Absent Friends

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 8

image

The Way Home

October 31, 2001

Marian hesitated outside. She had always disliked Flanagan's. She had been the one to call; but now, standing on the sidewalk in the amethyst hour when day surrenders to night, she wondered why she had agreed to have this encounter here. She could have demurred when Tom suggested it. (Though suggest was wrong: “Meet you at Flanagan's, five-thirty,” was what he'd said, and she'd said, “Fine, see you there,” as though Flanagan's ponderous furnishings and hushed talk had not, from the first, given her the uncomfortable feeling that something was happening just beyond the borders of her experience, something she was not welcome to know.) She could have requested another location. He would have consented, perhaps even apologized for not remembering how she felt, she who had not been inside Flanagan's for twenty years. But truly, how could he be expected to remember? You should have said something, she admonished herself, you should have spoken up if it mattered to you. It was not Tom's responsibility. People do not read minds.

Though Tom did, Tom sometimes did. She wished he had, on this occasion as so many times when they all were young, read hers. They might have met at the chrome-wrapped little diner, or they might have sat together in the Hilltop Café, finally somewhere to go in Pleasant Hills for a latte and a croissant. But it was as it had always been: what Tom offered sounded right, and without even considering another possibility (and in truth this was what most unnerved her: not that she had compromised, for Marian had built her life around her belief in the value of compromise; but that she had assumed without question that what he wanted was what she wanted also), she had agreed.

Impatient with herself, she pulled the door open into a room so startlingly unfamiliar that at first she was afraid she had somehow come to the wrong place; and then, for a brief time, she wanted the old Flanagan's back.

Dark, that tavern had been. Its linoleum floor stuck to your shoes, and its ancient jukebox throbbed with music from the days before your parents were old enough to drink. What had covered the walls? Stories clipped from newspapers, photographs behind glass. Horses, now she remembered, horses in the photos, trotting with sulkies behind. (Marian had always thought sulky races eerie and graceful, a little frightening. A trotter was expected to win, was cajoled and lashed by the man in the carriage behind, but could not run. How must that feel for the horses, she worried, what must it be like trying to do your best, having your best demanded of you, while forced to hold back?) There had been mirrors on the walls then, too, “Schlitz” or “Miller” scrawled across them in chipped gold leaf. Seeing in her mind the places where the mirrors had been, Marian realized that they had been set on the walls in such a way that from every part of Flanagan's, a customer could see the door.

She wondered whether she had always known that.

The mirrors were gone. The dark furniture and the sticky linoleum and the jukebox, the trotting horses locked behind glass, all had been replaced. Bentwood chairs, light and cheaply elegant, sat on a patterned tile floor beneath glass lamps that glowed seductively. Two television sets above the bar and three more by the green vinyl booths broadcast college football (one team a local one, their helmets bearing FDNY and NYPD logos alongside their tiger mascot's image), stock car racing (each car painted with its sponsor's name and colors and a large Stars and Stripes), and a sports interview show (tiny flag pins in everyone's lapel). You could swivel your head and take your choice. (Did they ever tune in Yonkers Raceway or the Meadowlands now, Marian wondered, where the trotters ran?)

Marian strained to hear the music. Over a lifelessly exact electronic beat a sad and sexy woman warned her man that he'd hurt her too often, and one day soon he'd find her gone. The rhythm and the melody were new, the sentiment the same as in Marian's youth, and her parents', and forever before. The raucous voices of the young crowd slammed the music down. A table or two, a booth here and there, were occupied by people Marian's age or older, resolutely eating burgers or plates of linguini, drinking their beers and watching the game. They sat in the date-night crowd like stolid old trees in a tangle of wild new growth. It was the kind of landscape, it occurred to Marian, that springs up after a forest fire. Most of Flanagan's patrons were kids, kids the age she and Jimmy had been when, finally legally permitted to drink—meaning, able to drink in public, not just in the woods or in the parking lot at Eisenhower or on the rocks under the bridge—they had only rarely chosen to come in here.

Tom, of course, had come here often; and he was here now. It was like Tom to be early, to be waiting so that she would not feel uneasy, alone in what had always been foreign territory and was now a numbingly unfamiliar country.

He stood when he saw her, and eyes in the crowd lifted to him as he rose. The plaintive woman quavering from the jukebox could be heard more clearly as conversation faltered and people glanced at one another. Tom walked to where Marian stood, just inside the door. He kissed her cheek and led her through the room.

He was no longer what he had been in days of old, the crown prince; and the kingdom he was to have inherited, he had dissolved. The young people in this new Flanagan's might not even know his name, not know what it was about him that drew and held their glances. But the older ones surely knew. They nodded to him as they had nodded to his father, smiled back when he smiled at them as though they shared a secret.

Tom led her to his table. Nothing in the new Flanagan's was familiar to Marian except this table of Tom's. Set for two and holding a half-drained pilsner of beer, it breathed an inch or two easier than the crowded tables around it and stood in precisely the spot on the floor where his father's table had always been.

And he was still Tom Molloy. His blue eyes were still clear, and his thick short hair was dark as a boy's. He still walked like a warrior, and his smile still told you that seeing you was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

Over the music, Marian said, “It's changed.”

Tom shrugged, and his smile turned rueful. “What hasn't?” He looked around, and she did, too, her head full of the past twenty years, the leisurely, incremental, inescapable alterations of time; and the last six weeks, the violent flashes of disaster.

“They still make a great cheeseburger, though,” Tom said, bringing them back to the solid world, the facts of the moment, and Marian, surprising herself, nearly laughed with delight at the persistent memory and hope of a world in which cheeseburgers were worth discussing.

She did not laugh, though, only smiled, and Tom did, too. She examined the menu and chose a pasta primavera. She also ordered wine, excusing herself for thinking this might be a difficult conversation to get through without something to encourage her. The new Flanagan's apologized for having no sauvignon blanc (the old Flanagan's would have laughed in her face), but the chardonnay, when it came, was surprisingly good.

Marian sipped at her wine, Tom at his beer. Tom brought up the Fund, only to say the board was still a hundred percent behind Marian, every step of the way. Marian smiled and didn't tell him that long, weary experience told her what that meant: someone on the board—at least someone, though most likely an entire faction—had questioned her decision-making, and probably her overall suitability in light of the Tribune's allegations, and had no doubt urged her replacement. If the board was still behind her, it was only because Tom and his faction had prevailed.

Marian thanked him and asked after his children. All were doing well. Michael, the oldest, who looked so like Tom had when they all were young, was home. He'd been in his senior year at college, in Syracuse; after the attacks, he'd rushed home and would finish school somewhere else, somewhere near. “He wants to stay in New York,” said Tom. “He doesn't want to be one of those people.”

Marian knew who those people were: the ones who ran from what had happened and what might happen, who deserted, escaped to other, less endangered cities. Or to cabins in the woods. “But he could come back next year,” Marian said, as though next year were something that could be counted on, as though next year would for certain come and be different from now. “Don't you think he should go back now and finish?”

“I'm his father. He doesn't ask me what I think.”

“You could tell him anyway. That's what my father does.”

Tom smiled at her again and looked down, and she thought he must be remembering his father, Mike the Bear, gone just over seven years now. How long that seemed! And yet it was not the Mike Molloy of seven years ago, or seventeen, whom Marian suddenly longed to see come striding through Flanagan's door. That had been a diminished and weary man, the exhausted king who had not fought his son's determination to democratize the kingdom and give away its wealth. No, the Mike Molloy whom Marian wished for was the Big Mike of her childhood, the old-time boss of Flanagan's. In charge, running things, and obeyed.

But she was being foolish. Big Mike was gone. And when the world had been his, it had not been a good world, not a fair one, and that world had ended badly, and that was why she was here with Tom right now. Tom had said it on the steps of St. Ann's in September: There are no grown-ups, only us. If Marian, and Tom, and everyone else who had been placed in positions they had not asked for, did not accept their situations, take responsibility, do what they had to do, they would find that no one was in charge.

Oh, Marian knew how much was in her hands. Still, reluctant to begin, to open a conversation she had avoided for twenty years (though it could not be that Tom did not know why they were here, so why did he not help her, why did he not begin?), Marian twirled her pasta, drank more wine, and asked after Tom's mother. “I saw her in September,” she told Tom. “At St. Ann's. But I didn't have a chance to talk to her.”

“That's too bad,” Tom said. “She'd have liked to see you.”

Marian had not spoken to Peggy Molloy at the mass she had come back to Pleasant Hills to attend, five days after the attacks. But not really because she had not had the chance.

Everyone, that day, was stunned and confused and trying to manage. All around her Marian had seen people working, for their own sakes and the sake of others, to hold themselves together, and she'd seen the different small things that made each fall apart. The sight of the empty apparatus floor through the open door at Engine 168 had been too much for one friend; another broke down sobbing as she spoke of talking to her neighbor while he watered the vegetable garden that now he would never harvest.

For Marian, strong and useful for those past five days, offering support to those weaker than she, volunteering late into the night and bearing up, that small thing had been the sight of Peggy Molloy. Seeing her shoulders bent as though carrying weight, her head covered in the old style with a black lace shawl, had brought Marian to unexpected tears.

If Tom was the abdicated prince, living now by choice as a commoner, Peggy Molloy, widowed seven years, was still the sad queen she had always been. She dressed as other women did, and walked like them, sat and talked among them in the same gentle voice she had always used; her grandchildren's friends adored her as her sons' friends always had. Others in church that day had lost loved ones; Peggy Molloy had not. But seeing her clothed in mourning out of respect for other mothers' sons had swept Marian back through years, to another mass, also at St. Ann's, when the loss had been all of theirs but Peggy's more than anyone's: the funeral mass for Jack.