Someone by Alice McDermott

the general devastation.
    But now the asphalt was as hot as a griddle. The air had thickened with the heat. Across the street, blind Bill Corrigan’s kitchen chair had been set out, but it was empty. There were only a few children on stoops. They sat on the higher steps, close to their buildings, where there was some shade. They looked limp and malnourished. I glanced up at them and then glanced down. The sun on the brim of my hat was a weight that threatened to bow my head. The hot concrete made the soles of my new shoes pliant and sticky.
    The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief.
    Even in this heat, there was the smell of industrial smoke in the thick air.
    My brother walked beside me. His suit jacket was buttonedand his tie was tight, but his hands were in his pockets, and this made his stride seem leisurely. He paused at the first corner and then shrugged a little, turned left across the street. Soon enough I saw that he didn’t really have a destination in mind—he paused at each corner, turned arbitrarily, put out his hand to make me wait for the traffic to pass—which was fine with me; I might as well do this, walk like this, as anything else. I’d had a brief fear, when I first saw him with his jacket on, and his tie, that he was going to take me to church.
    On the next block, a young man stopped right in front of us, pulled off his hat, and swabbed his high forehead with a white handkerchief as large as a flag. He was slipping his hat back on as we passed him. I heard him say, “Father,” and then, “Father Gabe?”
    My brother turned and greeted the man, whose friendly eyes seem to stagger for a moment, going to Gabe’s throat, and then to me. He was short, with a round, boyish face that was florid with the heat. His shirt and pale suit were stained with sweat, his wide blue tie looked as if it had been soaked in water, wrung out, and then returned to his neck. He lifted his hat again as I was introduced, and I saw that his hatband had left a red impression across his broad forehead. Tom Commeford. He said, “How are you, Father,” and my brother held up his hand.
    “Father no more,” Gabe said. He touched his tie, as if to indicate the missing Roman collar. “It wasn’t for me.”
    Now real panic crossed the young man’s eyes—he looked to me again and I found myself shrugging, the two of us united for a moment by the puzzle of Gabe’s lost vocation. It was the sensation of standing on a pier with a stranger, watching a familiar face disappear over the water’s horizon and knowing suddenly that all kinship now was determined by the fact of earth beneath your feet or only sea. For a moment I was more kin to this florid young stranger than I was to my brother, the failed priest, at my side.
    “Oh gee,” the young man said, “I’m sorry.” It was impossible to know if he was sorry for the lost vocation or for his own, awkward mistake. He looked to me again, as if I would know. “Once a priest,” he began to say, but Gabe spoke over him.
    “How’s everybody at the brewery?” he asked cheerfully. “Everybody busy?”
    “Oh, sure,” the man said. The effort he was making to recover himself was undermined by the growing