Brooklyn (26 page)

Her mother came into the room with a tray and cups and saucers and a teapot and some cakes.

“There you are now,” she said. “It’s lovely to see you both, a bit of life in the house again. Poor Eilis was fed up with her old mother. And we’re looking forward to the wedding, Nancy. We’ll have to get the best of style for it. That’s what Rose would want.”

She left the room before any of them could speak. Nancy looked at Eilis and shrugged. “You’ll have to come now.”

Eilis worked out in her head that the wedding was four days after the planned date of her departure; she also remembered that the travel agent in Brooklyn had said she could change the date as long as she notified the shipping company in advance. She decided there and then that she would stay an extra week and hoped that no one in Bartocci’s would object too strongly. It would be easy to explain to Tony that her mother had misunderstood her date of departure, even though Eilis did not believe that her mother had misunderstood anything.

“Or maybe you have someone waiting impatiently for you in New York?” Annette suggested.

“Such as Mrs. Kehoe, my landlady,” Eilis replied.

She knew that she could not trust herself to begin to confide in either of her friends, especially when they were together like this, without letting them know too much. And if she told them, she would soon find that one of their mothers would mention to her mother that Eilis had a boyfriend in New York. It was best, she thought, to say nothing, to talk instead about clothes and her studies and tell them about the other lodgers and Mrs. Kehoe.

They, in turn, told her the news from the town—who was going out with whom, or who was planning to get engaged, adding that the freshest news was that Nancy’s sister, who had been going out with Jim Farrell on and off since Christmas, had finally broken it off with him and had a new boyfriend who was from Ferns.

“She only got off with Jim Farrell as a dare,” Nancy said. “He was being as rude to her as he was to you that night, do you remember how rude he was? And we all bet money that she wouldn’t get off with him. And then she did. But she couldn’t bear him in the end, she said he was a terrible pain in the neck, even
though George says he’s really a nice fellow if you get to know him, and George was in school with him.”

“George is very charitable,” Annette said.

Jim Farrell, Nancy said, was coming to the wedding as a friend of George, but her sister was demanding that her new boyfriend from Ferns also be invited. In all this talk of boyfriends and plans for the wedding, Eilis realized that if she were to tell Nancy or Annette about her own secret wedding, attended by no one except her and Tony, they would respond with silence and bewilderment. It would seem too strange.

For the next few days as she moved around the town, and on Sunday, when she went to eleven o’clock mass with her mother, people commented on Eilis’s beautiful clothes, her sophisticated hairstyle and her suntan. She tried to make plans to see Annette or Nancy either together or separately every day, telling her mother in advance what she intended to do. On the following Wednesday, when she told her mother that, if it was fine, she was going the next day in the early afternoon to Curracloe with George Sheridan and Nancy and Annette, her mother demanded that she cancel her outing that evening and begin the task of going through Rose’s belongings, deciding what to keep and what to give away.

They took out the clothes hanging in the wardrobe and put them on the bed. Eilis wanted to make clear that she did not need any of her sister’s clothes and that it would be best to give away everything to a charity. But her mother was already setting aside Rose’s winter coat, so recently acquired, and a number of frocks that she said could easily be altered to fit Eilis.

“I won’t have much room in my suitcase,” Eilis said, “and the coat is lovely but the colour is too dark for me.”

Her mother, still busy sorting the clothes, pretended that she had not heard her.

“What we’ll do is we’ll take the frocks and the coat to the
dressmaker’s in the morning and they’ll look different when they are the proper size, when they match your new American figure.”

Eilis, in turn, began to ignore her mother as she opened the bottom drawer of the chest and poured its contents on to the floor. She wanted to make sure that she found her letters to Rose, if they were here, before her mother did. There were old medals and brochures, even hairnets and hairpins, which had not been used for years, and folded handkerchiefs and some photographs that Eilis put aside, as well as a large number of score cards for golf. But there was no sign in this drawer, or in any of the others, of the letters.

“Most of this is rubbish, Mammy,” she said. “It’ll be best just to keep the photographs and throw the rest away.”

“Oh, I’ll need to look at all that, but come over here now and help me fold these scarves.”

Eilis refused to go to the dressmaker’s the following morning, telling her mother finally and emphatically that she did not want to wear any of Rose’s frocks or coats, no matter how elegant they were or how much they cost.

“Do you want me to dump them, then?”

“There are a lot of people would love them.”

“But they are not good enough for you?”

“I have my own clothes.”

“Well, I’ll leave them in the wardrobe in case you change your mind. You could give them away and then find someone you didn’t know at mass on Sunday wearing them. That’d be nice now.”

In the post office Eilis had bought enough stamps and special envelopes for letters to America. She wrote to Tony explaining that she was staying a few weeks extra and to the shipping company at the office in Cobh cancelling the return passage she had booked and asking them to let her know how to arrange a later
date for her return. She thought that she would wait until closer to the date to alert Miss Fortini and Mrs. Kehoe to her late arrival. She wondered if it would be wise to use illness as an excuse. She told Tony about the visit to Rose’s grave and about Nancy’s engagement, assuring him that she kept his ring close to her so that she could think about him when she was alone.

At lunchtime she put a towel and her bathing costume and a pair of sandals into a bag and walked to Nancy’s house, where George Sheridan was going to collect them. It had been a beautiful morning, the air sweet and still, and it was hot, almost stifling in the house as they waited for George to arrive. When they heard the sound of the horn beeping in the station wagon he used to make deliveries they went outside. Eilis was surprised to see Jim Farrell as he held the door open for her and then got in beside her, allowing Nancy to sit beside George in the front passenger seat.

Eilis nodded coldly at Jim and sat as far away from him as she could. She had spotted him at mass the previous Sunday but had been careful to avoid him. As they moved out of the town, she realized that he, and not Annette, was coming with them; she was angry with Nancy for not having told her. She would have cancelled had she known. She was further infuriated when George and Jim began a discussion about some rugby game as the car made its way along the Osbourne Road towards Vinegar Hill and then turned right towards Curracloe. She thought for a moment of interrupting the two men to tell them that in Brooklyn there was a Vinegar Hill too but that it was nothing like the Vinegar Hill that overlooked Enniscorthy, even though it was called after it. Anything, she thought, to shut them up. Instead, she decided that she would not speak once to Jim Farrell, not even acknowledge his presence, and that as soon as there was a gap in the conversation she would introduce a topic on which he could not contribute.

When George had parked the car and George and Nancy
moved ahead towards the boardwalk that led over the sand dunes to the beach, Jim Farrell spoke to her very quietly, asking her how her mother was, saying that he and his mother and father had been to Rose’s funeral mass. His mother, he said, had been very fond of her in the golf club. “All in all,” he said, “it was the saddest thing that has happened in the town for a long time.”

She nodded. If he wanted her to think well of him, she thought, then she should let him know as soon as possible that she had no intention of doing so, but this was hardly the moment.

“It must be difficult being home,” he said. “Although it must be nice for your mother.”

She turned and smiled sadly at him. They did not speak again until they reached the strand and caught up with George and Nancy.

Jim, it turned out, had not brought a towel or his togs and said that the water was, in any case, probably too cold. Eilis looked at Nancy and then shot a withering glance at Jim for Nancy to witness. As Jim removed his shoes and socks and rolled up the bottoms of his trousers and went down to the water, the other three began to change. If this had been years ago, Eilis thought, she would have worried during the entire journey from Enniscorthy about her swimsuit and its style, about whether she was too unshapely or awkward on the beach, or what George and Jim would think of her. But now, however, that she was still suntanned from the boat and from her trips to Coney Island with Tony, she felt oddly confident as she walked down the strand, passing Jim Farrell paddling at the edge of the water without saying a word to him, wading out and then, as the first high wave approached, swimming into it as it broke and then out beyond it.

She knew he was watching her and the idea that she should really have splashed him as she passed him made her smile. For a second it came into her mind as something she could tell Rose and that Rose would love, but then she realized with a sense of
regret close to an actual pain that Rose was dead and there were things like this, ordinary things, that she would never know, that would not matter to her now.

Later, Nancy and George walked together towards Ballyconnigar, leaving Eilis and Jim to follow. Jim began to ask her questions about America. He said he had two uncles in New York and he used to imagine them among the skyscrapers of Manhattan until he found out that they were two hundred miles from New York City. It was in New York State, he said, and the village one of them was in was smaller than Bunclody. When she told him that a priest, who had been a friend of her sister, had encouraged her to go and helped her there, he asked her the name of the priest. When she said Father Flood, she was taken aback for a moment when Jim Farrell said that his parents knew him well; his father, he thought, had been in St. Peter’s College with him.

Later, they drove to Wexford and had their tea in the Talbot Hotel, where the wedding party was going to be held. When they got back to Enniscorthy, Jim invited them to have a drink in his father’s pub before going home. His mother, who was serving behind the bar, knew all about their outing and greeted Eilis with an effusive warmth that Eilis found almost unsettling. Before they parted, they agreed that they would repeat the outing the following Sunday. George mentioned the possibility of going from Curracloe to the dance in Courtown.

Eilis had no key to the front door of the house in Friary Street so she had to knock; she hoped that her mother was not asleep. She could hear her coming slowly to answer the door and thought she must have been in the kitchen. Her mother spent some time opening locks and pulling back bolts.

“Well, here you are,” her mother said, and smiled. “I’ll have to get you a key.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, when I saw you going off I thought to myself that you’d
be back late, but it isn’t that late because there’s still a bit of light in the sky.”

Her mother closed the door and led her towards the kitchen.

“Now, tell me something,” she said, “did you have a great outing?”

“It was nice, Mammy, and we went to Wexford for our tea.”

“And I hope that Jim Farrell wasn’t too ignorant?”

“He was fine. Minding his manners.”

“Well, the big news is that Davis’s offices sent up for you and they have a crisis because all the lorry drivers have to be paid tomorrow and so do all the men working in the mill and one girl is on her holidays and Alice Roche is sick and they were at their wits’ end when someone thought of you. And they want you to be there at half past nine in the morning, and I said you would be. It was better to say yes than no.”

“How did they know I was here?”

“Sure the whole town knows you’re here. So I’ll have your breakfast on the table at half past eight and you’d better wear sensible clothes. Nothing too American now.”

Her mother had a smile of satisfaction on her face and this came as a relief to Eilis, who had, over the previous days, begun to dread the silences between them and resent her mother’s lack of interest in discussing anything, any single detail, about her time in America. They spoke now in the kitchen about Nancy and George and the wedding and arranged to go to Dublin the following Tuesday to buy an outfit for the day. They discussed what they should buy Nancy as a wedding present.

When Eilis went upstairs she felt, for the first time, less uneasy about being home and found that she was almost looking forward to the day dealing with wages at Davis’s and then the weekend. As she was undressing, however, she noticed a letter on the bed and instantly saw that it was from Tony, who had put his name and address on the envelope. Her mother must have left it
there, having decided not to mention it. She opened it with a feeling close to alarm, wondering for a second if there was anything wrong with him, relieved when she read the opening sentences that declared his love for her and emphasized how much he missed her.

As she read the letter she wished that she could take it downstairs and read it to her mother. The tone was stiff, formal, old-fashioned; the letter was clearly by someone not used to writing letters. Yet Tony managed to put something of himself into it, his warmth, his kindness and his enthusiasm for things. And there was also something there all the time in him, she thought, that was in this letter too. It was a feeling that were he to turn his head, she might be gone. That afternoon, as she had enjoyed the sea and warm weather and the company of Nancy and George and even, towards the end, Jim, she had been away from Tony, far away, basking in the ease of what had suddenly become familiarity.