give her a brief idea of the contents of a letter; she herself composed those sentences that shone like music to her: threatening or clarifying, setting straight. This new person she had become had no place in her life for Eileen Foley, or for her brother Tom, whom she had finally brought over after six hard years.

He was fifteen when he arrived in New York; two years younger than Nora, but he was a child, and she a woman of the world. Eileen brought him to the Derencys to ask advice about his schooling; she was determined he be educated, although everyone advised against it, even Sister Catherine Benedict. And certainly Bridget advised against it.

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity," she said, and everyone grew silent. Any kind of quote abashed them all.

"Well, what would you say, Nora, with your education?" Eileen asked.

It was a terrible word to Nora, education, all that she had had violently, cruelly to turn her back on, all that had betrayed her, caused her shame. Yet even in her bitterness, she saw it need not be the same for Tommy Foley. He would not want what she had wanted, Latin and the poetry, the plays. He would want, and Eileen wanted for him, merely a certificate. What he would learn would never touch him; therefore it would never hurt him. He wanted, simply, a good job.

Nora felt her mother's eyes hard on her, wanting her to give encouragement to Eileen. She understood why. Eileen's desire for her brother's prospering was so palpable, so dangerous almost, that it should not be balked.

"Why not try?" said Nora in her new, sharp way. Her parents did not know she'd begun smoking; if she'd dared, it would have been a perfect time to light a cigarette.

Eileen was constantly afraid that her ambitions for her brother would be ruined by the influences of the neighborhood. For her they were contagious, like the plague; the greenhorn laziness, the f.e.c.klessness, the wish for fun. Nora's success made Eileen wors.h.i.+pful; she grew in Nora's presence deferential, asking her advice on everything, ravenously listening to every word she said, and urging Tom to listen, too.

Nora knew enough of the world not to overvalue the position that the Foleys had invented for her. She knew her place; it was a good place, near the top. And yet she knew that she would never be precisely at the top. She saw in the hallway of the office building where she worked a hundred girls like her. She was not the best of them; her bad leg meant she could not make the picture whole. She could not stride off, her high heels making that exciting sound of purpose on the wooden floors. She could not rise purposefully from her typewriter and move to the file cabinet, closing the drawers like a prime minister conferring an amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p, as Flo Ziegler or Celie Kane, the partners' secretaries, did. To really play the part she coveted required speed and line, like a good sailboat. Nora knew that her high shoe, her skirts cut full and long to hide it, detracted from her appearance of efficiency. Her work, the quickness of her mind, might earn the highest place for her, but she would always be enc.u.mbered and slowed down by what John Riordan, a kind man, called her "affliction." Even so, even though she would never be at the very top, she knew herself above Eileen and her brother; there was no place for them in her new life, except the place forced free by charity.

She tried to joke Eileen out of her subservience, reminding her of when they had shared Eileen's secret trove of almonds, nougat, crystallized ginger. But perhaps she didn't try wholeheartedly; her daily striving to achieve her dream of herself exhausted her; there was a kind of ease in lying back against the bolster of Eileen's adoration. Eileen had an idea of the game Nora was playing, even if she was mistaken about the nature of the stakes. Nora's parents and Aunt Nettie had no knowledge of the game. But Bridget did; she was contemptuous and mocking; when she saw Nora ironing, with pa.s.sionate devotion, her blouses, handkerchiefs, or skirt; when she came upon Nora polis.h.i.+ng her nails, she sniffed and walked by, loose and ill-defined in her practical nurse's uniform, trailing the scorn of her belief in the futility of every effort Nora made.

Eileen kept hinting that Nora should be on the lookout for a place in Mr. Riordan's office that Tommy could fill. She'd heard about boys who started in law offices as messengers and worked their way up till eventually they studied on their own, sat for the bar exam, and became lawyers.

"Well, I've heard of it. I've never seen a case myself," said Nora, smoking cynically. "You'd have to have an awful lot of push."

And this was what Tom Foley lacked completely: push. Pale, with hair that would never look manly and blue eyes that hid expression or else were supplicating, he was nearly silent except when he and Eileen talked about home. He could go then from silence to a frightening ebullience about some detail of their childhood: a cow with one horn only, a dog that barked when anybody sang, pears that fell from a tree once as they sat below it, soft, heavy as footb.a.l.l.s, damaging themselves before they hit the ground. Then he would grow embarra.s.sed at his outburst, would blush and look more childish than ever. It was quite impossible; she didn't understand why Eileen couldn't see it, he was not the office type and never would be. Right off the boat Eileen had put him with the Christian Brothers; he lived there while Eileen lived with the nuns. In the summer on her week's vacation they went to a boardinghouse three hours from the city in the mountains, a house run by an Irishwoman they had known from home. But Tom had never spoken to a soul outside his school except in Eileen's company, and Nora doubted that he could. She'd never mentioned him to Mr. Riordan, it would not work out and in the end would just make everyone look bad.

She suspected Eileen resented her for not doing anything for Tom. They stopped seeing one another; when the family got the news of Eileen they hadn't heard a word from her in longer than a year. She phoned to tell them Tommy had died. He'd got a job working for Western Union, as a messenger to start, but his bosses had said he'd shown great promise. He was delivering a wire and had walked by a saloon. There was a fight inside, and a wild gunshot had come through the window. The bullet landed in his heart.

Eileen said this in the kitchen drinking tea with Nora and her mother and her father and her aunts. As she spoke, her cup did not tremble. They had no way of knowing what she felt about the terrible thing that had happened; she would give no sign. She met no one's eye; her voice, which had been musical, was flat and tired. What they could see was that the life had gone out of her flesh. What had been her richness had turned itself to stone; her body life, which once had given her and all around her pleasure, had poured itself into a mold of dreadful bitter piety. She talked about the will of G.o.d and punishment for her ambitions. It was this country, she said, the breath of G.o.d had left it if it ever had been here. Money was G.o.d here, and success, and she had bent the knee. Her brother had died of it.

So she was going home, she said. She cursed the day she ever left, she cursed the day she'd listened to the lying tongues, the gold-in-the-street stories, the palaver about starting over, making good. It was the worst day of her life, she said, the day she'd come here. But she wanted them to know that she was grateful for the way they'd helped her when she first was over; she would not forget. She told them she was going back to her old job at the orphanage in Limerick. She said that she would write them, but they all knew she would not.

When she walked out the door, they felt one of the dead had left them, and they looked among themselves like murderers and could find no relief. When Bridget tried to blame Eileen or blame the Foleys, no one listened. They could hardly bear each other's company.

Nora went upstairs to her room and lay down on her bed, still in her work skirt. It would be terribly wrinkled; before the night was over she would have to press it. But not now. Now she lay back on her bed and knew what would be her life: to rise from it each morning and to make her way to work. Each morning she would join the others on the train, and in the evening, tired out but not exhausted, and with no real prospects that could lead to pleasure, with the others she would make her way back home.

Now I Am Married.