The City Below (49 page)

And then he stopped.

"You've forgotten your diaphragm," he whispered.

"No. No, I haven't."

"It isn't in you. I don't feel it."

"I don't want it, not tonight." She put her face on his, pushed her tongue into his mouth, rolled onto him.

"Not after today," she said. "Nothing between us."

"You want—?"

"You! I want you! Come in me!"

Amazed and dizzy, he touched her face. "Joan." He felt knocked down, as if that were why he was lying here. "I love you."

They turned so that she was underneath. When he pushed inside her, she feared that he would thank her. She sensed his relief, easily imagining it as that of a man allowed at last to breathe. It was no surprise when he began, while coming, to say "God, God," or that he seemed to mean it as a kind of prayer. It was no surprise, even, that the display of his gut piety did not offend her.

The surprise, still, was the certainty of her knowledge—more than intuition, an absolute sensation of blood and flesh, what she'd have dismissed in someone else as
female
piety—that she was already pregnant.

And the surprise was, also, the efficient calculation with which she was managing—"Yes, darling,
there
"—to adjust herself, and also him, to this unbearable situation. How she wanted to undo the day before, but she never could. How she wanted this child to be his. Her only hope was in his never, ever knowing. That was the heart of her ambition now, and always would be. The heart of her will, and of her love.

Her self-possession was a wonder to her, that she could do this, keeping from him what she knew. Something was alive in her, and something was dead. Black trillium.

"Oh, yes," she said. "Oh, sugar."

"Joan. My Joan."

Her sweet, weak husband was feeling saved. She was damned.

T
HE TRAIN RATTLED
along the elevated tracks forty feet above Washington Street, entering the long, curving stretch south of the cathedral where the steel wheels began their ungodly screech. Terry Doyle stared out the window across the rooftops of the indifferent South End. He did not look like an Orange Line rider, but neither did the others in the seats and aisle of the single train car, and ordinarily they weren't A well-groomed collection, dressed in suits and polished shoes, the few women in suits and heels, they looked like what they were, bankers and developers, city, state, and federal officials, presidents of companies. The less nattily dressed were reporters and the few low-level functionaries needed to hold doors, but even they were in suits and ties.

The knees and shoulders of those who were seated jounced with the jerky movement, and those standing rode the car with the necessary loose-jointedness of surfboarders. Doyle was one of these. He was still slim and tall, but he was forty-one now, vaguely stoop-shouldered. The skin around his mouth was creased, and his eyes were glazed with a hint of burdened weariness. His hair was thinner, showing gray. His clothing drew no special attention to itself, but in fact his blue suit and white shirt were handmade, perfectly fitted. The knot of his red tie rode above a gold collar pin. He was not the oldest of those on the subway car, not the wealthiest nor most powerful, but there was in everything about him, except perhaps those too moist eyes, the air of a man to whom the others were subordinate. He was the vice president of the Hammond Company now, an old Boston real estate management firm, which under him, in the Kevin White boom years, had become a major developer.

Old Hammond would retire soon, and Doyle was slated to succeed him as president, a discreet Irish takeover of yet another corner of the Yankee realm. BC guys had arrived, not just as pols, like their fathers and grandfathers, but as the businessmen who had the knack for riding this, the city's first big kanaka wave. Lately, it seemed, they were in on every deal, not just the renaissance of the city, but the reinvention of it, and that was why they were on this subway car. Nobody believed in the old prejudices anymore, or in the old limits either. From their predecessors, the Irish comers had learned to believe only in money.

The thin light of a spring morning washed the grid of dirty streets onto which Doyle looked. It was a mild day in April, but the scene below was meant for winter. Storefront windows were covered with splintered plywood. Here and there burned-out row houses, open to the weather, broke the line of dark rooftops. He glimpsed derelicts hunched in ill-fitting coats along a blank wall, early birds for the Pine Street soup line, and quickly looked away.

The train slowed as it veered west, and the noise became more piercing. Dover Street, Savoy, Waltham, Union Park—as the train clicked the distance off, Doyle's eye followed each South End street north to the point where it ended in the wall of the rail embankment three blocks away. The old Penn Central right of way, already a gash between two neighborhoods, had been widened in die sixties into a wasteland of cleared earth on which I-95 had been slated to make its run through Boston. Thousands of homes and businesses had been demolished, and one of the inner city's few manufacturing belts had been destroyed. The jobs lost had staggered the South End and lower Roxbury, and the all but impassable physical barrier had quickly drained both neighborhoods of vitality. Residents had denounced the highway scheme, and in 1970 Governor Sargent killed it, but the isolating gash remained. Cambridge-based urban planners had dubbed it the Southwest Corridor, but Roxbury preachers called it the Berlin Wall. Now, from downtown all the way out the five miles to Forest Hills, the rail line was bordered by wide, weed-ridden margins of moonscape, a savage and seemingly permanent no man's land, Boston's finest method yet for keeping people in their place.

But a miracle was about to happen in the South End and lower Roxbury, and on this midmorning train ride he and these others, like so many Gabriels, had come to announce it. The boom that had caused seventeen major skyscrapers to go up in ten years had generated more money than anyone in the weary old town had ever dreamed of, and it showed every sign of doing so indefinitely. As of this winter, a new mayor had been elected expressly to bring some of the money back to the neighborhoods. Beginning here, which was, in Irish Boston, the miracle.

A
lot
of money. Terry Doyle, as one of the men who'd been making it, had some idea how much. Private money and public, HUD and Model Cities grants, Interstate Transfer and Mass Transit funds; under Tide 23 alone, sue hundred million dollars had been appropriated to relocate the Orange Line from Washington Street to the Southwest Corridor, stimulating a whole complex of other projects, the latest of which they would unveil today.

Tom Lacey, head of the MBTA, leaned in on Doyle, and Terry became aware of the man's warm, sour breath. Lacey pointed out the window at the dark hulk of the cathedral, which seemed close enough to toss a line to. It had all the grace of an oil tanker run aground. The classic rose window was just above eye level, a massive gray disk enmeshed in wire screening. It and the granite façade were filthy, black with soot. Pigeons roosted on every ledge, in each nook and cranny, cutting the soot with the acid of their shit.

Lacey had said something.

"What? I can't hear."

"My point exactly." Lacey cupped his mouth. "When Cardinal Cushing was buried from there, we suppressed service on this line for three hours, out of respect, because of this racket. We did it for Curley too."

"I know about the noise. I've been inside." Terry thought of the ordination ceremony nearly two decades before, his own melodramatic take on Adam stalking out of Eden. He thought of the K of C ceremony even earlier, where Gramps had dubbed him Charlie. The old man had died in 1979, a blank-eyed ghost who didn't even know Squire. Terry winked at Lacey. "These trains have done a job on that place over the years."

"Wasn't that the point?" Lacey said. Both men laughed, a draft of the old amused bitterness. The Irish loved to tell themselves that the Brahmins had put the el here to ruin their grand cathedral.

Doyle said, "The truth is, Tom, the cathedral was always an ugly rock pile."

"Well, this fucking noise is another reason to move the line to the Corridor. The protesters are numbskulls."

"What protesters?"

"Never mind about that" Lacey slapped Doyle's shoulder. "If Curley was here, he'd claim it was called Orange for the Protestants who built it."

Doyle laughed. "You going to quote Curley in your speech, Tommy?"

"God, no."

Doyle's eyes lingered on Holy Cross, bereft on that mean-hearted street, and he was ambushed by a feeling of loss. The cathedral, the Church itself, the first life he'd chosen—all of it lost A familiar taste came into his mouth, a surge of nausea, the old insistent wish that his empty faith was the Church's failure, not his.

Moments later the ribbed mansard roof and twin cupolas of Dudley station came into view. Dudley was the hub of one end of Roxbury, a bus terminal and the site of a courthouse, a library, and what remained of a retail center. The car stopped with a jolt and the doors hissed open. MBTA policemen awaited them on the platform, keeping others back. "Not in service," they barked. "No one boards."

Duke of Dudley
, read the scrawl on the station wall.
Mandela '84.
What advertising signs there were seemed less posted than abandoned. The platform was littered with debris. A wire trash basket lay on its side, and the wall behind was charred, partially burned through, leaving a thin sliver open to the gray sky.

An MBTA bus was waiting at the sidewalk. The group filed on, pretending no interest in the dreary, overshadowed square. In fact, they were all instantly aware that across the street, on the plaza in front of the branch library, a crowd of blacks was hemmed in by police.
Don't Abandon Dudley!
read one sign.
Ask the People!
read another. The big shots refused to look across at the demonstration. Instead their eyes went, as they were supposed to, toward a bunting-draped branch of the Commonwealth Bank In its main window was a crisply lettered poster:
Commonwealth Bank and the Roxbury Planning Council Salute the Southwest Corridor Improvement Project.

Soon the bus was loaded and heading out behind a pair of motorcycles, through the congested, blighted streets ringing the train station overhead. Doyle took up his position in front of the bus, aware of the cold stares of the people on the sidewalk No matter what you did in this fucking town, somebody said no. Especially if what you did was try to help.

A few minutes later the bus broke out of the maze of narrow streets around Dudley, into the surprisingly open plain of cleared land. The bus picked up speed as traffic fell off. Instead of grim, dilapidated rooming houses, tenements, and pawnshops, the streets here were bordered by fields of waist-high weeds and mounded gravel.

Doyle gestured at the stretch of land to the south. "Eighteen acres, ladies and gentlemen, parcel twenty-two. The future site of Madison Park Townhouses, one hundred twenty units. Model Cities-funded; the Hammond Company, developer; Phillips and Phillips, architects; Commonwealth Bank financing." He fell silent as the bus moved deeper into the leveled Corridor, turning onto Ruggles Street, where the view opened on seventy acres stretching out on all sides. "Jesus," one of the passengers said, Harry Clapp, a mall mogul from New Jersey, "hell of a lot of open land for an inner city."

Doyle pointed. "More housing was flattened here than anywhere, because this was to be the site of the cloverleaf joining I-95 and the Innerbelt. The most devastated area, but now the richest opportunity, more than Hammond can handle, Harry." Doyle grinned suddenly. "Which is why you get your shot in Beantown."

Clapp snorted.

Doyle tapped the window. "We have key pieces in place already. There, for example, in the stretch running to the foot of the hill, is where we site the new campus high school. Beyond it, a post office and the community college. Two or three thousand kids, a retailers' bonanza, Harry."

The man next to Clapp elbowed him, and several others exchanged remarks, inaudible but obvious: retailers'
nightmare
, more like it, all those unleashed black boys, their boom boxes, basketball shoes, the old hit and run.

The bus plunged into the eerie, wide-open valley. Along its center ran the Penn Central tracks, and at one end a massive construction site straddled the trench along which the new Orange Line was being laid.

"The new Ruggles station," Doyle said, "to replace Dudley as the local hub." A pair of cranes towered over cement trucks, framing structures, and scaffolding. "The parcel to the west, parcel nineteen, is for the new Water Resources headquarters, but the governor hasn't inked it yet, last we heard, right Joe?"

"You asking me, Terry?" Joe Turino, seated three rows back, opened his hands helplessly. "You know Beacon Hill as well as I do."

Doyle laughed good-naturedly. "Which is why we're glad to have private interest in Ruggles Center." He swept his arm around, facing forward. The savage clearance had spared a pair of churches, St Francis de Sales, Catholic, and on Tremont Street St Cyprian's, Anglican—the West Indian church of which Bright McKay's father had been rector years before. Hard against that church, a platform had been built and dressed with bunting for this occasion. Bright was there, and so, Doyle saw, was the large crowd it had been Blight's job to deliver. On one side, a small knot of people held signs—more protesters—but here too they'd been isolated by police.

"And here we come," Doyle said as the bus slowed, "to Ruggles, the new heart of lower Roxbury, a mixed-use twenty-acre site of office, retail, housing, manufacturing, institutional, and hotel development." He paused, then added wryly, "Depending on you bastards, of course."

They laughed.

The bus slowed even more. A reggae band on the platform churned out languid, hip music, its every member swaying in soulful hats and army-surplus coats, horns at their faces, guitars at their groins. The crowd, perhaps two hundred people, seated on folding chairs, was neatly integrated. The blacks among them seemed to be moving with the music; the whites sat stiff and nervous, having either ventured across the tracks from Northeastern University or been bused out here from jobs at City Hall.