Chapter 9 - The Return of the Needle
The kitchen on Tenth Street had not changed between Wednesday night and Thursday evening, but the light had shifted.
The winter sun had dropped early behind the gas tanks, leaving the narrow room in that deep, purple twilight that always made my mother reach for the matches to light the small tin lamp on the window sill.
She was sitting at the pine table.
Before her lay three yards of navy-blue wool—not the cheap, sizing-stiffened blend from the discount bins, but eighteen-ounce double-faced melton cloth that Marcus Boyd had brought from the naval stores in Boston two days ago.
Her glasses—the ones with the wire frames mended at the bridge with a wrap of yellow dental floss—sat low on her nose. In her right hand was her old steel thimble, pitted and grey from forty years of guiding needles through heavy thread, its surface catching the yellow glow of the gas ring.
I set my keys on the counter.
"The commission voted, Mom," I said.
She didn't look up immediately. She finished a knot, her thumb smoothing the thread down with a sharp, practiced snap that broke the tail clean without the use of scissors.
"I heard the whistles at three," she said. "The tugboats down at the mouth of the canal. They were blowing three long and two short. That’s the signal they used to blow when your father brought the coal barges through the locks during the big freeze."
"The channel is forty-four feet," I said, sitting down across from her on the low stool. "The first container ship comes in from Rotterdam on Monday morning. They’re naming the turning basin after him."
"He wouldn't have liked that," she said, her needle diving back into the thick blue wool with a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Push. Pull. Click. "He always said that naming things after men only gave the pigeons something to foul. He’d rather you spent the money on the boiler tubes for the local school."
"We did that too," I said.
She stopped her hand. Her spectacles dropped another fraction of an inch, and her pale blue eyes looked across the pine table at my face.
"The girl was here, Daniel."
The kitchen grew very quiet. Outside, a string of empty flatcars clattered across the tenth street switch, their flanges squealing against the cold iron of the curve.
"Caroline?"
"She came up the stairs around two," my mother said, her voice entirely devoid of anger, entirely flat, the way she used to speak about the weather when the rain ruined the wash on the roof lines. "She had that little cardboard suitcase with the broken clasp—the one her aunt left behind in the basement. She was wearing that old coat with the safety pins."
"What did she want?"
"She didn't want anything," my mother said. She laid the needle down on the blue cloth, its polished steel tip reflecting the gas flame like a single star. "She stood in the doorway with her hands tucked inside her sleeves because she didn't have gloves. She looked at the stove, and she looked at the table, and then she looked at my shoes."
My mother looked down at her feet.
She was wearing her old felt slippers—the ones with the worn sheepskin lining that I had bought her for Christmas four years ago from a pushcart on Fourth Avenue.
"What did she say, Mom?"
"She said she was sorry about the water," my mother said softly. "She said she didn't know the pond had a stone lip on the drain. She thought it was just grass all the way down."
"She was lying," I said.
"Of course she was lying," my mother replied, picking up her needle again. "People like that lie the way horses switch their tails in the summer; they don't even know they're doing it. It’s just how they keep the flies off."
"Did you give her anything?"
"I gave her two biscuits from the tin," my mother said. "The ones with the lard from Sunday. And fifty cents for the cross-town bus."
"Fifty cents?"
"That’s what the bus costs to get down to the state laundry in Elizabeth," my mother said. "I told her to ask for Mrs. Gidley at the gate. Mrs. Gidley was a girl with me at the coat works. She doesn't care about grandfathers, and she doesn't care about French accents, but if you can keep your feet for eight hours behind the steam press, she’ll give you seven dollars and an apron that doesn't smell of bilge water."
I looked at the blue wool on the table.
"What are you making?"
"A coat for you," she said, her needle moving again. Push. Pull. Click. "You’re going to be standing on that pier all winter with those Dutch captains and those union men. A man who owns eighty million dollars shouldn't be wearing a store-bought coat that doesn't have an interlining. The wind comes off that channel like a knife through an open door."
"I have five coats, Mom."
"You don't have one that was made right," she said.
The phone on my belt buzzed once.
It was Marcus Boyd.
I stepped into the narrow hallway to answer, the cold linoleum beneath my socks reminding me of forty winters spent listening for the sound of my father's boots on the lower landing.
"Speak," I said.
"The auction at the Holloway estate concluded at five," Marcus said. His voice was tired, the flat, grey fatigue of a man who had spent seventy-two hours looking at the bones of a dead family. "The land was acquired by the county park commission for four hundred thousand dollars. The house will be demolished in the spring to make way for the highway interchange."
"And the town house in the city?"
"The bank took the keys at noon," Marcus said. "Richard Holloway didn't contest the eviction. The doctors at Bellevue signed the committal papers at four. He’s in the geriatric ward at the state hospital. He spent the last two hours telling the orderly that he had to be up by eight to meet the Governor at the yacht club."
"And the girl?"
"She didn't get on the bus to Elizabeth, Daniel," Marcus said.
I looked through the kitchen doorway at my mother's bent shoulders, at the grey head leaning over the blue navy wool, at the needle that had kept four children alive through three strikes and two depressions.
"Where is she?"
"She’s sitting on the bench outside the rail depot down on Fourth Street," Marcus said. "She’s been there since three. She has her little suitcase between her feet, and she’s watching the switch engines go back and forth. The station agent asked her if she had a ticket, and she told him she was waiting for the private car from Newport."
"There are no private cars from Newport, Marcus," I said.
"I know," Marcus said. "The last one was scrapped in seventy-two."
"Leave her there," I said.
"Daniel—"
"Leave her there," I repeated. "The night shift comes on at six. When the wind picks up off the flats, she’ll either get on the bus to the laundry or she’ll walk back to the river. Either way, she’ll find out what a yard of wool is worth before the frost gets into the rails."
I hung up the phone.
I walked back into the kitchen, pulled the low wooden stool up to the edge of the pine table, and picked up the heavy shears—the eight-inch steel shears that had belonged to my grandfather when he worked the cutting tables in the old country.
"Give me the facing, Mom," I said. "I’ll trim the edges while you set the pockets."
May you like
My mother didn't say thank you.
She just pushed the dark blue cloth toward me across the scrubbed yellow wood, and in the quiet room on Tenth Street, with the steam radiator clanking its ancient, rhythmic measure against the wall, we worked together through the cold hours until the last light died along the river.
