Brooklyn

At a quarter to ten his mother took the pad of nursing notes out of his lap and turned it to the inside of the back cover, which was the only place left, and wrote.

GO HOME.

He looked at it. It was the second time today. The doctor in the green clothes had written it on a glove packet in the Municipal Building and underlined it twice and then crossed it out.

He took the pen. He wrote under it.

THERE’S NOBODY AT HOME.

His mother read it.

He watched her read it. He watched her think of the flat in Sunnyside, which she had seen twice: the two rooms and the kitchen, the one chair at the table, the one mug, the five in their box in the cupboard, the photograph of the men on the cables of the bridge, the tree in the court. He watched her think of him going back to it tonight, on his own, with his ears and his hands and the gauze on his neck, and turning his key in the door, and the flat on the other side of it with nobody in it, and nobody to hear him come in, and him not able to hear if anybody did.

She took the pen back. She crossed out GO HOME, with one line, straight, the way the doctor had.

GO TO YOUR FATHER.

---

The trains were running out of the island.

He walked to the station at Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington, six blocks, in the dark, with the streets quieter now, emptier; the tide of people that had gone north up the avenues in the evening sun had gone, wherever it had gone, and the island was dark and still and the people left in it were standing in doorways and sitting on steps and looking at nothing, and every window that had a television in it had the same picture on it, flickering blue, and every bar with its door open had people standing silent in its doorway looking in.

At the top of the subway stairs there was a man in an orange jacket with a lamp and a card on the railing.

SOUTH TO BROOKLYN NOW. OUTBOUND ONLY. NO FARES.

The man looked at Tom’s uniform and his bandages and the label on his pocket and nodded him down the stairs without a word.

The train was waiting at the platform with its doors open. It was not full. There were perhaps twenty people in the car he got into, and they were sitting, all of them, spread out along the seats with spaces between them, not touching, the way people sat on a train at three in the morning; and a lot of them had dust on them. Not the white dust of Grand Central. The grey of the junction, or the harbour, he did not know; on their shoes, on the knees of their trousers, in their hair. A man in a suit with a grey sleeve. A woman in a nurse’s uniform with grey on the back of it from kneeling. Two boys in transport union T-shirts, the same as the bus driver’s, QUEENS COLUMN, asleep against each other with their mouths open.

Nobody looked at him. Or they looked at the uniform, and the bandages, and off them. A woman across the car looked at the label on his pocket for a long time.

The doors closed. He felt them close; he did not hear them. The train moved. He stood by the doors with his back to the wall and his bandaged hand on the rail, the way he stood every morning, and the train went down through the stations under the island, one after another, with their platforms lit and empty, no one waiting, no one getting off, and then down, deeper, under the river, into the tunnel, and the windows went black and showed him his own face.

He looked at it.

He did not know it. That was the thing. He looked at the man in the black window, in a City constable’s uniform with no hat, white with one dust and grey with another and red down the front, with white gauze below one ear and white bandages on both hands and a label tied by a string to his shirt pocket like a parcel, and he did not know who it was. He looked for a long time. The train went on under the river. Then the window showed him something he did know, and it was his mouth, which had gone in at one corner, the way his mother’s did, and Teresa’s, and Frank’s; and he looked at that, and it was his.

---

Bay Ridge was dark.

He came up out of the station onto the avenue and it was dark and very quiet and every house had a light on, and every light was blue, the blue of a television, flickering, in every front room on every street, all of them on the same picture. He could see it through the windows as he walked. The same picture in every window, changing at the same moment in every window, all the way up the street, so that the whole street flickered together, like one thing breathing.

People were on their stoops. Not many. Old men, mostly, sitting on the steps in cardigans in the dark, with the blue light of the front room behind them through the door, not watching it, sitting with their backs to it, smoking, looking at the street. They watched him go past. One of them, Mr Larkin, Mick Larkin’s father, eighty, on the steps of the house with the wall in front of it that had the chip out of it at the height of a boy’s arm, watched him go past and stood up.

He stood up off his step, slowly, an old man in a cardigan, and stood on his stoop in the dark, and did not say anything, and did not sit down again until Tom had gone past.

He did not know why. He did not stop to find out.

At the corner, the light was on in Hrynko’s.

He saw it from the end of the street. The shop was shut, the sign on the door turned round, the pyramid of oranges in the window in the dark; but there was a light on at the back, behind the counter, yellow, not the blue of a television, a lamp, and in it, sitting on a chair behind the counter with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, a big man with a grey moustache.

He did not go in. He looked at the light for a moment, from the corner, and went on, to the fourth house on the left, with the green door.

---

The door was not locked.

It was never locked. It had not been locked in Tom’s lifetime; his father said a man who locked his door on his own street did not deserve the street. He pushed it open. The hall was dark. At the end of it, the kitchen door was open, and there was light in it, the blue of a small television and the yellow of the lamp over the stove.

He went down the hall.

His father was at the kitchen table.

He was sitting very straight in a hard chair, the way he sat when it was bad, with both feet flat on the floor and his hands on his knees, not leaning back, not leaning forward. In front of him on the table there was the Sunday paper, the one Tom had brought from Hrynko’s yesterday, as thick as a brick, still folded, unopened, and his father’s hand was flat on top of it, the way it had been yesterday. On the counter by the stove, turned round to face the table, there was the small portable television that lived in the kitchen for the weather and the hockey, and it was on, and it had the picture on it that every window in Bay Ridge had, flickering blue, and his father was not looking at it.

He was looking at the door.

He had been looking at the door, Tom understood, for some time. Since the telephone, probably. Since a quarter past nine, when his wife had rung him from the ward desk at Bellevue on the landline and told him both, and all of it, and he had said good and put the telephone down. He had sat at the kitchen table since then, very straight, with his hand on yesterday’s paper, and the television on, and looked at the door to the hall.

He looked at Tom in it.

He did not get up. He did not say anything. He looked at him, the whole of him, from the hair to the shoes, the way his wife did, the way she had taught him to, or he had taught her, Tom had never known which; the dust and the red and the bandages and the gauze and the label. It took him a long time. He was not a fast man.

Then he nodded at the other chair.

---

Tom sat down.

His father got up.

He got up the way he got up when it was bad, in stages, with one hand on the table and the other on the back of the chair, his face doing nothing at all while his back did what it did, until he was standing, very straight; and then he went to the stove, slowly, with one hand on the counter, and turned on the gas under a pan that was already there, and stood over it.

Tom watched him.

He could not hear the gas. He could not hear the pan. He could see the blue of the flame under it and his father’s back, very straight, in his cardigan, and his father’s hand, the long brown hand with the knuckles standing up, the hand that was Frank’s hand, on the counter, holding himself up.

On the portable television on the counter beside him, with no sound, the picture changed. A street. Night. Lights. Men in uniform. A long shot of something with tape round it, yellow, the RAC’s, and a lot of lights. Then the studio, and a man at a desk, not the one whose voice Tom knew; a different one, later, the night one. Along the bottom, white on dark red, crawling, the letters he had been reading all day, and he did not read them.

His father took the pan off the gas and poured what was in it into a bowl, and brought the bowl to the table, slowly, with one hand on the counter and then on the back of the chair, and put it down in front of Tom, and put a spoon beside it, and a piece of bread from the loaf from the Italian place, yesterday’s, on the side, and sat down again, in stages, very straight, and put his hand back flat on the paper.

It was soup. It was his mother’s soup, from the freezer, the one she made on Sundays and froze in tubs with the date on them in marker, barley and lamb, and his father had defrosted it, Tom saw, some time this evening, before the telephone, or after it, and had had it in the pan on the stove ready, all evening, in case.

He tried to pick up the spoon.

He could not. The bandages. Teresa had wound them round and round his palms, tight, and his fingers came out of the end of them stiff and fat and would not close properly round anything as small as a spoon, and he tried twice, and the spoon went over on the table with a clatter he did not hear.

His father reached across and picked it up.

He did not give it back. He looked at the bandages for a moment. Then he put the spoon into Tom’s hand himself, the right one, and closed Tom’s fingers round it, one at a time, with his own long brown fingers, pressing them closed round the handle, the way you would close a child’s hand round a spoon, and held them there for a moment until they stayed.

Then he let go, and sat back, very straight, and put his hand on the paper.

Tom ate the soup.

---

When he had finished, his father looked at his feet.

Tom looked down too. His shoes. The work shoes, black, that he had done twice, on Sunday night in front of the television and again at a quarter to six this morning, until they shone, so that Mr Pettiford would not say they were a disgrace to the Corporation; that Mr Pettiford had looked at at five to seven this morning at the top of the Lexington passage and said Better. They were not black now. They were white, and grey, and on the toes and the laces something dark that had dried.

He bent down to undo them.

He could not do that either. The laces were knotted, double, the way the academy taught you, so they would not come undone if you had to run, and his fat stiff fingers in the bandages could not find the ends of them, and he sat bent over in the chair, pulling at the laces, and the knots went tighter.

His father got up.

In stages. One hand on the table. One on the back of the chair. Standing, very straight. And then he did a thing Tom had not seen him do in five years, since the back went the first time, really went, and they kept him four days at Bellevue: he bent.

He went down. Slowly. One knee, onto the lino of the kitchen floor, with his hand on the table holding him, and then the other, and his face did nothing at all while his back did what it did, nothing, perfectly still, a long brown face with pale blue eyes in it, very calm, and he knelt on the kitchen floor in front of his son’s chair with his back like a post and took Tom’s left foot in his hands and put it on his own knee.

He undid the lace.

He did it slowly, with the long fingers, picking at the double knot, the way you would pick at a knot in a line forty storeys up in the wind, without hurrying, because hurrying was how you lost the line. It came. He loosened the lace all the way down, every eyelet, and eased the shoe off, by the heel, and set it on the lino beside the chair, upright, the toe pointing at the door.

Then the other one.

Tom sat in the chair and let him. He looked down at the top of his father’s head, at the grey hair, thin on top, at the back of his neck, brown, with the lines in it from forty years of sky, bent over his foot. He did not say anything. He did not know what there was to say. He did not think his father wanted anything said, and he did not think his father would have heard it if he had, because his father was a man who did one thing at a time, and the thing he was doing was a knot.

The second shoe came off. His father set it beside the first, upright, the toe to the door, the two of them side by side on the lino, white and grey and dark, a pair.

Then he put his hand on the table, and on the back of Tom’s chair, and got up.

It took a long time. Tom watched it take a long time. He did not help, because he knew better than to help; you did not help Jim Keane get up off a floor, the same way you did not help him along a beam. He watched his father get up off the kitchen floor in stages, one hand on the table, one on the chair, with his face doing nothing while his back did everything, until he was standing again, very straight, over the two shoes; and then he went round the table, slowly, and sat down in his own chair, in stages, and put his hand flat on top of yesterday’s paper, and looked at the television, for the first time, as if there was nothing else in the room.

On the screen the picture changed again. A photograph. A woman, in a plain dark jacket, against a dark background with a flag at the edge, with the corner of her mouth just going in.

His father looked at it for a long time.

It was half past eleven.