The City Below

by James Carroll

  Bright shook his head. "My secret."

  "Even to me?" Kennedy produced a cigarillo and faced Terry, who from an old habit produced a light He used Joan's gold lighter, which she had given him when she'd quit smoking. After the senator got his smoke going, Terry lit his own cigarette, prompting Kennedy to poke him. "We're the last two left, Terry, who do this."

  "Don't you enjoy it more for that?"

  "Yeah," Kennedy said, as if just realizing it. "Yeah, I do." Kennedy laughed again, more jarringly than before. There was something manic about him suddenly. He threw an arm around each of them. "I miss you guys. I want you to come down to Florida for Easter. What do you say?"

  Terry started to decline, but before he could, Ted blurted, "Bring Joan, bring Max." He turned to McKay. "Bring whatshername. Are you still with whatshername?" More raucous laughter.

  Doyle and McKay exchanged a glance. Reporters hovered nearby, watching. McKay raised a finger at the film crew to stop. It was not like Ted Kennedy to shed his crafted, stately demeanor so quickly, and in the open. It was as if he'd been drinking already, but apparently he hadn't.

  His aide had him now and began pulling him toward his car. "Call the office," Kennedy said. "Let them know about Florida, when you're coming."

  "Thank you, Senator," McKay said, "but I'm also calling you about Amory."

  "Oh good, I liked that guy." Then Kennedy turned and went to his car, leaving his two former aides to watch as the new young one held the car door open.

  "Jesus," Terry said, "he's burning it at both ends, isn't he?"

  "But oh, what a lovely light One way or another, Terry, the candle goes out."

  Doyle did not comment until the car was gone. Then he looked at Bright. "Who's Amory?"

  "Our new partner." McKay pointed at the man in the fedora. He was sitting by himself at the end of the row of chairs, the last person still seated, a tan raincoat folded over his arm. He was reading the fancy brochure, the cornucopia that would follow up and down the Southwest Corridor once Ruggles took off.

  Bright said, "He's almost signed up."

  "For what?"

  "The showpiece, Ruggles Center."

  "What do you mean? I'm Ruggles Center. Ruggles Center is Hammond's."

  "I know. But I heard Hammond is shy about thirty million dollars."

  "Which Amory has?"

  "Not all of it. But he's collateralized at the bank. He gives me the bubble I need to float to the surface in. I've already run the numbers past Van Buren."

  " He's your secret? And I've never heard of him?"

  "He's from out of town. This is his first Beantown deal. Come on, I'll introduce you."

  Following McKay, Doyle eyed the man carefully. He sensed now that Amory had only been pretending to read the brochure, and that his flinch of surprise at their approach was also counterfeit.

  "Victor," McKay said emphatically, "here's Terry Doyle."

  The man stood and removed his hat, exposing his baldness, a gesture intended to ingratiate, but it only underscored an impression of phoniness. His thin hair was neatly combed up from a part at his left ear. The strands pasted across his skull were a sad hint of how he fancied himself. A green boutonniere was pinned to the sewn-over buttonhole on the lapel of his coat. Eagerly, he put his hand out.

  "How are you?" Doyle asked. "Neville tells me you're interested in our Center."

  "I am indeed."

  Glad to hear it. Retail, office, and restaurant, eight hundred thousand square feet—"we're going to build a beautiful building."

  Amory waved the brochure. "I can see that Thirty stories tall. Very impressive." The man had a slight, vaguely familiar accent.

  "Where are you from, if I may ask?"

  "I'm from Naples. I just flew in this morning."

  "Naples?"

  "Florida. Naples, Florida. I build condos."

  Bright touched Terry's sleeve. "Along the water, high-rises, Naples, Marco Island, and Fort Myers."

  "With?"

  "With iron beams, cinder block, and stucco. Nice marble also."

  "With whom?"

  Amory shrugged. "Just my brothers and me. A modest outfit. We're looking to expand up north."

  "Ruggles Center will be held close, Mr. Amory. Hammond welcomes investors, but on this we retain title."

  "That's the kind of deal we want, limited partnership, since we're new here. Although, point of fact, all three of us were born in Beverly. Our mother moved to Florida when we were kids."

  Beverly, Beverly Farms, North Shore Brahmin—that was what his accent evoked. Victor Amory, spun out of an old Boston family, looking to return.

  "Coming home," Amory said.

  "Me too." Bright pointed at St Cyp's. "My father was rector of this church. I was a teenager here, long time passing."

  Was McKay shifting focus here? What was going on? "Amory ... Amory," Terry said casually. "Cleveland Amory. North Shore?"

  The man didn't miss a beat "My mother left after a messy divorce. My father's people are total strangers to me."

  "Maybe you can rediscover them."

  "Perhaps." He grinned oddly and put his hat back on. "I must be off. Thanks, Neville, for the nice meeting with Senator Kennedy. One of my brothers and I gave him a wad in 'eighty. None of us could stand that Jimmy Carter, 'I'll never lie to you' bullshit Ted's a guy who lives in the real world with the rest of us. I guess he didn't know it was me, though, huh?"

  "I'll make sure he knows the next time, Victor."

  "He's the last liberal. We're liberals, me and my brothers. That's another reason they're going to like this project. You can only build so many winter love nests for rich Jews, right?"

  Instead of answering that, McKay let his smile stretch. Then he said, "I'll lay out your terms for Terry. We'll be in touch later. If you want to use an office while you're in town—"

  "I got offices, thanks. Just leave word for me at the Ritz. I'll get back to you." He and McKay shook hands, then Amory turned to Doyle.

  As they shook, Terry said, "I was admiring your lapel flower."

  "Oh, this. It's shamrocks, a little bunch of shamrocks in with this lacy stuff."

  "A sprig of baby's breath."

  "Nifty, huh?"

  Terry recognized the thin green wire, a single supporting strand wound around each of the dozen clover stems, keeping it upright even after it had wilted, a delicate creation but impossible to make money with. Now that he saw the thing, Terry's question was, Why the hell didn't I see it before?

  "Welcome to Irish Boston, right?" Amory's face was distended as he looked down at his lapel.

  "Where'd you get it?"

  "The Ritz," he said. "The flower shop at the Ritz."

  "Really?" Terry said with surprising calm. He gave no sign of what he was thinking: This lying fucker. Did Squire know he would see me? Was the kitsch boutonniere a message of some kind, or in the word Squire would use, a tickle?

  ***

  Three things he loved above all: his wife and his son and a view of the city of Boston. He welcomed the return of spring because it was their custom, when the weather made it possible, to go together to the river before dinner, Joan and Terry jogging, and Max riding along on his bike. They lived off Brattle Street now, on Sparks, two blocks from the Charles, and it was a simple matter to get to the jogging path, which they followed, always the same way, along the stretch of Harvard, down the Cambridge side two miles to the curve around which the magnificent view appeared—to Terry, always like magic. It was a reverse of the view that had transfixed him from Bunker Hill as a lad. Indeed, the monument was a feature of it, standing like a sentry among the sweeping girders of the Mystic River Bridge. Not a sentry, an upright needle, because it still pricked him, his eye always moving away from the obelisk to the rich green skyline.

  He headed for that point, aware of Joan pounding along beside him, and of Max gunning ahead. Max was eight, a sunny, blond child whose exuberance never served him better than on that bike, which was also
, at various times, a motorcycle, a stallion, a dolphin, and the space shuttle Freedom. He was a true child of E.T. The sight of Max up ahead usually soothed Terry, but not this afternoon. Despite the presence of his wife and son, he kept returning in his mind to the awful moment with Bright They'd returned to Bright's office on the thirtieth floor of the Commonwealth Bank Building downtown. Terry had stood facing the floor-to-ceiling window of his friend's posh office, looking out over the Back Bay, watching a blue tourist trolley wend its way toward the bar on Beacon Street that inspired Cheers.

  "So what's the problem?"

  And why hadn't Terry just come right out and told him? But he knew. One thing about which he'd never been direct with Bright McKay, the only thing, was Squire.

  So Terry had answered obliquely, "What do we really know about this guy?"

  "We know he's ready to put two million dollars cash into the deal, cash that's already been transferred into his account in our bank. I know it's there. And on the strength of it, Van Buren is ready to approve our loan to Amory for twenty million, and we have a verified letter of intent from his bank in Naples worth another twenty. That's forty-two million dollars for Ruggles Center. That's what we know."

  "I heard all that the first time, Bright."

  "And you think it's more likely we'll make a major-tenant deal with the governor? Requiring a bond that the legislature has to approve? Requiring several hundred state-hack micks to move their offices to deepest, darkest Roxbury?"

  Terry turned back to the room to face Bright. "Don't make the issue micks, all right?"

  "Victor Amory makes the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the State House irrelevant. Suddenly we don't need them to pull this thing together, which is damned lucky. Micks aren't the issue? What the fuck is?"

  "Amory."

  "What are you worried about," Bright said, "that he has Japs behind him?"

  "No. Not Japs."

  "Hey, the guy has made a killing in Florida real estate. It happens. He's worth two hundred mil, easy. He's in business with his brothers."

  "I heard him say so. Brothers."

  The old friends stared at each other then, neither willing to take it further. Bright was standing at his desk, which was an expanse of smoked glass large enough to land airplanes on. Fastidious McKay. On the wall behind the desk was a shelf holding photographs of his father in cope and miter, of his stately mother, and of Martin Luther King. On another wall were large photographs of John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, a young Bright McKay posed with each. Brothers.

  After a long time Bright said coldly, "This guy is the dealmaker for Ruggles Center, Terry. Ruggles Center is the dealmaker for the whole fucking Southwest Corridor. The Southwest Corridor brings Roxbury and Jamaica Plain back from the dead. Whatever your problem is, get over it."

  He wanted to, but he couldn't He hadn't. Now he was jogging along a path with the glistening river on one side, eight-man sculls scooting across its surface like waterbugs. Joan was on his other side. He glanced over at her.

  She was wearing a pale blue windbreaker and dark blue nylon shorts. Her sinewy legs were still tanned from their February vacation in St. Barts. On her feet she wore only shoe liners with her running shoes, and her bare ankles always gave her the look of a marathoner. Her hair was pulled back in a red railroad kerchief. She was forty-two years old. Time was touching her kindly.

  She seemed unaware of him. The black foam pads of her Walkman sealed her ears; Puccini, she often said self-mockingly, was what kept her running. Joan habitually withdrew into a shell when she ran, an exertion in solitude, which was not altogether unlike what she did during sex. The limits of their physical expression had long since ceased to be a source of disappointment for either; their proximity was enough when they were running, and a mutual, if introverted, somewhat passionless expertise satisfied the needs they brought to bed.

  Joan's eyes were fixed on a point ahead, but in her trance, he knew, she was not actually seeing anything—not Max on his bike and not the tops of the downtown buildings just coming into view. She loved running for the way it blanked her mind, she said. He loved running for the focus it brought to his.

  The differences between them, in other words, had become more sharply drawn over the years. She'd been successful at Harvard, where she was now a tenured associate professor and the curator of prints at the Fogg. Terry, for his part, had become busy in the mode of men like him. They grew apart Terry assumed that she was as chilled by their marriage as he, but also he knew that whatever disappointment she felt had been assuaged, to put it mildly, by his beginning to bring in real money. What bound them still—and in this weren't they like every couple they knew?—was their child.

  They came to their bridge and took it, to head upriver on the business-school side. But halfway across Terry reached over to her. "Stop," he said.

  She didn't hear him. When he took her arm, she looked around in alarm.

  "Can we stop here a minute?"

  "What?" She lifted an earphone pad.

  "I need to talk to you."

  Only then did she stop running, and he did too. He sensed her impatience at this violation not only of their routine but of the running ethic itself. It mattered to her, not cooling down. She craned to look past him. "Max is getting too far ahead."

  The boy was on the far bank, with the white cupolas and weathervanes of the sham colonial Harvard Business School behind him. Traffic was whizzing along on Storrow Drive, but he was back from it, safely pedaling up the dusty cinder path between two broad swaths of grass.

  "He's fine," Terry said. "When he sees we've slowed up, he'll wait."

  "We haven't slowed up. We've stopped."

  "I wanted to show you something from here."

  He took her shoulder and turned her toward the view of Boston. She shut off her tape player and dropped the headset to her neck. A film of perspiration decked her upper lip and brow.

  "There, see the BU buildings? The ed school and the dorms?"

  "Yes."

  "Right there in that gap is where our Ruggles Street building will be, three times higher than the BU buildings, a mile farther back, but it will show up as huge from here. The first major jump in the skyline away from downtown. It's going to happen. Boston will never be the same."

  "That's great, Terry." She pressed his arm.

  She thought he was good at what he did. She didn't know that any fool could make money in this market, although her pride was spot-on this time, since the market did not stretch to Roxbury. "If we succeed at Ruggles Street, Joan, if we show that investment pays off there, then Roxbury Crossing and Jackson Square are next The new Orange Line will tie the city together. It'll make everything different That Corridor has given us a once-in-a-century chance to heal this city's worst wound. And Joan"—he turned to her, took her shoulders in his hands, wanting to press his feelings into her—"we're doing it We're really doing it."

  "But something's wrong. I can tell."

  He turned again to the bridge railing, brushing a weathered bronze plaque that was unobtrusively attached to the concrete pillar there. His gaze went to the downtown skyline. What he loved most about the view from here was the way the modest profile of Beacon Hill, with its terraced brick houses, its trees, the Gothic spire of the Advent Church, and the gleaming gold sphere of the Bulfinch State House—how it all refused to yield center place to the towers behind. Two of the shining skyscrapers that loomed above the oldest part of the city were deals of his, Dewey Square and One Beacon. If they were beautiful to him—and with their razor-sharp edges, glass-and-steel surfaces fitted with Swiss-watch precision, they were—it was because in the very shape of that skyline they did not obliterate the past, but grew out of it. He not only loved the city, but believed in it. Except for this one nagging, goddamned doubt.

  "What?"

  He looked left a notch, to Bunker Hill. That fucking monument. "There is something wrong, something I wanted to ask you about." He swiveled around, looking at he
r, then glancing upriver for Max, who, still on his bike, was leaning on a bench, looking back at them. Terry waved. And Max, patient, respectful, waved back Terry said to Joan, "Bright has brought in a partner I wonder about. I'm trying to decide whether to push my misgivings or not."

  "What makes you wonder?"

  "The guy is a sleaze. I can smell it."

  Joan laughed. "Sugar, I thought they were all sleazes over there."

  "Said like a Cambridge yuppie."

  "I wish." She touched his cheek fondly. "We're not young enough to be yuppies."

  "This guy's name is Amory. He claims to be from Beverly, but he doesn't know any local Amorys. He says they don't know him."

  "That doesn't make him a sleaze."

  "He never heard of Cleveland Amory. Wouldn't he know—?"

  "Cleveland Amory, Grover Cleveland. Christ, Terry, if Bright trusts him, what's—?"

  "Bright only sees one thing, Joan. Making this deal. He doesn't care."

  "That can't be true."

  Terry looked again at the bronze plaque in front of him, and rather than fight with her, he seized on it as something to read. The raised green letters were barely legible: IN MEMORIAM, QUENTIN COMPSON.

  "What the hell is this?" he asked.

  Joan ran her fingers lightly over the worn metal. "Some literature professor must have put it here."

  "I don't get it."

  " The Sound and the Fury, Sugar. Quentin came to Harvard. He jumped from a bridge. Don't you remember?"

  "Oh, Christ, you Harvard people!"

  "Don't, Terry."

  "Then don't give me shit about whether this guy is a sleaze, even if he ir an Amory. Or about Boston not being Onomatopoeia County, whatever the hell it was."

  "Yoknapatawpha."

  In another context, he'd have loved such a cocky show of his wife's trap of a mind, how it let go of nothing. But at that instant her erudition fueled his anger, which flared now, to his surprise as much as hers. "I'm talking about Boston, not Mississippi! Boston! Do you hear me?"

  "Yes. So does all of Cambridge."

  "Fuck Cambridge!"