Absent Friends

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 15

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A Hundred Circling Camps

November 1, 2001

In the sun-drenched silence of Sally's kitchen Marian tried to find a way to say what she had come for, some way better than she had planned. But there was no good way.

Marian had never permitted herself the luxury of shrinking from difficult duties. She sipped her tea and she said, “Jimmy.” Her voice shocked her; it boomed in the silence, was harsh in the sunlight. She'd meant to speak softly; she'd thought she had. She went on before one of the many reasons not to go on could find her. “Jimmy left papers. Something he'd written.”

Sally nodded. “That's what the Tribune says. Do you think he did?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think is in them?”

Marian said, “The truth.”

Kevin's head snapped her way, and his eyes locked on Marian's.

Marian met them and saw there a storm that she had never seen before. Oh my God, she thought, wanting to look away and finding she could not. Oh my God. He knows.

“The truth?” Sally said. “About the money?”

The cozy sunlight pouring into Sally's kitchen, the smell of tea and toast and the presence of two people she had always loved: these things should have made Marian feel embraced. At home, and safe. Before, they always had. But now, locked onto Kevin's eyes, she had a sense she was stumbling, directionless, through smoking, twisted ruins.

With difficulty, she said, “And more.” She answered Sally without looking away from Kevin, because she could not.

Kevin could have held Marian there, staring into her eyes, as long as he wanted, all day, all night, there would have been nothing she could do. But instead he broke his grip. He flung the newspaper onto the counter and went back to his eggs, jabbing the yolks with toast, spearing the whites with a fork as though this was something they deserved.

“What more?” Sally asked. “What more?”

“Whatever was going on—” Marian had to pause, to force her ragged heart to slow. To cover this need she sipped her tea. Chamomile, a common weed that flourished in cold dry air. Its fragrant white flowers blanketed alpine meadows in Switzerland, whose mountains were famously its source; but Marian, attending a conference in Anchorage a few years earlier, had come upon a miniature forest of it growing through the cracked, oil-spattered asphalt of a parking lot.

“I think,” Marian said, “I think something happened back then that we still don't know. Maybe you're right about the money, Sally. But whatever was going on, it's clear that”—tread carefully, Marian—“that Phil wasn't the only person hiding something. Jimmy was, too. No, Kevin, let me go on.”

Kevin had begun, “Aunt Marian—” but Marian was suddenly using her conference-table voice, and like most people who heard it, he stopped midsentence.

“I don't care what happens to Phil—I'm sorry, but you guys know how I feel—but Jimmy's reputation is something else.” She shot Kevin a look; a lifetime of meetings had honed her instinct for impending interruptions and how to quash them. “Whatever happened back then, maybe it was what we always thought, and maybe it was something different. If it was something Jimmy . . . something he felt bad about, then it seems to me he spent a lot of money and a lot of his life making up for it.”

“Wait,” said Sally. Marian heard a world of uncertainty in that one word. “You can't believe the money came from Jimmy. . . ?”

“Sally?” Oh God, Marian thought, why do I have to do this? “Sally, it did.”

Sally stared. “What are you—”

“Phil told me.”

A pause. “Phil?” Sally spoke Phil's name as though it were a word whose meaning had changed without warning. “Phil told you?”

“I'm sorry, honey. God, I'm sorry. That's what he said.” Marian put her hand over Sally's. “From Jimmy. All these years.”

“But he—I don't believe it.”

“I don't know,” Marian said helplessly, “whether it's true. But it's what he said.”

“To the reporter? Phil told him that?”

“He says not. He says he never told anyone but me.”

“Why . . .”

“Why did he tell me? I got the feeling he wanted me to help make it all right with you.”

Sally was shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth. “It's just not true.”

“Maybe not,” said Marian. “Maybe it isn't. But, Sal? Phil and Jimmy, they didn't like each other, but they got together, lots of times, over the years. Why?”

“Aunt Marian?” Kevin's voice was insistent, angry. “You can't be saying you believe that?” With that he stabbed a finger at the Tribune, at the serpent-filled world of distortions and half-truths and real truths crowded into a two-inch-wide column of type.

Marian shook her head. Not that. She was not taken in by that. That was manufactured, a Frankenstein monster cobbled out of whatever fragments of truth a reporter had dug out of the smoking rubble. Salamanders, she thought. Weren't those the lizards that rose mythically from fire, indestructible, crawling out of the ashes when all else had been consumed? Yes, salamanders. The old firehouses sometimes had them carved on the beams above the doors. Engine 168 had them; Jimmy had shown her.

Marian could hear that salamander truth hissing now. She forced herself to speak above it. “What they're implying, most of it's probably lies. About Jimmy, and about Phil, too.” She added that without believing it, but it was possible, and it would help win Sally over. Although the hope that flooded Sally's eyes when she said it was almost unbearable to see.

“Jimmy's a hero,” she said softly. “He was always a hero, except, if anything in the Tribune's right, except maybe once. Somehow. I don't know how.” Oh God, she thought, how can I be lying like this? She continued bitterly, punishing herself. “Something. It changed him, whatever it was.”

Suddenly her words began to come fast. She felt like a machine caught and racing, unregulated, unstoppable. “But now, now he's a symbol. Of courage, sacrifice, things people need to believe in. Whatever the truth is, what people need now to help them through what happened is more important. I think Jimmy would think so, too. I think he always thought that, or he'd have told the truth—all the truth—back then. You can't change the . . . mistakes of the past. You can only build the future.”

She was dismayed, yes, even frightened, to see the storm still raging in Kevin's eyes. What do you believe? What do you know?

But Marian did not ask, and Kevin did not speak.

“Marian?” Sally said. “You really think, you think whatever happened then . . . Markie and Jack . . . you think it wasn't what they told us?”

All Marian could do was nod her head and wish she were somewhere infinitely far away.

“And that's what you think Jimmy . . . what he wrote down?” Sally's question was so hushed Marian could barely hear it.

“Whatever it is,” Marian said, “whatever it is, if someone finds it, people will read it who didn't know him, didn't know any of them, any of us. They'll make judgments. Nothing good will come of it, Sally.” Breathe in, breathe out, in, out. Find a calm place. “And,” she said, “it's the only thing they have.”

“The only thing people have?”

“No.” Marian shook her head. “The Tribune. Whoever's investigating. In Phil's case, the Ethics Commission.” She waited for the earth to open up and swallow her. She hoped it would. How could she be doing this, using Sally's love for Phil as just another tool of her own, another implement to shape the structure she had concluded must be built?

“Without what Jimmy wrote,” she said, “it's just speculation. It will go away. It's a hot story now, but it will cool, with so much else going on.”

“Aunt Marian.” Kevin pronounced the words carefully, as though he was afraid they were going to give him trouble. “‘The only thing they have.' But the paper”—he jerked his thumb at the Tribune, lying in bread crumbs—“they say they haven't seen them, Uncle Jimmy's papers. Only that reporter who died, they say he saw them. Where are they? Who has them?”

And at last Marian had reached the center of the labyrinth, the reason she had torn apart their sunny morning. “I don't know. I hoped you knew.”

“Me?” Kevin's eyes widened. “I never even knew about them, until the Tribune. Mom?”

“No, I didn't know.”

Both pairs of green eyes resting on her, waiting.

“Are you . . . sure?” asked Marian. To Kevin: “He left you his things.”

It was Sally who answered. “I cleaned out his apartment,” she told Marian. “Kevin was at Burke, and I thought . . . anyway, it was me.” She took a breath. “There wasn't anything like that there. He didn't have much. Shirts, pants. His dress uniform. Some books.” Softly, she smiled. “I wouldn't have thought . . . The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Some books about Buddhism. But nothing from those days. Not even old photographs. A picture of Kevin, from when he graduated the Academy. But not any old ones.”

None? Not any?

Oh, please, this is not important, Marian begged herself wildly, feeling her spirit plunge as though a cliffside path had crumbled suddenly beneath her feet. That Jimmy had not kept a photograph of her, not a single one, as she had of him, just the one, all these years in her bedside table—what had she expected? What had she any right to hope for?

She forced herself to speak. “Even if they were there,” she said, “the papers, even if you found them, wouldn't be the ones the reporter saw. There must be copies. Who has those?”

Kevin's face was dark and hard. With a shock Marian recalled a day long ago: Kevin at thirteen, Marian arriving to pick him up after school. She had entered the gate at St. Ann's at the start of a schoolyard brawl. Kevin had looked exactly this way in the seconds before he threw himself at a bigger boy. She'd run over and pulled the boys apart, had told them they should be ashamed of themselves, civilized people did not settle arguments with violence. She had made them shake hands. Marching Kevin out of the yard, she'd asked him what the fight was about. Kevin, still crimson, said without looking at her, “He said I had no dad because my dad was a killer and he died in jail. He said my mom was screwing a Jew.”

Now, empty of the certainties she'd had that afternoon, Marian said to Kevin, “Couldn't there be something, something Jimmy told you about, just so someone would know? That you never knew what it was, but you knew it was important to him? Because”—she raced to say this; she couldn't help herself, but that was good, because maybe the truth of it was powerful enough to force things to turn out the way they must, the way she needed them to—“because, Kevin, besides fighting fires, you're the thing he loved most in the world.”

Kevin's eyes fastened on hers again, but not to hold her, she thought, not to bind her. More, this time, to be held.

“Kevin?” Sally asked softly. “Was there anything like that, that Jimmy ever talked about?”

“He wouldn't have. It's not like that. I'm a probie. He's—he was Jimmy McCaffery. He was lowering guys on ropes when I was a kid. He had anything important to say to someone, maybe when I had a few years on the Job it might be me. I was thinking that. I was thinking, maybe someday it could be just, you know, Jimmy. Not Uncle Jimmy. Maybe someday. But not yet.

“The only thing I have, besides the books Mom said—his shirts don't fit me—” He swallowed and had to start again. “The only thing, from the memorial service, is his helmet. The guys gave it to me.”

He swiped at his eyes and looked away. Sally reached across the table, withdrew her hand without touching him. Silence as thick as the sunlight filled the room. Sally asked Marian, “Where do you think they are? Whatever's in them, these papers?”

“I don't know,” Marian answered. “But we need to find them—we need to find them—before that reporter does.”

Kevin's chair scraped across the floor as he pushed back from the table, reaching for his crutches.

“Kev?” Sally stood as he levered himself up. “Honey?”

Kevin shook his head and kept going. Sally took a step as though to follow but stopped herself. Marian didn't watch him go but she heard, she felt, the hard slam of his door.