On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to proveto the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife{28}that the hours of his life belong to himself alone. We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the mans brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decadestesting the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.
From the community