11

Mexico City, 1953

Tom didn’t realize he had nodded off in the deck chair until he came awake in the last hour of the night. He thought for some reason that he must be back on the docks in the early morning, but the air was full of the scent of chilis and peppermint and poinsettia, and not the diesel fuel and brine and coal smoke that laid so heavy on the tongue.

He stretched himself, stiff in the impression of the deck chair—then started when he saw his brother by the edge of the roof. He was standing in the same place where Slim had been, staring out at the city in the same way. To Tom’s surprise, he looked none the worse for wear. His silver hair carefully combed back. Dressed much as he was when Tom had seen him the day before, in a light-blue, short-sleeve sports shirt and a pair of navy blue pants with no socks. Another day at El Ranchito.

“‘Mother of pleasures and ocean of souls/ . . . Fair flower of cities, the West’s glory bold,’” Charlie recited before turning to face Tom.

“It’s the coming place, now that Europe’s blown itself up again. Give ’em another twenty, thirty years—maybe less!—and Mexico City will put New York to shame. This is the hemisphere of the future, and it’s perfectly located, right smack-dab in the middle. There’s no port, of course, but air is the thing now anyway. Besides, a port never brought anything but misery to a city.”

“Well, at least we’ll still be in the hemisphere of the future,” Tom said, walking stiffly over to stand next to him.

“Can you imagine what those first Spanish conquistadors must’ve thought when they saw it?” he asked—and studying his face closely, Tom thought he didn’t look bad at all, eyes a little bloodshot but genuinely engrossed with what he was saying—as always.

“You mean, before they set about slaughterin’ the population?” he asked.

“The whole city, built on islands, an’ floating gardens. Outside each house, a banner made entirely from the bright feathers of exotic birds, lighter than air. And a pot in which they would burn colored salts. Layers and layers of floating colors, everywhere. The Spanish must’ve thought they stumbled into heaven.”

“Heaven, or a death camp. With bodies an’ skull crammed into every available nook an’ cranny,” Tom said. “And the temples where they pulled the hearts out of the living sacrifice, and flayed the flesh of their victims to wear. I read the guidebook, Charlie.”

His brother looked at him sharply, then burst out laughing.

“Well, what great city doesn’t have its closets stuffed with skeletons, Tom? At least here there was a purpose to it. They honored the dead by wearing their skin an’ eating their flesh. Sort of one big, daily communion, you might say, though it’s difficult to imagine Francis Cardinal Spellman presidin’ over it.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Charlie. Something tells me His Holiness would’ve fit in just fine. I could just see him struttin’ about Saint Pat’s in his human flesh suit every Easter.”

For a few minutes they stood and watched the city together in silence.

“I’m sorry about last night, Tommy,” Charlie said straight out, at last. “It was just all the talk of home, an’ seeing her there . . . Anyway, I’m sorry. What would Dunphy the waiter say?”

“I’m pretty sure he’d say a man is only as good as his friends, Charlie—his friends and his family. He would say no man stands up alone in this world. And he’d be right.”

“I know, Tommy, I know it, and I appreciate the sentiment, an’ everything you’re tryin’ to do for me. I don’t know that it’s worthwhile, dredgin’ everything up again, just so I can go back to live among all those damned peacocks.”

 

 

“Here lie I, . . . who, alive, all living men did hate:

 

 

Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay

 

 

Not here thy gait.”

 

 

“Ah, Charlie! Which means what?” Tom said, the feeling of disgust growing in him again. “Goin’ out to dinner every night to play the stage Paddy? Tragic an’ drunk, sittin’ around El Ranchito framin’ your newspaper clippings? She’s not going to stand for it, Charlie.”

“Don’t tell me about my own wife!” his brother said, flaring up. “What the hell d’you know about it, anyway?”

“She won’t, Charlie, an’ you know it as well as I do,” Tom pressed, each word wrenching in his gut, but knowing he had to say them. “She’s still in love with you, Charlie. She married you. But not to be buried alive down here. You want to keep her, Charlie, you got to work with me.”

His brother put his head down in his hands, rubbing his marvelous thick eyebrows, and for a moment Tom thought he might be crying. But when he looked up again he was dry-eyed, looking a little queasy but nodding his head in agreement. He stared around the makeshift roof garden again in the half-light.

“You know I love the light this time of the mornin’. It reminds me of the evenings back home, somehow, when Da used to take me out to shoot at the lapwings. Did he used to take you shooting, too, Tommy?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Ah, that’s good. That’s when we talked, you know. I remember we were sitting out there with our shotguns across our laps, waiting for the lapwings to come in at dusk, so we could have our shot. And Da asked me, ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ And I—I couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time—I told him, ‘A schoolteacher,’ just like he was.”

“I did, too.” Tom chuckled. “I told him the same.”

“And I remember he told me, ‘No, son. A schoolteacher is an estimable enough profession. Your mother was one, and I’m one, and proud to be so, but only because that’s all there was for me. That’s what it is to live in a captive nation. It’s a petty life for a man.’”

Fighting all the time with the village priest, who schemed for twenty years to replace him with a favorite nephew. Peering up the road twice a day to check if the school inspectors were on their way down from Tuam.

He had married his assistant teacher, hitching up the horse and bringing her over to the an beann when it was her time. Bringing his children in one after the other to have the vindictive little priest place his spittle on their lips because it was sacred. His wife held back after Mass with the other new mothers to be “churched”—restored to the purity of the church after having sunk into the world of corruption and carnal sin by the act of giving birth. The life he had to live.

“He told me, ‘Charlie, there’s nothin’ more we can do for you here, son—nothin’ compared to the United States of America. There you can find out, at least, what you’re capable of. You may be a man, and you may be a bum, but at least you’ll find out.’ He said, ‘All the girls will stay here, and all the boys will go, that’s the way of it.’ An’ then the lapwings come in, an’ we had our shoot.”

“There was a sadness in the man,” Tom agreed.

His whole world a thatch-roofed house, with the mortar made from cow piles and sand and horsehair, mixed by the gobawn and paid for in Guinness. The slate-roofed schoolhouse on the baile na carraig, the one bit of common ground so rocky that nothing at all could be grown on it.

Winning over the people who became his people. Taking a churn at the butter whenever he walked into a cabin—but making sure never, ever to take a live coal from the fire when someone else did, lest the butter disappear. Listening and nodding as they told him where along the boreens the ghosts were likely to confuse him, and how to find his way again by taking off his coat and wearing it inside out.

Wishing them bol o dia an an obair—God bless the work—as he walked through their fields, and surveying their tiny holdings for them, and having them in to read from the Dublin papers on a Saturday evening. More and more comfortable with it all as the years went by, and despising himself for his comfort.

“Before that I’d never thought a goin’ anyplace else. Oh, maybe runnin’ away with the tinkers when they come through, but what boy hasn’t? Spend your days hunting and fishing, an’ filchin’ ducks and chickens from the passin’ towns. Your nights in a tent by the road, with your supper bubblin’ in a pot over the bright fire, and a tale or two before you eat, an’ what boy’s life could be better’n that?”

The whole idea of going off anywhere as great and as far as America sticking like a knife in his brain. Poring over the books his father got for him outside of school. Nourishing him on them in semi-secrecy, he knew, beyond the purview of the priest or his mother—the unspoken pact between them. Volumes of Sterne and Swift, and Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and O. Henry. Complemented by his own dime novels of the Great Plains, of buffalo and Indians, bought in Ballaghaderreen in the few hours they were ever let out from the diocesan high school.

“But you know, Mother was set on me becomin’ a priest, an’ there was no gettin’ around it. How that woman could go up in the air, Tommy! So off to Saint Nathy’s I went, an’ then to the seminary, with all the neighbors, and the aunts an’ the uncles sayin’, ‘It is a fine thing your father an’ mother are doin’ for you, takin’ you out of the rain an’ the mud.’ As if we were all livin’ like naked savages down in Zululand, an’ not in County Mayo!”

Qualifying in his examinations for the Irish College in Salamanca. Thinking if he couldn’t go to America, at least he would go to Spain. The old route, from whence the hedge priests had gone and come for centuries. Smuggled out for the preservation of the true church, drilled by the rectors in Latin and Greek, and a little philosophy, then smuggled back in to be hidden and succored by the people, passed along the villages and the hedgerows.

His father always despising it. His father hating all the narrow ways and the narrow brains of the priests. Repulsed by the idea of a son of his hiding behind their black skirts. Or would have been—had he ever believed it would really come off. Had he not known his eldest son as well as he did.

“The evening before, they sent me off to say goodbye to Aunt Mary. And on me way back, I stood on the hill above Kattie Byrnes’s, and looked away off at the little thatched huts of Lismirrane, an’ the church in Bohola two miles on. From where I was I could see the river, an’ the herons flying slow over the water, lookin’ for fish, an’ beyond that the little island by which the salmon spawned.

“And I looked at all that, an’ I thought this time tomorrow evenin’, when the trout in the river are snappin’ for flies, I will not be here. And it was the same, for every place that I passed on the way home. At the stone steps up to the well, and I thought, when the village women come to draw their water, I will not be here. By the whin bushes where the hares’ nest was, and I thought, I will never be here again to see the hares run, an’ tease my fat old dog.

“And it was a curious thing, too, for it was an ancient place. I knew that, and yet in the ways of the young I could not fathom the idea of a place I had known—the only place I had known—without me.

“But it’s good I was young, for the young can slough things off the way people with too many memories cannot. By the next morning, I was singin’ while I dressed, an’ I could not wait to be on my way. I remember our da squeezed me, an’ pumped me on the back, an’ held me before him sayin’ he wanted to get one more good look at me, for he didn’t know that I’d ever be back. An’ Mother scoffed at him an’ said, ‘Of course he will, as soon as he’s taken the orders, he’ll be back here to celebrate Mass at Saint Tola’s, with me sitting in the front pew, an’ we’ll just see what Father John O’Grady thinks about that.’

“She was giddy with pride, I remember. While the brothers an’ sisters couldn’t stop laughin’ behind their hands, at the very thought of their brother Charlie off to become anything so all-bloody powerful as a priest.”

The neighbors crowding in, each of them come with a little gift to see the young man off. Putting thirty shillings in his hands before the morning was done. A fortune, he knew, for the seventeen households of Lismirrane, his eyes glistening with their generosity. Then it was time for his father to hitch up the sidecar to old Molly again, and make for Kilfree, and the Sligo-Roscommon line, where the spalpeens would be walking in just a few weeks more, to lift the oats for the English in the back end.

“But then the old horse shied at something, and broke part of the harness. That made us late for the train, but everyone knew we was comin’. Half the town of Bohola came with me, an’ Tom Wallace, the town porter, persuaded Pat Snee, who was the engineer, to wait ten minutes. And then when we still weren’t there, he finally gave the signal an’ rang the bell an’ started on down the line. But then Tom Wallace spotted us an’ started wavin’ the red flag something frantic, so old Pat Snee reversed the engine and come chuggin’ the fifty yards back down the track.”

The train, he would come to understand later, one in name only—bright wooden boxes mounted on an iron undercarriage with a teakettle for an engine. One that would have been ground to splinters if e’er caught on the same track by a proper American train, a Super Chief or a Twentieth Century, without the engineer so much as noticing. But to him, the grand chariot of his dreams.

“The crowd started cheerin’, an’ then the passengers started cheerin’, too, and the fife-an’-drum band from Dernacartha started up playin’ the one song they knew, which was “The Girl I Left Behind Me”—an’ quite the proper farewell song that was, too, for a novitiate! And then off I went, the conquistador on his way, quite as grand in his own way as Cortés or Pizarro.”

The world opening up before him as he went, traveling on from train to boat, and train to boat, to train. Staring wide-eyed out the window at the vast golden fields of Normandy as they passed. The French farmers’ lands larger than anything he’d ever heard of back in County Mayo, ploughed and planted with geometrical precision right down to the very last little copse, and the perfect haystacks. Realizing, as he watched them go by, that no matter what he had read, the world was still far bigger than he ever suspected. The fields going on and on into France, and endless as they were, nothing at all compared in turn to the limitless fields and plains of the United States.

“All of it waiting out there for me—an’ growing in me, as I went, the bitter truth that I was to be locked up in a Spanish seminary for years an’ years, then spat out again an Irish priest, fit for nothing but the little places from whence I had come.

“You know what Sterne writes about the ‘seven wasted years’? How ‘the accusing spirit, which flew up to Heaven’s chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in, and the recording angel as he wrote it down dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out forever.’ That’s how I felt, for I knew that I would not complete that vow.”

The university like the town around it, elegant but old as time and holed with decay. The rooms and the chapels reeking of old candle wax, and dust, and yellowed paper. He stuck it out for two years, reading still more about Cortés, and Columbus, and dreaming about America. Mooning along the old Roman bridge, high above the river, cursing the vow he had made to God, and above all to his mother.

“The time it came to tell her, I met with apprehension. I put off writing night after night again,” he told his brother, who simply nodded at the familiar story, one he had heard so many times before, and let him tell it yet again. “But finally I found the words, and I told her it wasn’t in me. What I wanted to say was that I found all the dogma and the theology so much hooey, an’ the robes and an’ the rituals absurd, and I felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world to imagine takin’ someone else’s confession and offering him absolution. And that the idea of goin’ my whole life without knowing a woman filled me with the most profound depression.

“But I didn’t say a word of that to Mother, of course. I told her that I could not feel a calling, and so to proceed would be an affront to Christ, and an insult to the living church. I told her that what I wanted instead was to find a good wife, and raise a decent Christian family like the one I had been brought up in. She wrote back and asked me to pray for guidance. But finally she saw where my heart lay, God bless her, though I know it must’ve broken hers. By the next post Da sent me a money order with every pound he could raise and a note sayin’, ‘For God’s sakes, boy, go!’ and I knew exactly where he meant.

“I took that money, an’ the thirty shillings the good people of Lismirrane gave me, for there wasn’t excuse or time allotted for spending money in Salamanca, and I bought passage out of Cherbourg for the United States. Takin’ the train back up into France, through all the green, glimmering fields of the early summer, an’ then over in steerage to Ellis Island, where I was claimed by Tom Rouse, who was a dear love of your old aunt Annie—I don’t know that you were old enough to know her. And Tom Rouse, who would do anything for her, even collect her spoiled priest of a nephew, took me over to Manhattan on the ferry, an’ fed me lunch at a saloon under the Third Avenue el. Then he popped me into the subway an’ took me up to a furnished room he’d found for me at a Hundred Sixty-First Street in the Bronx.

“So many amazements in one day, the elevated, an’ the subway, an’ a real-life saloon, an’ then when we come up from underground that whole rush that the City has, you know? Steppin’ out on the street, with the hurdy-gurdy man playin’ “Alice Blue Gown,” an’ “The Sidewalks of New York,” an’ little colored girls dancing to it more gracefully than anything I’d ever seen, right there on the sidewalk. And all the horse cabs, an’ the lorries, an’ the cars, an’ the sidewalks—my God! the sidewalks, filled with men an’ women at all hours of the day and night, all of ’em walking, walking somewhere. Half running, to tell the truth—nobody ever seemed to walk anywhere in America, not even then. An’ givin’ a tip of their cap, an’ shovelin’ a coin to the newsie, and readin’ and eatin’ and talkin’ as they walked, shakin’ hands and askin’ each other ‘How’s business?’ without a word about havin’ to ask the help of this saint or that god, or any concern for the crops, or the weather, or the graces of heaven.

“And I went up there to me room—me own room, where I might do anything I wanted!—and sat on the bed an’ took off me shoes. Me, sitting there in the Bronx with twenty-five dollars to my name, an’ me own room, without three or four brothers an’ sisters, or two or three fellow novitiates to share it. And I told myself, ‘It will be all right. I am now at home.’”

“And now you’re here.”

“And now I’m here.”

“Are you at home here, Charlie?”

He stayed where he was, resting his forearms on the roof parapet, studying his brother for a long time, his face seeming to grow still older and less certain as Tom watched him.

“Don’t think I don’t think about that, too, Tommy! In all the ways I imagine my destiny would’ve been different. If I shouldn’t have come here when I left the Jesuits, instead of to New York . . .” His voice trailed off. Testing him, Tom had the distinct impression, probing for something. But for what?

He thought again of the piece of paper he had curled up in his pocket. The photographic copy of the note in the medical examiner’s hand: Withhold information by order of DA. Gripping it, thinking of confronting him with it right here and now.

“What a thing it would’ve been, eh, to end up here? After two years starin’ at the bust of Cortés in the courtyard of the seminary in Salamanca?”

Tom relaxed his grip on the scrap of paper. Thinking it better to dig it out in its own time. When he could get this brother to face facts again, past all his words.

“Maybe it was fated, Charlie,” he said.

“Ah, me, maybe it was, maybe it was.”

“In any case, it’s not your home. And it’s not Slim’s, either.”

“No. You’re right there. It’s a lovely city, but it’s not my own.”

He roused himself from the parapet wall then and started to walk away, talking to Tom over his shoulder.

“Get yourself some real sleep in a real bed, then come over for lunch an’ I’ll have my cook rustle you up somethin’ fine.”

“Your cook?”

He stopped and gave Tom a broad, teasing smile.

“Oh, you’ve never seen anything like ’im. But he can cook. Come on over, an’ we’ll eat, an’ you can ask me anything you like. But go get some sleep now. You have to be careful at this elevation. It catches up to you.”