“If there isn’t time I’ll do it later.”
“You can’t expect yourself to crutch all over Cambridge in the snow,” Teddy said.
“So go dig the car out and meet me.” Tip swallowed another Percocet and pushed the bottle down in his pants pocket. Normally he would have just left them on the kitchen table and never given it a thought. Normally Sullivan lived in Africa.
“You’re exhausted,” Doyle said to Teddy, then he turned to Tip. “And you’ve got one functional foot. I’m taking her over to Cathedral.”
“I said I would take her running,” Tip said.
But Doyle wasn’t going to budge. Suddenly, with some strong and nameless desire, he wanted the boys at home. “You’ll still take her running. I’ll bring her back here and you can take her over to school in a cab. It will take you that much time to get cleaned up anyway. Then Teddy can get some sleep and we can all meet up at the hospital later on.”
At that moment Kenya was back in her coat and her mother’s deep green hat whose brim swallowed up her forehead and shadowed her eyes. She held up the keys in her hand, two keys on a silver loop. “I can go now,” she said.
Doyle stood up and put his cup in the sink. “Good. I’m ready.”
“It’s okay for me to go by myself,” she said. She hadn’t thought it would be Doyle who would walk her over. She was sure it would have been one of the boys. “My mother wouldn’t mind.”
“But I would mind, and for the time being you’re my responsibility. I don’t want you getting caught in a snowdrift.”
Both Teddy and Tip had meant to come along but once Kenya was standing there in the kitchen they didn’t want to argue with their father anymore. What they found was that neither one of them was sorry not to go. By telling them they had to stay home, Doyle had made them feel younger than they were, and that, oddly enough, made them think how nice it would be to be younger again. They had liked being the little boys. There was an ease in obedience, never thinking past their father’s instruction. For a long time after their mother’s death Doyle was able to protect them, and all there was in the world to worry about was what would happen that night on Darwin’s Beagle. It made the brothers think for a moment that Kenya was the lucky one. At eleven, not only could her life be ordered, she still had all those books to look forward to. She could be foolish enough to go to bed at night believing that one day she might grow up to be president.
At the bottom of the steps Doyle and Kenya turned in the same direction, walking down Union Park Street away from Tremont. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning but most of the sidewalks had been cleared and the snow was neatly banked on either side. “What I always wanted to know was what happened to the people who lived in that house?” Kenya said, and pointed to a house that was exactly like Doyle’s but four doors away. “I don’t think it ever was for sale but one day there were different people living there.”
Doyle nodded. “The Baughmans. He was a lawyer. The house sold quickly. It might not have even gone on the market, I can’t remember. I know they went to New York.”
“They had twin girls.”
“That’s right, Scarlett and Lucy.”
“I always thought that would be a lot of fun, having a twin.”
“Did you know them?”
“The girls?” Kenya shook her head. “Oh, no.”
The wind whipped across the narrow park and Doyle snapped up the collar of his coat so it stood straight. It was so much colder now than it had been the night before. The leafless trees looked brittle standing naked in this little park. The bowls of the two black fountains were filled with snow.
They followed the street past Shawmut, past St. John the Baptist Hellenic Orthodox Church with its enormous mosaics of a sad-eyed Christ on the front of the building. They passed the Cathedral of the Holy Cross where Bernadette’s uncle had baptized the boys, where they made their first communions and first confessions with their grade school class, and where John Sullivan came back to say the mass for Bernadette when she died. It was not her uncle’s parish but it was theirs and the bishop made special allowances for Doyle’s family. Doyle saw the cathedral as a joyless structure, the granite Gothic Revival so massive and foreboding that it was impossible to imagine that anything as light as faith had ever existed within its walls. He wondered if it was all those years of going to mass at the cathedral that had ground religion out of him. Perhaps if he had attended a more modest church, maybe even the Hellenic Orthodox closer to the house, he might have done a better job of holding on to God, or perhaps religion had only ever been a campaign device for him, as Sullivan so often suggested. When he knew that he was finished in politics, he let himself be finished with his faith as well. As a law partner he was no longer required to be the good Catholic son of Boston.
“Are you and your mother Catholic?” Doyle asked.
Kenya nodded. “Sure. We’re all Catholic.”
Cathedral Grammar School sat between the church and the housing project, a tall chain link fence wrapping up its basketball court tight. It would have been full of children normally but this morning everything was empty with the snow. Doyle had a real affection for this building. He thought of the countless plays he had attended to watch his boys dressed up as shepherds or sheep, the parent-teacher conferences spent sitting beside the teacher’s desk in undersized chairs to hear how well Tip was doing and how mightily Teddy struggled. He thought of the hallways lined with lockers, the construction paper butterflies stuck to classroom doors, the primordial spaghetti suppers that were the cornerstone of a Catholic education. Sullivan had gone to Cathedral Grammar as well. Teddy and Tip had followed him there. Later, Teddy went around the corner to Cathedral High and Tip took the bus to Boston Latin. It was one of the reasons Bernadette had wanted to buy their house in the first place. She had looked at the schools before they ever had children to enroll. She loved the idea of walking her imaginary children over in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. Doyle had asked her if she loved the idea of the school being next door to a public housing project. “I’ll thank God if it saves them from only seeing other Irish kids all the time,” she said.
Of course in the end it was Doyle who wound up walking the boys to school in the morning and rushing home when he could to pick them up in the afternoons. He blessed Bernadette for having the good sense to keep them all so close together. “Do you go to school here?” Doyle said, and pointed up at the building. She was a smart little girl after all, and he knew there were a certain number of scholarships. He had served on the scholarship committee.
Kenya shook her head. “It’s private.”
Past the school they walked into the first courtyard of the housing project, but now he let her lead him. “We’re towards the back,” she said. “It looks pretty in the snow, sort of like everything’s just been painted.”
He knew what it looked like without the snow. He had been the mayor after all and on the City Council before that. He was familiar with the housing projects, their budgets and statistics. He was especially familiar with Cathedral, sitting as it did in his own backyard. It was better than a lot of places. The sprawl of mustardy-yellow brick buildings turned into something of a maze and no good ever came of mazes, but there was a playground that kids actually used. Because it sat hip to hip against a better neighborhood, it was patrolled with greater regularity. The police pushed down hard on the nefarious elements and in doing so managed to hassle most of the decent citizens as well, so the crime rates stayed down and for the most part no one was happy. Boston Medical Center was only blocks away. There was a women’s shelter, a food pantry, plenty of resources and yet every one of them was stretched thin enough to snap. If Doyle could have been the mayor again he liked to think there were some things he would do differently.
Once they were through the second archway they passed three Hispanic girls standing against a wall smoking cigarettes in the cold. They had on puffy nylon jackets but none of them wore hats. “Hey,??
? Kenya said lightly because they had turned their eyes to her, to Doyle walking behind her.
“Fucking freezing,” one of the girls replied, as if she had been asked about the weather.
Kenya quickened their pace slightly and led him through an exterior door that was propped open with a brick. A fine wedge of snow had dusted into the hallway and was marked with footprints. She unlocked the door to her ground floor apartment, using the larger key for the top lock and the smaller one for the knob. She switched on a light inside the door and when they were both safely in she closed the door behind her and locked it again. Just like you’ve been taught, Doyle thought. The lightbulb was weak and the apartment stayed dark. “My mother wouldn’t be thrilled about you coming over,” she said. “She’d get all worried about cleaning everything first.” She went to pull back the curtains and when she did she kept her gaze out the window for a minute, looking at a narrow walkway and then another covered over window like her own. “We don’t have that many people over.”
But the apartment, albeit small and dark, was perfectly clean. There was a long floral sofa and an easy chair on one side of the room, a table and two chairs beside the kitchenette. There was a round-faced clock on the wall with a pendulum that swung behind a small pane of glass. The place was stuffy and had the vague smell of something that had burned. Doyle wondered if that came from another apartment.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in one of these apartments before,” Doyle said.
“You can sit down if you want to,” she said. “The couch is really comfortable.”
Doyle sat down obediently and the couch pulled him back. It would have been impossible to sit there for any length of time without falling into a coma-like sleep. “Very nice.”
“People give my mom lots of stuff. The clock and the couch, both of the lamps. It all came from the people she works for.”
“Where does she work?” Doyle wondered how they had come this far without him knowing what Kenya’s mother did for a living.
“She takes care of old people. It’s called assisted living.” Kenya said the words carefully because it was what she considered to be a grown-up phrase. “She used to work in a nursing home but the assisted living place is a lot nicer. Sometimes when the people die their families give you furniture. It’s still hard work though. A couple of the old people are really mean but my mother says they can’t help it. They’re frustrated.”
“I suppose old people are like everybody else,” Doyle said. He had a sudden, uncomfortable vision of himself as an old person, the furniture of his little apartment winding up in the little apartment of the women who cared for him. “I can call them if you’d like, let them know that your mother’s been in an accident.”
Kenya nodded. “That’s a really good idea. I’ve been worried about them firing her for not coming to work.”
Doyle looked around the little room. There was a door on the other side, surely a single bedroom, a bathroom. “Where do you stay when your mother’s at work?”
“I’m at school, or I’m at after-school.” Kenya swept her hand over the kitchen counter and pulled some loose mail, bills, and fliers, into a neat stack. “On Tuesday nights I go to the Girl Scouts. She tries not to work at night but if that’s the schedule then I stay at home. I used to go with her to work but if anybody finds out she gets in a lot of trouble. I used to stay in a room that was empty but then the old people told on her. They all liked me fine and they still told.”
“You stay here by yourself?”
Kenya slipped out of her coat and laid it over the back of the chair. She took off her mother’s hat. “It’s no big deal. I put both of the locks on the door and I leave the television on. Someday she’ll get a job where she’ll only have to work while I’m in school. That’s going to be perfect.”
Doyle was glad he’d left the boys at home. He did not want to see them here. He did not want to picture them sitting on the too soft sofa, their too long legs pressing the edges of the coffee table. He used to find Bernadette sitting in their room sometimes after they had gone to sleep. She did it even more once she was sick, when she still had it in her to climb all those stairs. She would be sitting in the dark and he would come and sit on the arm of the chair beside her and for awhile they would listen to the boys breathe. “They could have gone to someone else,” she’d always say to him. That was the part of it she never could get over: that these sons who were so unquestionably hers could just as easily have gone to another home, a different fate. But what they never said was that they had already belonged to someone else, and they could have just as easily stayed where they were.
“What do you want me to bring over?” Kenya said.
Doyle felt himself flush with emotion and he was ashamed. “Whatever you’d bring over to stay at a friend’s house.”
“I don’t go overnight,” she said. “My mom doesn’t like me to go.”
He tried to find a handkerchief in his pocket. “Do you have a Kleenex? All the cold is making my nose run.”
Kenya went through the door of the other room and came back with a handful of toilet paper. Doyle thanked her. She stood in front of him while he blotted his eyes. There seemed to be something she didn’t know how to say. There was an old white man crying in her living room. What was she going to say about that? “Don’t worry about me,” Doyle told her. “I’m fine.”
She twisted back and forth on one foot, just the slightest movement of nervousness. “I don’t know how to pack exactly,” she said.
He blew his nose and stuffed the paper in his pocket. The child stood in front of him nibbling her lower lip and he smiled at her. “Kenya, I have no doubt that you could land a plane if the situation called for it. Packing for someone as smart as you wouldn’t require any thought at all. Besides, if you get it wrong we can turn around and come right back.”
With those few words, so true and therefore easily given, she all but fell down next to him on the couch in a swoon of happiness. He took her hand and patted it with authority. “Bring a nightgown, the warmest one you’ve got. Underwear, socks, an outfit for tomorrow, something to run in. Bring your schoolbooks.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Bring them anyway. The boys are going to want to see what you’re studying. You know that Tip’s going to want to help you with your homework so if you don’t have any just invent something. It will make him feel good.”
She got up then and went into the other room on her mission. He could hear the sound of drawers opening and closing. He wanted to take her back to the house and play her some Schubert. Not the lieder. The lieder would be too overwhelming for a child. One of the quintets would be exactly right for her. He wondered if she had ever listened to Schubert before. She had only just now gone and he wanted her to come back to him. He found he could not bear to be in this room without her. “Let me know if you need any help,” he said.
“What do I put it all in?” she called to him, and he was able to catch himself before he said the wrong thing.
“Put it in a pillowcase,” he said. “Then we’re going home.”
Chapter 8
AFTER ALL THE PILLS IT WAS HARD TO FOLLOW THE STORY BUT IT WENT SOMETHING LIKE THIS: two men came into her room, two different men, and they took the sheet she laid on at either end of the bed and they said, “On the count of three,” and they lifted her. Sweet Mother of God. She never knew that pain could form a light, a bright and blinding pool of heat. It poured through her. It broke open in her hip and flooded through her gut—her fingertips and teeth and hair, the rounded pads of her feet—everything that she was belonged to the pain. The pain jarred loose the very deepest part of her heart, a place so secret that she never went there herself. The stone was rolled away from the mouth of the tomb and in that moment she forgot herself and called out the name of her friend, the one whose name she never called, the one she tried her best not to think of.
“That’s right,” the man at her feet said, working to make
his voice sound soothing and being no good at it. He had already forgotten her name. He forgot it the second he crossed her off his list. “We’re going to Tennessee.”
The hallway was paved in cobblestones and they banged forth over them with inhuman violence while rattling through every conversation two men could have about basketball. Full-court and half-court pickup. NBA or college ball. Eastern versus Western Division. It was impossible that a hospital could be so enormous. She didn’t know where they were going but it would have taken less time just to wheel her back to Cathedral. It occurred to her they might be steering around aimlessly just to have more time to talk. Every corner they turned put a knife in her side and soon, she knew, that knife would cut her in half. “Celtics? Man, tell me you’re making this up. You could not be interested in the Celtics.”
The man at her feet scolded back. “Loyalty,” he said. “Loyalty. Do you even know the word?” They chattered on like women, a basketball of happy banter thrown back and forth from head to feet. They weren’t even interesting to each other. It wasn’t worth the effort it took to make sense of the words and after awhile Tennessee stopped trying. She let the voices float above her like an unbroken string of lights. The entire room was going down now, abruptly stopping, starting again. People came in and stood very close beside her, not speaking to her but laughing with the basketball men. Then somewhere a door slid open and just like that the first group left and new people came on. Everyone agreed that there hadn’t been a snow like this since ’78.
“Thomas, did you get caught here?”
“All night, Mister,” Thomas replied. “All day and then all night.”
“That’s too much,” the Mister said. “You tell them I said they need to let you out of here soon.”
Thomas acknowledged that this was his last delivery. “I drop her off and I am gone.”
It went on this way until they reached some ground floor in hell. “Last stop,” the man above her head said in a jolly voice. They pushed her out and bumped into another hallway, this one congested with people like herself laid out on rolling slabs. That was when the two men left her. No goodbye. No good luck. She could only tell they were going because their voices receded, dribbled off towards the edge of her vision and then disappeared. Later on a woman came and stood beside her table.