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Father Flood and that he was there to see what Tony was like for her.
Eilis was almost proud of Tony’s casual good manners, of his easy way of responding to the priest, all of it underlined by a way of being respectful, of letting the priest talk, and not saying a single word out of place. Rose, she knew, would have an idea in her head of what a plumber looked like and how he spoke. She would imagine him to be somewhat rough and awkward and use bad grammar. Eilis decided that she would write to her to say that he was not like that and that in Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone’s character by their job as it was in Enniscorthy.
She watched now while Tony and Father Flood spoke about baseball and Tony forgot that he was talking to a priest as he became feverish in his enthusiasm for what he was saying and thus interrupted Father Flood in a mixture of amused friendliness and passionate disagreement about a game they had both seen and a player Tony said he would never forgive. For a while they appeared not to realize that she was even there and when they finally noticed they agreed that they would take her to a baseball game as long as she pledged in advance that she was a Dodgers fan.
Rose wrote to her, mentioning in her letter that she had heard from Father Flood that he liked Tony, who seemed very respectable and decent and polite, but she was still worried about Eilis seeing him and no one else during her first year in Brooklyn. Eilis had not even told her that she was seeing Tony three nights a week and, because of her lectures, she had time for nothing else. She never went out with her fellow lodgers, for example, and this was a huge relief to her. At the table, however, since she had seen every new movie she always had something to talk about. Once the others became used to the idea that she was dating Tony, they refrained from giving her further warnings or advice about him. She wished, having read Rose’s letter a couple of times, that Rose would do the same. She was almost sorry now that she had told Rose about Tony in the first place. In her letters to her mother she still did not mention him.
At work she noticed that some of the girls were leaving and being quietly replaced until she and a few others were the most experienced and trusted on the shop floor. She found herself taking her lunch break two or three days a week with Miss Fortini, whom she thought intelligent and interesting. When Eilis told her about Tony, Miss Fortini sighed and said that she had an Italian boyfriend also and he was nothing but trouble and he would be worse soon when the baseball season was to begin, when he would want nothing more than to drink with his friends and talk about the games with no women around. When Eilis told her that Tony had invited her to come to a game with him, Miss Fortini sighed and then laughed.
“Yes, Giovanni did that with me too, but the only time he spoke to me at the game was to demand that I go and get him and his friends some hot dogs. He nearly bit off my nose when I asked him if they wanted mustard on them. I was disturbing his concentration.”
When Eilis described Tony to Miss Fortini, she became very interested in him.
“Hold on. He doesn’t take you drinking with his friends and leave you with all the girls?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t talk about himself all the time when he’s not telling you how great his mother is?”
“No.”
“Then you hold on to him, honey. There aren’t two of him. Maybe in Ireland, but not here.”
They both laughed.
“So what’s the worst thing about him?” Miss Fortini asked.
Eilis thought for a moment. “I wish he was two inches taller.”
“Anything else?”
Eilis thought again. “No.”
Once the dates for the exams were posted up Eilis arranged to have all that week free from work and began to worry about her studies. Thus, in the six weeks before the exams started, she did not see Tony on the Saturday evenings for a movie; instead, she stayed in her room and went through her notes and waded through the law books, trying to memorize the names of the