Suddenly they burst through the front door of the liquor store. They stared down at him; their eyes went wild. One of them, the taller, raised his hand quickly, too quickly and carelessly, for Aaron timed his shot, controlled the aim before he cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger. He felt the rebound up along his arm. The gunman fell. His shoulder brushed Aaron’s leg. His falling gun hit Aaron’s foot.
The second man, the one who had been wounded, crouched behind some garbage cans. Instead of running, he crouched behind the garbage cans and shot in Aaron’s direction. He had more than one gun and he fired quickly, first one then the other.
There was a loud whistling ping along the sidewalk and a chip of cement must have cut into Aaron Levine’s shoulder: he felt a sharp, clean, cutting sensation. Snakelike, with an instinct he’d never tested before, he writhed to take cover behind his patrol car. There were sirens, somewhere in the distance, or close up, he couldn’t judge exactly because there was a ringing sensation in his head now. He took quiet, steady and accurate aim at the exact spot where the remaining gunman would appear, and when he did, just as Aaron had calculated, Aaron squeezed the trigger and watched, without emotion and without much understanding, as the second gunman fell dead to the sidewalk.
He stood up, somewhat unsteadily, legs shaky, ice-cold. He held the revolver in the palm of his hand, uncocked it carefully. Another patrol car was on the scene now. It was the fat captain with the hard and penetrating stare.
“That one, over there, Captain, that officer is still alive, I think,” Aaron heard himself say.
“Put the revolver in your holster, son,” the captain said and he did as he was told.
Other patrol cars arrived. Blue-uniformed men moved all around him. The captain told everyone what to do and Aaron didn’t have to think or act anymore. He leaned against the fender of his patrol car and waited. He felt pain along his shoulder and reached up to rub the pain away. He looked with surprise at his fingers; they were wet and sticky with his own blood. Just before he lost consciousness, Aaron Levine thought, Oh, my God. I’ve been shot I’m going to throw up.
The call had come insistently over the car radio and broke into the consciousness of Captain Peter Hennessy. Without looking at Brian O’Malley’s body, in a calm and terrible voice that was not to be denied, he had ordered Patrolman Charlie Gannon to proceed to the scene of the liquor store holdup.
When they arrived, there were just the two cars on the scene: one was that of the two men who were lying outside the store; the other was Brian O’Malley’s.
As he opened the door and sniffed the air, which was acrid with spent gunfire and the smell of dead and dying men, Captain Hennessy took a deep breath and saw his way clear.
“Now, just follow what I tell you from here on in, Charlie,” he said to Gannon, “and we’ll get Brian a hero’s funeral out of all this.”
FOUR
AUTOMATICALLY, MARGARET O’MALLEY’S FINGERS counted off the stitches: knit seven, purl two, knit two, slip one, knit one, pass the slipped stitch over. The intricate pattern took shape beneath her touch but her eyes were on some inner vision. Her brain absorbed all the various noises of her household, sorted them, then, satisfied, was able to disregard them. Her sons had quieted down. Kevin finally tossed and lunged himself into restless sleep; Martin had placidly settled in and wouldn’t move again until morning.
The soft snoring of her mother-in-law was steady, though God knew, the old woman could awaken at the drop of a stitch. Margaret tried, very hard, not to look at the clock. The radio announcer gave the time, though, softly through the fabric of the speaker. She kept the radio tuned so low she could hardly hear it, but she caught the words: 10 P.M. And Roseanne not home yet.
She held the piece of work before her eyes, sighed, started the next row, then gave it up as a bad job. Her mind was too filled with her oldest daughter, Roseanne.
Mother of God, she intoned silently, let her come home within the minute. An hour over the time her father set for her and he’d kill her if he knew. And me keeping the secret for her. Wrong. It’s wrong. Billy Delaney was wrong and that was the whole matter clear and simple. A great strong fair-haired boy, with a strong jaw and clear blue eyes and a way about him: that was all Roseanne cared to see. He’d come to no good, everyone else could see that the boy’d been nothing but trouble from grade school on, and here he was, eighteen years old and put out of St. Simon’s in his last year. Well, Father Donlon was not harsh; he’d kept Billy on years more than he should have, if the truth were known. The boy had been arrested when he was twelve, stealing money from a cash register in a drugstore. If it hadn’t been for his uncles and Father Donlon, he’d have been sent to reform school right then. There were other things, all along, and Father Donlon had resisted. He knew the boy’s aching background. Who didn’t? Poor Eileen Murphy got nothing but trouble and kids from Tommy Delaney and him nothing but a thief and a deserter. That was what was the worst thing of all. It wasn’t only the men in the neighborhood agreed on that point. The women too: a deserter, left his wife and children to fend for themselves and lose the bail money that friends and relatives and neighbors, including, God knew, the O’Malleys, had put up for him, and him charged with some crime or other. Took himself off and never came back, neither alive nor dead.
But it was Tommy Delaney all over again, for hadn’t he been the handsome, wise and charming boy that his oldest son, Billy Delaney, now appeared. And, oh, how could she tell Roseanne how little all that meant, how quickly it disappeared and the ugliness beneath came through.
Brian had turned to stone when first he saw the boy walking down Ryer Avenue with Roseanne. There’ll be none of that one, he said; both mother and daughter avoided his cold fierce expression and the girl ran crying to her bed. It was to her that Brian issued his instructions: Keep her away from that bad piece of business, Margaret. You’re the mother, that’s your job.
There was the soft sound of voices just outside the window. The O’Malley apartment, at street level, opened with its own private door into a little private hallway and Margaret heard the doorknob turn, waited, strained into the strange sound-filled silence. She thanked the Holy Mother that the girl was home and vowed she would try not to say angry things, not to say all the wrong things to the girl. But, oh, sweet Jesus, it was so hard. The girl had become a stranger to her these last few months, someone she’d never known, never laughed with or cried over or rocked in her arms.
“Is that you, Roseanne?”
The door closed softly, there was a stifled cough and then her daughter’s voice, sullen, muffled, speaking from behind her hands. “Yeah, Ma.” When she came into the room, pretending to be coughing, Margaret knew she was hiding her smeared lipstick. Her eyes blazed defiance and she said, before she could be accused, “Look, I know I’m late, I’m sorry. My watch is slow or something. I’m tired, Ma, I’m going to bed.”
“You’ll stay here and let me look at you.” It wasn’t the tone of voice she’d intended, but this wasn’t the girl she wanted desperately to see. This was a taut, angry young girl, with blazing eyes confronting her as though she was an enemy.
“Roseanne,” she tried in a softer voice, “if your dad knew what you’ve been up to—”
Quickly, as though she’d been waiting to attack, Roseanne said, “I haven’t been ‘up to’ anything. For Pete’s sake, I went for a walk. I’m not a child anymore. Can’t I even go for a walk?”
“You’ve been out with Billy Delaney, haven’t you?”
The deep-blue eyes, shimmering, closed; the pale full lips tightened; the girl turned her face toward the ceiling with an insulting glance of supplication.
She was so filled with herself and her own newly discovered feelings. The anger made the girl’s delicate beauty intensify; the fine bones of her high cheeks showed through the stretched white skin, her delicate nostrils dilated, her dark eyes sought her mother’s and held the glare without the slightest awareness or concern for the pain she coul
d inflict
“Oh, Roseanne,” Margaret said wearily, unable to speak to the girl the way she wanted to. “You’ve truly time, Roseanne. You’ve the whole of your life before you. Billy Delaney is just one boy in all this whole wide world.”
“You were married at seventeen.” It was an accusation and a challenge and a justification. The seventeen-year-old girl shifted her weight, her hand went to a thin sharp hipbone, her chin went up.
“Yes,” Margaret said sharply. “I married at seventeen but not to the likes of Billy Delaney.”
“You don’t know anything about Billy. You don’t. Everyone’s always been down on him because of his father.”
“Everyone’s down on him because of his own sweet self now, Roseanne. He’s not living on his father’s bad name anymore. He’s doing just fine making his own bad name.”
“It’s not fair, Ma, it’s not! Everyone always picked on Billy. In the street, at school. Brother Andrew was beating him up. What did anyone expect him to do anyway?”
Margaret held her hand up and lowered her own voice. “For the love of God, Roseanne, if you don’t care about the neighbors, at least let your young brothers and sister and poor old grandmother sleep undisturbed.” She pretended not to see the quickly wiped at tears and choking swallow back of sobs: all this for a great thug of a boy not worth her daughter’s thumbnail. She’d have to be careful; Brian didn’t understand it wasn’t all that easy. “Well, would you like a cup of hot tea with me and some poundcake I baked fresh this afternoon? It’s a bit heavy but the flavor’s nice.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Ah, you’re falling away to skin and bone.” She bit her lip, tried to be light and casual. “But I guess that’s fashionable these days, isn’t it?”
The girl seemed to be turning words over in her mind; her mouth worked for a moment, then finally she said, “You might as well know, Ma. He wants to marry me. And I want to marry him.”
Margaret shook her head and felt a little more sure of herself. That was such nonsense she could deal with it. “No, no,” she said. “We’ll hear no such talk in this house. Why, you’re a mere slip of a girl and you’ve just the year to finish at St. Simon’s and you’ve a chance to get out into the world a little bit. Why, you’re the champion in your typing class. Think of the nice office you can work in. Ah, Roseanne, you’re a silly little girl still, sometimes. Off to bed now and mind you don’t wake your sister.”
The tears spilled down Roseanne’s face now and she rubbed at them so hard with the back of her hand it seemed she was trying to jam them back into her eyes. “Oh, Ma, I love him. I love him. Have you forgotten what it’s like to be young and in love?” Through the tears, there was a hard glint in Roseanne’s eyes; a woman’s smile flashed on her child lips, mean and unpleasant, and her voice was small and unfamiliar. “Have you forgotten what it’s like to be loved?”
Margaret’s hands held the knitting; her fingers trembled over the wool and she spoke very softly, aware that the old woman’s snores had taken a false, uneven turn. “It’s a quickly passing thing, Roseanne, and seventeen is a quickly passing age. It isn’t just Billy Delaney, though God knows your dad wouldn’t let him in this house.” She looked up sharply. “Now, just hold your tongue and don’t give me one of your killing looks. You stay away from him for he’s a boy with no future and nothing good in mind for you. A kiss feels nice for a short time, Roseanne, and then it’s gone.”
Roseanne stood before her mother, filled with explosive emotions which she could not convey. How could she describe the sudden strange unfamiliar surge of feeling that kept her in a constant state of excitement and alarm? How could she risk having everything she was experiencing being discounted with a shrug, a sigh, an “Oh, Roseanne”? She looked about the room wildly, needing to find some way of inflicting pain on this maddeningly ignorant woman, her mother. Her eyes found the letter on top of the radio, wedged under the cut-glass vase, where her father had put it the day it arrived.
“What about Brian, Ma? Has Dad decided to let him come back?”
The knitting flew from Margaret’s hands; the needles seemed to have a life of their own. She kept her face down, collected the various items. “Brian will come back. He’ll come back home.”
“Well, he’s crazy to want to come back here, if you ask me.”
Margaret’s face froze. She dropped her work and moved toward her daughter, but stopped herself, hands clenched together before her. A terrible, implacable fierceness, seldom seen, but once seen, remembered, replaced her normal gentle, placid, resigned expression. “Don’t you ever dare to say such a thing to me again, Roseanne. This is Brian’s home and we are his family and I thank God on my knees that my son had the sense finally to write to us and that finally he knows where he belongs on this earth.” Her hands went to her mouth, fingers trembled at her lips.
Roseanne, breathless from the intensity of her mother’s emotion, startled, alarmed that she had caused the transformation, reached her hand toward her mother’s shoulder, but stopped just short of contact and let it drop to her side. “Ma, I’m sorry for what I said. About Brian. Honest, Ma, I’m sorry.”
Margaret nodded without looking up. She sat, gathered her knitting. “All right, then. Go off to bed now before your old gran starts complaining of the noise.”
She longed for the return of her oldest son as much as she dreaded it. With God’s help, Father Donlon said, with God’s help, Margaret, it will all work out. After all, didn’t he write the lovely letter from—where was it? Georgia?—the south of the United States, and wasn’t it God’s miracle that he was alive at all?
He’d had a terrible fever there in that strange place and the doctor in the hospital sent for a priest and he’d made his good confession and been given the rites and vowed that if he recovered he’d beg his father and his mother to let him come home. He would be the son his father wanted him to be and wouldn’t be off leaving home, pretending to be a man when he was just a mere boy still.
She tried to forget her husband’s face, his words, the hard smile as he read the tumble of words written in the large familiar hand of their oldest living child.
But as she had faced everything else in her life, Margaret O’Malley would have to face this too and she could not change fact by trying to alter memory.
“So the little bastard wants to come running home, does he? Thought he was on his deathbed, did he?”
“Oh, Brian, please. It’s what I’ve prayed these last terrible months, day and night, it’s what I’ve prayed for.”
“Yeah and that’s the point, isn’t it, Margaret? We’re to send him a reply through this priest—Father Concerna, an Eyetalian, for Christ’s sake—and tell him to come on home and we’ll forget the whole thing, the grief he’s caused his mother, the worry, not knowing if he was alive or dead in some ditch. We’re to forget the things that were said in this house by that boy.” He made the word a terrible insult He tapped the letter in the palm of his hand, glanced at it, folded it back into its envelope and placed it under the vase, where it stayed for the week.
She knew he’d wait until his own good time; she knew there was no way she could prevail on him until he was ready. And she knew that it would be hard when her son finally came home.
“Oh, Blessed Mother,” she prayed, her eyes on the large framed print on the wall over the radio, “oh, Sweet Mother of God, I know I’ve no right to ask more. You’ve watched over him all this time, you’ve watched over him. Just this one thing more, Blessed Mother.” She bit her lower lip, pressed her hands against her breast, her eyes on the sad, upturned eyes of the print. She knew how Margaret felt, as no man could ever know. She, whose hands and feet and heart ached with an anguish greater than nails and spikes could inflict. She would make it possible for Margaret to get through the hard time ahead. Her son would come home and her husband would relent and she would draw her family around her once again.
An unexpected memory caught at her: the three small dead
ones. Oh, Holy Mother, the three precious little ones. Look after them for me, kiss their sweet faces, smooth their brows. Oh, God, the years seemed to dissolve and the pain of their loss was as raw and new as the pain of their birth.
Margaret stood up abruptly, rolled the yarn, plunged the needles into the ball. She blinked and cleared her mind. No sense at all to suffer old pain. She’d see about some late supper, for Brian’s tour would be over before long. Indeed, wasn’t that him already at the door?
FIVE
BUT IT WAS NOT; and it was with the old one, Brian’s mother, that they had the most trouble. She’d buried enough of her own flesh to know ritual and rite, and was not easily denied.
“I washed the blood from his body the day I brought him into this world and I’ll wash the blood from off him the day he leaves it.”
Margaret, his widow, not fully comprehending, concerned with the rising anguish of the old woman, involved with her rather than with herself, held the old woman’s arms and shook her head. “Hush, now, they’ll bring him home soon. Let them do it their way, for the love of God. They’re trying to spare you.”
“To spare me? To spare me?” Brian’s mother whirled her strong compact old body away from her daughter-in-law. She planted her feet wide apart. Her eyes blazed with anger as she whirled back in time and filled the room with her accusations. “And who was there to spare me the birth pangs? Tell me that, will you? Alone but for the other small ones, alone without your fancy hospitals and doctors and nurses, if you please, and I birthed all twelve and kept my jaws locked together the whole time. And washed the blood from them and buried them when I had to!”
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