The City Below (11 page)

Terry laughed. "You never quit, do you?"

"Hey, you mick meatball, take a look." Bright held his hands out "This train is leaving the station. I don't want to leave my buddy behind." He pumped his hands, choo-choo. "Come on, Terry. It's an idea. They fucking
love
ideas upstairs. Anything that turns up the volume, and this would. Come upstairs with me."

Terry glanced back toward Didi. She had returned to the mimeograph, but she was staring across the vacant room at him. Without effort he read what was written in her expression. Why did they do this to us, coming down here? And Terry wondered for both of them, Why had it seemed so important, keeping this world separate, keeping it only theirs? He faced McKay again. "Okay, let's go."

They started toward the stairwell, but Squire called out, "One more thing." When McKay and Terry turned back, he said loudly, "We could probably get the carnations dyed. They could be green, like for St. Paddy's Day."

McKay said, "Jesus, you're not kidding, are you? We'll go with the matador theme, Squire, not the leprechaun."

One of the Young Dems working at a postage meter machine by the wall snorted. McKay continued to make his way across the wide room toward the heavy fire door.

Terry remained where he was for a moment, staring back at his brother. He knew damn well that while Squire had not been kidding about dyeing carnations, he had not meant it either. Leprechaun, shit Squire had fired a parting shot was all, and now he stood there grinning, the friendliest brother a guy could ever want He had puffed his chest out to flaunt his puerile jacket, asinine name on his chest, and Terry saw him suddenly as a pot-bellied, strutting, middle-aged fart, turning the circuit from City Square out to Old Ironsides,
still
wearing that thing after all, a true Townie male forever.

Only Terry Doyle could read the question hidden in his brother's phony smile, his wearing 'o' the green: Who
thefook
do you think you are?

***

The "bull gang" at Boston Garden was famous for the speed with which it could transform the parquet basketball court into an ice arena or a boxing ring or a dirt corral. Rigidly unionized crews of carpenters and mechanics did the massive nightly work of preparing for circuses, rodeos, revivals, concerts, sports events, and political rallies. Services and equipment that the Garden crew itself could not provide were contracted out, but there too, strict controls were in place, and the levers belonged not to the Garden owner or the sports team owners but to certain union leaders and, as it happened, to a few of the Garden's North End neighbors. Particular caterers, liquor and soft-drink distributors, printers, sign painters, even veterinarians had locks on the right to service Garden events. They were known euphemistically as "preferred suppliers," but the relationship went beyond preference.

The Garden was only a quarter of a mile from City Square in Charlestown, but the river boundary had been absolute, and the rule extended to flowers. Since 1947, the preferred florist was Joe Lombardi, whose modest shop on Endicott Street had been a North End fixture for decades. In his time, Lombardi had decked out pulpits for Bishop Sheen and Billy Graham, stages for Liberace and Tommy Dorsey, floats for the Ice Capades, and podiums for Eamon de Valera, James Michael Curley, and Winston Churchill. His arrangements, featuring long birds of paradise and gladioli spiking out of fanning palm branches, along with sprays of mums, delphiniums, and hollyhock, always looked the same, but Lombardi knew what selections showed up from one side of an arena to another, and he also knew that nobody ever looked twice at flowers in such a place. When Sonja Henie performed, or when Mrs. Roosevelt spoke, or when some big shot's wife went with him to the platform, the same dozen roses always turned up in her arms. When Tony deMarco, a welterweight who grew up on Salem Street six blocks away, took the world title from Johnny Saxton in 1955, Lombardi himself climbed into the ring with a huge bouquet and presented it not to Tony but to the beaten Saxton. The flowers were lilies, and the fans loved the joke.

When Walter Brown, the Garden owner, called to tell Lombardi that the Kennedy people were supplying their own flowers for the election eve rally, the old Italian reacted with silence. Brown thought they'd been disconnected. He took the phone's handset away from his face to stare at it, then put it back to his ear. Finally Lombardi asked simply, "Why?" Brown said with a shrug in his voice that Kennedys write their own rules; they weren't even paying Garden costs. Even Cardinal Cushing, when he used the place, paid costs. Lombardi thought of Dineen and Reynolds, the Irishmen who ran the Flower Exchange. They wrote their own rules too, and Lombardi understood implicitly that some mick friend had gotten to Kennedy and was using him to redraw boundary lines. "Relax, Joe," Brown said, "it's a one-time thing." Instead of answering, Lombardi hung up. The next morning he got his son to drive him up to Revere, to see what Guido would say.

A fortnight later an exhausted John Fitzgerald Kennedy returned to Boston—77,000 miles, 45 states, and 237 cities in ten weeks. It was already dark. One hundred thousand wildly cheering supporters lined the streets on both sides of the harbor tunnels, territory over which P. I. Kennedy had ruled as an East Boston ward boss, and over which the North End's "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald had presided as mayor, and which had launched Jack Kennedy himself as the IIth District congressman.

The plan was that he would speed through the old neighborhood, then stop and change shirts at his downtown hotel, but because the cars moved so slowly, and because cameras were waiting—television would be the real meaning of this event—the decision was made to go right to the Garden.

The overhead lights on North Washington Street illuminated the crowd, and sure enough the jumpers were there, cueing the crowd's hysteria. Sharp-eyed political operators saw right away what the Young Dems had accomplished: the spontaneous, overwhelming emotional outburst had been carefully prepared for. Screaming boys and especially girls—was this Sinatra?—roared without stopping, "We love yuh, Jack!" Just because their leaders had rehearsed them didn't mean it wasn't true.

"Where you want love," Bright McKay had said, quoting his father quoting John of the Cross, "put love and you will find love."

"We love yuh, Jack!"

The motorcade turned onto Causeway Street, but it was completely jammed, and the police were unable to clear the last several hundred yards even by bringing their clubs down on heads. For a few awful moments, it seemed Kennedy would not make it to the arena, not alive anyway. Was this South America?

But the drivers kept their cars inching forward. In that last stretch, the look of the crowd changed, for in front of the Garden itself, it was entirely college kids swarming around the vehicles. The Young Dems had turned them out from campuses all over New England, afraid they would be the only ones in the street.

And none of the spirited students was waving flowers, no long-stemmed carnations, no palm branches either.

Inside the Garden, twenty thousand people let up a roar when Kennedy appeared. Party hacks from all across the state; ward heelers from Springfield, Worcester, New Bedford, Fall River, Cambridge, and Boston; machine pols and state committeemen and volunteers from the suburbs—all had been transformed, by the mere sight of Kennedy, into holy-roller worshipers, worshiping him. Cameras filmed the scene as the crowd continued clapping, stomping its feet, blustering approval for nearly ten minutes.

Kennedy waved back at first, but then he let his arms hang as he stood immobile on that platform, taking all that they were giving him. He displayed a preternatural calm which, amid that pandemonium, made him seem even more dignified, even more unlike them. He received the outpouring as if it were appropriate, but he had not expected it.

Then he was speaking. "And in a free society the chief responsibility of the president.. Now he was hitting the crest of his speech. He stabbed his finger at them as the waves of his voice rose into the high reaches of the Garden, above all those rapt Irish faces, above the red-white-and-blue bunting, the huge photographs of himself, the banners emblazoning his name, the flags. The throng sat absolutely silent now, each person leaning forward, ready to leap and move, listening as intently as before they had cheered. "...is to set before the American people the unfinished public business of our country ..."

His words soared above the black superstructure from which the clocks, scoreboards, and nests of loudspeakers hung. His words carried all the way to the narrow catwalks, the network of girder bridges and klieg lights up near the roof. "...that this is a great country. But I think it can be greater ..."

Terry Doyle was perched on one of the catwalks in the shadows above the lights, his legs dangling. Didi Mullen was beside him. Other Young Dems sat like crows along the rafters. Doyle wasn't sure about Didi, but he had a had case of the whim-whams up here. Given what had happened that morning, Terry might well have been dizzy and afraid in any case, but the height sure wasn't helping. His left arm was in a cast and sling. His ribs were wrapped with a broad elastic bandage that bulked under his shirt He wore a white bandage on the side of his head.

Didi wasn't hurt, thank God. She'd stayed with the truck. Her brother and Squire were beat up about like Terry, but Bright—oh, Bright! He was in the hospital, and would be for a while. Terry wouldn't have come here without him, even to see Kennedy, but Bright had insisted. Now Terry was trying to concentrate on the speech, to hear every word, to know each nuance, so that he could tell his friend all about this climax of their effort.

"... can do better ... I think we can make this move again..."

But Terry kept losing him. He couldn't focus. His mind kept drifting back to what had happened. Didi looked at him, then turned away. He knew she could not stand the sight of his kicked-in face.

"... for in the final analysis, our greatest common challenge..."

Kennedy, in the beam of the champion-of-the-world spotlight, was a finger-size but sparkling mote bracketed on that platform by the crescent of politicians behind, some in boater hats, and in front, below, by a bank of flowers that separated the podium from the audience. Terry Doyle's puffed and aching eyes kept snagging on the flowers. Even from that distance he could identify the birds of paradise and gladioli shafts spiking out of the palm branches, blue delphiniums, and the showy hollyhock.

They had rented a twenty-four-foot panel truck that morning. Bright McKay had been authorized by Gorman to sign for it, but he was afraid to drive the rig, so Terry was at the wheel. Squire was with them in the cab, sitting by the passenger door. In the back, with the cartons of cut flowers, rode Jackie and Didi. Gramps wasn't along, which had been an issue between the brothers. Squire had counted on pulling away from the Exchange before Gramps got free to join them. Given how close Gramps and Squire were, that should have been Terry's first warning. Squire hadn't wanted Didi to come either, but she'd been on board already, and she'd insisted.

It was shortly after ten when Terry pulled into the alley that ran between North Station and the huge Garden service building. The alley became a tunnel under the third-story bridge between the arena and 150 Causeway, then it opened into a cinder courtyard that abutted the Boston & Maine storage yard where rolling stock sat idle. The enclosure reeked permanently of elephant urine and horse manure—all those circuses and rodeos.

The courtyard was clogged with deliverymen, concession stockers, bull gang workers, and the easily identified campaign staffers: effete young men in button-down shirts and prim women in wrap-around khaki skirts. A dozen trucks of various sizes were backed against the clock that ran the width of the building. Supplies were being offloaded by forklifts, dragged onto wheeled pallets, and tractored up broad ramps into the arena above the railroad station.

Terry tried to seem relaxed as he struggled to find reverse.

"Grind me a pound, Charlie," Squire said as he and McKay elbowed each other.

Terry grunted as, with the gears screeching, he rolled the truck backwards toward a narrow space between a Coca-Cola truck and a laundry van. He pulled forward, then backed up, and forward again. The secret was to move slow.

When the guys in back finally yelled out "Whoa!" as the rear bumper kissed the loading dock, Terry shut the ignition off and slumped over the wheel with relief. He rubbed his hands together, noticing for the first time how wet they were.

Bright nudged him. "Where'd you learn to drive like that?"

"Right here, just now."

"Shit, you told me you had experience." But then McKay slapped his thigh. "My God, we're
all
becoming like Kennedys. We can do anything!" With sudden exuberance, he threw an arm around each of the brothers and pulled them close across his own body, so that their heads almost touched.

Terry pulled himself free to look at McKay—dark-eyed, black-skinned, and determined. Bright had been cautious in Nick's presence all these weeks, but Terry sensed now that this display of affection was more than the infectious enthusiasm of the campaign. That McKay could include Squire in their friendship moved him and opened the door on his own oldest feeling for his brother. The bond between them was unbreakable, no matter what Bright still had Nick's head in the vise grip. Terry reached over and rubbed his knuckles on Nick's scalp, the old Indian burn.

"Don't fuck with the hair!" Squire slipped free and swiftly knotted the college boys' ties together. "And
don't
you"—he broke into song, hopping out of the cab— "
step
on my blue suede shoes!"

By the time Terry and Bright had untied their neckties, Squire and Jackie had the two hand trucks out and were unloading the boxes of flowers. As he piled one carton onto another, Squire kept jitterbugging, "Blue, blue, blue suede shoes ..."

Didi was in the truck pushing the cartons out, and she danced too.

When the dollies were loaded, Jackie and Squire each took one. Before rolling his off the loading dock, Squire said to Didi, "You stay here, okay?" He tossed his head toward the fifteen cartons of long-stem carnations still in the truck "Somebody's got to watch those. We'll be back in a few."