“Any telling of the story of Aidan Hockaday must begin with understanding the meaning of the land down County Carlow way. The land where Aidan was born, the land he deserted when he became a man.
“If you think this brutal judgment of my dear younger brother, I confess he only followed my lead, for this is the very premise to my own life’s tale. Aye, it’s the curse of us—two harps who could not stay true to their right place.
“And you could not in all the world have found a greener nor lovelier place as Carlow. It was all our kin ever knew, since way back to the darkest times when we and every other Irishman were getting about on all fours. God planted us Hockadays in that loam there, it was said, along with his trees and flowers and green grass. The whole clan respected this holy arrangement—up until your father, Aidan, and me, who spit in God’s face, so it was also said.
“Glorious the old Carlow soil was. It’s still fragrant in my dreams. How I see it in my sleep—soil black and creamy as Guinness stout. Our own wee patch of it nourished generations of us, in spite of the great pestilences the demons of hell delivered to
Ireland, by which I’m saying the English and the landlords and the great famine. Our father’s father’s father’s father broke the rocky crust with his bare hands. All our souls lay buried in that earth; yours, too, Neil. Do you see? The land is close to something sacred.
“So saying all this, why in the world do you suppose I and your father would break faith? My reasons are dreary, as you’ll see by comparing them to Aidan’s.
“Now, I can tell you almost everything there is to know about your father, for his birth is one of my own first memories. I was seven years at the time … That’s a long stretch between babies in an Irish house, which tells you something about how your grandparents regarded one another …
“Well, old as I am, I still see clear the day that Aidan finally come to join me. All raging purple and gasping for life, he was—and nae bigger than a titmouse.
“It was the misty time then, late into October, when the winds off the Wicklows hang over the fields and villages like damp woollens. My mother—Finola, may God rest her—lay in the birthing bed all through the night before, moaning and rubbing her big hard belly, and sweating like a spring thaw. I know her suffering intimately, for young and scared as I was, it was me laying there beside her for comfort. All I could think to do in her agony was mumble the only catechism I knew by heart, which I did, over and over until my throat went sore.
“Daddy stayed downstairs on a cot made up in the kitchen. He required an undisturbed sleep for the morning’s chores. There was only him with the big strong hands for such work, I at the time being a good three years off from being able to do my part. Besides which, Myles Hockaday was a renowned gentleman, and he was only being considerate by absenting himself in this delicate instance. His breath, you see, had the yeasty stink to it from drinking a new batch of poteen he and his mates had cooked up in the still back of our byre.
“I myself could scarcely stand his stench. Surely it was no fit breath to be wafting over a poor wife ready to burst. And so it fell to a young boy to watch over his mother’s labor, night and day. Daddy told me, ‘Stay by her, Liam, like you was a good and faithful duckling. But when our mum’s belly goes to rumble, leave her quick and come running straightaway to me.’
“Her time come in the lonely gray of morning. Daddy was outside already, he’d just nice be starting to tend to our cow and the pigs. There was an awful bleezer going on, so bad the windows were banging like drunkard’s fists, and the wind so stiff it was blowing the sleet sideways. It wasn’t the storm that waked me, though. Nae, it was mum’s howling from pain—or so I thought until I shook sleep from my eyes and saw different.
“She had kicked the bedclothes off her, and pulled her nightie clear up to her swelled chest. And there she was on that stormy morning, and howling out all the saints’ names and struggling to see beyond the top of her belly to some frightful thing between her splayed-open legs.
“Whatever it was made my lovely mum’s face go fearful, ugly. I was sore afraid to look, but she made me. ‘Quick now, Liam,’ she said to me, with the tears streaking down her face as fierce as the sleet outside, ‘see down below me gut and tell us if I don’t feel it coming out!’
“So I looked. And all I saw at first was a mess of bloody gush covering her womanhood. I turned away, disgusted like. My stomach was all mewly, my head felt like it was floating off my shoulders.
“Mum was screeching, ‘What is it, Liam? What is it?’ I told her I had to run to Daddy, like he said. But she told me, ‘No—there’s no time for him. Look down there, tell me exactly what you see!’
“Now, I could hardly believe the sight: a tiny pair of purple haunches, wriggling like a madman. I said to Mum, ‘Why, it’s baby coming out—rump first!’ She screamed, ‘Holy Mary, a breach birth!’
“Lord, this frightened me so! No more than a month earlier I’d seen our cow drop a dead calf that breached. I’d no idea the same could happen to humans.
“She began keening the name of Saint Gerard. That’s the patron saint of childbirth, you know. I’m still hearing that keening of hers some nights. ‘Protect me now in my hour of need, God—in the name of Saint Gerard Majella, blessed with bilocation, prophecy and infused knowledge, your child born to as humble a house as this I’m suffering in … ’
“Anyway, Mum calmed herself by the saying of this prayer over and over again, and finally she came out of it and told me, ‘Liam, be nimble. I need you to grab hold of baby’s bum. Use both your hands and be steady about it, pull it gentle out from me so’s it’ll get the breath of life. You must be very brave and very gentle, and take care you don’t go strangling nor suffocating baby.’
“Oh, but I hated to touch the slimy thing in Mum’s loins! But I did, and worried all the while how Daddy might take the strap to me later for disobeying him.
“I had no sense of bringing a body to life, but it’s what happened. I tugged until the two tiny legs flopped out, and then I tugged some more. And Finola, she grunted like some great gassy beast, pushing and pushing.
“Then, spat from our mother’s muck, came this lumpen, gasping head. Happy birthday, brother Aidan …”
Uncle Liam had been leaning forward in his wheelchair, his slender hands folded over the envelope, picking at it from time to time. He now sat back, shifting himself. He asked Ruby, “Would you mind pouring me another tea, bonny?”
Ruby poured, dropping in a tincture of whiskey from the bottle Snoody had brought to the table. She asked, “The charming story you told, is it true?”
“But you weren’t listening, girl,” he said, teasing her. “I would steal from you, but I would never lie.”
Snoody’s nose whinnied. Liam continued.
“Well, I finally did run to Daddy after helping Mum birth Aidan. First I pulled down Mum’s nighty, and gave her plenty of wetted clean linens, then I run screaming to him about what I done.
“The two of us galloped back through the storm into the house, me with muddy bare feet racing ten steps back of Daddy and his sopping Wellies, and on upstairs to mum wiping the goo from Aidan’s mouth and nostrils so’s he could breathe easy, and singing the babe a little song. Right off, Daddy sees it’s a fine new boy, and so he says, ‘A good job, Finola—we’ve got us another spade for the bog.’
“Mum, she looked at him with a slow queer face, queer and disgusted as my own when I first seen between her woman’s legs. Daddy was there, grinning and dripping wet in his farmer’s clothes. His breath had not sweetened from a night’s sleep, and it was powerful close in the room. She says to him, stern like, ‘Nae, Myles, it’s a new free day with this birth here. Neither you nor none of your Hockaday ghosts have got the right anymore to be claiming my boys to any further life under this slave’s roof!’
“Slave’s roof! The slur against the poor castle of a man such as Myles Hockaday! Poor Daddy. How this cut to his peasant’s bones, reminding him right there in front of me how he was only forever a docile, obedient sod living with a hateful wife in his rude, drafty tenant house on a wee little rented potato field and its peat bog—with no way out that neither he nor his whole family before him could imagine. All he had was his family’s lease to the house and land, which he was honor-bound to glorify, you see. And now here was his wife, coldly mocking even that. Slave’s roof.
“Whatever pride he felt on that first sight of his second male heir flew away. Instead he took to his heart the worst shot a peasant’s wife may fire. His vanity was mortally wounded, forever and ever more.
“So poor stricken Daddy went and sat downstairs by the hearth, flipping bricks of turf onto the fire, one after the other like he was rich as a king. And leaving Mum upstairs with the mess of a new babe, and only me for assistance. Mum, she was perfectly fine on her own, all cooing and larky with Aidan. But there was I, a boy of seven freshly tortured into learning the joke of family virtue. Down by the fire was Daddy, poisoning himself with a brood that’d hang around him like a hairy black dog the rest of his days.
“I’d peek at him down the stair from time to time. Jar after jar of poteen went down my daddy’s well-worn gullet. Meanwhile, our poor cow with her udder aching from unrelieved fullness went bleating through the storm and into nightfall. And little me, I grew powerful frightened, for I saw my father cry. It’s like the world’s ending when your father cries, Neil … Ruby. It marks you for life to see such impotence.
“Well, I laid low during the worst of Daddy’s tears. Myles Hockaday was a gentleman, sure, but nonetheless he was capable of being mean, and I had the feeling more than once he was about to come strike me, or even Mum or the babe. Just to do something with his hands, mind you, since there was nothing he could do with his life.
“But he finally got hungry, thanks be to God, and this took the raw edge from his rage. He called me downstairs, sat me at the table, and cut us some bread and meat with mustard for a cold supper together. I remember him apologizing for there being no cider nor milk. ‘Sorry, you’ll be dry packing it tonight, Liam,’ he says.
“Then when we were through, he tells me why he’s acting the way he is; he tells me the meaning of his distress. It wasn’t for years that I understood this was pathetic—how Daddy’s telling me, a boy, what his pride would prevent him from ever admitting to another man.
“Daddy takes and hugs me, and confesses: ‘Forgive me, son. The shadow of the famine’s a heavy burden on all my generation. I grew up hearing the stories from my own mum and pa, and from the shanachies, too, of people right here in our own valley laying in ditches when they got put out of their houses. And with green juice running from their mouths when all they had left to eat was weeds. Forgive me, but I was taught never to live a day without the fear of all that coming back. And it’s fear that keeps us tenants to the land here, and to this house; it’s fear that’s killed our dreams of anything more … ’
“He couldn’t go on he was crying so. He left me at the table to go guzzling more of his poteen at the hearth. I heard Mum singing her lullabies upstairs. And little me, I wanted to run. But not to the arms of either one of them.
“By and by, Daddy calls me to sit with him by the hearth. He is swacked to the eyeballs now, which was his customary condition from that day forward. I dreaded to hear him talk. His drunken self-pity was no more becoming than his tears.
“He says, ‘I got something to tell you that must always be remembered, boy: it’s the English who bring us to all dead ends. There’s never been one of them born who believes us Irish to be anything more than a race of donkeys. Hate them English, boy! Drink deep your hate, drink the hate into your nerves and your flesh and your blood … ’
“Well, I might not have it exact word by word, but it’s the sense and pith of what my old man said that hair-raising day everything and everybody changed; the day of your own daddy’s birth, Neil. After that, I don’t believe Myles Hockaday uttered one more word that caused anybody in Carlow to take note of him.
“He did his work in the bog and the field more or less like always; like a good donkey, with Aidan and me to help the cause when we were old enough. Our daddy taught us the secrets of working the land like his daddy before taught him, but his heart was never in the lessons. He looked queer at us, Aidan especially; he knew that we’d leave him there as the last Hockaday on the soil, never to keep his dreamless faith, nor respect his fear of the shadow. He was dying like.
“Mum, in her spiteful ways over the years, would abet the betrayal by providing certain things for Aidan and me … That’s what daddy called it when he was drinking, his sons’ betrayal—to him and to the land, and to the souls of all the Hockadays.
“He’d say she was killing him slow but sure, but Mum would claim it was only her noble desire to liberate us; she’d argue in the night with Daddy, good and loud so’s we’d hear, ‘Bugger this land you don’t even rightly own! My boys shall know finer things than you, Myles Hockaday—things of a real gentleman’s world! They’ll not grow to be like you, walking around just to save on funeral expenses.’
“Now, he never gave her a thumping, but it seemed in some strange way like it’s what she wanted … No offense to you, bonny Ruby, but a free-tongued woman in the benighted times I’m speaking of was a spiteful creature.
“Anyhow, what she provided us first was the wireless. A very good one, it was, with a band that at night’d pick up voices in the air, like magic, from all the four corners of the earth. We’d only find out years and years later where and how Mum come to get the wireless, mind you—that and all else she got.
“The wireless, she said, was our’ears to the fine mystery and lovely treachery beyond the mountains, to all the dear sweet turbulent life far from this homely dirt and muck.’ And for all the pleasure it gave us, we only owed her the duty to ‘listen every night, boys—learn the world’s a big place, with many things to do.’
“Oh, but Daddy resented the contraption. Jealous, he was. “The Devil’s voice box,’ he called it, though he listened along with us all the same. Mum would say, ‘Ain’t you feared you’ll become a sinner by listening to the wireless?’ Daddy’d get all red-faced and say ‘No!’ Then Mum would laugh at him, and say, ‘Too bad, Myles. Sinners are ever so much more interesting men than saints.’
“And this made so much sense to me and Aidan. What do you suppose two Carlow boys would rather do of a long cold evening—read a book of catechisms, or tune into some place in the world where there was jazz music and people laughing?
“Mum knew very well what she was doing. She was intoxicating us. Curiosity drunked us more than whiskey ever done to Daddy. Furthermore, every time the old man’s back was turned, and many a time it wasn’t, she’d feed us subversive notions.
“She had certain visions of us, and meant us to see the same. We were both of us bright and worthy, she decided, but different as could be; I was her practical one, Aidan possessed a mind in need of soaring.
“To me, she said, ‘Liam, it’ll serve you well to know it’s not work that makes money, it’s money that makes money. There’s no way you’re likely to see this principle put to practice in Carlow here, so I’m seeing to it you go to London and learn, for London’s where the money is.’
“Now, my brother loved two things: reading literature, and listening to voices from America over the wireless. Mum said to him, ‘It’s Dublin where you’ll be going for your education in letters, Aidan. To Trinity College, and never you mind it’s full of Prods; I know of a priest who’ll grant your dispensation. No people put the English tongue to better use than Dubliners. You’ll find Dublin a writers’ and talkers’ heaven, but you mustn’t stay longer than need be. New York’s the place for you. No people in the world have more need for lettered men than New Yorkers.’
“Well then, she saw us off, the both of us, the funds coming from the mysterious place where she got all her fancy things. We didn’t ask questions, we went like shots. First me to London, which Daddy cursed as hell; then Aidan to Dublin, which Daddy thought no more savory a place.
“I cannot tell you much of what happened to your own daddy in Dublin for the next several years, for we lived in two so very different worlds. Aidan’s dreamy world of books and Dublin literary cafés and such things, and mine of working in a London bank and taking night classes and generally trying to learn all I could in the great councils of finance.
“I wasn’t keen for Aidan’s interests, and he no more for mine. I used to think he sounded so much like Daddy when he’d screw up his face and say money was ‘nothing but dirty paper.’
“But anyway, there come a day I left London for Dublin myself, to continue in my financial pursuits, which eventually resulted in this house we’re enjoying now, among other things. Aidan and I began seeing one another when I got to Dublin … maybe not as regularly as two brothers should, but time and separation had changed things between us, see.
“We both got letters from Mum, never from Daddy. She’d be all on about how bad it was becoming between them, back in the place neither one of us called home no more. Only once did we go back there, on account of the scandal that’s no doubt bruited about the pubs of Carlow to this day …”
Liam paused, as dramatically as any ham at the Abbey Theatre, waiting for either Ruby or me to coax more from him. Snoody had no doubt heard this story many times before, judging by his blank expression. Ruby finally asked him, coolly, “The scandal?”
“Aye, bonny,” Liam said. He asked me to pass him the decanter, then he filled his cup with whiskey, spotting it with tea. “Mum and Daddy, as I suppose we might have anticipated, did no go gently unto night …”
I asked, “Meaning—?”
“The postman become suspicious when he saw how the box was filling up, and how it appeared nobody was around the old place,” Liam said. “So, one day he leaves his bicycle up on the road and goes down to the house for a look-about. There he finds Mum laid out on the kitchen floor, full of wounds from the knife she always used to pare the crust around her pies. And Daddy, he wasn’t far away nor in any better condition. Slumped down in front of his chair by the hearth, blood and brain shot out of his head and his shooting hand still wrapped around the old family horse pistol …”
For a while, I could not hear what Liam was saying. Maybe this was only for a few seconds, but it seemed at the time so very long. My mind was buzzing and full of moving pictures, racing in front of my eyes at crazy speeds. No sooner was I imagining my father as a young man trying to make his way as a writer, of all things, I was imagining the grandmother and grandfather I never knew—the two of these ferocious squabblers, and the scandal of a murder-suicide.
I am off in a corner by myself wondering about a guy who once so loved a woman twenty-five years ago that he married her, then one awful day hated her so bad he diced her all over the kitchen linoleum. The way I see it, this big murder story is no story at all. The real story is what happened during those twenty-five years … Here now would be The Truth. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the messy and complicated truth so help me God.
Then came my uncle back into view, and the pictures slowed. Him with his whiskey and tea, tapping a finger on the envelope in front of him. And moving on through the dreadful family saga, raising a hundred questions for later with every word he said now.
“Well, so before we beat it back to Dublin, Aidan and me stayed in the old house together, long enough to sell the animals and other such tasks of closing down two hardscrabble lives. It was very much on our minds how we were ending the line of Hockadays in Carlow, a long line surely now ending with less than great pride. The funeral, if you could rightly call it that, was short and bitter.
“No church in all Carlow would take Daddy into its cemetery since he was a murderer and, even worse, a suicide. Aidan and me, we decided against separating our two parents, knowing as we did how cruelly Mum must have rode Daddy before he could take no more. No priest agreed to so much as sprinkling a bit of holy water over the coffins, not even when nobody was looking on …
“… And this includes the randy priest who Mum was carrying on with for all the years she was providing us the fine things, beginning with the wonderful wireless. Thus, our trusty postman informs us.
“The priest’s name was Cor. The postman dishes this up like a regular magpie, right during the little service we had at Daddy’s sheepeen before we had Mum and him cremated.
“The postman says, ‘Myles, he knew all about Cor and his Finola. Never complained, though, mainly on account of how he was kept well provided with whiskey in appreciation of his tolerance. We all come to know it here in this sheepeen. I remember your daddy come to mocking himself as a cuckold, too. He’d say, “My sporting days is over, my little light is out, what used to be my sex appeal is now my water spout.”’
“I ask you, Neil, wasn’t that a fine thing to be discovering in our bereavement…?
“Well, that night, at home after the burning, when it was just Aidan and me alone together, we talked of Mum and Daddy until the dawn, about the war that was their marriage. We come to grips with the matter of Cor. We drank a mighty lot that night, and cried, too, wondering if Myles was our own true daddy indeed.
“And that started me telling Aidan of the old man’s drinking and carrying on that night of his birth … how he warned me of the Brits in no uncertain terms.
“Then soon it was me sounding like our wounded, besotted old dad. I myself was moved to telling Aidan what I’d not admitted to any other man—the true reason I’d left London as I did.
“Only I gentled it down a good deal. I said to my brother, ‘At the bank, I worked at the teller’s desk beside this great oaf bigot, an Englishman. Clever as a box of rocks, this one. He’d greet me every morning with the same: ‘Up the long ladder and down the long rope, God bless King Billy and go fuck the pope. Ain’t that right, Paddy?’
“Aidan’s face grows dark and queer like Daddy’s as he’s listening to me. I go on, telling him, ‘You can’t imagine how this grates you, brother dear. After a while, you can bear it no more. You either got to leave, or take one of them out. Me, I left for Dublin.’
“Then we had a final jar to the troubling memory of Mum and Dad. Aidan poured drops from the bottle out onto the floor in respect for the two who gave us life. Then we climb into the beds up in the little room we shared, back all those years ago listening to the wireless as boys waiting for the chance to flee.
“And in the dark, before we drift off, Aidan asks me, ‘Liam, do you hate them for how they slurred you?’
“‘Hate the English, you mean?’ I said. That’s what he meant. And so I said, ‘Well … yes, I confess it, I do.’
“Aidan’s quiet then, but all the same I hear him thinking. Finally, he says, ‘I do, too. God help me, I hate them all.’
“I think, We never betrayed Daddy after all. And maybe Aidan now hears my thoughts this time. He says, ‘Too bad Daddy didn’t live long enough to see there’s a way now of dealing with the bloody English, for once and for all—’”
Snoody cut him off.
“Hadn’t we best carry on with this later?” he said, glowering at me, then Ruby. Then, to Liam, “Really, I must insist.”
“Oh you must, must you?” Liam said, twitting him.
The two of them stared at each other for a while like a pair of tomcats about to have a spitting match. Liam sighed loudly, then looked away.
“Well, as mother hen wishes—another time,” Liam said to Ruby and me. Snoody quickly got up from the table and stood behind Liam’s wheelchair, ready to push.
“Before we call it a night, I want to give you this,” Liam said, handing the envelope to me. “Your father took to writing me letters when he finally left Dublin for New York. I haven’t got many left, but I found this one and thought you should have it. Like I say, I never did take to the literary side of life. But I do know from his letters, Aidan was a lovely, lovely writer.”
“I don’t know about you,” Ruby said, “but I feel like we’ve been through one of those … oh, what was it your uncle called a nasty storm?”
“Bleezer,” I said.
“That’s it. An awful bleezer, with a wind so stiff it blows sleet sideways.”
We were back down on the third floor in the red room, settled for the night and dressed in two sets of men’s pyjamas and robes that Moira had brought up for us with the fresh towels. Ruby was bustling around the room, unpacking all our things, tucking them away in the wardrobe and the dresser. I sat on the edge of the bed with the envelope in my hands, still unopened.
“Bleezer …” Ruby said again, thoughtfully. Then she stopped in front of me, pointed to the envelope, and said, “Well, are you ever going to read it?”
“Right now, I don’t really know that I’m up to it,” I said. “So far today, let’s see … I’ve learned my grandmother was some priest’s squeeze, my drunken grandfather got even with her—permanently, then popped himself out … Maybe that’s enough family history for one day.”
“You’ve heard worse in your time, Detective Hockaday.”
“About other people’s families, sure.”
“You jump in the ocean, you get wet. So what do you expect? Be a person, go ahead—read it.” Ruby lunged at me, grabbing for the envelope. “You want me to read it for you—?”
I pulled back. Ruby fell on top of me, laughing. And I was grateful for the moment’s diversion from my dark rain cloud of thoughts; so grateful for the feel of Ruby, for the sight of her breasts, brown as caramel beneath the white swaddle of terrycloth robe and the loose pyjamas.
“No!” I said. “I’ll read it … I will.”
“What’s stopping you? Liam said it’s lovely writing.”
“Do you trust Liam?” I surprised myself with this question as much as I surprised Ruby.
“That’s one hell of a question,” she said.
“He’s one hell of a talker. Answer me.”
“Your uncle’s a banker, so we know he’d steal. But lie…?” Ruby bolted upright in bed, and said, “Sure!”
She was very excited now, as if some of her own clouds had suddenly cleared. She straightened her robe. “You call your uncle a big talker, Hock?” she said. “No, he’s a bleezer … with wind enough to blow the words sideways. Follow me?”
“Well—no.”
“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me how any half-competent detective ought to approach a case sideways?”
“What are you—?”
“Step on it, Sherlock. Your uncle drops a big storm tonight. What for? To make you feel sorry about the pitiful Hockaday clan? No. He talked up a storm for cover. Follow me now?”
Ruby gave me a second to catch up. When I did, I said, “He’s trying to talk past Snoody, you mean?”
“Yes—of course. We know there’s something very strained be tween them, and we know there’s something strange going on here. We know there’s some secret in this house. Your uncle’s trying to get this across to you, Hock. Indirectly, so Snoody won’t realize it … So what do you think?”
I thought of Liam’s words to me, earlier: When you solve it, you’ll start seeing answers to questions that have burnt you hollow.
I said, “This afternoon, while you were still asleep and Snoody was off on an errand somewhere, Liam sent Moira up here after me. In the time we had alone together, Liam told me a riddle.”
“Tell it to me.”
“A man without eyes saw plums on a tree. He neither took plums nor left plums. How could this be?”
“Now, let’s hear that letter.” Ruby reached for the envelope.
This time I let her take it. She opened it, and read aloud my father’s words, written in a firm hand, in blue ink:
Dear brother Liam,
In your last, you seemed incredulous as to why I persist in being here—here in this city of right angles and tough, damaged people. Though I hardly needed reminding of it, you nonetheless pointed out that my writing income seldom pays for the groceries, and that I have responsibilities to Mairead and the baby she’s now carrying.
I’ve thought long and hard about what sort of answer might satisfy you. What I have concluded is that my answer may only truly satisfy myself, and that you can expect no more. So, here it is:
New York is a fabulous lady who gives incredible parties. You’re never invited, but you know they’re there, and you know that once you get inside, it’s going to be great. Every time you’re packing finally to leave the city, this lady calls you up and says, “Hi, I’m having a party, as you well know.” And so you start unpacking your bag. Then she says, “I’m not inviting you to the party this year, but I’m keeping you in mind.”
Love, Aidan.
Ruby gave the letter back to me. I looked at the blue ink, and thought of the lines of verse penned on the back of Aidan Hockaday’s photograph. But the handwriting in these two things of my father’s, the letter and the photo, did not seem to match. I folded the letter and put it back inside the envelope.
Ruby said, “Uncle Liam was right, it’s lovely writing. And lovely sentiments about New York. I miss the city something terrible right now.”
“So do I.”
“Your father should have written books in New York.”
“There was the war instead.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“No. What we’re trying to find is the war within the war.”
“Which is to say, the politics. And another riddle.”
“It’s making my head hurt. Let’s go to sleep.”
We turned off lights, took off our robes and slipped under the covers together. Ruby shaped herself against me, and whispered, “I want to dream of New York. How about you, Hock?”
“I’ll be dreaming like a detective.”
“Meaning?”
“A good detective believes in the kind of moment when he can see what people are doing, even when he’s not there.”