I sat down beside her.
THERE WERE FLOWERS in the shape of the Yankees logo, flowers in the form of an American flag, and green, white, and gold flowers arranged in the shape of a Celtic cross.
Hughie’s casket sat in the center of them, candlelight shining on its closed, varnished pine lid. There was music playing from the funeral parlor speakers overhead-Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, that crushing, ineffably sad classical piece from the movie
Not that any help was needed to produce crushing, ineffable sadness today, I thought as I signed the visitors’ book.
I’d been to Irish wakes before, but this one was outrageous. Half the Hibernian people in New York seemed to have made the pilgrimage to Woodlawn. A three-block-long line of mourners stood on McLean Avenue waiting to pay Hughie their respects. An FDNY fire truck stood outside the funeral parlor next to cop cars from New York and Yonkers and Westchester, their spinning lights flashing red, white, and blue on the regiments of sad, pale faces.
I’d just come from Detective Martinez’s wake out in Brooklyn and had another wake for the Midtown South cop to hit before tomorrow’s two funerals. I hadn’t seen this many funeral parlors since 9/11. Or sadness. Or broken people.
My bosses had forced me to speak to a PD shrink for a psychological debriefing. Though I didn’t hear word one of what the nice doctor woman tried to tell me, as I came out of her office, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to feel bad about what Hughie had done for me.
His act of courage was so incredible and selfless, all I could do was be happy and in awe of it. All I could do was to try to make myself live up to his sacrifice. It wasn’t going to happen, but I had to try.
The family had laid out about five hundred photographs of Hughie around the funeral parlor. Hughie in swimming pools; in Santa Claus suits. Hughie putting his fingers up behind his brothers’ heads. I was in a few of the older ones, me and Hughie in graduation gowns. Hughie and me with a couple of young ladies we met on a college trip to Myrtle Beach. I smiled as I remembered how Hughie, a true classic clown, had picked up the two by feigning a British accent.
Then it was my turn at Hughie’s coffin.
I dropped to my knees and said my prayer. I tried to imagine Hughie on the other side of the wood right in front of me, but I couldn’t.
It was because he wasn’t there, I realized suddenly. His spirit was long gone, roaring somewhere through the universe in the same no-holds-barred, awe-inspiring way it had roared through this world.
I finally laid my palm on the cool wood as I stood, and then I turned and gave a hug to Hughie’s mother, sitting beside it.
CHAPTER 21
THE GATHERING AFTER the wake was held near the funeral home at a pub called Rory Dolan’s.
Spotting the Irish and American flags along its facade as I crossed the street, I tried to think of the last time I’d been to my old neighborhood. It looked exactly as I remembered it. The same narrow two-family houses lining the streets. The same delis that sold Galtee Irish sausages and Crunchie candy bars along with cigarettes and lotto tickets.
Staring out at it all, I recalled warm summer nights about twenty years before, when Hughie and I and our friends would grab a gypsy cab and head north, up to Bainbridge Avenue, where the bars didn’t look too hard at our fake IDs. We’d usually end up in a loud, smoky place called French Charlie’s to try to pick up the girls listening to the New Wave cover bands who performed there. What I would give to be there now, blowing my summer-job paycheck at the bar, laughing as Hughie grabbed some girl and spun her right ’round like a record, baby, right ’round ’round ’round.
Inside Rory Dolan’s, it was three deep at the lacquered, wood-paneled bar. As I was waiting my turn, the door flew open and I heard a long, clattering roll of drums. Everyone turned as the DEA Black and Gold Pipe Band solemnly entered, their bagpipes droning.
The song they played was called “The Minstrel Boy,” I knew. I remembered my father singing the old Irish rebel song about harps and swords and the faith of fallen soldiers at a wedding when I was a kid. I remembered how embarrassed I’d been to listen to my father sing the corny, old-fashioned song in front of everyone. Now, years later, I thought of Hughie, and I sang along with tears in my eyes, remembering every word.
“Mike?” said a voice as a hand touched my shoulder.
I turned to find an attractive woman with dark tousled hair at my elbow, smiling at me. She seemed vaguely familiar.
“Hi,” I said.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, laughing. “I’m hurt. But it has been a couple of years-or decades, actually. I’m Tara. Tara McLellan? Hughie’s cousin from Boston. You and Hughie came up and visited me once at a BC-Notre Dame game.”
My eyes went wide as I took in her blue-gray eyes and radiant skin and really did remember. The drunken kiss I shared with the brunette looker as BC won was one of the highlights of my long-ago romantic youth.
“Of course. Tara. Wow. It has been a couple, hasn’t it? How are you?” I said, giving her a quick hug.
It all came back to me. We’d made out a little bit that weekend, held hands. Afterward, we’d even exchanged letters. Which showed how long ago it was. Actual paper letters. In envelopes with stamps. My nineteen-year-old heart was most definitely smitten. We’d planned to meet again the following summer, but a month or so later, Hughie let me know she’d gotten engaged to some Harvard guy and that was that.
She’d been very easy to look at then. Now she looked even better, in a sultry, Catherine Zeta-Jones kind of way.
“The family was happy that you were with Hughie at the end,” Tara told me with another smile. “It was comforting that he didn’t die alone.”
Cold comfort, I thought but didn’t say. A traditional Irish delicacy.
I nodded. “I’m sorry we have to meet again under such horrible circumstances. What are you drinking?” I said.
“Jameson on the rocks.”
I ordered us a couple, and we sat and drank and caught up.
It turned out that, like pretty much everybody in Hughie’s extended family, she worked in law enforcement. She’d worked as a tax lawyer for a Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund, but after 9/11, she needed a change and joined up with the government. First with the state’s attorney’s office and now with the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, where she’d just become an assistant U.S. attorney.
“Southern District?” I said, whistling. “Hughie never mentioned he had a big-league ballplayer in the family. So you must already be familiar with Perrine’s case?”
Tara chewed at an ice cube as she nodded.
“I’m pulling every string I can pull to get on the prosecution team,” she said. “When I get it, I’m going to work night and day to bury that son of a bitch.”
“You text me when and where, and I’ll bring the shovels and the backhoe,” I said, clinking her glass.
