The City Below (51 page)

Terry turned back to the room to face Bright. "Don't make the issue micks, all right?"

"Victor Amory makes the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority
and
the State House irrelevant. Suddenly we don't need them to pull this thing together, which is damned lucky. Micks aren't the issue? What the fuck is?"

"Amory."

"What are you worried about," Bright said, "that he has Japs behind him?"

"No. Not Japs."

"Hey, the guy has made a killing in Florida real estate. It happens. He's worth two hundred mil, easy. He's in business with his brothers."

"I heard him say so. Brothers."

The old friends stared at each other then, neither willing to take it further. Bright was standing at his desk, which was an expanse of smoked glass large enough to land airplanes on. Fastidious McKay. On the wall behind the desk was a shelf holding photographs of his father in cope and miter, of his stately mother, and of Martin Luther King. On another wall were large photographs of John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, a young Bright McKay posed with each. Brothers.

After a long time Bright said coldly, "This guy is the dealmaker for Ruggles Center, Terry. Ruggles Center is the dealmaker for the whole fucking Southwest Corridor. The Southwest Corridor brings Roxbury and Jamaica Plain back from the dead. Whatever your problem is, get over it."

He wanted to, but he couldn't He hadn't. Now he was jogging along a path with the glistening river on one side, eight-man sculls scooting across its surface like waterbugs. Joan was on his other side. He glanced over at her.

She was wearing a pale blue windbreaker and dark blue nylon shorts. Her sinewy legs were still tanned from their February vacation in St. Barts. On her feet she wore only shoe liners with her running shoes, and her bare ankles always gave her the look of a marathoner. Her hair was pulled back in a red railroad kerchief. She was forty-two years old. Time was touching her kindly.

She seemed unaware of him. The black foam pads of her Walkman sealed her ears; Puccini, she often said self-mockingly, was what kept her running. Joan habitually withdrew into a shell when she ran, an exertion in solitude, which was not altogether unlike what she did during sex. The limits of their physical expression had long since ceased to be a source of disappointment for either; their proximity was enough when they were running, and a mutual, if introverted, somewhat passionless expertise satisfied the needs they brought to bed.

Joan's eyes were fixed on a point ahead, but in her trance, he knew, she was not actually seeing anything—not Max on his bike and not the tops of the downtown buildings just coming into view. She loved running for the way it blanked her mind, she said. He loved running for the focus it brought to his.

The differences between them, in other words, had become more sharply drawn over the years. She'd been successful at Harvard, where she was now a tenured associate professor and the curator of prints at the Fogg. Terry, for his part, had become busy in the mode of men like him. They grew apart Terry assumed that she was as chilled by their marriage as he, but also he knew that whatever disappointment she felt had been assuaged, to put it mildly, by his beginning to bring in real money. What bound them still—and in this weren't they like every couple they knew?—was their child.

They came to their bridge and took it, to head upriver on the business-school side. But halfway across Terry reached over to her. "Stop," he said.

She didn't hear him. When he took her arm, she looked around in alarm.

"Can we stop here a minute?"

"What?" She lifted an earphone pad.

"I need to talk to you."

Only then did she stop running, and he did too. He sensed her impatience at this violation not only of their routine but of the running ethic itself. It mattered to her, not cooling down. She craned to look past him. "Max is getting too far ahead."

The boy was on the far bank, with the white cupolas and weathervanes of the sham colonial Harvard Business School behind him. Traffic was whizzing along on Storrow Drive, but he was back from it, safely pedaling up the dusty cinder path between two broad swaths of grass.

"He's fine," Terry said. "When he sees we've slowed up, he'll wait."

"We haven't slowed up. We've stopped."

"I wanted to show you something from here."

He took her shoulder and turned her toward the view of Boston. She shut off her tape player and dropped the headset to her neck. A film of perspiration decked her upper lip and brow.

"There, see the BU buildings? The ed school and the dorms?"

"Yes."

"Right there in that gap is where our Ruggles Street building will be, three times higher than the BU buildings, a mile farther back, but it will show up as huge from here. The first major jump in the skyline away from downtown. It's going to happen. Boston will never be the same."

"That's great, Terry." She pressed his arm.

She thought he was good at what he did. She didn't know that any fool could make money in this market, although her pride was spot-on this time, since the market did not stretch to Roxbury. "If we succeed at Ruggles Street, Joan, if we show that investment pays off there, then Roxbury Crossing and Jackson Square are next The new Orange Line will tie the city together. It'll make everything different That Corridor has given us a once-in-a-century chance to heal this city's worst wound. And Joan"—he turned to her, took her shoulders in his hands, wanting to press his feelings into her—"we're doing it We're really doing it."

"But something's wrong. I can tell."

He turned again to the bridge railing, brushing a weathered bronze plaque that was unobtrusively attached to the concrete pillar there. His gaze went to the downtown skyline. What he loved most about the view from here was the way the modest profile of Beacon Hill, with its terraced brick houses, its trees, the Gothic spire of the Advent Church, and the gleaming gold sphere of the Bulfinch State House—how it all refused to yield center place to the towers behind. Two of the shining skyscrapers that loomed above the oldest part of the city were deals of his, Dewey Square and One Beacon. If they were beautiful to him—and with their razor-sharp edges, glass-and-steel surfaces fitted with Swiss-watch precision, they were—it was because in the very shape of that skyline they did not obliterate the past, but grew out of it. He not only loved the city, but believed in it. Except for this one nagging, goddamned doubt.

"What?"

He looked left a notch, to Bunker Hill. That fucking monument. "There
is
something wrong, something I wanted to ask you about." He swiveled around, looking at her, then glancing upriver for Max, who, still on his bike, was leaning on a bench, looking back at them. Terry waved. And Max, patient, respectful, waved back Terry said to Joan, "Bright has brought in a partner I wonder about. I'm trying to decide whether to push my misgivings or not."

"What makes you wonder?"

"The guy is a sleaze. I can smell it."

Joan laughed. "Sugar, I thought they were all sleazes over there."

"Said like a Cambridge yuppie."

"I wish." She touched his cheek fondly. "We're not young enough to be yuppies."

"This guy's name is Amory. He claims to be from Beverly, but he doesn't know any local Amorys. He says they don't know him."

"That doesn't make him a sleaze."

"He never heard of Cleveland Amory. Wouldn't he know—?"

"Cleveland Amory, Grover Cleveland. Christ, Terry, if Bright trusts him, what's—?"

"Bright only sees one thing, Joan. Making this deal. He doesn't care."

"That can't be true."

Terry looked again at the bronze plaque in front of him, and rather than fight with her, he seized on it as something to read. The raised green letters were barely legible:
IN MEMORIAM, QUENTIN COMPSON.

"What the hell is this?" he asked.

Joan ran her fingers lightly over the worn metal. "Some literature professor must have put it here."

"I don't get it."

"
The Sound and the Fury,
Sugar. Quentin came to Harvard. He jumped from a bridge. Don't you remember?"

"Oh, Christ, you Harvard people!"

"Don't, Terry."

"Then don't give me shit about whether this guy is a sleaze, even if he ir an Amory. Or about Boston not being Onomatopoeia County, whatever the hell it was."

"Yoknapatawpha."

In another context, he'd have loved such a cocky show of his wife's trap of a mind, how it let go of nothing. But at that instant her erudition fueled his anger, which flared now, to his surprise as much as hers. "I'm talking about Boston, not Mississippi! Boston! Do you hear me?"

"Yes. So does all of Cambridge."

"Fuck Cambridge!"

"Terry—"

"I think the man is a sleaze, Joan, because I think he's involved with Squire."

Joan's shock—not surprise—registered in the jolt of her face and a quite dramatic backward movement. She leaned against the bridge with a false casualness, to steady herself. "What makes you think that?"

"I guess..." He was suddenly vague, the way he was after too many drinks. "I always have an eye over my shoulder, looking for that bastard."

Me too, Joan said, but to herself. Because of her, they had arranged their lives so as to see him as little as possible. In fact, Joan had not laid eyes on Nick since their grandfather's funeral five years before. Terry Knew—he must have known—of her repugnance, but he had no idea what sparked it "Look over your shoulder, Terry," Joan said stiffly. "No one's there."

"But he is there." Terry spoke with such an absence of inflection that it frightened her. She was sorry that he could see the blush that seared her skin from her throat to her forehead. What did he know?

"When I met Amory this morning, he was wearing one of those shamrock things."

"What?"

"You remember, the Kerry Bouquet shamrock, what Squire gave me when he gave you that black orchid years ago."

Black trillium. She could not believe that flower was being referred to. Confusion and dread filled her, emotions she simply had to flee. Without meaning it to, her tone became mocking. "A boutonniere? You're talking about a boutonniere?"

"A shamrock boutonniere. My grandfather's invention. Squire's the only other one who's ever made them. They're foolish things that only last a few hours. Even on St. Patrick's Day, they've never made it out of Charlestown. Amory said he bought it at the Ritz, which is ridiculous. Imagine, shit like that at the Ritz."

"Not even the Ritz is the Ritz anymore. They might sell—"

"If I'm right," he said coolly, "it means the money Amory is offering us isn't his. Nick would be a go-between. The money would be from the mob."

He had never mentioned any of this to her; so much unmentioned between them. Their secrets about his brother—hers above all—had grown like tumors inside the body of their love. "Terry, just leave this alone. Why throw open a door into a place you don't want to go?"

"That's what I'm telling you. The door opened in front of me, on its own, this morning."

"Then close it." She had. He could. She turned and began to run. Her mind flew to the day two or three years ago when she had bumped into Didi at the new Neiman Marcus at Copley Place. Amid the gleaming brass and marble, Didi came up to her and said, "Mrs. Livingstone, I presume?" Joan was nonplused, and Didi used that against her. "You don't know who I am."

"Of course I do."

Each woman shifted her shopping bag to shake hands.

Joan said, "How are you?"

"Well. Very well. But you were going to call after Gramps's funeral. You never called. I called you, but you never answered me."

"Didi, I'm sorry, but I—"

"You don't have to explain. I know everything."

Joan's heart sank She stared at Didi, who was still grinning. She wore a beige linen dress and a silk cravat; she looked like a restaurant hostess.

"Everything?"

"Why you won't see us. Why you won't let Terry near us."

"Why?"

"Because of Squire," Didi said with supreme matter-of-factness. "Because of what he does. You disapprove."

"I disapprove?"

"Yes. Of him. Of us."

Joan backed away from her, blanching with relief. "I disapprove of you?" She began to laugh then, a release from panic, even as she turned and moved away as quickly as she could. "I'm late," she said. "I'm sorry, but I'm late." She'd almost broken into a run, thinking, She doesn't know. Didi doesn't know.

Now she
was
running. Terry watched her leave the bridge and turn upriver, toward the business school. His gaze went ahead of her, to the classic stadium and the gabled Victorian boathouse. He saw the scullers in sweatshirts hauling their pencil-thin boat onto the dock, their workout over. The boathouse, the adjacent graceful bridge, the river itself, all glowed crimson in the setting sun, a Thomas Eakins scene so beautiful it hurt Doyle's eyes to look.

Against the sunlight, framed by the arching brick bridge behind, he found the small, golden figure of his son. Max was still at that bench, resting his bike, but staring back hard, worried now at what had kept his parents. Doyle began running too, toward his son, letting the current of his love flow on ahead.

***

Of all the rooms in the house, theirs was the one devoid of "touches," but pointedly so. The house had been built by Artemas Ward, one of George Washington's generals, and he'd made the second-floor parlor its grandest room. Joan and Terry had made it their bedroom.

An enormously high ceiling crowned the full wall of windows, which were actually four sets of French doors opening onto a narrow wrought-iron balcony and overlooking the sweep of garden. The property was bordered by a ten-foot-high serpentine brick wall worthy of Monticello, and it gave the garden a perfect frame. The flower beds and shrubs were laid out around, and the ribbons of grass were centered on, a masterpiece oak. The tree had reputedly been planted by Ward, but it was known in this decade as Max's Ladder, because it so lent itself to climbing. Its branches undulated toward each corner of the garden, and reached high above the house toward the unbroken sky. When the wind brought its leaves forward, they brushed the glass of the bedroom windows with a gentle sound of wooing.