A kick, Maddie thought. A kick in the crotch. More than once Maddie had defended herself with a well-placed kick, often followed by a straight jab to the nose. Her da had insisted she know how to fight back, paid for her to be taught the basics of self-defense. Still, what worked on the street, what worked in an open-ended alley, would not work in a closed room in the Charles Street jail. Yes, she could overcome Mundy; but what would be the follow-up? A criminal charge for assault and battery on a public employee in the performance of her duties. A felony. A classic she said/she said situation. I was patting her down, Mundy would testify, when she attacked me without provocation. Nothing Maddie could say would persuade a judge or jury otherwise. Win the battle; lose the war. Fág an Bealach, Maddie chanted to herself. Fág an Bealach.
With one motion, Mundy stripped Maddie’s skirt, stockings, and underpants and pushed her down until she squatted like a primitive woman about to give birth. Football fingers snaked through her pubic hair.
Hatred, Maddie now realized, was Mundy’s ecstasy, her addiction. To Mundy, Levy was just another fix, me her connection. This must be what first generation Irish endured, Maddie thought, landing in Boston to be greeted by “No Irish” or “Irish Need Not Apply” signs, or what African-Americans feel in parts of Boston today. The cocoon Maddie had been born into, the one she didn’t realize sheltered her, had been shredded, ripped away, exposing her in a way she had never been exposed. The abstract was now concrete. The rifles of her grand da’s firing squad now aimed at her.
“You’re clean, sweets.”
Maddie dressed, then ran to the ladies’ room, the furthest stall. She hung from the door, limp and liquid as a wet rag. There was no toilet seat, no toilet paper. Graffiti covered the walls and ceiling. Reagan ass fucks. Mayor Charlie blows. Warden Spirelet sucks. Phone numbers. Obscenities. Cartoons of penises and balls, tits and pussies. Maddie felt as if she had night sweats, but her mouth was dry, dead bone dry, so dry she feared her lips would crack if she opened her mouth, her tongue would crack if she moved it. She gagged and dry heaved into the toilet. Phlegm, someone else’s, floated on the surface of the water, a piece of scum on a stagnant pond. She poked through her purse for a pocket douche or a napkin, but found only a piece of tissue shredded by her keys. She flattened her palms against the walls of the stall to hold herself up. Dry heaves tore through her.
Hatred had always persecuted somebody else, her namesakes Mary and Ann Devlin in Kilmainham, her grand da in Traitor’s Hell, Jews like the rabbi and Moskovitzky, the immigrants of her grand ma’s generation. Hatred, pure hatred, had always been abstract, experienced vicariously, but now, hatred in its purest form had raped her, deposited its seed in her womb and she knew if she, crazed by the narcotic of vengeance, succumbed to hatred this one time, she, too, would be addicted, always needing another fix, haunting back alleys for her connection, eagerly, happily, paying whatever the price might be. Yet, there was something comfortable about hatred, the way it liberated the mind, amplified the emotions, ordered the chaos of the world into something manageable, understandable. Black and white. White and black. Pluses and minuses. Minuses and pluses. A binary world.
Maddie straightened her clothes and wiped her cheeks with the back of her palm and took several deep breaths as if she were venting nitrogen from her system, and stumbled out of the toilet stall. A new life awaited. Washington. Money. Maybe, marriage. To a man–her fling with a woman over–a man who would father her child, a child who would be christened with a proper Irish name, a name beginning with E in remembrance of Elizabeth.
Gloria Mundy was a messenger not from God, but the devil, an invitation to succumb to hatred, an invitation she would not RSVP because hatred was not the way to her new life. By the time she reached the attorney’s visiting room, she had driven her craving into that deep pit where she had caged Richard Gloucester and Edward Hornstein and the Brits who imprisoned her namesakes and great uncle Clancy and the scum she so resolutely represented. And Michelle Furey? No. Never Furey for Furey had reawakened her capacity to love, to live.
The familiarity of the attorney’s visiting room, its stale, brackish air, the wooden table lined with cigarette burns, the air vent clogged with balls of dust which looked like gray cheese curls, comforted and consoled her the way the execution of a convicted murderer comforted and consoled the family of his victim.
Next week, Washington. She felt like a convict in the last hours of a long prison sentence.
-2-
“Traif. Must you always desecrate the Sabbath?” Levy asked.
Maddie ignored him.
“Why am I still here? Because you think I’m guilty and deserve to be here?”
“No.” Maddie explained the inevitability of the outcome of the bail hearing, why she waived cross-examination, why she withheld the rabbi from the witness stand, speaking rapidly, letting her persona for the previous eight years as an attorney who aggressively defended her clients no matter how reprehensible take control of her thoughts, her actions.
“When do I meet this Howard Kaplan?”
“Kaplan’s a dead end. He’ll take you to trial. Guaranteed conviction. The jury won’t see beyond your skull-cap. Murder One is life without parole. Murder Two, life with the possibility of parole, but in your case, chance of parole is the same as your becoming a Jesus freak. You’re looking at life, probably in solitary since you wouldn’t survive a week in the general population. If the warden owes Charlie Sullivan a favor, he’ll put you in the general population and let nature takes its course which it will, the first day or two if it takes that long.”
Maddie had intended to bid Levy farewell, to wish him luck with his new attorney, but the encounter with Gloria Mundy had recalibrated her thinking. Abandoning Levy to Howard Kaplan would signal the Gloria Mundy’s of the world they had won. She was not prepared to concede victory to them, not so much for Levy’s sake but for her own. She swallowed some phlegm which she coughed up into a tissue.
“Your only hope is to let me negotiate a plea-bargain, a plea to a lesser included offense, probably manslaughter; maybe negligent homicide if I’m really on my game, in exchange for Bonturo’s agreeing to a prearranged disposition, a term certain, something less than life, something that will let you die a free man, and assignment to a correctional institution rather than a state prison, protocols regarding your personal safety, kosher meals, the right to practice your religion, whatever else I can dream up.”
The more she talked, the more she felt like an actress trapped in a bad movie condemned to speak words someone else had written for her. She spoke so fast her mouth raced ahead of her brain. She coughed again, this time a dry cough which came from so deep inside her that her lungs exploded against her ribcage.
“The judge has the last word, but judges usually accept plea-bargains and agreed upon dispositions. It’s the grease that lubricates the justice system.”
“Why would you do that if you know I’m guilty?” Levy asked. “According to Rabbi Luria and Rabbi Schachter, the Talmudic commentaries or Tosafot make it clear that the Torah prohibits a lawyer from defending a client who the lawyer knows is guilty because it is forbidden to help the criminal escape the consequences of his act, forbidden to assist someone to avoid his just punishment, and forbidden to fail to eradicate the evil in our midst.”
Maddie had never seen Levy so animated. His skill at parsing Jewish law would make him a formidable attorney, but she doubted he would be able to persuade many of the Jewish mob lawyers that they were violating Jewish law by defending their clients. She had never considered this in the context of Catholic law. Someday, perhaps, she would; but not today.
“To think or believe something,” Maddie said, “is not the same as knowing it. What if there is doubt, no matter how small? What does your Talmud say then?”
“Tosafot and Rabbenu Asher would say that the defense is permitted as long as the doubt is sincere and the client is not known to the attorney to be guilty in fact.”
&
nbsp; “My doubt may be small, miniscule in fact; but it is sincere as is my belief that you are guilty. I believe. I do not know. Is this sufficient for us to continue?”
Levy looked into her eyes, searching them for the answer to her question. This was more, she realized than the children’s game of stare-down. She willed herself not to blink, not to turn away, because she feared doing either would be interpreted to mean her doubt lacked sincerity. After several seconds that seemed to Maddie to be several minutes, Levy smiled, something he had never done before in her presence. He leaned back in his chair. “If my case is so hopeless, why would they agree?”
“They don’t know I’m withdrawing and they’re afraid of me. I’m the David to their Goliath. The Moses to their Pharaoh. Howard Kaplan? Samson after his haircut. No one’s heard of him. No one fears him. He’s God’s gift to the prosecution. Me? I’m God’s gift to you.”
“Hashem hateth haughty eyes, Proverbs 6:16 and 17.”
“As does my church which considers pride to be a mortal sin; but it’s not pride when it’s a fact. They’re trying to scare me off. I just suffered a body search worse than a rape. A real rape is probably next.”
“It is also written in Proverbs that Hashem hateth those who speak with a lying tongue.” Levy paused. “As much as I fear you would betray Anne Frank, I have no choice but to hide in the attic and pray you do not.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. His lips moved. Rapidly. Adonoy ro-i, lo echsar. Bin-ot desheh yarbitzayni, al may m’nuchot y’nahalayni . . . When he finished, he opened his eyes and looked directly at Maddie, then recited in English, The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .
-3-
Hours later, Maddie sought relief in the rainbow bubbles of a hot bath. Three empty bottles of Guinness lined the edge of the tub like altar pieces. She opened and drank a fourth, then a fifth. The Guinness felt heavy in her head, heavy behind her eyes, between her ears. Mid-afternoon. Only alcoholics were into their fifth Guinness so early in the day. She had defended her share of alcoholics, always without sympathy. A liar Levy had called her. Someone who would betray Anne Frank. Not the first time a client had called her a liar, not the first time a client had accused her of betraying them, selling them out, always out of anger, frustration, ignorance of how the justice system worked; but never the way Levy had. In his eyes, she was to him what her great-uncle Clancy had been to her grand da. What was she in her own eyes?
The Guinness clouded her mind and carried her back to the year of her fifteenth birthday, 1961, the year of her ma’s death, the year her da dragged her to Dublin for Christmas. The morning they arrived Brian Devlin marched his daughter to Arbour Hill Cemetery, the grave of Seamus, one of Grand da Michael’s brothers, then to Kilmainham, Dublin’s Tower of London, whose prisoners were either executed or forever forgotten until their bones were swept up and given to dogs to gnaw upon.
“Your namesakes,” Brian said, pointing to a page from the 1803 prison register on display in the prison’s entryway as if it were a sacred document or illuminated manuscript reposing in a church nave. “Mary Devlin, prisoner 94; Ann Devlin, prisoner 98. Six Devlins. The youngest a boy of nine. Killed because Ann wouldn’t betray Robert Emmet.”
Maddie gripped her da’s hand as they walked through stone corridors cold and damp. In tiny cells with slits for windows, she imagined a small boy sleeping on a pile of straw in one room, dead with a bloody head wound on the cold stone floor of another, a skeleton in rags in a third. She saw his shadow darken the hole in the moss-covered stone wall into which the executioner slid the crossbeam of the gallows. She heard his voice where the prisoners stood while the firing squad lined up, readied, aimed, fired.
“Da.” Maddie tugged his sleeve until he stopped. “I want to go home.”
“You are home, daughter of mine.”
Outside the gates of Kilmainham, they caught the bus for Hollyfield, a riverside slum infested by gangs and rats and a cemetery known as Traitor’s Hell, where they dumped traitors and sinners excommunicated by the Church. Grave markers, a few whole, most in fragments, were strewn about the bare ground like bones scattered by grave robbers angered by the poverty of the graves they had opened. There were no footpaths, no sidewalks, no roads for hearses to enter or exit, no shrubs or bushes, no sacraments, no last rites. The markers were unadorned except for names, dates. No crosses. No religious symbols. No sign of heaven. Hell abounded.
Maddie followed her da as he zigzagged between the stones. On a slight rise he stopped at a marker, fissured and listing to the side, as grimy as a gathering storm cloud, as smooth as a sunless Irish sky except for its lettering, “M Devlin”. Brian made the sign of the cross. “My da. Your grand da. May God have mercy on his soul.”
“Grand da was a traitor?” Maddie asked.
In a quiet voice both sad and defiant Brian told his daughter what he had told George Harriman so many years before on Guadalcanal. “I could never get Seamus’s side of the family to see beyond Clancy’s lies.” Brian put his arm around his daughter.
Maddie struggled to understand. Three brothers. Michael her grand da. Seamus Trish’s. Seamus killed in a Brit ambush. Michael executed by the IRB as an informer because of Clancy’s lies. Trish’s da blamed her da for Seamus’s death. Trish blamed her. It made no sense, all this blame.
She wished she were back in Boston, attending basketball games with Duncan Siward or jitterbugging at the Friday night dances at the Y or holding hands at the latest Elvis Presley movie, going out for pizza afterwards, making out on her back porch or, when it was cold, in the back hall among winter coats hanging from pegs in the wall, their feet surrounded by boots, stifling their giggles when they heard someone moving about the kitchen. She didn’t want to be in Ireland visiting a jail where Devlins had been imprisoned, tortured, executed, or a cemetery where her grand da lay buried in shame. She didn’t want to be named for sisters who sacrificed themselves for Ireland’s freedom. She didn’t want to be Irish.
Now, many years later, sipping her fifth bottle of Guinness, Maddie once again heard her da’s voice, dead these many years, reciting the Devlin family history, hers and Trish’s, both direct descendants of Robert Emmet. From Robert Emmet to his son, Robert Michael Arthur Devlin, named Devlin rather than Emmet to hide him from the British, to Michael and Arthur being two Devlin cousins, both veterans of the Rising of 1798 and the Rising of 1803 to the Easter Rising of 1916 which begat first her grand da’s betrayal by his brother Clancy and, then, the Republic of Ireland.
All this and more Maddie remembered.
Once again it was November of Maddie’s sophomore year in college. During her freshman year, Duncan Siward, her first great love, her only love, had faded away like a one-hit-recording star. Against her better judgment, she allowed friends to drag her to the Harvard-Yale game and to a party at Eliot House where she met Richard Gloucester, a Harvard junior who asked her for a date. Suffolk Downs, he said, because my tuition’s due.
She didn’t know what to make of this Harvard horse player who majored in English and argued that Richard III was Shakespeare’s greatest play. Once every two or three months her da went to Suffolk Downs with George Harriman, budgeting $25.00 to cover admission, a hot dog and beer, and half a dozen bets, long shots to place, never to win. On a good day he came home with movie money which he gave her with a smile and a kiss. On a bad day, he laughed about the noses that came up short and vowed next time to bet only on Jew horses.
Her da worked hard for that $25.00, fifteen years at two jobs to save up the down payment for their house, nights the janitor at Holy Name High School, days factory work, operating a punch press to attach rings to loose-leaf binders, eight hour shifts, no paid lunch hour, eight hours surrounded by the steady pounding of a battalion of punch presses, surrounded by air humid with machine oil and heated by motors too hot to touch. Insert the rings. Slide in the binder. Push the button. Snatch back the fingers before the press crushed them, which happened to someone every few months, but ne
ver, at least not yet, at a punch press operated by her da. Every night he came home five fingered, smelling of grease that never washed away. He hated the factory, her da, but he was proud he did his work the right way, proud he was reliable, proud he provided for his wife and daughter. Maddie respected his pride and loved him for it and prayed it was genetic and that one day she would be able, like him, to get up every morning and do what she had to do for her children.
Gloucester’s carefree attitude, on the other hand, his blind faith that his next dollar was at the finish line of the next race, both repelled and attracted her. Yet, in spite of Gloucester’s sun-sprite disposition, there was something ominous lurking within his eyes, set deep in their sockets as if they were sinking into his soul, something ominous in their color, a brown so dark it verged on black. His eyebrows merged at the bridge of his nose like a land bridge between two continents that never should have been joined. But, when they kissed, he closed his eyes–she peeked–and imprisoned her fears and worries behind pearly smooth eyelids of love.
Much to Maddie’s surprise, her da liked Gloucester and, after much prodding, accompanied them to the track, betting Gloucester’s touts, small, conservative bets, winning bets, twenty-five dollars becoming seventy-five after subtracting admissions, grandstand instead of track side, a hot dog and premium bottled beer (two) instead of draft (one). Gloucester bet big, both short odds and long (which he wouldn’t allow Brian to bet), always to win. And exotic bets. Not just daily doubles and trifectas and quinellas, but wheels and boxes and bets based on mathematical formulas requiring a slide rule to calculate. Hundreds became thousands and at the end of the day Gloucester banked the profits for graduate school, a PhD in medieval literature. His life plan was to teach Beowulf, Les Chansons de Roland, and The Canterbury Tales in the mornings, play the horses in the afternoon, enjoy evenings at home with wife and children, publish an occasional article or book to maintain his standing in the world of academia. He was the first person Maddie had ever met who had mutated a future based on chance into a future plotted with precision.
The Fire This Time Page 18