Someone by Alice McDermott Page B

we were young, when we had shared that single bedroom. He was not sitting close—the heat required a good space on the bench between us—but I was aware of the easy physical nearness we had known as children.
    I put the handkerchief to my eyes and then put my glasses back on. I looked up, looked out, as my brother was doing. I watched the turning silver spokes of an elegant baby carriage go by. And then a woman walking with her lanky son, a gloved finger raised in the air. “Get this,” Gabe whispered as two teenage girls I knew entered the park. They were dressed in stiff Roman collars and big red choirboy bow ties. “Sharpies” was what we called them.
    “Sacrilege,” Gabe said, amused. “And in this heat.”
    “They go to Bishop’s,” I told him.
    “They should know better, then,” he said.
    One of the girls waved at me, and when I waved back, the other did the same. And then the first girl pretended to stumble. She grabbed her friend’s arm, laughing loudly, throwing the laugh back over her shoulder, her eyes on Gabe.
    I saw the flirtation. He did not. I felt older than them all.
    We watched a young man pass by with his jacket over his shoulder, a thick book in his hand. Then a pair of policemen withswinging billy clubs. A trio of thin sailors. I watched a pigeon strut in the dirt beneath another bench. I was only vaguely aware of birdsong in the trees, barely audible above the echoing din of the traffic in the street.
    Gabe tossed his cigarette into the dirt at his feet. He lifted his hat. The space between us on the bench was wide. He leaned forward, over his knees, his hat in his hands. He spoke without turning.
    “He’s more to be pitied,” he said softly. “That bad leg. An affliction like that. It can sometimes make a person more compassionate. You’d expect it would. But more often than not, it makes them cruel.”
    I looked up at the trees, the thick landscape of them against the colorless sky. I had loved Walter Hartnett for the hitch in his walk, the built-up shoe, as much as I loved him for his clever smile and his gray eyes.
    “More often than not,” Gabe said, “it diminishes compassion. Makes people resent God. I’ve seen it. They figure, If He formed me, then why did He choose to form me this way? Why burden me with all this needless pain? It seems deliberate.” He paused.
    “Once,” he said, “we were playing ball. Walter was there, but he was just a little kid. This was long before he made himself grand commissioner of the Brooklyn street leagues.” He looked up at me to see if I laughed. I didn’t. “An ambulance came along,” he went on. “It stopped just past us, in front of the Corrigans’ house. Of course we tore over there to see what was going on. The ambulance men were halfway up the Corrigans’ steps when this nursing Sister comes running out of the house next door, waving her arms and saying, ‘She’s here, over here.’ So they turn around, back down the Corrigans’ steps and then up the steps next door. All of us right behind them. In no time at allthey’re back out again with an old woman—Mrs. Cooper, it was, I don’t know if you remember her—on a stretcher. Dead, one of us says. Drunk says someone else. But the nun says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and shoos us all away.” He held the hat between his knees. He was slowly turning it in his hands.
    “So we go back to our game,” he said, “but we’re arguing about this, the way kids argue. Each one claiming more assurance than the next. Was she dead or was she dead drunk? Then we all look at Bill Corrigan, as if this is another call for him to make. But Bill’s got his fists tight on his knees and there are big tears running down his face. ‘Is it my mother?’ he says when we come closer, in a voice we hadn’t ever heard before, cracked and whispery.”
    He was slowly turning his hat in his hands. There was a bit of white satin in the crown, elegant and cool, ecclesiastical.
    “I mentioned