The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  Charlie parked between the stone lions that guarded the front entrance of Capablanca. He dragged himself up the granite steps. His breath rattled in his lungs, the sound reminding him of his mother’s death rattle. He coughed up a wad of phlegm; then, another. He leaned against the front door to catch his breath. His lungs ached. His chest felt like it was constricted by an ever tightening straitjacket. Slowly, he crossed the foyer to the circular staircase leading to the Club’s second floor. Gripping the banister, he pulled himself up the stairs, pausing to pant on every other step. With each pant, he considered what punishments to inflict on Bumper. Take away his bicycle. No television for a few days. Extra chores like sweeping the winter’s grit out of the garage, or raking the dead leaves from beneath the shrubs. Nothing too harsh, but harsh enough so Bumper understood he should never, never, never pull stunts that worried or frightened his mother. That, Charlie would explain with a wink and a smile and a playful slap against the side of the head, was a spanking offense. He coughed up more phlegm, grinding it into the carpet with the tip of his shoe, then struggled to open the library door with his shoulder. If this was a preview of old age, he hoped to die young.

  A small reading lamp on the fireplace mantel glowed yellow. It illuminated the library and imbued the mahogany paneling with a rich, peaceful luster which was what Charlie imagined the paneling in a Senate office to have. He wished the mayor’s office had that look. He despised the poured concrete of Boston’s City Hall. Cement had the charm of a grave liner, and Charlie felt himself stepping into the grave each time he entered the building. He longed for Washington’s hallways of marble.

  In front of the fireplace, Bumper sprawled on a high backed red leather couch. One hand, fist clenched, flopped across his face, the other hung down by his side, fingers dangling above the thick nap of the carpet. His feet rested on the arm of the couch. His sneakers were unlaced in the school-yard style. Less than a week old, they were already scuffed from pick-up basketball games and Little League tryouts. Bumper wanted to pitch–it was the part of baseball closest to chess–and over the winter Charlie hounded the Red Sox for their pitching coach to teach Bumper to throw a curve. At his age, the coach advised against it, his bones being too fragile to handle the torque.

  “Bumper!” Charlie’s voice was soupy, phlegmy.

  Charlie shook his son. No response. He kneeled beside the couch and searched Bumper’s wrist for a pulse. Nothing. He put his ear to Bumper’s chest. He thought he heard a heartbeat. He covered his other ear with the flat of his palm. It was his, not Bumper’s, the heartbeat. He pinched Bumper’s nose shut, squeezed open his mouth, and blew as hard as he could. Bumper’s chest did not rise. With his fist, he pounded Bumper’s chest. Still, no heartbeat. Charlie pried open one of Bumper’s eyelids. The pupil, dilated, yawned open.

  Bumper was dead. His son was dead. Nine years old. Dead.

  He took a deep breath, then lay his head on Bumper’s chest, cursing the God that punishes the son for the sins of the father. Tears occluded his eyes.

  Charlie took another deep breath, then wiped the tears from his eyes with the tips of his fingers. He grasped Bumper and lifted him off the couch and hugged him and rocked him back and forth as he had when Bumper had colic and had to be comforted and cooed to sleep and he tried to sing him a lullaby; but the words jumbled up in his head and all he could remember was “Down came the cradle, baby and all” which he sang over and over until his voice dissolved into a cough and tears flowed from his eyes like the phlegm clogging his throat. He lowered Bumper on the couch and pried open his clenched fist and smoothed his shirt and straightened his legs and crossed his arms over his chest and made the sign of the cross and tried to recite the Act of Contrition, but could not remember what came after ‘. . . I detest all my sins’ even though he had started reciting it before he could pronounce all the words correctly. He attempted the Twenty-third Psalm, but his mind went blank after “the valley of the shadow of death”.

  What would he say to Trish? His words were a politician’s words, words for constituents at wakes and funerals, words of public condolence written by speechwriters; but for his wife, what words did he have?

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a skull-cap beneath one of the chairs of the chess table closest to the couch. It was inside out. He crawled over to it. Stitched inside the lining was a name, Avram Levy. He shook his head to dislodge, to expel, the cancerous thought that he should take the skull-cap, find this Avram Levy, exact revenge; but he knew better. He knew enough not to disturb evidence at a crime scene. He left the skull-cap untouched, the crime scene uncorrupted.

  He looked around. Under the couch, a spiral notebook, Bumper’s spiral notebook in which he recorded all his chess matches, move by move, in standard chess notation. It was open to the most recent match, the one he had apparently played that evening. Date: April 9, 1981. Opponent: A blank. An empty space. Location: Capablanca Chess Club. Played: Black. It made no sense. Bumper never omitted the name of his opponent. Unless it had been erased. By the murderer. By Levy. Charlie held the page up to the lamp on the mantel. In the yellow light, it glowed like an illuminated manuscript. No erasure; the space was blank. Why? Was Bumper ashamed to play Levy? Was he afraid Levy would checkmate him and he didn’t want to record losing a match to a Jew? Or, in the rush of the moment, had he skipped over the name of his opponent, a typical goof for a nine-year-old?

  Charlie didn’t understand chess notation, but he knew the white moves were on the left, the black on the right, and that “checkmate” entered beside a move meant that player had won. Entered as white’s last move: checkmate. Whose writing? Not the same as the earlier moves. Not childish enough to be Bumper’s. No matter. Bumper had lost his last match. To a Jew. And now he was dead. Charlie closed Bumper’s spiral notebook. This is not evidence, he thought. It’s a relic, something to be venerated as if it were the finger bone of a saint, a sliver of wood from the Cross, something tangible to remember his son by, something for him and Trish to cherish, to cry over, to lament the future that never would be. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants in the small of his back.

  Once again, Charlie’s eyes burned with tears. His lungs ached. He kissed Bumper on the forehead, then stumbled out of the library in search of a phone. He had to call Detective George Harriman of the Boston Police Department. Maybe Harriman had words.

  Another pothole, another jolt. Charlie opened his eyes. The heat inside the limousine had intensified. The stink of grief seared the air. It emanated from his pores. It coated the inside of his mouth. Scarred his lungs. Dried the tears in his eyes. Baked love out of his heart. The cortege slowed as it approached the cemetery. In his mind’s eye he dumped a bucket of ice water on himself, slapped himself across the face, once, twice, a third time, desperate to shock himself awake. He faced a challenge, one he had never faced before, perhaps one of the most important of his political career, sharing his grief with the people of Massachusetts without whimpering, without wailing. Whimpering and wailing was for women. Not for the mayor of the city of Boston. Not for the next United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He would go forward with the news conference. Today. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Today. Doing so, he would stare down Bumper’s empty grave, dare it to swallow him, mock it when it didn’t. He closed his eyes as the cortege passed through the cemetery gates.

  Between Trish and Charlie in the back seat of the limousine, Katie Devlin’s mouth moved in silent prayer. She crossed herself, then sighed. Was she praying for Bumper’s soul, Charlie wondered, or for God to strike me down? God already had. By letting him live.

  The telephone rang and rang and rang until Katie Devlin realized it was the real telephone, the ancient black bulky phone which crowded her night table beside her pill bottles and Holy Bible, and not the petite pink Princess phone secure in her night table drawer through which Jesus spoke to her, she to Jesus. Katherine Meaghan Devlin, born in and of the old country, spinster sister of Trish�
�s da, Trish’s favorite aunt, tolerated one informality in her life. She allowed people, friends and family, even strangers, to call her Katie, and, only then, because Jesus had done so in their first conversation. Too sleepy to answer the phone, too hot, too tired, she let it ring; but like the devil who created a new temptation with every click of the clock, the ringing persisted. Sliding her sleeping mask on to her forehead, she answered.

  “We’re on our way over,” George Harriman said, “Charlie and me to pick you up. Be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?” Katie bunched her nightgown in front of breasts, pendulous with age and calories. Once she had enjoyed the rakish beauty inbred in the Devlin women, her hair redder than the setting sun, but age had whitened her hair, thickened her body, and curved her upper spine so she walked with her head angled forward, her shoulders hunched.

  “It’s Bumper.”

  Katie twisted the nightgown, noosing its collar around her throat.

  “He’s dead, Katie. Murdered. His blood drained. Every last drop.”

  “Passover. The Jews are baking their matzoh.” She crossed herself and prayed for her Princess phone to ring.

  “Charlie wants you there when he tells Trish.”

  Inside the limousine, time crawled and the limousine crawled with it. It was an endurance race Charlie ran, a race he wanted to end; but it never would. After the funeral, the press conference. The Senate race. The election. Maybe six years in Washington. Twelve. Eighteen. Maybe none. A race with no finish line. A race death would not end if the Catholic doctrine of the soul’s journey were true. All the money in the world would not buy the indulgences he needed to escape his fate. Bumper was dead and would always be dead. And he would be famous in Hell as the father who put hockey highlights ahead of his son.

  Thirty minutes later, Harriman parked across the street from the Sullivans’ house. The car was standard issue for police detectives, black, chromeless, oversized exterior mirrors, heavy duty engine, unmarked but easily recognized. It blended into the shadows of the trees that canopied the street. Moths danced on the heat waves that distorted the street lights. Silent but for Charlie’s wheezing, they watched Trish pace back and forth in front of the picture window with the regularity of a metronome. In her mind’s eye, Katie saw her ma pacing the same way as her ma awaited word on whether Katie’s da had survived the ambush. She heard once again the voice of the priest when he came to tell them the Brits had killed her da and, later, that her uncle had been executed and, later still, the tone in which he spoke when her ma passed away in her sleep, her death mask bearing the scars of her life. Those memories had stowed away with Katie and her brother, frightened teenagers smuggled out of Dublin, consigned to steerage on the ship to New York, and to third class on the train from New York to Boston. Now, years later, watching Trish, her brother’s daughter, pace back and forth, those memories were as real as loose dirt beside a freshly opened grave. Harriman helped her out of the car.

  “I’ve buried as many people as I can in one life,” Katie said.

  He nudged her toward the house. “Trish needs you.”

  Trish flung open the front door. “Charlie! Aunt Katie! Where’s Charles? Which hospital? Take me to him.”

  Katie wrapped Trish in her arms and whispered in Trish’s ear, “He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Over Katie’s shoulder she saw George Harriman on the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop, his head bowed. She pushed Katie aside and rushed down the steps. “How, George?”

  Harriman bit his lip. “Murdered, Trish. Murdered.”

  Trish shrieked and collapsed against him, almost toppling him. Harriman grabbed the wrought iron railing to steady himself, then wrapped his arm around Trish’s shoulders and helped her up the steps, into the living room, to the couch. Trish gripped Harriman’s arm. He peeled open her fingers and lowered her on to the couch.

  Through the night, Trish shuddered in Katie’s arms like an infant fighting a high fever. Charlie paced from kitchen to living room to bedroom and back, avoiding Bumper’s room. Harriman worked the phone, coordinating Bumper’s autopsy, the examination of the crime scene by forensics, the arrangements with the funeral home, the press bulletin. A police detail guarded the street, keeping reporters at bay. At first light, Trish finally dozed off. Slowly, her sleep deepened, became less fitful. Her facial muscles relaxed. She breathed in little gasps as if she were dreaming she was crying.

  Harriman kneeled beside Katie and squeezed her hand. “You holding up?”

  “Do you think it’s the Jews?”

  “Get some sleep, Katie. It’s going to be a long day.”

  Charlie reached across Katie’s lap and fumbled for Trish’s hand. Her fingers lay limp and lifeless on her leg. He covered her fingers with his, gently squeezed them. Trish did not respond. Katie shifted in her seat, separating his hand from Trish’s. He withdrew his hand, folded it into his lap. The cortege arrived at the open grave. The driver hastened to open the back door of the limousine. It had been two long days, two long nights. Now, another long day, another of the death march of never ending long days. Now and forever. He stepped into the heat. He would not wilt.

  At the cemetery aides from Moynihan’s Funeral Home held umbrellas to shield the mourners from the sun. The membership of Capablanca formed an honor guard through which Charlie and Trish and Aunt Katie passed to reach the grave. Trish wore neither veil nor makeup. Grief twisted her features into those of a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral. Throughout the graveside service, Trish’s expression did not change: not when the cardinal sprinkled holy water on the coffin; not when cemetery workers lowered it into the grave; not when the rich black loam, shovel by shovel, cascaded off the coffin’s slippery shine; not when stones bounced off its polished wood, sounding like shots from a child’s cap gun; not when the members of Capablanca lined up to offer condolences, Mabi, Capablanca’s only African-American member, at line’s end.

  “I’m Mabi,” he said when Trish reached him.

  “Did you know Charles well, Mr. Mabi?” Trish asked. He dressed like a young associate at one of Boston’s Brahmin law firms, tailored suit, white shirt, regimental striped tie.

  “Just Mabi. We chess played, ma’am. Charles always won.”

  Trish’s lips quivered.

  “This cemetery sure be looking nice,” Mabi said. “My brother he’s buried in a city cemetery. Weeds so bad we bring scissors when we visit. The old potter’s field. White folk call it Nigger Heaven.”

  Trish touched his upper arm. “How can people be so full of hate they hate the dead?”

  -2-

  Maddie Devlin connected a borrowed video cassette recorder to her television to videotape Charlie Sullivan’s press conference. Michelle Furey had insisted Maddie watch it at her place–I have a VCR, she pointed out–but Maddie needed to concentrate and to concentrate she had to be alone, not distracted by the strange attraction she felt for Furey. Sudden, unforeseen, it had welled up from deep within her like the lava of a long dormant volcano. Church dogma–that sex with persons of the same gender violated both divine and natural law–had been drummed into her from early childhood. It was little consolation that homosexual desires without consummation were not considered sinful. She had leapfrogged the desire stage. If it were a sin, why did she feel so fulfilled? So at peace? Focus, focus, she chastised herself.

  *

  One of Mayor Charlie’s endearing qualities was that he strayed off-script whenever his mouth started moving. So harebrained was he that a talk radio host once labeled him the Happy Harebrain. In the social halls of Boston’s Irish and Italian neighborhoods, people laughed with, not at, Charlie’s harebrain; but the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit cited it as a reason for affirming one of the nation’s toughest school busing orders designed to integrate Boston’s racially segregated schools. They learn better when they’re schooled with their own, Charlie had testified in the busing trial before United States District Court Judge W. Arth
ur Garrity, Jr. who was so outraged at the mayor’s testimony he devoted several pages in his initial court opinions and several more in subsequent opinions attacking and refuting it. Charlie wore those court opinions as badges of honor on the campaign trail, his defiance blinding the voters of Boston to his complicity in the court orders that roiled the city.

  Charlie’s harebrain vexed Maddie. Maddie knew Charlie understood the problems that would arise both for the prosecution and for his Senate campaign if he pronounced Levy guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and urged, better begged, a jury to convict. It would not surprise her if he spoke of blood libel. Reason did not always control Charlie’s actions. At times, he spoke and acted with the underdeveloped brain of an adolescent. If he did now, maybe she could use it to Levy’s advantage in court; but it would also guarantee the change in venue Ugolino had schemed to obtain. Maddie tested the video cassette recorder, pulled a chair up to the television, and unfolded a tray table for her pot of tea. When Charlie stepped up to the podium, she pushed the record button.

  The camera zoomed in on the mayor’s face, on his nose, the nose that caused his detractors–especially the righteous liberals who lived in the ritzy suburbs beyond Boston’s city limits–to mock him as Boston’s Jimmy Durante, twice the nose, half the sense of humor. The tight focus made his nose look like a top-down view of a mountain after an avalanche, the nose of a boxer who had been knocked out in the first round of every bout he had fought.

  It wasn’t boxing that gave Charlie his nose; it was hockey. Twice Charlie had broken his nose playing hockey, once in high school, once in college. Shaped like a blob of oatmeal fallen off the spoon, his nose would embarrass most men. Not in Boston. Not in Southie. People still stopped him on the street to thank him for his exploits on the ice, to ask him to sign autographs for their children. His nose was his calling card. In Southie’s bars and taverns, people bought him drinks because of the cross-check he made that freed Pierzynski to score the winning goal for Holy Name High School in the Massachusetts Super 8 state championship game, Holy Name’s one and only trip to the Super 8 Hockey Tournament. Neighborhood recognition became citywide when he earned a hockey scholarship to Boston College and saved a NCAA championship by diving into the goal crease over the body of the injured goalie as time wound down, deflecting a slap shot with his eye socket and cheekbone. Hockey fans had elected him to the City Council, and a few years later with Boston euphoric over Bobby Orr and the Big Bad Bruins’ first Stanley Cup in decades, they had elected him mayor. Term after term they had re-elected him, the opposition weakening with each election.