William H. Hallahan - (9 page)

Wherever Brendan went for the rest of his life, he could evoke
that house simply by shutting his eyes. He could hear the old
grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, could see the cat
cleaning her coat on the deep sill of a kitchen window and feel the
contentment that filled the whole building.

On the first night Aunt Maeve put Brendan in Terry's old bedroom.
She pulled up the window shade so that he could look out over the
harbor from his bed, bade him good night and shut the door. He was
alone for the first time since his parents had died.

He lay there thinking of his lost home. He missed the excitement
that his father always brought home and missed his mother's
sympathetic ear. There was no one else in the family he could discuss
his second sight with. He wanted to talk about the black hawk that
had attacked him and about his father's last cry to him: purple.
Purple what?

Something distracted his thoughts. There was another presence in
the room. He lay alert listening and watching. Where was it?

A voice said with shrill clarity, "They were drinking beer
behind Uncle Jim's house." Brendan raised his head from the
pillow. "I saw them." Brendan recognized the voice; it was
his cousin Terry's.

Silence followed. Then Brendan heard deep, inconsolable weeping. A
moment later he heard Terry's angry voice speaking through clenched
teeth. "I hate you all!" Brendan was astonished when he
realized where the voice was coming from. Sullen, scheming, unloving
and unlovable Terry had left emanations of his life--emotional
debris--in this room, and here, years later, like a reluctant magnet,
Brendan was drawing it all to him: He was absorbing all of Terry's
most intimate secrets. His second sight was growing stronger than
ever.

In this room Terry had cultivated a strange and perverse
loneliness. Here he'd fed the bitter pleasure of feeling rejected.
And here he'd done a lot of weeping. Brendan felt a great pity for
him.

Also, as he watched the Staten Island ferry cross the dark harbor,
Brendan felt pity for himself. He was in the grip of strange forces,
premonitions, sudden revelations of other people's affairs. Worst of
all, somewhere ahead of him in the frightening future, a terrible
challenge was in store for him. A dark furious figure waited to
pounce.

He didn't want to know about Terry, didn't want to see the past or
the future, especially his own. He yearned to be normal. In his fear
he desperately wanted his parents, and knew he would never see either
of them again. For the first time in his fifteen years, he discovered
the inconsolableness of grief.
 
 

"He was pickled in his own juices," Aunt Maeve said of
her son in the morning. "I tried to love him but I never found
the way into his heart. It was like trying to handle a porcupine. He
simply rejected me and everyone else. I knew there were many times
when life hurt him and he was feeling very dejected but he never let
me comfort him or get close. Even as a baby he didn't like to be
held. Most of all, Terry loved to feel sorry for himself."

One morning Terry's vibrations felt stronger than usual, and that
afternoon when Brendan came in from school, Terry sat in the kitchen
in his familiar slouch, one leg slung over the other, kicking slowly,
cheek on fingertip with the expression on his face of a man who had
just smelled a skunk. He didn't speak to Brendan.

Brendan felt embarrassed, seeing the man up close and knowing his
most intimate boyhood secrets. It was as though he'd heard another
man's confession to a priest. He took a few hesitant steps into the
kitchen.

"I like your room, Terry. I can lie on the bed and look out
over New York Harbor."

"I always kept the shade down on that window," Terry
said.

Brendan left him talking to his mother in that whiny murmur of
his, stirring his tea with a spoon absentmindedly as he talked. When
Brendan came down later, Terry was gone, as furtively as he had come.

"Terry," Aunt Maeve said sadly, and shook her head. "God
help me." She radiated dismay and regret and guilt. Impulsively
Brendan put his arms around her.

"You'll never go into a nursing home as long as I'm around,"
he told her.

"How did you know we were talking about that?" She
looked at him curiously.

"A guess," he said.

"Ah, well, he thinks I'm one of his stamps that should be
safely stored in an album." She smiled at Brendan. "Have a
cup of tea and cheer me up. It's not nearly time to talk of nursing
homes. These modern medicines make things a lot different from
Momma's day."

The arthritis was getting into her knees and her hands, especially
the left hand, and she had to wear rubber gloves whenever she washed
anything in soapy water. She used a cane now.

A little irritated, she pulled a colorful folder from her apron
pocket and dropped it into the wastebasket. "Golden Years
Nursing Home" it said in happy yellow letters.

She smiled at him. "Brendan, don't be so nice to the world.
It doesn't deserve you."

That night, Brendan was waked from a deep sleep by a sound on the
landing outside his bedroom door. A board had creaked in the
darkness.

Then the door moved slightly. Something was rubbing up against it.
Then he heard the snort of an animal. It rubbed against the door
again, moving it on its hinges. The latch tapped back and forth,
threatening to pop open. The angry snorting grew louder.

Brendan sat up in his bed and watched the door. He told himself he
was dreaming but the fear was real enough. The animal leaned forcibly
against the door and snorted again in frustration. Brendan leaped
from his bed, seized his desk chair and propped it under the
doorknob. The animal sensed his presence and snorted again at the
crack of the door. It sounded like a powerful beast with a coarse
coat of hair that scraped on the door panels.

Brendan waited. And the rubbing stopped. Brendan got back in bed
and watched the stars westering.

At dawn he awoke and remembered the bad dream.

But when he looked, his desk chair was propped under the doorknob.
 
 

It was at Anne O'Casey's Christmas party that Brendan discovered
he had a purple aura.

Annie hadn't seen him since that last sorrowful day at the
seashore the summer before. A number of times she'd begun to call
him, ready to start talking in her breezy style. The head-on method
always worked best for her. Her mother called her Wham Bam Annie. But
when she thought about his dead parents, she was afraid she'd sound
disrespectful; she might offend him. She felt intimidated and didn't
call.

But in December she found just the right reason to contact him: a
Christmas party. So she picked up the phone and dialed, vowing that
if he refused to come, she'd die of embarrassment.

His voice had the same nice quality that she remembered. And he
still had his sense of humor. She babbled so much she felt like a
fool. Then she told herself to let him talk. He told her he was fine.
He said he had planned to call her for Christmas--as a Christmas
present to himself. He never mentioned his parents. Instead he made
her laugh. He told her he was now 7 feet 15 and 350 pounds--a giant
walking zit.

Finally she said, "I wanted to see you so I decided to have a
Christmas party as an excuse and I called to tell you you're going to
come or I'll hold my breath until I turn blue."

He said that blue was his favorite color. And she told him to hold
his own breath in front of a mirror then. And they both laughed and
he said he would come.

Before she hung up, she said, "It'll be nice to see you
again." Then she spent the rest of the evening wondering if it
had all sounded dumb to him. But it was true: It would be wonderful
to see him again. So she planned a terrific party to please him.
Maybe he would even be glad to see her.

The O'Caseys lived in the mid-Fifties of Manhattan off Second
Avenue in an apartment with a doorman. Brendan and several others
from Brooklyn rode there in a cab, their laps full of presents; on
the way they picked up Jackie Sharkey from his apartment over the
family pub on Third Avenue.

When they arrived, Annie opened the door and Brendan grinned with
joy. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She had let
her fair hair grow and now it was soft and springy and she'd tied red
and green ribbons in it; she was wearing a white blouse and a long
red Christmas skirt of wool that went to the floor. And when he
stepped over the threshold, she carefully positioned him with a hand
on each of his shoulders. She smelled like soap and water and her
lips tasted like chocolate when she reached up and kissed him. Not a
peck. A real movie kiss.

A whole group of her friends with instant cameras took pictures of
them kissing under the mistletoe. Brendan knew he must have said
something very funny for everyone laughed but after he could never
remember what he said.

The two of them had been photographed from every angle, and in a
few moments Brendan had seven color photographs of the event in his
hand. He scanned them self-consciously and was tucking them into his
jacket pocket when he paused and looked at them again. In each of the
seven shots, over his head he saw a purple dot. So small it was not
very evident. At first he thought it might be an imperfection in the
film. But the dot was in every photograph. Like a satellite, the tiny
dot floated above his head.

It was a wonderful party. It was the first time Brendan had danced
seriously. And he danced most with Annie. He held her in his arms
unaware of what else was going on around them. He could hardly take
his eyes off her. And yet throughout the evening, there was a part of
his mind that dwelt on the seven photographs. The dot. The purple
dot. He kept recalling his father's last word: purple.

Late in the evening he saw more instant photographs on the
tablecloth by the punch bowl and he found several pictures of him
dancing with Annie. In each one the tiny purple dot was visible.

As they were leaving, Annie said, "I'm having a party every
month from now on, Brendan. And the next one is New Year's. Are you
coming or not? And you'd better say Yes or I'll kiss you again."
So he said No. And she kissed him again under the mistletoe as
everyone cheered.
 
 

He brought Aunt Maeve a piece of cake. Then he handed her the
pictures. She smiled at each one, then frowned and shuffled through
them again quickly. She rubbed her fingertip on them. At last she
looked at the air over his head.

"You see it too," he said to her. "The dot, I mean.
The purple dot."

She frowned at the pictures. "I wonder what it is. Maybe it's
in the film."

She got him to tell her about the party while she ate the cake.
Later, when he went to bed, she sat at the kitchen table with the
seven photographs of him kissing--and being kissed by--Annie O'Casey.
What a wonderful dream. Brendan and Annie.

The purple dot must have been caused by the flashbulbs, she
decided.
 
 

At regular intervals throughout the calendar, the shadow of the
hawk would pass over Brendan's rooftop, skim along the streets he
walked, ever searching, ever on the alert.

One night, when he was eighteen, Brendan had a particularly bad
dream. Without warning, silently, the black horse came riding and on
his back was the black-cowled figure. They were searching for
Brendan. "Purple,", the cowled figure bellowed. "Purple!"

Brendan sat up in his bed and looked out at the harbor lights,
weary of the torment. He knew he would be found by the faceless
black-cowled monk someday. Without weapons, without skills, how do
you fight a demon? He wished he could be done with it all. It was the
long years of constant threats and intimations that he wanted to
escape. He decided he had to seek help. But where?

Who could teach him how to fight a demon?

In the morning at breakfast he made up his mind: The person to
talk to was his uncle Malachi. This in spite of the fact that he
hardly knew the man. He remembered him as a bustling, noisy man who
exuded tremendous self-confidence, who smelled of lilac water, horses
and, on his breath, expensive whiskey, a spraddle-legged figure
standing by his stables in riding jacket and pegged cavalry-twill
breeches with a stirrup cup in his hand, ready to ride with his
wealthy Westchester County friends. The Irishtocracy, his aunt Maeve
had called them. The family called Malachi, behind his back, the
Squire. Or the Squire of Mayo.

But many in the family considered Malachi as smart as Brendan's
father had been. The two brothers had been competitive all their
lives. Malachi had made two fortunes, one in the commodities market
and one in the stock market. When he talked, others always listened.
They said he'd beat the devil.

When Brendan's father and mother had died, Malachi had gripped the
boy by the shoulders. "If ever you need help, if ever you need a
strong arm, if ever you need a lifeline, money, advice, counsel--a
confidant, a leg up, a push in the right direction, the opening of a
door--I tell you solemnly, Brendan, I'm always available, my hand
extended. Just call me. Anytime. Never hesitate."

Brendan had taken the speech to heart, and ever since, his uncle
had been his rabbit hole. The lighthouse in a storm. Sanctuary. If
ever he needed to, he could run to Malachi and be saved. Malachi had
beaten the devil.

After breakfast Brendan kissed Aunt Maeve and went off to school.
He was enrolled in the center for social studies at New York
University, and as he went along the winter-bitter streets to the
subway, he thought about Malachi. He decided to go see him.

Later in the morning he stood doubtfully in his uncle's reception
room. He felt comforted and intimidated both. There were plush
carpeting on the floor and glass and aluminum paneling and soft-green
walls. The chairs were expensive and the receptionist beautiful and
in the vase the flowers were real. Well-dressed young men went to-ing
and fro-ing along the corridors. The whole enterprise hummed like a
well-oiled machine. Money. Power. Security. Brendan felt safer
already.