The City Below

by James Carroll

  "You're naming him Jack? Really?" Mullen's eyes brightened.

  "If it's a boy, Jackie. I want you to be the godfather. So does Didi," he added, which was a lie.

  ***

  Terry was in the seminary a good two years before Squire and Didi had seen each other alone. It was the night of the day of her father's funeral. Terry had used his grandfather's pull with the cardinal to get special permission to attend the service; he showed up in his impressive black suit and tie. As if in memory of his mother, the old ladies oohed and aahed over Terry, though to Squire he looked forlorn, like a Mennonite preacher or an Orthodox Jew —or one of the assistant undertakers. Squire felt sorry for him, and wanted to spring the guy, break him loose, get him out of there. But from what he could see, Terry lapped the attention up, an Irish muckamuck at last.

  At the cemetery in West Roxbury on a cold, battleship-gray winter afternoon, Terry led the prayers of committal, chirping away in Latin as if the words meant something, the police honor guard answering the " Et cum spiritu tuo" like the altar boys they had all been. Then Squire watched Terry go to Didi and put his arms around her. She leaned against him and so shook with sobbing that Squire, even on the far side of the hill, with the dispersing crowd and the biting wind between them, felt the stab of her grief. Grief for her father, sure. But also grief for the life she would never have with Terry. Nick saw her feelings clear.

  When Didi had rejoined her family, and while other people were returning to their cars, Terry came over to Squire.

  "Hey, Nick," he said, hunching into his black topcoat. They faced each other on a low hill up from the tidy road. Their breath came in puffs.

  "Sad, Terry, huh?"

  "You mean Didi?" They both watched her as she put an arm around her mother. Her brother Jackie was on the old woman's other side. Nick and Terry noticed when he hooked his fingers into Didi's on their mother's shoulder. "Makes me think of Ma."

  "Me too."

  "But not only Ma," Terry said. "Did you ever wonder what it was ...?"

  "What?"

  "To lose a father."

  "We lost a father, Terry. Jesus. Did we ever."

  "I mean, to know him first, then to lose him."

  "No."

  "No what?"

  "No, I never wondered about that."

  "I did. I mean I do. Really, Nick."

  Squire shrugged. "Maybe that's the difference, then."

  "What, between us?"

  Squire studied his brother's face, then burst out laughing. "Of course between us. The difference, Charlie. The difference." Squire opened his hands, indicating Terry's black clothing.

  Terry looked down at himself. Then his eyes settled on the ground.

  "Anyway," Squire said, "we've had Gramps."

  "How's he doing?"

  "Slowing down, Terry. You should pay a little more attention."

  "You know how little freedom I —"

  "Can't you call the guy? Why can't you at least phone him?"

  Terry looked up at his brother. "I'm not allowed to, Nick."

  "When the hell did we become the world, the flesh, and the devil?"

  Terry laughed. "But not necessarily in that order." He glanced toward Didi, who was just getting into the limousine. "I hate to say it, but I have to get back."

  "Before the clock strikes and your black pants turn into a dress again?"

  "Exactly."

  "I'll drive you."

  "I'm going to hop the MTA, Nick. You should go back to the Mullens'. They'll expect you. They'll need you. Say something nice to Didi, would you? She's shaken up." The limo pulled slowly away.

  "She never got over you, did she? I got to tell you, Terry, sometimes I think you finally went into the sem just to get out of the corner she had you in."

  "I'll tell you the truth, Nick. She thinks that I love her, but that I love God more. When I see her, I feel like a fucking liar."

  "Because you don't."

  "Love her? Love God?" Terry smiled sadly. "I don't know what love is, buddy." He suddenly clasped his brother by the shoulder. "Except for you, you piece of shit."

  Squire nodded somberly. "Yeah. Me too."

  They stared at each other, surprised by the strength of what bound them. Instead of a mother and a father, and despite everything —here was the feeling —they had one another.

  At the Mullen house on Monument Square, there had been the traditional funeral aftermath: the crowd of neighbors and friends; Tim Mullen's fellow cops; the feed line at the long table laden with cold cuts, brisket, potato salad, and chips; the booze. Didi had downed several Scotches, then disappeared. Squire went upstairs looking for her. He found her in her room, on her bed, crying. He lay down next to her, like a brother. Say something nice, he thought.

  All he could think of was how forbidden her lanky body had been all those years, how it had never entered his mind —so that when she turned her streaked face to him and raised an arm for him to enter, he was completely unprepared for how turned on he was.

  Something nice: when he opened his mouth to speak, the word on his tongue was his brother's name, and so, quite simply, he closed his mouth again and kissed her. He knew, when she kissed him back, that she too was thinking, Terry. They made love with all those people downstairs, all those cops, her mother, her father unburied still, beside the mound of dirt covered with the flowers Squire had helped lay out.

  They fucked with a wildness unlike anything he had experienced before. Was it the forbidden thrill of incest, a kind of adultery? The taboos must have ignited her too, because she kept pounding under him, churning to the rhythm of her own deep, throaty music long after he was ready to begin regretting what they had done. "Dream," she said finally, and then again: "Dream."

  When, later, she turned out to be pregnant, there was no question in his mind, any more than in hers, about what to do. Everybody claimed to be just delighted when they announced their intention to marry immediately. Jackie, of course, and even Terry.

  Just before the ceremony, Squire had pressed his brother's arm and whispered, "Say something nice."

  "Like you did, you bastard," Terry answered affectionately. The truth was that to him, Nick and Didi's marrying seemed the perfect solution. From the pulpit, where he read Saint Paul, what he said was, "'The greatest of these is love.'"

  ***

  "Hey, sweetie pie," Squire called as he swung through the open door of his grandfather's flower store. Molly had been stacking and unstacking cardboard seedling pots in the corner behind the cash register. She was three now, and her birth had made Squire feel that, yes, he did have the golden touch. He couldn't lose.

  When Molly saw her father, she cried out happily. She stalled while getting to her feet, a little momentary arc of triumph, then scampered over to him. Her white shoes slapped the floor. He scooped her up and made her fly; for engine noises, there was her squealing laughter.

  "Hi," Didi said, sticking her head out of the back room.

  "Should she be out here alone?"

  Didi ignored his question, the criticism not so thinly veiled. She had on the blue smock she wore in the store, but it would no longer button closed, her belly was so big, oddly disproportionate to the rest of her body. During this pregnancy, her shape had become even more ostrich-like than the first time. The larger her stomach became, the narrower her shoulders seemed, the smaller her head. Her long neck, once, with her hair, her most alluring feature, now seemed gawkish. It helped not at all that she habitually wore, both in the store and in the kitchen upstairs, bright yellow rubber gloves.

  Now she held a trimming knife and two long birds of paradise. Despite the barb in his question and his lack of greeting for her, Didi's broad-mouthed face was alight with pleasure. It never failed to make her happy, watching his way with Molly. He was as good a father as he was a grandson.

  But her happiness gave way to the other thing. "Your grandfather wants to see you right away. He's upstairs." Didi lifted her hand to her ear to push back
an unruly strand of her rich red hair. The blade of the knife blanked her eyes for an instant, giving her the odd look of a Star Trek character.

  "What's up?" he asked, putting Molly back on the floor, playfully swatting her hugely padded derriere as she waddled back to her corner and her seedling pots.

  "Something has Gramps upset. I don't know what."

  "What could —?"

  "His Eminence called here. I answered the phone. There was his raspy, barking voice, just like on the radio rosary. He asked for 'my old Ned.' I thought it was somebody pulling a joke. You maybe, or Jackie. I almost said something rude. But it was the cardinal all right. I never knew him to call here, did you?"

  "In the old days, he did. Cushing always came by here when he was in the neighborhood. What did he want now?"

  Didi shrugged. "I didn't dare ask." She let her right hand rest on the shelf of her belly, the two flower stems dramatically erect. Every move she made lately struck Squire as strange. The woman's uneasiness inside her own body was palpable. "I think he'd been drinking," she added.

  "He probably wants some money. He's always hitting people up. Or he wants flowers for some monsignor's funeral. Gratis, natch."

  "I don't think so."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When Gramps took the phone, he listened for a minute, then he said, real shocked like, 'Terry did that? Our Terry?' Then he said, 'Why, that disloyal bastard!'"

  "Gramps said that to the cardinal?"

  "Yes."

  "What the hell did Terry do?"

  "I don't know. Gramps said, 'We'll see about that.' He listened some more, then he said, 'Absolutely, Your Eminence. I guarantee it.'"

  "What?"

  "Then he hung up and went right up the stairs. I went to see what was wrong, and he snapped that it didn't involve me. It was 'a family matter.'" Didi's eyes were at the mercy of an old hurt. "As if I'm still not a member of this family."

  "Don't start in on that."

  "About an hour ago, Gramps called down. He told me to send you up as soon as you got back."

  "Shit," Squire said.

  Then Molly, behind him, repeated the word. "Shit, Daddy, shit"

  Didi's face darkened. "Out of the mouths of babes."

  Squire threw a hand toward the ridiculous flowers sprouting from the vase of her yellow glove on the perch of her stomach. "Do something with those birds, Didi. You look like the Mount of Olives with a TV antenna on top of it, for Christ's sake."

  Squire turned his back on her so abruptly that Didi's eyes automatically went to Molly, checking if she'd seen. But Molly, truly her mother's daughter, was only smiling.

  When Didi and Squire had married, they'd replaced the tenants in the third-floor flat Ned had the second floor to himself. It was more cluttered than ever, because he had kept his late daughter's figurines and gewgaws, as if the place were a shrine to her. There were doilies on the backs of the plush furniture and on the tables, copies of Fulton Sheen books and Catholic Digest. A dried palm branch arched across the wall behind the crucifix, brushing a cheap oil painting of Flo done from a photograph. The windows were blanketed with double thicknesses of real lace. Squire could never enter those rooms without a burst of wonder that he and his brother had ever lived in them.

  The lights were out, and though it wasn't nearly dark yet outside, the living room was deeply shadowed, except for the flickering blue of the television set Cronin was sitting in the rocker in front of it, his back to Squire, some game show unrolling before him. The parakeet, whose cage sat on top of the forever untouched upright piano, whistled at Squire, alarm.

  "Gramps?"

  Cronin did not react.

  Squire leaned over. "Gramps?"

  The old man was asleep, adrift in the country of his dreams. Sixty-eight years old now, his once great crown of white hair had thinned considerably, and his muscled body had gone flaccid. He was always forgetting things, hardly knew the names of lifetime neighbors, was easily angered. In the store Squire cooperated in the fiction that he was still in charge, but customers who struck him wrong, guilty of nothing more, say, than normal indecision in choosing between irises and snapdragons, he simply told to get out. Didi and, occasionally, Squire himself would go after them to apologize.

  "Gramps?" He shook him lightly.

  Cronin jolted awake. "Wha?" He looked up at his grandson, stupefied. Slowly his memory returned. He grabbed Squire's arm. "That brother of yours has disgraced us."

  "What happened?" Squire pulled the hassock over and sat facing his grandfather.

  "He led a rebellion against the cardinal. The cardinal wants him out!"

  "Calm down, Gramps. One thing at a time."

  "He led a meeting. They made demands, just like radicals. Terry disobeyed the pope."

  "The pope?" Squire burst out laughing.

  "What's funny?"

  "Nothing's funny." Jesus Christ, Squire thought, the pope. At Columbia they take on LBJ, in Prague Brezhnev, in Chicago Mayor Daley. But Terry takes on the fucking pope!

  "The cardinal wants him to stop, and he won't. He has the whole seminary in an uproar. The cardinal asked me to talk to him. You have to take me over there."

  "What demands? What's the issue?"

  "That's what I asked."

  "What'd the cardinal say?"

  "Birth control."

  "Oh, brother."

  "Your brother! TV stations called the cardinal, that's what he's trying to avoid. They said Terry's going on TV, an act of pure defiance, of betrayal!" In his excitement Cronin pushed himself up to stand.

  "Gramps, wait."

  "The nerve of him, that brazen bastard, who the hell does he think he is?"

  Squire forced his grandfather back down into the chair, and with an unprecedented sharpness he ordered, "Be quiet."

  Cronin submitted, raising a hand to shield his face, as if expecting Squire to strike him. The gesture stunned Squire, who would never grow accustomed to this man's decline, Squire's Knight, his Lord, his only God.

  The old man shook his head, whining, "But wait'll your mother finds out This will just break her heart"

  "What?"

  "Your mother. This will —"

  "Gramps."

  "The disgrace of it, defying the cardinal. She'll —"

  "No she won't, Gramps. Ma's not here anymore. You remember."

  Squire took his grandfather by the shoulders, his other baby. "Let me worry about this. Let me find out what's going on. Okay?"

  "The cardinal asked me."

  "Gramps, you can. He asked you to talk to Terry and you can. But let me find out first All right? I'll fix it. Then you call the cardinal and tell him it's done. Okay?"

  "You think you can talk sense into that kid?"

  "I know I can. Terry will listen to me." Squire and his born-to-bring-flowers smile. "Doesn't everybody?"

  "When you and me used to go down to the Exchange, all the fellows told me what a good kid you was." The old man's face became enlivened with gratitude. "Terry'll listen to you."

  "Right," Squire said, afraid all at once that it would someday be like this between himself and Molly.

  Downstairs, Didi was just closing up the store. She looked up expectantly when Squire came in.

  "Jesus, sweetheart, you won't believe it."

  "What?"

  "Birth control!" Squire leaned against the cold-storage case and laughed hard, with Molly watching quietly from her corner.

  But Didi frowned. "Oh, but that's sad." She waited until her husband looked at her. "Really. Don't you think that's sad?"

  "It's pathetic is what it is. Those guys in a snit about rubbers and the Pill." He went over to her. "Listen." He took her by the shoulders. "I'm sorry I gave you shit before."

  Didi leaned against him.

  "Now I have to bomb out to Brighton and talk to Terry. Imagine that. Me, a papal peacekeeper."

  "Tonight?"

  "Right now. There's a publicity problem. That's the cardinal's issue, TV.
The last thing he needs, Uncle Walter saying, 'Today's campus riot took place at St John's Seminary, Boston. Future Catholic priests demanding that, instead of napalm, B-52S should be dropping condoms."

  "Nick —"

  "I'll be home as soon as I can." He kissed her forehead. She inclined toward him, thinking that now, perhaps, he would gentle her body. But he was careful not to touch her protruding stomach. Even with his mouth shut he could taste her loneliness. When he dared look, he saw that her eyes were closed.

  He turned and crossed to Molly, splendid child. He picked her up. She squirmed away but he kissed her, loving her refusal to be compliant. He brought her to her mother, whom he chastely kissed once more. Didi clung to him. Molly twisted between them, working herself free and onto the floor, leaving just the emptiness to bind them.

  On his way out he picked up a small shamrock plant, a Kerry Bouquet specialty. "'One always asks, holding a plant' —this is Terry speaking, get it? —'how the tiny leaves carry their burden of life.'" He laughed, shook his head.

  "You shouldn't make fun of him if he's in trouble."

  "I could have predicted something like this. The guy doesn't know what he wants. Never has."

  "Unlike you."

  "As a matter of fact."

  "What do you want, Nick? That's what I don't know."

  Squire smiled. "I want what I have." He saluted the room with the shamrock.

  "And what you don't have?"

  "I want that too." He wrapped the plant in a square of green tinfoil, deftly bundling it by gathering the four corners in a silver ribbon. "This'll be my calling card. I'll say I've come to offer to do the altar flowers for Charlie's ordination."

  "Don't call him that." She was surprised by the sudden edge in her own voice.

  Squire looked at her with distaste. "He's my brother: I'll call him what I want."

  "Why do you and Gramps need so to have him in the priesthood? You're like your mother would have been if she was alive."

  Squire looked slapped. He glared at Didi, and she saw his hatred. He couldn't stand it, the rare times she said what was true. Everybody needed Terry in the priesthood because that was how they would hold on to him. Didi knew this about Nick and his grandfather because she knew it about herself.