Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

Eleanor jumps back in her seat.

Walker laughs. “And the crew they all just go back down the ladders and into the tunnel. They’re walking with their scarves over their mouths to stop the dust. And one of them engineers goes first to make sure it’s safe, make sure there’d be no rocks falling on them. Sure enough, the tunnel’s looking good, and they all start getting that rubble out of there. Five of them. Shifting the big rocks backwards. Getting ready to put in roof supports. And all of a sudden one of them ups and screams, ‘Looky here!’ And he’s standing with a piece of tile in his hands. And they’re all thinking, Goddamn. ’Scuse me. But that’s what they’re thinking. Goddamn it all to hell, where did this tile come from? And then another one of them boys picks up another tile and then a piece of a face like from a building, what you call it?”

“Gargoyle,” says Maura.

“Gargoyle, yeah, he picks up a piece of gargoyle, and now all of them are saying that word as loud as can be too. Goddamn. ’Scuse me, ma’am. But that’s how they musta been talking.”

Eleanor, fourteen years old, leans forward with her elbows on the table and her face propped up in her hands.

“Then that crew reaches in to pick off more rocks, and suddenly they hit air. Nothing there! Not a thing! So they crawl their way through that gap in the tunnel until they can stand and stretch! Now, these men, they’re used to bending all day long and back again, and here they is, standing up! Tiles and paintings all around them and a train track at their feet! So they go, all five of them, walking along and not a one of them believing their eyes. Deeper and deeper and then they see that ol’ fountain—’course there’s not any water coming from it, but it’s there, that ol’ fountain and way behind it, still, that grand piano! No kidding. The piano! Covered in dust. Must about have given them heart attacks. And one of them workers, he lifts the lid of the piano and commences himself to playing, and all the men they gather around, holding their lanterns up above the keys. Ain’t none of them got a note in their heads, and I don’t know what song they was singing, but I s’pose it don’t matter. They stood around in that ol’ tunnel until the inspector came down and saw them shouting and laughing and singing over that piano.”

The women sit speechless over cold cups of tea, a smile breaking at the edges of Eleanor’s mouth.

“A piano underground?” she says. “My God.”

“Eleanor!” says Maura. “You know I told you not to say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like my God.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

They sit quietly until Walker says, “But that’s something else now, ain’t it?”

Maura nods. “It sure is.”

“Could fool with a man’s mind if he like to let it.”

“Sure could.”

“An underground piano.”

“My God Almighty,” says the girl again.

And all three of them start laughing.

* * *

Eleanor writes him a note: Meet me under the billboard for Wills cigarettes at six.

She arrives early, in a yellow muslin dress once worn by her mother. Passing men eye her long red hair. She avoids their stares and looks along the street. When Walker shows up she takes his hand, but he quickly lets it go and steps behind her at two paces, tentative and nervous, saying nothing. He walks in her shadow. The streets are grayed by fog. Motorcars throw fumes into the grayness. At the head of the tunnel the foreman — his face fretted with acne — says she shouldn’t be accompanied by a Negro into the darkness.

“Ain’t no saying what those kind’ll do, ma’am.”

Walker steps aside, his hands in his pockets.

The foreman takes her down the shaft and along the tunnel to show her the piano covered in dust. She lifts the lid to play a few notes, and he leans over her, holding the lantern near her head. Slyly, he puts his hand on her lower back and spreads his fingers across her hips and squeezes.

“Don’t do that!” she says, pushing his hand away.

“Aw, come on. Just a little kiss.”

“Leave me alone!”

She steps away and runs from the tunnel, but Walker is gone, and she searches frantically, running back and forth through Battery Park until she finds him, shy and head-hung, standing behind the billboard.

“It’s true,” she says.

“Of course it’s true.”

“I knew it was.”

“Then why y’all so surprised?” he asks.

She shuffles her feet. “That man, he tried to touch me.”

“Did he hurt ya?”

“No, but you should say something to him.”

“Huh?”

“He shouldn’t be allowed to do that. That’s not right. You should say something to him.”

“Y’all serious?”

“’Course I’m serious.”

“I’m stupid, girl, but I ain’t that stupid.”

“Why not?”

“Girl.”

“What?”

“Take one good look at my face.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

Walker turns away when she leans up to try and kiss him on the cheek, and he mumbles, embarrassed, “Y’all shouldn’t do that. It ain’t right.”

Although once he saw a famous middleweight boxer emerging from the Theresa Hotel with a French actress. She wore a short skirt, high heels, and perfume and held a long thin cigarette elegantly at the tips of her fingers. At the door of the hotel, she brushed her lips against the black boxer’s cheek. They moved to a waiting car. When the couple was gone, young girls on the street held popsicle sticks in the exact same manner as the Frenchwoman’s cigarette, and her perfume hung on the air like stigmata.

“It just ain’t right,” says Walker.

But for years he takes her down to the bank of the East River anyway. The eyes of strangers cause him to hang his chin on his chest. He knows what they think. Sometimes he even gets violent glares from his own people. He walks way behind Eleanor to make it seem like they aren’t together, and he even ignores her if people stare for too long.

At the water’s edge, Eleanor says, “Tell me that story about my father again.”

“Well,” he says, “it was early morning. We all came down and we was just working, normal like. Digging away like we always done.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We was sweating and loading and loading and sweating.”

“And then it happened?”

“Yeah. I had my shovel in the air just like this. And Con, he was behind me somewheres. And Rhubarb too. He was the one let the shout. First time he said something full in English. It like to broke my ears. ‘Shit! Air go out. Shit!’”

Walker points toward the middle of the river.

“We rose up right out over there.”

Across from his nest an icicle hangs near the metal grate, held in static, a shaft of ice one foot long exploring its way down toward the tunnel floor. It looks like a stalactite, although he knows stalactites aren’t made of ice, but of mineral deposits. No matter, he will call it that anyway: a stalactite. He wonders how long it might grow. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen feet, maybe all the way down to the ground. He nods to the piece of jagged ice. “Good morning,” he says. “Good morning.” The world, he knows, can still spring its small and wondrous surprises.

* * *

She arrives on the morning of the third snowfall.

A black handbag is all she carries. He is amazed to watch her from the safety of his nest. She moves under his catwalk, a huge fur coat wrapped around herself, open at the buttons, so she looks like an animal that has been sliced longways, from neck to belly button. The coat is old and tattered and yet vaguely beautiful. Underneath, she wears a red miniskirt and high heels. Her hair is threaded with multicolored beads. Some of it stands out in obscene shafts as if it hasn’t been washed in years. She walks in the center of the tracks and, when she gets to the grill facing his nest, she stands in the shaft of cold blue light beaming through from topside. He can see, even from his height, that there are streaks of dried mascara on her face. She shivers in the freezing cold and pulls the fur coat tight.