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QT.”

    I returned to Saint Vincent’s at seven o’clock for visiting hours. My father’s condition hadn’t changed, and there was nothing for me to do but sit by the bed and watch the rise and fall of the respirator’s bellows. The steady pumping of the apparatus was not new to me. I had seen it once before, at the Westchester hospital where my brother Elijah’s body lay awaiting transportation to the funeral home after the accident. An old woman was tethered to the machine, which inflated her weak lungs with oxygen and sucked the CO2 back out. The vision remains eerily clear in my mind, and I associate it with Elijah’s corpse. At times his face blurs into hers: gaunt eyes and loose, colorless skin; a trickle of saliva escaping from the corner of her mouth; and thin gray hair, too weak to stick together, falling like dried grass on the foam pillow of a hospital gurney.
    My mind drifted inexorably to thoughts of my older brother, his offbeat sense of humor, uncommon intelligence, and charm. A gangly kid, Elijah grew into a restless adolescent, rebellious in the often-strange world of Greenwich Village. There was the flirtation with a smoky crowd of beatniks on Bleecker Street and the time he ran off with a group of out-of-town toughs on motorcycles. He lived his adolescence as if it had been a challenge to my father’s authority and cultural legacy.
    In the meantime, Dad and I were enjoying a special affinity, as special as it ever got between us, grounded in the iconography of American childhood: sports. I loved the Yankees and the football Giants, perhaps to win his approval or just to be close to him by sharing his zeal. My father didn’t seem to mind that I was a girl in love with boys’ games; he just liked having an enthusiastic protégée.
    My idols were called DiMaggio, Berra, Vic Raschi, Hank Bauer. For a time in the late forties, my favorite Yankee was Snuffy Stirnweiss. I liked the name. My father indulged me for a while, but when Snuffy was traded to the Browns and later to the Indians, he disparaged him as a middling player, whose only good years had come during the war when the best players were overseas. By the time Mickey Mantle came to epitomize Yankee pride and glory, I was too old and rational. Baseball is a childhood obsession; adolescence brings other fixations, and the spell of the game dissipates.
    Ours was not a religious family, so Yankee Stadium was my temple. I preferred the upper deck in the infield while my father, more reflective and attuned to the history of the House That Ruth Built , liked the bleachers in dead center, where he could contemplate the monuments at any time. So while I enjoyed rare moments in my father’s company, Elijah had always remained his favorite, and that despite his lack of direction and my father’s constant disappointment. Whether it was my sex or my sins that he couldn’t accept, I can’t say. There was nothing I could do to warm his frozen affection for any length of time.
    A nurse nudged my shoulder, rousing me from my thoughts, and told me it was time to go. Before leaving, I looked again at the harness of tubing affixed to his face, and I realized he hadn’t moved since I’d arrived.

    I stopped for a drink at a tavern across from McSorley’s on East Seventh Street. As a woman, I wasn’t allowed inside that establishment, but Jock Brady’s welcomed me warmly. Two drunken gents at the bar stared at me for ten minutes before annexing the empty seats in the booth where I was sipping my Scotch. Good, sturdy proletarians, about forty, they probably worked for the city hauling trash or digging up streets. Their hands looked knobby and strong, with a little too much grime under their fingernails for my taste. They smiled gray, toothy grins at me. The one opposite me did all the talking.
    “What’s a pretty little thing like you doing here all by yourself?”
    “I’m not so pretty,” I said. Probably came across as flirting, which it wasn’t, but