Dear Irene,

by Jan Burke

  “No!” This chorus from the cop contingent, all of them grinning as they looked at Frank.

  “ ‘Courage among our policemen?’ they say, ‘Why, it’s easier to find a politician who wants to make a good Act of Contrition.’ ”

  “No!” the chorus supplied.

  “Yes, that’s what’s being said. I’m told the police so lack courage, they’ve become as useless as a snake’s glovemaker!”

  “No!” Again the chorus, but through laughter.

  “Nearly as useless as reporters,” Kevin said, causing an outbreak of shouts and laughter.

  “Impossible,” more than one voice called.

  “I’m here to tell you that the rumor is false—absolutely false—and I can prove it,” Kevin said. He pointed to Frank. “This man, Frank Harriman—Detective Frank Harriman—is employed by our very own Las Piernas Police Department. And I’m telling you, he has more courage than any man among you. He’s the bravest, most stouthearted, brass-balled sonofabitch I know! Do you know what he’s done?”

  Eager silence.

  “He’s asked Irene Kelly to marry him!”

  There was a great deal of shouting and cheering at that point.

  “Fools rush in!” remarked one of my coworkers.

  A series of more picturesque comments followed.

  Kevin motioned the crowd to silence by simply lifting his pint of stout.

  “Here’s to Frank Harriman, who’s had the courage to take our treasure from us! May he and Irene Kelly share a long and happy life together!”

  Finally able to drink, the crowd was especially lively in joining this part of the toast.

  After accepting the congratulations of a number of the patrons, we settled down into a couple of chairs at Kevin’s table. It felt so comfortable, this pub and all its memories. It was where O’Connor had most often held court. On Friday and Saturday nights, when they had live music, he would sit and watch the dancers. I thought of nights when Kevin, O’Connor, and I would argue and laugh and generally carry on until closing. Somehow all those memories brought back an old sense of myself. An Irene who was less afraid. I was free of more than a fiberglass cast.

  I ordered a Tom and Jerry to warm my bones. As the waiter brought it, I looked up to see Frank quietly regarding me. We smiled and lifted our glasses to one another.

  “So when will this wedding take place?” Kevin asked, watching us.

  “She refuses to set a date,” Frank told him.

  “What? Irene! The man has proposed. What more do you need?”

  I just shook my head.

  “What makes you hesitate?” he persisted.

  “I just need time to heal, Kevin.”

  Frank reached over and took my hand. “She can take as long as she likes, Kevin. She said ‘yes’ and she knows she’s not getting out of it.”

  Kevin gentled his tone, needing no further explanation of my meaning. “Well, Irene, here’s to healing quickly. Don’t begrudge your company to those of us who would salve your wounds.”

  “I don’t. Being here, I feel better already.”

  We talked for a long time, reminiscing about Kevin’s days with the paper, where he worked before starting his PR firm. Taking an off chance, I asked, “Kevin, can you remember any work I did for you that might tie into the college or the zoo or Greek mythology?”

  “You’re speaking of the case of the history professor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t you remember writing a publicity campaign for the college or the zoo?” Frank asked.

  “I know I didn’t do anything on the zoo or the college directly. But Kevin knows the clients better than I do.”

  “If the connection is through us, it’s very subtle,” Kevin said. “You don’t have any particular client in mind?”

  I shrugged. “No. I don’t even remember half of them, to tell the truth.”

  “Let’s see. Greek mythology is a complete dead end, I’m afraid. The only person I’ve known who could quote the Greeks was O’Connor. You know how he was. He also quoted the works of Shakespeare, Eleanor Roosevelt, Yeats, Marx—Groucho, that is—the Bible, the Tao, and anyone and anything else that happened to interest him. No, it must be something else. Perhaps one of the people you dealt with is a big donor to the Alumni Foundation or to the Zoological Society . . . Hmmm.” He thought for a while longer then said, “I’ll go through the computer files on your work for us. If I see any names that look like they might have some connection, I’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  FRANK AND I ended up taking a cab home. Inside the house we were greeted by Cody, the old reprobate, who bit my newly uncovered ankle. I yelped as he ran off in a gray streak.

  “Cody’s waited more than six weeks to have a chance to do that,” Frank said, grinning in a way that made me forgot all about my ankle.

  I reached around him. “God, it feels good to hold you with both arms.”

  He kissed me, slow and easy; a kiss that had more hello than good night in it. He took me to bed, where I got a chance to try out some of the things I had been waiting more than six weeks to do.

  5

  I HAD MY HEAD INSIDE the Liberty Bell and someone was striking it repeatedly with a large mallet. I groaned and woke up to hear Frank’s simultaneous groan. The phone was ringing. I fumbled for that instrument of torture and looked at the clock and scowled. Seven o’clock. Who the hell was calling us at this ungodly hour?

  “Irene?” the voice on the other end asked from a distance. I flipped the receiver around so that I was no longer holding it upside down.

  “Barbara,” I said to my sister, “the next time you call me this early on a Saturday, I will attach you to a twenty-foot bungee cord and push you from a nineteen-foot overpass.”

  Frank groaned again and put his pillow over his eyes.

  “You’re hungover!” she scolded loudly. I moved the receiver a good six inches from my ear while she prattled incessantly about how ashamed my mother would have been had she lived to see me behaving like this. (I am convinced that Barbara, given a choice between dropping a neutron bomb and invoking my mother’s memory, would still find the latter a more potent weapon.)

  Frank groaned louder and rolled onto his stomach. I reached down and unplugged the phone, wondering as I fell back to sleep how long it would take Barbara to realize all her bitching was failing to do more than sear some phone lines.

  Sometime around noon, as I lay watching him, Frank pulled the pillow off his head. “I don’t know how you do that without suffocating,” I said.

  He managed a smile. “I’m going to tell your sister that we are moving to the Himalayas and can’t be reached by phone.”

  “Sooner or later she’ll see my byline in the Express and know she can start calling again.”

  “You’ll have to make up a pen name.” The smile broadened to a grin. “How about—”

  “Never mind. I can tell from the look on your face that it doesn’t belong in a family newspaper.”

  “What did Barbara want?”

  “I don’t know. I unplugged her.”

  He laughed and pulled me close. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”

  “Are you kidding? I just got my cast off. I want to get some exercise.”

  “Who said you won’t be getting exercise?”

  There was a loud banging at the front door. I heard my name being screeched by a fishwife. The bedroom is at the back of the house, but we could hear her “I know you’re in there!” quite plainly.

  “Barbara says I won’t be getting exercise.”

  Frank groaned for the fourth time that morning and reached for his jeans. I hurriedly got into a bathrobe, amused briefly by the realization that I could now do something like pull on a bathrobe and run to the front door.

  “Hell’s bells, Barbara,” I called out as I made my way down the hallway, “keep your pantyhose on!”

  I opened the door and she shot into the house like she had been launched from a catapult.


  “Of all the despicable tricks! I can’t believe you were so rude! I had hoped Frank would teach you a few manners but I can see . . .”

  What she could see just then was Frank, coming down the hallway as he buttoned a shirt. It stopped her mid-tirade.

  “Good afternoon, Barbara,” he said.

  She took in his bare feet and sleep-tousled hair and began to stammer. “Fr-Fr-Frank. I . . . I only saw Irene’s car. I didn’t know you were home.”

  “My car is at Banyon’s. We took a cab home last night because your sister and I forgot to draw straws for designated driver. We were celebrating the removal of her cast and splint.”

  “Oh.” She looked more than a little disconcerted.

  “Were you yelling at me on the phone all this time?” I asked.

  That brought back some of her ire, but Frank’s chuckle cooled it right back down into embarrassment. “Never mind,” she said.

  “Come on in and make yourself comfortable,” Frank said. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  Barbara looked down at my hand and, seeing the puffiness around my thumb and forefinger, said, “It still looks funny.”

  “Thank you.” I walked back to the kitchen, leaving her to follow or stand there.

  She chose to follow and soon the pleasant aroma of coffee allowed me to become a little more human.

  “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.

  “Not a thing,” Frank said, getting some cups and saucers.

  “I’d be happy to help,” she tried again.

  “Just relax and enjoy yourself,” Frank said easily.

  As I watched her take a seat at the kitchen table, I mused to myself that Barbara had probably never in her life “relaxed and enjoyed herself.” She’s bird-nervous by nature.

  I put a couple of pieces of nine-grain bread in the toaster on the table and studied my sister while I waited for them to pop. For the most part, Barbara and I don’t look or behave as if we could be related. She has my mother’s red hair and green eyes; she’s tall and willowy. Her delicate features are very similar to our mother’s. Her skin is soft and white.

  I’m only a little bit shorter than Barbara, but I’m built differently. She has always seemed more fragile to me; even though she’s the older sister, I’ve been the one she runs to with her problems. Unlike her, my hair is dark, my eyes blue. I look more like my father’s side of the family. I am, I admit, much less feminine than my sister—always have been. I was climbing trees while she played with dolls. I felt great when I hit my first home run, she felt wonderful when she learned to put on nail polish. I got tremendous satisfaction out of digging a hole in the backyard and filling it with water and then bombing it with dirt clods. Barbara was in the house, trying on my mother’s high heels. I still haven’t learned to walk gracefully in heels.

  She married O’Connor’s son, Kenny, and divorced him when he turned forty and went thorough man-o-pause. He was brutal in his verbal abuse of her in that period. I couldn’t stand him before that, and afterwards was unwilling to try for polite. She got back together with him, much to my dismay. I was praying they wouldn’t remarry. But it’s her life. Barbara and I have never been great pals; in fact, we usually drive one another crazy.

  The toast popped.

  “Your hair is growing,” she said to me, as Frank filled our coffee cups. It made me reverse some of my thinking of the last few minutes. We are sisters, and woven over our differences is a fabric of kindnesses paid out to one another in times of trouble. After my captors had cut my hair into odd-shaped clumps, it was Barbara who came by and patiently reshaped my hair out of its bizarre styling into the cut I wore now. Having my shoulder-length hair lopped off by those men had been demeaning and extremely upsetting; Barbara’s efforts had made it much easier to look at my reflection in the days following that ordeal.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Thanks again for the haircut.”

  “I should trim it for you.”

  “No thanks. I want to let it grow out again.”

  “You can’t go around with the same hairstyle you had in ninth grade, Irene. You’re a grown woman.”

  I was determined to keep my cool. “Like I said, I appreciate what you did for me, but I’m going to let it grow out.”

  “Honestly. You’d think you’d act your age.”

  Frank was looking between us, not trying very hard to hide his amusement. To hell with him, I thought. I’m still not going to be drawn into a fight with her. My head hurt.

  “Was there something you wanted this morning?” I asked.

  “It’s afternoon.”

  I shifted in my chair a little but said, “This afternoon, then.”

  “Well. Yes.” She took a dainty sip of coffee and glanced nervously toward Frank. He looked toward me with a silent question and I answered with a look that asked him to please stay put.

  “Don’t drum your fingers, Irene,” she said.

  “You came by this afternoon to ask me not to drum my fingers?” I took a deep breath. “I have to drum my fingers. It’s part of my physical therapy.”

  Frank made a sputtering noise in his coffee, but she either didn’t pick up on it or was still too intimidated by him to comment. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I’ll stop doing it. Now, you were saying?”

  Once again she looked over at Frank, who seemed to have himself back under control. “Well,” she said.

  We waited. When she got it out, it was all in a rush.

  “How can I make any of the wedding arrangements if you won’t set a date? Of course I didn’t tell him you were living together, but Father Hennessey is willing to give Frank instruction and said he would set aside a date for the wedding if we would just name one.”

  Two sounds broke the brief second’s total silence which followed this announcement. One was Frank’s coffee cup clattering onto its saucer, and the other was a rushing noise I heard in my ears. I began to realize that the latter was the sound of my blood boiling.

  “Of all the unmitigated gall!” I shouted. “Barbara, who asked you to make any arrangements? Who asked you to talk to Father Hennessey? Who in the hell do you think you are, talking to him about Frank converting when I’ve never even said to you that we would be married in the Church?”

  “Not get married in the Church!” she shouted back. She looked between us as if I had just said we planned to go live naked in the woods.

  “The point is, my dear sister, that you are once again butting your nose in where it doesn’t belong!”

  “I’m your older sister. I have an obligation to take our mother’s place in situations like these! If Mother were alive—”

  “Don’t start! If Mother were alive, she’d respect my wishes. But she’s dead, Barbara. She’s been dead for over twenty years. And you won’t ever take her place in any situation!”

  “You are being mean and selfish!”

  “I’m being selfish. Look at you!”

  Our shouting match came to a sudden halt when Frank stood up and looked between us. He shook his head, then walked out of the room. Not much later, I heard him going out the front door.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Barbara said, but I had already decided to honor Frank’s unspoken request—to grow up—so I didn’t rise to the bait. She went on for about another thirty seconds, but conversations with Barbara, like earthquakes and dental appointments, always seem to last longer than they actually do. When she finally wound down, I even managed to hold back the 486 really spectacular comebacks I had been considering, and simply said, “I need to find Frank. You need to go home. We need to talk about this later.”

  “What do I tell Father Hennessey?” she whined.

  “That there has been a misunderstanding and that I’ll call him if I need him.” To administer Last Rites to my sister, I added silently. Okay, so I was only pretending to have grown up.

  “And Bettina Anderson wants to do the flowers! She’s going to be so upset wi
th you.”

  “Who the hell is Bettina Anderson?”

  “You don’t remember her? You went to high school with her.”

  “I’m not just trying to irritate you, Barbara. I swear I didn’t go to high school with anyone named Bettina.”

  “Betty Zanowyk.”

  “Betty Zanowyk? Lizzy Zanowyk’s sister, maybe? I went to school with Lizzy Zanowyk. What does that have to do with this Bettina person?”

  “Bettina Anderson is Elizabeth Zanowyk. Or should that be the other way around? You know her, Irene. She called herself Betty Zanowyk after high school. Lizzy, Betty, and Bettina are all names that come from Elizabeth. She’s been Bettina Anderson for about five years now.”

  My head was aching again. “Let me guess. She’s not a Zanowyk because she got married to someone named Anderson?”

  “No, she got tired of being a ‘Z.’ She says she was subjected to alphabetic discrimination all her life.”

  “Barbara . . . please, go home.”

  “I don’t know if you should marry Frank. It’s not healthy to deal with anger by going off and pouting,” she said.

  “Barbara.” I said it very softly, with my teeth closed. She knows that when I say her name like that, she has gone too far. This has been instilled in her since childhood, when she learned about it the hard way. I use it sparingly.

  “He isn’t used to us yet, I suppose,” she mumbled.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We bicker. We fight. But we stick up for each other, too. Don’t you remember? Dad used to say it was because we’re Irish.”

  “I don’t know if it’s being Irish,” I said. “But it’s true that Frank’s quiet, for the most part. I can get him to shout, but most people can’t.”

  She smiled knowingly. “That’s how you know he loves you. I read about this in a magazine at the place where I get my nails done. If he’s willing to shout when he’s around you, it means he trusts you enough to get angry with you.”

  “Well then, Jesus Christ, Barbara, I must trust you to the depths of my soul. Go home. Let me get dressed and go after him.”

  She stood up, then asked, “How do you know he didn’t just drive off?”