This Must Be the Place (32 page)

‘Jackie’s mother.’

So, Teresa thought, not father: uncle. She finished rearranging her coat and turned to look at the man for the first time. Her intial thought was that he was familiar. I know you, she almost said, don’t I? We’ve met, surely.

She could tell he was having the same thought: his expression was one of confusion, hesitation, tempered by a strange, cautious joy.

She doesn’t know it at the time but she will think about this moment again and again, the two of them standing on the steps of the subway station, a boy between them, a pool of blood at their feet, trains arriving and departing above their heads. She will play it over and over in her head, almost every day, for the rest of her life. When she lies in the bedroom of her apartment with only hours to live, her daughters bickering in the kitchen, her husband in the front room, weeping or raging, her son asleep in the chair next to her, she will think of it again and will know it is perhaps for the last time. After this, she thinks, it will live only in the head of one person, and when he dies, it will be gone. She finds herself hoping that the man will, in a few days’ time, happen to read the death notices in the paper so that he will come to her funeral; she knows he would come, without doubt, that he would sit near the back, that he would bring well-chosen flowers, nothing too gaudy, that he would speak to no one. She knows that people will look at him and wonder who he is, what his connection is with her, and perhaps conclude that he knew her via the library. No one, she knows, would guess his true link with her, not even Daniel, her son, who naps next to her, looking washed up and burned out and too thin and already grieving, who guesses and divines too much about people, always: it is his blessing and his curse.

On the subway steps, Teresa and the boy’s uncle looked at each other, in something close to shock or fear. She was filled with an urge to apologise, she wasn’t sure for what: I didn’t know, she wanted to say, I didn’t realise.

She broke the lock of their gaze first. She fitted her gloves onto her hands, feeling her skin slide against the wrong side of the leather. ‘Have you money for a cab?’ she said, as if to her hands.

‘A cab?’ the man repeated, dazed.

‘To get the boy to a doctor.’

She wasn’t going to look at him again, no, she wasn’t. For the first time, an image of Paul floated through her mind and, in an effort to recall herself to herself, to her life, she clenched the fingers of her left fist to feel the pressure of her engagement ring on the neighbouring digits.

Then she did look and the same sensations hit again, like a row of dominoes toppling into each other: the towering sense of recognition, the disbelief that she doesn’t somehow know him, the ridiculousness that they do not know each other, the impossibility of them not seeing each other again.

‘Yes,’ the man said, delving in his pocket. ‘I have money for a cab.’

‘Good,’ she said, and she thought again of Paul, of his mother, of her parents, her sisters, as if they were all there, on the subway platform perhaps, looking down on her as she stood with this man. She was seized with a terrible dread and it propelled her away from the man and the boy, down the stairs, made her pretend not to hear him yell after her to wait, to hang on a minute. ‘Good luck,’ she threw over her shoulder, and was gone.

She didn’t see him again for a week, for seven days and seven nights. She went to and from work; she cooked supper; she ironed her clothes. Her mother tried to get her to write to Paul, to ask if they could set a date for the wedding during his next leave. Her sisters fought over who would get to be chief bridesmaid. She went to the movies, twice, with her friend Maureen. She received a bundle of letters from Paul, some dated two months previously and held up in some mysterious wartime net; she read some of them; the others she put in the tin box under her bed. She locked herself into the bathroom for hours on end, until her brother hammered on the door to let him in, for pity’s sake, a man has to go. And at the library she conducted a search about love at first sight.

Teresa was not a romantic. She was not what she thought of as an airy-fairy type of girl. She had never dated anyone other than Paul and when news of their engagement had been made public, she discovered, in people’s expressions of surprise, that it had been expected she would never marry. She’d had the misfortune to be born tall in a time when women were meant to be petite, neat, fit nicely under the arm of an accompanying man. As a newborn, her mother was fond of telling anyone who would listen, she wouldn’t fit into the crib; her feet had stuck out of the bottom, ‘like ninepins’.

Who could have predicted, then, that one of the most eligible boys in the neighbourhood, Paul Sullivan, whose parents ran a general store on Vinegar Hill, would start to pay court to the bookish, lanky eldest daughter of the Hanrahans when he was home on leave from fighting in Europe? She didn’t, at first, understand what he wanted: she assumed he was asking her to the movies, to walk back from mass because he wanted to date one of her sisters. But, no, it seemed it was her he wanted and when he sank to his knees in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge on a drizzly evening, how could she have done anything other than nod, turn herself slowly, like a speeding ship, towards that alternative destination of wife-and-mother to escape her predicted role of librarian and maiden aunt?

In her lunch-hour, she sat in the park and thumbed through
Romeo and Juliet
but found nothing in there to alleviate her turmoil: all that palm-to-palm stuff and the holy kiss seemed strained and constructed. It hadn’t felt like that at all. It was as if someone had reached into her with an electrical wire and given her such a jolt that her heart had been obeying a new rhythm ever since. She tried Anna and Vronsky’s meeting but became distracted by how silly and unworthy of Anna’s love she always found the count. Over the following days, she took with her to her park bench Donne, Browning, Byron, the Brontës and Christina Rossetti. But nothing came close to what she had felt on the subway steps.

A week since the meeting and she found, in an anthology of love letters, something by Hazlitt: ‘I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like … and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.’

She raised her head, tilted it one way then the next, as if the words were the ball bearings of a puzzle, seeking a resting place in her skull. Not so great an absurdity, she murmured to herself, and something touched her shoulder and there was Mr Wilks, the head librarian, saying that someone was here to see her. Teresa stood and smoothed her hair, and tried to breathe above the cantering of her heart because she knew who it would be – she’d known he would come, somehow and soon.

And there he was, by the enquiry desk, without a hat this time but still in his wool coat, a package gripped in his hands. Again, they looked at each other in confusion and Teresa wondered how this had come about, what had happened there on the steps as Jackie sliced open his finger.

‘For you,’ he said, breaking the spell, holding out the package to her: brown paper, knotted twine.

‘What is it?’ she said, as she took it.

He grinned. ‘A scarf. A new one. Yours was –’

‘Oh, really, you needn’t have. I—’

‘– all stained and ruined, and my sister said it was the least we could do.’

They both took a pause, looking away, then back at each other. One of the elderly librarians, behind them, cleared her throat, snapped shut a drawer.

‘How is your nephew?’ Teresa asked, rather formally.

‘Jackie?’ He grinned again. ‘Fighting fit. Got six stitches and couldn’t be more proud of them.’

The colleague behind her coughed again and Teresa, not knowing what to say next, where to take things, said, ‘Shall I walk you out?’

Outside the library, as the revolving door released her into the winter air, he was there; he took her hand, he guided her to one side so that they stood out of the way of people going about their business, out from under the lit portico, so that a light rain fell on them, flecking his face and lashes.

‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said urgently, at their new proximity.

‘Teresa,’ she said. ‘Teresa Hanrahan. Yours?’

‘Johnny Demarco.’ He squeezed her fingers in his. ‘It is,’ he said, with a smile on his lips, ‘very nice to meet you.’

‘Thank you for the scarf.’

‘I hope you like it. I chose it. It’s a little brighter than your other one but I thought, hey, she needs something to bring out those blue eyes of hers. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve been to to deliver it. I’ve been to every library in Brooklyn today, looking for the girl in question, just to—’

‘I’m engaged,’ Teresa said.

He gave her a long look. ‘Huh,’ he said. He stepped sideways and slumped against the library wall. ‘Huh,’ he said again. He took out a lighter, put a cigarette in his mouth and stared up into the darkening sky. ‘Well,’ he said, inhaling, ‘it figures, I guess.’

‘I didn’t …’ Teresa began ‘… I don’t …’

He let out a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Me too, actually.’ He took a drag of his cigarette. ‘I mean, sort of. Almost.’

‘Oh,’ she said, trying to master the surge of grief, of jealousy rising in her chest.

Johnny Demarco flung his cigarette to the ground and turned towards her. ‘So, what do you want to do?’

It was four years before she saw him again. Brooklyn was a big place and the Italians and the Irish, although celebrating the same festivals, the same masses, had different parks, different streets, different shops.

Paul said they should open the store on Easter Monday; his mother disagreed, as evidenced by the thin line of her mouth, the heft with which she slammed down the skillet onto the stove. Teresa had no opinion on the shop’s opening times – she couldn’t have cared less: she wanted only to go into the next room, to place her head on the cool pillow, pull up the covers and sink into the novel she had borrowed last week and of which she had managed only fifteen pages, the children and the store keeping her so busy.

But open they did, afternoon only, to appease Mrs Sullivan. So by lunchtime on Easter Monday, Teresa had been to mass, cooked the lunch, installed the toddler in her playpen in the back room and the older girl with a game of counting out dried beans, under the sometimes-watchful eye of her grandmother, and was standing behind the wooden counter, the shop overall straining over the mound of her third pregnancy – another daughter, as it would turn out.

She was shifting from foot to foot, serving a half-blind neighbour from the next block when she heard him before she saw him: ‘… but just for a minute, OK?’ he was saying.

The woman with him was beautiful, she saw, the discovery causing her equal parts pain and pleasure. She was small, with a gloved hand hooked around his sleeve, her hair curled and set in the latest fashion. When they turned towards her counter, she saw that the woman’s belly was the shape of her own.

‘Something cold, Johnny, a soda or an ice pop,’ the wife was saying. ‘What do you think?’

It happened: he saw her. She saw the recognition, the shock ignite in his face. Their eyes locked, just as they had done four years previously, and the room, the voices, the shop, the customers, the shelves and shelves of jars and cans and flour all fell away. It’s you, he seemed to be saying to her and she answered, yes, it is.

The neighbour fussed between two types of canned beans and the wife talked about which soda she liked best and would it be cold, what did Johnny think, and how hot it was today for April, and Teresa held onto the counter, as if caught in a gale.

When the neighbour finally shuffled away, Teresa raised her chin a notch and took a deep breath. The wife was selecting a soda from the refrigerator and Johnny said, ‘Hello again.’

‘Hello,’ Teresa replied, her eyes flicking towards Paul, who was up a ladder on the other side of the shop.

The wife put down her soda on the counter with a look of enquiry.

‘This is Teresa Hanrahan,’ Johnny said. ‘She …’ He seemed to lose track, his conversation falling off a precipice into nothing, causing his wife to glance sharply at him.

‘Sullivan,’ Teresa heard herself correcting. ‘I helped out your nephew one time when he’d got himself in trouble.’

The wife rolled her eyes. ‘You mean Jackie? Always in trouble. I’m Lucia,’ she said, ‘seeing as my husband has forgotten to introduce me.’

Teresa nodded at her.

Lucia’s eyes flicked down Teresa’s overall. ‘You too?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Your first?’

‘Third.’

Lucia’s eyebrows went up. ‘Third? I tell you, I will never get to three. This one’s been so much bother already. I told Johnny the other day, I’m stopping at one, honey, that’s it for me.’

Teresa reached for the bottle of soda, eased off the cap and handed it back to her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you might change your mind.’

‘Never,’ Lucia said, as she headed for the door.

Johnny stood where he was for just a shade too long. No one else would have noticed, Teresa told herself afterwards: of this, she was almost sure. He laid his hand on the broad, worn wood of the counter, exactly opposite Teresa’s. He mimicked the arrangement of her fingers: first two curled under, thumb and final fingers pointing outwards, as if in salute, as if in welcome or perhaps farewell. Then he was gone.

She counted the years: one and then two and then three and then four and then more. Paul’s parents moved out to live with one of his sisters. After a decent interval, Teresa asked Paul if they might make the room into a bedroom for the girls and he had nodded. He got a friend who was a carpenter to come and build bunkbeds for three.

They invested, at her suggestion, in a large, refrigerated counter so that they could make fresh sandwiches for the lunchtime customers. Seven years, eight years, nine years. The girls started helping in the shop after school, doing their homework at the shop counter. Teresa, having thought there would be no more children, was surprised to find herself pregnant once again. She gave birth to the baby, who would turn out to be her last, a boy, Daniel. She walked the floor with him in the night – he was always a sleepless, restless baby – and she discovered that if you stood on tiptoe in the front room you could see a section of the flat, dun-coloured East River.