Someone by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

and his mouth set. He threw up his hands when he saw me. On the sidewalk, he took my elbow. “Where have you been?’ he said. “I told you to come right home.”
    Inside, climbing the stairs, he said, “Did you go to church?” and I wasn’t quick enough to think of a lie. “No,” I said.
    He paused on the landing in front of our door. He took off his cap and ran his hand over his thick hair, our father’s gesturealtogether. “Was that the truth?” he said. He said it firmly. “About the lady wanting you to go light a candle?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    Gabe took the penny from my palm. He put his cap back on, raising his chin as he did, looking in the dim hallway light resolved and resourceful. “What did she ask you to pray for?” he said. I shrugged. I could not call up the phrase. “Safe travels to New Jersey,” I said. “For Gerty.”
    Gabe’s eyes moved in a way that reminded me of the fat woman on the stair, reading my face. “All right,” he said, reading everything there. “Go on in. If Daddy wakes up, tell him I’ll be home in a jiff.” And he turned back down the stairs.
    I waited until the outside door had closed before I entered the apartment. There was immediately the faint odor of my father’s having been sick. I found my mother in the bathroom, leaning over the sink, throwing cold water on her face. Throughout her life, this was my mother’s second-best antidote—after prayer—for pain and suffering: go throw cold water on your face.
    I slipped behind her, sat on the narrow edge of the bathtub. My mother was still dressed in her dark suit jacket and skirt, her going-into-the-city clothes, even when she just went in to fetch my father home whenever a message came to the house, usually from Mr. Lee at the candy store or from Mr. Fagin at the funeral parlor—the two neighborhood establishments that accepted phone calls for those of us who didn’t yet have a phone—a message that said he was under the weather.
    I waited for my mother to turn off the running water. I wanted only to say to that broad back, to those sure hips, The man Dora Ryan married was not a man at all, only so my mother could say, Nonsense, as was her way, and thus restore the world. But my mother turned from the sink with the rough towel to her face and seemed surprised to see me there. “Ah, Marie,” shesaid, looking over it, and would later apologize that she did not have the wherewithal, at that moment, to break the news more gently. “Poor Gerty’s lost her mother. Fagin’s girl told me. She passed away this morning. In agony,” she added. “God give her peace.”
    There was only one small narrow window in this bathroom, high up in the tiled wall, and it faced only the airshaft, but the light through it caught my mother’s face nonetheless. There were no tears in her eyes, and only a few wet strands of hair at her broad forehead, plastered to her cheeks. She began to dry her hands on the towel, in her own efficient, getting-on-with-it way. “A little girl,” my mother was saying. “A sister for Gerty. They’re calling her Durna.”
    My mother said, folding the towel neatly, returning it to the bar, “It was late in her life to be having another child.” She said, “There’s a woman over on Joralemon, above the bakery. She might have helped the poor soul. If only she had asked.”
    Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, I was aware of the vertigo I’d known when I was younger, when the reflected bathwater swung me high and shook me out and rattled the teeth in my head. Suddenly I held up my arms to my mother. I heard her cluck her tongue—either at the pity of Mrs. Hanson’s death or the childishness of my pose, perhaps both—before she crossed the narrow space between us and took me into an embrace.
    I faked a stomachache to avoid Mrs. Hanson’s wake. Said I’d caught “the grippe” from my father. My fear was that when I saw Gerty again she would resemble the neglected kids at school—kids