CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I CAME TO A FEW HOURS LATER, MY HEAD POUNDING, THE ROOM spinning, my jaw wired in place, harsh light in the hospital corridor overhead, nurses whispering confidentially, the low-grade olfactory smear of liquor and residual anesthesia making me sick to my stomach. Pop was crazy drunk and bent over me, his hair an irregular skyline, his florid Celtic face inches from my own and sounding like a refugee from Going My Way.
“There, there, Collie, you’ve had a terrible time. You’ve just come out of surgery. Your mother, God bless her, she packed quite a wallop, the strength of the bereaved, she had, the madness of a corpse. But you’re on the mend and your papa is here and I’ll take care of everything. You haven’t a worry. And Mammy and Bingo are in heaven, and I’ll bet there are dogs in heaven, aren’t there, Collie? Now, you must not try to talk. And you’re forbidden to think. I don’t want you thinking of anything, just that your papa is in charge and everything’s taken care of, everything’s perfect, never better,” he said, slurring and choking back sobs.
I stared at him, finally aware of what people mean when they refer to a feeling of sudden terror.
“And I don’t care what anyone says, you’re the bravest one of them all, and I’ll fight to the death anyone who says otherwise. If you’d gone in after him, you’d be dead, too.”
He took my hand in his. “I’ve never been more proud of you, Collie. I’m bursting with pride in my son. You did the practical thing. Let no one tell you otherwise.”
Pulling a deck of weathered cards from his back pocket, he swerved unsteadily from side to side. “Are you thinking of a card, Collie? Pick a card.”
Drawing himself up, he swayed back and forth, complained of not feeling very well, and passed out cold and blunt on my chest, all two hundred pounds of him. He was covering my face, the cards spraying across the bed. I couldn’t breathe. He was like a plastic bag over my head. I was seeing stars, resigned myself to dying right then and there, when one of the nurses spotted my predicament, and she and an orderly pulled him off me—it felt as if the whole world were shifting—and they shook their heads in disgust at his condition.
I closed my eyes and went away. Hours passed, maybe days. The next face I saw was my own, taking blurry shape in the form of the great and powerful Peregrine Lowell standing over me.
“I suppose you’d like to know what happened to your mother,” he said. “It appears she died of something called stress cardiomyopathy—it typically occurs among middle-aged women who’ve suffered a great shock or trauma, although I pointed out to the doctors that King Lear succumbed to the same condition, an example which seemed to elude them altogether. It isn’t always fatal, it doesn’t need to be fatal; however, in the case of your mother, unfortunately, it proved quite deadly.”
He inhaled deeply and then exhaled slowly, as if he were making an effort to control his breathing.
“Now, Collie, let me say that none of this is your fault.” His gaze was slightly deflected, his focus was on the black beret he held in his hands, his fingers clenching and unclenching the fabric. He paused and stared into my eyes. “Now, I acknowledge the temptation to lay the burden of blame at your doorstep. After all, it was your idea to go caving, to take along your younger and inexperienced brother, to attempt such an ill-conceived venture with so little consideration for your safety.”
Setting aside his hat, he began to smooth the sheets on my bed as he talked, straightening out the wrinkles and tucking in the edges until I was so tightly wedged in white cotton, I felt as if I’d been consigned to a pod.
“As a result, not only is Bing dead, so is your mother and so are two other young people, including Telfer Ferrell’s only grandson. I have no doubt but that your mother would be alive today had she not been faced with the horrendous shock of Bing’s terrible and premature death.” He paused and surveyed his handiwork, his lips curving into a half smile, my immobilization somehow satisfying to him. He leaned down, his eyes trained on mine, and put his hand on my right forearm, the only limb that remained exposed, and he secured it under the sheets and pulled the blanket up around my neck.
“Considering the carnage, one might be moved to say, Thank God you didn’t actually set out to do harm.” He finished me off with a smile.
Covered head to toe in a dark, rich shade, he looked like a bottle of cognac, tall and slim and so well dressed, it hurt my eyes to take him in.
“That aside, I’d like you to know I don’t blame you for what happened, nor do I think you were cowardly for not trying to rescue your brother. You made the right decision.” He hesitated. “At least, let’s hope it was a well-reasoned response and not the act of a coward—I give you the benefit of the doubt in that regard, although others might not be so generous. I’ll leave the matter to your conscience, and you and Bing can sort it out in the afterlife, assuming, of course, that Catholics go to heaven, which is another matter entirely. So, we understand one another, then?”
My eyes watered, tears pooling, blurring my vision, an involuntary response to all the pain I was feeling. The Falcon impatiently drummed the back of a chair with his fingers.
“Good. The matter’s put to rest. So it’s back to school this fall. You must focus firmly on the future. There’s a job for you at one of the newspapers after you finish school. I want you to learn the business from the ground up. I’ve arranged for you to come home with me. Enough of this damned hospital business. . . .” Looking around the room with an expression of disgust, he waved his arms dismissively.
The Falcon despised doctors—he had never recovered from the indignity of a colonoscopy he’d had when he was fifty. In his view, the test was clinically sanctioned buggery, and he hadn’t been to a doctor willingly since.
“You’ll live with me.” He glanced out into the corridor, speaking vaguely, seeming to be distracted, although there was no one there. “It’s what your mother would want—especially now,” he added, knowing that sending me to Cassowary would be my mother’s way of telling me to go to hell, a fitting punishment for what had happened.
“What is it?” he said, turning back to confront me, his mouth twisting with exasperation, noting my reflexive frown.
“What about Pop? Uncle Tom?” I wrote in a shaky hand on the yellow notepad kept on the little table next to my hospital bed. My shoulders were sloping; I felt so tired, the effort to breathe brought more tears to my eyes.
He glanced down at my note, then methodically tore the paper from the pad, shredding it into small pieces that fell to the floor.
“What about them?” he asked, heading for the door, delighted by my enforced silence. We’d never had such an agreeable encounter.
There was a joint funeral for Bingo and Ma in Boston, the same church where Ma and Pop were married, their burnished coffins side by side at the front of the altar, so near that they touched. I sat in the first pew, my swollen face a deep aubergine. On one side of me, Uncle Tom was clear-eyed, well scrubbed, and sober. He smelled like cold air. My grandfather sat on the other side, gloves on his hands, silk scarf at his throat protecting him from the disease of Catholicism. Pop was nowhere to be found.
“Unforgivable,” the Falcon said, dusting off his lap, scanning the pews, conducting a silent head count.
Pop showed up midway through the Mass, reeling down the center aisle of the church, leaning to the left and bending to the right, hollering at the priests and berating guests of the Falcon, stopping to attack me.
“You’ve stabbed me in the back for the last time, you yellow coward, leaving your dear brother to drown, and he was worth a thousand of you, and killing your mother as sure as if you’d plunged the dagger into her heart. Go on, coward, traitor, bastard, I know your dirty game.”
“Pop, please . . .” I was talking to myself, my jaw clamped shut, marveling at my own ability to think things couldn’t get any worse.
“Mr. Flanagan, you’re obviously distraught,” said one of the priests.
“Don’t practice your priestly bullshit on me,” Pop said. “Pederasts, the lot of you. You wouldn’t recognize the will of God if it came down from heaven and bit you on the wrinkled ass.”
Crimson-faced and speechless, the Jesuit abandoned his benevolent posture and signaled for the ushers at the back of the church to escort Pop from the premises.
Pop never did grasp the concept of gracious defeat. “Dignity,” he used to say, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.” He started swinging the moment they came near him.
The choir continued its protracted torture and murder of “Ave Maria.” Pop shook his fist up at the balcony. “Catholics cannot sing! Catholics cannot sing!” he shouted in a desperate parting shot, his voice echoing from the vestibule.
I felt the eyes of the world on the back of my head. Poor Collie, what do we make of him, having recently distinguished himself as a moral and physical coward? And what of the old man, his shanty Irish father whom he obviously takes after, a raving drunken lunatic?
Back at my grandfather’s house, I was subject to endless rounds of solicitous inquiries and compassionate murmuring from people who could hardly bear to look at me. I was nodding and smiling weakly, good manners my formal wear, as around me the conversational buzz grew loud and uniform, absent melody, sounding like the godless chant of cicadas deep in August.
“Poor Anais, she died of a broken heart.” I overheard two women talking, friends of the Falcon. “She adored that boy. I understand her heart stopped beating on the spot.”
“I heard she’s the one who broke the older boy’s jaw. Imagine. She must have been out of her mind with grief. What a tragedy. It makes me shudder to think about it. Her death feels like a curse. Poor Colin. . . .”
The other woman looked startled. “Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic? Anais wasn’t a Gypsy, after all. Oh, by the way, I think his name is Collier.”
I stopped listening and wandered alone into the study, where I sat in the window seat and stared outside.
The Japanese call what happened to Ma tako tsubo, which means “octopus trap” in English. The left ventricle bulges and balloons—in an X-ray, the affected part of the heart looks like a traditional fishing pot for snaring octopus.
When Ma died she let the octopus out of the bag. I had already begun to feel the long strangulating reach of its tentacles.
Ingrid, the housekeeper, came looking for me and, with her arm around my shoulders, ushered me back to the main part of the house, where the Falcon’s guests continued to circulate.
“This is no time for you to be alone,” she said.
It was hot. The sun was bright and hard. I went and stood by the open window in the cherry-paneled dining room. The curtains were blowing, but the breeze was warm as wool. Everyone was embarrassed, discomfited—each awkward kindness a searing rebuke.
Parched and feeling as if I were about to burst into flames, I retreated to my room on the second floor, where I sat dejected on the edge of my bed, cradling my glass jaw. Eyes wide open, still I couldn’t see a thing. It was dark where I was.
“Collie!” I heard a muted shout as a spray of gravel hit the bedroom window.
I drew the curtain. Pop stood below, a debauched Romeo pleading his mottled case.
“Collie,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’ll come to the point. Could you spare a twenty? It seems we were living a lie. Your dear mother ran through most of her fortune years ago, spending it all on the Commies. Your grandfather’s been supporting us, and now he’s frozen the accounts and left me practically penniless but for a meager monthly honorarium. I’ve got only enough for dog food.”
I signaled him to wait a moment, walked over to the dresser, picked up my wallet, and withdrew the contents—three twenties. After taking a moment to fashion them into paper airplanes, I leaned out the window and let fall all three bills, watching as they drifted gently downward, an incongruous rescue flight, Pop struggling to catch them in midair.
“You’re a peach, Collie. I won’t forget it. I’m a broken man, but I’ve got my integrity. I can’t be bought, and by God, they’ll never own me. They can’t take it away from you, try as they will, don’t let the bastards get to you, promise me, Collie, you’ll never surrender.”
It’s hard to surrender when you’re not putting up much of a fight. I wasn’t Pop—Pop didn’t know how to give in.
“Collie,” Pop said, turning to leave, pausing, not looking up at me there in the window, holding back the white curtain, crumpling the bills and folding them into his pants pocket, “it’s all right. You mustn’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”
I just looked at him, his profile outlined in a charcoal glow. I was listening to him talk, and all the while I knew that by morning it would be my fault once again, that Pop’s emotional support was as unsettling as a Mafia kiss.
“Your mother loved you, Collie,” he blurted out as if he were apologizing for something.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. “Well”—Pop was struggling—“if it seemed sometimes she preferred your brother, it was only because she’d convinced herself he was her reincarnated Irish setter . . . and didn’t she love the look of him?”
The dog’s barking grew louder and more insistent. “Jesus,” Pop said, suddenly fuming, turning to face the offending sound.
I stared after him as he disappeared into the amber light.