4

Even if one nurtured the illusion that things were as they had been in the world, in the nation, in one’s own life, one could not sustain it past the moment of crossing the threshold of a massive urban railway station. It was in the railway stations of the United States that the war was most visible to Americans—every third man was in uniform—and most felt: he was saying goodbye to someone.

It was July of 1942, a Friday afternoon. The noises in South Station in Boston filled the vast pseudo-Roman cavern the way confetti fills the air over a parade of heroes. Travelers and welcomers rushed out of their compartments and porticoes at each other, weeping, laughing, squealing like bats released from caves. One woman with a sagging midriff and thick thighs was precariously standing on a girdled suitcase trying to see a train just sliding into its stall. A little boy, his eyes bone-white and dry, was staring up at a man and a woman who seemed intent on eating each other. The boy’s eyes did not turn or close. People jumped from trains before they stopped moving; their relatives caught them. Engineers looked down from their perches, not bored, not wondering what the shrieking was about. A fat man wearing a butcher’s apron ran in from the street. No one seemed to think him strange. Young boys in brown uniforms wore their dreams of wounds like ribbons, stood holding their inert duffle bags as if they were corpses, and kept repeating the same gesture to their mothers and fathers and girlfriends; raising their wrists to see what time it was. Later they would rest their cheeks against the glass of train windows, wanting nothing but a kind word from the sergeant.

Colman Brady, looking trim and well tailored in a tan cord suit, stood beneath the arch of the entrance foyer that led into the station from Summer Street. He had wheeled his way deftly from the curb where he’d left the taxi, through the crowd that was rushing out the doors. He had been worried that he would miss his train. But now he was stopped, standing still, taking in the scene as if he weren’t part of it. It was the sight of all the soldiers that struck him. The soldiers, invariably, were tall and had short brown hair and had great smiles even while saying farewell to the lovelies who clutched at their own hurt more than at their men. The soldiers, invariably, all looked to Colman Brady like Collins.

“Don’t you talk to me in that tone of voice!” Brady could still hear himself saying it. It had been months before, winter. Pearl Harbor’s aftershock still rumbled beneath everything.

“I’m only explaining, Dad,” the kid said with patronizing calm, “that I don’t share your prejudices.”

“My prejudices are irrelevant. They have nothing to do with your quitting school.”

They had the argument on the esplanade of the Charles. The wind whipped up the river from the basin of the Back Bay. The boy wore a flimsy cotton jacket, and his lips turned blue with cold. But Colman had no sympathy for him. Such carelessness was typical. The kid led with his chin habitually.

“It’s a leave of absence. It’s not quitting. All kinds of fellows are joining up.”

“Not seniors, I’d venture. Not now. For God’s sake, Micko, you’ll graduate in five months.”

“But they’re offering commissions to seniors now. I’d go in as an officer.”

“You will in any case.”

“But, Dad, the war’s on now. They need us now.”

“The war’s been on for years. It’ll wait.”

“You’re indifferent because it’s England.”

“As I said, that has nothing to do with it. I’m thinking of you.”

“No, you’re not.” Micko was responding to an instinct he had never felt before, yet trusted absolutely, the way the young do.

Colman Brady, responding to an instinct of his own, slapped his son across the face.

He instantly realized that he was badly overreacting. It was the first blow he’d struck against the boy in years. Where was the infuriating truth in what the kid had said? His son’s graduation from Harvard College was far from a matter of indifference to Brady. It mattered more to him then—he would never admit this—than the war did.

Collins took the blow. He showed his father a stoic face which promised never to forget. For once anger outweighed the hunger for approval. Collins Brady had garnered honor and respect from his friends and teachers. He had achieved a habit of such excellence that he took the deference of others for granted. It was inevitable that at some point he should require deference from his father.

“You will never do that to me again,” he said evenly.

The son was putting his father on notice; not a grand defiance, a simple announcement. From it, two things, as they say in mathematics, would follow: his own freedom and his father’s admiration.

“You will never do that to me again,” he had said.

Colman drew back his hand. It still stung from the first blow. He held it poised at his shoulder long enough for Collins to think, Good God!

Colman swung his open hand more grandly this time and, in landing the second blow, made Collins gag for breath, turning him from a strapping young man who’d won his prizes into a victim under the kitchen table who only waits for lickings. The boy would not so easily defy him again.

Collins completed the year at Harvard, but, owing to the national emergency, the traditional commencement was canceled, and his father felt a petty disappointment. The pomp, the undulating robes, the dignitaries uncelebrated, the passing of his son into something not his, the sight of him—magna cum laude—in their midst: he had wanted it more than he was ready to admit. Ironically, Colman Brady had sent his son to Harvard to be like Harvard and, caring nothing for commencement and intensely for his country, his son was.

Exactly a week after the term ended he went off to basic training and then OCS in Virginia, hoping for an assignment with the Seventh Army, which was commanded by a proper New Englander who, though a West Pointer, had through his family and his years at Groton numerous ties to Harvard. His name was George Patton. Phelps Otis was already one of the junior officers on his staff. Collins, whose instinct for status had not failed him yet, hoped to be another. Indeed, the only sense of failure Collins Brady carried with him when he left at last for the army was that of having cruelly disappointed his father by becoming what he wanted him to be.

Colman, standing under the arch of the entranceway, watched the soldiers bustle in and out of the station. He had forgotten momentarily that there was a train to catch. He was looking at a tall draftee on whom the summer khaki was draped inelegantly. Collins, in contrast, had worn it beautifully, even on his first day. The draftee was saying goodbye to his parents, both of whom were weeping. Brady wondered what the father would say to his son. He took a step toward them to eavesdrop, but their intimacy was mute, a matter of stifled groans and sobs. The boy had a terrified look in his eye, like a snagged beetle in a web. He had a baldy sour and pimples and was losing the snot of his weeping off his chin and onto his uniform’s ribbonless breast, its first decoration. The sight of the boy transfixed Brady momentarily.

But the announcer called a train, and that brought him back. He was late. Brady pressed his way through the station, banging his small leather bag against other people’s knees and apologizing. He made his train, just barely.

He read an abandoned front page, the Hartford Courant. The news was all war and bake sales. Hitler could use his U-boats against New York. What would America do without the Pacific Fleet? The Hartford Christian Universalist Church needed a steeple. North of Boston a series of artillery outposts were being constructed; Brady read that item with interest, but it told him nothing he didn’t know. One of the companies he had acquired had the contract to provide the cement.

He looked out the window. The train was passing slowly by the rear end of the Back Bay. A quick monotony of scene and sound asserted itself; dreary old row houses, the hard clack of iron on iron. Colman’s mind returned to the great hall of South Station from which Collins too had taken his farewell nearly two months before.

Maeve, Maureen, Deirdre, and Jack had all come to South Station and, for nearly an hour, they’d swayed around Collins in uniform like petals around a pistil. Jack was rigid with guilt at his cousin’s departure, for as a seminarian he was draft-exempt. He dealt with his embarrassment by, on the one hand, extolling the righteousness of the Allied cause, and, on the other, expressing the hope that the war would last long enough—four years, to be precise—for him to be ordained and appointed a military chaplain. Deirdre, by then a nurse at Carney Hospital, pointed out to Jack the macabre and inappropriate character of this hope. She was more shrill and carping than ever. Maureen said very little, never releasing Collins’s hand. Maeve kept giving him orders about food and clothing, to which he seemed to pay close attention. Colman said nothing to his son, standing on the edge of the circle, smoking a lot, keeping an eye on the big clock that hung from the fists of the naked angels over the information booth.

What Colman remembered best about his boy was the lack of fear. His certainty had matched his posture.

What Colman remembered best about himself was how he kept thinking, The things that boy doesn’t know! But what could he have said? Keep your chin on your chest? Protect yourself? Don’t jab with your left unless your right is cocked. Goddamn it, don’t confuse sport with fighting for your life. And don’t confuse fighting for your life with fighting for someone else’s. And for God’s sake, save your best for your fight! Listen to me, son. Your father knows something. Here are the rules: if they come at you with a knife, don’t move until they do; if with a gun, wait until you can touch it, then you must move first. There are no good shots or bad at ten yards. Remember, you are faster acting than reacting. So is your enemy. Give him nine of what he anticipates. The tenth is yours and will win for you. Never trust the general. Always trust the sergeant, to whom you must never lie. To the general you must never tell the entire truth. Do not feel sorry for the men who die. Do not ride in an open car on roads with ridges nearby and no cover. Do not stop if a dray full of bottles has been turned over in the road. Do not listen to your leader. Do not love him.

Brady was stunned by the string of his thoughts, its final knot, Michael Collins, C-in-C, the big fellow in green with the Sam Browne and the Aussie bush hat, dead. Michael Collins whom he, when younger than his own son, had loved and therefore failed. Brady snapped as a sailor snaps a tangled line that length of memory, and he saw himself standing on the road as Purcival’s Lancia screeched to a halt in front of him. He remembered the quick movement with which he had pulled the pistol from his tunic and the force with which he’d pressed it against Purcival’s cheek and the authority with which he’d said, “Move and you’re dead!” Where the hell, he wondered now, had he gotten such nerve?

He remembered how his son froze when they announced his train. “Capital Limited! All aboard for Washington, Richmond, and points en route! All aboard!”

Colman had looked up at the clock that hung from the angels; seven seconds before three minutes to ten in the morning. It had been a glorious spring day in Boston. Inside the unclothed vault of South Station it was always night. It was always cold.

“I guess, Dad,” Collins had said, “this is it.”

“Yes, son, it is.”

“Well.” The boy was still cocky and sure. He seemed to have completely eliminated from his consciousness the winter event of his thwarted rebellion and Colman’s blows. Colman, on the other hand, when he was with the boy alone, thought of little else.

“There are some things I wanted to say to you, son, but . . .”

“Aunt Maeve covered it all.”

“Right.”

“But I wanted to say something to you, Dad.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I’m glad that . . .” Collins paused, but more for effect than out of awkwardness. Brady thought his poise remarkable, but—and this was stimulated perhaps by his son’s uniform—he wouldn’t trust it under fire. “. . . that I finished out the year. It feels right having ended one phase before beginning the next.”

“Good, son. I knew you’d see it that way.”

“I do, Dad. Thanks for making me see it.” His son’s concession had a depressing effect on Brady. It embodied perfectly what had gone wrong between them. The father wanted the son’s acquiescence in everything, but when he had it, he resented his son’s surrender. Collins, knowing that, was turning his surrender into a farewell gift, a punishment, an act of vengeance.

“There is something, son.”

“What?”

“I’ll be thinking about you all the time.”

“Me too, Dad.”

“And I want you to write to me.”

“I will. I must go.”

“Goodbye, dear,” Maeve said, kissing him. The two girls hugged him. Jack shook his hand manfully, a peer in his own uniform, the black clerical suit and tie.

Collins turned back to his father, whose eyes went back and whose mind went back, back until they were fixed on Nellie saying, “I am. You are. But another time. Not now.” How he had loved her! How he loved this boy! How he had hoped to spare him all jeopardy!

They embraced each other, not emotionally, and then his son walked confidently away from him, turning back only when Colman called out “Amico!” and waved.

Brady looked out the window. The train was passing through Jamaica Plain, picking up speed, blurring the drab scene of the backsides of flaked gray three-deckers. Here and there families were at their supper on their porches. They waved like laundry, not resenting the intrusion of the locomotive whizzing down the track that kept their houses filthy. Brady had no impulse to wave back at them.

Curley lived in J.P., and Brady thought of him. His house, a white false-modesty on the Pond, was a mile from the spot they were passing. Poor Curley. Demolished by Lodge in ’36, defeated narrowly for mayor by his own boy Maurice Tobin in ’37, creamed for governor by Leverett Saltonstall in ’38, defeated for mayor again in ’40 by Tobin, this time hugely. The old codger was talking up a run for Congress in ’43, but now he was his own cartoon and everyone knew it but him. All things doomed to die touch the heart. Curley had the capacity to believe himself capable of everything but death.

“Tickets, please!” the conductor bellowed from the rear of the car. Brady bought his ticket from him and then asked the way to the dining car. He went back to it.

In the dining car he found a table by himself, but was soon joined by a pair of spinster teachers whom he resented instantly, not so much for their pursed lips, their bunned-up hair, or their clacking nosiness as for their being not much older than himself.

He decided to order the veal, though he knew he’d get the cardboard box they shipped it in, but before the waiter came one of the women said, “I think I’ll have the veal.” And the other said, “You can’t, Marie. It’s Friday.”

Neither could he, goddamn it.

“The scrod, please,” Brady said when the waiter arrived, a lanky black whose subservience was as artfully creased as his white jacket.

“So will I,” Marie said, regret in her voice.

“Are you together?” the waiter asked. He seemed to address the silverware, the dishes, not the threesome.

“Oh, no,” Marie said, blushing; “I’m sorry.”

The waiter finished taking Brady’s order, then, flourishing a new and separate check, began the ladies’.

Brady lit a cigarette. In the silence after the waiter’s departure he smiled at the women pleasantly, but took no initiative toward conversation. Neither did they. The three waited for, received, and ate their meal in silence. Brady was the first to pay his bill and leave. He smiled at them again as he excused himself. No sooner had he gone than Marie said to her companion, “For a Catholic, wasn’t he rude?”

Brady stopped in the parlor car long enough to have a brandy. By the time he returned to his seat it was dark, the cabin lights had been dimmed, and the window was like an ebony mirror. Brady rested his cheek against it and let the sound of the train wheels cracking the tracks lull him. Gradually his mind gave up its focus and he worked a vacuous hypnosis on himself by staring blankly into his own eyes.

Curley. James Michael Curley. Twenty years before he’d cut such a splendid figure, a man in his prime. Brady told himself again it had been an act of wisdom, not foolishness, to throw in with Curley, despite how it ended. Brady knew what his mistake had been; he’d thought himself exempt from Curley’s viciousness merely because he knew about it. The knowledge of evil does not protect from it. Brady felt a rush of his old disappointment. The attempt to conquer fortune can be defeated by time and by death, and by your homeland and by your heroes. All Brady had wanted, really, from the outset was a certain place from which to expend what energy he had been given; a place of his own to share with loved ones and improve a bit and hand on to his son. He had begun by assuming that Four Mile Water was that place, given him by his father, who had lived and died the center of an order which made such grants inevitable and perfect. But that world—how fragile it was!—fell apart when one intruder violated it. Purcival withdrew a linchpin, setting off a sequential collapse which left Brady with nothing, not even the feeling of having caused it. He arrived in Boston with the sense that he had been thrown there and an absolute determination to take for himself what the world had refused to give him. Boston was where, having fallen back on his own resources, he discovered how considerable they were, and how dependable. He understood then that what order and hierarchy his world would have, it would get from him. A dreadful and lonely business, but Brady had taken to it and learned that he was not altogether unsuited for it. By God, he had roared through those first years, throwing off the burdens of other men’s prescriptions and expectations until he had only one left: Curley’s. If Brady had the feeling he had failed himself—and he did—it was because Curley had discarded him before he had Curley. Curley, like Purcival, like De Valera, like Gavin, had hit him by surprise and changed everything. Brady had had an enormous confidence in his ability to assess the layout of his terrain. Yet he had failed exactly in that and repeatedly. He was the connoisseur of ambush who had been ambushed terribly. Once he went to work for Anselmo he knew that he was again in another man’s shadow, a guest in an alien place, a permanent stranger, a man without a spot of his own. If that was what was left to Brady he would take it and, by God, make a masterpiece of it, because now he took his meaning from something new. Colman was living to see that what had happened to him did not happen to his son. If Colman had inherited a fragile niche from his father, Collins would have a place to keep and to be kept by, a trustworthy place, a permanent place. Brady’s ironic sense of himself was as a man who had not successfully made it from one side of the ocean to the other. He had made his departure but, finally, no arrival. His son had made the crossing, or was making it, and Colman was behind him all the way. It was not the grand purpose a man sets out with, but it was a purpose, and Colman Brady clung to it for his son’s sake and therefore for his own. He watched the boy’s growing like a hawk, ready to swoop down and save him from his enemies.

“Stockbridge! Stockbridge!” the conductor cried, disturbing the slumber of the entire car. Brady continued to stare into his own eyes while the train slowed. It seemed to him he could just make out figures running through a wood: a boy, a man, a woman. It was all those years ago, the day he’d met Madeline and they’d chased after Micko, thinking him dead. When he’d begun his affair with Madeline two years before, he’d already come to feel like a traveler without a ticket of his own, and that was exactly what had brought them together. They both had felt that way. Circumstances had dropped Colman between continents and left him there. He met her. She was between continents because her son had died in the ocean, and she had lost the purpose of her life before she knew she’d had it.

Brady was just starting to admit the thought that Madeline had changed things for him in a fundamental way. For two years they had regularly enjoyed each other’s company, arranging their meetings to keep them private and taking pains to understand each other and be kind to each other. It had started with that as the simple motive, in fact. They were both so weary of defeat and solitude. Kindness was what they wanted, and the delights of sexual pleasure; such rarities, and they had them in abundance.

Madeline had changed and for the better, and that was evident by her presence in Stockbridge again at last. But Brady now saw how he was changed too perhaps. Nothing required that what he and Madeline were doing had to end in defeat. He had assessed this terrain carefully, more carefully than any before it. He was still cautious, for example, in using language that would make him vulnerable to her. He had not yet told her that he loved her. He could not say that until he was prepared to drag out the old dream of a place of his own and ask her to share it with him. He knew that Madeline was offering a new chance to have a life besides his son’s, a life of his own again. The thought of it stirred him—how he wanted it!—and frightened him—how afraid he was of yet another failure! But how he loved her and how he longed to tell her!

“Stockbridge, mister,” the conductor scolded. “You paid for Stockbridge.”

“Yes,” Colman said. “Thank you.”

He was the only passenger to disembark at Stockbridge.

A tall white-haired stationmaster greeted him—“Evening!”—with the clipped enunciation of a rural Yankee.

Colman nodded at him, then stood beside him to watch the train pull out.

“She’s late,” the station man said.

“What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty.”

Brady nodded again, and, bag in hand, entered the large room that, with its cubbyhole in the corner, comprised the entire railroad station. But the place was a gem of rough stone, sweeping upward in multiangled lofts. A huge fireplace dominated the space. On its hearth was a polished oak plank with the legend, “Welcome to travelers! Speed the departing guest.”

The room was deserted. Brady admired the warmth of it despite its emptiness.

“Stanford White,” the master said.

“Sorry?”

“Stanford White. Eighteen eighty-two.”

“Oh,” Brady nodded.

“He designed Madison Square Garden, you know. Then got hisself murdered, they tell me, by his floozie.”

“That so?” Brady touched the stone wall. “Granite?”

“Nope. Rough marble. Looks like granite, though. He used to come up here summers.”

“Who?”

“White. Usually get lots of folks up here summers. But this war now, seems like everybody stays home. There’s no taxi, not at night.” The man tugged at his broad white mustache, openly studying Brady.

“Is the town nearby?”

“Down the road, past the feed barn.”

“A hotel?”

“Red Lion. Seventeen seventy-three.”

“That right?”

“Yup. Get a drink there, too, if you like.”

“Where is it in relation to . . .” Brady paused, then kicked himself for pausing. “. . . the clinic?”

“Clinic?” The man stared at him blankly.

“Austen Riggs’s clinic.”

“You mean the Center. They don’t call it a clinic. Doctor Riggs don’t allow no one to call it a clinic.”

“Where would that be?”

“Across the street.”

Brady turned, as if to look.

“From the Red Lion. Across the street, catty-corner. Main Street.”

“Thank you,” Brady said. He sensed from the way the man was looking at him that he thought he was an arriving patient.

Brady drew himself up and shook off his uneasiness. He straightened his tie, eliminated his disheveled air and bent posture. He stared at the stationmaster until the latter looked away, as if that small triumph would say to him, No, mister, not me. I’m not mad, you see, at all.

Brady turned and walked out into the dark road, leaving the railroad to its memories, and the quaint stationhouse to its connotations.