She knew that once you married a man, you were tied to him for good or bad—sickness, health, richer, poorer, till death did you part. A husband’s good decisions could make your life easier, and his bad decisions, or bad habits, could absolutely ruin you. She had seen it in her parents’ home and had vowed that she wouldn’t fall into the same trap. Her father was a blusterer and a bully. He made enemies, he stepped on toes, he took from men the things he had it in his power to take and he gave to men what it benefited him to bestow. That was politics. And her mother, who had hitched herself to him when the two had little in life, had become an imperious, lonely woman. Suspicious of people who had less, resentful of those who had more. Did she have anyone she could count as a friend, a confidante? Or did everyone fear that sharing the least bit of their own troubles with Birdie Dwyer would surely find its way back to Dennis, whereupon it would be filed away until it was useful? Still, her parents had mounted a charge that got them most of the way to the top. It was a good life. Most had far less. But it wasn’t a life that Rosemary had ever wanted for herself.
She had gone and hitched herself to Martin, and for all that was good about him—he was no blusterer, no bully—he had proven himself to be capricious at times. She knew that men made decisions for their own reasons and you hoped that you could fit those decisions into the life you thought you were making, but she was starting to see that life was like being handed the ingredients one at a time for a meal you were supposed to make, never knowing what was next. You might start with a chicken, a few carrots, a sack of potatoes, and think, Now we’re getting somewhere—but the next three items would be a bicycle tire, a top hat, and a bag of penny candy, and you had to figure out how to use it all. There was no chance to slip any of it into the trash, or set the hat on your head, or pretend you never saw the tire.
Martin claimed he had a plan and maybe that was true, and maybe it was even a good plan. But a good plan—a truly good plan—wouldn’t have left Martin out of work, wouldn’t have left her wondering how on God’s green earth she was going to square their expenses in the black-bound ledger where she tracked every nickel spent with the grocer, the butcher, the butter-and-eggs man, the cobbler who would fix the heel on the old shoes she would wear to the wedding.
A truly good plan—one that would be good for her, too—wouldn’t need to be cloaked in secrecy. Because if it was truly good, Martin would have been bursting to tell her all about it. He would have talked to her about it over his cup of tea, after the girls were in bed, on one of those rare nights when he was home instead of at the Kensington or somewhere on Fifty-Second Street or in Harlem. They could have formulated this plan together. She thought again of the kiss outside the chapel on the day they’d gotten married. Was she wrong to see that as a promise? Or just wrong to think that promises couldn’t be broken?
MILES TO THE south, on the island of Manhattan, in another church of the same faith, John Gavigan bowed his head in prayer. The priest had raised the Host and it was a time for all good Christians to fall to their knees, but if Gavigan perched his wrecked skeleton on the padded kneelers for even a second he would need to be lifted back into his seat. So he would risk blasphemy to save himself from that humiliation.
He bowed his head and turned his thoughts to his own mortal end. He wasn’t bloody-minded but seeing Tommy Cronin again had gotten him thinking about how the time had passed. For a dozen years, Tommy had been faithfully at his side. Gavigan’s shadow, they called him. And then one day he was gone, and with his disappearance some of Gavigan’s foes whispered that Gavigan was get-able. That Cronin hadn’t been just a shadow but a shield. Here Gavigan was, though, years after Cronin had walked off his post, and no one had gotten him yet.
Most of the men he had known in life had not made it this far. The loudmouths and the brawlers, the ones who were too quick to provoke or too bullheaded to ever back down, were the first to go. They seldom made it out of their teens, which was the Decade of Not Being Too Stupid. Then you’re in your twenties, the Decade of Hustle, where you’ve got to keep your eyes open for every opportunity, whether it knocks or not. That would get you into your thirties, the Decade of Luck. Gavigan had seen plenty of guys who were full of get-up-and-go lose it all because they picked the wrong side of a turf dispute in the old neighborhood, or got swept off to Rikers Island for not bribing the right cops (or for trying to bribe the wrong ones), or claimed too big a slice of some union’s bankroll only to find out firsthand how many bodies you can hide in a building’s foundation, and how quickly the concrete sets. You saw enough of that and you realized you had to find a way to bleed the luck out of the system, to make it all about the right decision instead of the wrong one. That’s when you entered the Decade of Being Smart, and if you knew what was what, you kept being smart for the rest of your life. But if you were no good at being smart, or if you were one of those guys who had been lucky and who thought that the luck would never run out, then you became one of the men whom Gavigan sheared like sheep, taking from them year after year, until they were good for nothing but mutton.
Gavigan had made it. Through all the traps littering the streets of the city, he had made it. But now, as his knees turned into rusty hinges and his lungs filled with a vile sludge, he had begun to wonder what all the decades of hustle, luck, and smarts had gotten for him, and what relics of his trials and victories he would leave behind. He had never had a wife, never had children. He wasn’t about to make like his fancy-pants neighbors and leave what he had to build a museum full of watery French landscapes or hand it all over to the opera, where the rich sat bawling in their seats while some fat Italians screeched about lost love.