The Shadow Box

by Maxim, John R.

  On the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend, he came over on his whaler and they went sailing on Buzzards Bay. He'd given himself Wednesdays off. They docked at New Bedford for lunch, polished off a bucket of steamers.

  Sailing back, Fallon at the helm, neither said much. Megan was playing the spinnaker sheet, trying to keep it filled in light air, and Fallon's mind was on his birthday, which was coming in two days. Or rather he was trying not to think about it. He certainly wouldn't mention it to Megan. She might get him a cake or some damned thing.

  Megan seemed preoccupied as well. She glanced back at him once or twice, then turned away when he looked up. After a while, she said, “Cole.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It's Cole.”

  “Um . . . you want me to get you a sweater?”

  “No. Cole. You asked my name. It's Megan Cole.”

  “Oh.”

  Nice to know you, Megan Cole.

  He knew that Megan would have understood about his birthday. She has her hang-ups, he's allowed to have his.

  She would tell him that it's time to let that go and that what happened then, on his twelfth birthday, had nothing to do with any other.

  Easy for you to say.

  Year after year, Uncle Jake had done his best to blur the memory. He had planned some spectacular birthdays. There were parties, sports outings, even a three-day cruise to Bermuda when he turned sixteen. But nothing really worked. Fallon blamed himself for what happened that day and he probably always would. That he was only a kid didn't matter. He should have seen it coming. His mother had been gone for a year by then and, in some ways, her going was a relief. Until about a year before that, his parents' marriage had seemed as solid, or as routine, as any other. His mother had a mouth and some strong opinions. She also had trouble cutting a little slack and letting boys be boys, or men be men, but she was never really mean about it. She could be kind, she could be funny, and she was totally devoted to her family. Family was everything to her. Well . . . family and the church.

  You wouldn't know it to look at her, though. Anne Murray was black Irish. Spanish blood in her veins. Some ancestor had to have been a shipwrecked sailor from the Spanish Armada who washed up on the Irish coast and said the hell with it, I'm staying right here. She had very dark hair, flashing brown eyes, and a trim, lithe figure. Put her in the right kind of dress and she could easily have been a flamenco dancer. Maybe in a past life she was.

  They had, by most standards, a pretty nice life. A six-room high-rise on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. A little place on Fire Island. Boxing and the GI Bill had put his father through college—the first ever in the Fallon family—and through graduate school where he studied to become a certified public accountant.

  Maybe that was at the root of it somewhere. Becoming an accountant. Michael understood that it was no mean accomplishment to become a CPA but, still, it must have been a come-down after such an adventurous young-manhood. His Bronze Star, his Purple Hearts, and his several campaign medals were kept framed on the wall of the room Pop used as an office. Around it were photographs of himself and his tank crew and one in which Eisenhower himself had stopped to shoot the breeze with them during a lull in the fighting.

  There were other photos from his boxing days, most of them clipped from newspapers. In one, he stood in the ring, arms raised, over a prostrate fighter named Buddy Nash. The headline was “Nash Mashed.” His father had seemed so full of life back then. Always that grin.

  Working as a CPA wasn't exactly stultifying either. He did a good deal of traveling and much of it was glamorous. None of the other kids' fathers got to travel to Germany, Switzerland, even to India a few times. Working for Eagle Sales wasn't crossing the Rhine or mashing Nash, but then, few jobs are.

  Michael came along late, in the sixth year of their marriage. By that time, his father was doing pretty well. The Horatio Street building was one of the few in the whole Village with a full-time doorman.

  The change, when it came, seemed almost overnight. Michael was eleven. The arguments suddenly became nasty. At one point, he thought it was because his father had stopped going to church. His mother would nag him for not going to Mass but, when he did go just to shut her up, she would ask how he dared show his face to God. She threatened, one time, to have her policeman cousins come over and slap some sense into him. Michael was never clear on what he'd done to deserve such contempt. But it hurt him that his father would just take it. He wanted him to say, “If your cousins come through that door, I will kick their asses all the way back to Queens.”

  And he could have. But he didn't say that.

  Instead, he asked, “You didn't tell them, did you?”

  Her answer was, “I'd die of shame.”

  Uncle Jake, those days, didn't seem to have much use for his younger brother either. His attitude, however, seemed to be more of a wistfulness, an unspoken sadness, than an active contempt. More than once, in the years since, Uncle Jake would begin to remark on the sort of man Tom Fallon might have been, and once was. But he would always stop himself.

  “Don't judge him too harshly, lad,” was all he'd say. That and, “We all lose our way sometimes. We have to find our own way back.”

  Nor would Moon shed much light on the subject.

  “Moon? Was my father a crook?”

  “That ain't the word, exactly.”

  “What is the word?”

  “He . . . got caught up in something. I don't know the whole of it but I'll tell you this. There was never a time when he decided to do bad. It just kinda grew. It got away from him. You get older, you're gonna see how easy that can happen.”

  His mother had never approved of Uncle Jake. She was never all that crazy about Moon either—she considered him a thug—but she was never deliberately rude to him. She said that God might have mercy on Moon, he might consider what it's like to grow up black, but Uncle Jake would have no such excuse. Jake Fallon was an irredeemable rogue who should count himself lucky to get off with an eon or two in purgatory and was certainly no fit example for a growing boy.

  “But I'll say this for him,” he once heard her say to his father. “He's not a coward. Corrupt and a hypocrite, surely, but at least he's a man.”

  Michael did not let on that he heard. What made Uncle Jake a hypocrite in her eyes was that he was a grafter who had cops and judges in his pocket and yet still went to Mass. Mass wasn't the half of it. Uncle Jake marched in parades at the head of the Knights of Columbus. Uncle Jake boozed with bishops. Cardinal Spellman used to sit in Jake's box at the Polo Grounds. This made his mother crazy.

  Michael did not understand, however, how she could call his father a coward. Cowards don't become prizefighters. They don't win the Bronze Star.

  And then one day his mother was gone. No note. Not even to her parents. That letter came later. His father was never the same.

  He didn't work. He rarely left the apartment. He bathed erratically. He spent his days, usually drunk, watching television in a ratty bathrobe. And yet there was plenty of money.

  He would pay the rent, with cash, only when the building's agent came to the door, and he'd tip him for his trouble. He would pay for liquor deliveries the same way. It was Michael who saw that there was food in the apartment. The money came from various wads that his father kept in cereal boxes, coffee cans, and old shoes, and with the fifty-dollar bills that were pressed inside nearly every book his father owned. Years would pass before it struck Michael that not everyone kept that much money at home.

  His mother being gone, Uncle Jake went out of his way to fill some of the void. He would take Michael to museums and bring him books to read. These were things that his mother had always done and that Uncle Jake learned to do by quietly consulting with Michael's grade school nuns.

  But his mother, unlike Uncle Jake, never took him to the Friday night fights at St. Nicholas Arena and to Sunnyside Gardens where his father had once fought. His mother never took him to Mets and Yankee games.
She never introduced him to the players, many of whom knew Uncle Jake, or got them to sign baseballs for him.

  Jake would show up at the apartment every week or so with his own housekeeper in tow. They would stay until the place was in order. He never had much to say to his brother.

  By his twelfth birthday, which fell on a Sunday, Michael knew better than to expect a gift from his father or even for him to remember what day it was. But his father had gotten up early, had showered and shaved, and was making breakfast with trembling hands when Michael emerged from his room. He said he thought they might go shopping together, buy some new clothes for school, and then maybe go to the Radio City Music Hall, see Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand.

  Michael was embarrassed for him.

  For one thing, Funny Girl`s run at Radio City had ended almost six months before. For another, he'd already seen it because everyone said the Nicky Arnstein character was so much like Uncle Jake. Fine figure of a man, great smile, an inveterate rascal, could charm the devil himself.

  More to the point, Uncle Jake was coming by at noon to take him to a Yankee/Red Sox game followed by dinner at Toots Shor's, where Mickey Mantle had promised to stop by their table. This, Michael told his father, had been planned for weeks. His father said that he understood, poured himself a drink, turned on the TV, left Michael's breakfast in the pan.

  When Uncle Jake arrived, his father, already well on his way, did not look up. Michael thought of asking him to join them. Uncle Jake saw it on his face.

  “We'll stay if you wish, lad,” he told Michael. “But let's not take him out until he's had a nap.”

  “Pop?” .

  “You go, Mike. Your uncle knows best. Your uncle always knows best.”

  He got up and went into his office.

  “I've got something downstairs for you,” Jake said to Michael. “Let's see if it'll cheer you up.”

  In the taxi, waiting at the curb, a genuine team-issue Yankees jacket was hanging from the coat hook. Michael gaped when he saw it. He wanted to try it on at once. As he did so, on the sidewalk, he happened to glance up. He saw his father looking down at him from their sixth floor window. His father raised a hand, gave him a little salute. It was the last time he saw his father alive. Tom Fallon, according to neighbors who heard him hit, must have jumped within minutes of that cab pulling away.

  “Megan?”

  “Um?”

  “When is your birthday?”

  “July fourth. It's very widely celebrated.”

  “How old are you, by the way? I mean, now that I know your last name and all . . .”

  A small hesitation. Just a beat. “I'll be twenty-seven.”

  “Let's do something special.”

  “If you're there, it will be special.”

  Uncle Jake, himself a widower—Aunt Bess died young of breast cancer—took Michael into his home. The Brooklyn Heights town house was a handsome ivy-clad brown-stone, four stories high, with twelve-foot ceilings on the first three floors. But by far its best feature was that collection of his. For a twelve-year-old kid, Jake's house was like Cooperstown and Massillon combined.

  That stuff aside, Jake undertook to raise and educate Michael. He took the job seriously.

  Jake Fallon loved the Jesuits. He especially believed in Jesuit discipline. Accordingly, Jake had him take the entrance exam for St. Francis Xavier High School, a military school for day students. Xavier always marched in New York's parades. Jake Fallon loved parades.

  Michael was accepted. His uncle then hired tutors to assure top grades, and trainers to make sure that he could win a spot on any team he wished to try out for. Xavier didn't have a boxing team. That led to the great Golden Gloves debate and Moon becoming his newest trainer. He always wondered whether Uncle Jake really knew what sort of things Moon was teaching him. It was some pretty brutal shit.

  “Doctors learn to cut off a leg,” Moon pointed out. “That doesn't mean they'll jump at the chance to do it.”

  Michael lettered in three sports, made cadet major, and got to salute the cardinal with his saber as his battalion marched past St. Patrick's Cathedral. And to wink at Uncle Jake, who was usually up there with him.

  While still a junior, Michael thought he might try to get into Yale or Harvard. He had the grades and his uncle had said that money was not a problem. But Jake hated the idea.

  For openers, he said, those schools can be real snotty about whom they take and he might need to call in a marker here and there to get him admitted. Michael would then spend his next four years trying to live down not having gone to Andover or Choate and being frozen out by those who had. People go to those schools, he said, to make connections. They graduate, they spend the rest of their lives sitting in meetings and joining clubs that keep everyone else out. Go where you learn to do things. Go where a quick mind and a good set of balls counts for more than who your father is.

  Unsaid, according to Moon, was the fear that Uncle Jake might lose his nephew to the cucumber-sandwich set. Fat chance.

  In the end, his choices narrowed to Notre Dame and Villanova. As for Villanova, Rocco Giordano's son, Johnny, was in his second year there after failing to get accepted by Notre Dame. Johnny had aced their entrance exam and his SAT scores were in the top ten percent. Still, they passed on him. Michael learned, much later, that it was because of talk that his father was about to be indicted.

  At the time, Jake didn't realize that either. So it became a sort of competition. Jake lobbied hard for Notre Dame.

  “The only pain in the ass,” he told Michael, “is that for the rest of your life everyone will ask if you played football there. Otherwise it's perfect. Everyone trusts a man who went to Notre Dame.”

  “Michael?”

  Megan was staring at the horizon. She had an odd, dreamy look.

  “Yes'm.”

  “Where did you go to college?”

  “Um . . . what made you ask that? I mean, just now, out of the blue.”

  An innocent shrug. “Just wondered.”

  “Notre Dame. I went to Notre Dame.”

  Uncle Jake threw a party when the letter of acceptance came. It was an embarrassingly expensive affair at the River Club. Moon said don't worry about it. He said, “Your uncle won some bet with Rocco Giordano.”

  Jake's pleasure didn't last, however. During Michael's first two months in South Bend he was suspended over one incident, then arrested and nearly expelled over another.

  He had barely moved into the freshman dormitory when, while he attended an orientation lecture, his new electric typewriter, his stereo and two new sport jackets were stolen from his room. Several freshmen had similar losses.

  Two weeks later, he spotted one of his jackets. The student who was wearing it, upon learning that it was stolen, was as angry as he was. He said that he bought it from a senior, a scholarship hurdler on the track team, who told him that the jacket was a gift from an alumnus but the sleeves were too short for him.

  The hurdler lived off campus. Michael went to his apartment complex and knocked on the door. No one answered. The door was locked. He went back outside, climbed in through a window, and found his typewriter, two TV sets, and several clock radios and pocket calculators. His stereo and his other jacket had apparently been sold. He waited for the athlete to return.

  The thief opened the door, found Michael standing amid the loot, went pale for an instant, then proceeded to deny that any of that stuff has been stolen. Michael said fine, we'll call campus security. He stepped toward the phone on the kitchen wall but the hurdler blocked his path. He told Michael that he could have his typewriter back. But if he said one word, made one accusation, the player had friends who would beat him bloody every day that he was still at Notre Dame.

  Michael ended the hurdler's career with two kicks to the knee. He was promptly suspended.

  The suspension was soon lifted, however, after an inventory of the stolen goods and after other students came forward to claim items that had been stolen from
them. The thief and his roommate had made a specialty of robbing incoming freshmen because more of their possessions tended to be new and because freshmen were more easily intimidated.

  Michael became something of a hero to his class. Stories about the episode, some wildly exaggerated, spread through the dorms. Michael would try to shrug them off. Moon had always said, “You put a man down, never crow about it. It comes back to haunt you.” But his reluctance to speak only added to his reputation.

  This led, indirectly, to a second incident several weeks later. On a Friday night in November, Michael had gone to an off-campus pizza parlor with two other freshmen and their dates. The place was patronized largely by factory workers, most of them under thirty. Friday was pay day. Several had been celebrating.

  Two men, early twenties, were staring at the girls at Michael's table. They wore work boots and jeans. Michael noticed but paid no attention. The two men began needling them, offering their opinions of Notre Dame football, then of Notre Dame in general, and then of Catholics in general. Nothing need have come of it. It must happen in college towns everywhere. But one of the freshmen made a reference to “hard hats, hard heads.” The two came over, beers in hand, and asked him to repeat it.