Some of them, Jonathan gestured.

‘Here, catch!’ The yardmaster picked up an ink bottle and threw it at the door; Jonathan leaped, arm outstretched. Ink splattered his face and the wall behind him, but he caught the bottle. ‘You got good reflexes,’ the yard-master said, throwing his legs back on the desk. ‘Well, what the hell, come around Monday morning. I’ll put your name on the board.’

The story’s fantastic. Of course it is. Yokels didn’t get jobs like that, not even Irish yokels. I think to myself, is my grandfather lying? In those mysteriously coded diaries of his? To me? And yet – There’s a picture taken of him not long after this. I’ve never seen a picture like it, or a face like his, anywhere else. He did look young – that’s true – but the anger in him was luminous, it really was, and even in that photograph, even all these years later, it glows, shifts, glistens – not a face that smiles often, though it must have lit up then. The yardmaster laughed.

‘Hey, kid—’ He took fifty cents out of his pocket and tossed it over. ‘Go around to Mother O’Neill. Fifteenth Street. Tell her Frank Fleming sent you. She’ll give you a bed and sommat to eat.’

Across town, Mother O’Neill peered near-sightedly at the coin in Jonathan’s hand: a small, round woman, round blue eyes, little round mouth, little round nose, sixtyish maybe, soft flesh at the jowls jiggling with indignation, hair pulled fiercely away from her face and fastened in a tiny black bun at the top of her head. ‘Frank give you that, did he? He’s a damn fool. Don’t know what he said to you, but that’ll only take care of one night, and I don’t take no transients.’

‘I got a job,’ Jonathan cried. (He was, after all, still only a boy.)

She stuck her face into his. ‘You? Down the railroad? Yardman?’ Their noses were almost touching. He held his ground. ‘You an Irish boy? Well, that’s different, ain’t it? Follow me.’ She handed him a boiled potato. ‘I’m gonna have to use kerosene on your hair – can’t have lice in my kitchen.’ She led him to the side of the house. ‘Take off your clothes; water’s hot from the washing. How old are you? Sixteen? Tell Frank eighteen. Take out those teeth. I’ll wash them with the plates. What’s your name? Carrick? I got people in Carrick, I been told.’ She scrubbed Jonathan with a laundry brush in a tin bath. She washed his hair with kerosene and fed him another potato. ‘You can’t put on those clothes. I’ll burn them. Wear these instead. Belonged to a yardman – got squashed yesterday. That’s how come you got a job, know that? Here’s his shoes. Hole in his chest you could throw a frying pan through.’

2

My uncle Atlas’s wife Claire had begun preparations for her French dinner party days before. The pace had been frantic from the beginning, so Atlas told me, and was frantic still. Just before lunch, she ran out of oven cleaner; we were sent to fetch some more. Out in the garage, various pieces of yellow oven interior lay spread out on newspapers. ‘What the hell are you doing, Claire?’ Atlas said as he folded me into the car.