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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning author of The Master , a hauntingly compelling novel--by far Tóibín's most accessible book--set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s about a young woman torn between her family in Ireland and the american who wins her heart.
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, Eilis cannot find a proper job in the miserable Irish economy.
When an Irish priest from Brooklyn visits the household and offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she realizes she must go, leaving her fragile mother and sister behind.
Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and studies accounting at Brooklyn College, and, when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian, slowly wins her over with persistent charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Eilis is in love. But just as she begins to consider what this means, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.
With the emotional resonance of Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes , Brooklyn is by far Tóibín's most inviting, engaging novel.
Author Notes
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland in 1955. He studied history and English at University College Dublin, earning his B.A. in 1975. After graduating he moved to Barcelona for three years and taught at the Dublin School of English.
In 1978 he returned to Dublin and began working on an M.A. in Modern English and American Literature. He wrote for In Dublin, Hibernia, and The Sunday Tribune. He became the Features Editor of In Dublin in 1981, and then a year later accepted the position of Editor for the Irish current affairs magazine Magill.
His first book, Walking Along the Border, was published in 1987 and his first novel, The South, was published in 1990. He wrote for The Sunday Independent as a drama or television critic and political commentator. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
He has written several other novels including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster. The Heather Blazing received the 1993 Encore Award and The Master received the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He was short listed for the 2015 Folio Prize for his title Nora Webster.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Colm Toibin's engaging new novel, Brooklyn, will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. Toibin has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her emigre tale? Toibin's maneuvers draw us to the bright girl with a gift for numbers. With a keen eye, Eilis surveys her lonely, steady-on life: her job in the dry goods store, the rules and regulations of her rooming house-ladies only. The competitive hustle at the parish dances are so like the ones back home-it's something of a wonder I did not give up on the gentle tattle of her story, run a Netflix of the feline power struggle in Claire Booth Luce's The Women. Toibin rescues his homesick shopgirl from narrow concerns, gives her a stop-by at Brooklyn College, a night course in commercial law. Her instructor is Joshua Rosenblum. Buying his book, the shopkeeper informs her, "At least we did that, we got Rosenblum out." "You mean in the war?" His reply when she asks again: "In the holocaust, in the churben." The scene is eerie, falsely naive. We may accept what a village girl from Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, may not have known, but Toibin's delivery of the racial and ethnic discoveries of a clueless young woman are disconcerting. Eilis wonders if she should write home about the Jews, the Poles, the Italians she encounters, but shouldn't the novelist in pursuing those postwar years in Brooklyn, in the Irish enclave of the generous Father Flood, take the mike? The Irish vets I knew when I came to New York in the early '50s had been to that war; at least two I raised a glass with at the White Horse were from Brooklyn. When the stage is set for the love story, slowly and carefully as befits his serious girl, Toibin is splendidly in control of Eilis's and Tony's courtship. He's Italian, you see, of a poor, caring family. I wanted to cast Brooklyn, with Rosalind Russell perfect for Rose, the sporty elder sister left to her career in Ireland. Can we get Philip Seymour Hoffman into that cassock again? J. Carol Naish, he played homeboy Italian, not the mob. I give away nothing in telling that the possibility of Eilis reclaiming an authentic and spirited life in Ireland turns Brooklyn into a stirring and satisfying moral tale. Toibin, author of The Master, a fine-tuned novel on the lonely last years of Henry James, revisits, diminuendo, the wrenching finale of The Portrait of a Lady. What the future holds for Eilis in America is nothing like Isabel Archer's return to the morally corrupt Osmond. The decent fellow awaits. Will she be doomed to a tract house of the soul on Long Island? I hear John McCormick take the high note-alone in the gloaming with the shadows of the past-as Toibin's good girl contemplates the lost promise of Brooklyn. Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, the last season of her quartet of novels based on the four seasons, will be published by Viking in October. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In his latest novel, following The Master (2004), a celebrated and highly imaginative re-creation of the life of American novelist Henry James, Toibin maintains his focus on the past. Keeping the pace relatively slow and stressing the wealth of authoritative detail, he contrasts small-town Ireland and big-city Brooklyn in the early 1950s, highlighting the vast differences between the two in customs and opportunity. Eilis Lacey, a smart young woman unafraid of hard work, must leave employment-poor Ireland to find a more lucrative existence in booming New York City. Under the auspices of an Irish priest, Eilis secures employment at a department store and residence in a rooming house for young women. She meets a handsome, charming Italian man, and their relationship quickly flowers into love. When her outgoing sister dies in Ireland, Eilis returns home and must face the decision to stay put or go back to the more exciting life she had begun to create in Brooklyn.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY now and then, with a thrill of connection, you come across a passage in a book that feels as if it had been written with exact foreknowledge of your state of mind: a soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. During a long-ago solo trip to Rome - a self-assigned distraction after a difficult break-up - I remember opening George Eliot's "Silas Marner" while sitting at the window of a high room in a cold albergo (once a nuns' cloister) as strains of conversation floated up from the courtyard. Describing her protagonist's new start in a new town, Eliot wrote of the relief that "minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love" may feel on finding themselves in a "new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap." In such a setting, she wrote, "The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories." For Silas Marner, this "exile" was self-sought. But for Eilis Lacey, the biddable daughter at the center of Colm Toibin's new novel, "Brooklyn," her leave-taking from Enniscorthy, in Ireland's County Wexford, and her resettlement in New York in the fall of 1951 are imposed on her by her energetic, well-meaning older sister, Rose. Young, docile and incurious, unscarred by heartbreak or reversals of fortune, Eilis has no desire or need to quit her widowed mother, her friends, her familiar surroundings. Her "old faith and love" are intact, and she seeks no distance from her memories. But she submits to Rose's plan for her transplanting, bending to a superior force of will, wishing to do what her mother and sister expect of her, wishing to please. "Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbors, the same routines in the same streets," Toibin writes. "She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children. Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared." Confused by her family's "almost unnaturally happy" mood in the days before her departure, Eilis is relieved to hear her mother, in response to a friend's casual inquiry, blurt, "Oh, it'll kill me when she goes." But go she must, Eilis assumes, even though she "would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose could go instead." But the Lacey women cannot speak plainly to one another. "They could do everything," Toibin writes, "except say out loud what it was they were thinking." And so, too young to understand the consequences of her reticence, too obedient to bolt at the dock, too humble to imagine that her own life is her own business, Eilis boards the liner for America, an irrevocable step that her mother, her sister and Eilis herself might never have wished her to make had they thought it through. America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn't such a person; detachment isn't part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is. What were they thinking? They wouldn't, or couldn't, say. Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. His characters and plots vary widely. In his beautiful, painful novel "The Blackwater Lightship," he coaxed a touchy, lone-wolf woman to stiffly re-embrace her mother, their reconciliation precipitated by her brother's battle with AIDS. In his best-known novel, "The Master," he animated the inner world of Henry James. And in his story collection, "Mothers and Sons," he tapped the hidden bonds and vexed motivations of diffident men and women - from thieves, shop owners and farmers to a grandmother who plays favorites and gay men who rally to the side of a friend whose mother has died. In one of these stories, "Famous Blue Raincoat," a woman listens to a song, recorded by her long-dead sister, taken from an album her son has found in the garage. The song "gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister's face." She did not want that clarity, Toibin adds. "She hoped she would never have to listen to it again." In another story, "A Priest in the Family," an aged mother accepts the fact that her son, a priest, will go on trial for molesting teenage boys. "When people stopped to talk to her, she was unsure if they knew about her son's disgrace, or if they too had become so skilled at the plain language of small talk that they could conceal every thought from her, every sign, as she could from them." Yet when her son urges her to leave town during the trial, to "spare" her, she refuses. "When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance," she observes, "he had the face of a small boy." She tells him: "Whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going away. I'll be here." THROUGH all these books and stories, intimations of attachment, abandonment and strong feeling (felt but rarely spoken) fall like a plumb line. Toibin's new novel stands apart because its protagonist has such an uncritical nature that she doesn't see she has grounds for complaint, much less possess any impulse to initiate confrontation. But slowly, equably, and without malice, Eilis exacts a bittersweet revenge for the expatriation she never intended - or, rather, one unfolds for her unsought, organically. In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis - a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion - Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis's passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal. Accompanying her on the ghastly voyage from Ireland to America, where the sea swell has all the passengers green and reeling, he soon brings her to a Brooklyn boarding house run by a respectable Irishwoman. Eilis numbs herself against nostalgia until letters from home awaken her homesickness. Then she grieves. "She was nobody here," she thinks. "It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty." Unlike Silas Marner, unlike intentional voyagers everywhere, Eilis hasn't sought the consolations of anonymity. And so, when she meets a man, an Italian-American named Tony, she does what her instinct dictates: puts down roots. When her family calls her back to Enniscorthy, Tony seems to her like "part of a dream from which she had woken." And yet, back in Ireland, Eilis knows that if she were in New York it would be Enniscorthy that seemed like a "strange, hazy dream." Is it surprising if a seed grows where it lands, once it's been scattered? Can it be helped? In "Brooklyn," Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
One of the striking things about Colm Toibin, perhaps the most admired Irish writer to emerge since John Banville, is the feeling in his work of a powerful sense of humour being strategically suppressed. Toibin's writing isn't humourless; there are darkly comic scenes in The Master and some witty lines of dialogue in The Blackwater Lightship, and his journalism is frequently very funny. But in his novels, on the whole, he's so intent on leading his readers where he wants them without letting them catch him doing it that making them laugh too often might strike him as counterproductive. His fiction works hard to create the illusion that the characters reveal themselves almost independently of the narrating voice. It also aims to depict complicated feelings and interactions with a minimum of fuss and portentousness, using simple words and a precisely controlled tone that implies a certain hush. Toibin, it should be added, has serious interests. These include Catholicism and the legacy of Irish nationalism, the inward sufferings of gay people throughout most of history, and difficult emotional currents within families. Spanish and Latin American politics are part of the background to The South and The Story of the Night, and he touches in several books on the devastation done by Aids to gay men in the 1980s. He writes well about women, often putting them centre stage, and about people who feel compelled to hold their feelings at a distance, his Henry James in The Master being a good example. At the same time, he loves form and imposes strict rules on himself concerning point of view and narrative manipulation, rejecting tricks as firmly as Raymond Carver did. His plain style is unostentatious even in its plainness, avoiding musical balance but also taking care not to seem mannered or excessively clipped. In Brooklyn, Toibin continues to conjure strong emotions from the gaps between his lines, but this time humour has more of a place in the range of available tones. He fits it in partly through lightly comic dialogue. "No one likes flies," a haughty Wexford shopkeeper tells the heroine, a young woman named Eilis Lacey, "especially on a Sunday." Yet the jokes aren't free-floating. Toibin gives Eilis - whose point of view is strictly adhered to throughout - a well-tuned ear for such speech, which she uses to entertain her mother and elder sister. The reader quickly sees that there's something brave and sad about her spirited performances over the dinner table in the economically stagnant provincial Ireland of the early 1950s. Her father is dead; her older brothers, much missed by her mother, are working in England; there are few prospects of marriage and few jobs in Enniscorthy. Eilis's sister Rose, whose earnings from an office job support the family, plays golf in the evenings. At the club she meets a priest, back from America on his holidays, who knew their parents years before. The priest offers to arrange a job in Brooklyn for Eilis, who soon finds herself crossing the Atlantic third-class, fully understanding that, by organising this, Rose has sacrificed her own future. Toibin patiently dramatises Eilis's homesickness and her brushes with enforced American good cheer, her relations with her fellow inmates at an all-Irish boarding house, her work at a moderately enlightened department store, her night classes, and her pleased discovery of all-night heating and affordable women's fashions. In time she meets a handsome Italian-American man who speaks seriously and tactfully of marriage. Then a death summons her back to Ireland, where she finds that America has made her glamorous and desirable, and faces a choice between the old life and the new. This simple-sounding story takes on depth and resonance in a number of ways, starting with what it leaves out. There's no awed first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline; even the account of Eilis's first trip to a baseball game focuses on her boyfriend's way of being with his brothers, not the chance to write a set piece. Overemphasis is almost obsessively dodged. "'She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now,' he said": most writers would have put the speech tag between the two sentences, but not Toibin. Within his stern parameters, however, he's able to convey pathos, sharp observation, and finely detailed psychological realism. Brooklyn 's symmetries and neatly circular plotting aren't camouflaged as heavily as the rest of its artistry, but there's no mistaking the book for a conventional historical weepie. The word "love" is applied more often to Eilis's feelings about her room or her textbooks than to the men in her life, and Toibin doesn't sentimentalise his central character's experience of either country. We're used to getting these kinds of stories from an American perspective in which moving to America is the natural thing to do. Toibin makes his emigrant's story more painful without simply reversing those assumptions or ruling out an ironic distance from postwar Irish insularity. (A prim young woman from Belfast shares her views on Brooklyn's Italian and Jewish populations: "I didn't come all the way to America, thank you, to hear people talking Italian on the street or see them wearing funny hats.") Eilis herself is an interesting character, less defenceless and more troubled than she initially seems, and the novel uncovers the "dark, uncertain" areas within her with a very light touch. Her rejection of her landlady's proffered friendship, and her encounter with her sexually wistful female boss, are handled as delicately as any scene Toibin has done, although here and there his delicacy doesn't exclude a note of ribald amusement as well as worldly melancholy. Caption: article-taylertoibin.1 This simple-sounding story takes on depth and resonance in a number of ways, starting with what it leaves out. There's no awed first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline; even the account of [Eilis Lacey]'s first trip to a baseball game focuses on her boyfriend's way of being with his brothers, not the chance to write a set piece. Overemphasis is almost obsessively dodged. "'She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now,' he said": most writers would have put the speech tag between the two sentences, but not [Colm Toibin]. Within his stern parameters, however, he's able to convey pathos, sharp observation, and finely detailed psychological realism. Brooklyn 's symmetries and neatly circular plotting aren't camouflaged as heavily as the rest of its artistry, but there's no mistaking the book for a conventional historical weepie. The word "love" is applied more often to Eilis's feelings about her room or her textbooks than to the men in her life, and Toibin doesn't sentimentalise his central character's experience of either country. - Christopher Tayler.
Kirkus Review
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid. Tib"n's treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest's sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tib"n fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel's final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn's roiling motley populace, and at the women's boarding house where she's virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis's own dour and scattered one. Tib"n is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis's first sexual experience with Tony (whom she'll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis's future (literally) again and again. A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tib"n's ever-increasing skills and range. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This latest from Toibin (The Master) begins in the southwestern Ireland town of Enniscorthy during the early 1950s, where dutiful daughter, doting sister, and aspiring bookkeeper Eilis Lacey lives with her mother and older sister, Rose. Her brothers have long since left Ireland to seek work in England, and Eilis herself soon departs for Brooklyn, NY. Once there, she attempts to master living and working in a strange land and to quell an acute and threatening loneliness. Initially friendless and of few means, Eilis gradually embraces new freedoms. She excels in work and school, falls in love, and begins to imagine a life in America. When tragedy strikes in Enniscorthy, however, Eilis returns to discover the hopes and aspirations once beyond her grasp are now hers for the taking. Toibin conveys Eilis's transformative struggles with an aching lyricism reminiscent of the mature Henry James and ultimately confers upon his readers a sort of grace that illuminates the opportunities for tenderness in our lives. Both more accessible and more sublime than his previous works, this is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Eilis went to midnight mass with Mrs. Kehoe and Miss Keegan, discovering on the way home that Mrs. Kehoe was among the parishioners who were roasting a turkey and potatoes and boiling a ham for Father Flood, who had arranged for it all to be collected at twelve. "It's like the war," Mrs. Kehoe said. "Feeding the army. Has to be done like clockwork. I'll carve what our own small needs will be from the turkey, the biggest one I could get, it'll be six hours in the oven, before I send it off. And we'll eat, just the four of us, myself, Miss McAdam, Miss Heffernan and Miss Keegan here, as soon as the turkey is off our hands. And if there's anything left over, we'll save it for you, Eilis." By nine o'clock Eilis was in the parish hall peeling vegetables in the big kitchen at the back. There were women working beside her whom she had never met before, all of them older than she, some with faint American accents but all of Irish origin. Most of them were just here for this part of the morning, she was told, before going home to feed their families. Soon it became clear that two women were in charge. When Father Flood arrived he introduced Eilis to them. "They are the Miss Murphys from Arklow," he said. "Though we won't hold that against them." The two Miss Murphys laughed. They were tall, cheerfullooking women in their fifties. "It'll be just the three of us," one of them said, "here all day. The other helpers will come and go." "We're the ones with no homes to go to," the other Miss Murphy said and smiled. "Now, we'll feed them in sets of twenty," her sister said. "Each of us prepares sixty-five dinners, it might even be more, in three sittings. I'm in Father Flood's own kitchen and the two of you are here in the hall. As soon as a turkey arrives, or when the ones we have cooking upstairs are ready, Father Flood will attack them and the hams and carve them. The oven here is just for keeping things hot. For an hour people will bring us turkeys and hams and roast potatoes and the thing is to have vegetables cooked and hot and ready to be served." "Rough and ready might be a better way of putting it," the other Miss Murphy interrupted. "But we have plenty of soup and stout for them while they're waiting. They're very nice, all of them." "They don't mind waiting, and if they do, they don't say." "Are they all men?" Eilis asked. "A few couples come because she is too old to cook, or they're too lonely, or whatever, but the rest are men," Miss Murphy said. "And they love the company and it's Irish food, you know, proper stuffing and roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts boiled to death." She smiled at Eilis and shook her head and sighed. As soon as ten o'clock mass was over people began to call by. Father Flood had filled one of the tables with glasses and bottles of lemonade and sweets for the children. He made everyone who came in, including women with fresh hairdos, put on a paper hat. Thus as the men began to arrive to spend all of Christmas Day in the hall they were barely noticed among the crowd. It was only later, after midday, when the visitors began to disperse, that they could be seen clearly, some of them sitting alone with a bottle of stout in front of them, others huddled in groups, many of them stubbornly still wearing cloth caps instead of paper hats. The Miss Murphys were anxious for the men who came first to gather at one or two of the long tables, enough to make a group who could be served soon with bowls of soup so that the bowls could be washed and used again by the next group. As Eilis, on instructions, went out to encourage the men to sit down at the top table nearest to the kitchen, she observed coming into the hall a tall man with a slight stoop; he was wearing a cap low over his forehead and an old brown overcoat with a scarf at the neck. She paused for a moment and stared at him. He stood still as soon as he had closed the main door behind him, and it was the way he took in the hall, surveying the scene with shyness and a sort of mild delight, that made Eilis sure, for one moment, that her father had come into her presence. She felt as though she should move towards him as she saw him hesitantly opening his overcoat and loosening his scarf. It was how he stood, taking full slow possession of the room, searching almost shyly for the place where he might be most comfortable and at ease, or looking around carefully to see if he knew anybody. As she realized that it could not be him, that she was dreaming, he took off his cap and she saw that the man did not look like her father at all. She glanced around her, embarrassed, hoping that no one had noticed her. It was something, she thought, that she could tell no one, that she had imagined for an instant that she had seen her father, who was, she remembered quickly, dead for four years. Although the first table had not been filled, she turned and went back to the kitchen and set about checking the number of plates for the first serving, even though she knew she had the right number, and then lifting the lid of the huge saucepan to check if the Brussels sprouts were boiling, even though she knew that the water was not hot enough yet. When one of the Miss Murphys asked her if the nearest table had been filled up and if every man had a glass of stout, Eilis turned and said that she had done her best to move the men to the tables but maybe Miss Murphy could do better. She tried to smile, hoping that Miss Murphy did not notice anything strange. For the next two hours she was busy, piling food on to plates, carrying them out two at a time. Father Flood carved turkeys and hams as they arrived, piling stuffing and roast potatoes into bowls. For a while, one Miss Murphy devoted herself entirely to washing up and drying and cleaning and clearing space as her sister and Eilis served the men, making sure to leave nothing out -- turkey, ham, stuffing, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts -- and making sure in their haste not to give anyone too much or too little. "There's plenty of food now, so don't worry," Father Flood shouted, "but no more than three potatoes a head and go easy on the stuffing." When they had enough meat carved, he went outside and busied himself opening more bottles of stout. At first the men seemed shabby to Eilis and she noticed body odours from a good number of them. As they sat down and drank their stout waiting for the soup or the food, she could not believe there were so many of them, some of them so poor-looking and so old, but even the younger ones had bad teeth and appeared worn down. Many were still smoking, even as the soup came. She did her best to be polite to them. She observed a change in them soon, however, as they began to talk to each other or shout greetings down the table or enter into low, intense conversations. At first they had reminded her of men who sat on the bridge in Enniscorthy or gathered at the seat at Arnold's Cross or the Louse Bank by the Slaney, or men from the County Home, or men from the town who drank too much. But by the time she served them and they turned to thank her, they seemed more like her father and his brothers in the way they spoke or smiled, the toughness in their faces softened by shyness, what had appeared stubborn or hard now strangely tender. As she served the man she had thought was her father, she looked at him carefully, amazed at how little he actually resembled him, as though it had been a trick of the light or something she had completely imagined. She was surprised also to find that he was talking to the man beside him in Irish. "This was the miracle of the turkey and the ham," Miss Murphy said to Father Flood when large plates of second helpings had been left on all the tables. "Brooklyn-style," her sister said. "I'm glad it's trifle now," she added, "and not plum pudding and we don't have to worry about keeping it hot." "Wouldn't you think they'd take off their caps when they are eating?" her sister asked. "Don't they know they're in America?" "We have no rules here," Father Flood said. "And they can smoke and drink all they like. If we can get them all home safely, that's the main thing. We always have a few a bit too under the weather to go home." "Too drunk," one Miss Murphy said. "Ah, on Christmas Day we call it under the weather, and I have a rake of beds made up for them in my own house," Father Flood said. "What we'll do now is have our own dinner," Miss Murphy said. "And I'll set the table and I've kept a nice dinner for each of us hot and everything." "Well, I was wondering if we were going to eat at all," Eilis said. "Poor Eilis. She's starving. Will you look at her?" "Should we not serve the trifle first?" Eilis asked. "No, we'll wait," Father Flood said. "It'll stretch the day out." By the time they were removing the trifle dishes, the hall was a mass of smoke and animated talk. Men sat in groups with one or two standing behind them; others moved from group to group, some with bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags that they passed around. When all the cleaning of the kitchen and the filling of garbage cans had been completed, Father Flood suggested that they go into the hall and join the men for a drink. Some visitors had arrived, including a few women, and Eilis thought, as she sat down with a glass of sherry in her hand, that it could have been a parish hall anywhere in Ireland on the night of a concert or a wedding when the young people were all elsewhere dancing or standing at the bar. After a while Eilis noticed that two men had taken out fiddles and another a small accordion; they had found a corner and were playing as a few others stood around and listened. Father Flood was moving about the hall with a notebook now, writing down names and addresses and nodding as old men spoke to him. After a while he clapped his hands and called for silence but it took a few minutes before he could get everyone's attention. "I don't want to interrupt the proceedings," he said, "but we'd like to thank a nice girl from Enniscorthy and two nice women from Arklow for their hard day's work." There was a round of applause. "And, as a way of thanking them, there's one great singer in this hall and we're delighted to see him this year again." He pointed to the man whom Eilis had mistaken for her father. He was sitting away from Eilis and Father Flood, but he stood up when his name was called and walked quietly towards them. He stood with his back to the wall so that everyone could see him. "That man," Miss Murphy whispered to Eilis, "has made LPs." When Eilis looked up the man was signalling to her. He wanted her, it seemed, to come and stand with him. It struck her for a second that he might want her to sing so she shook her head, but he kept beckoning and people began to turn and look at her; she felt that she had no choice but to leave her seat and approach him. She could not think why he wanted her. As she came close she saw how bad his teeth were. He did not greet her or acknowledge her arrival but closed his eyes and reached his hand towards hers and held it. The skin on the palm of his hand was soft. He gripped her hand tightly and began to move it in a faint circular motion as he started to sing. His voice was loud and strong and nasal; the Irish he sang in, she thought, must be Connemara Irish because she remembered one teacher from Galway in the Mercy Convent who had that accent. He pronounced each word carefully and slowly, building up a wildness, a ferocity, in the way he treated the melody. It was only when he came to the chorus, however, that she understood the words -- "Má bhíonn tú liom, a stóirín mo chroí" -- and he glanced at her proudly, almost possessively, as he sang these lines. All the people in the hall watched him silently. There were five or six verses; he sang the words out with pure innocence and charm so that at times, when he closed his eyes, leaning his large frame against the wall, he did not seem like an old man at all; the strength of his voice and the confidence of his performance had taken over. And then each time he came to the chorus he looked at her, letting the melody become sweeter by slowing down the pace, putting his head down then, managing to suggest even more that he had not merely learned the song but that he meant it. Eilis knew how sorry this man was going to be, and how sorry she would be, when the song had ended, when the last chorus had to be sung and the singer would have to bow to the crowd and go back to his place and give way to another singer as Eilis too went back and sat in her chair. As the night wore on, some of the men fell asleep or had to be helped to the toilet. The two Miss Murphys made pots of tea and there was Christmas cake. Once the singing ended some of the men found their coats and came up to thank Father Flood and the Miss Murphys and Eilis, wishing them a happy Christmas before setting out into the night. When most of the men had left and several who remained seemed to be very drunk, Father Flood told Eilis that she could go if she wanted and he would ask the Miss Murphys to accompany her to Mrs. Kehoe's house. Eilis said no, she was used to walking home alone, and it would in any case, she said, be a quiet night. She shook hands with the two Miss Murphys and with Father Flood and wished each of them a happy Christmas before she set out to walk through the dark, empty streets of Brooklyn. She would, she thought, go straight to her room and avoid the kitchen. She wanted to lie on the bed and go over everything that had happened before falling asleep. Copyright (c) 2009 by Colm Tóibín Excerpted from Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
