RAY’S wife was picking up the living room when he straggled home.
“Remember me?” Ray said.
Mary-Pat Dunn had an empty wineglass in her hand. “Remember dinner? It was four hours ago.”
Ray hung his things in the hall closet. A picture book about Tangier was open on the floor, along with a copy of Life and some record albums, in and out of sleeves. Joan Baez revolved in the corner, waiting for the needle. They had moved to this house a year before, when Ray became first assistant, but the place still looked empty. It was all the rage in Sweden, apparently—something called “minimalism.” Ray figured Mary-Pat was too busy with her causes to shop for chairs.
He sat on the couch and she joined him, folding her legs under her butt. She wore the latest fashions for pretty Catholic wives: brown rayon stretch pants and matching slippers, white cotton blouse with puff sleeves, a tiny gold-plated crucifix at her throat.
“You get your man?” she asked.
“My man?”
“The murder at the airport. I heard it on the news. Priest found bludgeoned. You get the bad guy?”
“They said a priest?”
“Found bludgeoned,” she confirmed.
Ray yanked his tie loose. The leaks were starting already.
She read his face. “Was it bad?”
“Fairly bad. The priest was wearing a scapular when he died. It’s like a wraparound vest lined with rough metal studs. Sinners wore them a hundred years ago.”
“How gruesome,” she said, getting up from the couch and slipping Joan Baez back in her cardboard sleeve.
Ray saw a second wineglass under the coffee table. “Company come?”
“The Hunger Group was over.”
The Hunger Group was Mary-Pat’s new passion—a circle of activists who met to discuss malnutrition in the ghetto. Their guru was a man named Win Babcock, bright light of the local left. Babcock drank wine and loved Joan Baez. Lately, so did Mary-Pat.
“Doesn’t look like the Hunger Group was here,” Ray said. They usually ate like pigs and left a mess.
“Win stayed behind and helped clean up.”
And sat on the carpet, because that’s where his glass is, and you sat with him, because nobody sits on the carpet alone.
She shut off the hi-fi. “What’s wrong?”
Ray lay out on the couch. “Johnny Cahill is retiring.”
“Good,” she said, with venom. Whenever Ray came home late, he told his wife everything he had done that day, from beginning to end, as if confessing. She heard about his honest work and about the bad things too—the bribed abortionists and burned diaries, the black-bag jobs for Johnny C., the scandals throttled in the cradle. Ray couldn’t bear the thought of her loving someone else, even if the someone else was just himself cleaned up. He had no feel for honesty; he knew he was telling the truth only when she recoiled. Anything short of that might be sugarcoated. It was hell on Mary-Pat, of course, and she blamed Johnny Cahill.
“Is it cancer?” she asked. “In the colon, I hope.”
“He wants to anoint his son as the next DA. He wants me to stay on as Eddie’s first assistant.”
“Quit,” she said. “Run against them. Beat them all, Ray. You should be the DA. God knows you’ve earned it.”
They had covered this ground many times; Ray could have the conversation in his head and save her the trouble. Ray didn’t have the money or the stomach to take on Cahill’s machine. He’d point out that Cahill had a dump truck full of dirt on Ray and on Ray’s father, the famous cop and dead bag man, Tim Dunn. She would retort that Win Babcock said this, and Win Babcock said that, the voters want change, the machine’s a dinosaur, and anything is possible—
“You have to stand up to Cahill,” she said. “Jesus, be a man. You’re afraid of them—”
“Do you have any idea what running against Johnny means?”
“Yes, Ray, I read the paper. Books, sometimes, too.”
“It means that our lives will go under the microscope. Johnny will sling mud—at me and at my da. They’ll go back to the old days if they have to.”
“I see,” she said. The microscope. The mud. The old days. The conversation always left them where they started, trapped by the past, trapped by each other. Win Babcock never made her feel this way.
“The boys asleep?” Ray asked.
He saw her nod on her way upstairs.
Ray lay on the couch until he was sure that she was asleep, then went into the kitchen, made a chicken sandwich, and climbed the stairs as softly as he could. His sons slept together in the back bedroom. Ray Jr. was eight. Timmy was seven. Baby Stephen, in a tall crib by the door, was their Christmas present from a year ago. Ray stood in the doorway and chewed.
Ray Dunn was the product of a certain time and place: Boston, the Depression, and the war. His three sons, with their toy astronauts and Montessori schoolbooks, were strangers to him.
Ray was born in a cold-water tenement on D Street, Telegraph Heights. When he was older than the baby, but not as old as Timmy and Ray Jr., he learned that the Communists in Spain were raping nuns, or so people said. Ray asked his mother where the Communists lived, and his mother got vague.
“They started in Russia,” she said, “but now they’re everywhere.”
The only place Ray knew besides D Street was Ireland, from Da’s stories of milking cows and feeling lucky that you had a cow, but Ray knew the Communists didn’t live there because picture calendars from Ireland had rainbows all the time, like Paradise. Ray thought perhaps the Communists lived in this bad place called Roxbury. Ray’s father went to Roxbury every morning and came back with stories that sounded like war. Uncle Gus Hanratty went with him, as did everybody’s favorite drunkard, Jerry Drogheda. Sometimes they came back with cut knuckles or black toenails from kicking somebody hard.
“You should see the other guy,” Gus Hanratty always said. “His whole body’s black.”
When Ray went to grade school, he saw a wall map. He realized Boston was a speck in one corner of the U.S.A., and Mother Ireland was puny. Russia, evil Russia, was ominously brown and three feet wide, so wide it fit its full name in black letters: THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS. Russia made Ray shiver. What chance did Ireland, and D Street, and Ray, have against that?
Ray was a cop’s kid. He thought everybody was. He thought all the men in Boston carried .38 revolvers in worn leather holsters. Da’s gun smelled like holster, and his holster smelled like gun, and neither of them smelled like anything else. Ray thought all fathers got up at dawn, and put on woolen tunics with brass buttons that dug into your face when you hugged them, and met up with other men who dressed the same and had guns too. All kids had uncles like Gus Hanratty, who taught Ray and Ray’s little brother secret code, which would surely foil the Communists when the Communists finally came: EOT meant End of Tour, when Da came home; steady midnights meant the months Ray never saw his father; a beat was a street, like Ray’s own D street; a sector was a set of beats; a precinct was a station, and a station was a set of sectors. This was secret information, very, very serious, and Ray, the king of secrets, held it dear.
The only other place with things as serious was the Church. Ray sensed a deep connection between the cops and the Church: both had dark uniforms and special power, and both had secret code. The Church’s code was called Latin, and the Church had beats, called beatitudes. The Church had stations too, called Stations of the Cross. There were fourteen Stations of the Cross and nine stations of the Boston Police Department.
But the more Ray learned, the less he understood. Mother said that it was a sin to use tobacco or alcohol, but Ray often got up early and found his father on the kitchen floor, bottle of Power’s by his head, Uncle Gus and Jerry Drogheda draped all over the parlor furniture. Mother came out from the bedroom in the back of the flat, cursed the stink of booze and Lucky Strikes and socks, and dumped a glass of water on Da’s face. Da sat up fast, like a puppet, reaching instinctively for his gun, which was usually someplace improbable, like the freezer. Da would poke Uncle Gus and Jerry Drog, who would sit up fast too. Mother fried them eggs and ham steaks in a skillet:
Ray won a scholarship to Xavier Prep when he was twelve, and started going crosstown by trolley every day. He saw slums from the elevated tracks. Roxbury went on forever, and looked nothing like D Street. It was smoky, and confusing, half torn-down, and this, somehow, embarrassed Ray, who buried his face in schoolbooks until the trolley crossed back to what he considered Boston. Ray saw that Roxbury cops hung out in small gangs around patrol cars, like men around a campfire, swapping laughs and counting money. Later, his da would come home from a midnight tour out of the Roxbury station, with black toenails or a sprained wrist, and say the sector was a madhouse.
“On the go all day, didn’t have a chance to take a meal,” he’d say. Mother would get a ham steak sizzling, her solution to everything. Ray would think: I was in Roxbury today too, and to me it just looked sad.
Everyone else seemed to get along fine. Biff was Ray’s little brother. Like all the other kids around, Biff rooted for the Red Sox and the Allies, in that order. After Pearl Harbor, the Russians were good. After VJ Day, the Russians were bad. Ray tried not to notice that this made no sense.
Da was transferred twice or three times, Ray lost count. In ’46, when Ray was fourteen, Tim Dunn wound up back in Roxbury with Jerry Drog and Uncle Gus, who was now Da’s boss, and a whole new crew of rookie partners.
Da got quieter as he got older. He and Ma spoke less and less, and then not at all. Ray knew that something was wrong with his father, and he knew it had to do with his job and with money. When Ray went from Xavier Prep to Boston College in the fall of ’50, Da paid for his whole freshman year up front, in cash. The same thing happened every September.
Then came the morning that Ray would never forget, when everything went wrong: a quiet Saturday in April ’55. Biff was fifteen, a budding hoodlum who parted his hair with Kiwi XTRA Sheen cordovan brown shoe polish, enjoyed smut on the sly, and smoked Lucky Strikes. He preferred radio Dragnet to TV Dragnet, saw crusading cop Glenn Ford’s wife get blown up by Lee Marvin sixty-two times in The Big Heat, memorized Mike Hammer’s comebacks from Kiss Me Deadly when it doubled with Chicago Syndicate at the F Street Loews. Ray was twenty-three, living at home, a first-year law student at BC. Ray’s mother had been after Da to beat the carpets, and at the breakfast table that Saturday morning, she handed her husband a baseball bat.
“Beat the carpets,” she said.
Da took the bat from his wife, stood it against his chair, and went back to the sports page. Ma snatched the paper away from him.
“Start with the rug in the parlor,” she said.
Da gestured at the sports page. “It’s spring training,” he said, as if the Sox couldn’t make a move without him.
“Spring cleaning,” she said, and cleared his plate.
Biff, in a shiny Elvis pompadour, licked his teeth and laughed.
Spring cleaning. Biff and Ray moved the couch and rocker and end tables from the parlor to the kitchen. Da helped them roll the carpet up, maneuver it out the front door of the flat and down the narrow tenement stairs to the stoop. They hung the heavy, ugly rug over an iron fence, and Da took a swing into the carpet, dead center. A puff of dust leaped up.
Ray remembered every detail: Harriet Dunn leaving for the grocer, buttoning her housecoat and tying a flowered scarf over her gray hair, squeezing past Ray and Biff, who hogged the stoop. Men in sport shirts washed their cars or fixed busted chairs and warped doors with their sons, suds and hosewater carrying wood shavings down the steep hill, where the Harbor sparkled blue. Da was soft in the gut and starting to sweat. He stripped down to a white T-shirt, laying his wristwatch, wallet, and bulky service .38 on the sidewalk between Ray’s feet. Ray pulled his father’s things closer as Tim swung the bat into the hanging rug.
“Let me,” Biff said, hopping down the stoop. Tim handed him the bat, and Biff hit the rug. Thud.
Biff looked up the street and stiffened. Ray followed his eyes and saw two men approaching. They wore black raincoats, collars turned up.
“Hey, Da,” Biff said. “Look at me. I’m knockin’ homers.” He beat the carpet.
“I see you,” Tim Dunn said, relaxed and smiling, his back to the men. Shafts of dust hung in the sun. Biff had a nice flat swing. Thud. Thud.
Da turned just then. The men in the raincoats were a car length away.
“Timothy James Dunn,” one of them said. The other took a step closer, cuffs open in his right hand. He said, “FBI.”
Upstairs in the flat, the phone started ringing.
Ray went to his father’s side. They almost touched. Behind him, Ray heard Biff drop the bat to the sidewalk.
“Go inside,” Tim said to his sons.
“Get out of here,” Biff shouted. He was at the stoop pointing his father’s gun at the man with the cuffs. Biff had a mad look on his face and his bony finger on the trigger. The .38 was big-framed, old-style, and heavy. Biff aimed at the FBI agents with both hands. The phone upstairs kept ringing.
“Biff,” Tim said, “put it down.”
Ray stepped in front of the agent with the handcuffs. Now Biff was pointing the pistol at Ray’s chest.
“You heard Da,” Ray said.
Tim took the gun from Biff and handed it, butt first, to the FBI agents. They cuffed Da from behind, Da looking at Ray and Biff as the agents patted him down. Da’s lips moved. What was he saying? Don’t look or Go upstairs or Find your Ma.
The phone rang and rang. The ringing followed Ray up D Street, when he ran to find his mother after the agents put Da in a car and pulled away. Biff ran after them, waving a bat. “You lousy fucking FBI cocksuckers!”
The phone was still ringing in Ray’s ears when he and Biff found their mother at the butcher’s on the avenue, Ray and Biff babbling to her at the same time:
Ray: “Da’s been arrested—”
Biff: “Fucking lousy fucking fuck—”
Ray heard the ringing as they sat in the flat until dark waiting for word from Vinnie Sullivan, their lawyer. When the call finally came, Harriet Dunn said, “Yes?” and “Yes,” and then hung up.
“They gave him bail,” she told her sons. “Da’s coming home.”
Biff exploded. “Lousy bastards, Jesus Christ—”
And Ray just heard the ringing in his head. He snuck out and bought a late-edition newspaper. Da had made page one: SIX NABBED IN PD SCANDAL. The feds said a bookmaker named Ed Weiss had paid Lieutenant Hanratty four hundred dollars a week, with Tim Dunn and Jerry Drogheda and three other cops as “bag men.”
That’s what the papers said: bag men.
Ray figured the FBI would try to trace where the bribes went. He envisioned a subpoena on the BC bursar, who would tell the world that Patrolman Timothy Dunn had bought his son a Jesuit education with money from a bookie. But Da had a stroke before his trial, and the subpoena never came. Ray scraped through law school with grants and loans and half a dozen part-time jobs. When he met a girl he liked, it took a month to get a night free and ask her out. Her name was Mary-Pat McCallion. Her father owned the biggest Chrysler dealership in Massachusetts, and her brother, Chipper, played hockey for Harvard.
They fell in love fast. People did that back then. After a couple of dates, she wanted Ray to have dinner at her parents’ “place”—that’s what she called it. Ray put her off with transparent excuses. She thought he had another girl and stopped returning calls. Ray gave in and explained the real reason he didn’t want to meet her family.
“My father was Tim Dunn,” Ray confessed. They were fighting in the doorway of her apartment. Ray was in his last year of law school.
“I’m sick of your excuses,” she said, still too mad to let him in.
“He was the cop in the papers, the one that got arrested for bribery. The Globe called him a ‘bag man.’ He had a stroke and died before the trial, so nothing was ever proved, but still, that’s who he is, or was, or whatever. Okay?”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
“I’m his son,” Ray said. Wasn’t it obvious? Your da hung all over you, his good and his bad. You made a life in the hide of his reputation, until your sons inherited the mess.
She laughed. “Do you believe in horoscopes too, or just destiny?”
It slowly dawned on Ray that she meant it. It amazed him then. It amazed him now.
He went out to Dover, met her father and mother and brother, and no one even asked who his “people” were. Instead, they talked about movie stars and Ivy hockey and the latest line of Chryslers. Suddenly, Ray was free.
They got married at a lavish high mass outside Wellesley. Ray’s side of the wedding mostly got lost on the drive out from Boston.
The reception was at a country club. A dance band played Ink Spots and Sinatra. Ray’s cousins stampeded the lounge, which was lined with leather-bound volumes on fly fishing. They drank every drop of beer in sight, and stared at the walls in horror. What kind of people put books in a bar? It’s like selling shots at the library. It seemed barbaric to them, disrespectful to the books and the booze.
Ray’s little brother, Biff, then seventeen, got drunk and introduced himself to waiters, thinking they were with the bride. Ray’s mother sat on the dais, wholly mortified. Toward the end, in a nod to the Boston crowd, the band did a waltz-time “Danny Boy,” which was the insult Ray’s cousins had been waiting for. They left in a caravan right about then and got lost on the way back to Boston.
After graduation, Ray started looking for a job. He had plenty of interviews—his in-laws saw to that. He went sailing with a law partner who had roomed with Mary-Pat’s father at Colby. He went golfing with the president of the company that insured the Chrysler dealership. Ray was top of his class at BC Law, and he knew how to act around middle-aged men: sober, eager, pliant.
Mary-Pat had fallen in love with a handsome three-bedroom tudor near Jamaica Pond in West Roxbury. Her parents were fronting the down payment, and Ray could pay the mortgage with his salary at a downtown firm. But by then Ray had already called his father’s pal Gus Hanratty, and asked if he knew anybody in the DA’s Office. The betrayal of Mary-Pat was under way. Johnny Cahill had hired his new prosecutors for the year, but Hanratty cashed in favors galore and got Ray a meeting with Cahill himself.
A defining moment—high summer, 1957: Johnny Cahill in his sordid glory, Ray in a seersucker suit from Filene’s Basement.
“You married a girl with bucks,” Cahill said. “You got jobs out the ass—swank ones, too. Yet you want to work for me. That it?”
Ray felt ill. “Yes,” he said.
“You’re Tim Dunn’s boy. D Street in the Heights.” Cahill talked five minutes straight about D Street. He knew the potholes, the parish, the pols, and the precinct, knew Silent Tim Dunn and Gus Hanratty, Manny Manning and Jerry Drog, knew everyone and everything, Ray knew—or so it seemed. An awesome performance, even for Johnny, who was then in his prime.
“You want kicks, that it?” Cahill asked. “See a little of the seamy side? Play at cops and robbers?”
“It’s not a game,” Ray said. Both of them thought of Tim Dunn, who had been both cop and robber.
Cahill nodded, point taken. “So, why? What the hell are you about, Ray Dunn?”
Ray wanted to see the world for itself. He wanted to see power naked. He wanted to see how bad it was. The truth was something like that. But Ray didn’t owe Johnny Cahill the truth.
“Just hire me,” Ray said.
“Got some spunk, do we?” Cahill smiled. “See you after Labor Day, kid. Now scram. I got a city to run.”
That afternoon, Ray met his bride in a Howard Johnson’s on Route 9 to tour her dream house. She was at the counter, doing lipstick in the reflection of a polished napkin holder, looking like Audrey Hepburn on a manhunt. Ray grabbed her from behind and she drove him to Jamaica Pond.
The real estate agent walked them through three bedrooms, kitchen, den, and breakfast nook, a finished basement with a washer-dryer combo, and a garage under the screened-in porch. The agent saved the backyard as a deal-clincher—a small but perfect lawn, sloping gently down to pine woods.
Ray sent the agent on his way and wandered along the treeline. He could hear the whine of cars on the Jamaicaway, but only faintly. He was just inside the Boston boundary. Beyond these trees was everywhere else. Mary-Pat watched him closely.
He walked back to her and said, “We can’t afford it, Mary-Pat.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not taking any of those jobs your da lined up.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m going to work for the district attorney.”
She sat on the grass in a heap. Ray checked for dog shit, then sat down next to her.
She said, “Explain it to me, Ray.”
“The DAs help people, Mary-Pat. They protect the innocent and serve the public. It’s my dream.” This was the first big lie of their marriage and also the last.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and hugged him on the lawn. They went back inside the house, made love in the breakfast nook, then said goodbye to all of it. In September, he got married all over again—this time to Johnny Cahill.
RAY finished his sandwich and checked the boys. Ray Jr. moaned softly. Timmy, on the next bed, snored. The baby coughed, and Ray turned him on his side. Down the hall, Mary-Pat was long asleep.
Ray roamed the house, checking little things for flaws: the furnace sounded sooty, several doors weren’t plumb, and the kitchen clock was three minutes slow. He switched the back porch light on and off to see if it worked. Outside, the snow was thinning.
This house was the seventh place he and Mary-Pat had lived in eight years together. First they tried Dover, with Mary-Pat’s parents, but Ray’s commute to the courthouse downtown was impossible. Then they tried D Street, with Ray’s mother, but Ray’s mother was impossible.
They rented a studio on Beacon Hill, and Ray started walking to work. Mary-Pat taught delinquents how to paint. When Ray worked late, she went alone to lectures by French Marxist priests. She was the kind of burning, do-good liberal turned out by Catholic colleges in the 1950s, and she thought their tiny apartment and Ray’s job with the DA were grand adventures. She told everyone that her husband was a prosecutor, a crusader for justice. They moved again—a one-bedroom in Back Bay—and Mary-Pat got pregnant.
After Ray Jr. was born, Biff Dunn passed the police exam. Ray didn’t want his brother on the force, and he and Biff stopped speaking for a while.
Mary-Pat asked her husband why. “Just let him join,” she said. “You followed your dream, why not let him follow his?” They were pushing Ray Jr. through Boston Common.
There were many safe answers to her question, but all of them were bullshit, and Ray had resolved not to bullshit her anymore. Her faith in Ray broke Ray’s heart, so he let her in on the truth.
“I don’t want Biff to become a cop because a lot of cops are crooked,” he said. “They don’t set out to be crooked, they just get sucked in. That’s what happened to Da. That’s what will happen to Biff.”
“Biff says your father was innocent. Biff says that the tragedy was that he died before he could be exonerated.”
“Biff’s a fool.”
“If cops are so crooked, why do you work with them?” She was baffled: how could Ray be a crusader if his cops were corrupt?
Ray stopped the baby carriage. “Do you really think I go out and do justice all day long? I don’t. I help keep a lid on this city. That’s what you married: a lid.”
He turned on Mary-Pat. “Why are you crying?”
She wiped her face. “Because I’m pregnant again.”
The birth of Timmy forced a move to the top floor of a drafty triple-decker in Hyde Park. Mary-Pat threw a housewarming party in November of ’58, though they only had a floor, not a whole house, and it wasn’t warm, even with the gas on high. Her brother, Chipper, brought a case of champagne and a Harvard classmate named Win Babcock.
Ray’s people dropped by too. Biff was a rookie patrolman by then, and his date was, likely as not, a whore. They trooped up the wooden stairs with some goons from Narcotics.
The party was strangely edgy. Ray’s mother came and left, apparently afraid that Mary-Pat’s mother would show up. Ray Jr., who was one, clattered through the kitchen in a walker. Timmy, the baby, got passed around, and a platter of ham-and-cheese heroes was consumed by the cops. Johnny Cahill sent a note and flowers. A dozen roses, he wrote, and all my best. Mary-Pat counted the roses and found only eleven. When Chipper and Babcock popped corks in the kitchen, a narc in the front room half-pulled his gun.
After the party, Ray and his wife did dishes. Mary-Pat asked Ray why his family didn’t like her family.
“We’re nice,” she said, handing Ray some wet forks. “Chipper mingled. His friend was nice too.”
Ray took the forks in a towel. “Harvard boys,” Ray observed.
“It’s not like we’re Cabots or Lodges,” she said, giving him a plate. “Dad had business success, but we’re Irish too.”
Ray wiped the plate. “Nobody minds that the Cabots have money. That’s what the Cabots are for. But if the Irish start going to Harvard, it’s a reproach to the Irish who don’t.”
“That’s a very twisted attitude.”
“Welcome to Boston,” Ray shrugged.
“That man who played with the baby for an hour—who was he?”
Ray racked some plates. “Manny Manning, a sergeant in the Narcotics Division. Probably the best street cop in Boston.”
“He’s very good with children.”
“He’d better be—he’s got six or seven of his own.”
“Your brother follows him around like a puppy.”
“After Da died, Biff was pretty wild. Manny kind of took him in.”
“Is Manny crooked?”
“No,” Ray said. “And his men aren’t crooked either. Manny sees to that.”
She pulled the last bowl from the water and turned it upside down. “Why don’t you like Manny Manning, then?”
Ray took the dripping bowl. “Who says I don’t?”
“You act funny around him—curt, sort of. It’s like you’re mad at him. He knows it, too.”
“Manny was my father’s partner toward the end of Da’s career. When Da got indicted, the rest of his squad got indicted too. All except for Manny.”
“Maybe he was the one good apple.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you blame Manny for what happened?”
Ray thought for a moment. “No.”
She reached into the dishwater and yanked the stopper from the drain. “Do you forgive him?”
The drain sucked. “No,” Ray said.
They left the drafty triple-decker when Timmy and Ray Jr. were walking. There were too many stairs in the place, Mary-Pat said, so she rented them a house with no stairs, none, except for two front steps. The house had been a junior officers’ billet on the marshy grounds of the Weymouth Naval Air Station, and it was amazingly flat. The boys’ backyard was also flat, and a mile square, but it was said to be full of unexploded ordinance. The move was a temporary thing, two or three months, just until Ray could work up the nerve to demand a raise from Johnny Cahill so they could buy a house.
“A real house, with no bombs in the yard,” Mary-Pat said. “Like normal people.”
Two months became two years. Mary-Pat claimed that Ray actually liked the house on the old bomb range, and she was almost right. He didn’t care about the house, but he liked the life he had there. Ray would come home late, like tonight, and find Mary-Pat drinking alone. He’d tell her what he had done, and she would take it all in. Sometimes the phone rang after they had gone to bed, an emergency downtown. Sometimes detectives would show up in their driveway, a war party, and ask to see Ray.
Manny and his men were frequent late-night visitors. Manny was an obsessive narc, always working. When Manny came by, Ray knew something good was afoot—Manny needed a search warrant, or a rat sprung from jail, or buy money for an undercover sting, or maybe a quick-hit wiretap. Mary-Pat would let them in and put on a pot of coffee as Ray threw on clothes. Ray would come out in a sweater and slacks and Mary-Pat would go to bed without a word.
“Can we talk?” Manny would ask. “Someplace private?”
The flat house had thin walls. There was nowhere private. So Manny and Ray and whichever other narc was there, Shecky Bliss or Nat Butterman or Paddy Hicks, would go out to Manny’s car and talk shop as the sun came up. They were good years to Ray.
Mary-Pat hated the place. Ray Jr. was in second grade and Timmy was a year behind, and she was pregnant yet again.
Ray went to Johnny Cahill and said that he owed his wife a house, and threatened, respectfully, to quit. Johnny gave him a small bonus and a big raise, and Mary-Pat moved them to this place, which was on the block they had looked at back in ’57.
She made new rules for the new house. Johnny Cahill would never set foot here. Cops would not appear in the driveway at four in the morning, except maybe Manny, who was Mary-Pat’s pet. Finally, Ray would be home on time at least twice a month so that they could entertain.
“Like normal people,” she said.
Their first dinner party at the new house was an eclectic affair. Chipper McCallion, Mary-Pat’s brother, came in from Dover with his wife and with good old Win Babcock. Mary-Pat invited the neighbors, an Italian computer programmer and his Japanese wife, and, to add some grit, Manny and Ray’s brother, Biff. Mary-Pat served cheese fondue, a smorgasbord of herring, salmon, and Swedish meatballs, and a bowl of something she called “guacamole.”
Chipper and Win were fascinated with police work, as if Manny and Biff were gentlemen huntsmen. The Italian thought mainframe databases could greatly aid police work and asked Biff how often he used a computer in his job.
Biff had a mouthful of guacamole. He looked at Manny helplessly.
“We’re pretty primitive,” Manny said.
Mary-Pat went around the table and asked everyone what they thought of the nuclear test-ban treaty. Win Babcock, the great liberal, was strongly in favor. The Italian supplied the obligatory European perspective. Chipper wasn’t so sure.
“Can we afford to trust the Russians? That’s the question,” Chipper opined.
“Can we afford not to?” Win Babcock thrust, and everybody tittered, except for Ray and the cops, who found the whole thing a strain. Babcock patted Chipper’s hand and said, “You raise a very valid issue.”
Ray watched Babcock work Chipper, who now ran the Chrysler dealership and was worth about a million. Chipper pumped money into worthy causes, with Babcock as his condescending Rasputin. Every few minutes Babcock mentioned that a number of people were begging him to run for Congress, and Ray, who made a living reading motives, knew that Babcock was going to spend Chipper’s money when he ran.
Babcock’s flattery towered. The fondue was tremendous, the meatballs thrilling. He let on that he had been in love with Mary-Pat since his frosh year at Dunster House. Babcock was one of those impoverished Brahmins who somehow took the best vacations. He’d been a Fulbright in Morocco and got arrested in Mississippi. He knew the sort of people Mary-Pat yearned to know. The poet Robert Lowell was some kind of distant cousin, and Babcock called Leonard Bernstein “Lennie.”
“What’s Bernstein really like?” she asked.
“Tremendous,” Babcock said.
When the guests were filing out, the Italian kissed Mary-Pat’s hand. Babcock, next in the arrivederci line, kissed her hand and held it. Manny, seeing this, shot Ray a look as if to say, Gimme the nod and Win won’t make it home.
Win Babcock was coming over a lot these days, once a month for dinner, sometimes with Chipper or the Hunger Group and sometimes—perhaps—alone. He filled Mary-Pat’s dinner parties, and her head, with great talk.
He said that by 1975 we wouldn’t recognize the United States. By then, we’d all go to work on monorails speaking Esperanto, and the races would be equal. Poverty would be cured, and, with it, crime. Guys like Ray and Manny would be obsolete. Guys like Win Babcock would be senators and famous.
THE snow finally stopped an hour before dawn. Ray went upstairs to bed, and found Mary-Pat awake. He got undressed and swooped to kiss her.
She pushed him back. “Are you going to use the Thing?” The Thing was Mary-Pat’s latest and raciest sexual innovation—a latex rubber sheath that fit over the penis and prevented pregnancy.
Ray started to whine.
She got up on her elbows. “I’ve had all the children I’m going to have. There’s a population crisis going on. Win Babcock says…”
Ray burrowed under the covers. He resurfaced with a great idea. “We could use the rhythm method.”
She jeered. “The rhythm method is a trick designed to get me pregnant. Wear a condom or do without. Those are your choices, buster.”
“But it’s been more than a year since we…” Ray slurred it: “…made love.”
“Boo-hoo,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Six-thirty.”
“You’ve been pacing. It woke me up.”
“Sorry.”
She fell back in the sheets. “That’s okay. I was having a bad dream. I was pregnant—the first pregnant woman ever. Everybody was terrified because they’d never seen a woman get that big that fast. Everyone thought I was dying, or turning into some kind of monster.”
“Let’s have Chipper over to dinner,” Ray said. “Let’s get some of your political people together.”
Mary-Pat jumped out of bed. “You’re gonna do it? You’re gonna take on Johnny Cahill?”
Ray didn’t say yes or no. He said, “I was thinking of the old house, the Weymouth place.”
“With the bombs. Do you miss it?”
“I miss those days. I went to work and came home. I had you and the boys and nothing else. It was stable.”
“It was stifling.”
Ray said, “I never thought so.”
“You’ve never gotten over your da, have you? One minute he’s a cop, next minute he’s a crook, and the minute after that he has a stroke and dies. Ever since then, you’ve wanted bedrock.”
“Don’t you?”
“Bedrock’s a lie, Ray. We can’t go back, and we can’t stay still, not when everything’s changing around us. I think that’s really why you hate condoms—because they’re new to you.”
“I hate them because I can’t feel you when I’m inside you.”
“Well—” she kissed him lightly on the cheek—“adjust.”