Up close, there was indeed the wreckage of time in his face. But he hardly looked to be at death’s door, as Snoody had advertised. His brown eyes were as bright and sharp as his tongue. He still took obvious care in his grooming. His skin had the good ruddiness of a man who still enjoyed wine and the daily weather.
He might well have read in my own face a rush of anxious questions about his health and wealth. And so maybe this was why Liam started talking to Ruby and me as if the three of us were picking up from only that morning, yesterday at the very latest. “I’m sorry for all the boisterous codswallop,” he said, braking his wheelchair to a stop between us.
Ruby and I stood. Liam winked at me, then reached up to embrace Ruby in a brittle hug. She bent forward, and kissed his cheeks. He said to her, “My bonny Ruby Flagg, you’re beautiful, and tonight as I’m alone in my bed, I shall cry for being a man born too early to romance you proper.”
“Oh …” Ruby said. I have never thought of Ruby as the melting type, but she melted then.
“I’ve heard no more about you than your name, but we’ll get to know one another by-and-by,” Liam said. He put his lips to her hand. “Welcome to Ireland.”
“Oh…!”
I moved to Liam, took him in my arms, kissed his rough cheeks. I asked, “How are you, Uncle?”
“Suffering the usual indignities of a man seven decades here,” Liam said. He read pity in my face. Old people in wheelchairs have a right to resent such looks as mine. “This contraption instead of my legs, for instance,” he said, sniffing. “Also, an impressive case of constipation. Such knots in my pudding I suffer! And a mighty crink in my neck from looking up at you two. I could go on. But you’d leave me then. So, sit down.”
We sat.
Liam said, “I notice you’ve started on the whiskey, Neil. Too much spirit for me now. You’ll be kind enough to fetch me a sherry then?” He turned to Ruby. “And for yourself, bonny?”
“Yes, sherry please,” Ruby said. “I enjoy a drink with a charming man, especially in charming surroundings,”
I poured.
“Now, let me first say you mustn’t be overly heedful of the house squabblers,” Liam said after a small sip of his drink. “Moira’s a bit of a bigot and a monumental blister, but graced by God with the talent for cooking. That’s a rare woman in this land of potatoes and earnestly boiled beef, as you’ll soon come to appreciate. Old Patrick’s a defrocked priest, so he’s naturally a touch bitter and superior like. But he’s been my companion of ten years now, and I’ve learned to forgive him his mother hen ways.”
I shot a look at Ruby, then asked Liam, “Snoody was a priest? What did he do to lose the collar?”
“That was a long, long time ago,” Liam said, laughing lightly. “When Snoody was much younger than you, Neil. He was an idealist, believing in the perfectibility of man and such other twaddle. Which might have been tolerated had it not been for an unfortunate habit.”
“What was that?” Ruby asked.
“He was given to saying strong things that those above him could remember,” Liam said. “This is always most unwise. I suppose you’d like to know just what he said that got him the heave?”
“Yes,” Ruby said.
“Yes!” I said.
Liam took another small, slow sip. I felt a pinprick of memory: Uncle Liam sitting in our parlor in Hell’s Kitchen, for hours on end with my mother and with Father Tim and the neighbors, telling us wild, funny tales from the other side. And me, never guessing such stories came from anywhere but the house of a man rich only in imagination. Now here we sat in the lavish surroundings of this house, and Ladbroke Street.
“The Lord only knows where priests are delivered of these notions, but our young Father Patrick Snoody got it into his head as how the church must strive to be a blazing force for goodness and light in the world,” Liam said.
“Poor Snoody, he quickly found the church lacking in this mission, and this stunned the lad. So he became a viperous critic of the ecclesia, stunned as he further was to discover that the church is only one more society with the ordinary population of cheats, blackguards, mediocrities and Pecksniffs. He once actually sent a letter to a particularly nasty-hearted monsignor, and included the line from Swift that goes, ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another
Liam paused and sipped, then asked, “By the way, have you a fag?”
“Cigarette you mean?” I asked after a moment’s confusion.
“Aye, that’s it.”
“Sorry, no. When I smoke, it’s somebody else’s cigarettes.”
“Well, that’s a way of reducing the morbid odds,” Liam said. “Patrick and Moira, they’re not so very much different as would seem, the recipe for many a battle. Neither smokes, for instance. They won’t let me near fags of my own.”
“They’re concerned for your health,” Ruby suggested.
“Overly so,” I said. “Snoody wrote me you were dying.”
“Did he now? Dying!” Liam freed the brake on his chair, pivoting so he could look at the hallway. He turned to us again, and said, “The mother hen worries that I’m lonesome for my American nephew, and deprived of beautiful American women. He’s right. Good fellow, he’s got you both here.”
“Not without tragedy, Uncle,” I said.
“You’re speaking of the late Francie Boylan?”
“You know?”
“Aye. He was a good lad, but an idealist, with idealistic friends who spent entirely too much time in angry talking of the troubles.”
“The troubles—?” Ruby said.
“We Irish are unfailingly genteel in discussions of the guerrilla war up in Ulster, by which we mean the IRA murderers versus the Brit murderers,” Liam explained. “Anyway, as for poor Francie Boylan, loyal soldier to an ancient cause, may he be dead for a year before the Devil hears of it.”
“May I ask a blunt question?” Ruby said.
“Americans usually do. Ask away and I’ll answer you true, bonny. I would steal from you, but I would never lie.”
“How is it you’re not excited about any of this? You nor Snoody?”
“We are not so demonstrative as you Americans.”
“But your nephew and I could have wound up the same as Francie Boylan, shot dead in O’Connell Street by masked goons. And you’re not jumping up and down about it?” Ruby’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh—oh, I’m so sorry.”
Liam smiled. “I’ve done my share of jumping, and look where it’s got me,” he said, patting the chromed steel pushing rims around the wheels of his chair.
“Sorry,” Ruby repeated, twisting herself on the couch into a position that looked like it hurt.
She might have pressed Liam further, as I might have myself. But Ruby and I were not up to the challenge. We were numb and weary to the bone, from the shooting and from the long flight over.
“Think no more of it. I’m only a coot who’s lived long enough to know how violent death is unpleasant, though not unique. But what is unique is the pleasant moment now and again. In these few years God’s left me, I dedicate myself to cultivating the cheerful mood. I command all unpleasantness, no matter how close to home, to fly out of mind at once. So right you are, Miss Ruby, I’m a breezy old goat. ‘Tis a form of selfishness peculiar to the aged. Closely related to whistling in a graveyard, don’t you see.”
Liam finished his sherry. He asked me for another, and I fetched the bottle. He winked at Ruby, then offered me some avuncular counsel, “Lose your darling, Neil, and you’re a bleeding fool like myself. I lost a darling of my own, long ago, and now you know the great regret of my life.” He took a sip of the fresh sherry. “So tell me, how do you plan doing right by our bonny here?”
“Go on and talk about me, gentlemen,” Ruby said. “I’m not even here.”
“What she means, Uncle, is we’ve come for your blessing,” I said. How dangerously close I was coming to a real proposal, I thought. Ruby shot me a look tha
t told me she thought the same.
“How old-fashioned, how refreshing. You’ve got what you’ve come for, Neil. I fell in love with Ruby at first sight.”
“But it’s not all we’ve come for.”
“Oh?”
“What he means,” Ruby said, “is he’s come to fill up his hollow places.”
“I don’t follow you, bonny,” Liam said. There was the slightest quaver in his voice. He turned and looked at me.
“I’m in the pull of memory,” I said.
… And that I was, remembering the day I first told Ruby how I had all my life dreamed of my father; how dreams, and one photograph, were all I had of him; how anything else I might know of the man was taken by my mother to her grave. And how Ruby, staring quietly at me, had said, “I’m sorry, Hock, but shame on your mother.” And had I not said this same secret thing to myself?
Ruby also said that day, “Your father should never have been allowed to die that way, with nobody to give you his memory. Nobody survives without memories …”
Liam eyed me suspiciously, as well he should. I wanted to tell him all of it, right then and there: my father’s soldier photograph, the cryptic poetry, Father Tim’s suicide, Davy Mogaill. I wanted to ask my uncle a hundred questions about himself, starting with his fine house in Ladbroke Street all these years. And if he would not answer quick enough, I would shake the truth out of him.
But Liam’s cheery mask had faded, and with it, his strength. It was not now fair to ask him anything.
I could not help but resent this, just as Liam resented his wheelchair. Were we not both hostages? Liam to his chair, I to the silent truth of my father?
I managed to say to my uncle, “I’ve been dreaming about him, more than I ever have before.”
“Who?”
“My father, your brother.”
“There’s time,” Liam said, using his old arms to hoist himself up a few inches from his chair. A leg spasmed. He pounded at it with a fist, then pulled the quilt in his lap farther up toward his waist. These efforts tired him. “We’ll talk of Aidan, by-and-by …”
“And his mother, Mairead, too?” Ruby said.
Liam, a stricken expression in his face, said, “Yes, and Mairead, too …”
“Will you be all right, Uncle?” I asked him.
“I take my lie-down each day about now, that’s all. And why don’t the two of you run along and rest yourselves? The red room’s up on the third floor, to your left off the stair. Moira’s no doubt up there praying over your sinful bed.”
Ruby and I stood. I stepped behind Liam’s wheelchair and took the handles. “Tell me where you want to go, Uncle,” I said.
“Be off, you two,” he said. “Patrick will come find me here.”
As we headed toward the hallway, I remembered the phone on the desk with the eighteenth-century Italian sketch that was such a hit with German royals. I turned and asked, “May I make a telephone call?”
Liam, waving, said, “Yes—sure, sure.”
“I’m for a shower and a long nap,” Ruby said in the hall.
“Go on up then,” I said.
“You won’t be long, will you?”
“If I am, come get me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean this doesn’t feel good, does it?”
“No,” Ruby said.
“Go on.”
Ruby climbed the stairs. I dialed the international operator and gave the private number for Inspector Neglio at his office in One Police Plaza. As I waited for the connection, I heard a footstep in the back hall.
I looked. And saw only a shadow, of something.
“Hock—?” Neglio’s voice was as clear as if he were in the next room.
“Yeah … what do you hear from Mogaill?”
“Bad news.”
Chapter 15
My present line of work was not my first career choice.
Years ago, when City College was still tuition-free, as politicians had not yet learned they could win votes by mugging the poor, and I was up there taking journalism classes and trying my best to stay out of the draft, I saw myself as a newspaperman. In those days, I was crazy for a Hungarian girl who waited tables in her father’s no-nonsense restaurant on Convent Avenue.
I would sit for hours in that dreary spoon nursing coffee and goulash, telling Magda how I dreamed of being a reporter. “It’s like a calling,” I actually said. I admit, it brought a heat to Magda’s face that excited me. “I’m being called to make my living writing The Truth!”
One day the old man heard this. He walked over to where I was sitting with my goulash and where his daughter was floating happily around me. He was as big and solid and cold as a Kelvinator, and he never liked me. He noticed the pink in Magda’s neck and face and he did not like that either. The old man knew what to do about it.
“What’s it you going to write?” he asked me.
Again, I proclaimed my calling.
“What for you want to write the truth?”
“People need truth.”
“Maybe so, but people no want it.”
“Gee, I don’t know—”
“Don’t write truth, kid. You’ll die in the gutter. That’s the truth.”
All the air went out of me. Magda was not so moony anymore, and after a while I stopped coming by. And so I never became a journalist. But I became sadder and wiser, and as I did I noticed how the newspapers only became sadder.
Sometimes I think I would make a great newspaperman today, if I was not so busy being a cop. Which is just as well, because I do not think any newspaper would actually have me.
I imagine myself in some throwback of a newsroom, the kind in the black-and-white movies on late night television. My feet are up on the desk. I am dozing.
Flash! Some guy just murdered his wife of twenty-five years with a ginsu knife he got her for their last anniversary. A bloody, hacked-up job of it. The neighbors are very shocked because the guy and his missus were such a lovely couple and they never missed Sunday mass and all that.
The ladies and gentlemen of the press naturally fall all over themselves rushing over to the house because this is a major paper-seller. The hair helmets from television are there, too, looking into cameras and telling viewers they are “live” at the scene of the crime. As opposed to dead?
And then while all the other reporters are filling up their notebooks with the facts of the matter, I am off in a corner by myself wondering about a guy who once so loved a woman twenty-five years ago that he married her, then one awful day hated her so bad he diced her all over the kitchen linoleum.
The way I see it, this big murder story is no story at all. The real story is what happened during those twenty-five years of these two people being a lovely couple together. Here now would be The Truth. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the messy and complicated truth so help me God.
Only this does not cut it with the editor, who does not share my enthusiasm for the big picture. He is as big and solid and cold as a Kelvinator, and he does not like me. He says to me, “Just give me the facts, kid. You’ll find that’s the easiest way of filling up space on the page.”
I begrudge no one the warm comfort of an uncomplicated view, least of all simple journalists. Sometimes I wish that I, too, could trust in what I can see and hear, or what can be read in a few column inches of newsprint. Sometimes I wish I was not a cop.
In my time, I have hunted down many murderers. None of it was ever simple. Some killers were meek, small people with faded dreams that corroded their hearts over time, until they burned to show somebody something. They were mostly pathetic, and their crimes were mostly uncelebrated. Others held the city in a thrall of terror until collared, their marks on us validated as much by big black tabloid headlines as by the corpses.
My killers were all tried and convicted in court, where great and costly care was taken to reveal the facts of their crimes, if not their scarred lives. The jury would say what it ha
d to say, the judge would pronounce sentence, then later I would type an S for solved after their official case numbers. I would close up their manila folders and file them away, and sometimes forget.
The newspapers would give jumpy readers a soothing coda to the dreadful tale. A story about how the victim’s family felt that justice was done. Or how the murderer had bowed his head at the verdict and wept in repentance.
But these were only facts. And facts do not necessarily speak for themselves.
Any good cop knows that. Cops like Davy Mogaill, who would be the first to say that truth is as welcome as the lash; and that the truth may not always set us free.
Certainly not me. I hear a man can die in the gutter from truth.
Far from the gutter, there I stood in the hallway of my Uncle Liam’s well-appointed house. Where I had come for The Truth, finally, of my father. Whose name had so clearly troubled absent friends.
The telephone was in my hand, my heart was in my mouth. Hie priest was dead. And now this with my rabbi, whatever it was.
I was so terribly tired from it all—the flight, the grief of Father Tim’s suicide, the murder of Francie Boylan, the strangeness of my uncle’s house, now this with Mogaill; I wanted nothing more than to be upstairs, sleeping next to Ruby. Even if that meant hearing voices as I dreamed. Like Aidan Hockaday’s ghost, or the last thing Davy Mogaill said to me: “Sorry to say, Hock, there’ll be no easy sleep …”
But it was the sound of Neglio coming at me again, which is about as dreamy as a burglar alarm in Canarsie, at least when he is talking to me. Put him in a room full of his uptown Gracie Mansion friends and he sounds different; you would swear Tomasino Neglio never even heard of Knickerbocker Avenue. Now, from faraway Manhattan, he said, “Still there, Hock?”
And I actually said, “I’m here, just give me the facts.”
“All right, so far we got one thing for sure,” the inspector said. “Davy Mogaill’s house out in Queens was wired with a bomb that went off in the tiny hours.”
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