The City Below (24 page)

"Gramps?"

Cronin did not react.

Squire leaned over. "Gramps?"

The old man was asleep, adrift in the country of his dreams. Sixty-eight years old now, his once great crown of white hair had thinned considerably, and his muscled body had gone flaccid. He was always forgetting things, hardly knew the names of lifetime neighbors, was easily angered. In the store Squire cooperated in the fiction that he was still in charge, but customers who struck him wrong, guilty of nothing more, say, than normal indecision in choosing between irises and snapdragons, he simply told to get out. Didi and, occasionally, Squire himself would go after them to apologize.

"Gramps?" He shook him lightly.

Cronin jolted awake. "Wha?" He looked up at his grandson, stupefied. Slowly his memory returned. He grabbed Squire's arm. "That brother of yours has disgraced us."

"What happened?" Squire pulled the hassock over and sat facing his grandfather.

"He led a rebellion against the cardinal. The cardinal wants him out!"

"Calm down, Gramps. One thing at a time."

"He led a meeting. They made demands, just like radicals. Terry disobeyed the pope."

"The pope?" Squire burst out laughing.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing's funny." Jesus Christ, Squire thought, the pope. At Columbia they take on LBJ, in Prague Brezhnev, in Chicago Mayor Daley. But Terry takes on the fucking pope!

"The cardinal wants him to stop, and he won't. He has the whole seminary in an uproar. The cardinal asked me to talk to him. You have to take me over there."

"What demands? What's the issue?"

"That's what I asked."

"What'd the cardinal say?"

"Birth control."

"Oh, brother."

"
Your
brother! TV stations called the cardinal, that's what he's trying to avoid. They said Terry's going on TV, an act of pure defiance, of betrayal!" In his excitement Cronin pushed himself up to stand.

"Gramps, wait."

"The nerve of him, that brazen bastard, who the hell does he think he is?"

Squire forced his grandfather back down into the chair, and with an unprecedented sharpness he ordered, "Be quiet."

Cronin submitted, raising a hand to shield his face, as if expecting Squire to strike him. The gesture stunned Squire, who would never grow accustomed to this man's decline, Squire's Knight, his Lord, his only God.

The old man shook his head, whining, "But wait'll your mother finds out This will just break her heart"

"What?"

"Your mother. This will —"

"Gramps."

"The disgrace of it, defying the cardinal. She'll —"

"No she won't, Gramps. Ma's not here anymore. You remember."

Squire took his grandfather by the shoulders, his other baby. "Let me worry about this. Let me find out what's going on. Okay?"

"The cardinal asked
me.
"

"Gramps, you can. He asked you to talk to Terry and you can. But let me find out first All right?
I'll
fix it.
Then
you call the cardinal and tell him it's done. Okay?"

"You think you can talk sense into that kid?"

"I know I can. Terry will listen to me." Squire and his born-to-bring-flowers smile. "Doesn't everybody?"

"When you and me used to go down to the Exchange, all the fellows told me what a good kid you was." The old man's face became enlivened with gratitude. "Terry'll listen to you."

"Right," Squire said, afraid all at once that it would someday be like this between himself and Molly.

Downstairs, Didi was just closing up the store. She looked up expectantly when Squire came in.

"Jesus, sweetheart, you won't believe it."

"What?"

"Birth control!" Squire leaned against the cold-storage case and laughed hard, with Molly watching quietly from her corner.

But Didi frowned. "Oh, but that's sad." She waited until her husband looked at her. "Really. Don't you think that's sad?"

"It's pathetic is what it is.
Those
guys in a snit about rubbers and the Pill." He went over to her. "Listen." He took her by the shoulders. "I'm sorry I gave you shit before."

Didi leaned against him.

"Now I have to bomb out to Brighton and talk to Terry. Imagine that. Me, a papal peacekeeper."

"Tonight?"

"Right now. There's a publicity problem.
That's
the cardinal's issue, TV. The last thing he needs, Uncle Walter saying, 'Today's campus riot took place at St John's Seminary, Boston. Future Catholic priests demanding that, instead of napalm, B-52S should be dropping condoms."

"Nick —"

"I'll be home as soon as I can." He kissed her forehead. She inclined toward him, thinking that now, perhaps, he would gentle her body. But he was careful not to touch her protruding stomach. Even with his mouth shut he could taste her loneliness. When he dared look, he saw that her eyes were closed.

He turned and crossed to Molly, splendid child. He picked her up. She squirmed away but he kissed her, loving her refusal to be compliant. He brought her to her mother, whom he chastely kissed once more. Didi clung to him. Molly twisted between them, working herself free and onto the floor, leaving just the emptiness to bind them.

On his way out he picked up a small shamrock plant, a Kerry Bouquet specialty. "'One always asks, holding a plant' —this is Terry speaking, get it? —'how the tiny leaves carry their burden of life.'" He laughed, shook his head.

"You shouldn't make fun of him if he's in trouble."

"I could have predicted something like this. The guy doesn't know what he wants. Never has."

"Unlike you."

"As a matter of fact."

"What do
you
want, Nick? That's what I don't know."

Squire smiled. "I want what I have." He saluted the room with the shamrock.

"And what you don't have?"

"I want that too." He wrapped the plant in a square of green tinfoil, deftly bundling it by gathering the four corners in a silver ribbon. "This'll be my calling card. I'll say I've come to offer to do the altar flowers for Charlie's ordination."

"Don't call him that." She was surprised by the sudden edge in her own voice.

Squire looked at her with distaste. "He's my brother: I'll call him what I want."

"Why do you and Gramps need so to have him in the priesthood? You're like your mother would have been if she was alive."

Squire looked slapped. He glared at Didi, and she saw his hatred. He couldn't stand it, the rare times she said what was true. Everybody needed Terry in the priesthood because that was how they would hold on to him. Didi knew this about Nick and his grandfather because she knew it about herself.

She shrugged. "Offering to do the flowers, that's a nice idea."

"I'm a nice person, hon."

Didi laughed, turning away. "It's true, you son of a bitch. You are nice."

***

Squire drove across Boston, hating rush hour, wondering, as he idled in traffic, how he would do as a diplomat Everywhere he turned, some wop was sticking his finger in someone's eyeball, and his job was to get their fingers out.

He looked at the other drivers, salesmen going home, cops waving cars through yellow lights, football players practicing on the fields along the river. None of those people knew anything about Guido Tucci, much less his death. If they'd heard of the pope's encyclical, they probably thought it was something cold on a stick. Tucci and Pope Paul, the two posts, Squire thought, of the wire he was walking on.

At numerous intersections along Commonwealth Avenue, college kids pouring out of their classrooms into the streets ignored the lights, as if the rules didn't apply to them. Fucking radicals, fucking peaceniks. He remembered the line from senior year: "College, where false pearls are cast before real swine."

At one corner, a particular girl caught Squire's eye —her tie-dyed T-shirt, her long black hair hanging straight. As she crossed in front of his car, she shifted her books, and he glimpsed an unshaven armpit Suddenly it was more than he could stand that she had no idea of his existence. He resisted the urge to honk, and instead reached down and snapped on the radio, loud.

"Can't
get
no satisfaction ... but I try and I try ..."

She looked his way, startled. Squire raised a forefinger, clicked it once, a minimal salute. And the girl dropped her eyes. I could teach you things, he thought.

Mick Jagger sang with sex in his voice. "Can't
get
no ..." The way he would have if he'd become a singer. Now Squire wondered, Did they call him Mick because he was Irish?

The light changed. Squire hit the gas, slapping the steering wheel in time to the music as the song built to its conclusion, blaring out into the street.

The entrance to BC was just ahead on the left, but shy of it on the right, hovering over the avenue, was the cardinal's house, a super-rectory set on an obviously artificial and, to Squire's eye, overly landscaped hill. He reached to the dashboard to lower the volume on the radio. He knew to turn into the next driveway, and recognized the sweeping curves of the private road as it wound past the residence and the chancery and another nondescript building or two before descending into a tidy, fairwaylike valley that seemed miles from the city he'd just left.

The next song to come on was "Sympathy for the Devil." He laughed, but also snapped the radio off.

The road brought him down toward the massive main building of the seminary proper. Twilight had already fallen in this valley, and the Gothic stone hulk loomed eerily, five stories high, row upon row of chaste leaded windows, corner turrets, towers, and arches like out of a fairy tale. Only a cross rising from the peaked center of the roof undercut the impression that this was an asylum, or a setting for a movie about a baron who had no choice but to help the Nazis because they've locked his daughter up in this abandoned old castle.

Squire pulled into a visitors-only parking space near the front door, turned his motor off, and told himself to cool it. For a moment he sat there watching the windows. Lights were on in most of the rooms, but the blinds were drawn. He saw nothing.

Before, when he'd come here, spirited boys in cassocks had swarmed the stairs leading up to the large double oak doors, worthy of a drawbridge, of dwarves to act as porters. But those visits, usually in the company of his grandfather, had been by invitation, on feast days. He was an intruder now, and knew it. Except for the lights in those windows, no human being was in evidence here. It was creepy.

He got out of the car with his wrapped shamrock plant Instead of going to the door, he walked the length of the building to its corner, from which he had a view of the handball and basketball courts. He had half expected Terry to be out there shooting hoops. All those years ago, how he had been the last to leave the asphalt court behind the high school. How many times, at dusk, had their mother sent Squire out to get him? Squire had always approached the court wondering why his brother seemed so at home shooting baskets alone in the dark, seemed so perfectly himself like that. The sight had always made Squire's heart sink, because his own idea was of the two of them playing. Squire had always hated practicing alone, but not Terry, which was why, eventually, Terry's skill had left Squire's behind. Terry could hit baskets even when it was so dark that Squire needed the snap of the threads to be sure he'd scored.

The seminary courts were deserted, and Squire was relieved. A lone figure out there now could only have evoked the image of the wandering mystic, the hated man who had no place to lay his head, the misunderstood and finally crucified Christ —from whom Squire Doyle had long since claimed his distance.

Why am I nervous? he wondered as he walked back to the pointed arch of the entrance. He mounted the stairs, found a button in the wall beside the door, and pushed it He pushed it again, then stepped back so they could see him. He nestled the plant in the crook of his left arm like a ball.

Jesus, Terry, he thought, you've buried yourself alive.

After a few minutes, he pushed the button again.

The door opened partway, and he realized someone had been just inside all this time, watching him.

"Yes!" An old man put his head in the opening. His skin was flaked with psoriasis, his eyes seemed twisted, lifeless.

"I'm a visitor. I want to see one of the students."

"No visitors. Come back."

The man's head only now came far enough through the door for Squire to glimpse his Roman collar, the shoulder of his dandruff-layered cassock.

"I'm sorry to bother you, Father. It's a family emergency. I need to see my brother."

"What's that, then?"

"A gift for the altar, a plant" Squire offered it.

The priest shook his head and pulled back "An emergency? But you bring a plant? You're ..."

"Terry Doyle, Father. Can I see him?"

"No, no." The name seemed to confirm him in his suspicion. He began closing the door. "You're a reporter."

Squire jammed his foot in the door. "I'm his brother. The cardinal —"

"They're on retreat They're all on retreat. No visitors."

Squire could easily have pushed the priest aside, claiming authority from Cushing himself. But suddenly he wanted the hell away from here. He'd say to his grandfather, "Retreat, they're on retreat What trouble can there be if they're on retreat?"

"So when can I see him?"

"Call the rector. Call Monsignor —"

"When can I see —"

"Recreation, tomorrow, after lunch."

Squire pulled his foot back The door slammed shut, a solid, low-toned
thunk.

Fuck you, Father. How does Terry survive this shit? But maybe he doesn't. Was that the point?

Squire stared at the oak panels, bile in his throat that he hadn't tasted since being an altar boy. He remembered the monsignor clipping him from behind: "Line up! Line up!"

Doyle balanced the shamrock with one hand, bouncing it slightly, for the heft. Right through the fucking window, that was his thought.

But who was he kidding? No bile of humiliation since the monsignor of his boyhood? What about yesterday? What about Frank? How does Terry take such shit? No, how do I?