Hot Night in the City

I couldn't think of anything to say and Mrs McGivney seemed content just to sit there, smiling at me vaguely, her head tipped to one side. I glanced over at Mr McGivney, but he was still staring out the window. And I remembered a scary episode of Lights Out about zombies and the living dead.

I felt Mrs McGivney's eyes on me, so I turned to her quickly and asked her the first question that came to mind, so she wouldn't guess that I had been thinking her husband might be a zombie. 'Ah... ah... what was your nephew's name again?' I'd just ease into this interrogation. You know, like smart detectives do.

'My nephew?'

'The one who used to visit you, but doesn't anymore? You told me his name, but I forgot it.' Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mr McGivney. I'd never seen anyone sit so still before. Even his eyelashes didn't move. I watched to see if he'd blink.

'Do you mean Michael?'

'Michael? Who's Mi... Oh, yes. That's right. Michael.' No, he didn't blink. Was it possible not to blink? I looked at his neck, then his wrist, but I couldn't see any throbbing of a pulse. It was almost as if...

'He's dead,' she said with a sigh.

'What?' An icy wave rippled down my spine.

'Michael was killed in France. Poor, dear boy.'

Oh... the nephew. I took a deep breath, and tried to get back to my interrogation. If the nephew died in France during the Great War, then he hadn't visited them for about twenty years. 'Uh... Don't you have any other relations?'

She smiled a faint, sad smile. 'No, no. My people are all gone, and Mr McGivney was an orphan, so no, we don't have any relations.' She shrugged, and sudden tears filled her eyes but didn't fall. 'No one at all.'

'I'm... I'm sorry.'

'Are you, John-Luke?'

'Only my mother calls me... Look, Mrs McGivney, I'd better be getting home.' I rose from the chair and went to the door. 'Thanks a lot for the cookie.' Then I did something risky. I turned to Mr McGivney and said, 'Good-bye, Mr McGivney.'

'He can't hear you.'

'Is he deaf?'

'No, no, he's not deaf.' She opened the door for me. 'Mr McGivney is a hero.'

'Oh.' I looked back at him. '...I see, well...' I left.

Uncle Jim, Gabby, Tonto, Jack, Doc, and the rest were in the alley, anxiously awaiting my return. 'Michael!' I whispered hoarsely out of the side of my mouth. 'Killed in the Great War. Write it down, and don't forget it!'

A week or so later, I was cutting through the back alley with an armful of books about birds that I was returning to the library. I no longer remember why I suddenly decided to make our ship come in by becoming a rich and world-famous ornithologist, but I wouldn't be surprised if I had just stumbled across the word 'ornithologist' and taken a fancy to it. It was a period when I lurched from one eventual profession to another, often on the basis of small clues to my destiny I found while reading the encyclopedia in the library. This idea of becoming an ornithologist lasted longer than most... a week or two, maybe. I had even begun my first book, Meet the Warbler, which I wrote as a book, with sheets of paper folded in half and stapled together so you could turn the pages and read my careful printing, which I justified right and left by spreading or cramming the final words. The cardboard cover had a crayon picture of a yellow warbler on it, and at the bottom: Written by Jean-Luc LaPointe, author. It was dedicated to 'my best friend, My Mother'. Working on the worn, fingernail-picked oilcloth of the kitchen table, carefully wiping the tip of my nib on the edge of the ink bottle after each dip to avoid blots, I painstakingly produced half a dozen pages of this seminal study, scrupulously altering a word here and there from my research sources to avoid being a copycat. Then something went wrong; I don't remember what. Maybe I misspelled a word, or miscalculated the room necessary to fit a word in, or made a blot. At all events, my effort to erase the error made a huge smear, and my attempt to erase the smear converted it into a hole, so I abandoned the profession of ornithologist and began to look for yet another career that might bring our ship into port. I found the aborted scholarly effort many years later, when I was going through my mother's things after her death. She had underlined the dedication: To my best friend, My Mother.

I had stopped in the alley to shift the heavy bird books from one arm to the other when three sharp clicks on a window above made me look up. Mrs McGivney was gesturing for me to come up. I indicated the books I was carrying and tried to mime the complicated message that I had to bring them to the library before it closed. But she just smiled, tilted her head in that little-girl way of hers, and beckoned me up, so I reluctantly returned the books to my apartment and went down the street, up her stoop, and up the staircase to the top floor.

Again the cookies and milk, again her wistful smiles, again Mr McGivney sitting perfectly still in the evening sunlight. But this time I was determined to uncover the facts about his heroism. I decided on a deceptively direct approach. 'Mrs McGivney, how did Mr McGivney become a hero?'

She seemed pleased that I was interested enough to ask. 'Mr McGivney was a soldier. He fought the Spanish in Cuba.'

Now we were getting somewhere! A war hero! I had read something about the Spanish-American War, but I couldn't place it in history. It wasn't a war that inspired novels and movies, like the Civil War and the Great War, which we didn't think of as World War I because the trouble brewing in Europe wasn't yet called World War II. 'When was that, Mrs McGivney?'

'He left to join his regiment the day after we were married. He looked so grand and handsome in his uniform!'

'Yes, but when was that?'

'I'll bet half the people on the block came to our wedding. It was up at Saint Joseph's. Do you know Saint Joseph's?'

Of course I knew Saint Joseph's. It was our parish church. Within two years, I would become an altar boy there, but at that time my only religious distinction was my ability to get through the Stations of the Cross faster than any other kid on the block. None of us would have dared to skip a single word of the five Hail Mary's we said at each stage of the Passion, nor would we have failed to bow our heads at the word 'Jesus', but we saw nothing wrong in saying the prayers as fast as we could, rising from one Station while still muttering nowandatthehourofourdeathamen, then sliding to the next on our knees and beginning its string of Aves before we'd come to a complete stop. And we would never have dreamed of failing to genuflect as we crossed the central aisle to get to the second half of the Stations, but we did it so quickly that sometimes a kid would get a bruised knee.

'Sure, I know Saint Joseph's.' I made a mental note of where they got married. It didn't seem important just then, but in an investigation of this kind the smallest bit of information might turn out to be the key that unlocks...

'We stood there at the altar, him in his uniform and me in my mother's wedding dress. It was all so... beautiful. I was just seventeen, and Mr McGivney was twenty-one.'

'And this was... when?'

'September. September weddings are good luck, you know.'

'Yes, but what year! I mean... what year were you married, Mrs McGivney?'

'1898. That's when our boys went to Cuba.'

1898. Another century! But then... let's see... if she was seventeen in 1898, and this was 1939, that would make her about sixty. That was pretty old, sure, but not impossible. Still, it seemed strange to me that this old man had been in the war before the Great War. The Great War had started when my mother was about my age, for crying out loud.

'So he was wounded while doing something brave in Cuba?' I asked.

'No, he wasn't wounded. I don't know exactly what happened. And, of course, he wasn't able to tell me after he came...' She shrugged. Then she continued in a distant voice, tenderly fingering the old memories. 'I moved into this apartment right after I came back from seeing him off at Union Station. All the boys in uniform... bands playing... people waving and cheering. I made this little nest for Lawrence to come home to.' She rose and started to walk around the room. 'I ran up the curtains myself, and found furniture in second-hand stores, and my father helped me paint—he was a house painter, you know—and I chose this paper for the parlor—like the color?... Ashes