All Souls (21 page)

Every day we called the hospital, and it turned into months of hearing the same thing: “Danger list,” the voice would say before hanging up on me, as if they were sick of me calling. But I was relieved, after every call, not to be told she was dead. Every day through the winter months of 1981, we woke up to continue our watch. Some nights I couldn't sleep at all, thinking I'd wake up to bad news. No doctor or nurse could tell us whether Kathy would live or die. The nurses said they didn't want to give us too much hope, when she could die at any moment, and I thought they were cold to say such useless words. They did tell us early on, though, that the longer Kathy stayed in a coma, the worse her brain damage; and that it was unlikely she'd ever be the same again.

We all took turns visiting Kathy in the intensive care unit, but it seemed I was there around the clock, in the surgical mask and gloves they made me put on so I wouldn't pass on any germs to her. I should've been at Boston Latin School, but I couldn't sit through class, knowing Kathy might die at any moment. I thought that if I kept talking to Kathy while she was in the coma, it might get her brain working and she'd come back to life. The nurses never asked why I wasn't in school, and every morning Ma saw me leave the house with my huge stack of ancient history and Latin books, not knowing that I was going to the City Hospital. Our telephone was disconnected in those days for not paying the bill, so the school could never call Ma. And I ripped up any mail that would come from Latin. I was relieved that the telephone was out, except that I kept thinking no one would be able to reach us when Kathy died. So whenever I couldn't be at Kathy's bedside, I'd go out to the phone booth at least once an hour to call patient information.

One of our neighbors who was a nurse at City Hospital came by the house every day, to give Ma updates about Kathy and to offer some hope that Kathy would get through this. Karen was always sneaking by Kathy's bedside, checking on her vital statistics even though it wasn't her floor at the City Hospital. Karen said Kathy was a fighter, and that she must really have the will to live, because she was baffling the doctors, overcoming every threat of death that came her way. Karen Young was one of the people in the neighborhood who came and went from Old Colony each day, never getting caught up in the action on the streets. She was always smiling, and some of the younger kids bragged that they knew her whenever they saw her going off to work in her nurse's uniform. One of her brothers, Charlie, hung out with Kevin in the back room. One time I'd walked in on them, weighing white powder on scales and snorting lines. But Karen seemed different. That's why the neighborhood went into a dark and silent state of shock a year later, on the day she was strangled to death by her boyfriend. I remember having seen Karen and her boyfriend the day before her murder, and thinking it might be possible to live a normal life in the Old Colony Project.

I saw all the comings and goings from the room where Kathy lay in a coma. It was like being at a wake, with everyone stopping by with flowers and a card to pay respects over the body. Kathy was listed in “stable condition,” but she just lay there with her eyes sealed shut and tubes connecting her to machines. No one knew what to do, the way we never knew what to do around the bodies that we were seeing more and more of those days at Jackie O'Brien's Funeral Parlor. “Should we pray?” “Should we talk to her?” “Can she hear us?”

Early in the day, I was the only one up there. Then Ma would come in the afternoon, and ask me to leave the room so that she could be alone to yell into Kathy's ear and try to wake her up. “Kathy always hated like hell to be woken up in the morning,” she laughed. Ma was all smiles when she showed up, like everything was normal. Then, after spending some time alone with Kathy, she looked like she'd been crying, but she still forced a smile when she left to pick up the little kids from nursery school. Ma always told me not to stay too long, and every day she'd say she had “a good feeling” that Kathy would be coming out of the coma.

All the aunts, Ma's four sisters, came in regularly to visit Kathy. My Aunt Mary Kelly would come bursting into Kathy's room to tell her that the hostages in Iran had been freed, or to give other updates, like that Ronald Reagan was doing a great job running the country. But all she got in return was the beeping from the machines that told us Kathy was still alive. My Aunt Leena looked around the room at some of the cards Kathy was receiving and made conversation about Kathy's nice friends. “Ohhh, who's this one from?” she asked about a poem written to Kathy; “my Irish Colleen” it called her. “Oh, just some guy,” I said. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was from a convicted bank robber doing time in a federal prison.

Kathy's friends didn't come in much. Most of them were usually too busy getting high on Patterson Way and East 8th Street, the way Kathy would have been if she hadn't crashed onto the sidewalk. Ma said they didn't come around much because they couldn't deal with the pain of seeing Kathy like that. She'd been a beautiful girl, hard to remember now, with half her hair shaved off, infections all over her face, tubes going in and out of her, and the machine that beeped every second. I had a hard time seeing her like this too, I thought, but isn't that what Southie loyalty is all about? Kathy had been such a popular girl, and I wondered why more people didn't seem to care. Some of her friends did come, though, and sometimes I'd walk in to find them blessing themselves or holding Kathy's hands and crying, or talking away and laughing as if she was alive and well.

Timmy Baldwin was one who came in all the time. He wanted to be alone with Kathy, just like Ma. And he always brought flowers. Timmy was known to be a tough kid in Southie—we all knew about his beating someone over the head with a crowbar once when he was high, and about the time he was all messed up and shot a sawed-off shotgun from the project rooftop, yelling, “Look out below!” But I got to see his soft side, like at Kathy's bedside, and remembered the times he'd appeared out of nowhere when I was having a problem with older kids in the neighborhood. “What do you want, a beatin'?” he'd say to them. “Do you know who this is? He's a MacDonald!” pointing at me like I was some kind of royalty in the Old Colony Housing Project. I knew the Timmy who was loyal and watching our backs, like you were supposed to do in Southie. When Kathy dated Timmy, I thought they'd get married someday, and I'd have my own personal bodyguard for a brother-in-law. They'd broken up before Kathy went off the roof, but here was Timmy, still loyal to Kathy and to the MacDonald family. Timmy was both tough and loyal, like everything we wanted to believe about Southie.

A few years after Kathy's fall, Timmy was shot twice in the head while sitting in his car in front of the Quiet Man. About a hundred people leaving Triple O's Tavern across the street saw the shooting, but wouldn't rat to the cops. When the judge at the grand jury tried to get Timmy's best friend to tell what he'd seen that night, he just looked at the judge and said, “I'm from Southie. We keep things to ourselves.” The word around town was that Mark Estes had killed Timmy. Years later, he would die the same way: shot in front of a crowd spilling out of a pub, none of whom came forward. Everyone said he deserved it for what he'd done to Timmy, but that's what some people had said about Timmy too.

Julie Meaney came in to Kathy's bedside a few times, as high as a kite. I couldn't tell if she was falling apart, shaking like a leaf and crying, for Kathy or for herself. I don't think she knew either, high as she was. In a few years, Julie would walk into the water at Carson Beach and never come out.

Frankie McGirk came in once with Julie. I left the room immediately, because I could feel his badness, and Ma had always said he'd gotten Kathy into the angel dust. Not long after that visit, we heard the screams come down Patterson Way when he was stabbed to death over a drug debt. Everyone said McGirk deserved what he got too. I knew some of my neighbors wanted to downplay how bad it was that someone could lie dead in a project hallway while kids played outside. I remember thinking Frankie McGirk should've been arrested by the cops and put in jail, not given a death sentence from people no holier than he. But that's what some called “street justice” in Southie.

Tommy Dooley came in too, all spiffed up in his cashmere coat, like he had to dress up for Kathy. Tommy was dating Tisha Stokes, who Kathy'd been hanging out with. Ma liked Tommy Dooley, but she didn't like to see Kathy with Tisha or any of the Stokes family. Tisha was heavy into the angel dust and coke, and Ma cringed every time she heard “that voice” squealing up to the window for “Kathy Mac!” When Tommy Dooley came in to see Kathy, he began by cracking jokes with her, but then he would give up like everyone else and just say a prayer over her motionless body. Two years later Tommy was killed by Tisha's family outside Kelly's Cork and Bull Tavern. Everyone said Joe “Stokesy” Stokes had led his brothers in kicking Tommy and beating him to death with a lead pipe. But when it came time to testify before a grand jury, when Stokesy turned himself in five years later, all the witnesses who'd been at the bar that night couldn't remember a thing. And Stokesy's brother Stippo was married to the niece of Detective Lumsden, the homicide investigator.

Betty LeClair used to come in to see Kathy with her son Eddie. Betty drank a lot, but she was always there for Ma. She wasn't like “the vultures,” as Ma called some of the older women who came to Davey's funeral and Kathy's bedside just to see who was grieving properly. Betty had real tears as she talked into Kathy's ear and kissed her forehead, disobeying hospital rules to keep the surgical mask on at all times. Eddie was my age and we had hung out a lot, going to Illusions in the disco days. And he stood now at the foot of Kathy's bed with hands clasped, doing the praying-at-a-wake thing. In a few years, his body too would be lying still like Kathy's, but in a casket at O'Brien's Funeral Parlor. Eddie was run over, murdered some said, at three in the morning outside a crowded bar on Dorchester Street. People kept their mouths shut about that one too.

Kevin came to the hospital with Okie O'Connor. Kevin and Okie were best friends, and it was Okie who made sure the two took time out from their busy day to visit Kathy. Ma always raved about how polite Okie was, carrying her bundles and answering all her questions with a “Yes, Mrs. MacDonald” or a “No, Mrs. MacDonald.” Frankie and Kevin said that Okie was a comedian, keeping them laughing all the time. But Frank was worried about Okie's coke use. Still, no one ever imagined he'd be found, two years after I saw him talking to Kathy in her coma, hanging from a rope in his parents' basement, dead by the age of nineteen. Kevin and Frankie broke into Jackie O'Brien's Funeral Parlor in the middle of the night to stay awake by Okie in his casket. Jackie O'Brien was going to press charges to get them to pay for the back door they broke, but Okie's father had no problem with what the kids had done to show their loyalty, and said he would pay for the door himself.

Brian Biladow came all the way to the City Hospital in his wheelchair, with Michael Dizoglio pushing him. When Ma was studying at Suffolk University in the seventies, she'd gotten a social work internship at an alternative school for juvenile delinquents and kids who'd dropped out—mostly since busing began. That's where Ma had met Brian and Michael and a gang of kids from the D Street Project. The teenagers were thrilled that “a Southie lady” was working at the school, rather than “another liberal snob,” as they told Ma. They thought Ma was pretty cool in her fringed cowboy coats and spike-heeled go-go boots. They opened up to her, and came by the house to tell her all their problems. Not long after Ma started working at the school, Brian got shot in the spine after getting high and breaking into a neighbor's house for drug money. Ma had made the whole family visit Brian in the hospital, and now here he was, being wheeled into Boston City by Michael Dizoglio, brother to Dizzo, the ice cream man. “Hey, Kathy—how ya doin', hon',” Brian yelled in his nasal voice, like he was wheeling into a party in Old Colony. He brought her some flowers, and jokingly offered her some of the coke he always kept hidden under his ass while he wheeled around the projects, waving to the cops. Michael Dizzo was quiet while Brian did all the socializing in Kathy's room. Some years later Michael was murdered, along with his nephew Stephen Dizzo, in an apartment in the three-decker where they lived in Andrew Square. According to the newspapers, their upstairs neighbor, a seventeen-year-old, shot the two of them with his rifle after Michael had broken down the apartment door in a fight over money. Michael had just gotten out of a detox a few months earlier. His nephew Stephen, a quiet kid getting his high school diploma from Boston High, ran upstairs after hearing the gunfire, and was shot in the head. Stephen's thirteen-year-old sister found them both on the floor.

But then I only knew my own family's pain. First Davey, and now Kathy. We were too closed in on ourselves to know that we were only part of a bigger bloodbath spilling into the streets of the neighborhood we'd thought was heaven on earth. Although we'd seen people like Brian Biladow wheeling around the neighborhood, they seemed more like upbeat survivors than victims of anything. No one took the time to make all the connections. Most of us were too busy picking up the broken pieces of our families. And those who hadn't been hit yet protected themselves by seeing our young dead or wounded as somehow deserving their fate.

Frankie came in to the City Hospital and watched Kathy with anger in his eyes and fists clenched. One time he put a holy medal in her hands and left in tears. That day he walked up to Richie Amoroso on Dorchester Street and gave him a beating that landed Richie in the hospital. Frankie wasn't usually a troublemaker now that he was winning titles in boxing rings all over New England. But he said he was tired of waiting on the cops to investigate Kathy's fall. All the same neighbors who said they'd seen and heard the fight between Kathy and Richie that night, the coldest night of the year, never answered the door when Ma and Frankie showed up with detectives looking for a statement. Ma saw their peepholes go dark, though, from their eyes looking through, so we all knew they were just minding their own business. We knew that minding your own business was the rule in Southie, but it was different for us now that we wanted some answers about Kathy being in a coma. Frankie chose street justice, with no one talking and the cops giving up so easily. But Amoroso was back out on the streets in no time, and people were already starting to ask less often about how Kathy was doing in the hospital.