"Okay, what's next?" Danny asked when they had seen all the graves worth seeing.
"I dunno. We just follow the line on the sidewalk and see where it takes us."
They were walking the Freedom Trail, and Sullivan was pretending to be an expert on American history, as well as all the other subjects that fathers were supposed to be experts on. It thrilled him that Danny was so interested in his country; there were no signs in him of the sullen MTV-sated mall-crawling creature that was Sullivan's image of the typical American youth. Was there anything that could give more satisfaction than producing a child you were proud of?
Sullivan thought of his own father, and felt more emotions than he had time to sort out. "Want an ice cream, Danny?"
"Sure."
He bought Danny a chocolate-covered from a guy wearing a red bandanna and one huge earring. "Am I spoiling you yet?" Sullivan asked Danny.
"Nope."
"Be sure and let me know if I start spoiling you, okay? I'm not supposed to do that."
"Sure thing, Dad." Danny laughed. He was missing a couple of teeth.
Sullivan felt as if his heart were about to burst.
* * *
"And I suppose you bought him all sorts of junk to eat?"
"No, Ma. Just enough to keep body and soul together. Isn't that right, Danny?"
Danny nodded. "That's right, Dad."
Mrs. Sullivan shook her head darkly. "We'll see what kind of appetite he has for my roast beef."
"I've got plenty of room for roast beef, Nana."
"Well it won't be your fault if you don't, I'm sure. We'll be eating at five-thirty, which is when your father ate when he was growing up. Isn't that right, Billy?"
Sullivan grinned. "I can't imagine eating supper any other time."
Mrs. Sullivan still lived in the three-decker where he had grown up. It was in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston that had its share of crime and racial tension. Once a year, tired of her complaints about what was happening to the neighborhood, he made the ritual suggestion that she move, and once a year she told him that this was her home, and she wasn't going to leave until they carried her out.
It made Sullivan curiously uneasy that his boyhood home still existed, virtually unchanged, like a shrine. It was as if everything he had done and everywhere he had lived since he left could vanish in an instant if he chose to return here for good. Just visiting on vacation made his adult life seem insubstantial, a trivial afterthought to the true reality. The out-of-tune spinet with the Infant of Prague on top, the Reader's Digest condensed books in the mahogany bookcase, the dark hallway lined with faded photographs of marriages and births and graduations, the smell of corned beef and cabbage being cooked by Mrs. Kelly downstairs—these were the things that really mattered, that would always matter. Remembering them was powerful enough; experiencing them again was almost too much.
Danny thought the three-decker was neat, although it was as alien to his experience as a Russian izba. It didn't strike him as odd that his father had grown up in this place, so different from a Virginia ranch house or a Florida apartment complex. He did, however, find it extremely funny that his father had once been young, and he laughed uproariously at Nana's stories of young Billy's escapades.
At supper, Danny did a creditable job on his roast beef, and then went off to watch TV. Sullivan and his mother cleared the dishes, then had tea and Jell-O at the kitchen table. The sound of kids playing street hockey wafted in through the open window, and Sullivan half wanted to ask if he could be excused so he could go out and join them.
"Isn't he a nice boy," Mrs. Sullivan said.
"He sure is."
"Maureen is doing a good job with him."
"Uh-huh." Sullivan knew where the conversation was heading, and he was helpless to stop it.
"How are things between you two?"
"We're divorced, Ma. There are no things between us, except Danny."
His mother sighed a where-did-I-go-wrong sigh. "Everything seemed fine, even with all your traveling, and then all of a sudden you're getting divorced. I just don't understand it."
Sullivan was not about to explain it to her. "Maybe everything was fine because I was traveling, and we didn't have to see each other much. These things happen, Ma."
"I suppose." She didn't sound convinced. She sipped her tea and stared out the window. She looked very old.
Sometimes she surprised Sullivan with how liberal her views were. Once she said that the pope had his head up his ass for opposing birth control. "Let him try being a woman in the real world for a while, and see how quick he changes his mind." And she never saw the sense of the Vietnam war, even before Sullivan's older brother died in it.
But they were the liberal views of someone who never had to do anything about them. At bottom, she felt comfortable submitting to authority—her husband, her church, her country. She could believe whatever she wanted, knowing that they ruled her life. And it made her feel like a failure when her children refused to be the same.
They had all tried, one way or another, Sullivan thought, and, one way or another, they had failed. He had been her last hope. His brother Danny enlisted to save the world from communism, and promptly got himself killed in a Saigon bar under circumstances that were never cleared up. Veronica entered the convent, stuck it out until she thought she'd go insane, then jumped ship, married a Pakistani, and moved to LA, where she didn't seem to be any happier.
So the burden had fallen on Billy, and he too had tried. And he had no one but himself to blame for his failure. Maureen had put up with all the travel and the secrecy, and they had both longed for the time when he could settle down. But the settling down hadn't come the way it should have, and instead of pleasing him, it turned him into a self-pitying alcoholic wreck trying to find someone besides himself to blame. He hadn't succeeded; he had succeeded only in driving away the two people he loved most in this world. Nice work, Billy.
He stifled a sigh.
"Another Jell-O?" his mother asked.
He shook his head. He hated Jell-O, but it seemed to be too late in the game to tell his mother that.
She brought their empty dishes over to the sink. "Billy?" she said, her back turned to him.
"Yeah, Ma?"
"Do me a favor?"
"Sure."
"While you're here, don't take him... you know where."
Sullivan knew. And he agreed with her, though for reasons he figured were very different from her own. But he didn't see how he could avoid it. "He's asked already, Ma. It's a big deal for a kid his age. It'll just get bigger if I don't take him."
His mother turned back to him, and she looked afraid. Old and afraid. "If you have to go, just don't tell me about it. Okay?"
"Okay, Ma. I understand."
She turned back to the sink again and started to do the dishes. He figured he should offer to help. But he knew she wouldn't let him, so he didn't bother. After a while he left her to her work, and went into the living room to watch TV with his son.
* * *
Sullivan didn't sleep well in his old bedroom; it held far too many ghosts. He tried to escape from his past by thinking about work, but that wasn't much better.
He had followed the Fulton story in the newspapers. The pianist's decision to play in Moscow was big news for a few days, and some congressmen made outraged statements about it. But Fulton refused to speak to the press, and the story eventually died for lack of a new angle.
Sullivan heard nothing further about the operation at headquarters. That was to be expected, of course; it wasn't any of his business, as Houghton had been kind enough to point out. In Moscow, Osipov had seen Doctor Chukova once more, and she told him that another target had been scheduled for after the Peace Festival. As usual, she didn't know who it would be, but she did know that it was going to take place in London—the first time they would venture outside the Soviet Union. Sullivan sent in his report and heard nothing more about it. He had been told that Diet
er Schmidt, far from becoming a Soviet double agent as a result of his encounter with Borisova, had promptly written a complete report about the experience. Bonn would keep an eye on him, but for now they were satisfied he was loyal.
Sometimes Sullivan thought there was nothing to any of this: the Company hadn't launched the operation he had proposed, Borisova had no powers, parapsychology was a fantasy dreamed up by people who wanted life to be more interesting, and his job was just what he thought it was—a sinecure for washed-up case officers.
Wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if he had psychic powers, so that he could find out what Borisova was really doing, so that he could change Culpepper and Houghton's minds about him and make them put him back out into the field. So that he could change the past and, most of all, change himself.
But he had no powers. The past wouldn't change, and he would remain what the past had made him. He fell asleep finally in the midst of the past and dreamed, as usual, of ice, and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
* * *
"How come it's called Boston College, if it isn't even in Boston?"
"Well, um, it used to be in Boston, and then they just kept the name when they moved, I guess."
"Was it in Boston when you went to college?"
Sullivan smiled. "No, this is where I went. The towers on the Heights. It's changed a lot, though."
"And Mom went here too?"
"That's right."
"Wow."
They were silent for a while as they walked through this latest prehistoric site, a combination of neo-Gothic grandeur and concrete-and-glass modernity in a fancy suburb next door to the city. Danny was obviously pondering the strange, misty time when his parents did not know each other. "You met at a hockey game, I bet," he said finally.
"You lose. Your mother hates hockey, remember?"
"Oh. Right. I give up, then."
"We were in physics class together. I was trying to fulfill my science requirement, and I thought it was supposed to be an easy course. It wasn't. Your mother tutored me. I never would've graduated without her."
"But I thought you were smart."
Sullivan laughed. "People are smart in different ways, Danny. Ask me anything you want about Russia, just don't ask me about physics." And he thought of Maureen, gorgeous in her plaid skirt and white sweater, trying to explain angular momentum to him while he was imagining her naked on his bed in the dorm. Ah, college. "There's the hockey rink over next to the football stadium, Danny."
"Oh, wow." Danny raced ahead and tried the door, but it was locked. Not much doing at a hockey rink in August. He looked disappointed. "Is this where you won the Beanpot, Dad?"
"Actually no, that was intown at the Garden, where the Bruins play."
"Tell me the story."
Sullivan tried to conceal his delight. "Oh, come on, Danny, I've told you that story a hundred times."
"Tell it again."
"It's still the same story. It hasn't changed."
"Doesn't matter."
Sullivan shrugged with false modesty. "If you insist." They walked past the rink in the hot sun, and he thought of the smell of sweat and oranges in the locker room, the tension, the exhaustion, the joy. That was one part of the past he didn't want changed. "It was the finals of the Beanpot, right? Boston Garden, fifteen thousand people, BC versus Harvard for the championship. Who goes to Harvard, Danny?"
"Bunch of snotty-nosed rich kids."
"That's right. It was the fine upstanding Irish and Italian youths versus the snotty-nosed rich kids. I was first-line left wing. Tough game. The Harvard goalie was good, but we thought he had a weakness on the glove side, so we went for that. I nicked the post in the first period and got an assist in the second, but I really didn't get much accomplished. Tight checking all over the ice, Danny, that's the way the big games are played. Anyway, it was three to three at the end of regulation, and that meant sudden-death overtime.
"I tell you, I was beat waiting for OT to start. It isn't your legs so much as your arms and upper body, see, from all the checking. But you gotta go out there again, so you gotta find some energy somewhere. Anyway, play became very conservative in OT—nobody wants to be the one to make the mistake, right? Both teams were running shorter shifts, because everyone was so tired. The crowd was going crazy—you couldn't hear yourself think, even if you had enough energy to use your brain.
"And then, all of a sudden, it happened. That's the way hockey is, Danny—it's a game of sudden opportunities. You win by taking advantage of them. Harvard was changing on the fly, and I saw some open ice in front of me, so I took off. My center, Paul Connell, hit me with a perfect pass just as I crossed the blue line."
"You were in alone," Danny breathed.
"I was in alone." They had stopped walking now. The two of them stood in the sunlight and relived the moment. "I didn't think—there wasn't time to think. But I saw the goalie's eyes, and somehow I knew he was gonna cheat to the glove side. We'd been going for the glove all night, see, and he knew that was his weakness. So I put my head down and faked the shot. And when he made his move, I pulled the puck back in, brought it around him, and tucked a little backhander into the empty corner of the net. Red light. End of game."
"All right!" Danny shouted. "And then what?"
And then what? "Then everyone mobbed me at the face-off circle. I lost my balance, and they all jumped on top of me and geez, it was a little scary there for a second—I couldn't breathe, and no one wanted to get off. But they did finally, and I grabbed the puck, and the BC fans were all still there on their feet cheering and singing 'For Boston,' and I don't think I've ever felt so excited before or since."
"It musta been unbelievable," Danny said. "Too bad nobody plays hockey in Florida. They don't even know how to skate."
"Yeah, that bothers me too. But you know how your mother feels."
"I guess."
They walked in silence through the quiet campus. Sullivan felt a little guilty whenever he told that story to Danny—trading on past glory to impress his son—but not guilty enough to stop telling it. It was glory, and it was real, and no one was going to take it away from him.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, Danny?"
"Was your father at the game?"
"No. He had died by then. You know that."
"Oh. Right. Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"When are we gonna go to that bank?"
"Pretty soon, Danny. Pretty soon."
* * *
The three of them went to Cape Cod, but it was not a success. Danny didn't see what the big deal was; Florida had better beaches, and the water was warmer. Sullivan's mother just wanted to get back home to Dorchester. And Sullivan himself felt out of sorts. He looked pale and flabby in his bathing suit, and he couldn't do more than a couple of laps in the motel pool before giving up, exhausted. At night his mother watched him drink his beers with silent disapproval, and there didn't seem to be much left to say to anyone. They went home a day early.
"Dad, what about the bank?" Danny asked from the backseat as Sullivan drove up Route 3. His mother stared out her window.
"We'll see, Danny. We'll see."
He had a six-pack that night in front of the television set, and stayed up long after Danny and his mother had gone to bed. The next day, while his mother was out shopping, he took Danny for a ride. To West Roxbury, a pleasant tree-lined Boston neighborhood where the Irish moved when they got rich enough to look down their noses at Dorchester. Sullivan parked the car on Centre Street. He took Danny's hand and they walked past a delicatessen, a funeral home, a dry cleaner, a drugstore. They stopped in front of a small brick bank with white wooden shutters. A blue-haired old lady with a cane tottered up to it, and Sullivan held the door open for her. She gave him a smile. Sullivan stayed outside.
"Is this it?" Danny asked.
"This is it. Don't ask for the story, 'cause you already know it."
"Okay."
Danny looked at the drab litt
le building with undisguised awe. Sullivan leaned against a traffic sign and wondered if Danny distinguished between the story of the Beanpot and the story that took place here. Were they just two tales of glory to make him proud of his family? Or did he understand the difference?
Glory. Sullivan's father was just a cop. Your ordinary working-class Irish cop, who drank too much occasionally and thought America was the greatest country on earth and worked extra details whenever he could so his kids could go to parochial school and get a better education than he got.
And one May afternoon the alarm at the First National Bank on Centre Street started ringing. Officers Sullivan and O'Malley responded to the alarm. Officer Sullivan got out of his cruiser at the same time that two ski-masked gun-persons came out of the bank. Officer Sullivan started to draw his weapon, whereupon the two gun-persons opened fire, blowing Officer Sullivan's brains over the side of the cruiser and into the West Roxbury gutter. End of story, Danny.
A life is over in a second, but the consequences last an eternity. Number-one son was already dead, but Veronica was still Sister Theresa, and young Billy hadn't chosen a major yet at the Heights. And suddenly nothing was the same. Glory.
The two bank robbers were from some radical group or other. One black man and one white woman, very nondiscriminatory and ideologically correct. They disappeared into the underground and were never heard from again. Mrs. Sullivan accepted a posthumous medal. A scholarship fund was started in her husband's honor.
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