I didn’t know what to make of all the social chaos, and I tried to heed my mother’s advice, which was essentially to live from the inside out, not from the outside in. The news wasn’t all the news, she’d said, and what held the world together was the way all those people who never made the news were inclined to live their lives.
Whatever else might be happening, the music that year was so fine. Percy Sledge. The Mamas and the Papas. Simon and Garfunkel. Motown—the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Miracles. The Beatles’ album Revolver. Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Jim McGuinn’s shimmering guitar on the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”
October gave way to November, and with the approach of winter, the country calmed down somewhat—though not for long. The divorce papers came, signed by my absent father, approved by a court, and although marriage was a sacrament to Sylvia, we were living in a time when fewer and fewer people agreed with her. We enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house, and they invited friends who had no families of their own.
On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself.
Four days later, on the evening of December 28, after reading in bed for an hour, before turning off the light, I took the tin box from my nightstand. In the weeks immediately after the destruction of the two recruiting offices, I had occasionally studied the pencil portrait of the suspected bomber, not sure why it fascinated me, but my interest had waned, and I hadn’t looked at the drawing for perhaps a month. This time, the moment I turned the clipping faceup in the lamplight, I realized that the description given by the witness to the police artist had resulted in a woefully inaccurate portrait of Lucas Drackman.
Before I had dreamed of Fiona Cassidy, I had dreamed of Lucas Drackman, on the night of the day that I had gone to the community center, discovered the promised piano, and had begun formal lessons with Mrs. O’Toole. When, in sleep, I first saw him, he was a teenager who had already killed his parents in their bed and was busy stealing what cash and jewelry and credit cards he could find. In memory, I could still hear him as he stood beside the bloody bed, speaking to his dead father: Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.
Either the witness had given an inadequate description or the artist had not successfully translated the description to paper. Lucas Drackman’s deep-set eyes had not been captured, nor the true bone structure and shape of his face. Although the nose appeared hawkish, like the murderer’s, it was too narrow, too pointed. The feature most accurately portrayed was his ripe and almost girlish mouth, which in life contrasted even more dramatically with his otherwise ascetic face than it did in the drawing.
37
The next day, December 29, was a Thursday, and of course I was still on school holiday. Mom didn’t have to sing that night; Slinky’s had closed to be lavishly decorated for the huge business it would do on the last two nights of the year. She had a five-hour shift at Woolworth’s; and then she would come home to spend the evening with me. Because she couldn’t be there on New Year’s Eve or on the eve before, she wanted that night’s dinner to be our celebration. She gave me money to get takeout from The Royal, the nearby diner on Forestall Street, where on some of our most special days together we had breakfast. They made the best chili in the world—a sign in their window announced that fact—and cheese bread so good that I sometimes dreamed about it. I was tasked with buying chili (which Mom would serve over buttered noodles), cheese bread, and whatever I wanted for dessert.
The day was cold but not bitter. I wore my zip-up quilted jacket, which was somewhat too big for me, because even though I was skinny and a bit short for my age, I grew too fast to get much use out of clothes if everything was bought to fit perfectly. Coats were more expensive than jeans and shirts, so I always had to wear them somewhat large to start and then gradually grow into them. I wore my new toboggan hat, too, which was striped red and white and topped with a red pom-pom that—in retrospect I am amazed to reveal—I thought was the essence of cool.