his feet, at the edge of one florid rose where the wall met the molding. He wondered if he was looking at the rest of his life.
The attic was surprisingly clean, and empty except for a big trunk, wood banded with metal. He lifted the lid slowly, afraid he’d hear the little feet again. The trunk was full. On top was a manila envelope, and beneath it a welter of lace and satin the color of tea. He could tell it was a wedding dress without even lifting it. Some dried flowers lay to one side.
He slid the contents of the envelope out and sat crosslegged on the unfinished pine floor. There was an old wedding picture, the bride wearing the sort of shapeless veil and straight, midcalf-length dress his own mother wore in her wedding pictures. There was a marriage certificate—Jean Flaherty to Harold Ryan, April 8, 1924, in Most Blessed Sacrament Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. There was a faded white ribbon, a scrap of material, and a postcard from Niagara Falls. Tommy could feel something small and hard in the bottom of the envelope. He shook it and into his palm fell a tiny tooth.
The attic seemed to have been cleaned, and the trunk stood in the center of the floor as though it had been abandoned. Did people think so little of the past? Tommy thought again of eating at Sal’s, of a lunch he’d had the week before. A shaft of sunlight had been shooting through the cheap stained-glass fleur-de-lis in Sal’s front window, so that bars of red and green and blue fell right across the plate placed in front of the third stool in from the end. Some of the men said that it was enough to give you indigestion, this big spot of color atop your corned beef and slaw, but Tommy liked it. He supposed it reminded him of church, perhaps of serving Mass when he was an altar boy, when he had felt solemn and important as he poured the water from the cruet over the priest’s consecrated fingers—his father’s cruets, his father’s chalice. As he had taken the seat, he thought of what a creature of habit he was, and it made him afraid.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Sal had said, and Tommy had found, to his great amazement and shame, that at the words tears welled in his eyes. It was dim in the bar at all hours of the day, and he hoped that Sal could not see.
“Your dad worse?” Sal asked, putting the cream in front of him, making Tommy suspect that the light was better than he thought.
“Ah, who knows,” Tommy said, playing with his teaspoon. “The doctors never tell you anything. I don’t think they know anything. Half the time he’s full of piss and vinegar and the other half he’s talking like a baby.”
Sal wiped the bar and emptied an ashtray.
“My brother’s daughter is getting married,” Tom went on, “my niece, very pretty girl, very smart, all the best things. And suddenly my mother calls and says Monica’s getting married, three weeks’ notice, with her grandfather in the hospital. I understand these things, it happens every day, but jeez, I don’t know, maybe it’s better that my father can’t come. She’s marrying a Polish boy, my brother says he’s a nice enough boy, but my father thinks that anybody who’s not Irish should get out of town, you know?”
Sal nodded. He’d heard about Mr. Scanlan from the Italian guys who worked for First Concrete.
“I guess I figured these things didn’t happen anymore, that girls were smarter, that guys were smarter. My brother was figuring on her finishing college, becoming a nurse or something. Now the boy will have to leave school, get a job.” It flashed through Tommy’s mind that the job would probably wind up being at Scanlan & Co., and that the news of the Polish grandson-in-law was going to be even more horrible for his father than he had at first imagined.
“Remember after the war,” Tommy said, “how everybody talked about how tough the changes were going to be? I didn’t fight, I was just a little kid, but I can remember everyone saying there would be changes, and there were changes, but they were all good. The wives stopped worrying, everybody bought houses, had a couple of kids, they were damn glad to be home. Now there’s no war but there’s changes, and they’re all bad. You go to Mass, the kids