Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "Her own private use?" Hanley grasped at the phrase as if it were a raft.

  And Dillon realized what a fiction he'd just concocted. His instinct was to back away from it. Is this what lawyers do, dance around the truth until they find the lie that works?

  "What do you mean, her private use?"

  Dillon dropped his cigarette, crushed it under his shoe. "Just what I said, Jack."

  "It's not for the police?"

  Dillon laughed. "The police! You think you take on Raymond Buckley by going to the police? The police are the rats in his wall. You know that. They feed on the scraps he leaves out for them. That's the point, Jack. Buckley won't be afraid of Mike Foley's widow, not that he knows she exists. Why should you be? Why should Doc Riley be?"

  Hanley eyed his helper, but obliquely, as if he didn't want to be caught at it. He knew Sean Dillon better than anybody. He knew that when Dillon put his wrench to a frozen pipe joint, no matter if the grooved metal of the pipes and coupling had long since oxidized into one solid piece, that joint eventually was going to come loose. "I wasn't thinking of Mrs. Foley," Hanley said, "as somebody to be afraid of."

  "Who then? Who were you thinking of?" Answering his own question, Dillon saw what he himself was after: not the police, but the coroner's jury. An autopsy contradicting essentials in Swift's posted cause of death could force Foley's case onto the coroner's docket. Even if the coroner belonged to Kelly-Nash, his jury wouldn't. How much leeway did that jury have? It was law he'd have to check on.

  Hanley was shaking his head. "Nobody. I wasn't thinking of nobody. If you say the autopsy is just for the widow to know about, that's good enough for me."

  "For the family," Dillon corrected, thinking of Cass, relieved to have found a way to nudge back toward the literal truth.

  "Then okay, I'll do it."

  "Do it this morning, Jack. Gibson is the undertaker, and he's waiting."

  Hanley nodded. He turned and moved toward the door, then stopped and indicated Dillon's clothes. "You dressed for the wake already, or what? You better get your dungarees on."

  "I'm off today, remember?" Dillon spoke as if they had agreed on this. "I missed that examination last night. I have to go downtown this morning to see if the priest will let me take it now." Another lurching to the side of what was so. Father Ferrick had scheduled him for late afternoon. These subtle deceptions were coming easily.

  "You already look like a lawyer, Dillon." Hanley checked himself before adding, And you act like one. "You going to the wake, though?"

  "Sure."

  "Good. The Hibernians are doing the rosary. Doc Riley will be there. All of us will be. Mike Foley was a Sinn Feiner, one of the first. He left the old country with a price on his head."

  Hanley's eyes had filled, reminding Dillon that he was still slightly drunk. The green fog was rolling in. Next he'd be cursing the Black and Tans. Dillon thought of his own father, a streetcar driver who'd been silent as stone, except on the subject of the British rape of Ireland.

  Dillon deflected Hanley. "Can I tell Mike's widow she can count on you then?"

  Hanley replied with a forced energy. "Indeed you can. I'm going to the dispensary right now." But then he sagged. "I don't feel so hot anyways. Maybe the doc can give me something before he goes to Gibson's." He paused, then added with sharp sobriety, "Doc Riley will do it for Mike Foley. I'll make sure of it." Hanley turned and left.

  But Dillon had intended to ask him one more thing: where to look for Buckley.

  Confronting Buckley early, before he was surrounded by lackeys, was the second of the two moves he had determined to make. Hanley had asked him for his plan, and now it struck Dillon what a thin set of impulses he had. What was he doing anyway? Would going to Buckley's unannounced be any more productive than half an autopsy performed by a company-owned—Buckley owned?—sot doctor? And where, anyway, would he find Raymond Buckley at this hour of the morning?

  Dillon checked an urge to call after Hanley, to ask him. There were half a dozen other fellows he could ask. He would pretend he wanted to approach Buckley for a loan. Simple enough. Better to leave Hanley out of it.

  The fiction he and Hanley had just implicitly agreed to hold by opposite ends, like a pair of herders holding rope, was that they would leave Raymond Buckley alone, no matter what he'd done to the once heroic Mike Foley.

  Not fiction, Dillon said to himself as he left the slaughterhouse changing room, but lie.

  There had been an essential weakness about her uncle, and Cass couldn't deny it; a weakness like her father's. Her uncle was dead, but it was an ache for her long-gone Pa that had wakened her.

  She lay in her bed listening to the sounds of the coming day, glad for them. She heard an automobile engine coughing in the street outside. She heard water running in the bathroom. She heard her mother's tea kettle blowing in the kitchen like a near version of the yards' shift whistle, which was floating faintly all across the neighborhood.

  She remembered how her father had always roused himself at the sound of that whistle. He would dress in his rough clothes. After eating his pancakes and molasses in silence, except for the click of his utensils, turning the plate twice to cut the cakes in quick squares, which he speared into his mouth on the tip of his knife, he would stand in the doorway of the kitchen looking back at Cass's mother, as if today they would speak. After a moment he would disappear behind the dotted muslin that hung in the threshold as a door. It would fall in after him with a swish, swish, which to Cass sounded like a slam. She would go after him, down the dark hall, to see his exit from the house. "Got to hustle down to Halsted Street," he would say back to her with a wink. "With any luck, they'll give me a job beheading hogs."

  Outside her window, the gray light moved. A summer morning. The curtains stirred.

  Sometimes when she was a girl, her father's hand would rest easily on her head as they walked to or from the streetcar, and she would feel as though the canopy of heaven itself—blue satin ardent with stars, Our Lady's veil—had settled on her.

  Sometimes when he was reading the paper, she would sit on the edge of his chair, smelling his leather and tobacco, studying the deep lines on his face, which in repose was always grave and sad. The sadness in him was the clue to his weakness, she thought now.

  She heard the muffled argument of her brothers a room away—a shirt they both wanted. She looked over at the cot in the corner of her own room: the tidy mound of Molly still sleeping soundly. The night before, when Cass pulled the sheet to cover her cousin, the pillow was still damp from her tears.

  Molly's father had had that same sadness reading the paper. Cass remembered how, often, when she went upstairs to the Foleys' flat, Uncle Mike would be sitting in the wing chair, with the job ads open in front of him, nothing to apply for.

  Cass rolled over in her white bed and crushed the pillow between her arms. Her heart sank again with the knowledge that her uncle was nothing but a victim. History's victim—Ireland, the Depression; whiskey's victim; his wife's. The weakness Cass sensed in him, and in all her men, was a weakness for victimhood. That was what she saw when they weren't looking, in the deep lines around their mouths, but she had just called it sadness. Sadness. A pathetic, weak word, it seemed to her now, which did not remotely describe the agonies or the furies that had taken her father away and destroyed her uncle.

  Cass felt herself sinking fast. Now was she to think of her Uncle Mike as the victim, finally, of a brutal slayer who stuffed him in a blood sewer?

  She squeezed her eyes shut against this train of thought.

  I am not a victim, she told herself.

  But she was. She was a victim of the ache behind her breastbone. "O God," she whispered, "not my will but Thine." She repeated the familiar phrase once, then twice, reaching for the strength and peace that always came to her when she prayed.

  But nothing.

  The prayer had left a metallic taste in her mouth, and she felt afraid that in this hour of need her faith was des
erting her. She pulled her right hand free of the pillow to touch her forehead, crossing herself, as if that gesture would release the wave of solace for which she longed.

  But the sensation of her own fingers lightly on her head released instead a memory of that other hand on the very crown of her head, but now it was her uncle's hand, a large, rough workman's hand. He was touching with outstretched thumb and little finger both her ears. Her uncle had replaced her father as the man who touched her head like that, but now, instead of the canopy of heaven, the memory of that loving touch felt like the weight of an unwanted hat.

  After washing and dressing, and greeting her mother, Cass went upstairs to sit in her aunt's kitchen. Her cousins had all finished with breakfast and were either gone now or elsewhere in the house. Cass was not going in to work. She sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Her aunt was kneading dough at the floured heavy board, her back to Cass. This was the first time the two of them had been alone.

  Mrs. Foley was a large woman. The flesh above her elbows made her upper arms look like thighs. In her summer dress, those arms were exposed now, and the sight of them, quivering as she pounded the dough, filled Cass with embarrassment for her. Mrs. Foley's most prominent feature was not visible from behind, an unfortunate goiter the size of a golf ball that protruded from below the right side of her jawbone. The swollen thyroid was harmless, the doctors said, but the sight of it never failed to stir Cass's sympathy.

  "Have you called Andrew, Aunt Flo?"

  "Yes, last night. He's coming up today."

  "By train?"

  "Yes. Hannah too, he said."

  They were silent for a moment, then Mrs. Foley said, "Monsignor Sweeney is postponing his retreat to stay here, thanks be to God. If he wasn't at the wake, those foolish Hibernians would expect to lead the rosary."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "It does to me."

  The determination in her aunt's voice surprised Cass and alarmed her, for now she was going to have to tell her what she had done. The best thing to do was just to come out with it. "I ordered an autopsy last night, Aunt Flo."

  "What?" Mrs. Foley's entire body registered her surprise, as she turned to face her niece.

  Cass suddenly felt dizzy, and she pressed her fingers against the rim of her cup, as if that would keep her voice from shaking. "I ordered Uncle Mike's body moved from Riordan's to Gibson's, and I told them we would want an autopsy, to learn what happened."

  "We know what happened."

  "No, we don't. Uncle Mike didn't die the way they said he did. It may not have been an accident. That's why an autopsy—"

  "What are you talking about?"

  To Cass's surprise she couldn't remember the name of the man who had made her think this way—or what he had said the night before that she'd found so convincing.

  She could see his face clearly, though, and remembered very well his earnest and generous eyes as he'd looked back at her on the street outside St. Gabriel's. He had made the autopsy seem so important, as if a doctor's dissections would tell them everything. But would it tell her where her father had gone when he disappeared? Would it explain what went so horribly wrong for her uncle?

  "I don't know," she said vaguely.

  "Then don't ever say such a thing again, to anyone. Do you hear?"

  Only now, in the light of this fierce imperative, did Cass see what her aunt thought, and she stood up at her place, jolting the cup. "He didn't kill himself, Aunt Flo. That's not what I meant."

  "Are you sure?" she asked, so weakly. Mike Foley wouldn't have been the first of the defeated fathers they knew to embrace that final defeat, that mortal one. Suicide would have consigned his soul to hell forever.

  But no, that wasn't what she was saying. Cass put her arms around her Aunt Flo's shoulders. Mrs. Foley leaned into her, the goiter pressed warm against the side of Cass's throat. Oh, Aunt Flo.

  Mrs. Foley kneaded her niece's thin body, weeping quietly. Cass stroked her.

  After a few minutes Cass said with the simple authority that had now fallen to her, "The undertaker will almost certainly call you this morning to ask for your approval. I want you to give it to him."

  "But won't an autopsy show if your uncle was drinking?" Mrs. Foley pulled abruptly back, applying the comer of her apron to her eyes. "Oh, look, I'm sorry, darling."

  Cass's dark dress was covered with flour. Both women brushed at it.

  "It doesn't matter if he was drinking, Aunt Flo."

  "People will laugh at him if it was his own fault."

  "But it wasn't his fault." Cass took her aunt by the shoulders again. This was the core of it for her. "That's the point. Not that he was drunk. Not that he was where he shouldn't have been. Not that what happened was his fault at all. That's the point. It's what we owe him, finding out what happened."

  "If he was drunk, though"—she was a child at the mercy of a night fear—"even if it wasn't suicide, that means he died in mortal sin, without confession. Do you want that put out for your cousins and your brothers and sisters to know?"

  The phone rang.

  Both women faced it where it hung on the wall near the window, opposite the icebox. Mrs. Foley wiped her face with her hands and, crossing, wiped her hands on her apron. "Hello."

  Mrs. Foley looked helplessly at her niece, who was slowly moving toward her. "What?" she said to the mouthpiece.

  Cass drew steadily closer.

  "Dr. Riley? I don't know him."

  Cass heard the impending collapse in her aunt's voice. She put her arms around Mrs. Foley's waist, thinking, If we stand together with each other, we can do this.

  Sean Dillon was his name. This call was proof that he'd meant what he said, that he was helping her. If we stand together—

  Cass moved her head up and down, supporting her aunt, but also commanding her. "Say yes. Say yes. You tell him yes, Aunt Flo."

  Sean Dillon, she thought again. How could she have forgotten that name? To have recalled it now exhilarated her. The sun hadn't risen above the eaves of the parish church yet, and already he had produced a doctor for the autopsy.

  Mrs. Foley saw in her niece's will, as she had so many times, her complete refuge. She did as she was told, letting go of her own impulse, which was so much easier to do than it ever would be letting go of her Mike.

  The Stockyards Inn billed itself as the finest example of authentic Tudor architecture in the Midwest. With its multiple gables and finely wrought leaded windows, its mortar-and-beam siding above a first story of tawny brickwork, its clumped hedges, perfectly shaped spruce trees, regimented garden flowers and swarded lawns, it had the air of a well-kept Elizabethan manor house, or perhaps of an English Benedictine monastery, or, at very least, of a New England boarding school. But in fact it was a two-hundred-room hotel facing rough-and-tumble Halsted Street on the east side of the yards. Designed originally for the yards' owners to accommodate leaders of the livestock industry, now it also served patrons of the mammoth exposition building, the Kelly-Nash monument to itself, the site of FDR's triumphant renomination. Stockyard workers like Dillon had no occasion to enter the inn, and for the Irish among them it had come to function as an oversized Chicago version of the Big House, to which, in the old country, they had access only as servants.

  Meals at the inn were served in the Sirloin Room, and even at breakfast, steak was the feature of the menu. The waiter whose job it was to enforce the rules of this sparkling universe did not bother to mask his disapproval when Dillon ordered only coffee and toast. He lacked enough money for anything else.

  When the waiter left, Dillon snapped his newspaper open and went back to watching Raymond Buckley.

  He was distracted by the entire scene before him, for here, on the very edge of the slaughter fields, which Dillon identified with everything he wanted to leave behind, was a display of opulence such as he'd rarely seen. The room could seat several hundred diners and was perhaps a third full. The waiters wore tuxedos. The guests, almost all of them men
, wore dark suits and waistcoats, the tailoring of which put his own poor suit to shame. Gleaming shoes and flashing cufflinks and sleek oak wall paneling and polished silver serving trays bounced the light around the room while patrons talked softly to one another or read their papers with a show of well-being and assurance. Dillon read a message of order, harmony and permanence both in the nobly proportioned room and in its self-satisfied occupants that clashed utterly with the message—violence, death, stink, greed—of the yards outside.

  Buckley was sitting with a pair of companions at a table in a far corner. Dillon's view of them was wide-open. From behind his spread newspaper he could watch without fear of drawing notice. But soon it was apparent that Buckley, so at ease, so expansive with the men before him, wanted to be watched. He was performing for the brilliant room the role of a great captain of business, and that required an exaggerated bonhomie that would carry out across the tables.

  But the two men with Buckley held themselves in check before him. The one on his right was apparently a clerk of some kind, fixed as his attention was on an oversized ledger in front of him. In the more than ten minutes that Dillon had been watching, the clerk had said nothing, confining himself to jotting notes. The man across from Buckley had only just sat down, replacing another, and another before him. They had conducted their business with gingery agitation. This one too wore the demeanor of pure underling, a man in unrelieved haste to be about his orders. His orders now had brought him here.

  Dillon surmised that a supply of men was waiting in a small chamber off Buckley's corner of the dining room, each to be brought for his moment with the ward boss. This was a routine, Dillon saw, and it was easy to grasp what was going on. The tavern owners, policy runners and gamblers who operated in or around the stockyards—canaries, Dillon thought, picking grains out of manure—came to Buckley at regular intervals to be informed of adjustments in their assessments. No money changed hands. Dillon saw how that would be pushing it, but he also saw that the public character of this obeisance, offered no doubt by every petty operator in the district, was essential to Buckley's hold on it. The hearty arrogance of the man; Dillon sat there and, despite himself, admired it.