No Detail

On the little television in the corner of Mrs Abelson’s stand, with the sound down, the Prime Minister was standing up in the Commons in New Westminster and saying something with his hands.

Tom watched it over the top of his paper while she gave him his change. He did not know what it was about. It was nearly always about something. The Prime Minister had a way of standing at the despatch box with one hand flat on it and the other going up and down, slowly, as if he were patting a large dog, and the Opposition benches behind the Leader of the Opposition were laughing at something he had said, and the Leader of the Opposition was not laughing, and then the picture changed to a committee room, a long table with men and women in suits behind it and a man in a suit in front of it, reading from a piece of paper, and a line of white letters across the bottom of the screen.

COMMONS COMMITTEE TOLD AGENCIES “UNDERSTAND THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES”

Then the weather. Rain on Thursday, clearing.

“Rain Thursday,” said Mrs Abelson, who had not looked at the television. “My knees say rain Thursday. You don’t need a man in a suit.”

“Walter’s knees say it as well.”

“Walter’s knees,” said Mrs Abelson, “say rain every day of the year, and Walter’s knees have been right about twice since the blackout.” She took the next customer’s money, a man in a hurry who wanted chewing gum and did not want to be spoken to, and gave him his change and spoke to him anyway. “Have a nice day.” She looked back at Tom. “You look better than Monday.”

“I slept.”

“Good,” said Mrs Abelson. “Sleep is free. It’s the only thing in this city that is.”

---

It was the middle of the morning, about five past ten, when she came.

He saw her from the Lexington side, where he was standing with his back to the wall by the mouth of the passage watching the floor go round. He saw her the way he saw anything on the floor that was not the floor: not her, first, but the shape of somebody crossing it differently. Everybody crossed it in a hurry, or in a dawdle, or with a map. She crossed it the way you would cross your own kitchen.

She came in from the Vanderbilt doors at the west end, down the stairs, on her own. She was small, smaller than he had remembered, a woman of sixty or so in a grey wool coat with the collar turned up and flat black shoes and her grey hair cut short, with a bag in one hand, a leather bag, not much bigger than a lunch box, and nothing in the other. No car at the door; he would have heard it on the radio. No officer at her elbow. No young man with a folder walking half a pace behind her and talking into his sleeve. Nobody. She came down the Vanderbilt stairs and across the floor towards the gates for the upper-level tracks, past the booth with the clock on it, past the queue at the ticket windows, between a man with a suitcase and two women with a pushchair, and nobody looked at her twice, because she was a woman in a grey coat going for a train.

He knew the face. He had seen it in the paper in January, on the steps of St Nicholas House with the flags behind her, on the day she was sworn, and he had seen it twice since in the concourse, once in February and once in March, crossing it like this, on her own, for the Albany trains.

Walter Odom saw her at the same moment, from the other side of the floor, and came.

He came across the floor with his trolley as fast as his knees would let him, which was not fast, the trolley rattling, his red cap straight on his head, and he arrived beside her at the gate a little out of breath, and Tom saw him take the cap off, which Red Caps did not do, and say something.

She turned round. She looked at Walter, and her face changed, opened, the way a face does when it sees somebody it knows, and she said something back, and Walter laughed, his big low laugh that Tom could hear from across the floor even over the noise of it, and she held out the bag, and Walter put it on the trolley as if it weighed a hundredweight, and they went through the gate together, Walter pushing, the Lieutenant-Governor of New York walking beside him with her hands in her coat pockets, talking.

Teresa had come across from the booth. She stood beside him at the wall and watched them go through the gate.

“No detail,” said Teresa.

“She never has one.”

“I know she never has one.” Teresa watched the gate. “I asked a man at the Fifty-First Street house about it in February, the first time. He said it’s how she wants it. She said to the Province when she took it that she’d take the train like everybody else, and they could put a man on it if they liked, and she’d talk to him all the way to Albany about his blood pressure, and they decided not to.” She drank her coffee. “She went up to the Assembly in March for something with a man from Albany carrying her bag and nobody else. A man in a raincoat. I thought he was her husband.”

“Was he?”

“He was the Clerk of the Assembly,” said Teresa. “He came down to get her, on the train, and carried her bag back up. Because he wanted to.” She shook her head, slowly. “No car. No detail. The Crown’s representative in the biggest province in the Realm, on the ten past ten up the river, on her own, with a bag.” She did not say whether she thought it was mad or the other thing. She said, after a moment: “If she were my mother, I’d make her take a car.”

“My mother wouldn’t take a car either.”

Teresa looked at him.

“My mother’s a nurse,” said Tom. “At Bellevue. Thirty years. She won’t take a cab to work in the snow. She says the snow’s the same for everybody.”

“Your mother,” said Teresa, “would get on with that woman.”

---

She came back out through the gate a minute later, on her own, without the bag.

He had not expected that. He had expected the train to take her, and the gate to close, and that to be the last of it. But she came back out through the gate onto the concourse, alone, with her hands in her coat pockets, and stood for a moment looking at the board, at the departures, the way people did who had five minutes and nothing to do with them, and then she turned round and looked at the concourse.

At all of it. At the ceiling, the green and the gold and the stars the wrong way round. At the clock on the booth. At the floor going round. He watched her look at it the way he had looked at it every morning for two years, and he thought that she had five minutes and had come back out of the gate to spend them on that, and he did not know what to do with the thought.

Then she looked at the Lexington side, at the mouth of the passage, at the two constables standing against the wall by it, and her eyes stopped on him.

He did not know whether she knew him. He did not see how she could. He had nodded to her once, in March, from about where he was standing now, because she had looked over and it had seemed rude not to, and she had nodded back, the small quick nod of a woman acknowledging somebody doing their job, and gone through the gate.

He nodded to her now.

She nodded back. The same nod. Small and quick, and with something at the corner of her mouth, as if the second time were funnier than the first. Then she turned round and went back through the gate to her train, and the gate closed behind her, and the board said the ten past ten up the river was boarding, and then it said it had gone.

Teresa had seen it.

“You nodded to the Lieutenant-Governor,” said Teresa.

“She nodded to me.”

“You nodded first. I saw it.” Teresa finished her coffee and looked into the empty cup with regret. “Twice now. You keep that up, Keane, she’ll put you in the honours.”

---

Walter came back at a quarter to eleven, without the trolley, and stood at the booth.

He did not tell Tom about his knees. He stood with his hands behind his back and his red cap on straight and his face doing something it did not usually do, which was nothing, very carefully, the way a man’s face does nothing when it is trying very hard not to do something else.

“Well?” said Tom.

“Poughkeepsie,” said Walter. “She’s going up to Poughkeepsie. The hospital there, the public one, they’ve built a new wing for the children, and she’s going up to open it. With scissors. She showed me the scissors. They’re in the bag. Big silver ones, in a box.” He paused. “She said she’s had them since January and she’s opened four things with them and she still doesn’t know where they keep them between times.”

“That’s what she said to you?”

“That’s not what she said to me.” Walter looked at the board. “What she said to me was Mr Odom.” He let that sit. “She came across that floor, and I came to her with the trolley, and I took my cap off, and before I could say carry your bag, ma’am, she says, Mr Odom. How are the knees?”

Tom said nothing.

“January,” said Walter. “One time. I carried one bag the size of a sandwich from that door to that gate in January, and I told her my name on the platform because she asked it, and that was four months ago, and she’s met, what. Ten thousand people. Twenty thousand. Shaken their hands. Opened their wings.” He shook his head. “Mr Odom.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the left one.” Walter put his cap straight, which it already was. “She told me ice. Twenty minutes, twice a day, and a towel round it, not straight on the skin. Then she told me the doctor’s going to tell me to stop carrying bags, and I’m to tell him I’ll stop when I’m ready and not before, and see what he does.” He looked at Tom. “That’s what a nurse says to you. That’s not what a doctor says. That’s a nurse.”

“That’s my mother,” said Tom.

“Then your mother’s a good nurse,” said Walter, and went off across the floor towards the lower level for his trolley, and Tom watched him go, and his left knee was doing what it did, and he was walking as though it was not.

---

At half past two, at the end of the tour, Teresa went for the boat and he went for the passage.

His telephone buzzed in his pocket on the stairs down to the subway. He took it out at the bottom, where the signal came back, and stood against the tiled wall out of the way of the people to read it.

It was his mother.

Sunday 2pm as usual. Your father’s back is bad again, he won’t say so. Bring a loaf from the Italian place, not the shop. Frank will be here. M.

He read it twice. Then he put the telephone back in his pocket and went down to the platform.

It was the line he always noticed. Frank will be here. She put it in every Sunday, at the end, after the bread, as if it were news, as if Frank were not always there, every Sunday for four years, at the same table, in the same chair, passing the potatoes and talking to their father about the job and to their mother about the hospital and to Tom about nothing at all, very pleasantly, the way you talk to a man at a bus stop.

She put it in every week. He had never once worked out whether it was a warning or a hope.

The train came in. He got on it. On the platform opposite, going the other way, a boy in a blue jacket with a fiddle case was sitting on a bench with his eyes shut, and it was not Nico, it was just a boy with a fiddle case, and Tom looked at him all the way out of the station anyway, until the tunnel took him.