Someone by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott [McDermott, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2013-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind,” Mr. Fagin said early in my tenure, “every once in a while, when things are quiet here, to go up and have a word with my mother.”

The third-floor apartment was all Irish lace: lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses, and a lace handkerchief in her pale hands. She was a tiny old woman with a small, pale, pretty face. The apartment was as neat as a pin, and there were always small vases of rearranged funeral flowers on the mantel and the windowsills, on the sideboard and the tea table.

I never found Mrs. Fagin alone, which was surprising, since I so seldom caught sight of her visitors coming in. But every time I climbed the stairs and knocked gently at the apartment door, I heard from behind it the energetic scuffle of another visitor. There would be tea and cake already set out, or a light lunch, or a kettle already whistling in the kitchen. An old Sister of Charity in her pioneer cap would be there, or one of the nursing sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, often both. Other old immigrant ladies of all shapes and sizes stepping out of the kitchen, bringing in another chair. Mrs. Fagin always sat in the middle of the high-backed couch, her little feet in black shoes barely touching the floor. She always threw up her hands in delight when I entered the room and touched the space beside her and said something charming and lyrical, “You’re as welcome as the flowers in May” or “Here’s a sight for sore eyes.”

The nuns had to turn their heads to smile at me from within their caps and wimples. I often had the impression that I had just interrupted a long, whispered story one of them was telling. They always seemed to me to be just leaning back. There always seemed to me to be a silenced breath hanging on the air. “God love you,” Mrs. Fagin would say as I came into the neat room. “You’ve just brightened our day.” Although there was no denying, as I came into the lacy, sun-washed room, that their day had already been going along quite brightly.

I sat beside Mrs. Fagin on the stiff couch, or if another old woman or one of the older Sisters was already there, I’d take a single chair. “Now,” Mrs. Fagin would say when I had my cup, “what’s going on downstairs?”

I would name for her whoever was being waked that evening, or whose family had called that morning to inquire about Fagin’s services, or whose body had arrived from the morgue and was currently being prepared. The old lady would cock her head at each name. She had bright blue eyes and pure white hair. Like her son, she might once have been a redhead. “Oh yes,” she’d say if she knew them, or if the name

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