Baltimore Blues

were impatient. Tess glimpsed the woman she assumed was Daphne, between Jonathan's parents down front. The name had always evoked for her someone sultry and petite, not unlike Ava Hill. But Daphne was a friendly- looking redhead whose natural demeanor was probably warm and cheerful. She looked like Tess, although a little shorter and a little rounder. She even had an overbite.

'Jonathan was a deeply spiritual person,' the rabbi was saying.

Feeney whispered: 'Yeah, he used to pray every day he would win the Pulitzer.'

'And when I was thinking today what would be appropriate to his death, I thought of a poem, a poem a lot of us studied in school…'

The journalists and ex-journalists throughout the small, muggy room shifted nervously in their seats, worried they might laugh. Many were professional funeralgoers who had sat through too many memorial services in which they had nothing at stake. They could sense a cliche rushing toward them.

The rabbi cleared his throat once, then twice, and began in an earnest, adolescent voice that seemed on the verge of cracking: 'The time you won your town the race/We chaired you through the marketplace…'

Whitney passed a note to Feeney, which Tess read over his shoulder: 'You owe me one drink. Told you it was going to be Housman's ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.''

'Who knew?' Feeney scribbled back. 'Thought Catholic church owned the rights and would lend it out to other denominations only when deceased was varsity football player who had run his Trans Am up a tree.'

For all its adolescent timbre, the rabbi's voice was compelling, bringing emotion to the time-worn lines. 'Smart lad, to slip betimes away/From fields where glory does not stay/ And early though the laurel grows/It withers quicker than the rose.'

A few rows ahead, Tess saw Nick, the old rewrite man who had made Jonathan's life at the Star so miserable. Not even fifty, he looked old and bent. His job in public relations at a local hospital had aged him fast. She saw a few other Star folks, but far more Beacon-Light staffers. Jonathan was theirs. Police officers also were scattered through the crowd, even the chief. The mayor had sent a representative. The city council president, who wanted the mayor's job, was there in person. Tess wasn't sure if she believed in an afterlife, but she hoped it provided the bittersweet pleasure of watching one's funeral. Only if it was cheering, as Jonathan's would be to him. If you drew a small or indifferent crowd, you should be spared seeing it.

'Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honors out,/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.' The rabbi bowed his head.

'Good choice, ending there,' Feeney whispered. 'This bunch wouldn't know what to make of ‘the garland briefer than a girl's' that is on the athlete's head in the last stanza. They'd think it had something to do with Jonathan's earring. I'm buying everyone a drink when this is over.'

Everyone proved to be Whitney and Tess. The other reporters and ex-reporters hurried back to their jobs, while Feeney turned his beeper off and Whitney phoned the office to say her engine had thrown a rod.

'I'll tell you one thing,' Feeney said to Tess when they were well into their third pitcher of Rolling Rock. Whitney was at the bar, trying to convince Spike's cook to make her a sandwich that didn't require frying or grilling. 'He read the wrong Housman poem. You couldn't have dragged Jonathan kicking and screaming from these fields, no matter how short-lived the glory.'

'What would you have read?'

'Terence, this is stupid stuff.'

'Hey, I'm not a Housman scholar. No reason to get rude.'

'That's the name, ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.' It was going to be part of a volume called The Poems of Terence Hearsay. It's about a guy who drinks and eats until he's stupefied.'

'That doesn't sound like Jonathan. He ate and drank, but only to fuel some inner machine. He didn't want to dull his senses.'

'How's this? ‘Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,/I'd face it as a wise man would/And train for ill and not for good.''

'Better, but I'm not sold.'

Feeney took this as an invitation to perform. He stood up, placing one foot on the booth's cracked vinyl seat, his right arm across his chest. He looked like Washington crossing the Delaware. But when he spoke, his voice stripped of its gruffness, everyone in the bar turned to listen. The words took on an Irish lilt, the kind Tess's father developed midway through a six-pack of Carling Black Label.

'…And down in lovely muck I've lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigh-ho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.'

He gave a little bow and took his seat. It was a side of Feeney Tess had never seen. The editors he terrorized would tear him limb from limb if they had ever sensed the melancholy poet beneath the crust.

'How do you know so much Housman by heart?'

'Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry.'

'That's Auden, writing about the death of Yeats.'

'She shoots, she scores!' Feeney gave her a high five.

Whitney approached with a huge sandwich, overflowing with cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, and hots. 'Oh, great, the English majors' convention is in town. How would you like it if I started jabbering in Japanese, my major?'

She took the top slice off her sandwich, picking at the contents with her long fingers, licking mayonnaise from her French-manicured nails.

'Whitney, that's gross,' Feeney said.

'Am I offending somewhere here at Spike's? This is the only way to eat a sandwich. Bread is just a buffer, something that gets in the way of you and the meat. It's like the preface and the footnotes. You don't really need it. It's nothing. It's nada.'

'Nothing,' Tess repeated. 'Nada.'

'Nada, nada, nada,' Feeney droned, then laughed. 'An old man is a nasty thing.' He was quite drunk, Tess realized.

'Hemingway,' Whitney said. 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. I can play, too.'

Tess stood up abruptly, grabbing Feeney's car keys from the table and tossing them to Spike. 'Have someone drive them home when they're done, OK?' She turned back to her startled companions. 'You're both too drunk to drive. Just tell Spike when you're done, and he'll have someone take you home. And tell him to put everything on my tab.' Which was another way of saying it was on the house. Spike had never taken a dime from Tess.

'What about you?' Whitney asked. 'Are you in any shape to drive?'

'Unfortunately, yes. I've never been more sober.'

In the Toyota she raced along the curves of Franklintown Road, running every yellow light and a few red ones. She took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and thought of Jonathan doing the same thing not even a week ago, when he was on the verge of a discovery. Now she knew what he had felt.

She turned her computer on. Abramowitz's disk was still in the drive. There it was again, the nada wallpaper at beginning and end. But she had never looked at the middle of the long manuscript. That was the problem with shortcuts. She instructed her computer to look for the one word she knew was in everyone's copy, the word one could not write without.

'Find ‘the,'' she told her Mac. The computer complied. Twenty pages into the file, she found the meat in the sandwich.

'Monday, Monday,' it began. 'I actually like the beginning of the week now. I can trust this day. I come in, thinking, ‘This time will be different. I will find work to do. I will force them to give me work to do. I will take a criminal case pro bono.' But it's no good. Having forced