THE WINSLOW CHUGGED THROUGH THE HARBOR, SPLITTING the steel water in front and churning it white like boiling laundry in the back. Fueled by gasoline, it had the power to cut through the thin sheet of ice that had formed on the harbor. The wind was wicked out on the open water, and all the passengers were hunched against it, so much so that when the boat bumped against the wharf, Charles could not tell one wool coat and hat from another. But only one passenger was peering out from his muffler, looking for Charles.
They shook hands, neither letting go right away. It had been years since they had seen each other.
Aidan spoke first. “Jaysus, we live in the same fecking city, and I’ve got to hop on a bleddy boat to see you.”
Charles smiled a little but looked down, embarrassed. In truth, he didn’t have much of an excuse for not staying in contact these past few years. When Aidan married Maggie, he had inherited her extensive Irish family in the West End, which kept them both busy with christenings, birthdays, holidays, and general visiting, and life had only gotten busier when Sean was born. Charles, on the other hand, had no such distractions. For the thirty years he had been in Boston, ever since he’d left the island for his apprenticeship at the Law Office of Hardricourt and Banfield, he had devoted most of his time to struggling his way through the legal profession. As one lawyer at the office had put it to Charles when he was twenty-three, “You’ve got plenty of passion for the law, son. Problem is, people don’t like you much.” Charles had left that conversation fuming, but he later admitted to himself that this analysis at least explained why other clerks in the office had been promoted while Charles was consistently overlooked.
“Hey.” Aidan slapped Charles’s shoulder. “I could have called too. We’ve both got telephones.” Aidan’s brogue washed over the both of them. Soon after they graduated from the Farm School, Aidan had given up trying to cover his accent, telling Charles that he was willing to risk some discrimination in favor of never having to keep straight in his head which voice to use with whom.
The two of them began walking up the curving road to Bulfinch. “Can’t believe I’m back here,” said Aidan. “The trees are so tall! They weren’t this tall when we were here.”
“You haven’t been back since, right?”
“Nope. Not much could make me want to get in a boat for a wee harbor cruise.”
“Looks like you did okay today,” observed Charles.
“It’s not as bad as back then.” They rounded the bend, and the building came into view. “That wing in the back, that’s new.”
“New dormitories. They had a bit of trouble with the builder on that one. Used the wrong materials on the roof and the thing wouldn’t stop leaking. Had to threaten to take him to court to get him to fix it. That was the last thing I helped out with. Before this last bit of business.”
They fell silent. The only sound was the crunch of shells under their shoes and the shoes of other alumni as they walked along the path up the hill.
It was right after Christmas that Charles had gotten a call from the matron. “The day after Thanksgiving, he took to his bed. The pain is worse now. He wants to make sure his affairs are in order. He’s asking for you.”
“He’s sure he wants me? This isn’t even close to my area of expertise.”
“His lawyer was here last week. But he says he wants your eye on it as well.” The matron paused. “I think he just wants to see you. Before . . . while he still has time.” Being the matron, her voice did not break, but Charles was disturbed to hear a slight quiver when she spoke—it was like seeing a crack in the Statue of Liberty.
Charles left the office a half hour later and took the next boat over to the island.
He had only been back a handful of times since he left at age fourteen, but Bradley had asked his legal advice over the phone on several other occasions. Of course, in the beginning, it was Charles asking Bradley about how to pursue his legal career. When he was finally, after years of dogged attempts, licensed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he wrote to Bradley to tell him he would help the school out in any way he could, pro bono. But when he’d made the offer, he hadn’t imagined this last scenario.
Aidan and Charles stopped in front of the building, and Aidan consulted his pocket watch. “We’re a bit early for the service,” Aidan said. “Do they still have that bench around the elm tree on the other side?”
It was cold, but less so once they got out of the wind. They sat facing each other on the bench.
“So.” Aidan tucked his hands in his armpits to warm them. “Tell me about when you saw Bradley. This time.”
“He was so sick, Sully.” Charles sighed. “Plenty of old men just pass in their sleep, or their ticker gives out while they’re turning the crank on their auto. He should have been able to go that way. But he’d been in that bed for almost two months. Cancer eating at him. He didn’t deserve that.”
“Was he lucid?”
“At times. Had a lot of morphine. Mary said he actually insisted on taking less that morning because he knew he wanted to meet with me. When he was talking about his will, he wasn’t looking at me much, seemed to be in a bit of a haze. But he perked up when he started talking about all his boys over the years, how proud he was of them.” Charles stopped for a moment. “How proud he was of me.” He discreetly wiped one eye.
“I guess us Catholic boys don’t get a mention, eh?” Aidan said, trying to lighten the moment.
“Actually, he talked about you too. He said he’d been less worried about you turning out well. Despite your being a Pope-loving Mick and all.”
“He said that, did he?”
“Well, maybe not in so many words.”
Smiling, Aidan said, “You know, there have been times, with Sean and all, when I wasn’t sure what to do, how I should punish him, or whether I should trust him to go off on his own somewhere or what have you. And when I felt really stuck, sometimes I would think, what would Bradley have done?”
“He would have loved to know that.” Neither mentioned but both thought about the fact that Bradley would never know that now.
“Speaking of fathers and sons, is Henry here?” asked Aidan.
“I think he’s inside, greeting people or getting ready for the service. I guess he turned out all right. Mary told me he’s in advertising, went to Harvard.”
“I hear that’s a pretty good school.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You really call the matron ‘Mary’? To her face?” Aidan asked, dubious.
“First time I came back to the island, she insisted I call her Mary.”
“How long did it take for you to be able to call her that?”
“Only about five years.” They both grinned.
After a while, Aidan said, “Any more of us old-timers gonna show up today?”
“Not sure. The family put a notice in the Globe, but I didn’t call anyone except you.” They both thought of their classmates. Until Sean was born, Aidan had kept up sporadically with the Laurel boys—organized a few saloon get-togethers, updated Charles with news of them whenever he had any. But ultimately, even Aidan had lost touch.
“Bradley did tell me something interesting, now that I think of it. Did you know that he had been in touch with Bess for a while, after the whole business with the judge?”
“No!” Aidan was incredulous. “Did he ever figure out what she really did for a living? He must not have had the full picture.”
“He did. She told him.”
“I don’t believe it. Why in the world would he have stayed in contact with her?”
“Well, it turns out that Bess was not originally trained to be a whore. Remember that note that we brought to the minister?”
“I remember we brought a note. And we read it, but I don’t remember what it said.”
“Me neither, but remember how it was well written, with proper grammar and all? And we thought, how the hell does a whore write like this? Well, Bess was originally on track to be a teacher.”
“A teacher! How do you get from being a teacher to being a prostitute?”
“She never made it to being a teacher. Some fellow took advantage of her when she was sixteen, got her up the pole, and when she started showing, she had to leave school. Then she lost the baby, but her family had kicked her out, didn’t believe the man forced himself on her.”
“You got all this from Bradley? Was the matron in the room while he was telling you this?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not. She had no idea about any of this, and Bradley made me swear I wouldn’t tell her.”
“But I still don’t understand why they were corresponding.”
“Bradley was trying to convince her to become a teacher.”
“You’re joking. Who would take her?”
“Bradley would. He wanted her to come teach on the island.”
Aidan punched Charles in the arm. “Go on.”
“Dead serious.”
Aidan started laughing. “Now I’ve heard it all. Not only does he take two little criminals from the Waterfront into his island sanctuary, he wants a whore to teach them.”
“Hey, I bet she would have been better than The Coffin.”
“Faint praise, my friend.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“But she never did come here to teach,” said Aidan quietly.
“No, they talked about it on and off for a few years and Bess always had some excuse, but Bradley thought that the real problem was that Bess just didn’t believe she was good enough. Not her ability to teach, but that she wasn’t a good enough person.”
“Really? Jaysus, that’s sad.”
“Bradley said if he’d had another year, he thought he could have convinced her. He thought she was getting tired of the life, thought the customers were getting rougher. But then, well, you know.” Charles thought about what happened to Bess, how he’d met Aidan outside Aidan’s apprenticeship office after work one day and told him how her body had washed up in the harbor. Charles hadn’t been able to find her for a while, and finally the whores at the brothel on Bess’s street had told him the story. He had thought he would spare Aidan the details—how her forehead was bashed in, how some said that could have happened in the water, but no one at the brothel believed her death was an accident—but he had ended up telling Aidan anyway.
“Did Bradley know how she died?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that.”
After that, there didn’t seem to be much to say.
Charles broke the silence between them. “He really just wanted to save everybody.”
They heard the Bulfinch bell begin to sound—slowly and mournfully, at half the tempo with which it had announced every meal and class time for the last ninety years. Charles and Aidan rose from their bench and started to walk toward the sound.
“You taking the one o’clock boat back to the mainland?” asked Aidan.
“Planning on it.”
“Maggie’s holding dinner ’til I get back. Interested?”
Charles had only seen Maggie once since the wedding. She was such a happy person and a natural conversationalist that most people never noticed she wasn’t especially pretty. In personality, she was the polar opposite of Charles. “Are you sure she’ll be okay with a spare for dinner?”
“Maggie cooks for an army. C’mon, I know you don’t have other plans.”
Charles bristled a bit. “You feeling sorry for me?”
“Maybe. You coming?”
They walked a few steps more. Charles looked straight ahead. “I suppose that’s a pretty good offer.”