one, and he had never done anything in his life without massive forethought and a hedge of precautions, so I reckoned that if I swanned into Boston unannounced and took him by surprise there was a good chance that I could be away before he had a chance to react, maybe before he even knew I was in Massachusetts.
Yet, at the same time, I knew I could not avoid a confrontation with Michael forever, because if I was to live the rest of my life on Cape Cod, free to waste each day on its circling seas, then Michael and his henchmen would need to be faced down or bought off. I would also need to make sure that Sarah Sing Tennyson was safely evicted from my property, which meant I had to twist the tail of the bombastic ape who had married my sister.
The bombastic ape was called Patrick McPhee. He was a big-bellied man with a hair-trigger temper and a face like a steam shovel. He was a drunk, a failure, a bully and a lout. Everyone had warned Maureen against marrying him, but in McPhee my sister had seen a tall handsome young baseball player who boasted of his glorious future in the major leagues, and Maureen had first insisted on marriage then made it inevitable by becoming pregnant. My father raged at her, provided her generously with a dowry, then had walked her down the carpeted aisle of Holy Redeemer. Maureen had worn a lace-edged frock of glorious white, and within days she had the first black bruises to show for her trouble. “The screen door banged into me when I was carrying some shopping,” she told our mother, and a month later she had tripped across a curbstone, then it was a fall she took while stepping off a bus, and so it had gone on ever since.
Patrick had duly gone to the minor leagues and there failed. His pitching arm that was so good at raising bruises on Maureen turned out to be muscled with noodles. He came home to Boston where he drank, put on weight and lived off past glories and Maureen’s money.
That money had long been frittered away and all Maureen had to show for her impetuous romance was a crumbling house and five sullen sons who, God help them, took after their father. Christ, I thought as the taxi drove me down the wintry and rain-sodden street, but we had been a wicked family.
Maureen herself opened the door to my knock and, for a moment, just stared. “Oh, my little brother,” she finally said. She had put on weight and there was a bruise next to her right eye, suggesting she had turned away too late from a blow.
“Can I come in?”
“You’ve come this far, so why not the last step?” She pushed the screen door open and stepped aside to let me into the kitchen. “You remember Terence?” Terence was Maureen’s youngest and was now twelve or thirteen years old. He was sitting at the kitchen table stuffing his face with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He wore a Desert Storm T-shirt stretched tight across his huge gut. “Say hello to your Uncle Paul,” his mother told him, but the kid’s mouth was too stuffed with sandwich to let him say anything so he just raised a languid hand in greeting. In the kitchen corner a television blared, while another television, showing a different program, was just as loud in the living room next door.
Terence slumped off his chair and dragged open the fridge door. He stared bemused into its well-stocked interior, then delivered his verdict. “No soda.”
“I’ll get some, honey,” Maureen said.
“Why don’t you go and get it yourself?” I asked Terence in a reasonable voice.
“Leave him alone!” Maureen intervened, clearly practiced in defending her children from the wrath of adult males. “Go on upstairs, honey,” she told her son. “Take something to snack on.”
“Where are the other little charmers?” I asked when Terence had shambled out of the room and Maureen had switched off both televisions.
“Probably at Roscoe’s, playing pool. His lordship’s at the Parish of course, where else?” Maureen sat at the table and lit a cigarette. The ashtray was overflowing with butts and her fingers were the color of woodstain. She studied me for a while. “You look good. Where in God’s name have you been?”
“In the last seven years?” I dropped my sea-bag by the door and ran myself a cup of water from the tap. The sink was piled with unwashed dishes. “Mostly in Belgium. But here and there. I really came to see Patrick.”
“About that girl?”
I nodded. “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”
She shrugged. “I told his honor not to rent the house to her, but things have been tight these last few years. When were they not? You want a cigarette?”
“I gave up.”
“Good for you. I tried quitting and put on thirty pounds, so I started smoking again, but the thirty pounds stayed with me just the same. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“I can smell it off you like the smoke off a bonfire. You know they’ve been asking about you?”
“Who has?”
“Herlihy and his friends. They’re fair mad at you, Paul. Are you going to tell me why?”
“No.”
“Why do I even ask?” She struggled to her feet, crossed the room and reached into a high closet for a fifth of gin and a fifth of Jameson’s. I noticed how thick she had become in the waist and ankles. My God, I thought, but she was only forty-two or -three yet she looked twenty years older; all but for her hair, which was as lustrous and thick as ever. “Help yourself.” She sat and pushed the whiskey bottle toward me.
“Patrick’s going to have to get rid of that Tennyson girl,” I said.
Maureen laughed. “Some chance! You know Patrick. He’s terrified of any woman he’s not married to. He’ll tell you that he’ll deal with her, but he won’t.”
“How much rent is he taking off her?”
“Five hundred a month, and even then he gets to use the house when she’s not there. God knows why she lets him.”
“Five hundred?” I was astonished. The house was certainly worth five hundred dollars a month; indeed, in the summertime, I could have let it for five hundred dollars a week, but Sarah Sing Tennyson had to be crazy to pay that much for part-time occupancy.
“Not that I get to see any of the money,” Maureen said bleakly. “His eminence takes it all for himself.”
“Is he in work?”
“Not so you’d notice. A bit here and there.” She shrugged and I guessed that nothing had changed. Patrick had pimped for a time, then worked as an enforcer for a debt-collector in Roxbury, but mostly he lived off what small income there still remained from Maureen’s inheritance and, evidently, off the rent he illegally took for my house.
I poured myself a generous finger of my brother-in-law’s whiskey, then grinned at the health warning printed on the label. “When did they start putting this shit on bottles?”
“About the same time the telephones stopped working.” She gave me the flicker of a smile, a hint of the old Maureen. “You’ve been away too long, Paul. You even sound like a foreigner.”
“I’m back now.”
“To Boston?”
“The Cape. When were you last there?”
“It must be all of four years. His excellency doesn’t approve of my going down there. He takes his Parish friends down if the girl’s not there, but not me.” She drew on the cigarette. I had given Maureen the keys to the Cape house so she could have an escape hatch, but I had never intended Patrick to take the place for his own amusement.
“What does he do there?”
She shrugged. “They play at being men, you know? They lose money at cards, drink beer, and shoot duck in the fall.”
“He won’t be doing it any longer,” I said, “I’m moving back in. Have you seen Johnny Riordan lately?”
She shook her head. “Not for three years. The last time he came here Patrick picked a fight with him. It didn’t come to blows, but they fair shouted the tar out of each other, and Johnny hasn’t visited with us since.”
“What was the row about?”
She sighed. “The usual, you know?” She explained anyway. “Patrick had just got back from Ireland, so he was sounding off about the Brits. How they were worse than the Nazis, and Johnny wouldn’t take him seriously.”
“Patrick went to Ireland!” I could not hide my astonishment.
“The Friends of Free Ireland arranged the trip. They had one week in Dublin and one week in Belfast. Father
