Absent Friends

Marian, parted her hair, and nuzzled the back of her neck.

“Ummm,” said Marian; but she leaned forward, reached across the table as though she needed the milk pitcher, though her coffee was already pale. “Oh my God, listen to this!” she wailed, and she was off again, incensed at the Tribune for the same quality she admired: fiery muckraking.

Tribune reporters tore into corrupt politicians, drug-dealing rock stars, millionaire athletes who beat their wives. They pounced with conviction and courage, and of those things, Marian approved. The problem was a lack of balance. Everyone had a story; every story had two sides. At least; at least that. But you never saw the other side of a story in the Tribune. Only the Tribune's passionate indignation, its outraged cries for justice.

Or whatever powerful emotion the Tribune was peddling at the moment.

Two weeks ago, when they'd run Harry Randall's tribute to Jimmy, Marian had been unable to read it. She sat at her desk, her office door shut, staring at the headline, trying to make her eyes move down the page. But every time she hit a name—Tom's, Father Connor's; Owen McCardle, she remembered him—it was another bone-jarring bump on a rocky road. In the end she gave up. And what would she learn, what would this story tell her? Everything in it was no doubt true, but the truth would not be in it.

Marian recognized the irony: the McCaffery Fund had by that time already hit over $100,000 and by anyone's accounting was likely to top out at over $2 million; people were being so generous in these terrible times. And the McCaffery Fund's administrator could not bring herself even to skim a newspaper story that was sure to spark a new round of donations, a newspaper story in which she herself was quoted. Everyone else in the office was talking about it, about the sorrow and the sense of loss it brought home to them. Marian hoped no one would notice her silence, or perhaps that they would take it for deep emotion and go no further.

She had walked through that day saying little and had a paralyzing headache by noon. Still, she told herself, these articles the Tribune was running, these tales of the lives of true heroes—and on that day, in that tower, Jimmy had been a true hero, she did not doubt that—brought such comfort to New Yorkers that Marian was inclined to believe that the story, like any powerful, consoling myth, had been, on the whole, a valuable thing.

Then came Randall's second article. When he'd called to ask for another interview, she'd felt a heart-skip of fear, as though a solid path she walked had without warning turned marshlike underfoot.

“Just a follow-up,” Randall had said. “The ‘Hero' stories make people feel better.”

But the Tribune had not run follow-ups to any of the other “Hero” stories. And precisely because Marian so desperately wanted people to feel better, she mistrusted Harry Randall's use of this as a reason. “Why this one?” she had asked. “Why Jimmy?”

“Because of the young guy” had been Randall's easy answer. “Kevin Keegan, that you pointed me to. The Fire Department torch passing from one generation of heroes to the next, that kind of thing.”

She had considered refusing the interview, pleading a lack of time, pleading a concern for Jimmy's privacy, for Kevin's and Sally's, too. But in the end, knowing he'd be calling Sally in any case, calling Kevin—calling Phil Constantine and hearing, well, who knew what half-truths and lawyer's lies—she'd allowed Randall to come again to her office, to drink her coffee and ask his questions. The questions he selected increased her unease. Asking about Jimmy, he asked about Kevin; and when, asking about Kevin, he asked about Markie, Marian felt a flutter of desperation. She tried, as ever, to tell only the truth. But she chose truths that led in directions she wanted Randall to go, away from paths she hoped he wouldn't even see, so overgrown were they, so choked, so long untraveled.

But she was not sure she had succeeded.

When that second article ran, she forced herself to read it. Finished, she brewed a cup of ginger tea (good for a queasy stomach) and stared out the window. Close to her, the dark stone buildings and the smooth glass ones stood as they always had; but in the gaps between them the view had changed. Now she could see the twisted steel, the giant, slow-motion cranes, and the great sprays of water arcing through the haze.

Then two days ago the Tribune had published Randall's third story. Marian, through mounting panic, had allowed herself to be interviewed for this article, also, hoping yet to persuade Randall that the hero Jimmy had been for the last twenty years was so much more important than anything that might have come before.

And this time she knew she had failed.

Quiet, well worded, asking seemingly reasonable questions about the circumstances of Jimmy McCaffery's life, Randall's third story had had the same effect on Marian as watching a naturalist turn over rocks on a hillside with endless patience until he came on the one concealing the nest of writhing snakes.

And now Marian was privately boycotting the Tribune.

She knew it wouldn't matter to the paper, the seventy-five cents a day they could no longer count on from the newsstand by her office. It mattered, though, to the stand's owner, a cheerful Pakistani man trying to raise a family in New York. For three weeks after the towers fell, trucks couldn't cross the perimeter to make deliveries; the newsstands had nothing to sell. Even now, though the papers were getting through, business was down. The cheerful man's name was Muhammad; for some people, that was enough, and they were buying elsewhere. That made Marian furious, and she said as much to Muhammad, who merely shrugged. Still, in her heart she could understand. People, everywhere, wanted to do what was right, to do something that would help. They just didn't know what that was, the thing they should do.

And now that she wasn't buying the Tribune, now that being named Muhammad was bad for business, Marian asked for a Coke and a Kit Kat bar to go with her Times. Today, handing them to her, Muhammad had wished her a happy Halloween. It was Halloween? She hadn't remembered. The time in the year, she thought with bitterness, when we admit the existence of evil, in order to mock it. We hang silly skeletons and friendly ghosts and congratulate ourselves that we've vanquished demons, conquered wickedness, gone to the very gates of hell and laughed.

No, the Tribune wouldn't notice her boycott and would not care. But the principle was important to her. Marian did many things because of principle, not allowing the depressing truth of how little effect her gestures sometimes had to give her permission to forgo them.

As a child, sitting in the sweet-scented darkness of St. Ann's with her father and her three little sisters, holding her baby brother (the baby her mother had left behind for them to love when she went to Heaven), and listening as hard as she could to Father Connor telling them all to be good (though sometimes he said it in grown-up words), Marian had had a vision of what that would mean. What would happen if everyone tried to be good. All those small tries would be like pebbles. Everyone would bring one, a little stone, rough or smooth, and put it down. Some