The Rota

The rota for the first of May went up on the board in the muster room at the Fifty-First Street house on Friday afternoon, at half past two, in Sergeant Costello’s hand, and by a quarter to three there were eleven people standing in front of it.

It was a long sheet, three pages pinned edge to edge, because the first of May was a long day. There was the ordinary day: the sector cars, the foot posts, the station, the court officers, the desk. And there was the march. The march took two of the three pages. It always did. The building trades of Brooklyn came over the bridge at eleven and the transport trades of Queens came down from the north at the same hour and the dock and the garment and the public trades came in from the other boroughs, five columns, behind their banners, and met as they went, and the City’s police walked beside them every yard of the way, the way the City’s police had walked beside them every first of May since before anybody in the muster room had been born, and Sergeant Costello had divided the route into posts and the posts into names, in his small square hand, and pinned it up.

Tom found his name on the second page.

BROOKLYN COLUMN. BRIDGE APPROACH TO PARK ROW. 1000 to 1600. KEANE, MORAN.

He stood and looked at it.

Beside him, Dwyer was looking at the sheet with his hands in his pockets and his mouth moving. Kevin Dwyer was a big soft fair man of thirty-four from Woodside with nine years on and a moustache he had been growing since Christmas without success, and he was the only man in the Fifty-First Street house who actually liked the march detail, because he liked the music and he liked the banners and he liked, above everything, the hot dog man from Queens who walked with the transport column with a cart and gave hot dogs to the police for nothing every first of May on the grounds that it annoyed the stewards.

“I’m on the Vanderbilt post,” said Dwyer, with disgust. “Vanderbilt. All day. Outside the station. On the first of May.” He looked at Tom. “Where are you?”

“The bridge.”

“The bridge.” Dwyer looked at the sheet, at Tom’s name, with the frank envy of a man who has been given the wrong present. “The Brooklyn column. You lucky bastard. The ironworkers have a band. You know that? A real band, with a drum. They play the old songs coming off the bridge.” He sighed. “And the steamfitters have a banner from nineteen-eleven that four men carry, and it’s got a picture on it of a man with a wrench the size of a horse.”

“I know,” said Tom.

Dwyer looked at him again.

“Keane,” said Dwyer, after a moment. “You’re from Brooklyn.”

“Yes.”

“Your old man,” said Dwyer slowly, working it out. “He was building trades. Wasn’t he? Somebody said.”

“Ironworkers.”

“Then you know the band,” said Dwyer, with the air of a man who has solved something, and did not ask anything else, because Dwyer never asked the second question, which was why everybody in the Fifty-First Street house liked him and nobody told him anything.

---

Costello was in the office behind the desk with the door open, writing.

He was a broad, short, bald man of fifty-four from the Rockaways with a face like a fist and the gentlest voice in the precinct, and he had been a sergeant for twenty years and refused promotion three times on the ground that he would have to wear a better suit. He wrote everything by hand. The house had computers and Costello used them for the things he had to use them for and then wrote everything again by hand in a ledger, in pencil, because he said the computers would not be there in fifty years and the ledger would.

He looked up when Tom knocked on the open door.

“Keane.”

“Sarge. The rota for Monday.”

“I know what’s on the rota for Monday,” said Costello, in his gentle voice. “I wrote it.” He put the pencil down. “Go on.”

Tom stood in the door. He had thought about how to say it, standing in front of the sheet, and he had thought of several ways, and none of them had sounded like anything he could say out loud in a sergeant’s office, so he said the shortest one.

“I’d rather not be on the march, Sarge.”

Costello looked at him.

He did not ask why. He sat behind the desk with his hands flat on the ledger and his face like a fist and looked at Tom in the door for about four seconds, which was a long time to be looked at by Costello, and Tom stood there and was looked at.

“The Brooklyn column,” said Costello.

“Yes, Sarge.”

“The building trades.” Costello looked down at the ledger, at nothing, and up again. “Your father’s a building trades man. Keane. Iron. Thirty years on the high steel. He was on the Bay Ridge job in eighty-one with my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law says he once walked out along a beam forty storeys up to fetch a man’s hat.”

“That was the wind,” said Tom. “It wasn’t a hat. It was his lunch.”

“Was it.” Costello did not smile; Costello never smiled; but something in the fist of his face loosened very slightly. “And there’s a younger one. In the trade.”

“My brother.”

“In the column.”

“He’s a steward,” said Tom. “For the local.”

Costello said nothing for a moment.

He knew; Tom could see that he knew. Not the details. But Costello had been a sergeant in this city for twenty years, and he had come from the Rockaways, where half the houses on a street were firemen and the other half were cops and the third half, as he said, were neither and wanted you to know it, and he had seen it before, the thing that happened in a family when one of them went on the job and the rest of them were on the other side of the line on the first of May. He did not need it explained. He looked at Tom for another moment, and then he picked up the pencil.

“You don’t stand in front of them, you know,” said Costello. “On the march detail. You stand beside them.”

“I know, Sarge.”

“I know you know.” Costello looked down at the ledger and turned back a page, and then another, to the rota in pencil from which the sheet on the board had been copied, and ran his pencil down it. “You were always the concourse. I put you on the march because I’m short. I’m short every year. Half the house wants the day off, and the other half’s got a cousin in one of the columns.” He stopped the pencil. “Dwyer.”

“Sarge?”

“Dwyer wants the march,” said Costello. “Dwyer’s wanted the march for nine years. He likes the hot dogs.” He rubbed out a name, carefully, with the end of the pencil, and wrote another one in its place. “Dwyer goes to the bridge with Ostrowski. You and Moran stay on the concourse. Where you were.” He looked up. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Yes, Sarge. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’ve given Dwyer a present and I’m going to get no peace from him till Monday.” Costello put the pencil down. “Tell Moran. She’ll be pleased. She hates the march. She says the brass bands give her a headache and the stewards look at her like she’s going to arrest their grandmothers.” He looked at Tom for a moment longer. “Go on. Go home.”

Tom went to the door.

“Keane.”

He stopped.

“My brother-in-law,” said Costello, to the ledger, “says your father went out along that beam for the man’s lunch because the man had five kids and it was Friday and the lunch was all he’d brought. Forty storeys. In the wind.” He turned a page. “I always liked that story.”

---

He told Teresa in the locker room. She was changing out of her uniform shirt into a sweatshirt that said St George Ferry Terminal 1998 Fun Run on the back and had a hole in one elbow, and she stopped with it halfway over her head.

“The concourse?”

“Costello moved us. Dwyer’s on the bridge.”

“Dwyer,” said Teresa, from inside the sweatshirt, “will be insufferable.” She pulled it down. “Why?”

He told her. He told her the short way, the way he had told Costello, and she listened to the short way without asking for the long one, and then she sat down on the bench in front of her locker and did up her shoes, and when she had done them up she looked at him.

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Teresa.

---

The bar was on Lexington, two blocks down, a long narrow room with a tin ceiling and a television over the door that nobody watched, and it was full of the Fifty-First Street house and the fire company from round the corner and the men from the telephone exchange on Third, in their separate tables, the way it always was on a Friday. They took a table at the back by the jukebox, which had been broken since 1990 and which the owner kept, he said, as a monument.

Teresa had a beer. Tom had a beer. On the television over the door, with the sound down, a man was standing outside the Assembly building at Albany in a raincoat with the old stone behind him, talking to the camera, and then there was a picture of the Assembly chamber with its red seats and its galleries, empty, and the mace on a table, and a line of white letters at the bottom of the screen.

ALBANY: NEW SESSION OPENS MONDAY

“She’ll be on the train,” said Teresa, looking at it. “Monday. The ten something. She’ll come across the floor with her sandwich bag and Walter will go to her with his knees.” She drank. “We’ll be there. You can nod to her again.”

“That would be three times.”

“Three times,” said Teresa, “and it’s a relationship.” She put her glass down. “Eddie’s on the half-eleven out of St George on Monday. He changed shifts with a man whose kid’s making his first communion on Sunday and the man wanted Monday for the party. So Eddie’s working the first of May.” She shrugged. “He doesn’t mind. He says the boats are quiet on the first of May. Everybody’s marching.”

Eddie was her husband. He was a mate on the Staten Island boats and had been for nineteen years, and Tom had met him twice, a lean dark quiet man with a grey beard and very large hands who had shaken Tom’s hand without saying anything and then said, at the end of the evening, putting on his coat, she says you’re all right, and gone out. They had a daughter at the college on the island, studying to be something with computers that Teresa could not explain and was very proud of, and a son of fifteen who was, Teresa said, at present a werewolf.

“Does Eddie march?”

“Eddie?” Teresa laughed. “Eddie’s a ferryman. Ferrymen don’t march. They watch everybody else march from the water and think they’re idiots.” She turned her glass round on the table. “My father marched. With the fire unions. Every first of May till his knees went. In the dress uniform, with the white gloves.” She turned the glass the other way. “He didn’t speak to me for a year when I went on the cops.”

Tom looked at her.

“A year,” said Teresa. “Not a word. Sunday dinners, Christmas, my brother’s wedding. He’d pass me the gravy. He’d say pass the gravy to my mother and she’d pass it to me and I’d pass it to him.” She drank. “Firemen and cops. You know. It’s not like your lot, it’s not a picket line, it’s just, the fire department’s the fire department and the cops are the cops, and they think we’re thugs and we think they’re babies who sit around a firehouse all day cooking dinner. And his daughter went on the cops.” She shook her head. “A year.”

“What happened after the year?”

“His firehouse burned down,” said Teresa, “and the cops came and held the street while they fought it, and the cop who held the street outside his firehouse was me.” She put the glass down. “And he came out after, all black, at four in the morning, with his helmet under his arm, and saw me, and stood there. And I stood there. And then he said you held the street. And I said I held the street, Pop. And that was it.” She looked at Tom. “That was the whole thing. We never talked about it. He just started passing the gravy to me himself.”

The jukebox, broken, sat there.

“My brother doesn’t pass me the gravy,” said Tom.

“No,” said Teresa. “I didn’t think he did.”

---

He did not tell her the rest. He did not need to. She had worked it out, he thought, some time in the first winter, from the way he said my brother and the way he did not say anything after it, the way she worked out most things, by not asking.

But he thought about the rest, sitting there, with the beer.

He had done two years of it. That was the part he never said. He had left school at eighteen and gone into the apprenticeship, the way his father had and his father’s father, the way every Keane man had since the first one came over and walked out along a beam on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1902 with a rivet gun and no rope. He had done two years of it, in the yard at the local and on the jobs, in his father’s old gloves, and he had been good at it, everybody said so, steady in the wind and not afraid of the height, and at twenty he had stood forty storeys up on a cold morning on a beam over Fulton Street with the whole city under his boots and the harbour beyond it grey and enormous and the boats going across it, and he had thought, very clearly, this is not mine.

He did not know why. He had never known why. He had come down at the end of the shift and gone home and told his father, at the kitchen table, that he was going to finish the year and leave, and his father had looked at him for a long time, and said nothing, and gone on eating.

Then he had applied to the City’s police.

And Frank, who was sixteen, and who had been going to the yard on Saturdays since he was twelve to watch his brother learn the trade he was going to learn himself, had stood in the kitchen door and listened to it, and had said, very quietly, in front of their mother: You’re going over.

That was all. Going over. It was what the old men in the local said about a scab. It was the worst thing an ironworker’s son could say to another ironworker’s son, and Frank had been sixteen and had said it in front of their mother, and their mother had put down the plate she was holding and said Francis, and Frank had gone upstairs, and their father had sat at the table and said nothing.

Their father always said nothing.

Frank had gone into the apprenticeship at eighteen, into the place Tom had left, with Tom’s old gloves, which were their father’s old gloves. He was twenty-two now, and in his fourth year, and already a steward for the local, because, their mother said, nobody else would do it and Frank would do anything nobody else would do, and on Monday he would walk over the bridge from Brooklyn at the front of the ironworkers behind the banner, with an armband on his sleeve, and keep the column in order, and look across at the City’s police walking beside it, the way the Keanes had looked across at the City’s police every first of May for a hundred years.

And Tom would be on the concourse, with his back to the wall, watching the floor go round.

“You’re thinking,” said Teresa.

“No.”

“You are. I can hear it from here.” She finished her beer and put the glass down and stood up and put on her coat. “Go home, Keane. Go to bed. Go to your mother’s on Sunday and eat whatever she gives you and say thank you for it, and on Monday come to work, and we’ll stand on the floor and watch the Lieutenant-Governor go to Albany.” She buttoned the coat. “That’s a good first of May. That’s a better first of May than Dwyer’s going to have, with his hot dogs.”

She went out. Over the door, on the television, with the sound down, the man in the raincoat outside the Assembly at Albany had been replaced by the weather, and the weather said a fine weekend, and then Monday, the first of May: sunshine, light winds, a high of sixty-four.

A good day for it, the weather said.