The City Below

by James Carroll

  "That's what she had before," Nick said.

  "Yes. But she's developed a new clot, almost certainly in her leg. A piece of it broke off and went to her lung. We find that if they don't kill a patient right off, then the patient usually does fine."

  "So she'll be okay?"

  "We have her on heparin, an instantaneous blood thinner. It will take a while for the clot to organize."

  "What?"

  "For the body to reabsorb the clot Until that happens, the danger remains that it will break off again."

  Ned Cronin stepped between his grandsons. "But she always wore those elastics. Always."

  "That's good, Mr. Cronin." The doctor's solicitude was laced with condescension. "But she was also supposed to be taking her Coumadin."

  "She did," Nick said angrily. "She took it every damn day. I made sure of it"

  The doctor glanced at Terry.

  Nick leaned in on the doctor. "So why did this happen? You said those pills would—"

  The doctor backed away. "We don't know, son. The Coumadin should have kept the blood from clotting, but if there was trauma in the wall of the vein—"

  "She knelt too much," Cronin said.

  Terry took his grandfather's arm, but the old man shook him off. "I told her. Novenas. Holy Hours. The daily rosary. Her knees were always swollen."

  The doctor kept backing away, as if the three men frightened him. He said, "Bed rest That's the thing now. She won't be critical after tomorrow. We'll keep her on blood thinners and in bed for a few days. Im sure she'll do fine."

  "You're sure?" Terry asked.

  "Yes."

  "When can we see her?"

  "You can look in for a minute, but she's asleep. Wait for the nurse to come out Tell her I said you could look in." The doctor turned and went off down the corridor, the tails of his white coat flapping.

  It was the next afternoon when Flo told Terry to go to D.C. anyway. Nothing doing, he said, not a chance. But she insisted. The color had returned to her face, her blood pressure was near normal, and she seemed herself again. The nurse had said she was doing great.

  In the hallway outside her room, Terry took Nick's elbow. "Christ," he said, "what am I going to do?"

  "Do? What do you mean, do?"

  "I mean, should I go?"

  "You just told her nothing doing."

  "But she insisted."

  "Yeah, right. 'Don't worry about me, boys.' Well, I'm worried, Terry. Aren't you?"

  "But if she's just going to be in bed ... I'd be back before she got out of the hospital. Meantime, I don't think she really needs me, Nick."

  Nick stared at his brother. In a million years, he would not have put his reaction into words: But me—what if I need you?

  "I'd call in," Terry said. "I'd call in regularly."

  Nick winked and struck his brother's shoulder softly. "Like the good son you are."

  The next day, inaugural eve, a blizzard hit Washington. The buses from Boston arrived in the early afternoon, just as the snow began to really dump. While the president-elect, his inner circle, the party regulars, and the major contributors attended a concert in Constitution Hall that night, the Young Democrats would be having their own belly rub at the gymnasium at Georgetown University. Kids from colleges all over the country were coming in, and they were being put up on couches, makeshift cots, and spare mattresses in the lounges and hallways of the dormitories of the local colleges. The Boston contingent was slated for the dorms at Georgetown itself, just down the street from John Kennedy's own house. This coup was arranged through the BC-Jesuit connection, through Bright McKay, in fact, who'd played it like a trump card when the best Ed Lake could do was a setup at Johns Hopkins fifty miles away. Didi and the two dozen other girls from Boston would be at Visitation, the convent school that shared one high wall with Georgetown. The debs from Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Simmons had arched their eyebrows at that news, but it had enabled Didi's mother to overcome her reluctance to let her daughter go.

  Terry and Bright claimed a choice corner in the lounge of Healy Hall, the spired old building that stood like a black-robed Jesuit in the center of the campus. They unloaded their sleeping rolls and duffel bags onto a pair of adjacent leather couches, confident that the gear was claim enough.

  "I got to make that phone call," Terry said.

  "Good luck. I hope she's okay."

  "She will be. She is."

  Terry found a telephone in a dark hallway and called the hospital. The nurse said his mother was asleep. His brother was there, but he'd gone down to the cafeteria. Everything was fine, not to worry. The nurse took Terry's message: It's really snowing here. I'll call later.

  McKay had gone on ahead, and Terry found him in the formal sitting room off the main entrance of the musty old building. On one wall was a portrait of George Washington. Bright was standing in front of the portrait on another wall, and Terry, as always now, was aware at once of the off angle at which Bright held his head whenever he looked at something carefully. He took a place beside his friend.

  The painting was of a bishop, the red robes, the three-sided stiff hat, the ring flashing from the folded hands. But this bishop was a colored man, with unmistakable brown skin, flared nose, and wide lips. James Augustine Healy, SJ, the plaque read. The Bishop of Maine, 1830-1900.

  "Who's that?" Terry asked.

  Bright had to turn his face entirely around to look at him. The wound was mostly healed now. He had been wearing a black leather eye patch since before Christmas, but it was a shock every time Terry saw it Bright had missed the last half of the first semester, returning to school only when classes resumed last week. Their friends at BC still did not know what to say, not that Terry did.

  "Never heard of him," McKay said, "but I'm not that surprised. It was easier for a Negro in this country seventy-five years ago than it is now. There are no colored RC bishops today, are there?"

  As far as Terry knew, there were no colored priests; Floyd Patterson was the only colored Catholic he'd ever heard of. Bright looked at him with the grave sadness that rode on his shoulder like a bird now, piercing Doyle every time he saw it.

  On the bus early that morning, as the Young Dems happily piled on board, a pair of BC guys had taken the seat in front of Bright and Terry. One, meaning no harm, had cracked, "Hey Bright, can you get me a discount on a Hathaway shirt?"

  Terry wanted to slug the guy, but Bright didn't miss a beat. "Sure. Shall I have them stuff it for you? Or do you do that yourself?"

  Everybody in the nearby seats laughed.

  But McKay fell silent once the bus was moving. He faced the window, making it impossible to talk A little while later Terry began to doze, but he came alert when he realized Bright had said something. The bus was just leaving the for western fringe of Boston behind.

  "What?" Terry asked.

  "I hate that fucking city. I'm going to enjoy being gone."

  Hate Boston? Such a thing had never occurred to Terry. But then he realized that Bright was talking about his eye, a first.

  "You blame Boston?"

  "Sure I blame Boston. Wouldn't you?"

  "I'd blame the bastards who—"

  "Tribal warfare, Terry. Boston's tribal warfare." Bright's one eye, when it concentrated on you, could start a fire. "What I can't get over is, it wasn't even my tribe. Negroes had nothing to do with it that day. I mean, we weren't the fucking issue. Nobody was out to skin a coon. I got caught between you guys, wops and micks. Not my fight. Do you know what land of dickhead that makes me?"

  "Hey, come on. Don't put it on yourself."

  "Everybody has an enemy in Boston. That's what tribes do for a place. You know your friends and you know your enemies. All those different groups, Terry—WASPs, wops, micks, Jews, Chinks even—the one thing you all have in common, one tribe you all hate." He didn't have to name it "Which you all basically ignore until some nigger is stupid enough to make you notice. And then, boy: Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!"

  So he ba
d heard it too. Terry could think of nothing to say. Bright faced the window again.

  After a few minutes Bright said, "Washington is better. A good old down-south city where, when they kick the shit out of you, at least it's you they'd set out to get" The first rays of dawn were backlighting the snow-covered Blue Hills. "After I graduate," he said, as if to himself, "I'm signing on with the New Frontier and heading south."

  McKay's eye socket and that entire side of his head were acutely sensitive to the cold. Now, when he and Terry left Healy, setting out into the snow-blown city, McKay pulled his navy watch cap down to his left brow. The freezing air hit his head like a hammer, and he knew it would take a while to get used to the pain, but he would, and no one would know about it.

  They picked up Didi and a girl named Sally Fitzgerald, with whom Didi had hit it off on the bus. Sally was a sophomore at Regis, a nuns' college in Weston. She had not joined in with the debs' nervous jokes about Visitation. ("If we get pregnant, we can say it was a miracle.") Sally was friendly in the breezy way of overweight girls.

  For all Didi knew, the bung Dems had disbanded after the November election. She hadn't seen that much of Terry either, and in hindsight she'd realized that what had happened between them that drunken night had scared him as much as her. And there was the mystery of what had happened at the Boston Garden that day, the most terrifying experience of her life. No one had bothered to explain to her who those men were. Because of how mean Jackie was about it, she knew better than to press her questions. She had visited Bright in the hospital several times, but had not seen him since he'd been released.

  That she had met Edward Kennedy had come to seem as much a dream as kissing Terry in that cab, or watching a maniac chopping up cartons of flowers with a sword right in front of her. But then Terry had called about this trip to the inauguration. He had bulled right over her initial reluctance, insisting the trip was the Young Dems' reward, her reward therefore. She had felt thrilled that he had called her, then he'd admitted he was calling everyone, going down a list like they did on the campaign. She had fortunately channeled her anger into the act of doing something nice for herself for a change: she'd said yes. On the way down to Washington, the bus had been sleepy at first, but when they'd stopped on the Connecticut Turnpike, she and Sally had begun to talk Sally had a way of making her feel a part of things, and it didn't phase Sally when Didi said she was a working girl with no intention of going to college.

  Now they had five hours before the dance began, and they were in Washington, D.C., even if it felt like Antarctica.

  "How's your mother?" Didi asked.

  "She's good," Terry said. "She's over the hump. I just called. She'll be fine."

  "At least she's warm," Didi said, hugging herself. Terry put his arm around her as they walked, amazed at how relaxed he felt, how normal this adventure seemed.

  The four set off in the snow, their collars closed against the wind. They wanted to see it all, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol where JFK would speak the next day, the White House where he would live, and the monument built in imitation of their own Bunker Hill obelisk.

  But the gusts were too raw. The city was blanketed and more snow kept coming. There were no taxis. Terry linked arms with Didi, and likewise Bright with Sally. They pushed into the wind, determined, four members of a new generation of Americans come to claim their places.

  They stopped for hot chocolate at a hamburger joint on M Street, a tiny lunch counter called the Little Tavern. The counter man was yellow-toothed and scrawny. Wearing a soiled white paper hat, he stood with a spatula over a spread of sizzling meat patties. Grease stains freckled his shirt, and a cigarette perched on his lower lip. When he saw Bright McKay and Sally Fitzgerald holding on to each other, the man's eyes flashed. Sugar and spice! "Nuh-uh, not in here," he said. "Your land don't eat in my place, nuh-uh!"

  "What?"

  "You heard me. You can say we're closed, on account of the sudden bad weather."

  "Oh, brother," Bright said, though without surprise. But Terry remembered what he'd said on the bus, that Washington was better.

  "What do you mean closed?" Didi demanded. She leaned across the counter aggressively.

  Terry said, "You're not closed. You're still cooking."

  "That's for my dog. You all get out."

  "We will not—" Didi began.

  Bright took her arm. "Let's go. It's not worth it."

  Didi and Terry faced him, but it was Sally who drew their attention. Aghast, clearly stunned by the implicit accusation that she was with McKay as a girlfriend, she was backing out.

  Bright tugged Didi along, but he turned his eye on the counter man. "Do you know what tomorrow means, mister?" He spoke in the steady, firm voice that had first drawn Terry to him months before. "It means your days aren't even numbered. They're over." With that, he led Didi and Terry back out into the storm. On the sidewalk, Bright knew not to take Sally's arm again. "Forget it, okay?" he said. She found it possible to nod.

  Terry grabbed Bright's arm. "Forget it, hell! That son of a bitch can't do that to you."

  "To me? Was it to me he did that?"

  "Us, I mean. He did it to us."

  "That's more like it, brother."

  "But we're just walking away?"

  "What do you propose, Terry? That we go back in and kick his eye out?"

  "Jesus Christ, Bright."

  "Then forget it, okay? If you're not ready to jump the guy, forget it. Those are the fucking choices. Wise up."

  "Why are you mad at me, Bright?"

  The two stared at each other across a gulf that neither had, until now, admitted was there. The wind swirled a cone of snow around them. Terry dropped Blight's arm, quite aware that his question had gone unanswered because the answer was obvious: You fucking kicked my eye out.

  Terry said, "I'm sorry."

  Bright shook his head. "That ain't it, Terry. That ain't it at all." He grinned. "We didn't come all this way to sing the blues, did we?" He turned to Sally. "Do you sing the blues?"

  "No." She looked helpless.

  "Then what say, folks, aren't we going to see the monument? Wasn't that the plan?"

  "What about Lincoln?" Terry said. "With malice toward none." He tossed his head back toward the Little Tavern. "Except that asshole."

  Half an hour later, Terry and Didi were on the Mall heading, they thought, for the Lincoln Memorial. The wind and snow were worse than ever, and they could no longer see where they were going. They'd become separated from Bright and Sally, which had worried them at first, but now all they wanted was shelter. Away from the street, they'd become disoriented. Even the towering Washington Monument was blanked out. This was tundra. At one point, Didi stopped and fell against Terry. "I can't catch my breath. I can't breathe in this wind."

  "Take it easy, take it easy," Terry said, but he was thinking, Symptoms! Shortness of breath. Pulse rate. He opened his coat around her, a cave. She leaned into the hollow of his body, burying her head.

  "I'm scared, I'm scared."

  "Don't talk, Didi. Deep breaths, in and out. Come on now, in and out."

  They kept going. They found the edge of the Reflecting Pool, a step down into a field of snow, and they used it as a line to follow. Soon the huge white temple, pillars and pediment, loomed above them. Terry kept his eyes on it as if the thing would disappear again. A mansion in the clouds, a Parthenon:

  They moved into the vacant circular road. Beyond the memorial, the cloud was punctured eerily by headlights moving along the Potomac Parkway, but no cars came here. As quickly as they could, they crossed the apron and began to mount the long, broad stairs. But that side of the temple was more exposed to the river wind than anyplace yet, and Terry practically had to carry Didi up. At the top they fell into the cavern in which Daniel Chester French's marble Lincoln sat, big as God.

  Terry led Didi around behind the statue to get away from the dangerous weather. "Are you all right?"

  Instead of answering,
Didi leaned against the wall, struggling for breath. Above her head, a line etched in the marble caught his eye: ... IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.

  Neither knew the word "hyperventilate," but that was what she had been doing. Nothing to do with varicose veins, an organizing clot.

  Didi had expected to suffocate at any minute, which had made her panic, which in turn had made breathing nearly impossible. She was more afraid than she'd been since pressing herself against the wall of Terry's truck while the madman had swung his sword in her face. She held on to Terry now as she'd longed to do then. Once she could breathe again, she began to cry.

  How fragile you are, he thought. He closed his arms on her.

  He had always liked her for being strong, full of verve and wit. Yet here she was so needy, needy for him. He stroked her sides, rubbing his hands lightly up and down. Aware of the thickness of her tweed coat, that she could not feel his touch, he pulled his right glove off with his teeth and let it fall. He crooked his forefinger at her cheek and began to gently stroke her there. How fragile you are, how sweet.

  "Why haven't I seen you?" she asked.

  "After what happened in the Garden, I shut down inside."

  "It was scary."

  "It still scares me, Didi. Sometimes I dream about it And what happened to Bright, I feel—" He stopped because what he felt had yet to present itself in words.

  Didi said, "This wind's scary too. Will they still have the inauguration?"

  "I think they have to. He has to take the oath, right?"

  "I guess." Didi pulled back and found his eyes. "What do you think of me, Terry?"

  "I think you're my friend."

  "That isn't how you make me feel."

  "I'm sorry, Didi." He closed his eyes and leaned against the marble. Christ, all he could do was say he was sorry. Where was Bright? Where was Sally? If something happened to them now, would that be his fault too?

  Leaning together—it could have been all that occurred between them, two young people, lonely and afraid, consoling each other. But Terry's physical sensations, which moments before had been concentrated in his nearly frostbitten face, slowly began to settle in his groin. He opened his eyes and looked at her. He noticed her lips, too red, too big. He remembered having her tongue in his mouth.