Ten Thirty-Seven

He had the bread under his chair.

It was in its paper, the long loaf with the seeds on it that his mother liked and said she did not, from the Italian place on Fifth Avenue, bought at a quarter to seven that morning on the way to the station because the Italian place opened at half past six on a Sunday and he was on the day tour and would not be back in Bay Ridge until four. He had carried it on the train, under his arm, and into the house, and up to the muster room, and the Inspector had looked at it under his arm during the reading of the day and not said anything, and he had brought it down to the canteen and put it under his chair, on the lino, where he could feel it against his heel.

Frank had written it on a pad of nursing notes with a split mouth and three ribs gone. SUNDAY. YOU BRING THE BREAD. He had written under it, FROM THE ITALIAN. That had been the arrangement. He was keeping it.

The canteen on a Sunday was half full. The day tour, on its break. Bernadette at the counter with her spatula, making the same eleven things. The television on its steel bracket in the corner, on, with the sound low; he could hear it now if he tried, the voice of it, from across the room, the shape of the words if not all of them. Nobody was watching it.

Teresa was across the table from him with a mug.

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At twenty-three minutes to eleven he looked at the clock.

He did not decide to. He found that he was looking at it. It was on the wall over the counter, a plain round clock with a white face and black hands, the Corporation’s, the same as the one in every room of every house in the city, and it said twenty-three minutes to eleven.

Six weeks.

Six weeks to the minute. He sat at the table and looked at the clock on the wall over Bernadette’s counter and it said the time it had said on the face of the four-faced brass clock on the booth in the middle of the floor of the concourse, the face that was turned to him, at the mouth of the Lexington passage, with his back to the wall, the last time he had looked at anything before the light.

He did not do anything. There was nothing to do. He put down his fork. He sat, very still, at the table, with his hands on either side of his plate, and looked at the clock, and did not look away from it.

Nobody else in the canteen looked at it. He could see that. The men at the table by the counter were talking about the baseball. Bernadette was turning something on the griddle. A woman from upstairs was reading a paper. Nobody looked at the clock; nobody knew to; it was a Sunday in June, and twenty-three minutes to eleven was a time on a Sunday morning between breakfast and lunch, the same as any other. It had not been anything until six weeks ago, and it was not yet anything that a room knew about. It was something that he knew about, at a table, on his own.

The second hand went round.

Across the table, Teresa had stopped with her mug halfway to her mouth.

He did not see her stop. He felt it; the way you feel somebody across a table go still. He looked at her. She was looking at him, and then she looked where he was looking, at the clock over the counter, and he saw her read it, and understand.

She put the mug down.

She did not say anything. She put her hands flat on the table on either side of it, the way his were, and looked at the clock too, and the two of them sat there, at a formica table in a basement canteen at Fifty-First Street on a Sunday morning, with the men at the next table talking about the baseball and Bernadette turning something on the griddle and the television in the corner saying something about the weather, very still, and looked at the second hand go round once.

Then it was twenty-two minutes to eleven, and Teresa picked up her mug.

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He had the tin in his pocket.

He took it out at a quarter past eleven, when the break should have been over and was not, because it was a Sunday and the Inspector was in Albany for something and Costello was in his office with the door open and the ledger and did not come down. He took it out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table. The old tin. Round and flat and dented, the black gone off the lid in a ring where forty years of a thumb had pushed it open, with the name of the polish on it in letters you could hardly read. And the brush, old, the bristles worn down at one side in a slope. And the cloth, folded, black all through.

His father had given them to him the Sunday before.

He had not said anything. He had done Tom’s shoes at the kitchen table after dinner, with the tin and the brush and the cloth, the old way, while Frank sat across the table with his ribs strapped and watched and their mother washed up; and when he had finished, and put the shoes on the floor by Tom’s chair, side by side, with their toes to the door, he had put the lid back on the tin, and pressed it down with his thumb in the ring where his thumb had always pressed it, and put the tin on the table in front of Tom. And the brush beside it. And the cloth, folded, on top.

And looked at him. And got up, in stages, one hand on the table and one on the back of his chair, and gone to bed.

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He took off his left shoe.

He could do it now. He could do laces again since the Thursday. The bandages had come off on the Tuesday, and his palms were healed in long shiny pink lines where the glass had been, and stiff, and he could close his hands round a spoon and a pen and a lace and a cloth. He undid the lace, slowly, the double knot, picking at it the way his father had picked at it on his knees on the lino on the night of the first of May. It came. He eased the shoe off by the heel and put it on the table on a paper napkin.

He opened the tin. He pressed the lid with his thumb in the ring, and it came up.

He put the cloth over two fingers, the way his father did, tight, and touched the polish, a little, only a little, you don’t need much, you need time, and began on the toe. In small circles. Very small. One way, and then the other. Slowly. Working it in. Not hurrying, because hurrying was how you lost the line.

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He thought about it while he worked. He let himself.

He thought about the three faces on the portable television on the counter in his father’s kitchen at ten to twelve on the first of May, side by side against a pale background, from the front, with nothing in them. And the names under them that went in and did not stay. And the white letters. NO CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN MADE. NO STATEMENT.

He thought about the word he had written in the margin of yesterday’s paper with his mother’s pen. WHY. And his father looking at it for a long time and looking up and shaking his head, once to the left and once to the right and back. I don’t know.

Nobody had told him. Six weeks. The papers had had a word on the front of them for a fortnight, every day, in the biggest type, and an ambassador had been summoned, and a car had stopped outside Hrynko’s and three men had painted the word on the sign over the door; and then the word had gone off the front of the papers, last week, quietly, without anybody saying it was going, and nothing had come in its place. There had been a file, and nobody had opened it. There had been three faces, and they had said nothing in their faces and nothing out loud, and nobody had read out a reason at a lectern from a sheet of paper, and nobody was going to.

He did not think anybody was going to. He thought he was going to have to do his shoes, every Sunday night for the rest of his life, in front of the television in Sunnyside, with this tin, without knowing.

He worked the polish into the toe of the left shoe in small circles, one way and then the other.

He thought that his father had not known either. That his father had sat at the kitchen table at midnight on the first of May and looked at the word in the margin and not known, and shaken his head, and put his hand flat on top of the word, over it; and then, at some point in the night, while Tom was asleep with his head on his arms and the wireless on the windowsill and the grey not yet in the window, had got up, in stages, and got down the tin from the drawer under the sink, and taken the shoes from by the back door, and sat at the table with them, and done them. Because that was a thing he did know how to do. One thing at a time. Without hurrying.

He did not know why. He knew how to do this.

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At twenty-five to twelve the television in the corner said something, and Bernadette turned it up.

He did not hear it. He was doing the welt, now, the edge of the sole, where the polish went in the crease, with the corner of the cloth over one finger, very carefully, all the way round, slowly, and his head was down, and the television was behind him, across the room, high on its steel bracket in the corner, and the voice of it was the shape of words a long way off, and he was not listening for it.

He did not hear the canteen go quiet.

It went quiet the way a room of police went quiet, from the front backwards; the men at the table by the counter stopped talking about the baseball, and the people behind them saw them stop and stopped too, until it reached the back wall, and the woman from upstairs lowered her paper, and Bernadette put her spatula down on the counter and folded her arms. Teresa, across the table from him, turned in her chair. All of them, all over the canteen, at once, heads coming up, turning, towards the corner.

On the television, on its steel bracket, there were steps.

The steps of a big white house in New Westminster, with columns, in the sun, and a car at the foot of them with its door open, and reporters, and a man coming down the steps, slowly, in a dark suit, on his own, towards the car. He stopped, on the step, near the bottom. Somebody among the reporters said something to him. He looked at them. He said one sentence. Then he went down the last two steps, and got into the car, and somebody shut the door, and the car went.

Along the bottom of the screen, white on dark red, still:

AL GORE RESIGNS AS PRIME MINISTER.

Every face in the canteen was turned up to it.

Bernadette, with her arms folded. The men at the table by the counter. The woman from upstairs with her paper on her knee. Teresa, turned in her chair, with her mug in her hand, looking up at the corner. Costello, who had come to the bottom of the stairs from the muster room with the ledger under his arm at some point that nobody had noticed, and was standing there, very square, with his face like a fist, looking up.

And Tom Keane, at a formica table in the middle of the room, with his left shoe on a paper napkin in front of him and his father’s tin open beside it, and the black cloth tight over two fingers, working the polish into the welt in small circles, slowly, all the way round, one way and then the other, the way you would work a knot forty storeys up in the wind, without hurrying, because hurrying was how you lost the line, with the loaf from the Italian place under his chair against his heel, was the only one in the room who did not look up.