The City Below (46 page)

"No," she said, "I can't." She pushed against him, but knew, of course, it was futile to do so. He did not take no for an answer. Wasn't that clear from the start? Wasn't that what drew her in? How had she let this happen? She was aware of his hands pinning hers, of her head whipping back and forth, a wild gesture of refusal. Any other man she'd ever known, she could have closed out right then. But he knew exactly where the opening was, not just between her legs, but between what she wanted and what she didn't want at all. He pushed into it, the genius, the bastard, the fuck. "No," she said again, while her body opened to him.

T
AILLIGHTS FLASHED
on the gleaming, sand-colored surface of the tile ceiling as the automobiles ahead hit their brakes. Traffic slowed suddenly, all the way back from the point where the Sumner Tunnel emptied into the maze of downtown Boston.

"Shit," the driver said, but under his breath so that only Terry heard him, and not the two passengers in back. When Terry glanced back, the senator was going over his speech, pencil in hand, marking pages Terry himself had given him. Bright rolled his one good eye, a self-mocking bit of Stepin Fetchit. Facing forward, Terry watched the tunnel ceiling again. Up ahead it was awash in red, as if the tile had cracked and was leaking, not harbor water—here was his strange thought—but blood.

Along the right side of the roadway was a narrow catwalk, separated by a railing. As the traffic slowed nearly to a stop, Terry leaned out his window toward a tunnel cop standing by his booth. The cop held a walkie-talkie. "What's up?"

"Big crowd the JFK Building. Protest march."

Now when Terry glanced rearward again, Senator Kennedy was looking right at him. "Is that us?"

"Yes."

A cloud moved across Kennedy's face, settling there. The traffic continued inching past the cop, leaving him behind. Terry saw it when, stooping, the cop had recognized the senator, and had put his handset to his face. That single gesture, to Terry's surprise, pulled the cord on an inner alarm. His stomach lurched, the emotional equivalent of a fire whistle, and it became his complete purpose to get that alarm suppressed again, for himself and for Ted. He touched the driver's elbow.

"When we get out of the tunnel, go right on Endicott Street. We'll come up on the building from the North Station side."

"Right."

The four sat with eyes fixed on the red lights of the tunnel ceiling; when traffic opened up ahead, the red would disappear. It never did. Cars crawled along, braking all the way. Kennedy, after lighting one of his putrid cigarillos, turned back to his speech, three pages inside the black binder, five minutes' worth, maybe six. When Terry had handed the binder to him at National Airport, Kennedy had opened it, flicked the pages, and said, "This is it?"

They'd been standing in the VIP lounge at Eastern.

"Four hundred words, Senator," Terry had said. "Gettysburg was less than three hundred."

Kennedy had looked up sharply. "At a graveyard."

"To the people you'll be talking to, that's what Boston is, the site of a battle with no winners, only losers. A speech can change what people think and do, and what they feel. Sometimes a speech has to."

"The Gettysburg Address, huh?"

"Why not?"

Ted Kennedy had found Bright's eye then, and to Terry's chagrin they had laughed—laughed, he knew, at him. He had broken the great rule, invoking Lincoln. In their speeches they could do that, but never, never in their talk among themselves.

Now, from his corner in the rear seat, under his cone of light, Senator Kennedy said in a detached voice, "They're going to hate me for this."

"They already hate you," Bright said.

Terry whipped around. "No, no, they don't. That's ridiculous. These people love you, Senator. That's the point That's why you have to be the one telling them—"

"That they're wrong."

"That's not the main point You're reminding them what being Irish means, how the doors open in this country, how the last thing we want is to be a closed door for someone else."

"The Irish
open
doors." Kennedy snorted, elbowing McKay. "Irish doormen."

"In fact, Senator, that's exactly right Your family has opened doors for—"

"But on busing they are wrong. That's what I've come to tell them. Tell them to their red Irish noses. They're dead wrong."

Terry was afraid suddenly that Kennedy's mocking, angry tone meant he wouldn't do it The cloud in Kennedy's face, Terry realized now, was fear.

"Yes, Senator. That's what you're saying."

"Because no one else will say it except the
Globe,
Anne Cabot Wy-man, Thomas Winship, William O. Taylor—Boston WASPs."

"That's right."

Kennedy closed the folder. "Just wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. Jesus Christ" He looked away from Doyle, pretending to find something of interest in the grimy tile wall of Sumner Tunnel. He inhaled deeply on his cigarillo. A moment later he said softly, "I wanted to see David, but we won't be up here long enough. Ethel said he's not doing so great."

"We set him up in the office," Terry said. "He and a couple of other Harvard kids come over twice a week. I'll keep my eye on him."

"I'm going to tell his mother that Keep Bright posted, will you."

"Yes, sir."

A few moments later, their car came out into the sunlight The car swung right, past Martignetti's, onto the border street of the North End, leaving the bulk of traffic creeping onto expressway ramps. They shot into the Italian neighborhood, past a barber shop, a row of stoop-fronted tenements, and a butcher shop with lamb and pig carcasses hung to drip above the sidewalk, blood again.

Two blocks along, Endicott Street wedged into North Washington, and at the next intersection stood Boston Garden. Terry felt Blight's hand on his shoulder. "Jumpers. Remember?"

"Christ, yes," Terry said. "All those bobby sox."

Bright said to Kennedy, "Terry and I massed an army of kids here for your brother, election eve."

"Big difference, his hometown rally and mine."

Bright poked Terry again. "Where are the flowers?"

Blight's touch, and that awful reference, made Terry feel coldly certain that he'd made a terrible mistake in forcing these men here—like the mistake he'd made years before.

They passed Boston Garden and crossed onto the sloping back side of Beacon Hill. At Cambridge Street traffic snarled again, backing up from the demonstration three blocks away. When the car stopped, Senator Kennedy opened his door. "Let's do this," he said. And he got out.

Terry took the radio mouthpiece from its clip on the dash and handed it to the driver. "Call Hazzard. Tell him the senator's on foot. They can pick us up as we go by the building."

A moment later, Doyle and McKay were striding along beside Kennedy, one on each side. That block of Cambridge Street, between the boxy Saltonstall Building and the brute concrete of the Lindemann Mental Health Center, was clogged with honking automobiles, drivers craning out their windows to see what the fucking holdup was. Blue lights flashed up ahead, but police vehicles were stuck in traffic too.

"Hey, Teddy!" one driver called. "Tell them to get it moving."

The senator ignored him, and others in cars and on foot whose heads turned in recognition as he passed.

The rally had already begun on the vast brick plaza in front of City Hall, beyond the towering JFK Building. Though they could hear echoes of the amplification, roaring applause, hoots and cheers, neither Kennedy nor his aides could see the crowd yet.

At the next corner they crossed the wide street quickly, skipping between the shiny bumpers of stalled cars. Three tall men in blue suits, English shoes, and silk ties, they moved crisply. Only the fact that one of them was black—a black man with an eye patch—would have set them apart from other lunchtime big-shots up from State Street, except that one of the two whites had the most familiar face and hair in America.

A particularly loud roar went up from the crowd ahead, and it rolled back at them, echoing through the canyon of government buildings. Another block to the JFK Building itself, to connect with Hazzard. Terry worried that Kennedy wouldn't wait for the security men. He was afraid to show how afraid he was, which made him seem so brave. He'd been adamant: no police escort from the airport, no motorcycles, no uniforms, no obvious bodyguards. The rendezvous with Hazzard should have been simple, but Terry hadn't anticipated this fucking traffic.

Bright reached around Kennedy to nudge Terry. "There's your man."

Hazzard? Perry?

Terry checked the faces of the men they were passing, but McKay was pointing to a bronze bust on a stone pillar surrounded by benches in the center of a tidy park by the Bowdoin subway stop. Cushing, the beak of his nose, the jutting longshoreman's chin, the sunken cheeks. The eyes of the sculpture were dead, but otherwise, it was him. Cardinal Cushing at the foot of Bowdoin Street, where Jack had lived. Who had thought to put him there?

"Dear Jack..." The old prelate's words at Kennedy's bier, the bent head, the spotted, gaunt hand on the coffin. Terry felt the breath catch in his throat.

The three men had slowed and were looking at the bust. Terry said, "If he was still here, Senator, you wouldn't need to be."

"Not true. He'd have had me up here before this. You were right." With his closest aides, Kennedy felt free to be withholding, but now he looked at Terry Doyle with what, between them, was a rare directness. "I wish I'd come up sooner. Thank you."

"I hope it goes well, Senator."

Kennedy held up the black binder. "'Four score and seven years ago.'" He laughed suddenly, his great, infectious, releasing laughter. What freedom the man had to laugh at himself. He slapped Doyle's shoulder with the binder, and then led the way.

Passing the JFK Building, Terry saw Mike Hazzard, Joe Perry, and four or five others slipping in ahead of and behind the senator. Terry knew there would be others, Kennedy's personal Secret Service, but instead of relieving him, the sight of the bodyguards made Doyle afraid, really afraid, for the first time. The noise of the crowd had fallen off, which mystified Terry until, turning the last corner, they saw the plaza at last. He had expected a few hundred people, but the vast space was jammed with thousands. They were listening to a single speaker who was standing on a platform near the entrance to City Hall. A huge banner had been hoisted behind it:
ROAR! NEVER
! Kennedy would have to walk through the crowd to address them, which, Terry saw at once, would be a disaster. He expected the senator to turn on him with, Why did you bring me in on this side? Who advanced this?

But Kennedy, having seen what he had to do, was only doing it. He walked directly into the narrow aisle that a few cops were maintaining with sawhorse barricades. It ran through the heart of the throng to the platform, narrowing further all the way. For a moment, Kennedy was ahead of Hazzard and Perry, who roughly pushed people aside to get in front again.

"We're white," the man on the platform was bellowing, "and we want our rights!"

The crowd cheered and hooted.

The man was familiar to Terry—a tavern keeper or a City Square merchant, someone he had seen at church years ago. Terry had nearly to run to keep up with Kennedy. Bright had fallen back.

"We are white!" the man intoned again, a mantra with which to end a speech. The crowd responded, "And we want our rights!"

Terry felt a heightened perceptiveness as he moved through the crowd, as if he were taking in everything that fell within the range of his senses. Youths in Charlestown High dugout jackets, the white sleeves and red bodies, were posted at the ends of rows along the aisles. They wore armbands stenciled
CM,
Charlestown Marshals—the kids from the convent carriage house on Bunker Hill, Nick's garage.

"It's fucking Kennedy!" one of the kids yelled.

And then someone else repeated, even more loudly, "Fucking Kennedy!" Pronounced
fooking,
the phrase was repeated and repeated again as the people turned. The exclamation rolled back through the crowd.

Later Kennedy would laugh and say, "How did they know?" But not now.

"Nigger lover Kennedy!"

Where was Bright?

For a moment Terry's attention left the senator, who had pushed ahead. Where the hell was Bright? Who had advanced this? Christ, Jesus Christ, what have I done? Doyle looked and looked, but his friend was gone. Along the aisle down which they'd come, police were standing with outstretched arms, holding back the crowd.

Now came a surge against which those cops nearest to Terry were powerless, and the crowd spilled into the aisle, breaking the wooden sawhorses and closing off the Kennedy group's way out.

"Get Kennedy!" one of the nearby Townies cried, and Terry recognized him as the kid who'd toyed with Joan's car, putting his knife in the folds of the canvas top. The crowd pushed the boy from behind, right into Terry, who reacted instinctively by punching him in the face. The boy fell.

Hazzard and Perry were on Terry then, each with an arm around Ted. They were pushing through the crowd, back the way they'd come, through the vestige of the aisle. Terry turned and went ahead, swinging his fists, landing punches in the faces of everyone in his way.

"Don't hurt them!" he heard someone say. To his amazement, he realized it was the senator.

"Fuck Kennedy! Fuck Kennedy!" Red faces twisted around those words.

Don't hurt them? Terry Doyle would always remember that order for what it said about Kennedy, and for what it said about himself, because, as he pushed viciously through the crowd, he
wanted
to hurt them. They were would-be Oswalds and Sirhans. But like him, they were Irish. Like them, he wanted to kill.

***

Because Hazzard and Perry knew what they were doing, also because they were lucky and because a flying squad of cops arrived to open a way through the crowd, Senator Kennedy, with Terry Doyle beside him, made it safely back to the JFK Building. They rushed through the heavy plate-glass doors that the building's guards had held open for them, and for a moment the large marble foyer felt like sanctuary.