Roll Call

The muster room at the Fifty-First Street house was on the first floor at the back, a long room with a lino floor and a row of tall windows onto the yard where the cars were kept, and at twenty-five past six on the first of May it had forty people in it, which was about thirty more than it had been built for, and somebody had opened all the windows.

The air came in from the yard, cool, with petrol in it and the smell of the bakery on Third. Men and women in uniform stood along the walls and sat on the long tables and leaned in the doorway, with coffees, talking, the way a room full of police talked at twenty-five past six, low and continuous and with a lot of laughing in it, about nothing, about the hockey, about somebody’s car, about a man in the cells who had been singing since two in the morning and had a beautiful voice and only knew one song. On the wall at the end the rota was still up, three pages edge to edge, with Costello’s rubbings-out on the second page and Dwyer’s name where Tom’s had been, and somebody had drawn a hot dog next to it in biro, with a moustache.

Dwyer was standing under it, delighted.

“Keane,” said Dwyer. “Look.”

“I see it.”

“Ostrowski did it.” Dwyer looked at the hot dog with pride. “He’s very talented. He did a horse once on the back of a parking ticket that you would not believe.” He lowered his voice, which for Dwyer meant that only half the room could hear him. “I’m at the bridge from ten. The Brooklyn column. With the ironworkers. Your old man’s lot.” He beamed. “I’ll wave at your brother.”

“Don’t wave at my brother.”

“I’ll wave at him,” said Dwyer, “and I’ll say Keane says hello, and see what he does.”

“He’ll hit you.”

“He won’t hit me,” said Dwyer comfortably. “Nobody hits me. I’m too big and I’m too nice. It’s a combination.” He drank his coffee. “What’s he look like?”

Tom thought about it.

“Like me,” he said. “Only angrier. With an armband.”

“I’ll find him,” said Dwyer, and was so plainly pleased at the prospect that Tom could not say anything else, and Ostrowski, who was small and dark and from Greenpoint and the most silent officer in the house, looked up from the table where he was sitting with his coffee and said, to nobody, he will, and went back to his coffee.

---

Teresa came in at twenty-eight minutes past, with her hat in her hand and her hair still wet, and stood beside him against the wall.

“Did you sleep?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying,” said Teresa, without interest, and looked at the front of the room, where Costello had come in with a clipboard and a pencil behind his ear and the Inspector behind him.

The room went quiet. Not all at once. The way a room of police went quiet, from the front backwards, as the people at the front saw who had come in and stopped talking, and the people behind them saw the people at the front stop talking and stopped too, until it reached the back wall and the open windows and the yard, and there was nothing to hear but a car starting in the yard and the bakery’s extractor fan on Third.

Inspector Garvey stood at the front of the room with a sheet of paper in his hand.

He was a tall thin grey man near the end of his time, with a long jaw and a soft Galway voice that thirty-five years in New York had not got the Galway out of, and he had read the first of May to this room every year since he had been given the house, eleven years, and he read it the same way every year, from the same sheet of paper, which was typed, and which he had amended in ink every year where the posts had changed, so that by now it was more ink than type.

“Good morning,” said Inspector Garvey.

“Morning, sir,” said the room.

“It’s the first of May,” said Inspector Garvey, “and you all know what that means, and I’m going to tell you anyway, because it’s my job, and because one year somebody in this room is going to need to have heard it.” He looked at the sheet. “The ordinary day first. The ordinary day goes on. Sector cars as posted. Foot posts as posted. The station, as posted, with Constables Moran and Keane on the concourse floor from seven, and the Vanderbilt post, and the Lexington, and the taxi rank.” He did not look up. “If a man falls down the stairs at Grand Central on the first of May he is no less a man who has fallen down the stairs, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

“Sir,” said the room.

“The march.” He turned the sheet over. “Five columns. Brooklyn, the building trades, from the hall on Atlantic Avenue, stepping off at ten, over the bridge from eleven. Queens, the transport trades, from the depot at Long Island City, stepping off at ten, down from the north. The dock trades from the West Side piers. The garment trades from the Bronx. The public trades, from the island, by the boats, landing at Whitehall at eleven and walking up to meet the others.” He looked at the sheet. “They meet as they go, as they always do, and they come down together through the old streets to the Battery, and they’re expected in by one for the speeches. The posts are on the board. Sergeant Costello has your names. If your name is on the march, you walk beside the march, and you do not stand in front of it, and you do not get in its road, and if one of the stewards asks you to do something you do it unless it’s against the law, because they know the march and you do not.” He paused. “And you don’t take the hot dogs from the man from Queens.”

The room laughed.

“Every year,” said Inspector Garvey, not smiling, “every year I say it, and every year Constable Dwyer takes the hot dogs from the man from Queens.”

“He gives them to me, sir,” said Dwyer, from under the rota.

“He gives them to you,” said Inspector Garvey, “because it annoys the stewards, and the stewards are not our business to annoy.” He turned the sheet back over. “The rest. The Assembly at Albany opens its session today with the Lieutenant-Governor. That’s the Province’s business and the Province’s police and it’s not ours, except that she’ll be going up on the train from the station this morning, and if any of you on the concourse see her you’ll leave her be, because she’s asked to be left be, and the Province has asked us to respect that, and I’d respect it anyway.” He did not look at Tom and Teresa. “The Commons sits this afternoon. That’s not ours either. The weather’s fine. It’s a quiet day. It’s always a quiet day on the first of May, because everybody who would give us trouble is marching, and the ones who aren’t marching are watching it.” He folded the sheet. “Any questions.”

There were no questions. There were never any questions.

“Then go on,” said Inspector Garvey, “and have a good first of May. And somebody tell the man in the cells he can sing at the march if he likes, we’re letting him go at eight.”

---

Costello caught Tom at the door.

He did not say anything. He took the pencil from behind his ear and looked at Tom for a moment with his face like a fist, and then he put the pencil back behind his ear, and nodded, once, and went on down the stairs with his clipboard.

“What was that?” said Teresa.

“Nothing.”

“That was something.” She put her hat on. “Costello doesn’t nod. Costello hasn’t nodded since about nineteen ninety.”

---

They walked down. It was ten minutes, down Lexington from Fifty-First, in the cool, with the sun just reaching the tops of the buildings on the west side of the avenue and making them gold and leaving the street below in a long blue shadow. The avenue was quiet. It was always quiet at this hour on the first of May. The delivery vans were out, and the street cleaners, and the men opening the shutters on the coffee places, and a few people in work clothes walking south the way they were, towards the station, and no traffic to speak of, because anybody who could stay off the roads on the first of May stayed off them.

At Forty-Eighth there was a cart on the corner selling coffee and pastries, a silver cart with a striped awning, and a man in it from somewhere in the Mediterranean who had sold Teresa her coffee every morning for six years and had never once got her name right and called her Theresa with an h, and she had never once corrected him.

“Theresa,” said the man.

“Spiros.”

“Two coffee. One for you, one for the boy. The boy takes it black, no sugar, like a priest.” He gave them over. “First of May. You march?”

“We work.”

“Everybody marches,” said Spiros, with disapproval. “My cousin marches. My cousin’s a waiter. He marches with the hotel workers, with a hat. Every year he marches, and every year I say, Kostas, you are a waiter, the hotel does not care, and he says, Spiro, it’s not for the hotel.” He shrugged enormously. “It’s not for the hotel. So what is it for? He doesn’t know. He marches.”

“It’s for the nine hours,” said Teresa.

Spiros looked at her.

“The nine hours,” said Spiros. “Nine hours. Theresa. I work fourteen.”

“That’s why your cousin marches,” said Teresa, and put the money on the counter, and they walked on.

---

At five to seven they came in at the Lexington entrance, under the old iron canopy, and down the steps and along the top of the passage, and Mr Pettiford was there at his chair in his brown coat with his rag over his shoulder, waiting for the first pair of shoes of the first of May.

“Officer,” said Mr Pettiford. “Constable.”

He looked down at Tom’s shoes.

Tom stood there and let him.

Mr Pettiford looked at the shoes for a long moment, in the light from the passage, the black toes that he had done twice, on Sunday night and again at a quarter to six, and he did not say anything. Then he looked up, at Tom’s face, and his own face did not move, not by a hair, and he said:

“Better.”

And looked away up the passage at the next pair coming.

Teresa made a sound beside him that she turned, just in time, into a cough.

---

They went up to the post by the taxi rank first, and signed the book, and Teresa put the kettle on for the late tour coming off and did not drink anything from it, and at seven o’clock exactly by the clock on the wall of the post they went out and up the stairs and along and came out onto the floor.

The sun was in the Forty-Second Street windows. The light came down in its long slants across the floor, dusty and gold, and the floor was going round the booth in every direction already, the early crowd, the commuters off the trains from up the river, coming up from the platforms with their coffees and their bags and their faces still asleep, and going out through the doors to the offices, and nobody touched anybody.

Over it all the ceiling, green, with the stars the wrong way round.

Teresa stood beside him at the booth with her coffee and watched the floor. She looked up at the board. The Albany trains, the Boston trains, the Montreal train, the slow ones up the river. The seven-oh-five. The seven-twenty. The nine fifty. The ten forty-two.

“Ten forty-two,” said Teresa. “Your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Three nods,” said Teresa, “and it’s a relationship,” and she went off across the floor to the Vanderbilt side with her coffee, and he stood with his back to the booth and let the floor go round him, and it was seven o’clock on the first of May, and the light was in the windows, and it was going to be a quiet day.