Brooklyn

He lived in Brooklyn and he drank in Brooklyn and he died in Brooklyn at the age of fifty-three, of nothing in particular and many things at once.

His brother, who lived in Manhattan, came to the funeral. The brother had not been to Brooklyn in nine years. He wore a good coat and the wrong shoes for the weather and he stood at the back of the chapel like a man who had wandered into the wrong room and was being polite about it.

After, the brother went to the bar. The bar was three blocks from the chapel and it was the bar, and a man at the door nodded him in without asking who he was, because he had the dead man’s face on him, only thinner and better fed.

“He liked it here?” the brother asked.

“He liked it here,” the bartender said.

“What did he drink.”

“The same thing. Every night. For thirty years.”

“Make me one.”

The bartender made it. The bartender made it the way he had made it ten thousand times, the rye first and the vermouth second and the dark sweet rum that nobody else in the city used anymore, and the bitters last, two dashes, and a twist of orange dropped in and not stirred.

The brother drank.

“It’s sweet,” the brother said.

“Yes.”

“He drank this every night?”

“Every night.”

The brother set the glass down. He looked at the bar. The bar was long and dark and the wood was worn in places where the elbows of men had worn it, and one of the places was his brother’s place, and the bartender had not let anyone else sit there yet, and would not until tomorrow or the day after.

“Was he happy.”

The bartender thought about it. The bartender was an honest man within reason.

“He was here,” the bartender said.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the one I have.”

The brother nodded. He drank again. The chocolate came up under the rye this time, the way it did on the second sip, and he thought of the kitchen they had grown up in, and the cake their mother had made on Sundays, and the way his brother had always taken the corner piece without asking, and how nobody had minded, because his brother had been the kind of boy you let take the corner piece.

“He never married,” the brother said.

“No.”

“No children.”

“No.”

“What did he do.”

“He came here. He went home. He came here.”

“For thirty years.”

“For thirty years.”

A man came in from the street and sat two stools down and ordered a beer and did not look at them. The bartender poured the beer. The bar went on being the bar.

“I should have come,” the brother said.

“Maybe.”

“I should have come more.”

The bartender did not answer. The bartender had learned a long time ago not to answer the things a man said into a glass after a funeral. They were not questions. They were the man trying out a sentence to see if he could live in it.

The brother did not finish the drink. He left more money than was needed and he stood and put his good coat back on and he looked around the room one more time, the way a man looks at a country he is leaving and not coming back to.

“Thank you,” he said.

“He was a good man,” the bartender said.

“Was he.”

“He was here.”

The brother went out. The door closed behind him. The bar went on. The bartender poured the unfinished drink down the small steel sink behind the counter, slowly, and watched it go, and then he wiped the glass and put it back on the shelf with the others, and he did not come back to it for the rest of the night.