Sunnyside

The alarm went at a quarter past five, and he was awake before it.

He lay for a moment in the dark with his hand on it, not turning it off, letting it ring under his hand, because there was nobody else in the flat to wake. Then he turned it off. The flat was very quiet after it. Outside the window, over the roofs of the garden apartments across the court, the sky was going from black to the dark blue that came before anything else, and there was one bird somewhere going at it already, very loud, the only thing awake in Sunnyside, and a train going over on the elevated a long way off with the sound of a lot of small metal things being shaken in a tin.

He got up.

The flat was two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom, on the second floor of a brick building round a court with a tree in it, and he had lived in it alone for three years and had one of everything. One chair at the kitchen table. One mug that he used, and five in the cupboard that he did not, which his mother had given him when he moved in, in a set, and which he had not taken out of their box until she came to see the flat and asked where they were. One good knife. One saucepan. One photograph on the wall of the main room, of the bridge from underneath, black and white, taken by somebody in 1910 with men on the cables like birds on wires, which he had bought at a market in Brooklyn for four pounds because one of the men on the cables, the old men at the local said, was probably his great-grandfather, though nobody could say which one.

He put the kettle on and stood at the window while it boiled.

The court was empty. The tree in it was in leaf, the thin bright green, and the lights were coming on in two or three windows on the other side, people getting up for the early shifts, a nurse, a baker, a bus driver, he did not know which. A cat sat on the wall by the bins and looked at nothing. The sky behind the roofs went another shade lighter.

He made coffee in the one mug and drank it standing up at the window.

---

The shirt was on its hanger on the back of the bedroom door, where he had put it on Sunday night after he got back from Bay Ridge, ironed, with the creases down the sleeves the way his mother had shown him at fifteen and the academy had shown him again at twenty-two and nobody had ever needed to show him a third time. The trousers were on the chair. The jacket was in the wardrobe. The shoes were under the chair, done on Sunday night in front of the television, and he looked at them in the light from the window, and they looked all right, and he thought of Mr Pettiford saying they are a disgrace to the Corporation and did them again, quickly, with the tin and the brush and the cloth, sitting on the edge of the bed, for three minutes, until they shone.

He dressed. Shirt. Tie, the clip-on, because a real tie was a thing a man could hold you by. Trousers. Belt. Shoes. He stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom with the light on and looked at himself in it the way the academy had taught them to, from the top down, hat to shoes, and found nothing wrong, and turned off the light.

He put the radio on in the kitchen while he ate a piece of toast.

It was the ABC, the New York station, the early programme, a man and a woman he had listened to every working morning for four years and never seen. The man read the news. The Assembly at Albany opened its new session today, with the Lieutenant-Governor travelling up from the city to open it in the old chamber, as was the custom, and the Premier would speak afterwards on the programme for the year. The Commons sat in New Westminster this afternoon; the Prime Minister would take questions. Overnight in the Pacific, something about a ship. The woman read the weather. Sunshine, light winds, a high of sixty-four, a perfect first of May.

“And the columns are forming,” said the woman, in the voice of someone who had said it every first of May for some years and still liked saying it. “In all five boroughs. The building trades in Brooklyn at the hall on Atlantic Avenue from eight, the transport trades in Queens from half past, the dock trades on the West Side, the garment and the public trades in the Bronx and on Staten Island. They step off at ten, they meet as they go, and the whole march is expected in by one, at the Battery, for the speeches.” A pause, and a smile in it. “The Nine Hours March, if you want to impress somebody at work this morning. Though nobody’s called it that in about a hundred years.”

“The Union March,” said the man.

“The Union March,” said the woman. “Traffic. If you’re driving into lower Manhattan this morning, don’t.”

He turned it off.

---

His telephone buzzed on the kitchen table at twenty to six.

He looked at it. Nobody sent him anything at twenty to six. His mother sent him things at nine at night, on Wednesdays, about bread. Teresa sent him things at odd hours, mostly about the hockey and always in capitals. Nobody else.

It was Frank.

He picked it up. There was no writing. There was only a photograph, which took a moment to come, the little wheel going round on the screen, and then it came.

It was the banner.

It was laid out on a floor, a big wooden floor with lines painted on it, a hall floor, a basketball court, under strip lights, the whole length of it, the old dark red silk and the gold fringe and the faded painted man on his beam against the sky with the rivet gun, and the city under him, and the Latin nobody knew the meaning of. Around the edges of the photograph there were feet, men’s work boots, a lot of them, standing at the edges of the banner, not on it, and at the bottom of the picture somebody’s hand, holding one of the two poles, as if they were about to lift it.

And in the bottom left corner, very small, if you knew where to look, a line of dark red stitches.

That was all. No words. Nothing under it. Just the banner, on the hall floor on Atlantic Avenue, at twenty to six in the morning, sent from Frank’s telephone to his.

He looked at it for a long time, standing in the kitchen, with his coat on.

Frank had not sent him anything in four years. Not a word. Not at Christmas; not on his birthday; not when he was in the Wyckoff Heights for two nights with his chest the winter before last. Their mother had sent him things. Their mother had told him what Frank was doing. Frank had not sent him anything at all.

He did not know what it meant.

He thought he knew what it meant. He thought it meant look, Mum’s stitches, and we’ll hold it up, and it’s coming out for the first time in eleven years and I wanted somebody to see it before we took it over the bridge, and you were there yesterday when she did it, and something else, under all of those, that he did not have a word for and was not going to look for one. He thought it meant all of that. He did not know. It was a photograph of a banner on a floor, and it had no words under it, and that was the way Frank had sent it.

He started to type.

Looks good.

He looked at that. He deleted it.

Mum’s stitches.

He looked at that for longer. It was true and it was what he meant and it was also, he thought, the kind of thing you said when you wanted the other man to know you had seen the thing he had wanted you to see, and he did not know whether Frank wanted that. He did not know whether Frank had sent it to him at all, or to everybody in his telephone, all the men from the local, and his had been one name in the list. He did not know whether Frank had sent it at twenty to six because he was standing on a hall floor at twenty to six with a banner and nobody to show it to who had been in the kitchen yesterday.

He left it there. Mum’s stitches. He did not send it.

He would send it later. He would send it at lunch, when he had thought about it, from the concourse, with a cup of Teresa’s coffee in his other hand. He would think of something better than Mum’s stitches by lunch. He put the telephone in his jacket pocket with the words still in it, unsent, and turned off the kitchen light, and picked up his hat, and went out.

---

The street was grey and fresh and wet from the men who washed the pavements outside the shops on the avenue, and smelled of the bakery on the corner, which had its door open and its lights on and a man inside in a white vest sliding trays into an oven. The bird was still going. A few people were walking to the station, the way he was, in work clothes, with bags. A woman in a nurse’s uniform under her coat. A man in overalls with a lunch box. Two men in suits, together, talking about the Assembly.

The station was up on the elevated, over the avenue, on its iron legs, and he went up the stairs with the others and stood on the platform and waited, and the sky over Manhattan in the west was going pale now, a long way off, and you could see the towers of midtown against it like teeth, the old ones and the new ones, and the light coming up behind him from the east on Queens and the river.

The train came.

It came in along the elevated with its lights on and stopped and opened and he got on and stood, because he always stood, by the doors, with his back to the wall and his hand on the rail. The car was half full. The nurse. The man with the lunch box. A boy asleep across two seats with his mouth open and a skateboard under his feet. A girl in a waitress’s uniform reading a paperback with a red cover. Nobody looked at him, or they looked at the hat and off it.

The train went along the elevated over the rooftops of Queens, over the yards and the warehouses and the backs of the houses with their washing out already and their tomato plants in pots on the fire escapes, with the sun coming up behind it now, lighting the windows of the houses one by one so that they flashed as the train went past, and ahead of it, very close now, very big, Manhattan, the whole of it, in the first light of the first of May, with nothing wrong with it at all.

He took his telephone out and looked at the photograph again. The banner on the hall floor. The boots round the edges. The hand on the pole. The stitches.

Mum’s stitches, said the screen underneath it, unsent.

Then the train went down into the tunnel under the river, the way it did every morning at that place, and the light went, and the windows went black and showed him his own face and his hat, and the signal went, and the little bars at the top of the screen went out one after another, and the screen said nothing.

He put the telephone back in his pocket.

He would send it at lunch.