up in a state hole jokingly called a hospital. No matter how you dolled them up, nothing changed. There were always the smells of Lysol mixed with feces lingering in the halls and rooms; always burly men in sterile white pants and shirts, who called themselves “attendants” and resolved “incidents” by bending fingers back or hitting places that did not bruise easily; who slaughtered the King’s English but used long medical terms as casually as a preacher throws around cynical hypotheses like “God” and “Christ.” My mother’s fingers were permanently crippled and her dementia was so deep that lethargy was a generous way of explaining her state of mind. She lay comatose for a month before she died of what was wryly diagnosed as pneumonia. I knew she was not comatose, I could tell by the way her eyes flicked briefly toward me. There was a momentary hint of recognition in that glassy stare when I went to visit her. I think she found some semblance of comfort in retreating into her own troubled and chaotic psyche. The last time I saw her she was skeletal and her gnarled fingers lay limp and useless at her sides. Truth be known, she died of starvation, which I learned is not an unpleasant way to die. For a few years after her death, my dreams were often haunted by the sudden intrusion of her mummified look and by the way her hand felt when I held it, like a bunch of twigs. I would awaken squeezing my own hand. Eventually these troubling images became less and less frequent but they never fully vanished.
And I thought about Brodie Culhane; about a thirteen-year-old kid left alone in a rough-and-tumble waterfront town like Eureka, a town without laws or morals; a kid growing up with a strong sense of justice in spite of it all, a sense of justice possibly tempered by expediency.
“What’d you do?”
He took a hard sip of his drink, let it roll around in his mouth for a second or two before swallowing it, and smiled. It was a fond smile, a good-memory smile.
“I became a stableboy.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “But I was the Gormans’ stableboy,” he said rather proudly. “After the funeral, Ben took me up to meet old man Gorman. Mr. Eli took me by the shoulder and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ and led me to the stable. I had a small apartment over the stalls. I’ll tell you, the old man could be a real pisser but he looked after me like I was a gold nugget. I was treated like family, rode to school every day in the shay with Ben, ate dinner with them at night. I even had a yarmulke for meals and holidays, but he had the buggy take me down to the Catholic mission every Sunday for mass.”
“How come he treated you so well?” I asked.
“My mom was their washerwoman. And I was Ben’s best friend. Still am.” He went back into the bedroom. “I’ll be about five minutes,” he said.
I walked over to the rolltop and looked at the photos. One was a tintype, obviously Culhane with his mother and father. Culhane looked to be about seven or eight, a tough-looking little boy in a hand-knit sweater and a cap pulled down above one eye. He was wearing knickers and one leg sagged down around his ankle. Even at that age there was defiance in his wary smile. His father was a big, hefty, dark-haired man with a robust smile, his arm resting on Culhane’s shoulder, while his mother was a wisp of a woman no more than five feet tall, dressed in a long skirt and a sailor’s pea jacket. In the background was the Doolin Princess.
The second photo showed Buck Tallman in the saddle of a big Appaloosa. Culhane was standing in front of the horse holding its bridle. A good-looking kid in his late teens or early twenties, whom I assumed was Ben Gorman, was sitting behind Tallman, his hands around the big lawman’s waist.
The last picture was of Culhane standing with a young man who had one arm around Brodie and his other around the waist of a small woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, striking and beautifully groomed, with the dark hair and sharp features of a Jewess. Next to her was Ben Gorman. I assumed the woman was Ben’s wife, Isabel, and the young man their son, Eli, who had died in the car wreck. From their dress, the picture appeared to have been taken in the early twenties. It was an intimate photograph; they were all hunched together and smiling warmly at the camera.
He returned to the room dressed in black pants and a lightweight plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows.
“Nice photo,” I said, nodding toward the picture.
“Isn’t it though,” he said, and led me toward the French doors.
“Give you a start, brother?” Ben said. The two men rushed together, hugging and laughing like children. They walked briskly back to the house, both chattering away, cutting each other off with one story after another. Ben didn’t talk about the future. He didn’t have to.
“Eli and Isabel will be home in the morning,” Gorman said. “The kid’s dying to meet you. You’re his hero, Brodie.”
Culhane dreaded the meeting.
He was edgy when he and Ben had breakfast but tried to conceal it. They joked about the past, about kids who had grown up and moved on, about Delilah O’Dell and her infamous club. Ben drove them out to end-o’-track, and Brodie strolled back and forth trying to appear casual. He tried to roll a cigarette but his left hand was still stiff from a shrapnel wound and the tobacco fell out and was whisked away by the wind. He balled up the paper and stuck it in his mouth.
“Here comes the train,” Ben said gleefully. “Come on, come on.”
He took Brodie by the arm and they walked up to the makeshift station as the train rounded a bend and appeared through a thicket of pine trees. As the big engine hissed and puffed to a stop, he saw the kid on the platform between cars, looking through the steam, seeing his father and waving, and then, behind him, the tiny, dainty figure of Isabel, one hand holding her hat to keep it from flying off. The kid helped her off the train as Ben and Brodie went to meet them.
Time had been more than generous to her.
Or perhaps his memory was tainted.
He remembered Isabel as a tiny voice in the dark, the words chiseled in his brain. “First love is forever.”
He smiled at her, stepped close, kissed her on the cheek, and gave her a hug. He could feel her heart quicken the way it once had so long ago and for a moment he was swept back to the greenhouse with her beside him in the dark on a horse blanket.
He stepped away from her. “You haven’t aged a minute in twenty years,” he said in a voice that the years and the Marines had toughened.
“Irish blarney,” she said with a smile and, turning to the youth, said proudly, “Brodie, this is Eli, your godson.”
He was taller than Brodie and shorter than his father. A husky kid in good shape: dark hair, brown eyes with a touch of mischief in them, and a solid grip when Brodie shook his hand.
“I feel like I know you already,” the kid said, and looked at the bars on the shoulders of his uniform. “We followed the war from the day it started, wondering where you were over there. They didn’t tell me you were a captain.” Brodie could tell the kid was impressed.
“Last-minute thing,” he said. “They upped me just before I got discharged. The pension’s fatter. You play baseball like your old man?”
“Football’s my game,” he said. “More action. Baseball’s kind of boring.”
“Boring, then!” Brodie answered, and looked at Ben. “What have you been teaching the kid?”
Ben shrugged. “He’s a halfback at the University of Pennsylvania,” he said.
“One more year to go,” Eli announced. “I took this semester off. Got a busted knee in the Army game so I’m taking it easy.”
“Then what?”
“Haven’t decided yet. I may stay back East for a while. I’ve got some friends in Boston.”
“Male or female?”
A cocky grin: “Both.”
“Wanderlust, huh.”
Eli stuck his hands in his coat pockets and looked down at the ground. “I don’t think I’d make a good banker,” he said.
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Brodie said. “Neither would I.”
The kid laughed, and looked back and forth at his parents as if to say, “See, he understands.”
“I got a friend from the service who works down in Hollywood making moving pictures. Maybe you and me,
