a man, that’s what you do, I thought. To prove you aren’t a kept woman. I didn’t need the clothes; they were clothes to go out to restaurants and things in. I wasn’t going to do that. But I took the money. If someone pays you to leave town, it only makes sense to keep the money.”
The matter-of-factness took my breath away. She’d taken money to leave us. She could call it something else. But it was a payoff.
“So you’re still bought and paid for, then,” I said. My whole body shook. I looked at her small, neat kitchen, with the apples and butter on the counter, and rage filled me up. I remembered Billy describing his anger, how it made him blind, and now I knew blindness and hatred and how it felt.
“Why did you come?” Delia asked quietly.
“Not for your mea culpa!” I swept the butter and the apples and the flour off the counter. The apples bounced and rolled, and the sack burst, sending up a puff of flour that settled over our shoes like ash.
Mea culpa. The words in the Mass where you beat your chest three times. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
But Delia didn’t look humble. She looked fine. She hadn’t said the word sorry. She hadn’t asked about Jamie or Muddie or Da.
Why was I here? It was so clear that we didn’t matter to her, so why would I think she could help us? She didn’t know why Billy was on that train. I’d come for nothing, I thought, and a vast and helpless emptiness opened up inside me. I would have to leave here and face my grief again. I would have to face the fact that Billy was coming here and not know why. I would have to think of him on that train, dying with a heart full of anger and desperation.
“There are some sins that even God can’t forgive,” I said. “Go back to your new life — your library and your books and your apple pie. You’re right. We didn’t want you then. We don’t want you now.”
I heard Delia calling me, but it was as though from a far, far distance, and I was running, flinging myself out of the house as though pestilence was there.
Thirty-three
New York City
November 1950
The good news was that I was done with crying. Delia had stopped my tears.
All the way back into Manhattan, I thought about air-raid drills, disaster raining from the sky. They said that if the Bomb hit Manhattan the living would envy the dead. I knew how that felt now. All I wanted was to close my eyes and not hear another word, see another sight. When I looked out the car window and saw people walking, I hated them for their smiles, their scamper toward a meal, a hissing radiator, pumpkin pie. The whole world, it seemed, was in a holiday mood.
How had Billy lived with that, killing his cousin, attending that funeral? No wonder he’d been so afraid of his anger. So afraid that he clung to me desperately, wanting me to make everything all right.
Hank gave me space to think on the way back. He was good at that. The sound of the tires was like an easy beat if I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw we were leaving the tunnel. The circle of gray light ahead grew and grew until we hit open air. Hank followed the signs for uptown.
“What are you going to do now?” Hank asked.
“The right thing,” I said. “However it falls.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got to be braver than I want to be,” I said. “And that means going home.”
I hitched a ride with the Greeleys. It was a long drive and we drove without stopping, eating turkey sandwiches in the car. Mrs. Greeley had gotten up at four a.m. to roast a turkey, because that’s the kind of mother she was.
If the Greeleys felt it was my fault that Hank had gotten involved in a murder at a nightclub, if they resented me or despised me, they didn’t let me know it. They shared their sandwiches and their thermos of coffee, and they drove me through the streets of Providence straight to my front door.
I got out of the car. Hank rolled down the window and I leaned in to look at them all, Mr. Greeley at the wheel, his eyes red and tired, Mrs. Greeley, tense but summoning up a smile