Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

She wasn’t a woman with whom I had any dispute. She seemed perfectly fine to me, as gentle-wayed as they come. It wasn’t as if she tried to beat me upside the head with her tears. They came natural, like anyone else. She was embarrassed too, I could tell, with her curtains, her china, her husband painted on the wall, the teacup rattling on her saucer. She looked like she could fly out the window to Park Avenue at any time, with the streak of gray in her hair, her thin, bare arms, her long neck with blue veins. There were university diplomas on the wall in the corridor, and anyone could see that she was born on the right side of the river. She kept her house neat and scrubbed and she had a tiny southern lilt to her voice, so if there was any one of the ladies I felt a kinship with, it was her.

That morning glided by, like most good mornings do.

We had our flipflap with the tightrope man and then we wandered down from the roof and ate the doughnuts and sipped the tea and rattled on some. The living room was flooded with light. The furniture had a deep sheen to it. The ceilings were high and trimmed with a fancy molding. On the shelf, a small four-legged clock in a glass bell. My flowers were sitting in the center of the table. They had already begun to open a little in the heat.

The others were giddy with Park Avenue, I could tell. When Claire disappeared to the kitchen, they kept picking up their cups and glancing at the bottom to see what sort of stamp was there. Janet even lifted a glass ashtray. There were two cigarette butts squeezed into it. She held it up in the air to see if she could find some mark there, like it might have come from Queen Elizabeth herself. I could hardly contain my smile. “Well, you never know,” said Janet, in a fierce whisper. She had a way of flipping her hair sideways without hardly moving her head. She placed the ashtray back down on the table and gave a little sniff as if to say, How dare you. She rearranged her hair with another flick and looked across at Jacqueline. They had the white-woman language going between them, I’ve seen it enough times to know, it’s all in the eyes, they dip a little to the side, they hold the gaze a moment, and then they look away. They got centuries of practice at it — I’m surprised some people aren’t frozen in it.

I glanced towards the kitchen, but Claire was still beyond the louvered door — I could see her thin outline, bustling away, getting more ice. The snap of an ice tray. A running tap.

“Be with you in a jiffy,” she called from the kitchen.

Janet stood and tiptoed over to the portrait on the wall. He was painted very fine, the husband, like a photograph, sitting in an antique chair with his jacket and blue tie on. It was one of those paintings where you’d hardly notice a brushstroke. He was looking out at us very seriously. Bald, with a sharp nose, and a little hint of wattle at his neck. Janet slid up next to the portrait and made a face. “Looks like he’s got a stick up his rear end,” she whispered. It was funny, and true, I suppose, but I couldn’t help but feel a tightening in my chest, thinking that Claire was going to come out of the kitchen at any moment. I said to myself, Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing. Janet reached across and put her hand on the frame of the painting. Marcia had a wicked smile on her face. Jacqueline was biting her lip. All three of them were on the point of bursting out in laughter.

Janet’s hand moved up along the frame and hovered over his thigh. Marcia threw herself back on the couch and clasped her mouth as if it was the funniest thing ever to happen. Jacqueline said: “Don’t excite the poor man.”

A hush and a few more giggles. I wondered what might happen if I were the one to get up and touch his knee, run my hand along the inside of his leg — imagine that — but I stayed rooted, of course, to the chair.

We heard the push of the louvered door and Claire was out and about, a big jug of ice water in her hands.

Janet stood away from the painting, Marcia turned into the couch and pretended to cough, and Jacqueline lit herself another cigarette. Claire held the plate out to me. Two bagels and three doughnuts. One with glazing, one with sprinkles, one plain.

“If I have another doughnut, Claire,” I said, “I’ll spill out into the street.”

That was like letting the air out of a balloon and allowing it to fly around the room. I didn’t mean for it to be that funny, but by all accounts it was, and the room let out a big breath. We soon fell to talking again with our serious faces on — truth, it was good talk, honest talk, remembering our boys, how and what they were, and what they went and fought for. The clock ticked on the shelf near the bookcase and then Claire walked us down the corridor, past the paintings and the university diplomas, to her boy’s room.

She pushed open the door like it was the first time she’d done it in years. It creaked and swung on its hinges.

The room looked as if it had hardly been touched. Pencils, sharpeners, papers, baseball charts. Rows of books on the shelves. An oak dresser on tall legs. A Mickey Mantle poster above the bed. A water stain on the ceiling. A creak in the floorboards. It surprised me some, the smallness of the room — it just about fit all five of us. “Let me crack the window,” said Claire. I was careful to take the end of the bed where there was most support — I didn’t want it creaking. I put my hands down on the mattress so it wouldn’t bounce and I leaned against the wall where I could feel the cool of the plaster against my back. Janet sat on the beanbag chair — she hardly made a dent in it — and the others took the far end of the bed, while Claire herself took a small white chair by the window where the breeze came in.

“Here we are,” she said.

The sound in her voice like we’d come to the end of a very long journey.

“Well, it’s lovely,” said Jacqueline.

“It really is,” said Marcia.

The ceiling fan spun and the dust settled like little mosquitoes around us. Along the shelves there were lots of radio parts and flat boards with electronic gizmos, wires hanging down. Big batteries. Three screens, their backs open and tubes showing.

“He liked his televisions?” I said.

“Oh, they’re bits of computers,” said Claire.

She reached across and picked up a photo of him in a silver frame on his table, passed it around. The frame was heavy and it had a MADE IN EN-GLAND sticker on the back velvet. In the photo Joshua was a thin little white boy with pimples on his chin. Dark glasses and short hair. Eyes that weren’t comfortable looking in the camera. He wasn’t in uniform either. She said it was taken just before his graduation from high school, when he was valedictorian. Jacqueline rolled her eyes again but Claire didn’t notice — every word she said about her son seemed to spread the smile on her face. She picked up a snow globe from his desk, shook it up and down. The globe was from Miami, and I thought, There’s someone with a touch of funny — snow falling over Florida. But when she turned it upside down it was like there was some other gravity in the world: she waited until every little flake had settled and then she turned it again and she told us all about him, Joshua, where he went to school, the notes he liked on the piano, what he was doing for his country, how he read all the books on the shelves, how he even built himself his own adding machine, went to college, then out to some park somewhere — he was the sort of boy who was once liable to put another man on the Moon.

I had asked her once if she thought Joshua and my boys were friends, and she said yes, but I knew nothing was probably further from the truth.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.