It’s the poor man’s sauna, the hot shower behind a curtain bought cheap at Woolworth’s on Washington Street. As the steam rose and enveloped me in a mist, Jim’s death haunted me. That a man could freeze to death in one of the most public of places in Boston was proof that human life was no different from the water circling the drain near my feet.
Not one person, whether a citizen or a cop in a patrol car, helped Hoban. A man died, in a spot where couples picnicked in summer and spring, and kids rode their sleds during winter. It took time to die from the cold, from what we call ‘exposure.’ The man was out there for hours, and he didn’t even merit what the bums congregating around Park Street station or in front of the Boston Public Library received, the nudge of an officer’s baton and the encouragement to move along, or else.
I allowed the pressurized water to pummel my shoulders. Bonnie had purchased one of those adjustable Water Pik Massage units Barbi Benton hawked on television. It was a retractable feast of sensations on a long metal cord. The intensity, the pulsations made me think of what Bonnie did with this thing after a long day at the firm.
I could think of other purchases at the Five and Ten, and tried to laugh and consider items such as Soap on a Rope, or that DIAL soap spelled LAID backwards, but there was no laughter, only tears that wouldn’t come. I couldn’t help but contemplate how life had worked out for us. Jim and I had volunteered to avoid the inevitable. We were old enough to be drafted but not old enough to buy ourselves a beer in Boston. With both parents dead, jobs were tough to find, and the army prevented us from becoming homeless.
When we walked off the MAC charter flight to Danang, most of the country back home supported the misadventure in Southeast Asia. We didn’t need the subtitles or a translation. We understood going in that the French were saying Casse-toi! as they left the playground. We thought we had understood the situation, but we didn’t. The Vietnamese we fought were experts at laying down mortar because they fought the French before us and the Japanese before them
We’d thought it would be us, the good ol’ US of A, who would push back the Communists in the north of Vietnam. We’d been ‘sold a sin and a lie,’ to riff on a line from the Stones’ song “Wild Horses.” We’d gone in thinking the South Vietnamese would welcome us as heroes.
A lie.
The sin wasn’t that the politicians had found ways to escalate the war. No, no surprise there because the baby-kissers said and did whatever it took to stay in office. The sin was that their sons received multiple deferments while the kids from the inner cities and rural America were sent into combat, kids who’d walked across a stage for their high school diploma and that same day boarded a bus for Basic Training. Some survived, some didn’t. Everything changes, and nothing changes, only blood remains and men to blame.
Those of us over there in the charnel house didn’t have to think because the only thing that drove us was surviving. It was much later and over the same shoulder that some of us viewed our country as the god Saturn devouring his children.
Jim came back to the World broken. We all were for a while. He dove into the bottle, while others put a needle into their arm. Coming home was like putting a 45 or a 78 on the turntable. We searched for an adapter, that little thing we’d put in the center of the platter to adjust the speed so we could hear the music inside the grooves. The problem was that the music had changed in our absence. It wasn’t the Archies singing ‘Sugar, Sugar’ anymore, and we were accused of doing horrible things over there. Some of it was true, and some of it wasn’t.
People didn’t understand why, nor did they want to. There were no rules, no guidelines in a manual, for the vaguest of situations. It was you, the men with you, and the enemy; the choice of Them or You inside a body bag.
We chased after an adversary who lived in tunnels, set traps, and disappeared into the jungle at night. Terrible deeds were done, but I’d separated from the service before government men had convened a committee to investigate them, not that anyone went to Fort Leavenworth as a result of the inquiry. When I came home, I decided that the most constructive avenue for me was to become a cop, sublimate all that terrible energy in my veins, and direct it toward some greater good.
I was wrong. Death is music, heard in a minor key.
I turned the lever to OFF. The water stopped. I swept the curtain and heard the metallic shriek of rings against the metal pole, and reached for a towel. I patted my eyes first and saw Delilah sitting on the edge of the sink. She’d seen me naked countless times, and each time I felt as if I was in the Olympics, and she was the final judge and foreman of the jury. I didn’t ask her for the score. I toweled off.
She jumped down and sat on the toilet lid while I shaved.
Delilah listened to my soliloquy. I explained to her I wasn’t ignoring Tony Two-Times or Mr. B. I just needed to see where on the Common the man had drawn his last breath. I wanted to pay my respects to Jim Hoban.
I lathered. I scraped. I rinsed.
She followed me.
Delilah’s eyes tracked me around the bedroom while I dressed. Her eyes were as vigilant as a guard’s at Walpole on a new inmate. I repeated my intention. “I have to see for myself where Hoban died.”
She blinked. Her tail lifted and fell on the bedspread. I offered another excuse, transparent as cellophane, for the excursion. I said I hadn’t visited the office in weeks. There had to be a stack of mail there for me. Delilah lowered her head, curling her tail around her body to insulate herself against the lies.
I left the house in a suit and jacket. No t-shirt and jeans for me. I would not go out into the wild dressed like a teenager. I dispensed with the tie, though. I’d learned how easy it was for a suspect to strangle you with the noose you put around your own neck.
I’d make the journey to Hoban a walking meditation, and my mantra would be:
And a mile to go before my office I meet.
After Comm. Ave, I came up on the First Baptist Church. As kids, we used to point to the four angels on top of the tower and call it the Church of the Holy Pea Shooters. Each angel was associated with a season. The snow reminded me that Gabriel was the angel of winter.
Those angels of the tower made me think of my mother. We used to walk past the church often. She’d talk history, of how Henry VIII went from Fidei Defensor or Defender of the Faith to the first Protestant, the first iconoclast, all within the span of a decade. Her love of Latin made me think of Delano who’d taught me the dead language of monks and other literati of the past.
Delano would survey today’s weather and quote the final paragraph from James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” He’d enumerate the adverbs, of which there are six; the number of adjectives, of which there are eight; and he’d remind me of the cadence and the consolation, the inevitable march into the darkness that is death. He and Gabriel in the story can have their epiphany because I’m cold to the bone.
And a mile to go before my office I meet.
I crossed Arlington Street and entered the Public Garden. There’s a statue of George Washington on horseback, instead of a sign that said, ‘Washington Slept Here.’ The park is silent as the snow and much too cold for the drug dealers, for the hookers, and the hustlers. I cross the footbridge over the frozen lagoon and head toward Charles Street, in the direction of Park Street station.
Fields and rolling hills evoke the Wasteland, and not T.S Eliot’s poem. This quest, these bare trees, and the few birds remind me of Sir Gawain’s journey to the Green Chapel. There is cold, and there is pain in this life, and the birds still sing.
And a mile to go before my office I meet.
I glance uphill to see the golden dome of the State House. A wreath of flowers marked where Jim Hoban died. I see some people stop, take a moment of silence before they return to the routines and rhythms of life. Those flowers don’t move. They lie there as Jim had, dying and facing the sky.
I see the McDonalds on the other side of Tremont Street and think of my father, of the trip we’d taken together to Lowell, where he talked union with factory men. After his spiel, we ate at a Golden Arches, the first one in Massachusetts. Fifteen-cent hamburgers. Fries. Double-thick shakes. Nothing on the menu costs more than a quarter. I slide on black ice. The city of Boston ought to hire the guy that salted fries at McDonald’s to do the damn sidewalks.
And less than a mile to go before my office I meet.
I choose one of the many ladder streets down to Washington Street and my office. West Street is where people shopped for books at Brattle Book Shop, where George Gloss tended to customers before his son Ken took over the family business. It’s where my mother gave me change to buy used books and made me promise not to leave the store while she shopped at Filene’s. Only once I strayed, and that was to enjoy a forbidden nip of Rheingold beer with some older boys in Pickwick Alley, between the bookstore and the Old Brattle Tavern.
I turn left onto a desolate Washington Street. I’m the lone man on a lonely street. I stop at the window of Jordan Marsh, where I had purchased a bottle of L’Air du Temps for Bonnie. I disliked her perfume. She’d worn Charlie at the time. It was what all the teenage girls and hookers were wearing because it was cheap, and I thought it smelled like turpentine.
I wave to the shop girl, and she waved back, the polite, robotic hand of Queen Elizabeth. She’d asked me whether Bonnie was a blonde or brunette. She said it mattered when it came to perfume. I told her Bonnie was an ice blonde. I learned a lesson in chemistry, that the Nina Ricci perfume in the nice, collectible bottle went to ashes on brunettes. It’s a term I’d never heard. She explained that ‘to ashes’ was industry slang for a scent that degraded into a combination of ashes and ammonia.
Bonnie’s signature scent went into the dustbin. She was happy; my nose, happier.
Every relationship has its white lies.
I arrived at my office, the Jewelers Building of Boston.
Management employed guards, and there were several alarm systems throughout the property. People with valuables tend to guard their precious items the way the nurses in a cardiac ward monitor a heartbeat.
Sean, the concierge, said hello. I envied him. He was warm and toasty as a hash brown in his parka. I inquired about any messages. He said nobody had asked for me, or said my name in vain. I thanked him and ventured into the lobby, waving to Saul in the jewelry store on the first floor. He was another one. Zero degrees or one hundred, Saul wore a suit to work every single day and he felt naked if he didn’t have his yarmulke on his head. Saul waved.
I headed for the elevator and the seventh floor.
I unlocked the door and walked into the stale air of a tomb. My office had been the workspace and bedroom for a jeweler during Prohibition. When I moved into the space, I discovered a Murphy bed in the wall, and inside the filing cabinets, a lengthy and detailed list of the man’s conquests. I’ve often wondered whether the Casanova of Timepieces had replaced the bedsprings after a lifetime of their bouncing up and down.
I picked up the phone, dialed Mercury Answering Service. I gave the extension and waited for her. Dot answered, though there was frost in her voice.
“I know I’ve been away, Dot. I’m sorry.”
“Aren’t you the one who told me that apologizing was a sign of weakness?”
“Thanks for the reminder. Messages, please.”
“There was a call from a Sergeant Duffy this morning, and that’s a first for us.”
“A first, how?” I asked.
“He left a name.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked that you call him. He said you’d know his number. Do you?”
“I do. Anything else?”
“Hold one moment, please.”
She said it as politely as any one of the operators who answered the switchboard for Ma Bell. Service with a smile I couldn’t see, the Mercury Answering Service prided itself on discretion, attention to detail, and a nonjudgmental delivery of the facts, in a way Joe Friday from Dragnet would’ve appreciated. I have no doubt that politicians, notorious for extramarital liaisons, used the service. They probably used code, as Mr. B did, though he would never leave a paper trail of messages. I heard Dot before she spoke.
“An abrupt fellow, this one. No name. No initials either, but that’s to be expected from one of your clients. He called three times.” She let out her only laugh of the day and stated the date and time of the first call. “Two of his messages seem like a variation on a theme.”
“And the first message said what?”
“Dot-dot-dot-dash.”
“And the second time he called?”
“Next day, same time, and same message.”
“Dot-dot-dot-dash?”
“Any idea what three dots and a dash mean, Mr. Cleary?
“And was the third time he called the charm?”
“He said he’d like to meet you tomorrow night. Seven o’clock at The Dugout in—”
“Kenmore Square.”
“In Kenmore Square, correct,” she said, not one bit annoyed that I had interrupted her. I anticipated the schoolmarm’s tone of voice next, and Dot didn’t disappoint me.
“I’ve taken my share of strange messages for you, Mr. Cleary, but indulge me here. Does three dots and a dash mean something to you?”
“It does, and they do. I’ll tell you since your name is Dot.”
“Technically, it’s Dorothy, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“Dot-dot-dot-dash is Morse Code for the letter V.”
“V?” she said.
“As in Churchill’s V for Victory sign.” I hung up and felt a twinge of guilt. I’d told her the truth about the Morse Code but lied to her about what the messenger intended.
Not V for Victory; rather, V for Vietnam.