Brooklyn: Part Two Summary & Analysis

Eilis’s room in Brooklyn is in a house owned by an Irish woman named Mrs. Kehoe, who is from a town not far from Enniscorthy. The room is small and hot, and there are five other boarders at the house, all of them women. Each night, Mrs. Kehoe cooks dinner for the tenants, though she doesn’t do this on Sunday, since she goes to mass and then plays poker in the evenings. On the other evenings, though, everyone eats together, and Mrs. Kehoe discourages the women from talking about their boyfriends, instead wanting to talk about fashion and clothing. 

Eilis’s room is near Miss McAdam’s. Miss McAdam is older, works as a secretary, is uninterested in fashion, and is from Belfast. Another girl, Patty, lives on the floor above Eilis. She was born in upstate New York and, like Eilis, works in a department store in Brooklyn. There is also Diana, who lives in the basement and is Irish but speaks with an American accent. Both Diana and Patty are obsessed with boys and complain about Mrs. Kehoe’s cooking. On the weekends, they often go out—a fact that annoys people like Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan, a slightly older woman from Ireland who lives on the top floor with Patty. Like Miss McAdam, Sheila is a secretary, and they both find many reasons to become annoyed with Diana and Patty. The final resident is Miss Keegan from Galway, who doesn’t talk much.

On her first two weekends in Brooklyn, Patty and Diana invite Eilis to go out with them, but she refuses because she hasn’t been paid yet. Instead, she goes on walks with Miss McAdam, regretting that she can’t simply walk alone, since Miss McAdam complains about the other residents and speaks disparagingly about any Italian or Jewish people who pass them on the street. 

By her third week, Eilis has written several letters home but hasn’t yet received anything from Rose or her mother. One morning, she gets up early for work, wanting to avoid the other women in the kitchen, since she’s already tired of Diana and Patty giving her advice about living in America. As she walks to work, she thinks about how each day feels like an entire lifetime, knowing that she’ll have so much to think about when she comes home and lies in her bed to review the events of her day. On her first day at Bartocci’s, Father Flood went with her to the main office and introduced her to Miss Bartocci, the owner’s daughter, and Miss Fortini, the store’s supervisor. Miss Bartocci explained that Brooklyn is constantly attracting new people and that the store’s goal is to welcome all kinds of customers, treating everyone the same.

On her first day at Bartocci’s, Father Flood tells Eilis that many of the people working in the office started on the sales floor but worked their way up by attending night classes. Eilis tells him that she has studied bookkeeping, and he says he’ll see if there are any classes she could take nearby, though he tells her not to mention this to Miss Bartocci for the time being, since Eilis should seem focused solely on her new job at first. When he departs, he leaves her with Miss Fortini, who teaches her the shop’s system for keeping track of sales. Although Eilis is familiar with how to do this, she lets Miss Fortini teach her and then concentrates on the practice attempts Miss Fortini asks her to complete.

Eilis finds her job at Bartocci’s easy, even though Miss Fortini is constantly watching her and all the other floor workers. As long as she looks happy and concentrated, she knows Miss Fortini won’t correct her. One morning, she comes to work and discovers that the store is having a surprise sale on nylon stockings. For the entire day, she’s swamped with customers, and she’s so tired by the time she gets home that she doesn’t even notice until after dinner that there are three letters waiting for her. Excited, she goes to her room and opens them. They’re from Rose, her mother, and Jack. None of the letters contain much information, though Rose does propose that Eilis can write to her work address if she ever wants to include something that she might not want her mother to know.

Although the letters aren’t very personal, Eilis reads them multiple times and suddenly plunges into sadness, wishing she were home with her family. As she lies on her bed, she realizes that she hasn’t thought about Ireland for the past few weeks. Now, though, Enniscorthy is all she can think about, and this makes her want to cry, though she doesn’t let herself shed a tear. Instead, she tries to figure out what, exactly, is making her suddenly so sad, and though she has no answer for this question, she remembers that the last time she felt this way was after her father died, when she watched his coffin close and understood that he was truly gone and that she’d never be able to have a conversation with him again.

That night, Eilis has trouble sleeping, thinking all the while that she feels like “nobody” in America. Nothing, she thinks, means anything to her in this country. When she wakes up the next morning, she isn’t sure she actually got any sleep, but she gets up early to avoid the other boarders and goes to eat breakfast at a diner on her way to work. Feeling terrible, she sits at the counter until the waiter asks if she’s all right, pointing out that she looks sad. In response, she gets up and runs out of the diner, sensing that she’s about to start crying.

While working on the sales floor, Eilis struggles to look happy, and she can sense Miss Fortini’s gaze. Nonetheless, she manages to hypnotically go through the motions of the day, eventually making it home without Miss Fortini taking her off the sales floor. At dinner that night she remains quiet and sneaks away at the soonest possible moment, at which point she goes upstairs and stays in her room, spending one of the worst nights of her life in torment as she thinks about how much she hates her room and Mrs. Kehoe’s house. Just before morning, though, she remembers what Jack said to her in England about how miserable he was when he first left home. She wishes she could write to him to ask him to elaborate on this, but she decides that he’s too far away to help her.  

Not only is Jack too far away to help her, Eilis thinks, but everyone she loves is too removed from her current life to rescue her from her feelings. Furthermore, she decides to not say anything about her misery in her letters home, not wanting to worry her mother or Rose. As a result, she knows that her family will never really know what she’s going through, and this causes her to wonder if they perhaps never knew her in the first place, since if they did, they would have understood that coming to America would be too much for her. 

After a tumultuous night, Eilis is almost late for work. When she arrives, Miss Fortini approaches her on the sales floor and says that she looks unwell. She then tells Eilis to meet her downstairs. Eilis worries that she’s about to get fired, but once they’re both downstairs, Miss Fortini simply asks her to tell her what’s wrong, and when Eilis is unable to do so, Miss Fortini guesses that she’s sad and misses her family. Slowly gathering that Eilis has never left Ireland before and that she has no family in America, she says that she’s going to talk to Miss Bartocci and Father Flood, and when Eilis asks her not to do this, she says that they won’t create any problems, though she points out that Eilis can’t work at Bartocci’s if she’s sad. At the same time, though, she adds that her sadness is understandable.

Miss Fortini goes to speak with Miss Bartocci. When she returns, she tells Eilis that Miss Bartocci called Mr. Bartocci, who said that Eilis should be given a sandwich while he calls Father Flood. Miss Fortini says that Eilis is lucky, adding that Mr. Bartocci is often nice “the first time” but that she “wouldn’t cross him twice.” When Eilis argues that she didn’t cross him, Miss Fortini says that she truly did, ensuring her that Mr. Bartocci will never forget that she came to work unready to face the sales floor.

When Father Flood arrives, he says that Eilis’s sadness is his fault because he hasn’t been checking on her. This, he says, is because everyone said she was doing so well. He even reveals that Mrs. Kehoe said she’s the nicest resident she’s ever hosted. He then asks Eilis if she knows what’s wrong with her, and when Eilis shows confusion, he tells her that there’s a term for what she’s feeling: homesickness. Going on, he explains that everyone experiences this feeling and that it always passes, though some cases take longer to subside than others. In general, he says, it’s best to keep busy and have someone to talk to. To that end, he says he’d like to enroll her in night classes, saying that he thinks he’ll be able to convince a professor to let her join a bookkeeping class even though the semester has already started.

When Eilis goes home for the day, Mrs. Kehoe greets her and invites her into her private portion of the house for tea. As she sits there waiting for the tea, Eilis admires the room and thinks about how much her mother would love the way it’s decorated. It then occurs to her once more that she won’t be able to tell her mother or Rose anything about how she’s feeling, and she understands that the only thing she can do is simply move forward with her daily life. Later that night, Father Flood visits and tells her that he enrolled her in bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. The courses, he says, will meet in the evenings on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Eilis applies herself to her studies. She particularly likes her law professor, Professor Rosenblum, who speaks wildly in class and tells long, winding stories about various cases—stories that Eilis enjoys, though she has trouble understanding how what Rosenblum says relates to what’s in the textbook. Before long, she realizes she isn’t alone in this insecurity, since another student asks her which book Rosenblum is reading from. In response, she says that she doesn’t think he’s reading from any book at all. 

As winter approaches, Eilis agrees to work at Father Flood’s church for the annual Christmas dinner, when the church invites people (many of them homeless) to feast and make merry. When the day comes, she makes her way to the church and starts helping prepare for the many visitors. Father Flood says that 200 people attended last year, most of whom were Irish. For the most part, he says, they are older men who helped build the bridges and tunnels in New York but have never managed to make it back to Ireland. Each year, he goes around during the meal and asks people if they want him to reach out to their families in Ireland for them, though he never succeeds in reconnecting them to their relatives.

When people begin to arrive at the church, the two women working with Eilis ask her to organize them at a single table so there’s room for others when they come. As she goes to do this, she sees a man step into the church who looks exactly like her father. For a moment, Eilis forgets that her father is dead and is astonished, but then remembers that it can’t be him. When he turns his head so that she can see his face, she sees that he doesn’t actually look like her father, but she’s so rattled that she quickly returns to the kitchen to collect herself.

The church becomes merry and loud as everyone enjoys themselves. Many of the guests are drunk, but Father Flood doesn’t mind because it’s Christmas. At one point, he gets up and announces that they will continue their yearly tradition of listening to a bit of music after dinner, at which point the man Eilis thought was her father stands and gestures for Eilis to come toward him. At first, she’s afraid that he wants her to sing with him, but he simply holds her hand and begins an old Irish song in a beautiful voice, intoning, “Má bhíonn tú liom, a stóirín mo chroí.” As he sings, Eilis wishes the song would never end.