Read the opening chapter of Long Island by Colm Toibin, a Reader Favourite in our Good Books Summer Collection.
‘That Irishman has been here again,’ Francesca said, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘He has come to every house, but it’s you he’s looking for. I told him you would be home soon.’
‘What does he want?’ Eilis asked.
‘I did everything to make him tell me, but he wouldn’t. He asked for you by name.’
‘He knows my name?’
Francesca’s smile had an insinuating edge. Eilis appreciated her mother-in-law’s intelligence, and also her sly sense of humour.
‘Another man is the last thing I need,’ Eilis said.
‘Who are you talking to?’ Francesca replied.
They both laughed, as Francesca stood up to go. From the window, Eilis watched her walk carefully across the damp grass to her own house.
Soon, Larry would be in from school and then Rosella from after-school study and then she would hear Tony parking his car outside.
This would be a perfect time for a cigarette. But, having found Larry smoking, she had made a bargain with him that she would give up completely if he promised not to smoke again. She still had a packet upstairs.
When the doorbell rang, Eilis stood up lazily, presuming that it was one of Larry’s cousins calling for him to come and play.
However, from the hallway, she made out the silhouette of a grown man through the frosted glass of the door. Until he called out her name, it did not occur to her that this was the man Francesca had mentioned. She opened the door.
‘You are Eilis Fiorello?’
The accent was Irish, with a trace, she thought, of Donegal, like a teacher she had had in school. Also, the way the man stood there, as though waiting to be challenged, reminded her of home.
‘I am,’ she said.
‘I have been looking for you.’
His tone was almost aggressive. She wondered if Tony’s business could owe him money.
‘So I hear.’
‘You are the wife of the plumber?’
Since the question sounded rude, she saw no reason to reply.
‘He is good at his job, your husband. I’d say he’s in great demand.’
The man stopped for a second, looking behind him to check no one was listening.
‘He fixed everything in our house,’ he went on, pointing a finger at her. ‘He even did a bit more than was in the estimate. Indeed, he came back regularly when he knew that the woman of the house would be there and I would not. And his plumbing is so good that she is to have a baby in August.’
He stood back and smiled broadly at her expression of disbelief.
‘That’s right. That’s why I’m here. And I can tell you for a fact that I am not the father. It had nothing to do with me. But I am married to the woman who is having this baby and if anyone thinks I am keeping an Italian plumber’s brat in my house and have my own children believe that it came into the world as decently as they did, they can have another think.’
He pointed a finger at her again. ‘So as soon as this little bastard is born, I am transporting it here. And if you are not at home, then I will hand it to that other woman. And if there’s no one at all in any of the houses you people own, I’ll leave it right here on your doorstep.’
He walked towards her and lowered his voice.
‘And you can tell your husband from me that if I ever see his face anywhere, I’ll come after him with an iron bar that I keep handy. Now, have I made myself clear?’
Eilis wanted to ask him what part of Ireland he was from as a way of ignoring what he had said, but he had already turned away. She tried to think of something else to say that might engage him.
‘Have I made myself clear?’ he asked again as he reached his car.
When she did not reply, he made as though to approach the house once more.
‘I’ll be seeing you in August, or it could be late July and that’s the last time I’ll see you, Eilis.’
‘How do you know my name?’ she asked.
‘That husband of yours is a great talker. That’s how I know your name. He told my wife all about you.’
If he had been Italian or plain American, she would not have been sure how to judge whether he was making a threat he had no intension of carrying out. He was, she thought, a man who liked the sound of his own voice. But she recognized something in him, a stubbornness, perhaps even a sort of sincerity.
She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.
At home, however, no man would be able to take a newborn baby and deliver it to another household. He would be seen by someone. A priest or a doctor or a Guard would make him take the baby back. But here in this quiet cul-de-sac, the man could leave a baby on her doorstep without anyone noticing him. He really could do that. And the way he spoke, the set of his jaw, the determination in his gaze, convinced her that he meant what he was saying.
Once he had driven away, she went back into the living room and sat down. She closed her eyes.
Somewhere, not far away, there was a woman pregnant with Tony’s child. Eilis did not know why she presumed that the woman was Irish too. Perhaps her visitor would be more likely to order an Irishwoman around. Anyone else might stand up to him, or leave him. Suddenly, the image of this woman alone with a baby coming to look for support from Tony frightened her even more than the image of a baby being left on her doorstep. But then that second image too, when she let herself picture it in cold detail, made her feel sick. What if the baby was crying? Would she pick it up? If she did, what would she do then?
As she stood up and moved to another chair, the man, so recently in front of her, real and vivid and imposing, seemed like someone she had read about or seen on television. It simply wasn’t possible that the house could be perfectly quiet one moment and then have this visitor arriving in the next.
If she told someone about it, then she might know how to feel, what she should do. In one flash, an image of her elder sister, Rose, dead now more than twenty years, came into her mind. All through her childhood, in even the smallest crisis, she could appeal to Rose who would take control. She had never confided in her mother, who was, in any case, in Ireland with no telephone in her house.
Her two sisters-in-law, Lena and Clara, were both from Italian families and close to each other but not to Eilis.
In the hallway, she looked at the telephone on its stand. If there was one number she could call, one friend to whom she could recount the scene that had just been enacted at her front door! It wasn’t that the man, whatever his name was, would become more real if she described him to someone. She had no doubt that he was real.
She picked up the receiver as if she were about to dial a number. She listened to the dial tone. She put the receiver down and lifted it again. There must be some number she could call. She held the receiver to her ear as she realized that there was not.
Did Tony know this man was going to appear? She tried to think about his behaviour over the previous weeks, but there was nothing out of the ordinary that she could think of.
Eilis went upstairs, looking around her own bedroom as if she were a stranger in this house. She picked up Tony’s pyjamas from where he had left them on the floor that morning, wondering if she should exclude his clothes from the wash. And then she saw that that made no sense at all.
Maybe, instead, she should tell him to remove himself to his mother’s house and she could talk to him when she had collected her thoughts.
But what, then, if it was a misunderstanding? She would be in the wrong, too ready to believe the worst of a man to whom she had been married for more than twenty years.
She went into Larry’s room, examining the large-scale map of Naples that he had pinned to the wall. He had insisted that this was his real homeplace, ignoring her efforts to tell him that he was half-Irish and that his father was actually born in America and that his grandparents, in any case, came from a village south of the city.
‘They sailed to America from Naples,’ Larry said. ‘Ask them.’
‘I sailed from Liverpool, but that does not mean I am from there.’
For a few weeks, as he worked on a class project about Naples, Larry became like his sister, fascinated by detail and ready to stay up late to finish what he had begun. But once it was completed, he had reverted to his old self.
Now, at sixteen, Larry was taller than Tony, with dark eyes and a much darker complexion than his father or his uncles.
But he had inherited from them, she thought, a way of demanding that his interests be respected in the house while laughing at the pretensions to seriousness apparent in his mother and his sister.
‘I want to come home,’ Tony often said, ‘get cleaned up, have a beer and put my feet up.’
‘And that is what I want too,’ Larry said.
‘I often ask the Lord,’ Eilis said, ‘if there is anything else I can do to make my husband and son more comfortable.’
‘Less talk and more television,’ Larry said.
In the houses in the same cul-de-sac where Tony’s brothers Enzo and Mauro lived with their families, the children, most of them teenagers, did not speak with the same freedom as Rosella and Larry. Rosella liked an argument that she could win by using facts and finding flaws in the other person’s case. Larry, in any discussion, liked to turn the argument into a set of jokes. No matter how hard Eilis tried, she found herself supporting Rosella, just as Tony often started laughing at some absurd point that Larry had made even before Larry did.
‘I am only a plumber,’ Tony would say. ‘I am needed only when something leaks. One thing I am sure of, no plumber will ever make it to the White House unless they have problems with their pipes.’
‘But the White House is riddled with leaks,’ Larry said.
‘You see,’ Rosella said, ‘you are interested in politics.’
‘If Larry studied,’ Eilis said, ‘he could surprise everyone.’
