They passed Boston Garden and crossed onto the sloping back side of Beacon Hill. At Cambridge Street traffic snarled again, backing up from the demonstration three blocks away. When the car stopped, Senator Kennedy opened his door. "Let's do this," he said. And he got out.
Terry took the radio mouthpiece from its clip on the dash and handed it to the driver. "Call Hazzard. Tell him the senator's on foot. They can pick us up as we go by the building."
A moment later, Doyle and McKay were striding along beside Kennedy, one on each side. That block of Cambridge Street, between the boxy Saltonstall Building and the brute concrete of the Lindemann Mental Health Center, was clogged with honking automobiles, drivers craning out their windows to see what the fucking holdup was. Blue lights flashed up ahead, but police vehicles were stuck in traffic too.
"Hey, Teddy!" one driver called. "Tell them to get it moving."
The senator ignored him, and others in cars and on foot whose heads turned in recognition as he passed.
The rally had already begun on the vast brick plaza in front of City Hall, beyond the towering JFK Building. Though they could hear echoes of the amplification, roaring applause, hoots and cheers, neither Kennedy nor his aides could see the crowd yet.
At the next corner they crossed the wide street quickly, skipping between the shiny bumpers of stalled cars. Three tall men in blue suits, English shoes, and silk ties, they moved crisply. Only the fact that one of them was black—a black man with an eye patch—would have set them apart from other lunchtime big-shots up from State Street, except that one of the two whites had the most familiar face and hair in America.
A particularly loud roar went up from the crowd ahead, and it rolled back at them, echoing through the canyon of government buildings. Another block to the JFK Building itself, to connect with Hazzard. Terry worried that Kennedy wouldn't wait for the security men. He was afraid to show how afraid he was, which made him seem so brave. He'd been adamant: no police escort from the airport, no motorcycles, no uniforms, no obvious bodyguards. The rendezvous with Hazzard should have been simple, but Terry hadn't anticipated this fucking traffic.
Bright reached around Kennedy to nudge Terry. "There's your man."
Hazzard? Perry?
Terry checked the faces of the men they were passing, but McKay was pointing to a bronze bust on a stone pillar surrounded by benches in the center of a tidy park by the Bowdoin subway stop. Cushing, the beak of his nose, the jutting longshoreman's chin, the sunken cheeks. The eyes of the sculpture were dead, but otherwise, it was him. Cardinal Cushing at the foot of Bowdoin Street, where Jack had lived. Who had thought to put him there?
"Dear Jack..." The old prelate's words at Kennedy's bier, the bent head, the spotted, gaunt hand on the coffin. Terry felt the breath catch in his throat.
The three men had slowed and were looking at the bust. Terry said, "If he was still here, Senator, you wouldn't need to be."
"Not true. He'd have had me up here before this. You were right." With his closest aides, Kennedy felt free to be withholding, but now he looked at Terry Doyle with what, between them, was a rare directness. "I wish I'd come up sooner. Thank you."
"I hope it goes well, Senator."
Kennedy held up the black binder. "'Four score and seven years ago.'" He laughed suddenly, his great, infectious, releasing laughter. What freedom the man had to laugh at himself. He slapped Doyle's shoulder with the binder, and then led the way.
Passing the JFK Building, Terry saw Mike Hazzard, Joe Perry, and four or five others slipping in ahead of and behind the senator. Terry knew there would be others, Kennedy's personal Secret Service, but instead of relieving him, the sight of the bodyguards made Doyle afraid, really afraid, for the first time. The noise of the crowd had fallen off, which mystified Terry until, turning the last corner, they saw the plaza at last. He had expected a few hundred people, but the vast space was jammed with thousands. They were listening to a single speaker who was standing on a platform near the entrance to City Hall. A huge banner had been hoisted behind it: ROAR! NEVER ! Kennedy would have to walk through the crowd to address them, which, Terry saw at once, would be a disaster. He expected the senator to turn on him with, Why did you bring me in on this side? Who advanced this?
But Kennedy, having seen what he had to do, was only doing it. He walked directly into the narrow aisle that a few cops were maintaining with sawhorse barricades. It ran through the heart of the throng to the platform, narrowing further all the way. For a moment, Kennedy was ahead of Hazzard and Perry, who roughly pushed people aside to get in front again.
"We're white," the man on the platform was bellowing, "and we want our rights!"
The crowd cheered and hooted.
The man was familiar to Terry—a tavern keeper or a City Square merchant, someone he had seen at church years ago. Terry had nearly to run to keep up with Kennedy. Bright had fallen back.
"We are white!" the man intoned again, a mantra with which to end a speech. The crowd responded, "And we want our rights!"
Terry felt a heightened perceptiveness as he moved through the crowd, as if he were taking in everything that fell within the range of his senses. Youths in Charlestown High dugout jackets, the white sleeves and red bodies, were posted at the ends of rows along the aisles. They wore armbands stenciled CM, Charlestown Marshals—the kids from the convent carriage house on Bunker Hill, Nick's garage.
"It's fucking Kennedy!" one of the kids yelled.
And then someone else repeated, even more loudly, "Fucking Kennedy!" Pronounced fooking, the phrase was repeated and repeated again as the people turned. The exclamation rolled back through the crowd.
Later Kennedy would laugh and say, "How did they know?" But not now.
"Nigger lover Kennedy!"
Where was Bright?
For a moment Terry's attention left the senator, who had pushed ahead. Where the hell was Bright? Who had advanced this? Christ, Jesus Christ, what have I done? Doyle looked and looked, but his friend was gone. Along the aisle down which they'd come, police were standing with outstretched arms, holding back the crowd.
Now came a surge against which those cops nearest to Terry were powerless, and the crowd spilled into the aisle, breaking the wooden sawhorses and closing off the Kennedy group's way out.
"Get Kennedy!" one of the nearby Townies cried, and Terry recognized him as the kid who'd toyed with Joan's car, putting his knife in the folds of the canvas top. The crowd pushed the boy from behind, right into Terry, who reacted instinctively by punching him in the face. The boy fell.
Hazzard and Perry were on Terry then, each with an arm around Ted. They were pushing through the crowd, back the way they'd come, through the vestige of the aisle. Terry turned and went ahead, swinging his fists, landing punches in the faces of everyone in his way.
"Don't hurt them!" he heard someone say. To his amazement, he realized it was the senator.
"Fuck Kennedy! Fuck Kennedy!" Red faces twisted around those words.
Don't hurt them? Terry Doyle would always remember that order for what it said about Kennedy, and for what it said about himself, because, as he pushed viciously through the crowd, he wanted to hurt them. They were would-be Oswalds and Sirhans. But like him, they were Irish. Like them, he wanted to kill.
***
Because Hazzard and Perry knew what they were doing, also because they were lucky and because a flying squad of cops arrived to open a way through the crowd, Senator Kennedy, with Terry Doyle beside him, made it safely back to the JFK Building. They rushed through the heavy plate-glass doors that the building's guards had held open for them, and for a moment the large marble foyer felt like sanctuary.
This was Jack's building, the federal government's building, the FBI's—not some ambivalent mayor's building, not Boston's.
The mob had followed Kennedy, pushing against the hastily formed line of cops who were standing them off now outside the doors. The guards had the doors locked.
"Fucking
Kennedy!" Even through the glass their curses carried. "Fuck Garrity, the Kennedy judge! Fuck the Globe!"
Terry slowly turned away from the faces in the glass, unable to stand the sight of people he was sure he knew. To his surprise, he realized that he had been craning his head back across his shoulder, and that he had his arms around the senator, and so did Joe Perry. They had pressed Kennedy against the marble wall, shielding him. Kennedy was limp. His face was completely pale, except for an ugly blotch of red on his left cheek where someone or something had hit him. His suit coat was ripped at the shoulder seam. But his eyes were clear and cold, absolutely focused. "Where's Neville?" he asked.
"Neville?"
"McKay."
Bright! Terry looked back toward the door just in time to see the surge of energy cresting through the crowd, the hundreds of people who had mobbed the entrance. Those in front were being forced against the glass, at the mercy of those behind, who were pushing, pushing, until...
The huge plate-glass window beside the doorway proper shattered in an explosion. Shards of glass flew everywhere, and the noise was deafening, like a mortar shell. Was this Vietnam? The first row of people stormed through, and Terry thought, Now we die. Now the last Kennedy dies.
Then, suddenly, it was over.
The mob was stopped by what it had done. The people froze, all staring in horror at Kennedy.
Here and there, those bloodied by shards were crying, and some woman was shrieking "Help! Help!" But compared to the previous noise, the glass-strewn foyer, even open as it was now to the outside, was quiet. Doyle had no memory of having moved from his place with Kennedy by the wall, but now he was standing, as if alone, in the center of the space from which others had scattered. He stared at the stunned faces in front of him, the faces of mothers, fathers, and teenagers, faces like those he'd held the paten for at the Communion rail of St Mary's, and like those he'd seen turned to the sun on the benches of Bunker Hill. Faces like those he'd waved at and kissed all his pointless life.
The crowd on the plaza had fallen back, away from the building. Those inside, near him, twenty or thirty people, the ones who'd been pushed from behind and whose momentum had carried them into this other realm, had not moved. They had not meant to do this.
Is everybody all right?
"Go home," Terry said.
They did not move.
Terry looked back for the senator and saw Mike Hazzard, holding a pistol now, as he pushed Senator Kennedy through the door of one of the elevators.
For an instant Terry's eyes and Kennedy's locked together, and Terry saw clearly the pure terror in the man, and its meaning. The source of Kennedy's strength as a champion had turned against him. First Joe Malloy, then Squire, and now Irish children, Kennedy's children. They all felt free to say it: Fuck Ted! Why had it taken this long for Doyle to see it, that Kennedy was finished? Even now, Kennedy was being hauled back down into the muck of his own origins by people who'd never escaped it, never wanted to.
For Terry Doyle the moment was an exact replay of his having looked at Cushing years before and realized, Not for me. Only now, at last, it was Kennedy; the dream of being Kennedy was not enough. They may have you, Ted—the monster hands, hauling down—but they haven't got me!
The door of the elevator said closed, taking the senator away. Physically safe, but finished. Kennedy was not Kennedy anymore.
Terry turned toward the mob, his old neighbors, assassins after all. "Go home!" he ordered loudly. He began shoving against those nearest him, a pair of Charlestown Marshals. "Go home!" He jolted the boys, pushing them back with the stainless steel of his oldest feeling, pushing back against everything that wanted to hold him down, to keep him from fulfilling the ambition that had become the core of his very self. "Go home!"
The people scrambled away, stumbling out through the jagged opening in the wall where glass had been. Terry Doyle ordered them out—and they went He would never be one of them again.
At last he thought of Bright. Bright, where are you?
He went outside. Cops were using their sacks to push people back toward City Hall. They swung at anyone within range. One cop brought his club down on the head of a Townie. Terry heard the dull thunk of the hickory, and without thinking he grabbed the cop's arm. "Jesus Christ, you'll kill him!"
The cop raised his stick again, but now above Terry's head. Terry fell back, and the stick, swooping down with full force, just missed him. Another bursting red Irish face, all the madness of what was happening had collected in the policeman, who swung again, insane.
Terry pushed away. Instead of going with the crowd, he moved toward the low wall that separated the municipal plaza from the tree-lined apron that ran alongside the Kennedy Building toward Congress Street. The wall was low enough to offer government workers, when the world was not ending, a place to eat their lunches. Terry hopped onto it and turned to scan the crowd from there. Where are you?
Worry for Bright choked him. But then he remembered that the night before, when he'd called to tell her, so proudly, that Kennedy had agreed to come, Joan had said she would be here too. Jesus Christ, Joan! What if these animals—these Irish—hurt her?
***
Squire Doyle had watched everything from the place he'd taken across Tremont Street, in the shadow of the great arch of the curving brick Crescent Building. Government Center terrain was a long, gentle slope taking the city from its hill down to the sea. Squire had a sweeping vantage of the entire scene, from the new Druid temple of City Hall to the glass-and-concrete upended shoebox of the JFK.
The Crescent Building had cut off access between the courthouse at Pemberton Square and the government offices; the broad, through-the-building archway was the architect's solution, centered on an open-air escalator that carried pedestrians down the last notch of Beacon Hill into the brick expanse of the plaza. Ordinarily tourists, secretaries, stenographers, court workers, and jurors used the thoroughfare, but the moving stairs had been mostly vacant since the demonstration started.
What few passersby had gone through would have had no reason to notice Squire Doyle. He was dressed in the dark, loose-fitting but well-made trousers, shirt, and sweater that set him apart only slightly, and his position between the escalator and the side door of a Shawmut Bank branch was discreet With him was Jackie Mullen, but not in uniform. Mullen was dressed like a Townie dock worker, in sweatshirt, overalls, and ankle-high work boots. His jaunty tweed cap completed the image. He resembled dozens or hundreds of the demonstrators, which served his purpose. He was one of a number of state cops in plain clothes, but he violated his own costume with the handset of the police radio he was holding to his ear.
Because they had seen the frantic ebb and flow of the crowd, but also because, with the radio, Mullen had monitored the panicked police alarms, they had been aware of the threat to Kennedy. The commotion at the entrance to the JFK Building had been calmed, but word of what had happened had passed through the mob. Even from across Tremont Street Mullen and Doyle could hear the triumphant shouts: "We got Kennedy!" Kids had put on football helmets and were brandishing pipes. "Fuck the judge! Fuck Kennedy! Don't fuck with Southie!"
Mullen touched Squire's sleeve. "He's all right They took him through the basement, out the service entrance on Congress Street. He's on his way to Logan." Mullen lowered the radio.
"Whose idea was the football helmets?"
"Those aren't our guys. They're from Southie."
"White and red? Shit, Jackie. I thought you had them under control."
"Hey, Squire, if Kennedy shows his puss here, it serves him right. What a stupid-ass thing to do."
"I thought the point was, we want Kennedy. Isn't that it, Jackie? We have a grievance, and we want it heard. We want to win these guys over. Or was all this a way to come downtown to say Fuck you."
Mullen shrugged. "The folks are pissed off. I don't blame them. Kennedy was just going to wag his finger in their faces, as you know better than me."
"Becaus
e of Terry?"
"The greatest finger-wagger of them all," Mullen said.
"I encouraged Terry to get Kennedy here if he could. I'm amazed he was able to do it. I didn't think Ted Kennedy had the balls." Squire faced his friend. "And I didn't think Townies, including our punks, were looking to kill the bastard."
"Shit, Squire, don't blame this—"
"Forget it. Like you said, he's gone. Christ." Doyle turned back toward die throng, which was suddenly dispersing, as if the rank meaning of what had nearly happened had spontaneously dawned on thirty-five hundred people. Rowdies continued to hurl epithets and fists into the air, but the chalk-faced men and women around them moved in a subdued mass out into the surrounding sidewalks and streets.
At the edge of his vision, off to his left, Squire saw a dark form glide by like a mote. He turned his head fully to look and saw Joan, the upper half of her.
She was riding the escalator from Pemberton Square down to the Tremont Street sidewalk. He could have lobbed a basketball at her, she was that close. Her long neck was hidden by her black turtleneck, and he knew why at once: the mark of a poppy blossom that he had left on her throat.
She was staring straight ahead at the unraveling demonstration. She would have no idea that the rambling punks, now in clusters of three and four, were nothing compared to the just-passed danger of the mob. Watching her smooth descent, Squire saw a flash of the scene from the day before, her colorful underpants bunched at the base of that statue, what he had found himself staring at when, at last, he'd opened his eyes.
She might as well have been asleep, so unaware was she that he was looking at her. He regretted not telling her how she'd made him feel. Would she have been complimented, he wondered, to know how confused she'd left him when, afterward and so abruptly, she'd made him go? Usually he was the one who wanted out, and her urgency had impressed him almost as much as the shock of his feelings for her.
He took one step toward her, and as if she had registered the consequent movement of air, she turned toward him, a backward glance, as the escalator continued carrying her down and away.
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