Corner

He went out in his socks.

He did not decide to. At a quarter past twelve his father’s eyes were on the door to the hall and his own were on the window over the sink, which looked out on the yard and the backs of the houses on the next street, all of them with a blue light in an upstairs window, flickering together; and he thought of the light at the corner, the yellow one, the lamp, behind the counter of the shut shop, and the man in the chair under it with his face in his hands. He got up. His father looked at him. He pointed at the front of the house, and then made a shape with his hand, a corner, and his father looked at the shape for a moment and nodded, once, and looked back at the door.

He did not put his shoes on. He could not have tied them. He went down the hall in his socks and out through the green door and down the stoop and along the pavement, four houses, to the corner, in the dark, in his socks on the cold flags, with the blue light flickering in every front window he passed and nobody on the stoops now, not even Mr Larkin.

The light was still on in Hrynko’s.

He stood at the window. The shop was dark at the front, the tins and the jars and the pyramid of oranges and the sign for the Thursday eggs in shadow, and at the back, behind the counter, the lamp, yellow, on the shelf by the till where Mr Hrynko kept the lottery tickets and the cigarettes, and under it the chair, and in the chair, Mr Hrynko.

He was not sitting with his face in his hands now. He was sitting upright, in his cardigan, with his big hands on his knees, the way Tom’s father sat when his back was bad, very straight, and he was looking at the telephone on the counter in front of him. An old telephone, cream, with a dial, on a cord that went down behind the counter. He was looking at it the way Tom’s father was looking at the door.

Tom knocked on the glass.

---

Mr Hrynko looked up.

He did not get up at once. He looked at the window, at the shape in the window, in the dark, and Tom saw him not know who it was, the way Tom had not known his own face in the black window of the train under the river. Then he saw him know. He saw it go into the big face with the moustache like a broom, and down through it.

He got up. He came round the end of the counter, slowly, between the shelves, and unlocked the door from the inside, two bolts and a key, and opened it, and the bell over the door rang, and Tom did not hear it.

Mr Hrynko looked at him.

At the uniform, and the bandages, and the gauze, and the label, and the socks. He looked at the socks for a long time. Then his mouth moved, and Tom pointed at his ears, and Mr Hrynko looked at the ears, and nodded slowly, as though that were one more thing on a list he had been keeping all day.

He stood back from the door, and held it open.

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There was another chair. A wooden one, from the back room, where Mrs Hrynko sat on Saturdays to do the books. Mr Hrynko brought it out and put it behind the counter beside his own, and pointed at it, and Tom sat in it, and Mr Hrynko sat back down in his, very straight, with his hands on his knees, and looked at the telephone.

Tom looked at it too.

It did not ring. He would not have heard it if it had, but he would have seen Mr Hrynko move. Mr Hrynko did not move. The two of them sat side by side behind the counter of the shut shop under the yellow lamp with the lottery tickets and the cigarettes on the shelf above them and looked at a cream telephone with a dial.

After a while Mr Hrynko reached under the counter and brought out a paper bag. A brown one, the kind he put the Thursday eggs in. He flattened it on the counter. He took the pencil from behind the till, the one on a string, and wrote on the bag, slowly, in English, in big careful capitals that had been taught to him at a night school in Brooklyn fifty years ago by somebody who had not had much patience.

TARAS NOT HOME.

He turned the bag round on the counter so Tom could read it.

Tom read it. He looked at Mr Hrynko.

Mr Hrynko turned the bag back and wrote again.

AT AIRPORT. KENNEDY. THE BAGS. FOR THE PAN AM. ON AT 8. I TOLD YOU.

Tom nodded. He had told him. On Sunday, on the step, with his cigarette: tomorrow he’s on at eight. The first of May. He says nobody flies on the first of May, everybody’s marching, he’ll sit all morning in a room with a coffee.

Mr Hrynko wrote.

MY SISTER, HIS MOTHER. SHE WENT AT 1 TO JAMAICA HOSPITAL. NOT THERE. SHE WENT TO KENNEDY. THEY DON’T LET HER IN. SHE WENT TO ST JOHN’S. NOT THERE. SHE IS STILL GOING. SHE RANG AT 9 FROM A TELEPHONE IN A CHURCH. SHE SAID STAY BY THE TELEPHONE BOHDAN.

He looked at what he had written. He wrote one more line, under it.

I STAY BY THE TELEPHONE.

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Tom looked at the paper bag for a long time.

He thought of the whiteboard on wheels in the waiting hall at Bellevue, the numbers in red down the left and the few words in black beside them. M. 20-30. Fair. Work boots. UM. He thought of the trolleys in the corridor, nose to tail, both sides, and his mother going to every one as it came. There are forty-one in this corridor I can’t name. He thought of the woman at Beekman who had said she would look at their eyebrows.

He took the pencil on its string from Mr Hrynko’s hand. He turned the bag over to the other side and wrote, in the capitals that went up and down.

THE HOSPITALS ARE FULL OF PEOPLE THEY CAN’T NAME. BELLEVUE HAS 41 IN ONE CORRIDOR. THEY HAVE NUMBERS. FRANK WAS ONE. NUMBER 31. MUM FOUND HIM AT 8.

Mr Hrynko read it. He read it twice. He looked at Tom, and his mouth moved, and Tom saw it make a word that was not English, a short one, and then another, and Mr Hrynko crossed himself, the other way from the way Tom’s mother did it, right to left, and touched his chest.

Then he took the pencil back and wrote under Tom’s writing.

FRANKIE IS ALIVE.

Tom nodded.

THANK GOD, wrote Mr Hrynko. And then, after a moment, under it, in letters Tom could not read, the other alphabet, the one on the sign over the door under HRYNKO’S. GROCERIES. NEWSPAPERS. EST. 1971, the shape of which he had known all his life and the meaning of which he never had, a line of it, small, careful, as if it were for somebody else.

He did not ask what it said.

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Some time after one Mr Hrynko got up and went into the back room and came back with bread.

It was his bread. Not the Italian place’s. A round dark loaf, heavy, with a hard crust and a cross cut in the top, from the bakery on Seventh that his cousin ran, from his grandmother’s recipe from Lviv, which Tom’s mother said she did not understand. He put it on the counter on its paper and cut two slices off it with a knife from under the till, thick, and put butter on them from a dish, and put one in front of Tom and kept the other.

He did not write anything. He pointed at the bread, and then at Tom.

Tom ate it. He held it in his bandaged fingers, which could manage a slice of bread if not a spoon, and ate it, and it was dark and sour and dense and the crust was hard enough to hurt his split palms, and it was very good, and he did not know why his mother did not understand it. He thought he did not understand it either, and that it did not matter.

Mr Hrynko watched him eat it. Then he ate his.

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At half past one Mr Hrynko wrote on the bag again. Not about Taras. He wrote it slowly, and then he looked at it for a long time before he turned it round, as if he were not sure whether to.

A CAR STOPPED. TONIGHT. 9. OUTSIDE THE WINDOW.

Tom read it. He looked at Mr Hrynko.

Mr Hrynko took the bag back.

A MAN LEANED OUT. HE SHOUTED AT THE WINDOW. AT THE SIGN. He pointed with the pencil, without looking, over his shoulder, at the door, and the sign over it, and the line of letters under ESTABLISHED 1971 that Tom had never been able to read. I DON’T KNOW WHAT. I AM DEAF A LITTLE TOO. AT MY AGE. AND THE GLASS.

He stopped writing. He looked at the pencil. Then he wrote the last bit, very small.

THEN THE CAR WENT.

Tom looked at it.

He thought of the big man on the kerb at Bleecker Street with the glass in his hand and his tie pulled down, saying the same short word over and over to the people walking past him with their mouths shut, north. Russians. It’s the fucking Russians. Who else. And the small old man in the cardigan with the morning’s paper under his arm, who had stopped and looked up at him and said the King says don’t look at your neighbours. You don’t know. Shut your mouth.

He took the pencil.

WHAT DID THE CAR LOOK LIKE.

Mr Hrynko looked at it. Then he looked at Tom, at the uniform under the dust, and something went over his big face, and it was not what Tom expected; it was almost a smile, under the broom of a moustache, very tired, at the corner.

He wrote.

TOMMY. GO HOME. YOU ARE IN YOUR SOCKS.

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He did not go home. He stayed.

They sat side by side behind the counter under the yellow lamp, the two of them, in the shut shop on the corner, with the paper bag between them on the counter written all over on both sides in two alphabets, and the bread on its paper, and the cream telephone with its dial, and they waited.

It did not ring.

At two o’clock, by the clock on the shelf over the cigarettes, which was a cat with eyes that went from side to side, Mr Hrynko put his hand out, without looking, and put it on Tom’s arm, on the sleeve, the way Frank had and Dinny Shea had and the porter at Bellevue had, and left it there.

They looked at the telephone.

Outside the window, down the street, in every front room, the blue light flickered, all together, like one thing breathing.