Pete Hamill - Forever

He knocked on the door. Waited a long while. Then knocked again.

The door was jerked open, and he was startled by the woman who stood before him. Sharp, beaked nose. A slash of mouth. Gray, suspicious, disappointed eyes. There was a hint of rouge on her cheeks and a silver stud glistening in each earlobe. Her hair was pulled straight back. Her bosom was large and pillowy.

“Is it a room you want?” she said.

“Aye.”

“Are you Irish?”

“Aye.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Three shillings a week, meals included. In advance. Do y’ have money?”

“Aye.”

“Come in,” she said, “and don’t be clompin’ them boots on our nice dry floors.”

They were in a tight hallway, with coat hooks on the wall, a bench, a chipped porcelain umbrella stand, stairs leading to the next floor, and a closed blue door at the rear of the hall. She turned her back on him, and he noticed that she had wide hips and was wearing a scent.

“Mary?” she called up the stairs. “ Mary? Come down here, girl.” Then she turned to Cormac and scowled.

“Take off the boots,” she said, “and the socks too, if you’re wearing any.”

He sat on the bench, unlaced the boots, peeled off the socks. The odor of rain and feet and wet wool filled the tight hallway.

The stairs creaked, and he looked up and saw a young woman’s bare calves first, and then the rest of her: dark brown hair, sullen eyes, full lips, small waist. She was wearing a loose blue sweater over a white blouse and a long dark blue skirt. She inspected him in a chilly way.

“This is Mary Burton,” the older woman said to Cormac. “Your name is…?”

“O’Donovan,” Cormac said. “Martin O’Donovan. From Galway.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m Sarah Hughson. I run this place, with my husband, John.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cormac said.

“Mary, take Mr. O’Donovan to room three, would you, dearie?” the woman said in a flat voice.

“Yes’m.”

He lifted his shoes and socks in one hand and his bag in the other. At the sight of him, Mary Burton laughed out loud.

“Don’t you be laughin’ at a guest, y’ young flit!” Sarah said sharply.

“I don’t mind,” Cormac said. “I must look a right idiot.”

“It’s not for you to excuse her, young man,” Sarah said. “We live with rules here. The first rule is the three shillings is paid in advance.”

He dug the shillings from his pocket and handed them to her.

“Try to get some sleep,” she said. “You look fit for bein’ buried.”

“Aye,” he said, and followed Mary Burton up the stairs, eyes fixed on her bare calves. She led him to a small room under the eaves, furnished with a narrow cot and a battered bureau. A small window faced south to Fort George. He dropped the bag on the floor. There was a piss pot against the wall.

“Well, you’re certainly not from Galway,” she said. “Not with that accent. I’m from Galway, and I know. So I assume your name’s not Martin O’Donovan.”

“Are you a policeman in disguise?”

“Not in this bloody house,” she said, chuckling in a private, knowing way.

“Call me Martin anyway,” Cormac said.

“All right,” she said. “In this bloody town, nobody is who they say they are anyway.”

She stared out the rain-dripping window toward the harbor.

“Is there a way to get a bit of breakfast?”

“First take off your clothes,” she said.

He laughed. “Is this the way you welcome people to America?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t stand the feckin’ sight of that lovely feckin’ suit turning into a feckin’ coal bag.”

She stared at him. “And besides,” she said, “I want to know what it is you’ve got strapped to your back.”

He removed his jacket and hung it on the bedpost.

“It’s a sword,” Cormac said, unbuckling the straps across his chest and then holding the sword’s handle in its scabbard and showing her. There was a glitter of fascination in her eyes.

“A fecking sword it is,” she said. “I thought so.”

“Actually, it’s my father’s sword.”

“Was he thinkin’ of New York when he gave it to you?”

“No,” he said, and paused, as an image of his father’s corded arms scribbled through him, hammering the sword in his forge. “No, he was dead when it passed to my hands. He left it to me.”

She looked at him with another kind of disbelief. He sensed that there were few stories that Mary Burton truly believed.

“I see,” she said.

She lifted his jacket off the bedpost. A sour odor filled the room. Cormac was sure it was from him: sweat and rain and the stench of the ship.

“The trousers too.”

“Uh, I don’t know you that well, miss. I don’t—”

“I told you: The name’s Mary Burton. I owe the feckin’ Hughsons six more feckin’ years on me feckin’ indenture. Let me have the feckin’ trousers.”

“Why don’t you fetch me some breakfast and I’ll take them off while you’re gone.”

“Jaysus, another tightnutter from Ireland.”

She hustled out with the jacket, closing the door behind her. A key was slotted in the keyhole and Cormac turned it, locking the door. He was not really shy of Mary Burton seeing him naked, but he didn’t want her seeing the money belt. He stripped off the trousers, unbuckled the money belt, and shoved it under the mattress. He pulled off his long, soaked underwear and hung it with the trousers on the bedpost. Then he unlocked the door and eased under the coverlet, his hunger fighting with his exhaustion, and both in combat with images of Mary Burton’s body. Little squalls of rain spattered the windowpane. He smelled bacon frying. His body drowsed, but he remained awake, the sword on the floor, his hand on its hilt. Then Mary Burton returned with a tray. She laid it across his covered thighs: three fried eggs, slabs of greasy bacon, brown buttered bread, and a pot of tea.

“Sit up,” she said.

He did, leaning closer to her.

“Do you think I could have me a bath?” he said.

She snickered. “The rule is one bath a week. There’s seven feckin’ rooms in this hole, and your room doesn’t get its bath for two more feckin’ days. Don’t feckin’ complain to me. I don’t make the rules.”

He laughed. “How many times a day do you say ‘feck’?”

“As many as I feckin’ can.”

She paused at the door.

“I suppose you’d like me to join you?” she said.

”Well, I—”

She humphed in a dismissive way.

“Just leave the feckin’ tray outside the feckin’ door,” she said, picking up the rest of his clothes and closing the door hard.

He ate desperately, jamming the bread into his mouth, taking bacon in his fingers. Thinking: Mary Burton. Thinking: Who are you, girl? Thinking: Why do you talk worse than a sailor? Mary Morrigan moved in his mind, smelling of the forest, whispering the old tales. He saw the perfumed breast of Bridget Riley in the Earl of Warren’s bed. Then Tomora, gazing with her liquid black eyes from the blackness of her jail. Then the door opened again and Mary Burton came in, holding a steaming bowl of water. She placed it on the bureau.

“If you wait two days to feckin’ wash,” she said, “we’ll be dead of the stink.” She put a piece of gray muslin and a sliver of soap beside the bowl. “And don’t tell that bitch Sarah I took you some soap. She’ll add thruppence to the feckin’ account.”

With that, she was gone again. Cormac finished eating and then stood up naked, using the soap and the muslin cloth to wash his face and neck, armpits and balls and feet. He felt at once filled and purged, his stomach full, his flesh scoured. He then put the dirty dishes on the tray and laid them outside the door. The corridor was empty. He heard smothered female voices from below. Then male growls. He locked the door. He shoved his bag between bed and wall, with the small leather pouch inside containing his mother’s spiral earrings. He laid the sword under the thin mattress and strapped the money belt to the small of his back. Thirteen pounds. His mother’s spiral earrings. His father’s sword. They were all that he truly possessed, which was a lot more than most. All of them with him now in this room in America. The rain whipped the windowpanes, and he fell asleep.