Union Square. Adrian Koesters

in the mirror, flicking his thumb against the side of his nose like they did in the matinee cartoons, laughed and then rumpled his own hair as if there were a father standing with him.

      He dressed whistling, leaving his things on the floor and the bed unmade, jumped down the back stairs in threes and off the last step into the kitchen, smacked his mother on her backside, and sat down to a plate of eggs, bacon, and hot cakes.

      “That’s some swill for you,” he said with a mouth full of food, and she walked over and kissed him hard on the top of his head.

      Immigrants and That Bunch

      Paddy had turned twenty the month before. This was his fourth spring in America. The Dolans had come over some six months or so after his dad’s volunteering in the RAF, and Paddy turned seventeen the day his dad came home from the war. The first thing he said to Paddy was, “Lad, d’you remember when we’d fish up on the wall on Saturday dawn?”

      He and his dad had then been about the same height and his dad had to reach up a bit to chuck him under the chin and he did that then. Paddy had said nothing, his father’s touch and the intimacy of him in the room after his long absence felt disgusting, and he flinched a little, though he had tried not to. His parents both laughed in a nervous way, and then all had gone in to the prim front sitting room. He remembered how his mother had nudged Paddy, nodding toward his dad as they followed him in.

      “Yeh, Da,” he’d said quickly. “What was that you used to say?”

      His dad cackled from between the gaps in his front teeth where the rot had gotten them in France. “Bollocks!” he laughed in triumph, wheezing over it.

      Paddy threw his head back and barked out a laugh to match his dad’s but the truth was that he didn’t remember a lot about the years before his father left. That night he watched his mother serve the evening meal, a smile brushing the corners of her lips. Paddy found that he was sweating, that the room seemed to be darkening with a quickness that made him want to vomit. He ate nothing, and that night without understanding he pushed a straight wooden chair against his bedroom door. He woke to find the chair toppled over, all four legs just inches from the panels of the door, agape like a dog at its nap, the door slightly apart. He remembered a dream of blackness, the only image the sound of breathing, coming at him but not quite reaching him.

      From that night on until they left for America he slept out, with friends or even on a spot of ground out off the main road. He’d stay with his parents during the day, but at night he was gone.

      He decided to despise the free way his father had taken to tossing around vulgarities as his mother walked by them in the small, clean sitting room or the kitchen. He felt this made him a right fairy, since he knew his mother enjoyed the rough talk, but he didn’t care. And he hadn’t wanted to leave for America.

      When his parents decided to move to Baltimore, they said they were going to go work for Paddy’s brother Seamus, in a grocer’s he had there. Paddy’s father had had a good job driving a lorry before the war, but afterward his nerves weren’t up to that or any other kind of work, it seemed. Paddy tried hard to be sympathetic, even though his dad hadn’t been anything like a soldier, he bore stretchers or something like that—but he felt for sure it wasn’t only due to his Dad’s frailty that they were going. In fact, he knew it. One night about a month before Paddy began to stay away nights, he tried to get to sleep over the noise of his father approaching his mother in bed, a pillow over his ears and his eyes pressed into the mattress ticking, darkness ringing in them and flooding the backs of them with weird balls of light that shut out even the shadows. A minute later he heard her scream and run out of the room. She knocked into Paddy as he opened the door and she ran past him, out the kitchen and into the garden privy.

      He had flushed with shame at the sight of her slim buttocks in the light that fell across the hall, and burned at the sight of his father through the doorway, grinning as he sat on the edge of their bed. He seemed to think he and Paddy were sharing some kind of joke. Then Paddy saw Nevan wore no pants, and that he held his member in one of his hands. As Paddy stood, unable to move or turn away, his father began to stroke himself, contentedly, aware of his son’s eyes on him. He seemed to be inviting Paddy to something, something he should have known either to go to or run away from, but he didn’t do either. He finally heard his mother’s step through the back door and turned.

      “You all right, Ma?” he asked quietly, glad the darkness hid his burning face. She was covered up in the old dress she kept out there on a hook.

      “Sure, Pat, I just stubbed my toe in the dark.” They both knew it for a lie. “If that’s the worst that ever happens to me I’ll be lucky enough.”

      His dad called out, “You comin, woman? I got to get my sleep, now, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Send that fairy back to bed and turn out the light.”

      “All right, Nevan. Don’t shout the house in,” and she went to him and closed the door behind her.

      After that night his father regularly called him a fairy, especially out in public. But Paddy wasn’t a fairy, if what you meant was that he preferred boys to girls, or even if what you meant was that he was a sissy. He’d already sunk it often enough with the Bridgets and Marys and Roses at home, and now with plenty of Deborahs and Cathys and Sadies over here. A couple of times when he worried that maybe his dad was right, he even tried to think of sinking it with one of the lads, just to see if he would fancy it, but his gorge rose and the foot of his right leg flapped back and forth like a leather apron. Every time his father said it, he wanted to punch the life out him, beat him until he was pulp and put his head up on a pike as a warning to all men to never question him again. Over those months he’d had to go out and pick a fight with one of the boys, then another, then nearly every fellow in the town.

      And anyway, even aside from girls, Paddy also wasn’t above taking care of himself, but that didn’t make a man a fairy, it just sent him to hell. In the last couple of years he really hadn’t needed to, but he liked it sometimes. He enjoyed the rhythm of his own hand, his other arm thrown across his eyes, the back of his head and his heels digging into the bed. Sometimes he even gave himself a quick kiss on his the inside of his upper arm afterward as a small prize of affection.

      And then occasionally, but later nearly always, when he was by himself he would think of a little girl who had lived down the road from them in Killarney, Niamh was her name, and of the afternoon one spring he had seen her in the doorway of her house, sorting flowers into a basket. She wasn’t but a five-year-old, and he guessed she’d be about nine or ten now. There was something holy about her, he thought then, the light in her red curly hair, the plump little legs, the rumpled but clean pinafore over the dress. From that moment on, his favorite time of day was late afternoon, before twilight came on, and if he could remember to when the Sunday darkness came on him, he would imagine it was four o’clock in the afternoon and often this would be enough to help the dark moment pass.