Life Detonated

by Murray Moran, Kathleen

  And what of McTigue, when he woke up to a ruined face and stumps for fingers, did he figure out what happened? As the highest-ranking expert in the New York City Police Bomb Squad, did he know what went wrong?

  __________

  At a tarmac outside of Paris, Julie Busic and the co-pilot were allowed to get off the plane. When they were picked up in a van, the French police asked Julie how many terrorists were on the plane and were shocked when she said she was one of them. The police showed her proof that the declaration had been printed in the specified newspapers and she relayed to Captain Carey that their demands had been met.

  Busic took the microphone: “You will be freed. You see, my friends, we have a cause, and we wanted the world to understand our cause, a cause of oppressed people. Now the world knows. I hope that you will support our aims. It is just; it is right. We will win, but it will be hard; a long, hard struggle is ahead for my people. I do not care what happens to me. They can kill me—cut me up into hundreds of little pieces, put me in jail for the rest of my life. They can do to me as they like, for the message is sent; I have done my work for my people. You are free to go now. There are no bombs, they are not real, just silly putty. We never intended to hurt you. And the pots, just clay, my friends. Just clay.” And to the City of New York, Busic said, “there is no second device, only the one in locker 5713.”

  And so it was over for the hijacked passengers. Captain Carey took the microphone and asked for a round of applause for the Busics for their bravery and commitment. Somehow, during the course of the ordeal, the captain had been persuaded that the Freedom Fighters’ cause was worthy of hijacking a plane.

  At the time Captain Carey applauded the hijackers, he did not know that the bomb left in a New York City subway locker was filled not with silly putty, but real dynamite. He did not know that when the Busics placed that assembled device in the locker, they were sure it would not blow up and kill a cop who had recently celebrated his 27th birthday, blowing out candles with a wish that would never come true. The captain had yet to learn that the innocent-looking shopping bag made its trip to Grand Central Station on a warm afternoon where it sat unnoticed by hundreds of passersby until that young cop safely removed it and transported it to the sand pit in the Bronx. At the tmie he believed that while the Busics held captive his airplane filled with terrified passengers who were afraid those hours would be their last, that their actions were well-meaning, and that freedom for Croatian people was a justified reason for taking a plane hostage.

  None of the hostages who applauded their hijackers knew that in a few months the sympathetic couple who held them hostage would be sentenced to life in prison for taking the life of a police officer, father of two little boys who dreamed of a picnic with their Daddy. The picnic his wife had already prepared. The one they would never share.

  Captain Carey eventually learned the whole story of what happened in New York City while he placated the man and woman who held him captive on a French runway, but I never would. I continued to be plagued by the same questions. Why did a procedure the bomb squad had carried out hundreds of times unexpectedly fail? Why wouldn’t McTigue talk to me? I wanted to know. But could I sue the NYPD as Charlie had suggested? I had grown up feeling invisible and had narrowly escaped a life of poverty and degradation. Who was I to sue the City of New York?

  __________

  “Cover these newspapers,” my mother warned me when she moved her things into Brian’s study the following weekend. “You don’t want the boys seeing them.”

  I watched her looking askance at the notes I had taken while she put away her teacup. As she unpacked a box of paperbacks that Timmy had helped move in, I realized that she had never outgrown turning her back on danger, pretending that perpetrators like her violent husband would disappear if she stopped looking at him. My mother didn’t want to know how her son-in-law was killed. She wanted the whole thing to go away.

  “Don’t encourage her to read about those terrorists,” I overheard her say to Gracie one night. “Get her a good book.”

  It would be easier for me to just let go and make a new life for my sons and myself, but I knew that this was a legacy I could not bring into my life, this habit of hiding things, pushing them aside. Somewhere in the aftermath of the hijacking, it became clear to me that this kind of hiding was a seducer, something I needed to resist with everything in me. I could not dodge the truth of what the Busics had done or how that bomb exploded.

  The two most important days in your life are

  the day you are born, and the day you find out why.

  — Mark Twain

  Hiding

  1954

  I was seven when I first encountered my mother’s propensity for hiding. Aunt Delia was coming to visit our Faile Street apartment. The yellowed organdy curtains that normally hung in the basement kitchen were getting a bath. The red refrigerator had been realigned, the kitchen chairs re-taped. Danny followed me as I swept the cellar floor. “Hold on to this cardboard,” I instructed him. He squatted down so I could use it as a dustpan.

  My mother put out a plate of donuts and her best teacups. Her lips were painted red and her apron was on its hook, her favorite blue dress in its place. “You play outside with your cousins,” she told me. “I don’t want them running around the cellar.”

  Our cousins, who lived in a house in Queens with a dock and a boat in their backyard, stood far enough away not to catch cooties. “My mother said not to touch anything,” Frankie told us, and I thought about spitting on him when Johnny chimed in, “Let’s play hide and seek.”

  In an effort to take them outside I said, “How about cracks in the sidewalk?” It was a game where you ran the length of the street without stepping on a crack, your body zigzagging like a crab.

  Instead of listening to me, Frankie yelled, “You’re it!” and was quick to take off for the back of the cellar.

  “My mother said to stay outside,” I yelled to him, but he kept going, so I ran outside and covered my eyes and counted as everyone but Danny scattered. He held onto my leg, sucked his thumb, and tried to see through his long blonde bangs.

  “Eight, nine, ten,” I called, ready to start my search, when Frankie ran from the cellar to the yard.

  “There’s a baby in there.”

  Johnny came from behind the stoop, Annie and Timmy from the next alleyway.

  “Come see.”

  Frankie’s face flushed as he hurried into the storage room. He had on the red high-top sneakers that were on the list of things I wanted but knew better than to ask for. We followed him. And there, among old brooms and buckets and stray pallets of wood, was our old baby carriage. When we poked our heads in we found a blue blanket. A tiny baby was wrapped inside.

  “Who is this?” Frankie asked.

  It probably belonged to one of the tenants, I thought, or maybe my mother was minding it for someone, but my face burned hot as though I were telling a lie.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. The urge to pee made me squeeze my legs together.

  Frankie ran into the kitchen and came back with Aunt Delia. “There’s a real baby in the storage room.” His voice was pitched high as a whistle. We all looked in at the baby, who kicked its feet and tried to focus its little blue eyes. Aunt Delia stared at the baby and then at me, like I had done something bad. She had the same face as my mother, the same blue eyes, but her hair was black. She smelled wonderful.

  “Whose baby is this?” Delia asked. Her eyes were pinched together, making my stomach feel funny. And then she picked up the baby, apparently not concerned that it might throw up on her red dress. My mother stood at the door to the kitchen, her hands folded across her chest. “Who does this child belong to, Sarah?” Delia asked again.

  My mother lifted her head, but I noticed the quiver in her chin. “His name is Patrick, and he’s mine.” She reached out and took the baby from her sister,
burying her face in the blue blanket.

  Aunt Delia cleared her throat. “I didn’t know Tom still came around.” She looked like she might cry too. “Sarah. Why didn’t you tell me?” My mother shook her head, but she couldn’t look at her sister who would not understand giving in to a husband who took her whether she protested or not.

  “Can I hold him?” I reached out as Aunt Delia and my cousins gathered around, and my mother placed my newest brother in my arms.

  “Hi Patrick.” I touched his tiny nose. “You make eight.”

  __________

  My mother learned to hide what she loved early on. Back in their childhood in the ‘30s, it was Delia, older by two years, who had gotten pregnant first. When she and my mother were teens in a walk-up on West 80th Street that reeked of boiled cabbage, my mother had to pretend she was the good sister, wiping off the lipstick she put on after school, shivering at the thought of Papa finding out about Bernie, the boy she wanted to marry as soon as she graduated high school.

  And then one day she risked stopping at the Star movie theater where a sign called for a ticket taker at $2.50 a day. “I’m eighteen,” she lied to the manager, hoping he didn’t notice her Cardinal Spellman uniform under her coat. “I can work on Saturdays and Sunday after church,” she told him, not sure at all if her father would let her.

  “Come around on Saturday,” the manager told her, “and we’ll try you out.”

  She couldn’t wait to tell Delia, stuck at home with a big belly that had taken her freedom and shut down the subject of dating for her three sisters, so that Sarah had to sneak around to see Bernie. She tucked the pack of Pall Malls into the plaid skirt she thought made her look like the nuns who taught her at Cardinal Spellman, and opened the door to find her mother at the stove, the usual white apron covering the front of her flowered dress that came to her ankles.

  The way my mother told it, her papa had been sitting in the over-stuffed chair in the living room with The Daily Mirror and his cigar, a glass of Schlitz with a head of white foam on the table in front of him. Her papa wasn’t tall, but the farming back in Ireland had made him big and strong. With his wavy brown hair and round blue eyes, she told me he was often called handsome.

  But that day she walked into the living room and told him, “I got a job, Papa.” Her heart kicked in her chest. “It pays two dollars a day,” she lied, “and all I have to do is take tickets at the movie theater on Saturday and Sundays.” She thought the two dollars would persuade him, it was the depression after all, and she could put the other fifty-cents in her pocket. She didn’t tell him that the most exciting part of the job was that during breaks she could see Bernie. After work he could sneak in the side door and save the price of the fifteen-cent ticket, and together they could watch Clark Gabel stride across the screen.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, and went back to his newspapers.

  “He won’t let you work at the movies,” Delia told her later. “He’s afraid you’ll end up like me, pregnant and unmarried.” When my mother told me this story, I pictured Delia giving her a little smirk, pushing her glossy black curls out of her eyes, and my mother’s smugness, thinking she would never let herself get in Delia’s situation, never let Bernie go all the way until they were married.

  That Friday afternoon she had come straight home from school, dropped her books on the kitchen table, and braced for Papa’s answer. He had stalled three days, and if he didn’t say yes by tonight, the job would be lost. She stopped short when she saw a man standing in the living room with big ears and a cigarette burning low between his fingers. He was probably a friend from Papa’s job as a house painter. But her father introduced her.

  “This is Tom Martin,” he said. “He would like to marry you.”

  My mother had looked more closely at the man, at his shiny suit hanging on his skinny frame. “This is surely the best thing,” her father told her. “Tom will provide for you.” She then turned toward the kitchen. “Mama?” But her Mama was suddenly very busy with the dishes.

  Delia got pregnant, but it was Sarah who was forced to marry, doomed to a life with a stranger whose only redeeming trait was that he was Irish. Her parents didn’t have to worry about Catherine, the oldest, who promised she was going to become a nun as soon as she was over the Tuberculosis that had plagued her since she was a child, or Maggie, who had joined the Navy to get out of the house.

  “If you would rather the convent, Sarah, we can arrange that,” her father had said later when they sat down for dinner. Papa and Tom painted houses together and sometimes stopped for a beer after work. Tom was 28 years old, had a job, an apartment in the Bronx, and would keep her from carrying on with that boy who her father knew walked her home from school.

  A month later, Sarah wore a navy polka-dot dress and matching hat she borrowed from Delia and stood next to Tom Martin in front of a clerk at City Hall. Had she been more discreet with Bernie, my mother sometimes told me, everything would have turned out differently.

  “But it’s best not to think about the past,” she told me again and again. “The past will break your heart faster than anything.” She told me versions of this story many times in my childhood, sitting at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, her feet up after a long day at the automat. It seemed to act as some kind of apology or excuse for all the attention she never paid us. And I did feel sorry for my mother because I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be married to Tom Martin—a man I hated before I was old enough to understand the contempt he felt for his wife and children.

  To my father, we were five dollars a kid. On Wednesdays after school, Annie and I would pick up the child-support money. On our way through Grand Central, passersby did a double-take at two girls heading through the terminal, too young to walk around the city alone. But I was used to traveling by myself and had been riding the subways since I was old enough to read the station names.

  42nd Street bustled with guests coming and going from the Commodore Hotel and commuters swarming down the stairs to the subway trains. We stood beneath the big Tiffany clock and waited for my father to come out of the Horn & Hardart automat on his cigarette break. The 42nd Street store was one of the first automats, opened in 1902, and one of my father’s jobs, since he had quit house painting, was to stand behind a glass booth and hand out nickels for the slots that dispensed sandwiches and coffee that flowed from a brass lion’s mouth. “Nickel thrower,” my mother called him, “that’s all he’s good for.”

  Wind whipped at my skirt and I thought about the warm restaurant and the pie that came around on a carousel. But when my father crossed the street, he didn’t bring us pie. He didn’t even say hello. He lit up a Camel with yellow fingers and smoked as if we weren’t there. Finally, he glanced at me, spit a fleck of tobacco from his tongue, and handed me four tens.

  “I need carfare, too,” I said, abandoning the idea of asking for pie. His mouth twisted into a grimace as he reached into his pocket, and he shoved two dimes at me. Then he jaywalked across 42nd Street and disappeared inside the revolving doors.

  __________

  There were times that the cloak of invisibility served me well. So many times, I had watched my father’s hands grab hold of my mother and squeeze until she was down on her knees, had listened as his smoke-ruined voice called her “slut,” “whore,” “bitch.” But no matter how much Fleischmann’s whiskey he drank or how many times he whipped off his belt, my father never touched me. For a long time, I wondered when my time would be up, until I realized he didn’t see me. I was five dollars.

  __________

  My mother’s papa, old and bald by the time I met him, had also affirmed this idea that I was invisible. I remember going to his house in Queens for his birthday. He stood at the door and watched his daughter’s eight children walk up the narrow walkway. He let my mother and Rose and Gracie in the door and then stopped in front of the rest of us, ba
cking up the line.

  “You sit on the top step,” he told Corky, pointing to the flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms, “and you,” he pointed to me, “sit two steps down, and the rest of you, whatever your names are, skip a step and sit down.”

  We each took our step—Corky, me, Annie, Timmy, Danny, and Patrick—and didn’t move until he came back with a tray of six plates of birthday cake. He handed Corky a plate and doled out the cake to the rest of us on his way down.

  “Don’t spill anything,” he said as he walked away.

  We could hear our aunts chatting, cousins running around the house, but never close enough to see. Finally, I took a bobby pin from my hair and scratched the flowers off the wallpaper so they would know I was there.

  Nothing should be out of the reach of hope.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Juxtaposition

  My mother would have liked me to move on with my life, but I couldn’t do that until I had answers. The trial date for the Busics hovered like an impending storm, but when the district attorney asked me to meet in his office, I thought I would find resolution to the questions that left me troubled.

  It was a few weeks before Christmas when I sat in David Trager’s office. I could almost feel the Busics across the way in federal lockup, a block from Foley Square. While I waited for him to make himself comfortable behind his desk, I tried to steady my heartbeat. The room seemed smaller than I expected, overheated, crowded with papers, books, and files piled everywhere.