“Sorry I gave it all away, babe. I never even thought. You could use some of that cash yourself, couldn’t you?”
Ruby was thumbing her way through an impossible stack of bills, a risky combination of which threatened to close down her theater. Bills are not the nicest part about returning home to New York after a trip, which is why I was ignoring my own.
“Well, it might have been …” She stopped herself. “No! I can always go back to the ad agency.”
“I thought you hated that.”
“I said I hated the clients. You know what a client is?”
“Tell me again.”
“Five guys who share a brain.”
“How can you stand it?”
“The money. That part of the business I never hated.”
“What would you do at the agency now?”
“Well, Jay called this morning. Jay Schuyler, my old boss. Elegant guy, you’d like him. He’s everything you’re not.”
“What did he want?”
“He wondered if I was available.”
“I don’t know. He said maybe he’d call me sometime, about being a consultant on some special project.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody will discover yet another part of the human body in need of deodorizing.”
“This you want?”
“The money I want.”
I shrugged.
“Mr. Hockaday, cheer up. I love you.”
“What do you love most about me?”
“Like mother, like son. That’s you.”
“When the purse is empty, the heart is full?”
“Speaking of which, don’t you have to be running uptown to see Davy Mogaill in that nasty bar of yours?”
Mogaill was chatting with Terry Two when I arrived at Nugent’s. I expected to find him a drunken wreck, but instead he was a man transformed. There he was sipping something clear and bubbly in a glass with a red straw. It appeared to be plain seltzer.
“All part of the new Davy Mogaill,” he explained when I asked what he was drinking, confirming my worst suspicion. “I’m now cultivating the cheerful mood. The less I drink the more cheerful I am.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. I told Terry Two I would have a red label, and asked Mogaill, “Your new self won’t mind?”
“Boozing’s your pity now,’tis no longer mine.”
“On the other hand, I’d say leaving the department’s a pitiful way for a cop to sober up.”
“Say what you will. But I’m feeling I’ve got the weight of an old dead world off my back. I am clear-brained, for I am no longer the head of homicide in a homicidal town.”
“That’s nice for you, Captain.” I was trying to be enthusiastic. I was not succeeding. “Real nice.”
“Here now, you’ve got no cause for being a bloody dog in the manger. Not you, Neil, blessed as you are in coming back from Eire. There’s hope in living to tell the story.”
“Sorry. It was a hard trip. Some days it doesn’t seem like it’s over.” I downed my drink and ordered another.
“There’s hope, too, in the blessing of new marriage.”
“Hope is fragile, Davy.”
“Aye, heroes know this. It’s why they protect hope, and all other fragile things of life.”
You’ve been looking for a hero, now you’ve found one.
My head went cloudy, and I saw my mother. Sleeping in the early morning when I’d get up for school at Holy Cross. She’d worked all night, pulling stick … I’d go up and say good-bye to her there in her bed, lying on her back with her hair stringing around her head and her closed eyes like they were ready for pennies. I’d kiss her on the cheek. I don’t think she ever knew. And Ruby. I saw my wife, too—lying on a beach with sand white as sugar; and in Ireland, in the green field of a tinker’s camp, with flowers in her hair.
These were the hopes of my life. And so I, descended from only one hero among a string of cowardly bastards, would somehow have to become less fragile than hope. I wanted to say all this to Mogaill, but I could not. Booze had made pictures much easier than words.
Davy gave up waiting for me to say something.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that I’m decorating a new apartment in the old neighborhood? Right around the corner from Nugent’s here, up on Isham Street.”
“Sláinte.”
“Thank you, Neil. And, speaking of fragile hope, I am also planning a business venture.”
“Oh?”
“Sure, sure. Now I got the usual retirement advice: leave New York, go down to Coconuts, Florida, collect the pension. You know.”
I groaned.
“My sentiments exactly. But me, I decide I’m staying here. So, I’m in the snoop dodge.”
“PI?”
“Already have my license application pending.”
I put back my drink, and ordered yet another. Mogaill was now watching me drink the way I have myself watched many other cops drink, him included.
“Look here, I see you’re way down low,” he said. “What can I say that’d restore the nip to you?”
Davy Mogaill, ever the rabbi. Had he not warned me in this very bar the day before I left? Sorry to say, Hock, there’ll be no easy sleep under your Irish roof. Now here was I returned, full of the predicted grief and regret, and drinking in this unattractive way.
“You’re a right-born Irishman,” I said. “Tell me, how much time did it take you?”
“Time for what, Neil?”
“To get over what it means being Irish.”
“And what are you thinking that is?”
“I’m thinking, there’s no sense to being Irish unless you know the world is going to break your heart.”