Brooklyn (15 page)

She found the bookshop easily and was amazed, once she was inside, at the number of law books on sale and the size and weight of some of them. She wondered if in Ireland there were as many law books and if the solicitors in Enniscorthy had immersed themselves in books like this when they were studying. It would, she knew, be a good subject to write to Rose about since Rose played golf with one of the solicitors’ wives.

Eilis walked around the store first, studying titles on the shelves, aware now that some of the books were old and maybe second-hand. It was easy for her to imagine Mr. Rosenblum here, browsing, with one or two big books open in front of him, or using the ladder to get something from the higher shelves. When she had mentioned him several times in letters home, Rose replied to ask if he was married. It was hard to explain in return that he seemed to Eilis so full of knowledge and so steeped in the detail of his subject and its intricacies and so serious that it was impossible to imagine him with a wife or children. Rose in her letter had also suggested once more that if Eilis had something private to discuss, something that she did not want their mother to know about, then she could write to Rose at the office and Rose would, she said, make sure that no one else ever saw the letter.

Eilis smiled to herself at the thought that all she had to report
was the first dance; and that she had felt free to write to her mother about it, mentioning it only in passing and as a joke. She had nothing private to report to Rose.

She knew, as she browsed, that she would have no hope of finding the three books on her list in the middle of all the other books, so when she was approached by an old man who had come from behind the desk she simply handed him the list and said that these were the books she had come looking for. The man, who was wearing thick glasses, had to raise them onto his forehead so that he could read. He squinted.

“Is this your handwriting?”

“No, it’s my lecturer’s. He recommended these books.”

“Are you a law student?”

“Not really. But it’s part of the course.”

“What’s your lecturer’s name?”

“Mr. Rosenblum.”

“Joshua Rosenblum?”

“I don’t know his first name.”

“What are you studying?”

“I’m doing a night course at Brooklyn College.”

“That’s Joshua Rosenblum. I’d know his writing.”

He peered again at the piece of paper and the titles.

“He’s clever,” the man said.

“Yes, he’s very good,” she replied.

“Can you imagine…,” the man began but turned towards the cash desk before he finished. He was agitated. She followed him slowly.

“You want these books, then?” He spoke almost aggressively.

“Yes, I do.”

“Joshua Rosenblum?” the man asked. “Can you imagine a country that would want to kill him?”

Eilis stepped back but did not reply.

“Well, can you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The Germans killed everyone belonging to him, murdered every one of them, but we got him out, at least we did that, we got Joshua Rosenblum out.”

“You mean in the war?”

The man did not reply. He moved across the store and found a small footstool onto which he climbed to fetch a book. As he descended he turned towards her angrily. “Can you imagine a country that would do that? It should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

He looked at her bitterly.

“In the war?” she asked again.

“In the holocaust, in the
churben.
”

“But was it in the war?”

“It was, it was in the war,” the man replied, the expression on his face suddenly gentle.

As he busied himself finding the other two books, he had a resigned, almost stubborn look; by the time he returned to the counter and prepared the bill for her he had come to seem distant and forbidding. She did not ask him any questions as she handed him the money. He wrapped the books for her and gave her the change. She sensed that he wanted her to leave the shop and there was nothing she could do to make him tell her anything more.

She loved unwrapping the law books and placing them on the table beside the notebooks and her books on accountancy and bookkeeping. When she opened the first of them and looked at it she immediately found it difficult, worrying that she should have bought a dictionary as well so she could check the difficult words. She sat until suppertime going through the introduction, no wiser at the end as to what the “jurisprudence” mentioned at the beginning might be.

That evening at supper, when she had noticed that neither Miss McAdam nor Sheila Heffernan was still speaking to her, Eilis thought of asking Patty and Diana if she could go to the dance with them the following night, or meet them before it somewhere. She did not, she realized, want to go at all but she knew that Father Flood would miss her and, since it would be the second week for her not to be there, he would ask about her. There was another girl at supper that evening, Dolores Grace, who had taken Eilis’s old room. She had red hair and freckles and came from Cavan, it emerged, but she was mainly silent and seemed embarrassed to be at the table with them. Eilis learned that this was her third evening among them, but she had missed her at the previous meals because she had been at her lectures.

After supper, as she was settling back down to see if she could follow one of the other two law books any better, a knock came to the door. It was Diana in the company of Miss McAdam, and Eilis thought it was strange to see the two of them together. She stood at her door and did not invite them into her room.

“We need to talk to you,” Diana whispered.

“What’s up now?” Eilis asked almost impatiently.

“It’s that Dolores one,” Miss McAdam butted in. “She’s a scrubber.”

Diana began to laugh and had to put her hand to her mouth.

“She cleans houses,” Miss McAdam said. “And she’s cleaning for the Kehoe woman here to pay part of her rent. And we don’t want her at the table.”

Diana let out what was close to a shriek of laughter. “She’s awful. She’s the limit.”

“What do you want me to do?” Eilis asked.

“Refuse to eat with her when the rest of us do. And the Kehoe woman listens to you,” Miss McAdam said.

“And where will she eat?”

“Out in the street for all I care,” Miss McAdam said.

“We don’t want her, none of us,” Diana said. “If word got around—”

“That this was a house where people like her were staying—” Miss McAdam continued.

Eilis felt an urge to close the door in their faces and go back to her books.

“We’re just letting you know,” Diana said.

“She’s a scrubber from Cavan,” Miss McAdam said as Diana began to laugh again.

“I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Miss McAdam said, turning to her.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. It’s just awful. No decent fellow will have anything to do with us.”

Eilis looked at both of them as though they were nuisance customers in Bartocci’s and she was Miss Fortini. Since they both worked in offices, she wondered if they had spoken about her in the same way when she first came because she would be working in a shop. She firmly closed the door in their faces.

In the morning Mrs. Kehoe knocked on the window as Eilis reached the street from the basement. Mrs. Kehoe beckoned her to wait and then appeared at the front door.

“I was wondering if you would do me a special favour,” she said.

“Of course I would, Mrs. Kehoe,” Eilis said. It was something her mother had taught her to say if anyone asked her to do them a favour.

“Would you take Dolores to the dance in the hall tonight? She’s dying to go.”

Eilis hesitated. She wished she had guessed in advance that she was going to be asked to do this so she could have a reply prepared.

“All right.” She found herself nodding.

“Well, that’s great news. I’ll tell her to be ready,” Mrs. Kehoe said.

Eilis wished she could think of some quick excuse, some reason why she could not go, but she had used a cold the previous week and she knew that she would have to make an appearance at some stage, even if just for a short time.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying,” she said.

“That’s no problem,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “No problem at all. She won’t want to stay that long either.”

Later, after work, when Eilis went upstairs, she found Dolores Grace alone working in the kitchen and made an arrangement to collect her at ten o’clock.

At supper, none of them spoke about the dance in the hall; Eilis presumed from the atmosphere and from the way in which Miss McAdam pursed her lips and seemed openly irritated every time Mrs. Kehoe spoke and from the fact that Dolores remained silent throughout the meal that something had been said. Eilis understood also by the way both Miss McAdam and Diana avoided her eyes that they knew she was taking Dolores to the dance. She hoped they did not believe that she had offered to do so and wondered if she could let them know that she had been press-ganged by Mrs. Kehoe.

Eilis was shocked by Dolores’s appearance when she went upstairs at ten o’clock and found her. She was wearing a cheap leather jacket, like a man’s, and a frilly white blouse and a white skirt and almost black stockings. The red lipstick seemed garish against her freckled face and bright hair. She struck Eilis as looking like a horse-dealer’s wife in Enniscorthy on a fair day. Eilis almost fled downstairs as soon as she saw her. Instead, she had to smile as Dolores said that she would need to go upstairs and fetch her winter coat and a hat. Eilis did not know how she was going to sit beside her in the hall with Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan avoiding her on one side and Patty and Diana arriving with all their friends.

“Are there great fellas at this?” Dolores asked when they reached the street.

“I have no idea,” Eilis replied coldly. “I go only because it is organized by Father Flood.”

“Oh, God, does he hang around all night? It’ll be just like home.”

Eilis did not reply and tried to walk in a way that was dignified, as though she were going to eleven o’clock mass in the cathedral in Enniscorthy with Rose. Each time Dolores asked her a question she answered quietly and did not tell her much. It would be better, she thought, if they could walk in silence to the hall, but she could not ignore Dolores completely, although she found that, as they stood waiting for traffic lights to change, she was clenching her fists in pure irritation each time her companion spoke.

She had imagined that, when they were in the hall, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan would sit away from them once they had left their coats in the cloakroom and found a position from which to survey the dancers. But instead their two fellow lodgers moved closer to them, all the more to emphasize that they had no intention of speaking to them or consorting with them in any way. Eilis observed how Dolores let her eyes dart around the hall, her brow knitted in watchfulness.

“God, there’s no one here at all,” she said.

Eilis stared straight in front of her pretending that she had not heard.

“I’d love a fella, would you?” Dolores asked and nudged her. “I wonder what the American fellas are like.”

Eilis looked at her blankly.

“I’d say they’re different,” Dolores added.

Eilis responded by moving away from her slightly.

“They’re awful bitches, those other ones,” Dolores went on.
“That’s what the boss-woman said. Bitches. The only one of them is not a bitch is you.”

Eilis looked at the band and then stole a glance at Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan. Miss McAdam held her gaze and then smiled archly, dismissively.

When Patty and Diana arrived, they came with an even larger group than before. Everyone in the hall seemed to notice them. Patty had her hair tied back in a bun and was wearing heavy black eye-liner. It made her appear very severe and dramatic. Eilis noticed that Diana pretended not to see her. It was as though the very arrival of this group was a signal to the musicians, who had been playing old waltzes with just the piano and some of the bass players, to play some tunes that Eilis knew from the girls at work were called swing tunes and were very fashionable.

As the music changed, some of Patty and Diana’s group began to applaud and cheer, and when Eilis caught Patty’s eye, Patty signalled to her to come towards them. It was a tiny gesture but it was unmistakable and, having made it, Patty kept staring over at her almost impatiently. Suddenly, Eilis decided she would stand up and walk over towards their group, smiling confidently at them all, as though they were old friends. She kept her back straight as she moved and tried to appear as if she were in full possession of herself.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said quietly to Patty.

“I think I know what you mean,” Patty replied.

When Patty suggested that they go to the bathroom, Eilis nodded and followed her.

“I don’t know what you looked like sitting there,” she said, “but you sure didn’t look happy.”

She offered to show Eilis how to put on the black eye-liner and some mascara and they spent time at the mirror together, ignoring everyone who came in and out. With extra clips that she carried in her bag, Patty put Eilis’s hair up for her.

“Now, you look like a ballet dancer,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” Eilis said.

“Well, at least you don’t look like you’ve just come in from milking the cows any more.”

“Did I look like that?”

“Just a bit. Nice clean cows,” Patty said.

Finally, when they went back into the body of the hall, the place was crowded and the music was fast and loud and many couples were dancing. Eilis was careful where she looked or moved. She did not know if Dolores had remained seated where she had left her. She had no intention of going back there and no intention either of catching Dolores’s eye in the hall. She stood with Patty and a group of her friends, including a young man with heavily oiled hair and an American accent who tried to explain the dance steps to her above the noise of the music. He did not ask her to dance, seeming to prefer to stay with the group; he glanced at his friends regularly as he took her through the steps, showing her how to move in time to the swing tunes that were becoming faster now as the dancers on the floor responded to them.