Shea went from Holy Redeemer, and Michael Herlihy travelled, of course, and some young fellow from the Congressman’s office went with them. Patrick was full of himself when he got back. He was ready to fight England single-handed! I wish to hell he would sometimes. So now he’s on the committee. A big man, he is, and busy! He’s planning wars against England when he isn’t drinking whiskey or losing money on the horses.” She lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. “Are you really moving back home?”
“Yes.”
“And with a sack of troubles.” She was silent for a few seconds and the smoke of her new cigarette rose in a smooth column that suddenly tumbled into chaos a few inches above her hair. “Is it a woman?”
I shook my head. “I lost my last girlfriend. She reckoned I’d never make her rich so she went off with a Frenchman.”
“Good for her. What happened to that girl you were sweet on in Ireland?”
“She died.”
“Poor thing.” Her right hand sketched the sign of the cross. “Be careful, Paul.”
“I always am.”
She grimaced. “Is it drugs again?”
“I’m long out of that.”
“I’m glad, Paul. That was a cruel business. So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a fishing boat? Run after the tuna? I hear the Japanese buyers wait at the Cape wharves to buy fresh tuna. Cash on the nail, ten or even fifteen bucks a pound and no questions asked. I could make a good living with a tuna boat.”
“Sure you could, sure.” Maureen knew all about dreams that never came true. She was probably the expert.
I picked up my bag and went to the door. “You say Patrick’s at the Parish?”
“All day. I wish he’d stay there all night, too.” She got to her feet, walked to me, and put her arms round me. She said nothing, but I sensed she was crying inside, but whether at her wasted life or whether for relief at my homecoming I could not tell.
I drew back slightly and very gently touched the raw, yellow edged bruise beside her right eye. “Did Patrick do that?”
“No, it was Mother Teresa who hit me. Who the hell do you think did it?”
I kissed her. “Look after yourself,” I said, then I looked up and saw that Terence had come to the kitchen door from where he was staring aghast at us. I guess he had never seen anyone show affection to his mother and he was consequently in culture shock. I gave him the finger. “She’s my sister, punk.”
“Where are my trainers, Mom?”
“I’ll look for them, honey.” She pulled away from me.
“And you said you’d get me some soda, right? And these chips are stale.”
I let the door bang shut and walked fast away.
The hall was always called “the Parish,” though in fact it was not the parish hall at all, but belonged to one of Boston’s many fraternal orders who were happy for their big brick building to serve as a church hall, a social club, and as a meeting place where the local Irish community could vent its joys, sorrows and political indignations. During the hunger strikes, when the IRA men were dying inside Long Kesh, the Parish had been the scene of passionate gatherings, just as it had in the mid ’70s when Boston’s bussing crisis had turned the city into a battleground and the men of the neighborhood had sworn that not a single black child would ever cross their local school’s threshold. That battle had long been lost, but the older struggle went on, evidenced by two enthusiastic slogans which were hugely painted in green letters on the Parish’s side wall. “Brits Out of Ireland” and “Support the Provos!” the slogans read and were supported on either flank by gaudily painted arrangements of Irish tricolors, harps, and assault rifles.
The other enthusiasm of the Parish was sport, which meant basketball, and specifically the Celtics. The Parish was where men came to watch the Celts on a giant TV projection screen, and when the Celts were playing even the politics of old Ireland took second place.
Yet, that Sunday, when I pushed through the Parish door, there was no basketball on the big screen. Instead the crowd was watching a news channel. The land war in the Gulf had at last begun, and Saddam Hussein’s mother of battles was being joined on the sands of western Iraq. “We’re kicking ass!” a man I had never seen before greeted me ebulliently. “We are kicking ass, you bet! Kicking ass!”
I pushed through to the bar. The place was crowded and noisy, filled with smoke and the smell of beer. I glanced round, saw no sign of Patrick, so instead cocked a finger toward Charlie Monaghan behind the bar. Charlie stopped what he had been doing, stared at me, looked away, struck his head, looked back, grinned, then abandoned his customers to march down the bar with an outstretched hand. “Oh, Mother of God, but is it yourself, Paulie?” He reached across the bar to embrace me. “I thought it was a ghost, so I did! Paulie! It is you, is it not?”
“It is. How are you?”
“I’m just grand! Just grand! No complaints, now. Have you been hearing the news? We’ve been kicking ten kinds of shit out of the shitheads. And I’m not talking about Iraq, I’m talking about the basketball, so how will you celebrate it?”
“Give me a Guinness.”
“It’s on the house, Paulie.” He let his assistants take care of the other customers while he gave me the vital news that Larry Bird had recovered from the operation on his heel and was running, as Charlie Monaghan put it, like a buck deer in the springtime. “He’s playing like a hero! Like a hero! And last year they were saying he’d never step on the parquet again, not with his foot and being thirty-three and all, but now the other teams are having to double-guard him. Can you imagine that, Paulie? Double-teaming Larry Bird! It’s just like old times, Paulie!” Charlie had grown up in Letterkenny, County Donegal, yet to hear him talk about the Celts was to think he had lived his whole life in the shadow of Boston Garden. “I tell you, Paulie,” he went on, “but we’re going to be world champions this year, no trouble at all!”
I managed to check the ebullient flow long enough to ask where I would find Patrick.
“Patrick Ewing? He’s playing for the Knicks these days, but surely you knew that, Paulie?”
“Not that Patrick. I mean my brother-in-law.”
“Oh, Padraig? That’s what he calls himself these days. Patrick’s not good enough for him. It’s Padraig or nothing, so it is.” Charlie laughed, and no wonder, for using the Gaelic form of his name was an extreme affectation for a man like my brother-in-law who could barely speak his own language, let alone the Erse tongue. “He’s in the snug,” Charlie went on, “but he’s busy, so he is.” The snug was a back room of the Parish, much given to private business.
“Busy doing what, for Christ’s sake?”
Charlie scraped the head off the Guinness with a knife, topped up the glass, then slid it across the bar. Then, with a conspiratorial wink, he touched the side of his nose with the frothy blade. “He’s got Tommy the Turd in there.”
“The Congressman?” I sounded astonished.
“Aye! The cretin who wanted to give Saddam Hussein a whole year to get his army ready. Too dumb to succeed but too rich to fail.” A columnist in the
And Tommy the Turd was now in conference with my brother-in-law? “Good God,” I said. For however dumb Congressman O’Shaughnessy might be, he was still mighty exalted company for Patrick McPhee. Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was a thousand-toilet Irish, a Boston aristocrat whose family was one of the richest in Massachusetts. Tommy’s grandfather, Tommy O’Shaughnessy Senior, had been an immigrant from County Mayo who had made his fortune in cement manufacture. Tommy’s father had more than doubled the family’s wealth but, fearing for the company’s profits if his son ever took over the family business, Tom O’Shaughnessy Junior had purchased Thomas the Third a seat in the House of Representatives instead. Rumor had it that the safe Boston
