She told him simply, “Table for Detective Neil Hockaday.”
Pierre inspected me again, this time minus the curled lip, maybe out of respect for the courtesy title but probably not. In any case, he consulted his reservations list, taking his sweet time about it before finally saying, “Ah, oui. Monsieur Hockaday—for two. Très bien.”
We followed him to a corner table. I was surprised how good this seating was until I realized that Ruby probably did a lot of business here back when she was in the advertising dodge, and that she had no doubt spread lots of money around the place.
Not so long ago, Ruby wore female business suits and flogged a variety of potions that killed an impressive variety of body odors. For this she earned a considerable salary, with bonuses and a brisk expense account. A clever girl, she hoarded a good amount of this “silly money,” as she calls it, and invested in Manhattan real estate—specifically, a slanty frame walk-up down on South Street, where she carved out an apartment and a way-Off Broadway theater supported not so much by ticket sales as by rents from the tailor shop and the restaurant down below.
That was a couple of years ago. But everybody from the old days certainly remembered Ruby Flagg. Beginning with our friend the maître d’.
“Thank you, Pierre,” she said to him as he held her chair. I was left on my own. When his patent leather shoes went tapping away, I asked Ruby, “His name is really Pierre?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But he seems happy when I call him that.”
A wine steward dropped by and kissed Ruby’s hand. I scowled stupidly. Ruby asked about his wife and his kids and he said the family was just swell. She sent him toddling off after a flowered bottle of Perrier-Jouët. Then she turned to me and said, “You know—you, of all people, shouldn’t let the likes of him get to you.”
I had stopped scowling by then. I was instead now stupidly smiling at the little cleft in Ruby’s chin, and also the charming cleft in the scoop neckline of her evening dress. I said, “You’re talking about Pierre?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Allow the man his pretensions why don’t you? Where would you be yourself without deception on the job?”
That was an understatement. When I am on duty, it is rarely in a suit, not even the boxy kind from the A&S bargain basement I am sorry to say is favored by most detectives of my acquaintance. And to say my work clothes are plain could be considered felony understatement. Mostly I am dressed in Salvation Army castoffs I have collected over the years, all except for my own good old Yankees baseball cap, circa 1963, and a pair of black PF Flyer hightop sneakers I have had since the days I was married to the formerly lovely Judy McKelvey and we lived in Queens in a cute house with a fence around it and were miserable and I coached a bunch of kids on the neighborhood P.A.L. basketball league. Irregularly shaven and dressed the way I usually am, you would likely not be able to single me out from a crowd of men with nothing to lose and nowhere to go, which is the basic idea of the SCUM patrol—which is for Street Crimes Unit-Manhattan.
This night, on the other hand, I had somewhere to go. In fact, miles to go before we would sleep. I changed the subject with, “Let’s talk about the trip.”
“Good idea,” Ruby agreed.
The steward returned to our table with the champagne, poured out two glasses, set the bottle down in a bucket of ice and left. Ruby raised her glass and said, “To us and to Eire, and to your poor Uncle Liam—and besides all that, a happy birthday to you, my dear Hock.”
So we drank to all that. After which I offered a second toast: “And now to Ruby Flagg, sure to be the most exotic woman in the streets of Dún Laoghaire.”
Ruby laughed. “The only exotic, you mean.”
“You shouldn’t be too surprised to see a face or two as dark as yours,” I said. “There was the Spanish Armada a few centuries back that left its mark.”
“You like black Irish?”
“I like both just fine.”
“That’s not something most Irishmen would say.” She laughed at me again. The way she did it, she made me like it. I stared at her perfect white teeth and her maroon lips and the tip of her pink tongue. I might have drooled.
Ruby asked, “What are you thinking, Irish?”
“I’m thinking of the two of us lying on a beach with sand white as sugar and you’re talking to me in French. I look at you and think of things like that.”
She rolled her bright hazel eyes and said, “I keep having to remember, you’re not like most Irishmen, are you?”
“Neither is Uncle Liam,” I said. “If you’re worried he won’t take to you, don’t.”
“And how did he take to your wife?”
She had to bring that up? “That was a long time ago,” I said.
“Was it?”
Now I could not help but think how good it is for the ego for a man such as me, somewhere in the middle of his age, to be the focus of a woman’s abstract jealousy. Especially a woman who looked like Ruby.
“Long enough,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“All right.” Ruby fussed with a starched napkin. “But look, I am sorry about your uncle. It’s a shame you’re going to take me all the way over to the other side to meet him when he’s … well, the way he is.”
“Dying. You mean to say dying.”
Ruby leaned toward me and patted my arm, the way people touch each other at funerals. Here was I, already thinking of such things as a funeral. I barely heard Ruby saying, “I just wish I could be going to meet your uncle under happier circumstances.”
The news of Liam had come last week in a letter from Ireland, from one Patrick Snoody, my uncle’s self-described “loyal friend.” I had never heard of him. Snoody wrote to say that Liam and his weak heart were now confined to bed; he said Liam had “perhaps a year or better” left; he offered the standard Irish condolence, “I’m sorry for your troubles.” And now, on Sunday night and under this sad cloud, Ruby and I would fly off to Dublin to show a frail old fellow that life goes on. It was the best I could do.
I said to Ruby, “I am not being morbid. I’m only facing the facts is all. Liam is dying and I think that’s the word he’ll be using himself.”
A waiter came by to flutter over Ruby and ignore me. Eventually, he got around to taking our orders; and eventually, we got through dinner, which was very good and worth nearly all the money that Ruby had to pay for it. Then finally, as we loitered over coffee and port, up again rose that most unappetizing subject of all.
“What was she like?”
“She—?” As if I had to ask.
“You know who.”
“For crying out loud, it’s my birthday.”
“So I bring you to this nice place and wish you many happy returns. Now I think it might be nice if you sing for your supper. This is asking too much? You know how to sing, right? After all, you were a choirboy once-upon-a-time, weren’t you, Hock?”
Exactly when had I mentioned this? The most frightening thing about women is that they remember everything you tell them.
About the choirboy days, it was true. I was a soprano at Holy Cross Church on West Forty-second Street back when Harry Truman was in the White House, Sunset Boulevard was on the movie screens and shifty-eyed Communists were everywhere, working day and night to subvert the American way.
Father Timothy Kelly had been especially concerned about these Communists. He believed the reds were in league with Lucifer, and especially dedicated to the business of corrupting the youth of his parish. Thus, Father Tim hoped to lead us impressionable Hell’s Kitchen lads toward the pursuit of our better angels by way of singing the Lord’s songs. Father Tim had a particular interest in protecting me against the subversive forces of those days, as it happened I was the nephew of his great and good friend from Dún Laoghaire, my own Uncle Liam.
I had not thought of the boys’ choir in a very long while. Nor of Father Tim, I am ashamed to say. Not since Father Tim had lef
t the neighborhood for his professional reward: a room in a home for retired priests, on a leafy street in Riverdale, up in the Bronx. I visited him there once, about a week after he had moved out of sight. Then I telephoned three or four times, just to keep in touch like I promised. Then I became a typical shitheel and put the old fellow out of mind as well.
“When I was a choirboy, I sang to heaven,” I said to Ruby. “On my wedding day, they told me marriages are made in heaven. So you’ll understand if I don’t much see the point of singing nowadays.”
Ruby said, “Yes, and nowadays you don’t much see the point of marriage. And so you’ll be introducing me to your little old Irish uncle as, what—your main squeeze?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How are you going to put it when you’re face-to-face with Liam and he can’t help notice that I’m there beside you?”
“I’m going to tell him we’re slow-dancing together.”
“Aha! The very words you’ve said to me, Mr. Charmer. Only now they sound too clever by half.”
Absolutely everything they remember!
“What do you want out of me?” I said.
“You talk pretty, Hock, and I like it. But sometimes pretty’s not enough.” Ruby had been leaning toward me in her chair, and I had been enjoying the warmth of her breath and the heat of her caramel skin. But now she sat back. “When you talk about certain things, you have a way of turning words into walls.”
“Certain things?”
“Your father, for instance. Your mother—”
I interrupted. “Pardon me, I thought we were talking about my wife. My ex-wife.”
“Her, too. We’re talking about all those hollow places of yours, where people have dug holes in you. If I dance slow with a man, I want to know where the holes are.”
“Why—you don’t want to risk falling into his troubles?”
Ruby smiled patiently, like she was a kindly nun and I was the big dumb slow kid in her classroom. “In the case of other men I’ve known, that’s certainly true. But since you’re a cop and there’s nothing I can do about that, who knows but maybe I’ll have to pick you up from time to time. So you see how I’ll need to know where the holes are.”
I went for a joke, for a wall. “I thought you only liked me for sex.”
“I told you I was serious, buster. Meaning this dance of ours isn’t entirely about glands. Besides which, I’m sorry to tell you, you’d be awfully alone in the world thinking of yourself as a Great Irish Lover.”
I managed, “Remember—I’m not like most Irishmen, am I?”
My vanity was wounded, and Ruby knew it. And knew that I was off balance. So she asked again, “What was she like?”
“She had a great dimple.”
“You got married because of a dimple?”
“Would I be the first man who fell in love with a dimple and then made the mistake of marrying the whole girl?”
“That’s all you can say?”
“I can say that I’m worried how much I love the cleft in your chin.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“For now it’s a joke.”
“What about your father? Do you want to make a joke out of him, too?”
She had struck me in a hollow place. “I already told you everything I know,” I said. “Which is, I don’t know much.”
My unknown soldier father, of whom my mother, all her life, would only say, “Your papa went off in a mist, that’s all there is to it; it hurts too much to speak of him as if he was ever flesh and blood and bone to me.” Of whom his brother, Liam, on his many visits from Ireland after the war, would add nothing more illuminating than that.
Ruby had of course seen the photograph, maybe the only one there is of my mysterious father—the one that sits on the dresser in my bedroom. Private First Class Aidan Hockaday of the United States Army, in his stiff uniform, with the fear of God tailored into it; a handsome young Irishman who got himself missing in action somewhere in the war against Hitler and Tojo; the sound of him, and the feel of him, and the smell of him missing somewhere in me.
I have the photograph, and a deep sense of the man. I have heard his voice, in the form of his letters from the battlefronts of Europe. These my mother would share with the neighborhood ladies when women gathered in our parlor on Friday nights, to listen to Edward R. Murrow on the Atwater-Kent, to keep the homefront vigil. I was a boy in short pants eavesdropping from the other room as my mother read my father’s words; knowing, somehow, that I should commit these letters to fiercest memory, even though I did not understand half what I heard.
But I never dared to write down the words, and so I have lost most of them. The letters are gone; gone with my mother to her grave. Ruby considers this a theft, and so do I.
Now, to Ireland this Sunday night. There to visit my only living relation, my dying Uncle Liam. To have him meet Ruby before he, too, leaves me.
Ruby. There she sat, across from me, through the candlelight. But I was miles away. And yet, I heard her say to me, “Maybe you’ll begin to know, with this trip. Do you really want to know?”
How many times, as a boy and as a man, have I risen in the night, believing my father’s ghost was perched on the edge of my bed? How many times in my sleep have I reached out to touch this ghost, to hold something in my hand more than a single flash of Aidan Hockaday’s life captured in light and shadow on a piece of photographic paper?
“Maybe I need a drink,” I said. I flagged a waiter.
“For the record, I disapprove,” Ruby said.
Much later, into the half-light of an emerging Saturday morning, I awoke to the ghost on the edge of my bed.
I reached out, clutching the usual air. I strained to hear words I knew the ghost wanted to speak. But nothing. Only the familiar disappointment of wakefulness.
I rubbed sweat from my face and neck with a corner of the sheet. Then I slipped out of bed, leaving Ruby there making her soft sleeping sounds.
I picked up my father’s picture from the dresser, and took it with me out into the parlor. I set it on top of the things in my suitcase, which sat partly filled and open on the couch. Over in the kitchen alcove, there was yesterday’s coffee in a pot on the stove. I put a flame under it, then went into the bathroom to scrub my face with soap and cold water.
When I was through, I poured out a cup of bitter black coffee and sat down on the couch next to the photograph. Just the two of us, father and son. Do you really want to know? If I did, there was one last chance for answers to the questions of Aidan Hockaday; they waited for me, on the other side.
Maybe the photograph would help the cause. I asked it, “Would you like to come along with me to Ireland?”
I decided that the ghost answered, “Why yes, I’d love to go with you, boy.” And so I tried wedging the photograph between layers of clothing in the suitcase; then I got the bright idea that I might travel a bit lighter, and without breaking glass enroute, if I removed the photo from its frame.
The metal tabs in back of the frame were brittle, and snapped away entirely when I bent them back. Then I loosened the felt-covered pasteboard and slid out the picture. There was a musty smell, and a small puff of dust, nearly five decades of time and grit under glass.
I held my father’s picture for several minutes, staring at it for the first time in my life without the barrier of glass. I touched the features of Aidan Hockaday’s face; I touched a nose and lips and a chin that mirrored my own.
Then I placed the photograph facedown among my things in the suitcase. Which was when I noticed the writing.
In an elegant hand, in blue ink protected all these years from fading by the prison of a picture frame, someone had penned a poem:
“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman,
“They killed my goose and a cat.
“Drown, drown in the water butt,
“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman.
CHAPTER 2
; He sat in his room, in a chair by the window that looked down on a pretty and peaceful street. The girls who lived in the house across the way played double-Dutch jump rope; a fat man smoking a cigar walked slowly along with his fat twin dog on a leash; boys were gathered around the stoop of a house on the corner, haggling over marbles. Saturday morning’s strong sunlight dappled through the new spring green of maples and London planes lining the block.
With a sigh of expectant regret that sounded a thousand years old, he turned toward a ringing telephone on the table next to him. He stared at the flashing light of an answering machine connected to the phone.
When the machine picked up on the sixth ring, there were his recorded words: “Father Timothy Kelly here … I’m not about just now … Kindly leave your name and telephone number and I’ll call you back as quick as I can … Have a blessed day.”
The machine clicked once to receive and record a message. There was the crackle of static. And with that sound, he knew, the taint of the past intruding on the present.
Over the past two days, ten such calls had come to him. Ten times he had not picked up the phone. Ten times, he knew who it was who refused to speak up. Yes, Lord, he knew.
But today, the caller spoke: “What is a true patriot?”
Father Timothy Kelly knew the voice. Yes, Lord. He placed a pale, spotted hand over his thumping chest.
The voice was full of the memories of another place: the dark slow waters of the River Liffey moving under O’Connell Street footbridges; February’s wind hissing through hedges along clay roads beyond the city; his Wellingtons, mud-spattered, plodding through the dunghill behind the byre, where he and his brothers picked black-gilled mushrooms when there was nothing else for the family dinner …
… and later, before he had to leave the land of his youth, cloth hoods masking the faces of righteous comrades.
Had he not remembered this voice, and these words, so many times over the years? Had he not dreamed of them only last night?
Again, the caller asked, “What is a true patriot?”
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