They walked afterwards through the red-brick-and-wrought-iron South End in the fresh June sunshine. He put his hand down beside hers and she took it.
“Do you like going to Mass, Conn?” Mellen said.
“Yes,” he said, and smiled down at her. He was nearly a foot taller. “You?”
“Yes. It’s very comforting. I always feel closer to God when I’ve been.”
“Yes,” Conn said. “And I like the sense of connectedness. People heard that Mass in Ireland when Hugh O’Neill was a boy.”
“Who’s he?” Mellen said.
“First earl of Tyrone,” Conn said. “The last great leader of Gaelic Ireland.”
“I don’t know much about history,” Mellen said.
“‘Tis a pity,” Conn said, “that you were brought up here, darlin’. Had you been brought up a proper Irish girl, you’d know more than you wanted to about Hugh O’Neill and Cuchulainn and the dear Battle of the Boyne.”
Conn could go in and out of stage Irish dialect at will. When he wished he could conceal his brogue almost entirely, though he could never say Massachusetts quite right.
“I know about Parnell,” Mellen said. “But the nuns told us he was an adulterer.”
“He was that,” Conn said.
“And Mr. De Valera.”
“I knew him.”
“Did you, now?”
“Him and Michael Collins, Mulcahy, the whole bunch.”
“Oh, my,” Mellen said. “I think I’m with a hero.”
“I think you are,” Conn said.
They took a subway together to Park Street and walked past Brimstone Corner, along Tremont Street to the Parker House. Breakfast at the Parker House was something they had done for several Sundays after Mass.
“Would you like to talk about the troubles?” she said to him over shirred eggs and broiled tomato.
He smiled at her and shook his head.
“I’d rather talk about you,” he said, “and maybe me.”
“Why, Mister Sheridan,” she said, and cocked her head, like a proper virgin, the way her mother had no doubt taught her. When she smiled her cheeks dimpled.
Conn’s face became suddenly solemn.
“I know,” he said. “We’ve been so, sort of, you know, carefree, up to now, I guess it seems a little odd to suddenly start talking about, ah, us.”
“Oh, no, Conn, dear. It’s not odd. I think about us too.”
“Ah, Mellen, that’s good to hear.”
“Have you doubted that I like you, Conn?”
“I knew you liked me … as a friend. I guess what I have wondered is, if I was”—Conn shrugged and dropped his eyes slightly—“more.”
She blushed. Conn’s face remained solemn. She put her hand across the table and rested it on his. She was quite red now.
“Of course … you are more than a … friend,” she said. “I like you very much.”
He raised his eyes slowly and met hers. They looked at each other for a moment.
“Good,” Conn said. “I’m glad.”
Their eyes held. Conn waited. He’d learned patience in Kilmainham Jail. The lesson had been valuable. He drank some coffee. She turned her attention to the eggs, eating properly, taking small bites, her back straight, bending forward slightly from the waist, her left hand in her lap. Proper upbringing. Conn drank some more coffee. Mellen took a tiny bite off the corner of a piece of toast and chewed and swallowed and patted her lips carefully with her napkin.
“How could you not know that I care about you, Conn?”
Conn put the coffee cup down. He nodded gently.
“I know. It’s my own foolishness. But you’re so attractive, and I’m just an immigrant Paddy copper.”
“Oh, Conn, don’t be silly. You’re the handsomest man I know, and you’re very learned. And my father says you are the best detective in Boston.”
Conn shrugged a little. And smiled, letting the glint of laughter show in his eyes.
“Well, maybe in Boston,” he said. And they both laughed. “I’m a bachelor, I know, with little experience, and it makes me foolish; but I guess that it scares me when you don’t show your feelings.”
She was silent as she thought about this. He waited calmly. She frowned, and he admired how the little cleft appeared between her eyebrows.
“We do kiss,” she said.
“Like sister and brother,” Conn said.
“Mother of mercy, Conn. I’ve not known you more than a month. I try to be proper.”
“Of course you do,” Conn said. “And you should. But my heart isn’t as wise as my head, and you’re very beautiful.”
She smiled then, and blushed again, and put her hand once more on top of his.
“I do like you, Conn, very much. And I have strong feelings too, God help me. But I don’t wish to give in to them. I don’t wish to be sinful.”
Conn put his other hand on top of hers, and stroked it gently.
“Of course not,” Conn said. His smile was affectionate. “I’m just a foolish, fearful bachelor. Don’t be paying me any mind.”
“You’re not foolish, Conn. You’re very dear,” Mellen said.
And Conn smiled at her some more.
Conn
They went to Braves Field on a Saturday afternoon. They rode the streetcar out Commonwealth Avenue to Gaffney Street and walked down to the field with its very un-Boston stucco façade and serial archways. Fenway Park, where the Red Sox played, was appropriately New England with an ornamented brick front on Jersey Street. From the outside, Braves Field looked Californian to Conn, though he’d never been to California.
The Dodgers were in town and the crowd on a bright, hot August afternoon was large. Mellen held Conn’s arm as they pushed through the jam around the entry gates to the press entrance. A uniformed usher winked at Conn, tipped his hat to Mellen, and waved them on through.
“You don’t have to pay?” Mellen said.
Conn shook his head.
“Is it because you are a policeman?”
“I did a favor,” Conn said as they walked to their seats.
“Well, you must have done a lot of them, because everyone seems to know you.”
“I try to be kind,” Conn said.
“You’re softhearted like my father,” Mellen said.
“Not a bad fault,” Conn said gently.
“Not a fault at all,” Mellen said.
They had box seats along the first-base line. They had peanuts and scorecards. Conn tilted his straw boater forward to shield his eyes. Mellen wore a white visor, to keep the sun off her face.
“This is not a tennis match,” Conn said with a smile.
Mellen laughed.
“I burn so easily,” she said. “And I get all freckly even if I don’t burn.”
“That’s not freckles,” Conn said. “That’s an Irish tan.” He patted her knee gently.
Conn had never played baseball, and had never fully come to like it in nine years, but he wanted to distance his Irish past and few things were more American. He knew all the teams and players, and who hit well and how the game was played. Mellen had never been to a game.
“Are these good teams, Conn?”
“Dodgers are so-so,” Conn said. “The Braves are bad.”
“Who’s that little player, there?” Mellen said.
“Rabbit Maranville,” Conn said. “He’s playing shortstop.”
“He looks like a little boy.”
The pitchers were Socks Seibold for the Braves and Dazzy Vance for the Dodgers. There were no runs until the sixth inning, when Babe Herman hit a home run into the jury box in right field and the Dodgers won, one to nothing.
They rode the streetcar back through Kenmore Square where it dipped underground and rumbled under Commonwealth Avenue and parts of the Boston Common. It stopped at Park Street station, and they got off.
They came out of the underground into the glaring late afternoon sun, and walked, holding hands, down across the Common to
ward the Public Garden. To their right the golden dome of the State House gleamed hotly in the August heat.
“When’s the last time you rode a swan boat?” Conn said.
“I don’t think I ever have,” Mellen said. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, and her face was red. Conn too felt the sweat under his shirt, and his gun, worn back of his right hip, under his seersucker coat, felt heavy.
“Well, we’ll do it,” Conn said. “And then maybe we’ll stop at Bailey’s for a soda.”
They glided slowly around the small lagoon on the pontooned pedal boats with a realistic oversized swan concealing the pedal apparatus. The young man pedaling the boats looked as if he were riding the swan. There were several other passengers, mostly children. Everyone fed the ducks who followed the swan boats around the lagoon like tugs escorting a transatlantic liner.
The children tried to fool the ducks with peanut shells, but the ducks paid no attention.
“How do they know the difference?” Mellen said.
“Ducks are smarter than they look,” Conn said.
“That’s good,” Mellen said, and leaned her head against Conn’s shoulder.
The sun was still bright but had moved farther west and the shadow of Beacon Hill began to move shade across the Beacon Street side of the Public Garden. When they left the swan boats they walked to a bench in the shade and sat. Conn put his arm around Mellen’s shoulder.
“What is it you’ll be wanting to do now, my fair colleen?” Conn said.
“You did promise me a soda at Bailey’s.”
“I did.”
“Well, we could go up there and do that, and then we could go to my house.”
“And sit on the piazza with your parents?” Conn said. “And rock, and say, ‘Bejaysus it’s hot’?”
“My father would never let you use the Lord’s name like that in his house.”
“Not even on the piazza, when, bejaysus, it is hot?”
Mellen rubbed her cheek against Conn’s shoulder.
“Not even then,” she said. “But it’s all right. They’re not home. They went up to Nahant for the weekend.”
“And left you home alone?”
“My sister and her husband live downstairs. Besides, I wouldn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not,” Mellen said. “I wanted to see you.”
“Well, you got your wish,” Conn said. “And what’ll we do at your house? Just you and I alone? With your sister downstairs?”
“We’ll sit on the piazza,” Mellen said, “and rock and say, ‘Bejaysus it’s hot.’”
Mellen began to giggle, and Conn laughed.
“Well,” Conn said. “Let’s start with the soda.”
And they stood and walked hand in hand back up across the Common toward Tremont Street.
Conn
Mellen lived upstairs in a three decker on K Street in South Boston which her father owned. It had gray clapboard siding, and an open porch off the back of each of the first two floors. Mellen’s sister lived with her husband and small child on the first floor. Mellen, her mother, and her father lived on the second floor. The third floor was unfinished, except for Mellen’s bedroom.
It was a narrow house, two rooms wide and three rooms deep. There was a small den. The dining room was to the right. Off the dining room was a front parlor with an upright piano in it. The parlor was never used. The French doors connecting it to the dining room were always closed, and in the winter it was left unheated.
The kitchen, with its big cast-iron stove, was the heart of the house. All the rooms connected to it except the parlor. Mellen’s parents slept in a bedroom off the back corner of the kitchen. There was a pantry with an icebox and a soapstone sink and next to it the bathroom. There was a huge table in the kitchen covered in oilcloth, surrounded by chairs. There was a big leather rocker, a daybed, and a broad expanse of linoleum-covered floor. The walls were half wainscoted in narrow pine boards, installed vertically, and stained a dark walnut. Above the daybed was a picture of Jesus holding his robe open to reveal his bright red heart. The room smelled of kerosene, and when the stove was in use there would be a periodic burp from the kerosene bottle as it fed fuel to the stove.
Under the overhead light an easel was set up. On it was an unfinished oil painting of an idealized mountain scene, a small lake in a declivity among uniform mountains. The smell of the oil paints mixed with the kerosene; and the scent of cigar smoke insisted through both smells.
The windows had been closed all day, and the house reeked with heat. Mellen hurried about opening windows.
“You wouldn’t have a drink in the house, would you?” Conn said.
“Yes. My father keeps some,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like it, but Pop likes his jar of whiskey.”
She went to a broom closet on the wall near the dining room and rummaged behind some mops and brought out a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey.
“We don’t have any soda,” she said.
“Water’ll be fine,” he said. He went to the stained oak icebox and chipped ice off the big block in the top with an icepick. He put the ice in a water glass, added whiskey, and cold water from the water bottle in the icebox.
“Would you care for a dram?” he said.
Mellen shook her head hurriedly.
“Oh, no, no. I really shouldn’t.”
Conn looked at her with his head tilted and his eyes smiling.
“Shouldn’t you, now, Goodie Two Shoes? And should I be drinking alone?”
“I sometimes wonder, Conn, if you don’t do everything alone,” she said. “But …” She sighed a little and got herself a glass and held it out while he put a splash of whiskey in the bottom. He added ice for her, and water.
They took their drinks out onto the back piazza and sat on the spare kitchen chairs that furnished it. Below them was a small patch of board-fenced backyard. There was a little brown grass and a lot of bare spots. To the left at the end of a narrow driveway was a cinder-block garage. Across from them were the piazzas on the back of the three-decker on the next street.
Pigeons who roosted under the eaves above them were still busy and the noise they made was comforting. The summer evening was coming on. It wasn’t dark yet, but there was a blueness to the light that softened the ugly houses and gentled the heat. They sat quietly. Conn put his hand out and she took it and held it in her lap. Conn raised his glass to her and she touched it with hers and they drank.
The blue air darkened, and the sun went down, the sound of pigeons quieted. Conn refreshed their glasses. When they drank, the soft sound of the ice in the glasses seemed lyrical in the blue evening.
“You date other men, Mellen?”
“Of course, lots. But none since I’ve met you.”
“I figured you were popular.”
“Actually, what I said is not quite true,” Mellen said. “I dated lots of boys. You are the first man.”
Conn smiled in the darkness.
“There must be many women in your life, Conn.”
“Not lately,” Conn said. He allowed a tinge of sadness to show in his voice. “There was a woman once, but …” His voice trailed off.
“Did she hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Conn.”
She squeezed his hand.
“Was it a long time ago?”
“Yes.”
“In Ireland?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Conn, you can forget her. I’ll help you forget her.”
“Yes,” Conn said, his hand lying still in her lap. “Yes, you will.”
He drank, and turned toward her.
“You have.”
She brought his hand up to her face and rubbed it against her cheek and kissed the back of it.
“I’m glad, Conn. I want to make you happy.”
She finished the small remnant of her drink.
“I do make you happy, don’t I?”
“Yes,” Co
nn said softly.
He took both their glasses and went to the kitchen and mixed fresh drinks. As he chipped ice in the pantry he could see his face in the darkened window. He grinned at himself. He started back through the hot kitchen with a glass in each hand, and she met him there, near the unfinished oil painting. She put both her arms wordlessly around him and tilted her head back. Holding the glasses carefully he bent his head forward and kissed her softly. She pressed her lips hard against his kiss and held it and slowly opened her mouth. Behind her back he shifted the two drinks into his right hand, holding the glasses by the rim, and squeezed her tight against him with his left arm. Her tongue touched his and withdrew and then touched his again and then thrust fully into his mouth. He bent her slightly backwards and reached out and put the two glasses on the table. Then he put both arms around her, and they kissed fiercely. Her mouth widened as they kissed and she arched her back a little and thrust her hips against him. She was gasping for breath, rubbing her hands up and down his back. He maneuvered her gently to the daybed and eased both of them down onto it.
“Conn,” she said hoarsely, “we mustn’t.” She was rubbing her cheek against his as she said it, and her hands still moved up and down his back.
“Shhh.”
Conn stroked her shoulder and arm. He moved to her breast. She stiffened momentarily, and then put her hand on top of his and pressed it harder against her. With his free hand Conn carefully unbuttoned her blouse. He slid his hand inside her blouse and then inside her brassiere.
“No,” she whispered, “Conn, darling, we can’t.”
Conn kissed her and held the kiss. He could feel her heart pounding behind her breasts. She held his head with both her hands, kissing him harder. He put his hand under her skirt. She groaned and arched her pelvis.
“Conn,” she gasped. “Oh, God, Conn. Darling. No.”
He moved his hand gently, she moaned and then put both hands flat against him and pushed, wrenching herself away, and lay with her back half turned to him, her blouse unbuttoned, her breasts exposed, her skirt tangled around her hips.
All Our Yesterdays Page 7