Alice McDermott - Someone

“More often than not,” Gabe said, “it diminishes compassion. Makes people resent God. I’ve seen it. They figure, If He formed me, then why did He choose to form me this way? Why burden me with all this needless pain? It seems deliberate.” He paused.

“Once,” he said, “we were playing ball. Walter was there, but he was just a little kid. This was long before he made himself grand commissioner of the Brooklyn street leagues.” He looked up at me to see if I laughed. I didn’t. “An ambulance came along,” he went on. “It stopped just past us, in front of the Corrigans’ house. Of course we tore over there to see what was going on. The ambulance men were halfway up the Corrigans’ steps when this nursing Sister comes running out of the house next door, waving her arms and saying, ‘She’s here, over here.’ So they turn around, back down the Corrigans’ steps and then up the steps next door. All of us right behind them. In no time at all they’re back out again with an old woman—Mrs. Cooper, it was, I don’t know if you remember her—on a stretcher. Dead, one of us says. Drunk says someone else. But the nun says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and shoos us all away.” He held the hat between his knees. He was slowly turning it in his hands.

“So we go back to our game,” he said, “but we’re arguing about this, the way kids argue. Each one claiming more assurance than the next. Was she dead or was she dead drunk? Then we all look at Bill Corrigan, as if this is another call for him to make. But Bill’s got his fists tight on his knees and there are big tears running down his face. ‘Is it my mother?’ he says when we come closer, in a voice we hadn’t ever heard before, cracked and whispery.”

He was slowly turning his hat in his hands. There was a bit of white satin in the crown, elegant and cool, ecclesiastical.

“I mentioned Bill in a sermon once,” he said. “I wanted to say something about faith or second sight, but everyone laughed when I said we had a blind umpire when we were kids. So I pretty much left it at that.” He shrugged. There were more kids with baseball bats and mitts passing by even now.

“I guess it was something about those big tears. On a grown man. How many of us had ever seen a grown man cry? I guess it—the weakness of it—brought out something cruel in us.” He paused, looking out across the paths through the park.

“We said, ‘Yeah, Bill. It was your mother. She’s dead.’ “ He bit off the word, imitating the street kids they once were. “And then we just stood there. Bill dropped his head. His shoulders lost their shape. It was only a matter of a few seconds, but for a few seconds we saw him wrecked. His whole life, the rest of his life, however he had foreseen it, blasted. Just for a few seconds. We saw we had done this. Easily. Casually. Made him suffer.” He shook his head and narrowed his eyes, and his voice came from somewhere deep within his chest. “For a few seconds,” he said, “we savored it.”

He shook his head. “It was Walter who finally told him, ‘Naa. We’re kidding. Not her. It was the old lady next door.’ Which got us all slapping Bill on the back and laughing at how we had him fooled. It took a while for him to get the joke.” He gazed out at the park, his hat in his hands. “Some joke,” he said.

Even late in the afternoon of that day, even after all my tears, the habit of loving Walter Hartnett had not yet left me, and so I assumed that my brother told this story not to admit that he, too, had once been cruel but to prove that Walter had once been kind.

“Rescue me from my enemies, my God,” Gabe said, suddenly sitting back. “Deliver me from evildoers.” He paused. “I never much liked playing ball after that. With Bill Corrigan always there. I much preferred staying inside.”

He put his hand on the bench between them. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marie,” he said wearily. “There’s a lot of cruelty in the world.” And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. “You’ll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.”

Turning away from him, I leaned once more to examine the stinging blister beneath my stocking. I didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe there could be a worst taste of it. I didn’t consider then that my brother, too, might have longed to step out of his skin. Might have carried in those days his own blasted vision of an impossible future.

“Can you make it home?” I heard him say.

I told him I’d be fine if we walked slowly.

He raised his hat to his head, adjusted it jauntily. As he stood, I looked up at him, my right eye squinting closed against the sun. I touched his arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket sleeve, I felt him withdraw a little. Something in him, in his muscle or in his bone, withheld.

“Who’s going to love me?” I said.

The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers.

“Someone,” he told me. “Someone will.”

Once, I woke to find that a black wheel, spoked with flashing silver, had settled behind my left eye. Tom had gotten up sometime before. He was quietly bustling as he did these dark winter mornings of our late middle age—passing shadowy back and forth across the foot of the bed, silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. He was humming, as always, occasionally breaking into whispered song, his voice deep in his throat. “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” He was in undershirt and boxer shorts, and the room was filled with the scent of his soap and his shaving cream.

Until I reached for my glasses, all of this was soft-edged and indistinct. All but the solid black image that had imposed itself over my vision. With my head still on the pillow, I put a cupped palm over my right eye and then the left. It was in the left. “Something’s wrong,” I said, sitting up slowly. “There’s something in my eye.”

He was abruptly silent. He crossed to my side of the bed, sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress. He placed a crooked finger under my chin to lift my face as he leaned toward me. I looked up to the shadowed ceiling so I would not blink. I could smell the toothpaste on his breath, the soap on his fleshy shoulders, the aftershave on his warm hand.

“I can’t tell,” he said. I told him to turn on the lamp.

He leaned toward the bedside table, the mattress beneath me shifting with his weight. He turned back. Now the light cast across the ceiling was a spill of soft gold. He lifted my chin once again, gently, even coyly, the prelude to a kiss, and peered again at my eyes. “I can’t see anything unusual,” he said.

It was my own fear, as well as my surprise at the shimmer of desire that touched the small of my back when he put his warm hand to my face, that made me speak to him so impatiently. “Give me my glasses.”

He reached for them—I could have done this myself—and I slipped them on. I cupped my hand over my left eye, and the room settled into its distinct edges. I looked at his face, which was clear again. I could see the blush of irritation from his razor, a pinprick of blood on his cheek. Even then he was smooth-skinned, although there were laugh lines, drawn as if with a pencil, in the corners of his eyes. His lips were thin and serious. His chin grown slack. It seemed a long time since I had looked at him this closely. I put my hand on my right eye and the black wheel was imposed over everything.

“Something’s wrong,” I said again. I put my hand out, as if to brush whatever it was away. “There’s a black thing in my left eye.” I described a circle in the air before me and then tried to pluck at it again. I was aware of how foolish I must look—like a madwoman in my thin nightgown, with my hair sleep-skewed, grabbing at nothing. “There’s flashing,” I said. “Like spokes turning. I can’t blink it away.”