Читать книгу A New World - Robert M. Keane - Страница 11

By three o’clock in the morning, Florence was home from her date, had put up her hair, and was asleep. Jim was home from the movies, and was also asleep. Only Harry Meagher was still awake. He had spent four sleepless hours in bed. He got up and went downstairs. He had the doctor’s report on his mind. And the trouble at work. And Florence and the boy coming for dinner. And James.

Sure it was no wonder a man couldn’t sleep.

He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen and came back to the living room and sat in his chair and drank it. He looked around. There wasn’t a lace doily on a chair arm that wasn’t pinned right. What would he do when Florence was gone? She had done a grand job on the house. He got up and opened the door of the downstairs bathroom to see what kind of a job James had done to help her. There were stains still on the sink, and rings in the toilet. A half-assed job, as usual. Goddam kid, there wasn’t a thing he could be depended on to do right. Harry got a newspaper and spread it on the bathroom floor and, even though it was the middle of the night, got down on his knees and washed the toilet himself.

He avoided looking up at the tile job, which always annoyed him. The tile setter had started from the end instead of from the middle, so that the top of the last tile laid was a full inch higher than the first. Harry had a professional eye: his first job in the States had been setting tile. For almost three years he had tiled a room a day, thinking of the one in Ireland the whole while. Phyllis, tramp that she turned out to be.

He finished the job, and took up the newspaper. He went to the refrigerator and poured another glass of milk and put it in the pot to heat. It was supposed to make a person sleep, the warm milk. A lot of old horse shit: it never worked. He took the Old Overholt bottle down and poured some of that into the milk. Back in his chair, he held the milk glass in his hand and stared at it, swishing the milk so that it made shifting half moons on the sides of the glass.

Slow down, the doctor said. Sure, easy to say. The son was about to be thrown out of school, and the daughter was looking to get married, and the brother-in-law was drinking himself to death, and the two families were depending on him, and he was supposed to sit in the chair and slow down.

Cracked doctor.

And more trouble at work. Collins from personnel said there was talk the new brewery manager would be a quality-control man from Chicago. Don’t talk nonsense to me, Harry had told him. They’d never pick a man who hadn’t come up the technical side. But sure, there might be truth in the story. They’d cheat him out of the plant managership in the end, Harry thought. They didn’t want him anyway. He was too old. He gave them thirty years and they’d give him the thanks of a shoe in the ass out the door. He was almost sixty and what did he know of the new things coming along? They were talking about a line that would move a thousand cans a minute, and plastic packers, and self-opening cans, and throwaway bottles and what more? Sure, didn’t Schwartz change the labeler arm yesterday without even consulting him? The bastard, he wouldn’t try that again. Ah, but things were slipping. They’d pass him by. They’d pass him by. The last disappointment.

Suddenly a scene of his childhood came to his mind. Toppy.

“Who gets Toppy today?”

Am I drunk, thought Harry, that I’m thinking about Toppy after fifty years?

When he was a boy in Ireland, and his father had his afternoon egg, he would crack the top off and cry: who gets Toppy today? Sean would elbow Harry out of the way, and grab the top of the egg. For Sean was older and stronger. Or was then.

His mind stayed in Ireland. Phyllis elbowed her way into his memories. He was eighteen and running with her across the checkerboard fields that contoured the hills of Kerry. I’m going to go to America and I’ll come back and I’ll have the biggest hat and the whitest teeth of any Yank ever came home. Do, she cried, do. She came down to Queenstown to see him off, and she was the last he saw, standing there with the black curls blowing across her white forehead, waving, while the band played “Come Back to Erin,” and ahead the mouth of the harbor leading out to the open sea, and he gripped the upper rail and cried, his teeth drawing blood from his lower lip.

He worked for almost the three years tiling a room a day, and he finally made it home. The whole trip back on the ship he thought of her.

He had come up the hilly path and saw her riding the milk cans to the market. She saw him and stopped and paled. He ran to her.

“Phyllis! Phyllis!” he called, running.

But she hung back; she turned her face away as he approached.

He took her hand. Did she have a ring on?

“Jesus, is that a ring?”

“T’is.”

“Whose ring is that?”

“Joe Houlihan.”

“Are you married to Joe Houlihan?”

“I am.”

An eternity passed. He had no words. He wanted to give her a cuff across the face. Finally he blurted out the only thing that came to mind.

“Goddam ye!”

She answered right back, tartly, her face now red.

“Was I to wait forever?”

She climbed down from the cart and sat by the side of the road and wept.

“Could you not have written a letter?” she asked bitterly, angrily.

Such crap and nonsense, he thought.

“And I that had no schooling?” he asked. “Was I going to be sending letters in the handwriting of a child, to be laughed at?”

And so that was the welcome in Ireland.

He came back to the States, and he went to school at night, and he got the job in the brewery, and he worked his way, in fifteen years, to Maintenance Superintendent. He built a home in Riverdale and banked money when all he knew were starving in the city. But he had no family, and no happiness. He cursed the one in Ireland, and he cursed God, and he cursed whoever the unfortunate woman was who happened to be with him when the black mood came on him.

Finally, his own misery drove him to his knees. He went one Saturday night to the church.

In the dark of the confessional box, he mumbled out the words.

“It’s been fifteen years.”

The priest led him down through all of it. When all was said, Mr. Meagher heard the words half-remembered from so many years before.

“Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat; et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges.”

The priest paused.

“Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii. . .”

Harry made the sign of the cross out of memory.

“et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

Then Harry went out to the pew outside the confessional, and looked up to the Blessed Sacrament, and asked for a wife.

Two weeks later she was waiting for him outside of Sunday Mass. Con Aiken introduced her. Mary McInerny. She was a year over from the old country, and was working for the telephone company. At first he wasn’t sure she was speaking to him, for she had a wall eye. But he knew that this was her, the wife he had asked for.

He courted her. There were those who wanted to make a hare out of him because of her eye. “Sure,” said Finn Dolan, “You won’t know whether she’s looking at you or across the street.” He had grabbed Dolan by the throat and thrust him against the wall so that he’d have no more breath to make jokes about her. And sure, it turned out in the end, she was worth two of the one in Ireland. A clean, good woman and a hard worker, she made him laugh in the house, he who had never laughed.

Then God saw fit to take her. When James was born, and she was up and about again, they went to a picnic in Fort Tryon Park at the beginning of the trolley line.

In the heat of the afternoon, she drank a glass of water. Later that night, Mary complained she felt nauseous. She got up that night and vomited. Neither of them paid it too much attention at the time, and the next day she said she felt a bit better.

Three days later she was dead of cholera.

Perhaps the best thing would have been for him to find another mother for the children. He went back to the church and asked again. But another Mary McInerney did not come. So he raised them himself, with the help of his sister Nora.

What kind of a job had he done? The boy was stealing. That’s what it was. Cut it five ways and put jam on it: it still came down to theft. He’d like to take him by the shoulders and shake him. If a man wasn’t as good as his word, he wasn’t worth a damn.

Harry drank the glass of milk and whiskey and got up, and went out to the back to see if Nora’s kitchen light was on. It was. She was sitting in the kitchen, a long face on her.

“He’s not in yet?” Harry asked.

“He’s not. What are you doing up?”

Harry didn’t answer; he looked at the piece of soda bread she had in her hand, a layer of butter on it.

There was a time, Harry thought, when his sister had been so beautiful the reporter from the Irish Record called her: “the prettiest lass ever came out of Kerry.” God save the day the reporter ever laid eyes on her: for it was Arthur Connolly. She still had the article upstairs. Michael Murray had been mad for her, but she wouldn’t give him a look. She wanted Arthur and she got him. He didn’t bring home ten checks in a year, while Michael Murray was building the government buildings now in Washington. There wasn’t a sawhorse on the street down there, they said, that didn’t have his name on it.

Ah, but how could you blame Arthur, Harry thought. He didn’t want to get married. She dragged him to the altar. He stumbled on the altar step, and whimpered during the service. The priest got through the ceremony and dashed for the sacristy, and shut the door, and laughed so loud he could be heard above the wedding march. Arthur was no man for a family, but Nora had to have her way.

“He’ll be in soon,” said Harry.

Nora grunted, but didn’t say anything. Harry went back home and went upstairs. He hung his pants neatly. He put his shoes in trees. He knelt down at the bedside, and put his face in his hands.

Why were there so many disappointments? He had worked hard and seemed to have got so little. He had plowed at eleven years of age a straight line, a man’s work.

He prayed that Florence’s young man might turn out all right.

He prayed that Jim might find a good, homely girl who would love him, like Jill next door.

He prayed that he’d be able to look Mary in the face when the time came, and be able to tell her that it had turned out all right.