“How’d Ma hurt her back?” Chris said as they drove west on Route 2, through the still summer landscape.
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Hard to remember when she didn’t have a bad back.”
“She ever see a doctor?”
“Once. He told her she’d had a muscle spasm, suggested she do some sit-ups to strengthen her stomach.”
“Sit-ups?” Chris said. “Ma?”
Gus smiled.
“I never saw her do any sit-ups,” Chris said.
“No,” Gus said. “I don’t think she’d want to give up her bad back.”
They were quiet. Chris’s face was tight, the way it always was when he was scared. When he swallowed, Gus could hear him. Gus felt much the same way, but he’d learned to bury it deeper. At Chris’s dorm there were a lot of station wagons with the make-believe wood on the sides, a lot of mothers in cashmere sweaters and plaid skirts, a lot of fathers in Brooks Brothers sportswear. Very few Paddies, Gus thought. Very few coppers. The incoming freshmen all seemed tanned and blond, wearing standard-issue tennis sweaters. Chris looked at Gus for a moment and both of them felt the abyss beneath them. Then they took the luggage and trudged into the dorm.
“I won’t hang around,” Gus said.
Chris shook his head in agreement.
“You’ll be fine,” Gus said.
Chris nodded.
“Sure,” he said.
Gus didn’t know how to do this. He felt clumsy, he put his arms awkwardly around his son and hugged him. Chris felt awkward too.
“Call,” Gus said.
“Sure.”
“And remember the Sheridan family motto,” Gus said. “If they don’t like it, fuck ’em.”
Chris smiled a little, and Gus saw him swallow, and felt his own throat close. He made a small punching gesture with his closed right fist and turned and left.
That night he ate dinner alone at a Holiday Inn. At a table across the dining room a young man and woman had a baby in a portable bed. The woman took the child out of the bed, and held him in her lap as they ate dinner. Gus watched them, and felt his eyes fill. He thought he would cry. But he didn’t. Probably don’t know how, Gus thought.
1994
Voice-Over
The insistent snow fell heavily in the spring night. There was no steady gentle fall, nor drift of fine whiteness, rather the heavy plop of thick flakes designed to be rain.
“And,” Grace said, “of all people for you to run into, little Grace Winslow, of Beverly Farms. Tom Winslow’s only daughter.”
“All the colleges, in all the world,” I said. “You had to walk into that one.”
“It is a little eerie,” Grace said, “given the connection between our families that I’m the one you ask to dance.”
“I thought you looked like you’d come across,” I said.
“And you were right,” Grace said.
“Eventually.”
“I suppose you could say that the meeting may have been accidental,” Grace said. “But then, when we found out that our families knew each other, it helped us select each other out.”
“Thank you, Ms. Darwin,” I said.
“You’d rather believe in destiny?”
“If I knew exactly what I’d rather believe in,” I said, “we’d probably be married, raising children.”
Grace nodded.
“You were so smart. I’d never known anyone as smart, and yet you didn’t talk like all the boys I knew that went to Deerfield Academy and the Middlesex School. And you were such a wiseguy.”
“It was my disguise,” I said.
“It was more than that,” Grace said.
“Yeah. Maybe it was. I’d started noticing very early in life that things are not as they are alleged to be.”
“Yes,” Grace said. “And you knew that sooner than most of us.”
“Hell of a lot of good it did me,” I said.
“It’s the basis of knowledge,” Grace said.
“For me it was the basis for paralysis. You know? Like the guy, whatsis name, in The Iceman Cometh, a poor weak fool seeing both sides of every question?”
“Your father and grandfather were men of action,” Grace said.
“Don’t I know it.”
“What did it do for them?”
“I rest my case.”
We were back in her den sitting on her couch, still a space between us, but Grace wasn’t pressed quite so far into her corner, I thought. Always the optimist. My voice was getting hoarse from talking. I sipped some tea. Grace served the tea with honey and lemon, in big crimson mugs.
“My father used to take me to the station with him sometimes. All men. Everyone so sure of themselves, or seemed so, with their guns and nightsticks. They respected toughness, and courage, and action, and certainty. And everyone respected Gus. He was a stand-up guy. And what I hated every time I went there was the fear that I wasn’t.”
“But you wanted to be like him.”
“I thought I did,” I said. “But I couldn’t be a cop. Jesus, I just couldn’t.”
Grace nodded. Of course, the nod said. Her eyes seemed bigger to me, and maybe kinder than they had been when I arrived.
“So I become a lawyer. I thought I’d be a criminal lawyer, but when it came down to it, and I had the law degree and had passed the bar and was ready to practice, it seemed too …” I searched vainly for the word I wanted.
“Participatory,” Grace said.
“Yeah. That’s good,” I said. “Participatory. So instead, I went back and got a degree in criminology. Then I didn’t have to catch criminals, or defend them. I had only to study them. And not even criminals, I got farther away than that. I could study the abstraction—crime!”
“Perfect,” Grace said.
I nodded slowly, looking through the dark window at the thick white storm.
“Just perfect,” I said.
1979
Tommy
It was not easy for him. Never free. Never able to shake loose. Two generations of Sheridans, knowing his secret. Using it. It was too much. Too much pressure. He thought all the time about the girls now. The pressure. He hadn’t been with anyone since that girl in Charlestown, before he got sent away. But he’d thought about them every day. He’d wanted them every day. And now the pressure. Gus Sheridan. The gangsters. His own daughter, dating Gus Sheridan’s son. It was too much. He had to have relief. He felt as if he’d been overinflated. As if the surface tension of his very self would burst and scatter. He needed a girl. Smooth body. Innocent legs. Pale skin, unwrinkled, unblemished, still smooth. Compliant. Respectful. Not mean. Not someone who had breasts. Not someone hairy. Not someone who had children. Not someone who wanted things. Who wanted you to do things. Not scary.
After thirty-three years. He had to have a girl. He stood and put on his coat and left his office.
“I’ve got some meetings,” Tom told his secretary. “I’ll be gone the rest of the day.”
1993
Gus
Peggy was on her first bourbon. She was dressed up in a bright red polyester jacket and skirt, with a rhinestone rabbit on her lapel and a blue rayon scarf at her neck. Her short gray-brown hair was tightly permed. Her chunky cheerleader’s body had fattened over the years, and there was a roll of flesh that showed above the constriction of a corset. Her neck was short and fleshy and her head sat very nearly on her shoulders. Gus sat beside her. Across the table was their son, Chris, and his girlfriend, Grace Winslow. They had a table by the window, where you could look out at the slick black water of the harbor. His son was monochromatic in dark jacket, shirt, and tie. Chris was taller than his father, and his clean-shaven jaw was shadowed with a heavy beard kept barely in check by the razor. Gus could never get used to seeing whiskers on his son’s face. He could never see him except in the timeless compression of their thirty-six years. The infant in the hospital nursery, wrapped, and tilted head-down to allow things to drain. The five-year-old, swallowing nervously and y
awning with anxiety while he watched Tom Terrific on television and waited for the school bus. Time past and time present crowded in every time on Gus when he looked at the boy, now a man, and the density of memory and emotion pressed inarticulately against his intrinsic containment. My son.
“How’s Harvard, Christopher?” Peggy said.
“Fine, Ma. I’m teaching a graduate seminar this semester.”
“May Brennan’s son is teaching at Bishop Fenwick, she says. He’s doing wonderful.”
Chris nodded.
“Bishop Fenwick is a very good high school,” Peggy said. Her glass was empty. The waiter came by and asked if she’d like another.
“Just a small one. Old bones, you know, need a little lift.”
“Chris was offered the chair in his department,” Grace said.
She was strong looking, with huge blue eyes. Nearly as tall as Chris, with fine laugh lines at the corners of her wide mouth. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back from her face and tied with a black velvet ribbon. Even seated there was about her a kind of robust elegance. Even motionless she seemed somehow kinetic, full of exciting implication.
“What’s that mean?” Peggy said. Her tone implied, as it always did, that, if she didn’t understand it, there was something wrong with it.
“Head of the Department of Criminology,” Chris said.
“That’s nice,” Peggy said. She was looking for the waiter. “They must like you.”
“Probably has more to do with the quality of my work,” Chris Said. “I hope.”
The waiter brought Peggy’s second bourbon. She drank some.
“You’re not going to get anywhere,” she said, “if people don’t like you. I’m telling you that right now. You make people mad at you, you’ll never get anywhere.”
“I turned it down,” Chris said.
Gus nodded.
“You are making a mistake,” Peggy said. “I’ll tell you that here and now. You turn it down and they’ll never offer it again.”
“I’m not interested in academic administration,” Chris said. “I like research.”
“Just like your father,” Peggy said. She drank some more of her second bourbon. “Two lumps. Two bumps on a log. Lump bump. If it wasn’t for me your father would still be a dumb detective somewhere. When they wanted to promote him, I told him then what I’m telling you now. They don’t ask twice. If it wasn’t for me he’d be a nobody today.”
Gus sat perfectly still. His Scotch and soda was barely tasted in front of him. He tried not to get drunk in front of his son.
“So, Peggy,” Grace said, “how’s your bridge group these days?”
“I played today with May, and Stella, and Catherine Rose, at Stella’s house. She had an elegant lunch for us. And I bid three no trump and everyone said I couldn’t make it, and I did.” Peggy was animated. She drank the rest of her bourbon and clinked the ice around in the empty glass to attract the waiter. “Catherine Rose said to me, ‘Peggy, you are a bridge star.’ She’s a love.”
“Good for you,” Grace said. She smiled brightly. Gus could feel the amusement and the anger in her. My son and Tommy’s daughter, he thought. Sometimes it seemed to him that the Winslows and the Sheridans were dancing to the music of infinity, generation by generation, two-stepping blindly into hell. Peggy ordered her third bourbon. Chris had another beer.
“Beer’ll put the weight right on your belly,” Peggy said. “You’re at a very vulnerable age. Look at your father.”
Chris said, “Dad looks pretty good to me.”
“He’s got a belly on him,” Peggy said. Her words were starting to slur. “You’ll have one too if you keep drinking that beer.”
The waiter came and took their food order. If you could get her eating, you could keep her from getting too drunk. Peggy ordered baked stuffed shrimp. And another little drink. The waiter went away. At the next table a young woman was having a birthday, and the waiters brought her a cake with a candle and sang “Happy Birthday.” Peggy sang along with them.
How could she be his mother? Gus thought. How could I have permitted my son to be born to her?
Gus
It was April, early evening, raining, and almost dark when they came across the McArdle Bridge with the siren on. They saw the blue lights first, turning on top of four cruisers pulled up nose-in beside a boatyard on the East Boston side. The cruiser headlights shone on the boatyard, and the yellow crime-scene tape looked kind of pretty in the light.
The unmarked division car pulled up onto a shoulder behind the cruisers, and Billy Callahan shut the motor off. The siren tailed away weakly. And they got out. It was a hard rain and cold. Gus turned up his coat collar and stuck his hands in his pockets as they walked toward the group of uniforms gathered behind the hull of a dry-docked fishing boat. All of them wore yellow slickers in the rain.
The yard was a jumble of ropes and broken boards, and jerry-built boats sitting off center in their cradles. The partial brightness of the headlights distorted them even more than their owners had, and they loomed like imperfect animals in the shadows.
A patrol sergeant named Daly spoke to Gus.
“He’s down here, Captain. It’s Corky O’Brien.”
“I know Corky,” Gus said.
One of the patrol officers handed Gus a flashlight and he put the beam on the body on the ground. Face up, eyes unblinking in the rain. The blood which had dried around his nose and mouth was washing slowly away in a pinkish trickle.
“He looks like he took a beating, Captain,” Daly said.
Gus nodded.
“Wasn’t what killed him, though,” Daly said.
He nodded again. The patrol people were usually pretty eager at a murder. Wanted you to know they hadn’t missed anything.
“Somebody shot him behind the right ear, see?” Daly put the beam of his flashlight on the entry wound. “Looks like a small caliber to me. Maybe a .22, there’s no exit wound, means the bullet’s still in there.”
“That’s great,” Billy Callahan said. “Why’d you bother calling homicide?” Billy was very protective of Gus.
“Hey, fuck you,” Daly said.
Gus walked on past the body and down to the edge of the slip, where two more misshapen fishing boats bobbed on the black water. The ocean smelled brackish, as if it had insinuated among these rotting pilings too long. The rain came steadily. The hair was plastered to Gus’s skull. Behind him he heard more sirens as the crime-scene people showed up. Gus hunched his shoulders a little to loosen them, and turned and walked back toward the body.
“Let’s get out of the rain,” he said to Billy Callahan.
“Sure, Captain. Patrol hotshots got this fucker about wrapped up anyway.”
They walked back up toward the car. Billy Callahan had his head tipped a little forward so that the water running off of the brim of his scally cap cleared his chin and splashed onto the chest of his raincoat.
In the car Billy said, “You know the victim, Captain?”
“Hoodlum from Charlestown.”
“He connected?”
“Got four brothers,” Gus said. “They run their own outfit.”
Down the slope, in the headlight glare, the man from the coroner’s office was squatting beside the body. He had on a tan raincoat, and a felt hat. A clear plastic cover protected the hat. Nobody wore hats like that anymore. It made Gus think of his father.
“Gorky’s knuckles were skinned,” Gus said.
“You think it was just a fight, Captain?”
Billy had been his driver for ten years, and a cop for twenty. He lived with his sister, went to Mass every Sunday, and spent his free time lifting weights. He was stupid and goodhearted and would walk into the mouth of a cannon as required.
“No,” Gus said.
Billy nodded vigorously. He thought so too.
Gus
Town Liquors was in Thompson Square, part of a brick strip mall that developers claimed would help upscale Charlestown. The plate glass w
indow was full of big white tear sheets scrawled with splashy Magic Marker announcements of how cheaply you could buy Canadian Club, or Miller beer. Billy waited in the car while Gus went in.
“Butchie around?” Gus said.
The counter clerk was a thin, pale guy with a potbelly and too little hair combed sadly over too much scalp. He wore sunglasses.
“Sure, Captain, in back. You know the way, I guess. Huh?”
Gus went past the counter and through the back room stacked with beer cases and into another room that had been partitioned off with plywood and left unpainted. The door was green, obviously from another incarnation, and it hung on big strap hinges. There was a padlock hasp, but no padlock. He didn’t knock. The geek at the counter would have hit a button.
Butchie O’Brien was sitting in a big green leather swivel chair behind a big gray steel executive desk with two telephones and a loose-leaf calendar on it. A lamp with a big green shade hung from the ceiling over him.
“How you doing, Gus?” Butchie said. “Have a seat.”
Butchie nodded at a gray metal chair with a darker gray seat cushion. He was taller than Gus and slender, with a nearly bald head and a good tan, and his movements were graceful and economical. He wore a wide handlebar moustache, which was mostly gray. He had on a colorful sweater, and a diamond ring on his little finger.
“Sorry about Corky,” Gus said.
Butchie’s tan face didn’t change expression. He nodded.
“You see him?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Somebody worked him over pretty bad before they shot him,” Butchie said.
Gus nodded.
“You on it?” Butchie said.
“It’s a homicide,” Gus said.
“And you’re the homicide commander,” Butchie said. “You got anything?”
“No,” Gus said. “You?”
“Family matter, Gus. We got theories. We’re exploring.”
All Our Yesterdays Page 16