He looked round and saw the whiteness caught beneath his fingertips. His skin was already chafed and hardened, like his father’s, from the knives and icy flesh of the butcher shop.
“Nobody was hurt.” She whispered to him now; he could feel the words move inside the widow’s throat. “What happened had to be done. And the girl’s fine now. Isn’t she?”
He nodded. Everything she said was true. The war that had started with the altar flowers had come to an end, not by the parish women admitting defeat, but by their recognizing that the dark-eyed newcomers hadn’t left their skills and secrets in the old world. That, in fact, what they knew was a worthy match for those who had come over generations before them.
For everyone to know that was enough.
And the girl, the one who had taken the newcomers’ flowers, roses dark and red, and dumped them in the battered trashcans behind the church hall’s kitchen—she was just fine now. Or as well as could be expected. She was actually some second or third cousin of his, in those ways that could only be figured out by his grandmother or one of her sisters poring, mumbling, over a sepia photograph album, was just fine now. Or as well as could be expected. The girl had come back , tanned and loud-voiced, from a long vacation with her aunt and her uncle who ran a construction business in far-off Tempe, Arizona. The girl had only stayed around long enough to show how healthy she was now, that none of what had happened to her really mattered, that everything, her brief marriage and pregnancy and what had happened in the delivery room, that had all been something like a dream.
From which she had wakened with a Reno divorce certificate and a cantaloupe webbing of stretch marks across her stomach, that just meant she couldn’t wear two-piece bathing suits any more. Then the girl had gone with her barking, brittle laugh into the city, to work as a secretary in another uncle’s import-export company and sleep with negro musicians.
There were enough of her friends left behind who envied her, that the widow could say now that no one had been hurt and it would be true enough.
It was only the men who knew, and the older boys who knew, and those like himself who were caught between those estates, who dreamed and let their waking thoughts be troubled by such things, that were women’s business and none of their own. They all knew, even though they had seen nothing of what had happened to the girl. Fool that he was, fool that both he and the widow knew him to be, as all women know all men are; he could close his eyes, like the point of his tongue unable to resist prodding an aching tooth, and see a chrome and white-tiled room, the girl’s feet up in the stirrups, a hospital-green sheet over her enormous belly. And then another tongue poke, and he would see more of what he didn’t want to see and couldn’t keep from seeing: the doctor’s sweat soaking through his mask as he shouted at the nurses and anaesthesiologist to get out, to get out of the delivery room and leave him alone here. Then the doctor had turned back to his task, lifting the sheet above the girl’s spread-apart knees with one gloved hand, while the sharpest scalpel from the tray glittered in his other hand. Bringing the metal close enough to reflect the idiot round eyes peering from the small darkness, the webbed claws braced to keep it inside the wet sling of flesh it was so reluctant to leave.
How did these pictures get inside their heads, if they were of things the men had never seen, never been told about? But they all knew, after a night of bad dreams they could see it in each other’s eyes; he had seen it in the way his father had bent over the broom, sweeping off the sidewalk in front of the store, counting the money into the till to get ready for the morning’s first customer. And silence, the silence that lay behind the words even when someone spoke, silence that had looked at and then turned away from the cruel necessities of women’s business. All the men, the priest included, had been grateful that the war of the altar flowers had ended, that this truce both grudgeful and admiring had been achieved.
And he, the butcher’s son, had been grateful, because by that time he had already begun sleeping with the dark-eyed widow.
In her kitchen, the night velvet behind the steamy windows, he sat leaning across the table toward her. She loosened another button at the front of her dress, and his hand fell of its own weight, almost without will, to cup her breast.
“You’re so stupid,” she murmured and smiled, her own eyes half-lidded now.
He knew she meant not just him, but all of them.
There was one more picture inside his head, that he turned his face down toward his plate to see, as though ashamed of this weakness. But he had to, so he could forget for a while, or long enough. Her heartbeat rocked inside his palm even louder now. His arm felt hollow into his chest, where his own pulse caught in time with hers.
Inside his head, in that other night, the doctor still wore his surgical scrubs from the delivery room. As he walked across the field behind the hospital’s parking lot, the high grass silvered by the moon. Carrying something wadded up inside the green sheet, something that leaked through red upon his bare hands. Until the doctor flung open the sheet from where he stood upon the high bank of a creek, and heard a second later the pieces drop into the water. He threw in the red-edged scalpel as well, and it disappeared among the soft weeds like the bright flash of a minnow. In that picture, the doctor looked over his shoulder at the hospital’s lights, face hardened against what he’d come to know about the business of women. The doctor and the priest were brothers apart from other men, and the same as all men. They all knew, but could not speak of these things.
He felt the widow kiss him on the side of his face. He looked up and saw her, and nothing else. Nothing at all.
She wore a black nightgown to bed, or what would have been black if her skin hadn’t shone so luminous through it. To him it looked like smoke in her bedroom’s darkness, smoke across a city of a thousand doors, the shadow across the crypt deep in the white stone where Our Redeemer was both born and buried.
The black nightgown felt like smoke as well, if smoke could have been gathered into his hands. He lay with her in his arms, her eyes closed now, the sheets moulded with sweat to his ribs.
“She likes it very much that way.” Her husband’s awkward English came from above them, from the side of the bed. “To be held, and held. just so.”
He turned his head and looked up at the dead man. The Cracow dandy. Half of the man’s face was gone, from the first bullet that had struck him in the eye, then the rest that his murderer had poured like water from an outstretched hand, feet spread to either side of the man’s shoulders upon the pavement. Not murder really, but a business disagreement between the Cracow dandy and his dark-eyed brothers; it was the business of men to know the difference. Just as it had been the business of the butcher, every other Friday, to ring NO SALE on the cash register and count again the thin sheaf of fives and tens in the plain white envelope that he set beside the Saint Vincent de Paul charity jar. So that the Cracow dandy, when he’d been alive, or one of his elegantly tailored associates, could come in, smile and talk to the butcher, and buy nothing and leave, the envelope somehow magically transported into the dandy’s coat pocket without his ever having shown his soft, manicured hands. Then nodding to the butcher’s son with the pushbroom and smiling, all of them knowing that this was how the business of men was done. So much so, knowledge passed from one generation to the next, from the old world to this, that he had known what to do without being told, to wait upon the rest of the day’s customers, to wrap chops and stew bones, and make change and finally lock the shop up, turning the sign in the door from OPEN to CLOSED, all while his father sat on the alley stoop and knocked back thimbles of schnapps with a heavy, brooding scowl on his face.