S Rozan - Absent Friends

Over the music, Marian said, “It's changed.”

Tom shrugged, and his smile turned rueful. “What hasn't?” He looked around, and she did, too, her head full of the past twenty years, the leisurely, incremental, inescapable alterations of time; and the last six weeks, the violent flashes of disaster.

“They still make a great cheeseburger, though,” Tom said, bringing them back to the solid world, the facts of the moment, and Marian, surprising herself, nearly laughed with delight at the persistent memory and hope of a world in which cheeseburgers were worth discussing.

She did not laugh, though, only smiled, and Tom did, too. She examined the menu and chose a pasta primavera. She also ordered wine, excusing herself for thinking this might be a difficult conversation to get through without something to encourage her. The new Flanagan's apologized for having no sauvignon blanc (the old Flanagan's would have laughed in her face), but the chardonnay, when it came, was surprisingly good.

Marian sipped at her wine, Tom at his beer. Tom brought up the Fund, only to say the board was still a hundred percent behind Marian, every step of the way. Marian smiled and didn't tell him that long, weary experience told her what that meant: someone on the board-at least someone, though most likely an entire faction-had questioned her decision-making, and probably her overall suitability in light of the Tribune 's allegations, and had no doubt urged her replacement. If the board was still behind her, it was only because Tom and his faction had prevailed.

Marian thanked him and asked after his children. All were doing well. Michael, the oldest, who looked so like Tom had when they all were young, was home. He'd been in his senior year at college, in Syracuse; after the attacks, he'd rushed home and would finish school somewhere else, somewhere near. “He wants to stay in New York,” said Tom. “He doesn't want to be one of those people.”

Marian knew who those people were: the ones who ran from what had happened and what might happen, who deserted, escaped to other, less endangered cities. Or to cabins in the woods. “But he could come back next year,” Marian said, as though next year were something that could be counted on, as though next year would for certain come and be different from now. “Don't you think he should go back now and finish?”

“I'm his father. He doesn't ask me what I think.”

“You could tell him anyway. That's what my father does.”

Tom smiled at her again and looked down, and she thought he must be remembering his father, Mike the Bear, gone just over seven years now. How long that seemed! And yet it was not the Mike Molloy of seven years ago, or seventeen, whom Marian suddenly longed to see come striding through Flanagan's door. That had been a diminished and weary man, the exhausted king who had not fought his son's determination to democratize the kingdom and give away its wealth. No, the Mike Molloy whom Marian wished for was the Big Mike of her childhood, the old-time boss of Flanagan's. In charge, running things, and obeyed.

But she was being foolish. Big Mike was gone. And when the world had been his, it had not been a good world, not a fair one, and that world had ended badly, and that was why she was here with Tom right now. Tom had said it on the steps of St. Ann's in September: There are no grown-ups, only us. If Marian, and Tom, and everyone else who had been placed in positions they had not asked for, did not accept their situations, take responsibility, do what they had to do, they would find that no one was in charge.

Oh, Marian knew how much was in her hands. Still, reluctant to begin, to open a conversation she had avoided for twenty years (though it could not be that Tom did not know why they were here, so why did he not help her, why did he not begin?), Marian twirled her pasta, drank more wine, and asked after Tom's mother. “I saw her in September,” she told Tom. “At St. Ann's. But I didn't have a chance to talk to her.”

“That's too bad,” Tom said. “She'd have liked to see you.”

Marian had not spoken to Peggy Molloy at the mass she had come back to Pleasant Hills to attend, five days after the attacks. But not really because she had not had the chance.

Everyone, that day, was stunned and confused and trying to manage. All around her Marian had seen people working, for their own sakes and the sake of others, to hold themselves together, and she'd seen the different small things that made each fall apart. The sight of the empty apparatus floor through the open door at Engine 168 had been too much for one friend; another broke down sobbing as she spoke of talking to her neighbor while he watered the vegetable garden that now he would never harvest.

For Marian, strong and useful for those past five days, offering support to those weaker than she, volunteering late into the night and bearing up, that small thing had been the sight of Peggy Molloy. Seeing her shoulders bent as though carrying weight, her head covered in the old style with a black lace shawl, had brought Marian to unexpected tears.

If Tom was the abdicated prince, living now by choice as a commoner, Peggy Molloy, widowed seven years, was still the sad queen she had always been. She dressed as other women did, and walked like them, sat and talked among them in the same gentle voice she had always used; her grandchildren's friends adored her as her sons' friends always had. Others in church that day had lost loved ones; Peggy Molloy had not. But seeing her clothed in mourning out of respect for other mothers' sons had swept Marian back through years, to another mass, also at St. Ann's, when the loss had been all of theirs but Peggy's more than anyone's: the funeral mass for Jack.

October 31, 2001

The phone again. Goddamn it. There might be something to be said, Phil thought, fumbling for the damn thing in his pocket, for a city where the phones don't work.

“Constantine.” More of a threat than a greeting, but screw whoever it was if they couldn't take a joke.

“It's Kevin.”

Shit. Good going, Phil. Courtroom technique, swift softening of voice: “Hey, Kev. How're you doing?”

“You need to come out here. I need to talk to you.”

“I've been wanting to. But your mother-”

“Mom doesn't want to see you. We'll meet somewhere. You and me.” Kevin was on edge, his voice tight and cold, but at least he was calling.

“Wherever you say.”

“I'd come in-”

“No, no problem.” Come in, Kev-on the crutches, with the pain pills every four hours. “Where's good?”

“There's a bar called the Bird.”

“I know it. On Main Street?”

“That reporter's dead, Uncle Phil. I need you to tell me what's going on.”

“Kev? Kev, I don't know.”

“The paper says someone killed him.”

“I saw that.” And was just told it, by a girl not much older than you are, who's sure it's true and wonders if it was me.

“Did they?”

Do you mean, did I? “There's no evidence he didn't jump, Kevin.”

“Evidence? Oh, fuck evidence! What the fuck does that mean, there's no evidence? You think you're talking to a jury, you can just throw words around and convince me?”

“I'm not trying to convince you of anything.”

Kevin's anger fell back, a quick blaze that flared itself to embers. “What's going on, Uncle Phil? What does it have to do with Uncle Jimmy?”

And there you had it. The way it had always been: Uncle Phil and Uncle Jimmy. One weaving through the world the other came from, like the wind, everywhere in it, never part of it; the other a shining light so bright his glow had colored that world long after he'd left it. Now he was gone from all worlds, Jimmy McCaffery was, but his radiance was still blinding.