Sunday

He bought the loaf from the Italian place on Fifth Avenue, the long one with the seeds on it that his mother liked and said she did not, and walked up from the station with it under his arm in its paper, and the street was the street.

Bay Ridge on a Sunday afternoon at the end of April. The trees on the side streets were just coming into leaf, that thin bright green that lasted about a week, and the brick houses stood in their rows behind their little fences with their stoops and their bay windows and their Virgin Marys in the front gardens, and men were washing cars, and a boy was throwing a ball against a wall, and the wall was the wall Tom had thrown a ball against when he was nine, outside the Larkins’, and it still had the chip out of it at the height of a boy’s arm where his ball had taken it out in 1989 and Mrs Larkin had come out and shouted.

Hrynko’s was on the corner.

It had been on the corner since 1971, it said so on the sign, HRYNKO’S. GROCERIES. NEWSPAPERS. EST. 1971, in red letters on white that Mr Hrynko repainted every spring, and under that, smaller, in a lettering Tom had never been able to read as a child and could still only read the shape of, the same thing in Ukrainian. The window was full of tins and jars and a pyramid of oranges and a hand-drawn sign for the eggs that came on Thursdays from a farm upstate, and the door was open, propped with a brick, and on the step, in a cardigan, with a cigarette he was not supposed to be smoking because of his heart, Mr Hrynko.

“Tommy Keane,” said Mr Hrynko.

He was the only person alive who still called him Tommy. He was a big slow man of seventy with a grey moustache like a broom and hands like loaves, and he had sold Tom’s father the same paper every morning for thirty years, and sold Tom his first comic, and caught Tom stealing chewing gum at the age of eight and made him stand on the step for an hour holding the packet up so the street could see it, and then given him the chewing gum.

“Mr Hrynko.”

“You bring bread.” Mr Hrynko looked at the loaf. “From the Italian. Not from me.” He shook his head. “Your mother. Thirty years. She buys everything from me except the bread.”

“Your bread’s not as good.”

“My bread,” said Mr Hrynko, with dignity, “is the bread of my grandmother, from Lviv, and your mother is Irish and does not understand it.” He ground out the cigarette on the step and put the end in his cardigan pocket, where Mrs Hrynko would find it. “Your father didn’t come for his paper. Today. Or yesterday.” He looked at Tom. “The back?”

“The back.”

“Ach.” Mr Hrynko went inside and came out with a paper, folded, Jim Keane’s paper, the Sunday one, as thick as a brick. “Take. Tell him he owes me. Tell him I’ll put it on the book.” He held it out. “Tell him tomorrow, if he can’t walk, my nephew Taras comes past at seven on his way to the airport, and he can bring it to the door.”

“Taras is at the airport?”

“Since Christmas.” Mr Hrynko’s face did a thing that was pride trying to look like nothing. “Kennedy. The bags, for the Pan Am. Nights and mornings, whatever they give him. He’s a contract, not the airline, not yet, but he says next year.” He shrugged. “Tomorrow he’s on at eight. The first of May. He says nobody flies on the first of May, everybody’s marching, he’ll sit all morning in a room with a coffee.” He looked down the street. “And your father, this year, he doesn’t march.”

“No.”

“Fifty years,” said Mr Hrynko, “I watch your father go down this street on the first of May in his good jacket to march. With the old men from the local. With the band.” He shook his head. “This year, the back.” He looked at Tom. “And you?”

“I’m working.”

“Of course you are working,” said Mr Hrynko, and something went over his face that Tom did not know how to read, and he took another cigarette out of the cardigan and looked at it and put it back. “And Frankie marches.”

“Frankie’s a steward.”

“A steward.” Mr Hrynko nodded slowly. “A steward. At twenty-two.” He looked at the paper in Tom’s hand. “Go. Your mother’s waiting. Tell your father the book.”

---

The house was the fourth from the corner, on the left, with the green door.

His mother opened it before he knocked. She always did. She stood in the doorway in her apron with a wooden spoon in her hand and looked at him the way she always looked at him on a Sunday, the whole of him, from the hat he was not wearing to the shoes, quickly, the way she looked at a patient coming into a ward, and then she took the loaf.

“From the Italian?”

“From the Italian.”

“Good.” She looked at the paper. “Bohdan.”

“He says Dad owes him.”

“Your father owes everybody on this street,” said his mother, “and they all know he’s good for it.” She stood back to let him in. “He’s in the kitchen. Don’t make him get up. He’ll try.”

Maureen Keane was fifty-four and had been a nurse at Bellevue for thirty-one years, the last eleven of them as a ward sister on the medical floors, and she was small and dark and quick, with her hair going grey at the front in a streak she said was from Frank and her hands always doing something. She had the shift tomorrow, seven to half past seven. She had had the shift on the first of May for nine years running, because, she said, it was always quiet on the first of May with everybody marching, and she liked a quiet ward, and somebody had to.

His father was in the kitchen, at the table, sitting very straight in a hard chair.

He sat like that when it was bad. Straight as a post, with both feet flat on the floor and his hands on his knees, not leaning back, not leaning forward, the way you would sit if you were made of something that would break if it bent. Jim Keane was sixty-eight and had been an ironworker for forty-one years, on the high steel, on the bridges and the towers, and had come down off the last of them at sixty-four with a back that had been bad for twenty years and was now, his wife said, a disgrace, and he did not look at it as a disgrace. He looked at it as a thing that happened to a man’s back after forty years of walking on beams in the wind, and he did not complain about it, and he did not talk about it, and he sat very straight.

“Dad.”

His father looked up. He had a long face, weathered dark across the cheekbones from forty years of sky, and pale blue eyes in it, very calm. He nodded.

“Mr Hrynko says you owe him.”

His father nodded again, and held out his hand for the paper, and Tom gave it to him, and he put it on the table in front of him, unopened, and put his hand flat on top of it, and that was all.

That was his father. He had never been a talker. He had been, the old men at the local said, the quietest man on any job he was ever on, a man who could go a whole shift on the steel with a gang of four and say eleven words, and nine of them would be about the wind. He had not been a talker at home either. He came home and sat at the table and ate what was put in front of him and listened, to Maureen talking about the hospital and the boys talking about whatever boys talked about, and he nodded, and sometimes he smiled, a slow smile that went across his long face like a cloud’s shadow across a field, and he did not say anything, and nobody in the house had ever wanted him to.

When Tom had told him at this table, at twenty, that he was leaving the trade, he had said nothing. When Frank had said you’re going over, in the door, at sixteen, he had said nothing. He had said nothing for four years about any of it, to either of them, on any Sunday, and Tom had never once known what his father thought, and had come to understand, some time in the second year, that that was the point. His father would not take a side between his sons. He had decided it, the way he had decided to walk out along a beam for a man’s lunch, and he would sit at this table and say nothing about it until he died.

---

Frank came at two.

Tom heard him on the stoop and in the hall, the way you always knew a brother by the sound of him on the stairs of the house you grew up in, and then he was in the kitchen door, in his work jacket with the local’s crest on the back, with his hair still wet from a shower and a long rolled thing under his arm in a black bin bag.

“Mum. Dad.” He looked at Tom. “Tom.”

“Frank.”

That was how it went. It had gone that way every Sunday for four years. Tom. Frank. Like two men passing each other on a stair.

Frank was twenty-two and looked like their father: long, dark across the cheekbones already from two summers on the steel, with the same pale eyes, and none of the calm. Frank was not calm. Frank had never been calm in his life. He had been a loud baby and a loud boy and he was a loud young man, quick and funny and angry about things, and he had been the one, at eleven, who had organised the boys on the street into a union to demand the return of a football confiscated by Mrs Larkin, and had won.

“What’s that?” said their mother, looking at the bin bag.

“The banner.” Frank put it on the end of the table, carefully, and began to unroll the bag. “The old one. The nineteen-twenty-two. It’s coming out tomorrow for the first time in eleven years, and Mrs Sheehan’s been mending the silk for a month, and she’s done one corner and she says she can’t do the other, her eyes, and I said I’d ask you.”

“Me?”

“You did my christening gown,” said Frank. “You told me. When it got the tear. You said you sat up all night with a needle.”

Their mother looked at the banner.

It came out of the bin bag in folds, old silk, dark red, heavy, with a gold fringe that had lost half its gold, and when Frank laid it out on the end of the table there was a picture on it, painted, faded: a man on a beam against a sky, with a rivet gun, and a city under him very small, and below the picture, in gold letters with a scroll, the local’s name and 1922 and the motto, which was in Latin, and which Tom had never known the meaning of, and which, he had once been told by an old man at the yard, nobody at the local had known the meaning of since about 1950.

The bottom left corner had a tear in it as long as a hand.

Their mother looked at it for a long time. Then she put down the wooden spoon.

“After dinner,” she said. “Not on the table. You’ll get gravy on it.”

---

They ate at three. Roast chicken, potatoes, peas, the loaf from the Italian place, butter. Their father sat very straight at the head of the table and ate slowly with his back like a post and said nothing. Their mother talked about the hospital. Frank talked about the march.

“The bricklayers drew the front,” said Frank. “Of the Brooklyn column. They draw it out of a hat at the hall every year, and the bricklayers drew it, so they go first over the bridge, then the carpenters, then us. Then the steamfitters with the wrench.” He ate a potato. “We’ve got eighty marching. Eighty, from the local. The most since nineteen ninety-one.”

“Eighty,” said their mother.

“And the band. And the banner.” Frank looked down the table at their father. “And I’ve got the front of our section.”

Their father nodded.

“You’ll be on the television,” said their mother. “Your father can watch you on the television.”

Their father looked at his plate.

“First of May since nineteen fifty-three,” said their mother, to Tom, as if he did not know. “He went first at fifteen. With his father. Over the bridge. He’s never missed one. Not for a job, not for a wedding, not for the time he broke his foot and marched on a crutch.”

“He’ll march next year,” said Frank.

Their father said nothing.

“What do the stewards do?” said Tom.

He had not meant to ask. It came out, across the table, in the ordinary voice, and Frank looked at him, and the table went still for half a second, the way a table goes still when a thing has been said across it that is not the usual thing.

Then Frank shrugged.

“Keep the section together,” he said. “Keep the gaps. Keep the drunks out of the band. Keep the kids off the barriers.” He ate a pea. “And if anything happens, the chief steward says, you hold your section. You don’t let them run. Whatever it is. A fight, a fire, a horse, a man with a gun. You put your arms out and you hold them, and you look.” He put his fork down. “He says a crowd that runs kills more people than anything that makes it run.”

“He’s right,” said Tom.

“I know he’s right,” said Frank. “That’s why he’s the chief steward.” He picked up his fork again. “Where are you tomorrow?”

“The concourse.”

“Grand Central?”

“Yes.”

Frank looked at him for a moment, across the chicken. Tom could not read it. It was not the face from the door at sixteen. It was something else, something that went over Frank’s face quickly and was gone, and then Frank looked down at his plate.

“Good,” said Frank. “Saves us both a look.”

Their mother said Francis. She said it quietly. She did not put down a plate.

Their father went on eating, very slowly, very straight, and said nothing, and reached for the loaf from the Italian place, and broke a piece off it, and put it on Tom’s side plate; and broke another piece off it, the same size, exactly the same size, and put it on Frank’s.

---

After dinner their mother did the corner of the banner at the kitchen table, under the light, with the table wiped twice and a clean tea towel under the silk and her glasses on and a needle and a reel of dark red thread that she had sent Frank down to Hrynko’s for, and Mr Hrynko had not had dark red thread, and had sent his wife upstairs for her own.

Tom dried the dishes. Frank washed. They stood side by side at the sink, the way they had stood side by side at that sink every Sunday since Tom was ten and Frank was six and on a chair, and Frank washed and handed and Tom dried and put away, and neither of them said anything.

At the table their mother sewed.

“Peg Halloran,” said Tom, to the dish he was drying.

His mother looked up over her glasses.

“I saw her on Wednesday. On the concourse. Going up to Poughkeepsie on the train on her own to open a hospital wing. She carries her own bag. She remembered the Red Cap’s name.”

“Peg Halloran,” said his mother, and put the needle down for a moment, and something came into her face, a long way back. “She ran the nursing at Bellevue when I was on nights. Before she ran the whole lot. Nineteen seventy-nine, eighty.” She picked the needle up again. “She used to come round the wards at three in the morning. On her own. With a flask of tea and a packet of biscuits, and she’d sit at the desk with you and ask about your patients, every one of them, by name, and drink her tea, and go on to the next ward.” She drew the thread through. “She knew every night nurse in the building by name. Two hundred of us. She’d come in at three in the morning and say Maureen, how’s the man in bed six.”

Frank had stopped washing.

“You never said,” said Tom.

“You never asked.” His mother bit off the thread. “And she’s the Lieutenant-Governor now, and I’m a ward sister at Bellevue with a husband who won’t go to the doctor, and it was thirty years ago, and she won’t remember me.” She smoothed the corner of the silk with her thumb. “But she might. She remembered everybody.” She held the banner up to the light. “There. Your banner, Francis.”

The tear was gone. Where it had been, there was a line of small dark red stitches, very close, very even, that you would only see if you knew where to look.

Frank looked at it. He dried his hands on his jeans and came and looked at it close, and touched the stitches, and did not say anything for a moment.

“Thanks, Mum,” he said.

“Don’t let them drag it,” said his mother. “On the bridge. It’s eighty-four years old. You hold it up.”

“We’ll hold it up.”

---

They left together at seven, by accident, because Frank had to take the banner back to the hall for the morning and Tom had to get the train, and the hall and the train were the same way, down the street towards the avenue.

Their father came to the door.

He came slowly, from the kitchen, along the hall, very straight, with one hand on the wall, and their mother said Jim, sit down, and he did not sit down, and he stood in the green doorway in the evening light with his hand on the frame, and looked at his two sons on the stoop.

He did not say anything. He put his hand on Frank’s shoulder, once, and took it off. Then he put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, once, for exactly as long, and took it off.

Then he went back in, slowly, with his hand on the wall.

---

They walked down the street to the corner. Frank had the banner over his shoulder in its bin bag like a rifle. The boy had stopped throwing the ball at the Larkins’ wall. The light was going gold on the brick.

At the corner Mr Hrynko was on his step again with his cigarette, and he lifted it at them, both of them, together, the way he had lifted it at the two of them coming home from school.

“The Keane boys,” said Mr Hrynko.

They stopped. They stood on the corner under Mr Hrynko’s sign. Tom’s way was left, to the station. Frank’s way was right, to the hall.

“See you,” said Frank.

“Tomorrow,” said Tom.

“You won’t,” said Frank. “You’ll be on your floor.” He shifted the banner on his shoulder. Then he stopped, and looked at Tom, and for a second it was there again, the thing Tom could not read, going over his face. “Watch out for the Lieutenant-Governor,” said Frank. “With her bag.”

And he went right, towards the hall, with the banner on his shoulder, and did not look back.