The City Below

by James Carroll

  ***

  Funerals. The Irish believe, if not in death, in funerals; and a good thing it was that week, when there were not two, but three.

  First, a full-dress inspector's funeral for a policeman slain in the line of duty. The newspapers had been full of the story of Lieutenant John Mullen's brutal execution. Frank Tucci, the mob overlord whom Mullen was investigating, had been charged with the murder and was being held without bail. The public was outraged, and the Middlesex County DA had called for a restoration of the death penalty in Massachusetts.

  On a glorious, crisp April morning, seven hundred and fifty policemen, some from as far away as New Jersey and New York, all wearing white gloves and black armbands on the various shades of blue, filed into Holy Cross Cathedral near the elevated tracks of the Orange Line. The policemen joined a grief-stricken throng of Townies, including a special contingent of Mrs. Mullen's sodality ladies from St Mary's. Mayor Flynn and Governor Dukakis were there, and the Requiem was celebrated by the new archbishop, Bernard Law, whose many distinctions included his having gone to Harvard College.

  Joan Littel did not attend that funeral. To be with Didi, Terry went, but he moved through the motions of the Mass, the kneeling and standing, the blessing himself and the going to Communion, the dropping of dirt on the casket at the cemetery, feeling nothing.

  Squire's funeral was at St. Mary's, in the Town. But this one was impressive too, attended by the men from the Flower Exchange, the K of C, truckers, dock workers, corner boys, merchants, union men, and liquor dealers—many of whom were also wiseguys, hustlers, straws, shills, and fronts. Every Irish neighborhood in greater Boston was represented. Who of those mourners had not been stunned, some even to disbelief, at the news of his sudden heart attack? And who had not seen it as a grief reaction to the death of his old friend and brother-in-law?

  That was how Didi chose to speak of it She moved through the rituals of both funerals with great dignity, thinking more than once of Mrs. Kennedy—not Jackie but Ethel, who could understand what it was to lose a beloved brother and a husband too. Like Ethel, Didi had her brood of children to worry over now, but also, like Ethel, she had her faith. And she had her late husband's brother. Terry held her arm at St Mary's too.

  And once more, he felt nothing.

  Ethel Kennedy was on everyone's mind that week, because two days after the deaths of Jackie Mullen and Nick Doyle, her son David died of an overdose of drugs in a motel near the family's villa in Palm Beach. The clan's Easter reunion, to which Ted had invited Doyle and McKay, had become another communal act of mythic grief. On Friday, April 27, the family gathered for its Requiem at the Catholic church in McLean, Virginia. For the interment, they flew to Boston.

  The newspaper that reported on David Kennedy's funeral also reported, in another story, that the ever-diligent FBI had recovered, in a Dumpster not far from the Fogg Museum, the priceless Michelangelo print, damaged but intact. The Bureau had no leads as to the identity of the thief.

  And the newspaper noted, in a discreet item on the back page, that when the Kennedys arrived in Boston, they were joined by a number of family friends and political figures, and also former Kennedy staffers Neville McKay and Terence Doyle, and Doyle's wife, Joan. The unannounced service took place at two o'clock at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. Lasting less than twenty minutes, it was no one's idea of an Irish funeral.

  The family plot dominated a rise known as Cushing Knoll, at the end of a tidy asphalt lane. Forsythia and mountain laurel were in bloom. Daffodils, late crocuses, and early tiger lilies had sprouted in bunches, dotting the rolling green terrain like Easter eggs. The scent of honeysuckle was in the air. A stand of arborvitae formed the backdrop of a large, upright granite block on which etched letters spelled KENNEDY. David's casket was centered before the stone, the family huddled on one side—the sisters, Bobby's other kids, John and Caroline with their mother, the new young in-laws, seeming lost—all in sunglasses. Looking at Jackie Onassis, Terry heard the gruff longshoreman's voice of Cushing: Leave the poor woman alone.

  On the other side of the casket, mourners were more loosely clustered. Terry, Joan, and Bright stood close beside the coffin, near a pair of small tablets flush with the clipped lawn. The stones read, JOSEPH P. KENNEDY SR., 1969 and BABY GIRL, 1962. Terry had forgotten that Ted and his Joan had lost a child, but it was the thought of the old man that struck him most.

  He nudged McKay. "Himself," Terry said. And he thought even the old crustacean would see the connection of then to now. The mob, rumrunning, and big Irish money were still the holy trinity, only cocaine and heroin had replaced bootleg whiskey. If Joe were alive, he'd have made the deal with Amory work, but through his bank instead of Squire's. And if so, he'd have had the pleasure now of seeing the capsule of his own space shot return to Earth in the fatal speedballing of his grandson.

  For a shocking instant, as if inside Bright's head, Terry heard Bobby's voice asking, "with Aeschylus," as he always said, "Who is the victim? Who the slayer? Speak!"

  Joan took Terry's arm firmly in her hand.

  The archbishop, sprinkling water on the mahogany casket, said, "May the angels rush to greet you in paradise ..."

  And though the prayer went on, Terry said amen to that piece of it, thinking of the eager Harvard kid David had been, rushing to greet life. Then he thought of the twelve-year-old alone in the L.A. hotel room, watching his father's murder on TV. "Is everybody all right?" dying Bobby had asked. David wasn't all right, but no one knew it then.

  And what of his own Max, after what he'd seen? Max was what had changed him, finally, for in Terry a son's ache had become a father's.

  Terry glanced across at Ted, bent, old looking, too heavy. Yet strength was flowing out of him, into Ethel. From old habit, she clung to him. He was the father now.

  An emotion hit Terry at last, what he'd felt none of at Jackie Mullen's funeral, or at Nick's. A wall fell on him, not glass but stone, that stone: KENNEDY. He tasted a bitter draft of this one family's longing. Here was what they'd become in the end, to him and to the nation, the very opposite of what the dead brothers had sworn they were: a forever fading symbol of what we see, want, strive for—and will never be. And he knew from the weight of his pity that he was not one of them.

  Terry looked at Joan. He covered her hand with his own, aware for the first time that, in relation to her, unlike all these others, it had not occurred to him to wonder, Am I alone?