If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  The Bannon children had inherited the parents’ looks and, in the way of politicians’ kids, were socially poised. Except for Mark, who could look lost and confused one minute, oddly intense the next with eyes suddenly just like his father’s.

  Carol rose to kiss me as I approached the table. It seemed kind of like a Philip Marlowe moment: I imagined myself as a private eye, tough and amused, called in by the rich dame for help in a personal matter.

  When I first knew Carol Bannon, she wore pigtails and cried because her big brother wouldn’t take her along when we went to the playground. Recently there’s been speculation everywhere that a distinguished Massachusetts senator is about to retire before his term ends. Carol Bannon is the odds-on favorite to be appointed to succeed him.

  Then, once she’s in the Senate, given that it’s the Democratic Party we’re talking about, who’s to say they won’t go crazy again and run one more Bay State politician for President in the wild hope that they’ve got another JFK?

  Carol said, “My mother asked me to remember her to you.”

  I asked Carol to give her mother my compliments. Then we each said how good the other looked and made light talk about the choices of teas and the drop-dead faux Englishness of the place. We reminisced about Boston and the old neighborhood.

  “Remember how everyone called that big overgrown vacant lot, Fitzie’s?” I asked. The nickname had come from its being the site where the Fitzgerald mansion, the home of Honey Fitz, the old mayor of Boston once stood. His daughter, Rose, was mother to the Kennedy brothers.

  “There was a marble floor in the middle of the trash and weeds,” I said, “and everybody was sure the place was haunted.”

  “The whole neighborhood was haunted,” she said. “There was that little old couple who lived down Melville Avenue from us. They knew my parents. He was this gossipy elf. He had held office back in the old days, and everyone called him The Hon Hen, short for ‘the Honorable Henry.’ She was a daughter of Honey Fitz. They were aunt and uncle of the Kennedy’s.”

  Melville Avenue was and is a street where the houses are set back on lawns and the garages are converted horse barns. When we were young, doctors and prosperous lawyers lived there along with prominent saloon owners and politicians like Michael Bannon and his family.

  Suddenly at our table in the Astor Court, the pots and plates, the Lapsing and scones, the marmalade, the clotted cream and salmon finger sandwiches, appeared. We were silent for a little while and I thought about how politics had seemed a common occupation for kids’ parents in Irish Boston. Politicians’ houses tended to be big and semi-public with much coming and going and loud talk.

  Life at the Bannons’ was much more exciting than at my house. Mark had his own room and didn’t have to share with his little brother. He had a ten-year-old’s luxuries: electronic football, enough soldiers to fight Gettysburg if you didn’t mind that the Confederates were mostly Indians, and not one but two electric train engines which made wrecks a positive pleasure. Mark’s eyes would come alive when the cars flew off the tracks in a rainbow of sparks.

  “What are you smiling at?” Carol asked.

  And I cut to the chase and said, “Your brother. I remember the way he liked to leave his room. That tree branch right outside his window: he could reach out, grab hold of it, scramble hand over hand to the trunk.”

  I remembered how the branches swayed and sighed and how scared I was every time I had to follow him.

  “In high school,” Carol said, “at night he’d sneak out when he was supposed to be in bed and scramble back inside much later. I knew, and our mother, but no one else. One night the bough broke as he tried to get back in the window. He fell all the way to the ground, smashing through more branches on the way.

  “My father was down in the study plotting malfeasance with Governor Furcolo. They and everyone else came out to see what had happened. We found Mark lying on the ground laughing like a lunatic. He had a fractured arm and a few scratches. Even I wondered if he’d fallen on his head.”

  For a moment I watched for some sign that she knew I’d been right behind her brother when he fell. I’d gotten down the tree fast and faded into the night when I saw lights come on inside the house. It had been a long, scary night, and before he laughed Mark had started to sob.

  Now that we were talking about her brother, Carol was able to say, almost casually, “My mother has her good days and her bad days. But for thirty years she’s hinted to me that she had a kind of contact with him. I didn’t tell her that wasn’t possible because it obviously meant a lot to her.”

  She was maintaining a safe zone, preserving her need not to know. I frowned and fiddled with a sliver of cucumber on buttered brown bread.

  Carol put on a full court press. “Mom wants to see Mark again and she thinks it needs to be soon. She told me you knew people and could arrange things. It would make her so happy if you could do whatever that was again.”

  I too kept my distance. “I ran some errands for your mother a couple of times that seemed to satisfy her. The last time was fourteen years ago and at my age I’m not sure I can even remember what I did.”

  Carol gave a rueful little smile. “You were my favorite of all my brother’s friends. You’d talk to me about my dollhouse. It took me years to figure out why that was. When I was nine and ten years old I used to imagine you taking me out on dates.”

  She reached across the table and touched my wrist. “If there’s any truth to any of what Mom says, I could use Mark’s help too. You follow the news.

  “I’m not going to tell you the current administration wrecked the world all by themselves or that if we get back in it will be the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln all rolled into one.

  “I am telling you I think this is end game. We either pull ourselves together in the next couple of years or we become Disneyworld.”

  I didn’t tell her I thought we had already pretty much reached the stage of the U.S. as theme park.

  “It’s not possible that Mark’s alive,” she said evenly. “But his family needs him. None of us inherited our father’s gut instincts, his political animal side. It may be a mother’s fantasy, but ours says Mark did.”

  I didn’t wonder aloud if the one who had been Marky Bannon still existed in any manifestation we’d recognize.

  Then Carol handed me a very beautiful check from a consulting firm her husband owned. I told her I’d do whatever I could. Someone had said about Carol, “She’s very smart and she knows all the rules of the game. But I’m not sure the game these days has anything to do with the rules.”

  3.

  After our little tea, I thought about the old Irish American city of my childhood and how ridiculous it was for Carol Bannon to claim no knowledge of Mark Bannon. It reminded me of the famous Bulger brothers of South Boston.

  You remember them: William Bulger was first the President of the State Senate and then the President of the University of Massachusetts. Whitey Bulger was head of the Irish mob, a murderer and an FBI informant gone bad. Whitey was on the lam for years. Bill always claimed, even under oath, that he never had any contact with his brother.

  That had always seemed preposterous to me. The Bulgers’ mother was alive. And a proper Irish mother will always know what each of her children are doing no matter how they hide. And she’ll bombard the others with that information no matter how much they don’t want to know. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Bannon not doing that.

  What kept the media away from the story was that Mark had—in all the normal uses of the terms—died, been waked and memorialized some thirty-five years ago.

  I remembered how in the Bannon family the father adored Carol and her sister Eileen. He was even a tiny bit in awe of little Joe who, at the age of six, already knew the name and political party of the governor of each state in the union. But Michael Bannon could look very tired when his eyes fell on Mark.

  The ways of Irish fathers with their sons were mysterious and o
ften distant. Mark was his mother’s favorite. But he was, I heard it whispered, dull normal, a step above retarded.

  I remembered the way the Bannons’ big house could be full of people I didn’t know and how all the phones—the Bannons were the only family I knew with more than one phone in their house—could be ringing at once.

  Mike Bannon had a study on the first floor. One time when Mark and I went past, I heard him in there saying, “We got the quorum. Now who’s handling the seconding speech?” We went up to Mark’s room and found two guys there. One sat on the bed with a portable typewriter on his lap, pecking away. The other stood by the window and said, “. . . real estate tax that’s fair for all.”

  “For everybody,” said the guy with the typewriter, “Sounds better.” Then they noticed we were there and gave us a couple of bucks to go away.

  Another time, Mark and I came back from the playground to find his father out on the front porch talking to the press who stood on the front lawn. This, I think, was when he was elected Speaker of the Lower House of the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as the state legislature was called.

  It was for moments like these that Speaker Bannon had been created. He smiled and photographers’ flashes went off. Then he glanced in his son’s direction, the penetrating eyes dimmed, the smile faded. Remembering this, I wondered what he saw.

  After it was over, when his father and the press had departed, Mark went right on staring intently at the spot where it had happened. I remember thinking that he looked kind of like his father at that moment.

  One afternoon around then the two of us sat on the rug in the TV room and watched a movie about mountain climbers scaling the Himalayas. Tiny black and white figures clung to ropes, made their way single file across glaciers, huddled in shallow crevices as high winds blew past.

  It wasn’t long afterwards that Mark, suddenly intense, led me and a couple of other kids along a six inch ledge that ran around the courthouse in Codman Square.

  The ledge was a couple of feet off the ground at the front of the building. We sidled along, stumbling once in a while, looking in the windows at the courtroom where a trial was in session. We turned the corner and edged our way along the side of the building. Here we faced the judge behind his raised desk. At first he didn’t notice. Then Mark smiled and waved.

  The judge summoned a bailiff, pointed to us. Mark sidled faster and we followed him around to the back of the building. At the rear of the courthouse was a sunken driveway that led to a garage. The ledge was a good sixteen feet above the cement. My hands began to sweat but I was smart enough not to look down.

  The bailiff appeared, told us to halt and go back. The last kid in line, eight years old where the rest of us were ten, froze where he was and started to cry.

  Suddenly the summer sunshine went gray and I was inching my way along an icy ledge hundreds of feet up a sheer cliff.

  After a moment that vision was gone. Cops showed up, parked their car right under us to cut the distance we might fall. A crowd, mostly kids, gathered to watch the fire department bring us down a ladder. When we were down, I turned to Mark and saw that his concentration had faded.

  “My guardian angel brought us out here,” he whispered.

  The consequences were not severe. Mark was a privileged character and that extended to his confederates. When the cops drove us up to his house, Mrs. Bannon came out and invited us all inside. Soon the kitchen was full of cops drinking spiked coffee like it was St. Patrick’s Day, and our mothers all came by to pick us up and laugh about the incident with Mrs. Bannon.

  Late that same summer, I think, an afternoon almost at the end of vacation, the two of us turned onto Melville Avenue and saw Cadillacs double parked in front of the Hon Hen’s house. A movie camera was set up on the lawn. A photographer stood on the porch. We hurried down the street.

  As we got there, the front door flew open and several guys came out laughing. The camera started to film, the photographer snapped pictures. Young Senator Kennedy was on the porch. He turned back to kiss his aunt and shake hands with his uncle.

  He was thin with reddish brown hair and didn’t seem entirely adult. He winked as he walked past us and the cameras clicked away. A man in a suit got out of a car and opened the door, the young senator said, “OK, that’s done.”

  As they drove off, the Hon Hen waved us up onto the porch, brought out dishes of ice cream. It was his wife’s birthday and their nephew had paid his respects.

  A couple of weeks later, after school started, a story with plenty of pictures appeared in the magazine section of the Globe: a day in the life of Senator Kennedy. Mark and I were in the one of him leaving his aunt’s birthday. Our nun, Sister Mary Claire, put the picture up on the bulletin board.

  The rest of the nuns came by to see. The other kids resented us for a few days. The Cullen brothers, a mean and sullen pair, motherless and raised by a drunken father, hated us for ever after.

  I saw the picture again a few years ago. Kennedy’s wearing a full campaign smile, I’m looking at the great man, open mouthed. Mark stares at the camera so intently that he seems ready to jump right off the page.

  4.

  The first stop on my search for Mark Bannon’s current whereabouts was right in my neighborhood. It’s been said about Greenwich Village that here time is all twisted out of shape like an abstract metal sculpture: past, present and future intertwine.

  Looking for that mix, the first place I went was Fiddler’s Green way east on Bleecker Street. Springsteen sang at Fiddler’s and Madonna waited tables before she became Madonna. By night it’s a tourist landmark and a student magnet, but during the day it’s a little dive for office workers playing hooky and old village types in search of somewhere dark and quiet.

  As I’d hoped, “Daddy Frank” Parnelli, with eyes like a drunken hawk’s and sparse white hair cropped like a drill sergeant’s, sipped a beer in his usual spot at the end of the bar. Once the legend was that he was where you went when you wanted yesterday’s mistake erased or needed more than just a hunch about tomorrow’s market.

  Whether any of that was ever true, now none of it is. The only thing he knows these days is his own story, and parts of that he can’t tell to most people. I was an exception.

  We hadn’t talked in a couple of years, but when he saw me he grimaced and asked, “Now what?” like I pestered him every day.

  “Seemed like you might be here and I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

  “Real kind of you to remember an old sadist.”

  I’m not that much younger than he is, but over the years, I’ve learned a thing or two about topping from Daddy Frank. Like never giving a bottom an even break. I ordered a club soda and pointed for the bartender to fill Daddy Frank’s empty shot glass with whatever rye he’d been drinking.

  Daddy stared at it like he was disgusted, then took a sip and another. He looked out the window. Across the street, a taxi let out an enormously fat woman with a tiny dog. Right in front of Fiddler’s, a crowd of smiling Japanese tourists snapped pictures of each other.

  A bearded computer student sat about halfway down the bar from us with a gin and tonic and read what looked like a thousand page book. A middle-aged man and his wife studied the signed photos on the walls while quietly singing scraps of songs to each other.

  Turning back to me with what might once have been an enigmatic smile, Daddy Frank said, “You’re looking for Mark Bannon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have no fucking idea where he is,” he said. “Never knew him before he appeared in my life. Never saw him again when he was through with me.”

  I waited, knowing this was going to take a while. When he started talking, the story wasn’t one that I knew.

  “Years ago, in Sixty-nine, maybe Seventy, its like, two in the afternoon on Saturday, a few weeks before Christmas. I’m in a bar way west on Fourteenth Street near the meat packing district. McNally’s maybe or the Emerald Gardens, one o
f them they used to have over there that all looked alike. They had this bartender with one arm, I remember. He’d lost the other one on the docks.”

  “Making mixed drinks must have been tough,” I said.

  “Anyone asked for one, he came at them with a baseball bat. Anyway, the time I’m telling you about, I’d earned some money that morning bringing discipline to someone who hadn’t been brought up right. I was living with a bitch in Murray Hill. But she had money and I saw no reason to share.

  “I’m sitting there and this guy comes in wearing an overcoat with the collar pulled up. He’s younger than me but he looks all washed out like he’s been on a long complicated bender. No one I recognized, but people there kind of knew him.”

  I understood what was being described and memory supplied a face for the stranger.

  “He sits down next to me. Has this piece he wants to unload, a cheap 32. It has three bullets in it. He wants ten bucks. Needs the money to get home to his family. I look down and see I still have five bucks left.”

  I said, “A less stand up guy might have wondered what happened to the other three bullets.”

  “I saw it as an opportunity. As I look back I see, maybe, it was a test. I offer the five and the stranger sells me the piece. So now I have a gun and no money. All of a sudden the stranger comes alive, smiles at me and I feel a lot different. With a purpose, you know?

  “With the buzz I had, I didn’t even wonder why this was. All I knew was I needed to put the piece to use. That was when I thought of Klein’s. The place I was staying was over on the East Side and it was on my way home. You remember Klein’s Department Store?”

  “Sure on Union Square. KLEIN’S ON THE SQUARE was the motto and they had a big neon sign of a right angle ruler out front.”

  “Great fucking bargains. Back when I was six and my mother wanted to dress me like a little asshole, that’s where she could do it cheap. As a kid I worked there as a stock boy. I knew they kept all the receipts, whatever they took in, up on the top floor, and that they closed at six on Saturdays.”