iii

Eilis washed the floor again, making sure that none of the grease from the stew had congealed there. She then made herself busy around the house. When Tony seemed to be following her, she sat at the table with Rosella.

‘I think you should see a doctor,' Rosella said. ‘Your hand lost all its power and you just froze. If that happened when you were driving, it would be bad.'

‘I'm better now,' Eilis said, but she could see that Rosella was not convinced.

She went to bed early, lay thinking with the bedside lamp on. When Tony came into the room, he smiled softly and then tiptoed around as though she were already sleeping. As soon as he was in bed, he switched off his lamp and she hers.

She waited, wanting to give him a chance to speak, say anything, even talk about work or what he had been watching on television. He lay on his back and then turned away from her and then lay on his back again. He must be aware that she was awake. She heard him clearing his throat. In the dark, she could let this silence go on for as long as she thought fit. She might even decide not to break it at all, fall asleep beside him and put him through another day guessing what she knew or how she would respond.

But she worried that he might actually fall asleep, leave her awake beside him considering what she might have said. She had to say something now.

‘There's one thing I need you to tell me,' she whispered, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He did not move.

‘Does that man who came today mean what he said? Does he really plan to leave a baby on my doorstep or is it just a way of letting you know how angry he is?'

Still he did not respond.

‘If it's just an idle threat, you need to let me know this instant.'

When she heard nothing, she sighed.

‘You have to –' she began.

‘He means what he says,' Tony whispered. ‘There's no doubt about that. He loves making rules and big statements. He has her very frightened.'

‘I don't want to know about her.'

‘You can take it that he will do what he says.'

‘Literally leave the baby on our doorstep?'

‘I can tell you for certain that he plans to do that. I have been struggling, trying to find a way to break the news to you for the past few weeks.'

‘Not trying very hard, Tony.'

‘I know that.'

‘You let him do the talking for you.'

‘I know. I know.'

They lay together in silence for a while.

‘I need to ask you one other thing,' Eilis said eventually, ‘and I need you to answer clearly and please do not say anything that is not true. Has there been anyone else?'

Tony switched on his bedside lamp.

‘There is no one else. There has never been.'

‘You need to tell me now if there are –' she whispered.

‘Nothing. I told you. I promise you. Nothing.'

‘Just this.'

‘Just this,' he said and sighed.

—

Once the man had visited her with the news of the baby, Eilis looked forward to going to work each day, getting away from the house. If they were busy at the garage, she would willingly stay on later, anything not to go home where Tony was behaving as though nothing had happened.

Even the conversation at dinner had returned to normal.

A few times, when she wanted to talk to Tony about what they might do were this man to carry out his threat, she felt his fierce resistance to any further discussion. And since Rosella and Larry had no idea what was going on, Eilis alone was carrying the burden. The man, after all, had come looking for her. She had seen his face and heard his voice. No one else knew what that had been like. And there was no one she could tell.

Tony began to go to bed early. When she joined him, he pretended to be asleep. Sometimes, she lay in the dark knowing that he was awake beside her.

—

One evening, she found Tony in the kitchen. He averted his eyes when she came into the room and mumbled about being tired.

‘There's something that I didn't say to you,' she began.

He nodded his head slowly as if to say that he had been waiting for this.

‘There are no circumstances under which I am going to look after a baby. It is your business, not mine.'

‘Maybe you don't want to be,' he said softly, ‘but you are married to me.'

‘It's a pity you didn't think of that when you were out fixing leaks. But I don't want to go over that. I need to let you know that if that man comes with a baby I will not answer the door and if he leaves the baby on the doorstep, I will not open the door. I am not dealing with this.'

‘So what are we going to do?' he asked.

‘I have no idea.'

She stayed up late reading a magazine that Frank had left her, hoping Tony might be asleep by the time she went to bed.

Once she let herself see things from his perspective, the dilemma was clear. If he really believed that this man was going to dump a baby on their doorstep, then he must be feeling helpless. But she had to steel herself from feeling sympathy for him. If she softened in any way, she knew, it could result in her getting up in the night to feed someone else's baby. She was determined that she would not do this.

She could see that Tony was working on her, looking sad and making sure he did not say a single word that could make relations between them any worse. Without her support, he could do nothing.

And then it occurred to her that she could not be sure what Tony's mother would do. Francesca had a way of making everyone in the family, including Eilis herself, feel that they did no wrong. Even when Lena, in one of her rages, tried to run Enzo over in the driveway of their house, her mother-in-law declared that these things happened in the most loving families.

—

Each time Eilis bumped into Francesca, she studied her to see if there was any sign that her mother-in-law knew about the baby, but Francesca responded to her in the same way as always. Tony, she thought, had not felt free to confide in his mother.

In the garage one day, on a whim, Eilis phoned Frank's law office in Manhattan and made an appointment to see him.

The previous summer, Rosella had spent a month in her uncle Frank's office, sitting with the receptionist, learning about the filing system, getting to know Frank's colleagues. She even got to visit Frank's apartment in Hell's Kitchen which no one else from the family had ever done. She was going to intern at another law office once the school term had ended.

Frank had spoken to Rosella about her grades and her ambitions and had realised that she would, most likely, be accepted by a good college. If she was, he told Eilis, he would pay her tuition.

‘I can't do that for all my nieces and nephews,' he said. ‘But Rosella really should go to college and she wants to. She is dedicated.'

‘Does she know about this?'

‘She does.'

‘Did you mention it initially or did she?'

‘I was telling her about my time at Fordham. And I said I thought she would like it there. She was very hesitant when I offered to help her.'

‘And then?'

‘She admitted that it would be her dream.'

That same night, Eilis waited until she and Tony were talking in the dark, whispering about ordinary things, before raising the question of Rosella going to college. She explained that Frank had offered to pay and Rosella had accepted only when he had pressed her to do so.

‘No one consulted me?' he asked.

‘Nor me either,' she said.

‘But you know about it now.'

‘And so do you.'

‘What will Enzo and Mauro think? They know that we couldn't afford it.'

‘Well, Frank can't pay for all his nieces and nephews.'

‘Why is he paying for Rosella?'

‘Because she is the cleverest.'

‘Did you ask him to?'

‘Of course I didn't!'

‘What happens if the others find out?'

‘We can say that she won a scholarship.'

He grew silent. It occurred to her that he might feel hurt or undermined because someone else was paying for his daughter's education.

He sighed and moved closer to her.

‘I don't know how to say this,' he whispered.

It was important, she knew, to say nothing now, to make clear that she would not speak until he did.

‘It began as a sort of joke. You know the way Enzo and Mauro behave.'

He stopped for a moment as though he was unsure if he should continue. His voice faltered and then became more confident.

‘They make jokes about you and Frank,' he said, ‘how much the two of you talk, how he brings you newspapers and magazines, and they wonder why Frank doesn't get a girlfriend of his own.'

‘Frank is not going to have a girlfriend,' Eilis said.

‘Why not?'

‘Frank is one of those men.'

Tony held his breath. He began to say something and then stopped.

‘How do you know that?' Tony asked.

‘He told me.'

‘Who else knows? Does my mother know?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Will you promise me something?'

‘What?'

‘That you will never say this again. Ever. Not to me or to anyone.'

‘I wasn't planning to.'

‘No, no. I want you to promise that you won't. I need to be sure that no one ever says this again.'

—

Frank's law office was a twenty-minute walk from Penn Station. In letters from Ireland, Eilis's mother had often asked about the glamour of New York, the fashionable stores, the skyscrapers, the bright lights. But Eilis never had anything to tell her about the city. She still wrote to her mother regularly and sent photographs of the children.

Her mother would be eighty this summer; Eilis would love to see her one more time. But more than that, she thought, she would regret not having gone were she to get news if something happened to her mother. Martin, her brother, had come home from Birmingham and was living in Cush, on the edge of the cliff, ten miles from the town. He went to see their mother a few times a week, and often wrote to Eilis, in his own rambling style, about the state of her health.

She knew that Francesca as well as Lena and Clara, whose families lived nearby, thought it strange for someone to spend her life so far away from her family. In their world, people came to America in groups. No one they knew had travelled alone, as Eilis did, without family or close friends.

In the evenings sometimes she spoke about home over dinner, especially if a letter had come from her mother or from Martin, and she kept a photograph on the mantelpiece of her sister, Rose, taken in 1951, the year before she died, when she had won the Lady Captain's Prize at the golf club in Enniscorthy. But Tony and Rosella and Larry had no real interest in Enniscorthy, or even Ireland.

—

In his office, as she told Frank the story of the man's visit and his threat to leave the baby on her doorstep, Eilis hoped that he might be able to reassure her that there was a legal recourse to stop him doing this.

‘Obviously,' Frank said, ‘you can't just dump a baby. But the problem is what to do if he goes ahead with his threat. It could take days to get social services or even the law to act, especially if the baby's with its natural father.'

‘How can anyone prove Tony is the father?'

‘Yes, you're right. And eventually the problem would be solved and the man could even be charged and a foster home could be found. But what will happen in the first days, or the first hours even?'

‘That's Tony's business.'

‘But what if you are in the house, or Rosella and Larry are there?'

‘Maybe the man is bluffing, but Tony says he isn't. I can't imagine what it is like for the man's wife. Surely, she should have some say in the matter? Surely she should be the one –'

‘This man really does feel,' Frank interrupted, ‘that the presence of a child not his would actually contaminate his family. And he also believes that his wife should have no say at all in what should happen.'

‘How do you know all that?'

‘I met him. He came here.'

Eilis decided not to ask Frank why he had not told her this the very second she had arrived to see him. He looked self-satisfied as he waited to be asked questions. She had never disliked her brother-in-law before, but she did now. If the silence between them were to go on for an hour, she would not be the one to break it. She studied the window and looked at the shelf of books to the side and then directed her gaze at Frank.

‘I thought Tony might have told you that I knew,' he said.

‘Frank, you didn't think that.'

‘I don't have permission to talk to you about it at all. When you came in, I didn't feel I could tell you that I already knew the story.'

‘You know more than I do, it seems.'

‘If I talk to you, it will have to be agreed that you can never tell anyone what I've said. Do the others know you are here?'

‘No.'

He must regret, she thought, seeing her at all. His mistake was to allow her into his office.

‘Am I speaking to you in confidence?' he asked.

‘Who could I tell?'

‘I am asking you again if we are speaking in confidence.'

‘Yes, we are.'

‘About two weeks ago, my father came to see me. He has never come to my office before. He stayed for less than five minutes. All he would say was that I must do what my mother wanted. I honestly thought they had found me some eligible girl. But he would tell me nothing more. A few days later, when my mother appeared, she told me what you just told me, but added that she had been to visit the couple in question, the man you met and his wife, and she arranged for the man to come and see me here.'

He stopped and looked at her.

‘It has been decided that my mother is taking the child,' he said. ‘I am trying to work out the best way that this can be done under the law.'

‘Was Tony in the room for any of the meetings?'

‘No.'

‘Does he know what has been decided?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're sure?'

‘My mother told me.'

‘Did you ask your mother if I had been consulted?'

‘Yes.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She said that it would be all for the best.'

‘That is not what I asked you.'

He sat back in his chair and sighed.

‘You should talk to Tony, but you cannot tell him that you have spoken to me. You need to work this out between the two of you, but it's hardly my job to tell you that.'

‘Did you learn to talk like this at Fordham, or does it come naturally to you?'

‘I am sorry this has happened.'

‘Spare me your pity, Frank, if you don't mind. Now, before I go, I need to be clear. The baby will be delivered soon after its birth to my mother-in-law who will raise it in her house. Is that correct?'

‘The baby will be adopted.'

‘By whom?'

‘That is what I am working out.'

‘By Tony?'

She almost smiled at the thought that dealing with Enzo and Mauro about accounts had been easier than this. She had always admired Frank because he was so unlike the others; he had made his own life. Now she wished he had more in common with his brothers.

‘We are working out the details.'

‘Frank, I know you are taking no pleasure from this, so just answer. Is Tony adopting the baby?'

‘The husband wants the matter dealt with once and for all.'

‘Frank, if Tony is to adopt the baby, will I not be required to sign the forms as well?'

‘Tony and you will have to talk.'

‘I don't want this baby anywhere near me.'

‘Well, go home and discuss it with Tony. And I repeat: you cannot tell them that you've been here.'