Brooklyn Read Online Free Page B

Brooklyn
Book: Brooklyn Read Online Free
Author: Colm Tóibín
Pages:
Go to
every day.”
    Her mother made breadcrumbs with the stale bread and roasted stuffed pork. She did not tell Rose where the breadcrumbs came from.
     
    One day at dinnertime Rose, who walked home from the office at one and returned at a quarter to two, mentioned that she had played golf the previous evening with a priest, a Father Flood, who had known their father years before and their mother when she was a young girl. He was home from America on holidays, his first visit since before the war.
    “Flood?” her mother asked. “There was a crowd of Floods out near Monageer, but I don’t remember any of them becoming a priest. I don’t know what became of them, you never see any of them now.”
    “There’s Murphy Floods,” Eilis said.
    “That’s not the same,” her mother replied.
    “Anyway,” Rose said, “I invited him in for his tea when he said that he’d like to call on you and he’s coming tomorrow.”
    “Oh, God,” her mother said. “What would an American priest like for his tea? I’ll have to get cooked ham.”
    “Miss Kelly has the best cooked ham,” Eilis said, laughing.
    “No one is buying anything from Miss Kelly,” Rose replied. “Father Flood will eat whatever we give him.”
    “Would cooked ham be all right with tomatoes and lettuce, or maybe roast beef, or would he like a fry?”
    “Anything will be fine,” Rose said. “With plenty of brown bread and butter.”
    “We’ll have it in the dining room, and we’ll use the good china. If I could get a bit of salmon, maybe. Would he eat that?”
    “He’s very nice,” Rose said. “He’ll eat anything you put in front of him.”
     
    Father Flood was tall; his accent was a mixture of Irish and American. Nothing he said could convince Eilis’s mother that she had known him or his family. His mother, he said, had been a Rochford.
    “I don’t think I knew her,” her mother said. “The only Rochford we knew was old Hatchethead.”
    Father Flood looked at her solemnly. “Hatchethead was my uncle,” he said.
    “Was he?” her mother asked. Eilis saw how close she was to nervous laughter.
    “But of course we didn’t call him that,” Father Flood said. “His real name was Seamus.”
    “Well, he was very nice,” her mother said. “Weren’t we awful to call him that?”
    Rose poured more tea as Eilis quietly left the room, afraid that if she stayed she would be unable to disguise an urge to begin laughing.
    When she returned she realized that Father Flood had heard about her job at Miss Kelly’s, had found out about her pay and had expressed shock at how low it was. He inquired about her qualifications.
    “In the United States,” he said, “there would be plenty of work for someone like you and with good pay.”
    “She thought of going to England,” her mother said, “but the boys said to wait, that it wasn’t the best time there, and she might only get factory work.”
    “In Brooklyn, where my parish is, there would be office work for someone who was hard-working and educated and honest.”
    “It’s very far away, though,” her mother said. “That’s the only thing.”
    “Parts of Brooklyn,” Father Flood replied, “are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish.”
    He crossed his legs and sipped his tea from the china cup and said nothing for a while. The silence that descended made it clear to Eilis what the others were thinking. She looked across at her mother, who deliberately, it seemed to her, did not return her glance, but kept her gaze fixed on the floor. Rose, normally so good at moving the conversation along if they had a visitor, also said nothing. She twisted her ring and then her bracelet.
    “It would be a great opportunity, especially if you were young,” Father Flood said finally.
    “It might be very dangerous,” her mother said, her eyes still fixed on the floor.
    “Not in my parish,” Father Flood said. “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than

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