“I count myself a Shakespeare aficionado,” he said. He squinted his eyes and thought for a moment. “How about a Shakespeare challenge?” The cutter blew along the whitecaps, its sails majestic against the Brooklyn skyline. I stepped back from the window to face him.
“I accept your challenge, Governor.”
Excellent,” he said. “The subject is Macbeth. Over lunch we will ask three questions each. The winner gets a Montblanc pen, courtesy of this office,” and just as I was saying, “You’re on,” the press arrived, a flurry of cameras and microphones. The office’s press secretary rounded us up to stand behind the governor’s desk, New York’s top notable figures and three police widows.
“Governor Cuomo wants to have a literary contest with me,” I whispered to Mary Beth while the flashbulbs went off. I felt a surge of joy. I could never have conjured up this scene in a million years. Kathy Martin, the kid who slept on the top bunk in the basement apartment on Faile Street, was now standing next to the governor of the State of New York, and through my tenacity and diligence, the lives of every New York police and fire widow would change. No one else would have to fake a marriage or lie about it. My sons and the hundreds of sons and daughters who lost their father, children who had not considered higher education, would now go to college. As an educator, I was elated. As a South Bronx kid, I stood tall and let myself be counted.
All the major networks filmed as Governor Mario Cuomo signed the COPS Agenda, changing the path of those unfortunate enough to lose their spouses in the line of duty.
“The bill includes every New York State police and fire department,” the governor told the press, “including scholarships for survivors of volunteer fireman, and it has all come about as a result of the hard work of Kathleen Murray, Susan McCormack, and Mary Beth O’Neill.”
Afterward, we sat across from each other in the dining room, the governor and I, our plates piled high with sandwiches and salads. While we were standing around his desk I thought about the questions I composed for my Macbeth final, the ones we went over in class that were the first to be answered, a tactic I used to ease students into the more comprehensive questions that would come later. I would start with those now as well.
I taught Macbeth for the first time when I was a doctoral student. Then I stood before a podium in an auditorium with sixty or so students, all eyes on me, waiting to be enlightened on the Bard. I lectured from notes, unsure of myself. Now, over a decade later, having read the play scores of times, I no longer lectured. Instead, I gathered students into groups where they hashed out the language and the hidden interpretations and enlightened the class on their newfound appreciation of the master.
“Okay, Murray,” Governor Cuomo said, when we were settled. “First question: What did Lady Macbeth say when she thinks she sees blood on her hands?”
I smiled. He, too, would start with easy ones. “Out damned spot,” I answered.
We were a table of eight, including Matilda Cuomo, the first lady who had come to lend her support to police widows, Mary Beth, Susan, Jimmy Lysaght, Senator Dean Skelos, and the chief of police. Everyone at the table turned to listen as the Governor announced, “Correct! One for you.”
It was great fun for me, my territory, and I felt at ease and confident.
I asked, “What do the weird sisters predict?” He couldn’t help but grin at the anticipated question and waited a second.
Waving his fork in the air like a conductor, he said, “That Macbeth would become thane of Cawdor.”
“Yes, Governor, you are correct. We’re tied.”
“Now, tell me,” he asked as he dug into his plate of pasta salad. “How does Lady Macbeth comfort Macbeth when he begins to hallucinate?”
I waited a few seconds like I was considering the answer, but I knew it. The question was Shakespeare 101. “She comforts him by putting him to bed,” I answered.
“Your second question is,” I waited for the imaginary drum-roll, “what makes Duncan a good king?” It was an open question, the answers often varied, and I gave credit to anyone who suggested that Duncan was a people’s king.
He knew the answer right off, I could tell. “Duncan is kind and generous.” I felt the excitement rise up a notch. I could lose this, I thought. I will need to dig deeper into my bag of Macbeth trivia.
“Again, you are correct,” I said. “We are tied at two each. Give me your best shot, Governor, or go home empty-handed.”
“You got it.” He mimed a serious face before he asked his last question, “Why is Macduff able to kill Macbeth despite the witches’ prophecy?”
It was a really good question, one that had to do with Macbeth’s statement after he slays young Siward and announces that no man who is of woman born is a threat to Macbeth, but it was a question any learned Shakespearean would know. “Macduff was born by cesarean section,” I said, and waited for his reaction.
“Yes!” he declared. He was laughing now, animated, his eyes bright. There were smiles around the table, everyone waiting to see who would falter. I leaned forward and asked my last question, one I used to challenge my students. “Why is it Banquo and not King Duncan who haunts Macbeth?”
The governor squeezed his bushy eyebrows together as he thought over the question. He looked at his wife with a knowing smile before answering. “Because Macbeth is more troubled over murdering a king than a thane.” I popped a grape in my mouth and waited to see if he was going to revise his answer before I gave the correct one, as I would have done if I were in front of my class.
When he beamed at me as though the contest was a draw, I said, no, not quite. “Banquo was a greater threat because he heard the witches’ prophesy and knew of Macbeth’s ambition to become king.” He looked surprised and then realized his error.
“That’s right. I should have known that.” His smile lit up his face and everyone at the table clapped, and the governor took from his pocket a box containing a black pen with the white star on top.
We celebrated that afternoon, Mary Beth and Susan and I, and reveled in our accomplishment. It had been fourteen years since Brian died, and during most of that time I felt subjugated, at the mercy of the powers that be. Now I knew I had a voice and my voice was heard.
__________
For a long time after I left Julie sitting at the table in O’Neal’s, I would feel the sting of shame when I thought about her, that I had believed in her as an ally, that I had been seduced by her in the same way cult members talk about a kind of brainwashing that happens in the darkest, weakest corners of their mind. I don’t know if Terry McTigue ever knew that I was instrumental in Julie’s release, but it didn’t matter anymore.
As I moved about my life and realized what I had accomplished, I found that Julie became just an ordinary woman who had committed an egregious crime, believing it would make her extraordinary, and the aura I had built around her crumbled and remodeled into someone as indistinctive as a passerby.
What could, what should be done with all the time now before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
Aftermath
1990
On a warm summer day, James waited at the altar and I walked down the church aisle. As I stood before the priest, James took my hand and, finally, we were pronounced husband and wife. It had taken time, but James did forgive me for deceiving him. He said he didn’t understand why I didn’t trust him to support me, and I realized that he was right. James was a man who would always love and support me.
That fall I drove Keith two and a half hours to SUNY New Paltz. The roads were wet and clouds laced the sky. Keith sat up front with me, Kaitlin buckled in her car seat behind. I thought about how my eldest son had gotten to this day: night terrors as a child, his shaved head and black outfits as a teenager. Last summer he followed the Grateful Dead and had not called for a week
. He had not wanted Fordham in the Bronx where I could visit regularly. He was ready to be on his own.
The ride was mostly quiet as we watched the landscape pass. And then when we hit the thruway he said, “You know what, mom?”
“What?” I glanced over and noticed the shadow of a beard and saw again the day he sat on the bathroom sink while Brian shaved, his little face covered with foam as he watched his father. Today he looked a lot like his father, auburn hair cut short, square jaw, blue eyes.
“I was thinking about Brian. I know he was a hero. But I only knew him as perfect, never as a father or a man.” I watched him follow a raindrop down the windowpane with his finger. “But I think the real hero in my life is you.” He looked over at me. “You raised me, you taught me right from wrong, you changed laws.” He grinned. “I hope I can do half as much stuff as you did.”
Tears laced my eyelashes. My heart swelled with pride. He had never said words like that before. “Oh Keith, that’s so sweet. Thank you.”
We passed the rest of the time in quiet contentment and watched the sun come out, and as we drove onto campus Kaitlin read the sign.
“Sunny New Paltz,” she called out. We laughed. Sun glinted off the windows of the campus buildings.
“Well, here we are,” Keith said.
“Yes,” I told him. “We finally arrived.”
Epilogue
It was drizzling when the bomb squad van pulled up to Penn Station to pick us up for the trip to the West Village, a joy ride for my grandchildren with lights and sirens to part traffic. We were the guests of honor, there to co-name Charles Street Police Officer Brian Murray Way to honor a member of the bomb squad killed in the line of duty on September 11, 1976. Now it was 2014, and they had put up barricades to block traffic. A tent sheltered commissioners and chiefs and uniform police from the rain. Bomb trucks lined the curb, doors open, exposing robots and remote-control devices and every kind of protective gear available.
I never expected this kind of affirmation and recognition of our sacrifice. I thought a few of the members from the old bomb squad would gather for the unveiling, and watched in vain for Charlie, but even his absence and the rain couldn’t dampen the day. Today was a celebration. My sons, successful businessmen, mingled with dignitaries, and my grandchildren played in the street with a bomb-seeking robot. A gentleman I had never met offered his hand.
“I was a patrolman with Brian,” he told me, “and was deeply affected by his death. As a result, I decided to go into law instead of law enforcement. Now I am a judge.”
I felt a swell of pride, not grief, over the loss of a good man, and gratification at how many lives he touched. Keith stood before the microphone and spoke to the crowd of men who knew his father as he never had.
“We need only one light to guide us home,” he said, “and I was fortunate enough to have two, Brian Murray, whose light shone from heaven, and James Moran who walked by my side and showed me the way.”
Dignitaries on a dais spoke of heroism and bravery, how the bomb squad back then had dismantled devices in civilian clothes. A street re-naming is reserved for men like Brian Murray who saved lives, they said, trained to go where the rest of the NYPD cannot.
Spectators gathered at the corner, even when the rain began in earnest, and watched my grandchildren remove the shroud covering the new name of the street. It was a day I felt appreciation for the grand gesture by the City of New York and the New York Police Department, who in the end never forgot their own.
I missed Gracie. I always did on days like this. I wanted her to see the boys all grown up, fathers themselves now. And I missed my mother, who died in that nursing home surrounded by her family. My father died alone in his Brooklyn apartment, Corky followed a few years later.
Zvonko Busic was finally released from prison after thirty-two years. And as she told me on that October afternoon almost twenty years before, Julie went to Croatia to wait for him. Once there, she was put on a no-fly list and refused reentry into the U.S. When Zvonko returned to his home country, he was given a hero’s parade. But a few years later, after failing to assimilate into society, he left a suicide note and put a bullet in his head.
Sometimes, driving to teach an early morning class at Suffolk Community College, I think about those mornings I used to wake up in the basement apartment on Faile Street where I took my usual spot on the edge of the claw foot tub. There I watched my mother put on her makeup, cover the bruises my father left, and, as she rolled up her silk stockings with the seam up the back, asked, “Are they on straight?”
Perhaps we’re in jeopardy of being hijacked more often than we think. For my mother, the hijacker was a father who married her off at sixteen to an alcoholic she didn’t love, Gracie’s hijacker was her addiction, Brian’s was an obsessed political fanatic and his wife. But for those children and fathers and sisters and widows who are left behind, perhaps we have a choice, to be hijacked again, or to make the sometimes difficult, often-complex choice for freedom, instead.
Acknowledgements
Suzanne Kingsbury, my directional editor, mentor, shoulder to cry on, and everlasting friend, your brilliant ideas helped shape my story, for which you have my heartfelt thanks.
To my agents, Laura Rothschild, whose enthusiasm brought this book into the light, and Sandra O’Donnell, who saw what I didn’t and polished every word.
To my brothers and sisters, to whom I am grateful for giving my life such richness and diversity. Thank you to my mother, long deceased, but never out of my thoughts, and to Gracie, who loved me when no one else did.
Huge gratitude to my writing buddies, Rochelle Donnino, who lived this dream with me, Dede Cummings, who began our voyage together, Charlotte DeKanter Chung, Amanda Skelton, Sharisse Smith, Kyle Minor, Kate Goehring, and Lynne Kramer, who helped steer me toward my goal. Special thanks to Tony Curto, for his sound advice.
To Dayna Anderson, Kayla Church, Cami Wasden, and the staff at Amberjack, thank you for the amazing opportunity.
Most of all, thank you to my husband James, who stood aside while I wrote about a life that came before, and encouraged me always to just write. And to my children, Keith, who cheered me on, Chris, who believed I could do it, his wife Dayna, my number one cheerleader, Kaitlin, who listened to my endless stories and offered sound feedback, and her husband, Grant Lacey, who praised my efforts at every turn. And to my grandchildren, Olivia, Finnegan, and Lillian, who are proud their Mema wrote a book.
About the Author
Kathleen Murray Moran holds a BA in Journalism (Magna cum Laude) and an MA in English from SUNY Stony Brook. She has taught writing and literature at Suffolk Community College for twenty-five years.
She is the widow of Brian Murray, and the co-founder of Survivors of the Shield (SOS). As a cofounder of SOS, a New York City police widows’ organization providing social, economic, and emotional support to surviving spouses of police killed in the line of duty, Kathleen has given speeches in front of audiences of over one thousand people, has helped organize and secure funding for the bomb squad’s 100th anniversary dinner, has appeared on Sixty Minutes, NBC Live at Five, and given numerous interviews.
She was also instrumental in passing legislation that led to former Governor Mario Cuomo’s COPS Agenda. She has worked with State Senator Dean Skelos to establish full scholarships for line of duty widows and children to all SUNY schools, and a four-year scholarship to St. John’s University. She has worked with the office of the governor of New York, Crime Victims Board, and the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles, to ensure officers killed in the line of duty are recognized and to secure benefits for their families.
Kathleen has met with Mayors Dinkins, Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg, Commissioner Ray Kelly, and PBA President, Patrick Lynch, to ensure the continuing cooperation between the City of New York and police widows. She met with Mayor Giuliani to ensure the continued incarceration of Zvonko Bus
ic, the Croatian terrorist who spearheaded the hijacking of TWA flight 335 on September 11, 1976. She worked with Mayor DeBlasio and Councilwoman Christine Quinn’s office to rename the Charles Street corner of Bleecker Street in New York City, Police Officer Brian Murray Way, which was dedicated in an official ceremony on October 1, 2014.
In 2014, an excerpt from her memoir went viral on Salon.com (it was listed as the #3 Life story of the year). Another excerpt was shortlisted for the Huff Post/AARP memoir award and guest judge Rita Wilson called her story, “one of the very best pieces our judges encountered.” A podcast was recorded for NPR’s Snap Judgment (the segment earned Atlantic Monthly’s Top-Fifty spot). Her story has been showcased on NPR Ireland, Vancouver Public Radio, and Comcast X/Finity. Kathleen has recently been approached by 20/20 to participate in a feature on forgiveness.
She lives on Long Island where she organizes writing and book groups. Kathleen is currently working on her first novel.
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