The City Below (7 page)

"What do you mean 'going to be,' asshole?" Terry deflected the uncool impulse to express affection. "You've got some neat assumptions of your own."

"Like what?"

Doyle tossed his head toward the blue-haired lady and the other busy middle-aged Irish volunteers. "That they were all Joe McCarthy's people. Since Nixon was too, that they should be with him. That they're only here because Kennedy is Irish Catholic."

McKay showed those teeth of his again. "But that's true, isn't it?"

They laughed. Hell, maybe it was true. But Terry wanted to repeat himself. These are good people, he wanted to say. They don't know you, that's all. I love these people.

McKay put his arm around Doyle's shoulder. Terry was aware of Blight's hand falling across his sweater as they started across the floor again. He was aware of the volunteers watching them now.

"And I've got other surprises for you," McKay said.

"No you don't. Your father's a Brit? Nothing could surprise me more than that."

McKay said, "He's a priest."

Doyle stopped, sliding out from under his friend's arm. McKay continued for another step and a half, then froze with his leg in midair, a bit of slapstick.

"What?"

McKay swiveled around. "An Anglican priest, man. Ever hear of St Cyprian's?"

Terry shook his head. There was a lot he'd never heard of.

"On this same street, Tremont Street, out across Mass. Ave., in the Berry. You've heard of the Berry?"

Doyle did not react.

"Roxbury, Terence. St Cyp's is the Turkish parish."

"Turkish?"

"West Indian. My dad is the rector."

"He's a minister?"

"A priest Just like the priests at BC. Mass every morning. Chasuble, alb, transubstantiation."

"But he's got a kid, so we're talking Protestant, right?"

"Christ, if my father ever heard you say that As if he were Baptist, as if he were fucking Methodist! St Cyprian's Episcopal Church. Not AME! C of E!"

"Okay, all right." Terry put his hands up, surrendering the point. But only because it had been made: Episcopal was Protestant. "Now I see why you're excused from theology class at school. Because you're Episcopal."

"Episcopalian, actually. And yes, that's why I draw a bye. But"—McKay raised his hands now too, calling this game off, this one on one, this keep away—"the truth is, unlike my father, I am not a Christian, period." He leaned in, and Doyle could smell his cologne, spicy and sweet. "Don't tell my old man when you come home with me for Sunday dinner—you
will
come home with me, won't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't tell him or Mom either, but I'm an atheist."

The stark expression on McKay's face hit Terry, the dead earnestness at last He understood that there was more integrity in that statement, more virtue, than in all the easy, countless credos he himself had made. He answered quietly, "I'm not an atheist, Bright. But I have my version of the same thing. I am supposed to be a priest And I mean
priest!
I am the elder son. It's the landless Irish version of primogeniture. They still expect it of me."

"Shit, man, and you want no part of it."

"Right."

"Don't blame you. Who in hell could blame you? Tell you what." He slugged Terry's shoulder. "Stick with me. I'll teach you a thing or two."

McKay turned and strode back toward the Young Dems' corner. He glanced back and said, "Come on."

But Doyle did not move. For a moment he just stood there watching McKay and thinking, You already have, you bastard. You already have.

***

On another afternoon he stood inside the front door for a moment, just in from Tremont Street, having come down from BC alone. The room had been enlarged by the removal of walls and false ceilings, and it sprawled from the front of the building to the back. Light bulbs hanging in factorylike tin cones made a checkerboard of light and shadow. There were dozens of card tables, metal desks, folding chairs, and wooden benches, most piled high with cartons to be opened, sheets of paper to be folded into flyers, envelopes to be stuffed and addressed. Doyle watched the workers checking off names, moistening wads of envelope flaps on sponges, dialing telephones—all brimming with the edgy happiness of former athletes. In Boston politics, volunteers could be pros too.

Not only the lift of the campaign lightened Doyle's step as he crossed the spirited room. One of the things that had heightened his interest in the far back corner where the college kids worked was the fact that, as the weeks had passed and the momentum picked up, more and more of the Young Dems were girls. "Young Debs" was what McKay called them. They came from local women's colleges, Regis, Emmanuel, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Wheaton. They were suburban extroverts, flirtatious and surprisingly sexy in their blazers and pleated skirts. They seemed completely free of the feeling of displacement that he took for granted in himself and had sensed in the girls he'd known in Charlestown. In their double-your-pleasure levity, in their twin-sweater sets and penny loafers and pageboy hairdos, it was easy to picture the neatly trimmed lawns in front of their family houses—barbecues and patios out back—in white-collar Forest Hills, Roslindale, and even Wellesley and Winchester. What an anti-Xanadu the pinched, tavern-ridden milieu to which he returned at night would be to them. Much was made in the Town of Kennedy's having started out there, but the truth was he'd never had anything to do with the place. Some of these girls, on the other hand, were daughters of men who knew Kennedy. They were English majors, or history or poli sci or even economics majors. They were smart They talked of going to Washington when Kennedy won. They talked of working for him after graduation. The Kennedy girls gave no indication they thought the world was made for anyone but them.

But there was one thing the debs couldn't do so well, which was use a typewriter. That afternoon's crisis in the Young Dems' comer was about typing.

While Doyle draped his sportcoat over the back of his chair, he listened as the team captain cruelly berated a girl, waving a page of typescript in her face. He was Ed Lake, a Harvard senior whose blond hair fell across his forehead. "Where'd you learn to type, Ginger? At Disneyland?" he shrieked. "Or was it a home for retards? You have a dozen erasure scars on here, and they're a mess." Lake swung around to his audience of eight or ten Young Dems. "This letter is going to fifty college deans! It asks to get our people excused from school for the last push. It has to go out tonight, and it has to be perfect! Can't anybody here use a goddamn typewriter?"

"If perfection is what you want, why don't you do it yourself then, Ed?" one of the other girls said.

Terry liked her guts, and he looked for her eye. When he got it, he winked, Good for you. But the girl looked at him as if one of them were dead.

The typist was crying softly in front of Lake. It's fun, making girls cry. Lake made a show of collecting himself, taking a deep breath, boosting his shoulders, bunching up the letter, and tossing it in the wastebasket.

Terry felt he was watching a performance in a war movie, an officer confronted with a case of shell shock. A British officer.

Lake turned away from the girl and said calmly, all leadership now, "Seriously, folks. We need this typed. We can't send out a generalized mimeo. These are deans. We need the letter typed fifty times, each one separately, before Ken O'Donnell leaves tonight, so he can sign them."

"If Kenny has to sign them, why doesn't his secretary do it?"

"Because it's our job, that's why. Shit!" Lake banged the table, bouncing the telephones, jolting their bells. This is my shot, Terry imagined him saying, at a job upstairs!

As the bell sounds faded into the awful silence, Terry, from his place behind Lake, said, "I know a typist"

Lake faced him.

Terry looked at his watch. "If I catch her as she's leaving work, I could have her over here inside an hour."

Lake's eyes bulged. "Go! Go!"

Doyle did not move. He said quietly, "I wouldn't think of bringing her over here if it was possible you'd talk to her like you just talked to Ginger." Somehow Terry found it possible to keep from blinking as he held Lake's eyes.

Lake shrugged. "Okay, buddy. I'll be good. Promise."

Terry glanced across at the girl who'd looked through him before. She wasn't looking through him now. To Lake he said, "Apologize to Ginger, Ed."

"You're shitting me."

"If you want a typist, you apologize."

"You're the kid from BU."

"BC, Ed. Big difference. Eagles, not Terriers. What about that apology?"

Lake let everyone see the trouble he had believing this. But finally he looked back at the girl slumped in a nearby chair. "I guess he's right, Ginger. I'm sorry. I was out of line."

Terry hooked his jacket and walked away.

The Hancock Building was across Boston Common, a few blocks up Boylston Street at Clarendon. He arrived at the main entrance in time to light up. He leaned against a parked car and enjoyed his smoke and the cool air on his face. Beyond Copley Square the sky was red with the coming sunset. A feeling of calm acceptance came over Terry, and it reminded him of the feeling he'd once associated with church.

Girls began pouring out of the building at a minute past five. They were heading home to neighborhoods like his own, but they were dressed like women in magazines or, even, movies; not like students. They wore a lot of makeup, dresses with petticoats and cinched waists, hats, and, some of them, gloves. They must spend most of what they earn, he thought, at Jordan's or Filene's.

He didn't see her. He dropped his cigarette and pushed clear of the car, pulling himself to his fall height. Had she quit? he wondered suddenly. He hadn't seen Didi Mullen, except from a distance, since the May afternoon on Bunker Hill, and if her life had changed as much as his had—

But then he saw that hair in the grand doorway. She had it pulled back in a ponytail, but still it framed her face and set her apart, as it always had. Her hair was the color of the sky at the end of Boylston Street.

"Didi!" He called her name twice more as he cut through the crowd, waving. The girls made way for him. "Hey, Didi!"

She stopped on the stairs. Other office girls flowed around her. Terry crossed to stand on the pavement just below. "Hi," he said.

"Charlie!" she said, with an air of Anything can happen downtown.

He raised his fist in mock anger.

"Okay, okay." She laughed. "Terence." Her eyes sparkled behind the big round lenses of her glasses. Her arms went out He thought for a moment she was going to leap, hugging him, which made him pull back. He couldn't help it, but his first feeling was disappointment He had remembered her as pretty, but she just wasn't Now that he saw her face again—her pointed chin, her big lips with the wrong lipstick, her gangly neck, even her smile, which seemed goofy—it all made a sharp contrast to the pert good looks of the girls at the campaign.

"Hey, Didi."

"Hay is for horses."

He felt himself blushing. "How you doing?"

"Good, Terry.
Really
good." She hunched her shoulders girlishly, an unconscious emphasis of what could only have been happiness.

"You
look
good," he said, and as if his statement had changed her, he saw the way in which she did look good, her face transparent with affection, shining with feeling, unprotected. Her eyeglasses moved and he thought, Dragonfly! Their cigarettes touching, how foolishly sexual he'd felt for a minute that late afternoon, and how the sweetness of their accidental, unrepeated intimacy had lingered. Now she didn't seem at all older than him, and the connection between them seemed far closer than the fact of her being the sister of his brother's friend.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to find you."

"Me?"

"Didi, I need a favor. I'm in really big trouble."

"You are?"

"Did you know I work for Jack Kennedy?"

"I thought you went to college."

"I do. I go to BC. But I'm a volunteer in the campaign, and we're in the homestretch now, and—"

"He's going to win, isn't he? Everybody says he's going to win."

"The polls don't say that Ike is working hard for Nixon now, and with Lodge, even Massachusetts—"

"But
you!
You said
you're
in trouble."

The office workers were still streaming around them.

"Which way do you go?" Doyle asked.

"The MTA at the library."

"Shall I walk you?"

Didi fell into step beside him, but she kept her eyes fixed on his face, and walking was awkward. As they headed across Copley Square in the wrong direction, away from the campaign, Terry felt stupid. How had he ever imagined that she would agree to drop everything and rush to Tremont Street? Or, if she would, that she could handle what went on there?

"What trouble?" She asked this with such earnest alarm that he realized he had conveyed the wrong thing. She thought he was talking about himself. Hon, he wanted to say, in politics we always talk personal, urgent, end of the world. Relax.

She continued looking at him while they were walking, and he had to nudge her once to keep her from bumping someone. He fell back on a briefer's neutral tone. "My office in the campaign coordinates getting college students onto the bandwagon."

"I'm not a college student."

"I know. That's not why, I mean ... we hit a major snag today." He saw it coming, the insult she would feel. If he could have touched a button and disappeared—Captain Video! "I mean, like twenty minutes ago. They sent me over, like desperate, to see if you would help?"

"Help Kennedy?"

"Yes. At the campaign headquarters near the Parker House."

"Is he there?"

"Kennedy?" Doyle burst out laughing. "No, Didi, no. The candidate is anywhere but in his headquarters. I've been working there a month, and I've never seen him."

"Well, but what—?"

"A typist, Didi." Terry stopped, then she did. They faced each other. Behind her the brilliant sky glowed, making her hair seem spun of the purest light. "We need a typist, right now. We need one bad."