Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “So,” said Fallon. “The locket passed to someone named Callahan.”

  “How did Bertram Lee get it?” asked Orson.

  “I don’t know. But I think it’s time to ask Mr. Keegan.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” asked Evangeline.

  Peter Fallon and his brother, Danny, stepped out of a bright March afternoon and into the drinker’s darkness. Half a dozen sets of eyes looked up from their boilermakers.

  Peter hadn’t been in the Rising Moon Pub in twenty years. “Just as I remembered it,” he whispered to Danny. It was still the same narrow, crowded dump, with a row of booths along one wall and a few tables in the middle of the floor, and still that smell—stale beer mingled with the essence of urine-soaked disinfectant cake and well-done pastrami grease.

  “Don’t ask for any fuckin’ French wine,” said Danny out of the corner of his mouth. “Beer only. And drink from the bottle.”

  They sat at the bar.

  “Danny Fallon,” said the bartender, an ex-con called Smithy, not because Smith was his name but because of his forearms, which were the size of Peter’s thighs. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Come in to drink with the men?”

  “Bingo?” said Danny.

  “You mean ‘bingo’ like, ‘Yeah, Smithy, I’m here to drink with the men’? Or ‘Bingo’ like ‘Mr. Keegan’?”

  Danny said, “I want to talk to Mr. Keegan.”

  Peter noticed a black raincoat hanging from the hook on the last booth, and just visible above the seat back was a Bruins cap and a pair of eyes. Jackie Pucks.

  Peter told his brother, “Stay here.”

  “Be polite,” said Danny.

  “Yeah,” said Smithy, “we got good fuckin’ manners in here.”

  As Peter approached the back booth, Jackie stood. There was a mirror over Jackie’s head, so the guy seated opposite him could see everyone who came in or out without turning around. Jackie looked down, nodded at something the guy said, then stepped over to the bar.

  Peter did not say a word to the young thug. He just sat down and looked James “Bingo” Keegan in the eye.

  Keegan was wearing a gray scally cap, a white dress shirt open at the collar, and a plaid vest sweater with three lottery tickets sticking out of a pocket. A cup of black coffee, a pack of Camels, and a silver cigarette lighter were spread on the table in front of him.

  “So”—Keegan smiled, revealing teeth as gray as his cap—“the saints are singing your name.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Big Jim Fallon’s kid, gone all Back Bay on us. What are you drinkin’?”

  “Coffee.”

  “You sure? Maybe Smithy has a bottle of Olivier LaFlaive Puligny-Montrachet ’ninety-six back there. If he doesn’t, I know where I could get my hands on a few cases. What’s that wine go for these days, about seventy bucks a bottle?”

  “Eighty. You have a wide range of interests, Mr. Keegan,” said Peter. “And you pronounce your French quite well.”

  “Merci.” Keegan gestured to Smithy for another coffee, which appeared on the table in front of Fallon, in the bandaged hand of Jackie Pucks.

  Fallon ignored the coffee—and the hand—and said to Keegan, “Why are you so interested in me that you know I like white Burgundies?”

  “Local boy made good. That interests everyone.”

  “Enough to be causing me trouble since October?”

  “Trouble?”

  “You followed me home one night last fall.”

  “Me? Follow you?” Keegan’s bemused expression did not change.

  “Well, someone borrowed your scally cap and your raincoat, then. And someone tried to run me down in the Charles River a few days ago. And one of your boys broke into a house in Marblehead this morning.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  Keegan took a measured sip of coffee. Then he said, in the same pleasant tone, “Peter Fallon, who the fuck do you think I am, some mailman, all done with my route, killin’ an afternoon in here before I go home to the wife? If somethin’ happens around me that I should know about, I know about it . . . usually before it happens.”

  Fallon glanced toward his brother.

  “Don’t look for backup,” said Keegan. “I’m not gonna hurt you, unless you’re interferin’ with somethin’ that matters to me.”

  “I deal in rare books and documents.”

  “Some of the guys who work for me can’t even read.” Keegan slipped a cigarette from the pack, put it in his mouth, and lit it, all without taking his eyes from Fallon’s face. “Rare books mean less to me than rare steaks.”

  “So what does interest you?”

  Keegan blew smoke out the corner of his mouth. “Money.”

  “Money interests everyone,” said Fallon. “I can see where there’s money knocking over old houses in Marblehead, but running down guys on the river? Or ruining an honest bookseller’s reputation?”

  “I don’t think anyone could ruin the reputation of a guy who once made good on a quarter-million-dollar loss.” Keegan took another puff and placed the cigarette on his saucer. “The river stuff, whoever did that to a smart guy like you should be told to stop. As for a little B and E on the North Shore . . . rich old bags go south for the winter, and poor boys from the neighborhoods go north for opportunity.”

  “What do you think they were after when they broke in?”

  “The good stuff, I guess. Don’t pay to waste time stealin’ DVD players when you can get Oriental rugs and oil paintings.”

  Fallon looked at Jackie Pucks, who was now sitting at the end of the bar, watching ESPN. “How’s the wrist, there, Jackie?”

  Jackie put his bandaged wrist under the bar so that no one could see it.

  When Peter looked across the table again, Keegan was smiling. “I like your style, Fallon. A smart guy. Figured it all out back in the fall, or so I’ve heard, even if Wednesday’s Globe says you got it all wrong. And a good father, from what I can see.”

  Peter didn’t like that remark. Way too personal. “How would you know what kind of father I am?”

  On the seat beside him, Keegan had a Racing Form, a Boston Globe, and a folder. He flipped open the folder and took out a photograph of Peter on the steps of Widener.

  “We were watchin’ you to see what you found out at the Bleen House, and who you gave it to. Had my boy in the Harvard windbreaker follow you on a Crimson Key tour.”

  “Like you said, nothing happens around here that you don’t know about.” Fallon stood. “Just do me one favor. Stay away from my son.”

  “Agreed.” Keegan took another long drag on his cigarette. “But one favor for another. This business with Jackie Pucks . . . Jackie’s my sister’s boy, and you know how nephews can be. I’d take it as a personal favor if you kept the police out of this.”

  Fallon leaned his hands on the table. “If you can tell me he had nothing to do with the death of Ridley Royce, I’ll say nothing about Jackie Pucks.”

  “That I can guarantee.”

  Peter started to leave, then he turned back to Keegan. “Since you know about everything that happens around here, what do you know about an old locket that just came on the market?”

  Keegan blew smoke through his nose and laughed. “Rare books, lockets . . . you must think I want to run an antique shop instead of a bar. You thinkin’ of sellin’ yours?”

  “Not this year,” said Peter. “But if I ever do, I’ll call you.”

  Keegan laughed again. “Not only are you a smart guy, you’re a smartass, too.”

  Danny Fallon didn’t say anything until they were back in the car, heading down West Broadway. “He’s too dangerous to fuck with, Peter.”

  “Maybe, but after talking to him, I feel a little safer. He knows that I know how to find this play better than anybody else in the game. So I’m safe for a while.”

  “For a while, but remember Billy Gallagher. He inherited the Risin’ Moon. Always wa
nted to own a bar. Then Keegan come along. Offered a price. Billy said no. So Keegan come back the next day and offered ten percent less. Billy said no. So Keegan come back the next day with Smithy and offered another ten percent less and said that if Billy didn’t sell, he’d lose ten percent a day until he owed Keegan money. Next thing, Billy’s movin’ to Florida and Bingo’s doin’ business in the back booth. Whatever he wants, he gets. If he wants this book, he’ll get that, too, whether you lead him to it or not.”

  “Puligny-Montrachet,” said Peter.

  “What?”

  “He told me he knew where he could get a case of Puligny-Montrachet. He’s probably got it in the basement.”

  “Yeah . . . along with a few fuckin’ bodies.”

  While Peter was having coffee, Evangeline and Orson went back to the Newbury Street office and waited. And looked for distractions.

  For Orson, there were three crates of books.

  Evangeline held up a folder of papers. “I have some reading.” She had taken the letters of Artemus Pratt II with her, because after the war, her great-great-grandfather had returned to Boston to move in the same circles as many of the women who helped found Radcliffe. Artemus might now have something to tell her about that world.

  She had not read far before she came to his description of the third day at Gettysburg:

  When Lee’s bombardment began, the Twentieth was on Cemetery Ridge, and it was as if the heavens had opened and let hell fall out. There was nothing to do but lay down and endure it.

  Then, they came on, fifteen thousand Virginians, marching out of the woods by brigade front, at parade step, marching bravely and beautifully, right into our guns—the rifled cannon firing exploding shot, then the muskets, finally the canister. At the critical moment, when the Virginians breached our lines, our regiment went in smartly, smashing into their flank.

  What had begun as a scene of battlefield majesty ended as a dirty street fight, with men clubbing, punching, biting, bayoneting, and shooting at close range. By God’s mercy this swirl of blood and horror ended in victory, as the southerners one by one and then in groups came to realize that there were no longer enough of them to carry the attack and threw down their arms.

  Afterward, we tended the wounded and I heard someone calling my name. A Confederate lieutenant lay against the wall, a circle of red widening on his belly. He asked if I were not Pratt of Harvard. I recognized him as Hannibal Wall, ’63. He asked after the others in the regiment. How fared Heywood Wedge? Wounded and mustered out, I said. Jason Bunting? Somewhere on the field, I said. And stubborn Douglass Warren? Dead, I said, and gone to his reward.

  Wall said he’d known he was going against the Twentieth that day and was hoping to squash Warren’s hat. He reckoned now that they could squash each other’s hats in the hereafter. He then reached for his own red forage cap, which lay in the dust. I placed it in his hand, leaving him to place it on his head. His last words were, “Had we known, we might have been better friends. So many have died . . . so many.”

  So many, indeed. In our own unit, our dear friend Paul Revere, ’62, was killed today. And young Lieutenant Bunting, ’61, lost his head during the bombardment.

  Thanks be to God that you do not need to mourn for me, but in the Wall house, the Revere house, and the Bunting house, there will be sadness. In Harvard Yard, the elms and old men will weep. And in Gore Hall, where Samuel Bunting and Theodore Wedge spoke so proudly of their nephews, they will weep again, as they did, I’m sure, over the death of Douglass.

  Evangeline wrote down the name Samuel Bunting, for no other reason but that he was a friend of Theodore Wedge. As Peter had taught her . . . it could mean nothing. It could mean everything.

  And though she did not say so to Orson and wouldn’t say so to Peter, she was starting to enjoy this.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  1872-1898

  “TEN YEARS since we heard the news from Antietam,” said Dorothy Wedge Warren one bright September afternoon.

  “Your son had true gifts,” said Louis Agassiz. “We shall never stop mourning.”

  Elizabeth Cary Agassiz took Dorothy’s hand. “We are just glad to see you again.”

  “It’s time to enter the world again.” Dorothy and Theodore stood on the veranda of the Agassiz home after lunching with their old friends.

  Theodore took out his watch and popped it open. “I’m afraid we must be off. The president doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “A frank talk with President Eliot on the matter of female education seems a good way to announce myself again,” added Dorothy.

  Mrs. Agassiz, a heavyset woman with a quick laugh and lively eyes, said, “Remind him, as I often do, of the success we enjoyed in our girls’ school.”

  “And remind him that the work was exhausting.” The old professor lit his cigar. “Now we leave it to Gilman at his Cambridge School for Girls.”

  “That’s a preparatory school,” said Dorothy. “Girls need college experience.”

  “Ah, yes . . . college experience.” Professor Agassiz pointed across Quincy Street to a triangle of land called the Delta. “Once, our young men enjoyed college experiences over there, on a field that echoed with the sounds of games and competition. Now we build their monument on the very grass.”

  The monument was called Memorial Hall. It honored Harvard’s Union dead. And though it was shrouded in scaffolding, the Gothic majesty of it had moved Dorothy to tears when she looked upon it for the first time, earlier that day.

  “I would prefer the shouts of college boys to the clatter of construction,” said Agassiz sadly.

  “So would I,” said Dorothy, and she felt herself moved to tears once more, so she made a quick good-bye and hurried down the steps.

  Soon, she and Theodore were walking along Cambridge Street.

  Looking up at Memorial Hall, Dorothy said, “Heywood was right.”

  “About what?” asked Theodore.

  “In his fund-raising letter, he wrote, ‘The mighty tower will surge into the sky like a column of soldiers marching to their rightful reward.’ And I see it, Theodore. I see it.”

  “I think that losing a leg drained Heywood of his bile.”

  “Perhaps it was his marriage to Amelia.” Dorothy dabbed her eyes. “In any event, his efforts to build Memorial Hall will stand us in good stead with President Eliot.”

  “Eliot is a hard nut, you know,” said Theodore.

  “So am I.”

  Theodore was not so certain of that.

  After Douglass’s death, Dorothy had not left her house for three years, except to attend memorial services for other young men who had fallen. It had taken her four years more to come to Cambridge for the inauguration of Charles William Eliot. And Eliot’s speech had been enough to keep her away for two years more.

  On that day, the stiff-spined new president, just thirty-five, had stepped before an audience in the Unitarian Meeting House and outlined his vision for a style of education that would challenge young men rather than restrain them.

  “Until recently,” he had intoned, “all students at this college passed through one curriculum. Every man studied the same subjects in the same proportions, without regard to his natural bent or preference—one primer, one catechism, one rod for all children.

  “But the new elective system,” Eliot had continued, “gives free play to natural preferences and inborn aptitudes. It relieves the professor of students compelled to an unwelcome task by substituting lessons given to small, lively classes. We will persevere in our efforts to establish, improve, and extend this new system.”

  And the applause had poured forth.

  “You may not have felt it,” Theodore had whispered to his sister, “but the academic world just moved beneath our feet.”

  Dorothy had felt it but had restrained her applause, hoping that if Eliot would slip the bonds from the minds of young men, he might do the same for young women.

  Then Eliot had come to the matter of fem
ale education: “The world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of women’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities. . . .”

  And that had been enough for Dorothy. Rising conspicuously in her black dress, she had stepped over several people in her pew and bustled out. She had stopped by the burying ground just long enough to listen for the sound of Lydia spinning in her grave. Then she had boarded a Boston horsecar, resolving not to set foot in Cambridge again until Eliot’s term had ended.

  But now she was back, a fact very much on her brother’s mind as they came into the Yard. He said, “It’s good to see you wearing colored clothes again, Dorothy. A crimson dress flatters you.”

  “Crimson is the Harvard color, is it not?”

  “Ever since Eliot gave his rowers crimson neckerchiefs.”

  “Yes. I remember. Douglass wore one.”

  “But, Dorothy”—Theodore stopped in the shade of an elm and looked into his sister’s slender face, as heavy with lines as his own—“why now?”

  “A decade in black is enough.” She spoke with the calm confidence that she had always tried to maintain, even in grief.

  “You haven’t shed your widow’s weeds in honor of the elective system. Does this have to do with the birth of a baby girl, even if it is Heywood’s?”

  “I’ve made a deposit toward the child’s education in the Back Bay Institute for Savings. But women should not have to wait through ‘generations of civil freedom and social equality’ before Eliot decides we’re worth educating. Without education, we’ll have neither the freedom nor the equality.”

  “But why now? Was there something in the envelope from Aunt Lydia? A gift you must distribute now, perhaps?”

  Dorothy smiled. “‘The small gift of majestic proportion’?”

  “It’s a book, isn’t it? Caleb and Lydia argued many times over a book.”

  Dorothy glided on, spiritlike in the leaf-dappled September sunlight, her long dress skimming the ground, her feet moving invisibly beneath it.