the driveway, leaving two heavy black stripes of rubber tread behind him.
16
THE FRONT HALLWAY OF THE HOUSE HAD a faint odor, a pleasant mixture of wax, cut grass, and what Tommy supposed was the smell of emptiness, a musky smell that was a bit like the smell of the classrooms in the Catholic boys’ high school he’d gone to. Everything he did echoed: closing the heavy oak door, walking across the parquet floor, placing the freshly cut key, its edges still a little sharp, on the white wooden mantel in the living room. The only thing in the house was a bottle of window cleaner on the kitchen counter, left there by the black woman who took the train up from the Bronx to clean his mother’s house once a week.
The living room was long and cool even in the summer heat, with four big windows along the outside wall and the brick fireplace across from them, with small flowered tiles laid on the hearth and cabinets built in on either side. Across the hall was a dining room with wood paneling halfway up the walls. The kitchen was enormous, with room for a big table and lots of chairs. Beyond it was a screened porch, and a yard with grass so smooth and green it looked like a golf course.
Tommy had gone to Sal’s for lunch and hadn’t had the heart to go back to the office, where Buddy Phelan kept looking at him sideways, wondering when he was going to say that he was leaving. He’d had lunch alone at Sal’s, a roast-beef sandwich and a draft beer. He liked to eat alone, although he never admitted it. It seemed an eccentric kind of thing, like something you heard murderers had liked to do before anyone found out they were murderers. But after years of sharing a table, first with his four brothers and his sister, then with his wife and children, he found it soothing to sit with the Daily News propped between his plate and his cup and eat his sandwich without having to talk to anyone.
Sometimes, while he had his coffee, he and Sal would talk. He thought that Sal must be lonely, living upstairs above the bar in two rooms, alone since his mother died three years before. Sal was an only child, and now an orphan. Whenever Tommy tried to think about that, it was like imagining a man from Mars. Tommy thought how quiet it must be upstairs, and how Sal must have all night to read the papers, even the box scores for teams not in New York.
That morning Sal had just looked at him. Finally he said, “Word is you’re getting a promotion.”
“Word is sometimes wrong,” Tommy said.
“I’d miss you,” Sal said, wiping the bar with his rag. “But don’t cut off your nose to spite your dad, Tom.”
Perhaps that was why he had driven out here. He had parked his car down the street and walked up, so that none of his brothers would see the station wagon and report back that Tommy had given in. Or perhaps it was that he thought he might discover here how he felt about everything that was going on in his life, and what that everything was. Two nights ago he had gone upstairs to bed and heard his daughter crying behind the closed door of her bedroom, a high and lonely sound, like the sound the house made when it creaked in a high wind. He had stood outside for a minute, and then gone into his own room. For an hour he had strained to hear that sound, sometimes thinking he heard it, other times that it had stopped. Then Connie slid into bed beside him, and he fell asleep.
“Connie,” he said aloud, as he went upstairs in this big house, and the word came bouncing back from the clean white walls.
Upstairs there were six bedrooms and four bathrooms. The bathroom off the biggest bedroom had a glass shower stall and a dressing room with big red roses climbing up the papered walls. In the ceiling of the dressing room there was a pull-down door and steps to the attic. As Tommy hoisted himself up he heard tiny footsteps, like fingers drumming on a tabletop, and he thought to himself, “We need an exterminator.” He wondered if that thought meant that he was going to live here. For a moment he looked down below him, at the luminous oak beneath