All Our Yesterdays (30 page)

“I don’t get to anywhere, Gus. I’m fifty-six years old and about all I’ve done is have children, and play tennis.”

“Nothing wrong with having children,” Gus said.

Laura laughed.

“Gives you a lifelong rooting interest at least,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” Laura said, staring across
the harbor at the airport, “particularly if there isn’t too much else to root for.”

Gus nodded. He was leaning with his forearms resting on a piling. Laura stood next to him, her white purse over her shoulder. Her hands thrust into the side pockets of her dress.

“At least you have your work too,” she said.

Gus laughed briefly.

“Or not,” Laura said.

He smiled at her. “Mostly I root for the kid.”

One of the harbor cruise boats went by, full of people, It would go to the mouth of the outer harbor and come back in a wide circle.

“Nothing else?” Laura said.

Gus watched the tour boat for a while before he answered.

“I sort of look forward to these meetings,” he said.

Laura nodded slowly.

“Yes,” she said. “I do too.”

“I
told him straight out,” Peggy said to Father Boyd, “I’m very disappointed. You had a chance to make me proud, I said, to marry into a fine family.”

Father Boyd took a chocolate chip cookie from a white plate. The plate had a picture of a blue puppy painted on it. The cookie was the kind you bought in a bag at the supermarket. He ate half of it.

Awful
, he thought.

“Being a mother is a heavy burden, Peggy.”

“You’ll never know how heavy, Father. It would have been a fine marriage, good family, money. And I told him so.”

Father Boyd ate the other half of the cookie.

As awful as the first half
.

He swallowed the cookie and drank some of the instant coffee from a small teacup that matched the cookie plate.

“I told him they both should have talked with me first, I could have set them straight. She was sort of highfaluting and full of ideas but she had money of her own and she wouldn’t be after his, I told him. I said, Chris, you listen to me, any woman you go out with is looking to take you for all you’re worth.”

“I know, Peggy. I know. The things I hear in the confessional these days, Peggy, it would curl your hair. And from good Catholic girls too.”

“Course, she wasn’t Catholic,” Peggy said. “But I’d
have seen to it that the children were. He wasted nine years on that girl. Living together.”

Peggy shook her head and popped a cookie into her mouth.

“It’s the way nowadays,” Father Boyd said. He sipped a little more of the coffee. She had made it too strong, and it wasn’t hot enough. “It’s sinful, yes, but God is merciful.”

“I call a spade a spade,” Peggy said.

And a spick a spick, probably
.

“If he’d married her, and I told him, if he’d married her while he had the chance, she wouldn’t have gotten away. He’d be safe.”

“What’s the captain say?”

“Nothing. That’s what the captain says. That’s what he always says. Mister Say Nothing.” Peggy ate another cookie.

“Never know these were store bought,” Peggy said. “Taste just as good as if I’d baked them.”

Probably
.

“They’re delicious, Peggy.”

“Chips Ahoy,” Peggy said. “That’s what they’re called, Chips Ahoy.”

That’s why she bought them. They taste like a sawdust gumdrop, but the name is cute
.

“He was always that way,” Peggy said. “Never listen.”

Unlike myself
.

“Talk till I was blue in the face and he’d go right ahead and do what he wanted to.”

“It’s why God gave the job to women, Peggy. Motherhood’s too hard for men.”

“Damned right,” Peggy said. “Pardon my French. And a mother goes through all of that, the pain of it—my
womb
is
still tipped, you know, Father, ever since Chris—and they grow up and don’t pay a damn bit of attention to you.”

“It’s the way of it, Peggy.”

“Neither of them,” Peggy said. “Father or son. They don’t pay a damn bit of attention to me. My husband and my son. I talk and talk and they sit there like two bumps and when I’m through they go right off and do whatever they were going to do.”

Father Boyd nodded sadly.

“Your prayers guide them, Peggy, I’m sure.”

“I don’t matter to them,” Peggy said.

For a moment there was silence. Father Boyd cleared his throat.

“They need you, Peggy,” he said. “I know they do.”

“And maybe one of these days they’ll need me and I won’t be here, by God. Then maybe I’ll matter.”

Father Boyd took her hand.

“Let us pray together,” he said, “to Our Heavenly Father.”

Peggy took his hand in both of hers and clenched her features and closed her eyes.

“Our Father,” she began, and Father Boyd joined her. “Who art in heaven …”

Some pastoral visits are tougher than others
.

B
utchie O’Brien was alone when Gus arrived. He was leaning on the rail of the Gilmour Bridge, looking at the train tracks. Butchie was usually alone. You went to talk with Pat Malloy and there were sometimes eight, ten guys around. And if you did business with the Italians there were cousins and brothers everywhere. But Butchie was different. There was something priestly in his aloofness. He seemed sometimes to Gus to be a sort of ascetic, alone with his meditations and plans.

“Payday?” Butchie said when Gus walked onto the bridge from the Cambridge side.

“You dumped Frankie Carey in front of City Hall,” Gus said.

Butchie rested his chin on his folded hands.

“Yeah?”

“It was for me, wasn’t it?” Gus said.

Butchie smiled and shrugged.

“It made my kid look bad,” Gus said.

“Yeah?”

“You got a message for me, give it to me direct. Don’t involve my kid.”

“Your kid is involved, Gus. He’s got a fucking bug in my office. He’s got a tap on my phone.”

“I warned you about that,” Gus said.

“Sure you did, that’s what you’re paid to do. But it’s
still Goddamned inconvenient. I want to talk with someone, I got to come out here to do it.”

“And I told you don’t fuck with my kid,” Gus said.

Butchie took an envelope out of his inside pocket, and held it up.

“You don’t tell me, Gus. I tell you. The late Frankie’s appearance in front of City Hall was just to remind you. I don’t want this investigation to get too serious. This is between me and Patrick.”

He held the envelope out to Gus. Gus took it and without a glance tossed it over the railing. It planed briefly, then helicoptered down toward the tracks. Butchie glanced over the rail and smiled and shrugged.

“It’s your money,” he said.

“Not anymore,” Gus said.

Butchie shrugged again.

“You’re smart enough to know that it’s not just revenge, Gus. When it’s over this part of the city will belong to me or to Pat.” He smiled his meaningless smile again. “Think of it as a corporate takeover.”

“No,” Gus said. “It’s finished. You and Pat work out a settlement.”

“Gus,” Butchie said, “get real.”

“Or I’ll settle it.”

“How you going to do that, Gus?”

Butchie’s voice was perfectly flat.

“You think all these years I haven’t paid attention?” Gus said. “I could package you and Patrick tomorrow.”

“You’d go too, Gus.”

“So what?”

“I go, Gus. Everybody goes.”

Gus took his gun from under his coat. It was a
Glock 9-mm. He pressed the muzzle up under Butchie’s chin. Butchie’s expression didn’t change, though he raised his head slightly under the pressure of the gun.

“You could go right here,” Gus said.

“Could,” Butchie said.

“You and Pat don’t settle this between you I’m going to blow both of you right out of the water. You embarrass my kid again and I’ll kill you.”

“You said you’d let me know when you changed sides,” Butchie said. “This it? You back to being a cop?”

Cars went by steadily on the Gilmour Bridge. Their passage made a steady swishing sound behind Gus. No one stopped.

“This is it,” Gus said, and lowered the gun and turned his wide back toward Butchie and walked away down the length of the bridge without looking back, or bothering to holster his gun.

“I
want you to pick them both up and bring them in,” Chris said. He was at his desk with coffee in a paper cup. John Cassidy sat across the desk with his coffee and Billy Callahan was leaning on the wall near the door.

“Butchie and Pat?” John Cassidy said. “Together?”

“Pick them up one at a time,” Chris said. “Quietly. I want to talk with them together.”

“Here?”

“I guess not here,” Chris said. “Press would spot them for sure.”

“I can take them to Area D. I know a guy.”

“Warren Ave?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Do it.”

Cassidy finished his coffee. He came around Chris’s desk and carefully threw the cup in the wastebasket.

“I’ll give you a call,” he said.

Chris nodded, and Cassidy went.

“You think you ought to talk to your father?” Billy Callahan said. He was eating a chocolate-frosted doughnut with a cream filling. There was a little spillage. Billy caught it with his forefinger and tucked it into his mouth.

“No.”

“He might not think this was a good idea.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Chris said.

“Yes, sir,” Billy said.

“And don’t call me fucking
sir
. For Crissake, I’ve known you since I was like ten. You used to teach me to box.”

“And you got to be pretty good too, Chris.”

“Bullshit. I was awful. I never liked it,” Chris said.

“Your mother used to hate it when we boxed.”

“I know.”

Billy went over to the open box of doughnuts on the table and took another one with the chocolate glaze on it.

“These Boston creams are excellent,” Billy said. “You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

Billy went to the extra chair and sat down with his doughnut. However much he ate, he didn’t seem to change.
He works out so much
, Chris thought,
that he can eat what he wants. One of those single Irish guys with nothing else to do
. Chris felt the bottomless down spiral in his stomach.
Like me
.

L
aura Winslow gazed at her daughter’s face across the table. In the bright sunlight, she could see the faint lines beginning to show around her eyes.

“His name is Jerry Davis,” Grace said. “I met him at work. He’s a partner in another law firm and he’s married.”

“And you like him,” Laura said.

“Yes, of course, he’s very nice.”

“Have you known him long?”

They were outside under an umbrella on Newbury Street, drinking cappuccino in the late morning.

“Oh, sure, a bunch of years, since I started work. We got to be sort of pals, but nothing more than that until lately.”

“And you slept with him?” Laura said.

“Of course. You disapprove?”

Laura smiled and shook her head.

“No,” she said, “I don’t. I probably ought to, I’m your mother and all that. But I find it—I don’t know what exactly—charming seems too cute a way to say it. I guess I envy you.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I think so. I envy the freedom to do it, and the impetuosity, and the”—Laura made a circular motion with her right hand while she searched for language—“the sense of ease that it implies,” she said.

Grace put her hand out and held on to her mother’s forearm.

“Ease is fun,” she said.

Laura patted the hand that rested on her forearm.

“I imagine so,” Laura said.

“It was like I’d come out of a cocoon,” Grace said. “Like I’d been in traction. Mother, we—in New York—we did everything. We tried everything we’d ever heard of.”

Laura smiled.

“That’s nice, dear.”

Grace laughed. “I know I shouldn’t be talking like this to my
mother
.”

“Who better?” Laura said. “Besides, I’m fascinated.”

“Always with Chris,” Grace said, “it was like, about something. It was about who loved who, and who was willing to do what for who, and who controlled who, and it was always somber and heavy, you know?”

“I know something,” Laura said.

“With Jerry, it’s fan. We’re doing this stuff because we like it. You know? No other issues. No unspoken tests. No passing and failing. Just a balls-out good time.”

“Perhaps an unfortunate choice of metaphor,” Laura said. And they both laughed. “And you’ve told Chris?”

“Yes.”

“Must be hard for him.”

“I can’t help that.”

“You didn’t have to tell him.”

“He has a right to know.”

“Or you have a need to tell him.”

“Or both,” Grace said. “He knows there were men before him, he should know there can be men after him. It doesn’t do either of us any good if he thinks I’m home sorting things in my hope chest.”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“And even if I’m not,” Grace said, and she grinned at her mother, “what I need now is tea and sympathy. And as my mother you’re obligated to provide it.”

“At last,” Laura said, “a job description emerges. How
are
you feeling about Chris?”

“God, that’s hard. Relief is one feeling. He hasn’t got hold of me anymore. All that grimness.”

“But?”

“But we are so connected. I mean I’ve known him since I was a child. Our families have known each other since, what? Grammy Hadley knew his grandfather, or something?”

“Yes.”

“And I learned a lot of things from him. I mean, he’s from a whole other place and in some ways he helped bring me up. And … I do love him.”

“I think he’s a good man,” Laura said.

“Well, we’ll find that out, won’t we?” Grace said. “He has potential, but he’s got to get some perspective on his family.”

“I’m sure everyone ought to,” Laura said. “His father seems like a good man too.”