The Fourth of July 1906 saw good Alfred, sober Alfred. He enlisted two other men on the block to go up to East Harlem with him, and together they bought two crates of fireworks, and told as many as they ran into that they would be setting them off at midnight, in the middle of Third Avenue. He referred to it as the annual tradition, though Mary could think of only one other time when he’d ever organized a fireworks show. Down on the street, when midnight came, he’d yelled at everyone to stay the hell back so that no one would get killed. Just as he was about to light the first match he remembered the Borriellos, and their three young boys, and how they wouldn’t want to miss it. “Run up, will you, Mary? See if they’re awake.” He was standing in the middle of the street with a match. Mary and everyone else knew the Borriellos would be awake because who in the city could sleep on such a night? It was the kind of summer night when even the thinnest cotton sheet felt as heavy and stifling as a rough wool blanket. People had taken their pillows to the roofs, to the fire escapes. It was the first unbearable night in a stretch that would last until August, and most of the men had come down in their undershirts. They were all sweating and panting and waiting for the sky to be illuminated.
Mary ran up and pounded on the Borriellos’ door. “The boys,” she said to Mrs. Borriello, who answered by cracking the door half an inch. “Do they want to come down to the street to see? It’ll just be a few minutes. I’ll keep an eye on them.” There was a pause, and Mary thought the door would be shut, but instead it opened wider and two boys stumbled out and raced past Mary in their bare feet. The baby, the three-year-old, struggled to keep up with his brothers. “They worry I’ll change my mind,” said Mrs. Borriello, smiling.
“And you? And Mr. Borriello?” Mary said. “Will you come down?”
“I’ll watch from the window. My husband is on nights.”
“Make sure you watch,” Mary said as she turned and rushed after the boys. “I’ll bring them right up after.”
More people had gathered by the time Mary returned to the street. A ring of children formed an inside circle, closest to Alfred, and behind the children was a larger ring of adults. Mary recognized people she’d seen come and go at the Second Avenue grocer. She recognized a boy and his father from Twenty-Eighth Street. Alfred hollered at all of them to move back, farther, farther, and finally, when he felt everyone was far enough away, he crouched over the box of cylindrical packages, little circles and rockets with their fuses hanging out like tails, and made a selection. Before Mary could tell him to be careful he’d struck the match against a stone and staggered backward, holding up his arms as if the people who waited were a pack of animals who might stampede.
“What happened?” the older Borriello boy said as the crowd watched the small flame travel up the fuse of the first rocket and then fizzle out.
“A dud,” another boy shouted. “Try another!”
Alfred selected another, but the same thing happened. A few of the men stepped forward to confer, and the crowd started getting restless, moving in different directions.
“All right,” Alfred called after a moment. “Problem solved.” Again, he told everyone to move back, again he told everyone to beware, and on the third try, when he touched the match to the fuse, the little ball of fire ate the thin rope in an instant, and the rocket flew with a wild shriek into the sky, above the tenements of Third Avenue, arcing west for a moment before exploding red, white, and blue high over their heads, seeming to cover the whole island of Manhattan. The audience was transfixed, their faces lit, the kids openmouthed, and for the next half hour, until the very last sparkler had died, Mary was proud of him, that he’d done this for all of them, and she remembered why she loved him.
He was good for three weeks after that. He wasn’t working, but he stayed away from the bars, and sometimes made supper, and bought the newspaper for Mary, and went for long walks. When the message came that she had to go to Oyster Bay sooner than planned because the regular cook’s grandchild had come early, he acted as if she were lying, as if she had made it up to get away from him. So he disappeared, and when he finally came home just in time to say good-bye, she slipped past him and down to the street. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to hear herself say all the things she knew she’d have to say.
The remainder of his toy stock — a set of two play cups and saucers for girls, a china cat with one blue eye and one brown, marbles, a checker set, nearly a dozen toy soldiers without the faces painted on — all of it had been sitting in a box in the corner of their bedroom for the past six months. Before leaving for Oyster Bay, Mary left the whole crate outside the door of the Borriello family.
• • •
Looking back from the quiet of North Brother, her bare feet covered in wet sand and with an egret for company, the water lapping at the fallen hem of her skirt, it all seemed like a very long time ago, far longer than just a couple of years. Fighting with Alfred, that hot spring and summer of 1906, up and down the stairs of their building with sweat running in streams between her breasts, it all seemed like a fever that had now broken, and like so many of the patients she’d nursed, now she was on the other side, amazed that her skin was cool to the touch, bewildered by the stark blankness of everything without that heat to color it, without those swings from joy to rage. At the center of everything, like a selection of notes played at a lower register while the rest of the song sways and dives around it, was the fact that she loved him. She’d loved him since she was seventeen, and even when she wanted to take her skillet and swing it at him, even that time when she did take her skillet and swing it at him, she loved him. Everything would be easier if she didn’t.
• • •
On the evening before Alfred’s visit, Mary dragged the tub from a cobwebbed corner of her hut and out to the middle of the room. She ran a damp cloth along the inside to pick up any dust, and then she poured in kettle after kettle of boiling water until it was halfway full. She usually went up to the hospital when she wanted a bath — they had tubs there with running hot and cold water — but she didn’t want to be seen or questioned or rushed. She readied her soap, her tooth powder, her washcloth, her shampoo, and when she stepped in and lowered herself, the water rushed for the edges and sloshed over the brim. It ran in streams toward the door.
Mary washed. She pinched her nose and dipped her head under the surface and then rubbed the shampoo into her scalp with her fingertips. She dunked again to rinse. She soaped her neck, her long arms, her legs by lifting one out above the water in a straight line and then the other. She stood up, quickly, and soaped her breasts, her belly, her hips, between her legs, and plunged back into the exquisite warmth of the water and wondered why she didn’t perform the same ritual more often.