Absent Friends

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 5

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The Bodies of the Birds

October 31, 2001

One blowy, dark autumn day some years ago, Marian had lingered on the steps of Holy Innocents after mass to speak to Father Domingo about secrets.

What had been an early morning cloudburst had retrenched to a hostile dampness; a sky the color and weight of lead sagged over wet sidewalks stuck with fallen leaves. Father Domingo, the keen-eyed junior priest at Holy Innocents, lately come to this church and to his profession (and this was why Marian had selected him: she hoped for the counsel of someone to whom her questions, like most questions, was new and thus worthy of serious thought), had shown no surprise at the gravity of her inquiry or the time and place she had chosen to pursue it.

On the church steps, a cold, determined wind pushed the hem of the priest's cassock around his ankles and tangled Marian's hair. Father Domingo tilted his head to hear her question, then frowned thoughtfully, clasping his hands behind him.

The conundrum she posed was hypothetical. A man carelessly throws a match away, realizes he has started a fire, and runs inside the burning building, rescuing the inhabitants. All are grateful: the man has saved them. Their home is destroyed, their possessions lost, but the man, their rescuer, helps them rebuild. Their losses are great, but they take heart from the selfless spirit of their benefactor. They are not sure they could have gone on, they say, but for his help and his example. He never tells them, and they never learn, that it was he who started the fire.

Marian's questions were two: Do this man's bravery and good deeds outweigh his guilty action? And: Is it cowardly of him to fail to reveal the truth, or courageous of him to bear the burden of this knowledge alone so that people who need something to believe in can continue to believe in him?

“We need never bear our burdens alone,” Father Domingo said, in the suede-soft accent that made him the darling of the Dominicans and Mexicans who worshiped at Holy Innocents. “God stands always ready to share the weight of our burdens.”

Marian's heart sank. Still, she persevered. “Sometimes people can only come to God through good works.”

“This man, then, he is coming to God?”

“I don't know. But the people who believe in him, what if they believe he was sent to them by God, to give them faith?”

“Believing in a mortal man, this is a sad delusion.”

“But if he tells the truth, people might lose their faith.”

“In God? Or in him?” Father Domingo's eyes fixed on Marian's. He seemed to want to bore deep within her, below the protective stones and the nurturing soil, to the roots of her heart. She wanted to look away, but she could not.

The rising wind snatched at her scarf, trying to draw her attention as though to warn her of danger, but Marian had another question, in some ways the only question. “If someone else had seen him throw the match?”

“Would you like to come into the confessional?” Father Domingo suggested.

Marian flushed and shook her head. She had been to confession earlier, had taken communion at mass. Like most people, she was not lacking in sins to confess. But how to be sure what was a sin, what required confession; it was really this that Marian was asking.

The priest met her eyes again and she shuddered: had he found her core and seen the darkness there? “Then you must ask God,” he said.

Marian mumbled her thanks to Father Domingo. She walked slowly down the steps. She would ask God: tonight in her prayers, and tomorrow, and next Sunday at mass. But she had been asking God this question for many years already.



Years later, following mass at St. Ann's on the Sunday after September 11, Marian stood with Sally in the sunshine outside the great carved doors. They hugged each other, holding on, then wiped their eyes and smiled at each other.

“I went to the hospital to see Kevin yesterday,” Marian said.

“He told me.”

“He looks good.” Marian, who would have said this to Sally in any case, was grateful that it was true.

“He's doing well, the doctor said.” Sally cast her eyes down. In these times and in this place, she was ashamed, Marian thought, of the joy she felt because her son was going to live.

Marian felt a hand rest on her shoulder. “Hey, you two,” said Tom. He hugged Sally, and then Marian; his strong arms were surprisingly comforting in this time when comfort was rare.

“You okay?” Tom asked Sally. “I called NYU this morning, finally got to talk to Kevin. He sounds good.”

“You got through on the phone?” Marian asked.

“Took me an hour.”

“He's doing well. I'm going over there this afternoon,” Sally said.

“To the hospital? Want me to take you?” Tom offered. “The bridge's open.”

That was sweet, Marian thought. Sally didn't like to travel into Manhattan alone; her friends all knew. And Tom was one of her friends. He always had been. He had never turned his back on her, though her husband had gone to prison for killing his brother.

Sally was hesitating. It was a lot of trouble for Tom to go to. Marian stepped in.

“I'm just having coffee with Dad, then I'm going back,” she said. “Tell me what ferry you want to make, and I'll go with you.”

Sally smiled. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Tom said, “but the offer's still open. Marian, can we talk a minute?”

Sally gave them each a quick kiss. “I'll call you at your dad's,” she said to Marian, and left them.

Marian and Tom stood in the sun, and Tom told Marian about the fund that had just been created, the McCaffery Memorial Fund. Listening, Marian felt a lurch of fear. She told herself impatiently that was foolish. Jimmy was a hero. He was famous for unselfish courage. This fund would celebrate that. This was just the kind of thing New York needed right now. What was there to be afraid of?

“They made me chairman of the board,” Tom was saying. “But none of us knows anything about this. I'd like—the board would like—to ask you to be the director.”

“What? Oh, no.” Marian moved a small step back, as though fighting a magnetic field. “Tom, I can't.”

Tom gave a shake of his head. “Please.” He was handsome, as he had always been, with his dark hair and blue eyes that, when fixed on you, saw nothing else. Marian, seeking respite from Tom's eyes, glanced over the crowd. She saw Vicky on the sidewalk with her son Michael, named after Tom's father, Big Mike Molloy. When Vicky and Tom separated, Tom had been the one to move out; he'd bought a house two blocks away. Marian had asked him then if he'd considered a bigger move, a cleaner break. No, he said, sounding surprised: Pleasant Hills was where he belonged.

Marian watched Michael kiss his mother and stride away. The boy was twenty-two and looked so like Tom had looked that for a brief, disorienting moment, like a tremor or a spell, she found herself searching the crowd for Jimmy, for Markie, for herself, all of them exuberant and invincible as they had been, back then.

The moment passed, everything snapped back into focus. Marian was standing with Tom on the church steps, and Tom was speaking about the McCaffery Fund.

The idea was not Tom's, as the press later had it. Tom was inclined, as Marian was, to let Jimmy's legend rest, though his reasons were surely different. But other people—men who, as boys, had won trophies on teams Jimmy had captained; women who, when girls, had contrived innumerable accidental encounters with him in noisy school corridors, had whispered jealously to each other as Marian walked by—had elected this loss to stand for all the unbearable others. They had chosen to take action now to console themselves for their helplessness on that day, and they had come to Tom.

As he was coming to Marian.

“Please,” Tom said again. “He meant a lot to a lot of people. People want to give money—hell, it's all they can do. Think of all the good you can do with this, Marian.”

He'd smiled, and she'd had to smile, too. She was an Eskimo, and Tom knew, as he always had, just what to say so that she would be most likely to sign up for a delivery of ice.

She was nevertheless steeling herself and planning to refuse, when the church doors creaked open. She and Tom stepped aside to let a group of people pass. At their center walked Eddie Spano, talking on his right to someone Marian didn't know, while his left hand gripped the arm of his father, Aldo. Eddie was almost bald—had it been that long since she'd seen him? But it was the sight of Aldo Spano that stunned and scared her. When they all were young, Mr. Spano had been a legendary monster, lying in wait to eat you (or at least smack you, though you were not his) and teaching his two sons to be like him. Now he leaned on a cane, and on his son, his movements crabbed, imprisoned by that ferocious and insatiable jailer, age. The face she remembered as terrifyingly scarlet was dull, wrinkled, and soft, like something beginning to rot. While Marian watched, Aldo Spano looked to Eddie as though unsure what to do. Eddie spoke to his father calmly, then turned back to his conversation as though he had done this many times before. Marian drew a breath.

That Aldo Spano was no longer frightening was, to Marian, a fearful thing.

Tom watched her; Tom, because he was Tom, knew what she was thinking and how to turn it to his use.

“It's just us now, Marian,” he'd said, as they both watched the Spanos' slow progress down the stairs, Eddie half-lifting his hesitating father to each step. “There are no grown-ups anymore. It's just us. We have to do it.”

And so she'd told him she'd think about it. From the top of the steps she'd searched the crowd, found her own father in it, and hurried to him.



As Marian, still thinking of smoke and prayers, reached the door to her own office, she heard Elena call after her.

“Marian? That reporter, it was all right I gave her your cell phone? I wasn't sure, but you said, the press—”

“Yes, of course. Thank you,” Marian added with a quick smile.

Since September 11 Marian had been interviewed often in print, on radio, and on TV. To discuss the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan—and the role of the MANY Foundation and the Downtown Council in it—she made herself available to any journalist at any time. It was one of her responsibilities, one of the tasks she felt called upon to perform. Because MANY's phones still didn't work, she had given her staff permission to give her cell phone number out as liberally as she had jealously guarded it before.

And since she'd taken on the administration of the McCaffery Fund, she had been repeatedly asked about that, too, and she'd always replied with her gentlest smile and most assured tone.

“Our mission is outreach and support for Fire Department recruitment,” she'd told Larry King, and she'd taped that interview and later watched it carefully, to study her own face, her body language, as she said, “The New York City Fire Department was Captain McCaffery's life. His dream was to see a department that would continue to be the best in the world, because it would contain, it would welcome, all New York's Bravest.”

As a rule Marian did not worry about her public image, what she projected or how she was perceived. She tried to tell the truth and to be kind. She did not waste her time in inordinate concern about whether those intents were understood. Time spent speculating and fretting was time wasted on vanity, and Marian did not approve of vanity, least of all in herself.

But in this interview, she'd been talking about Jimmy.

This ground was too unsteady, this path too treacherous, for her to tread without looking back: she needed to assure herself of where she'd been. She needed to prepare herself for where she was to go.

She had run the tape three times, finally deciding she was satisfied with her look of comforting, of caring and firm resolve. “Through the McCaffery Fund,” she watched herself say, “we will be able to reach out to communities that have historically not had the opportunity to serve the people of New York through this extraordinary department. In this way we will help make Captain McCaffery's dream a reality.”

“A rainbow department,” Larry King had said. “Captain James McCaffery's dream. We'll be right back.”

It was beautiful, this dream, it was comforting to imagine heroes of all races, all colors, shapes, all beliefs and loves, being given the chance to help and save, to use their courage and their caring no matter who they were, no matter what. Beautiful, and a worthy goal for this Fund in Jimmy's name. It was a condition Marian had laid down for her service to the Fund, that this be its focus.

In truth Marian did not know what had been in Jimmy's dreams since the nights when they were young. She did not know what he had hoped for, what he had feared, over the years, but she did not imagine that since those nights his sleep had been untroubled.

Marian was not sure that the dead looked down from Heaven, or that they benefited from prayers rising or actions taken on their behalf, though Father Connor had always told them this was one of the purposes of worship. She did not know if Jimmy had made it to Heaven, was not sure what kind of heroism outweighed which sins. She did not know whether good done by a person in this life could redeem the darkness of a life gone before.

Once she had been sure of these things and so many others. The unsureness that now surrounded her, the sense that the ground was shifting under her and she had no firm place to stand: was it because, after so long, after a lifetime, of working to keep a vast empty space between them, she stood so close to Jimmy now?

Accepting the leadership of the McCaffery Fund had made her a visible target for Harry Randall's sharpshooting and all that followed. But more and more Marian suspected this: her true error was not the public revelation but the private one: that the bridge between herself and Jimmy that she'd crossed, when the time came, without looking back, she had never burned.

Seated at her desk, Marian looked at the papers in her hands, not sure how they'd gotten there. There were words on her computer screen, her coffee cooling on her side table. She turned to the window, to the dust-covered buildings, the rumbling trucks, the bright fall sunlight filtering through smoke and sprayed water.

She stood, stuck her head from her door, called down the corridor to Elena. “That reporter will be coming here soon. Make sure there's milk for the coffee, would you, and cookies or something?” Not wanting to give this interview was one thing; but since she had agreed to it, upholding MANY's reputation for comfortable hospitality was quite another.

Really, though, it was not all right. Not Elena's fault, nothing Elena had done that she should not have. But giving Marian's cell phone number to Laura Stone from the New York Tribune so she could ask Marian questions about Harry Randall was not all right at all.