Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Aiming to Please
By Claire Messud
Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín
Scribner, 262 pp., $25.00
Recently stopping by our old house, I ran into our neighbor, Mrs. Berniss, who, with her particular combination of fluster and devout resignation, informed me that her husband—a night-shift cabbie invariably encountered grumbling amiably on his front porch, flat cap on pate and cigarette butt dangling from his gray lip—is in the hospital, dying, as she put it, 'of the cancer.' In truth I know little of his life, except that he and his wife have lived all their married years—at least forty of them—in the once-imposing two-family house in which Mrs. Berniss was born; that he has meticulously tended their patch of lawn and its bathtub Madonna, covering her lovingly with a garbage bag each winter and touching up her paint when necessary; that he has embarked nightly in his taxi, off into the silent streets, between eleven and midnight, for decades; and that he has smoked innumerable cigarettes upon that porch, watching the local residents come and go with affectionate contempt. He is not, so far as one could see, a reader, even of the local paper; never, in my time at least, did he accompany his wife to mass. What his yearnings and strivings may have been over these years, I suspect even his wife may not fully know.
Review, 2889 words
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