All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  Most of my neighbors voted for Ronald Reagan that November, and figured things would be getting better, with the new president getting tough on crime and drugs, tough on the liberals who were always targeting our neighborhood for their experiments, and since he talked about money trickling down to the likes of us in Southie. But the optimism didn’t last. In Old Colony in the early eighties it seemed like our whole world was going crazy, and for most of us it really didn’t matter who was president. One time Mr. Heaney, three buildings down from us, took his family hostage at gunpoint. I was in the ninth grade at Latin School, and I came home from the library to find all of Patterson Way barricaded by the cops. When I went into my apartment, the whole family was watching live coverage on Channel 5 of what was happening just outside the door. “Mr. Heaney’s gone in the head,” Ma said. “He lost his job or something.” Everyone told me to shut up and sit down to watch the police special forces rescue Mrs. Heaney and her five kids. By morning they’d talked him into laying down his 12-gauge shotgun, and surrendering himself.

  Another time I came home to find the paramedics coming out of our building carrying Chickie on a stretcher. My friend Danny was scared. His mother had tried to kill herself, taking a bottle of pills, and we didn’t know if she’d live. I was always scared of Chickie, because I never knew what she’d do next. I never wanted to go into Danny’s apartment, and I don’t think he ever wanted anyone to come in. It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain. Like many of the women in the project, Chickie was barely getting by. Who were her husbands, I wondered, Danny and Robbie’s fathers? Just like Ma, you wouldn’t know that Chickie had many relatives. We never saw any, except for her twin sister, Duckie, who was also living in the project. Now here was Chickie, being brought down the front steps, suspended between life and death, and Danny and little Robbie too were left hanging in the balance, looking to the adults in the gathering crowd for any words of hope. “She’s gonna be fine, don’t worry,” one of the ladies from the stoop said. “Your mother’s just not feeling good.” But no one could look at Robbie when he asked, “Really? You sure?” with all the anxiety of a nine-year-old who knew that his mother wanted to die.

  Chickie was home again in a week, but ambulances were coming down Patterson Way all the time now. My Aunt Theresa in Jamaica Plain had a police radio, and asked me, “What in the hell is going on over there?” She said Patterson Way was coming up on the scanner all night long. I told my aunt that I didn’t take any notice, that Old Colony was the greatest. But I did take notice. I started to come in the back door of our building at night, to avoid having to climb over everyone hanging out on the front stoop—I was getting tired of hearing all the comical storytelling about lives falling apart. And at night the neighborhood looked darker to me. Whenever I came home late, I was scared to walk into our pitch-black hallway with all the broken lights. I might turn a corner and get bitten by the rats that were moving in, or someone being chased might mistake me for a cop and shoot me. I had a whole tragic scenario playing in my head whenever I opened the big creaky steel door to our building. A few times I yelled up to the window and had Ma open our apartment door to give me—and the hiding gunman or lurking rat—some light.

  Even taxi drivers didn’t want to go into my neighborhood anymore. Ever since busing, we couldn’t get a black taxi driver to take us to South Boston from downtown. They sped off as soon as they heard where we were going. So we started to make sure we were in the cab first, saying we were going to Dorchester, which was in the same direction, and then making as if we’d changed our mind halfway through the ride and would be jumping out on the edge of Southie. But now even the white cabbies were hesitant about taking us home. One night when I’d said Old Colony, I had to leave my two shoes in the front seat next to the cabby. “That’s so you won’t screw on me without paying the fare,” he told me. We could tell them to take us to Southie, but never to Old Colony Project. I started to say City Point, and from there would walk down the hills to the Lower End. Just before Christmas, a cabby was shot in the head and killed in Old Colony. The next morning people stood on street corners, telling each other that Mrs. Coyne’s sixteen-year-old son Mickey did it, after trying to rob the guy for a few bucks. They’d heard the cabby wouldn’t give him the money, and Mickey was messed up. They said the guy should’ve just given him the money. Mickey wasn’t charged with the killing, but he ended up in a federal penitentiary a few years later for other robberies.

  The only order I could make in those days was in my complicated schemes for coming and going safely through the project. I was getting pretty good at that, and was even trying to ignore the frequent wails of sirens that had begun to startle me only since Davey’s death.

  Then the sirens came again for us. I knew right away from the fast knocks, and then kicks, that it was our turn once again. “Kathy went off of the roof,” Richie Amoroso yelled when I opened the door. He was out of breath and looked scared, holding onto his head with both hands. I had heard the fire engines going down Patterson Way, but was trying to pay no attention. I didn’t know Kathy was lying in a pool of blood down the street. “She crashed onto her head,” a woman’s voice outside echoed right through me. There was no way I was going to believe this. This couldn’t happen twice. Ma came out of the back room, where she’d been keeping to herself since Davey died, retreating whenever she didn’t have the energy to be all smiles for the world to see that she was okay after losing her son. She’d heard what Richie had just said at the door, and she held onto a wall, because her knees were buckling under her. Her back arched. Her face looked as if she was being beaten on her back with baseball bats. The house was dark except for the flashing red lights from the fire trucks outside. The little kids came out, asking questions. Stevie, who was five, asked, “Is she gonna die?” Ma straightened up then. She could never let her babies see her fall apart.

  Later on, Kathy was in critical condition in the intensive care unit at City Hospital. Ma said she’d be fine. But I didn’t believe her—that’s what she’d said about Davey the night he died. I don’t think any of us slept. When I got out of bed in the morning, I called the hospital for patient information. They said Kathy was on the “danger list.” I spoke to a doctor who told me her brain was still bleeding, and that they were working to stop the hemorrhage. I lied and said I was eighteen so that he’d give me all the details; and he did, but mostly in language I’d never heard before. He talked about contusions and neuro this and neuro that. Mary had come over from her apartment in the Old Harbor Project, and since she was going to nursing school, I handed the phone to her. “She’s not feeling anything,” Mary told me after hanging up. Kathy was in a coma.

  The doctor said Kathy’s system was loaded with Valium, speed, and cocaine on the night she fell. Ma went through Kathy’s pocketbook that a neighbor found up on the roof, and came across bottles of yellow pills and some coke. The pills were prescribed to Kathy by a doctor who lived up on “Pill Hill,” a section toward City Point where quite a few doctors had offices. Ma said she knew people who got phony prescriptions up on Pill Hill, but she was shocked that this doctor would be prescribing to kids since, as she said, he was “as sensible looking as the day is long.”

  All we knew about Kathy’s fall was that she’d been up on the roof with Richie Amoroso, on top of the building where she’d been staying with her new friend, Joanie. The neighbors listening at their windows that night said they’d heard Richie and Kathy fighting over drugs, and that Kathy had accused Richie of stealing her Vals. They said Richie had taken the keys to Kathy’s apartment too. And some neighbors said they thought Richie Amoroso pushed Kathy off the roof in the struggle that broke out.

  Every day we called the hospital, and it turned into months of hearing the same thing: “Danger list,” the voice would say before hanging up on me, as if they were sick of me calling. But I was relieved, after every call, not to be told she was de
ad. Every day through the winter months of 1981, we woke up to continue our watch. Some nights I couldn’t sleep at all, thinking I’d wake up to bad news. No doctor or nurse could tell us whether Kathy would live or die. The nurses said they didn’t want to give us too much hope, when she could die at any moment, and I thought they were cold to say such useless words. They did tell us early on, though, that the longer Kathy stayed in a coma, the worse her brain damage; and that it was unlikely she’d ever be the same again.

  We all took turns visiting Kathy in the intensive care unit, but it seemed I was there around the clock, in the surgical mask and gloves they made me put on so I wouldn’t pass on any germs to her. I should’ve been at Boston Latin School, but I couldn’t sit through class, knowing Kathy might die at any moment. I thought that if I kept talking to Kathy while she was in the coma, it might get her brain working and she’d come back to life. The nurses never asked why I wasn’t in school, and every morning Ma saw me leave the house with my huge stack of ancient history and Latin books, not knowing that I was going to the City Hospital. Our telephone was disconnected in those days for not paying the bill, so the school could never call Ma. And I ripped up any mail that would come from Latin. I was relieved that the telephone was out, except that I kept thinking no one would be able to reach us when Kathy died. So whenever I couldn’t be at Kathy’s bedside, I’d go out to the phone booth at least once an hour to call patient information.

  One of our neighbors who was a nurse at City Hospital came by the house every day, to give Ma updates about Kathy and to offer some hope that Kathy would get through this. Karen was always sneaking by Kathy’s bedside, checking on her vital statistics even though it wasn’t her floor at the City Hospital. Karen said Kathy was a fighter, and that she must really have the will to live, because she was baffling the doctors, overcoming every threat of death that came her way. Karen Young was one of the people in the neighborhood who came and went from Old Colony each day, never getting caught up in the action on the streets. She was always smiling, and some of the younger kids bragged that they knew her whenever they saw her going off to work in her nurse’s uniform. One of her brothers, Charlie, hung out with Kevin in the back room. One time I’d walked in on them, weighing white powder on scales and snorting lines. But Karen seemed different. That’s why the neighborhood went into a dark and silent state of shock a year later, on the day she was strangled to death by her boyfriend. I remember having seen Karen and her boyfriend the day before her murder, and thinking it might be possible to live a normal life in the Old Colony Project.

  I saw all the comings and goings from the room where Kathy lay in a coma. It was like being at a wake, with everyone stopping by with flowers and a card to pay respects over the body. Kathy was listed in “stable condition,” but she just lay there with her eyes sealed shut and tubes connecting her to machines. No one knew what to do, the way we never knew what to do around the bodies that we were seeing more and more of those days at Jackie O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor. “Should we pray?” “Should we talk to her?” “Can she hear us?”

  Early in the day, I was the only one up there. Then Ma would come in the afternoon, and ask me to leave the room so that she could be alone to yell into Kathy’s ear and try to wake her up. “Kathy always hated like hell to be woken up in the morning,” she laughed. Ma was all smiles when she showed up, like everything was normal. Then, after spending some time alone with Kathy, she looked like she’d been crying, but she still forced a smile when she left to pick up the little kids from nursery school. Ma always told me not to stay too long, and every day she’d say she had “a good feeling” that Kathy would be coming out of the coma.

  All the aunts, Ma’s four sisters, came in regularly to visit Kathy. My Aunt Mary Kelly would come bursting into Kathy’s room to tell her that the hostages in Iran had been freed, or to give other updates, like that Ronald Reagan was doing a great job running the country. But all she got in return was the beeping from the machines that told us Kathy was still alive. My Aunt Leena looked around the room at some of the cards Kathy was receiving and made conversation about Kathy’s nice friends. “Ohhh, who’s this one from?” she asked about a poem written to Kathy; “my Irish Colleen” it called her. “Oh, just some guy,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was from a convicted bank robber doing time in a federal prison.

  Kathy’s friends didn’t come in much. Most of them were usually too busy getting high on Patterson Way and East 8th Street, the way Kathy would have been if she hadn’t crashed onto the sidewalk. Ma said they didn’t come around much because they couldn’t deal with the pain of seeing Kathy like that. She’d been a beautiful girl, hard to remember now, with half her hair shaved off, infections all over her face, tubes going in and out of her, and the machine that beeped every second. I had a hard time seeing her like this too, I thought, but isn’t that what Southie loyalty is all about? Kathy had been such a popular girl, and I wondered why more people didn’t seem to care. Some of her friends did come, though, and sometimes I’d walk in to find them blessing themselves or holding Kathy’s hands and crying, or talking away and laughing as if she was alive and well.

  Timmy Baldwin was one who came in all the time. He wanted to be alone with Kathy, just like Ma. And he always brought flowers. Timmy was known to be a tough kid in Southie—we all knew about his beating someone over the head with a crowbar once when he was high, and about the time he was all messed up and shot a sawed-off shotgun from the project rooftop, yelling, “Look out below!” But I got to see his soft side, like at Kathy’s bedside, and remembered the times he’d appeared out of nowhere when I was having a problem with older kids in the neighborhood. “What do you want, a beatin’?” he’d say to them. “Do you know who this is? He’s a MacDonald!” pointing at me like I was some kind of royalty in the Old Colony Housing Project. I knew the Timmy who was loyal and watching our backs, like you were supposed to do in Southie. When Kathy dated Timmy, I thought they’d get married someday, and I’d have my own personal bodyguard for a brother-in-law. They’d broken up before Kathy went off the roof, but here was Timmy, still loyal to Kathy and to the MacDonald family. Timmy was both tough and loyal, like everything we wanted to believe about Southie.

  A few years after Kathy’s fall, Timmy was shot twice in the head while sitting in his car in front of the Quiet Man. About a hundred people leaving Triple O’s Tavern across the street saw the shooting, but wouldn’t rat to the cops. When the judge at the grand jury tried to get Timmy’s best friend to tell what he’d seen that night, he just looked at the judge and said, “I’m from Southie. We keep things to ourselves.” The word around town was that Mark Estes had killed Timmy. Years later, he would die the same way: shot in front of a crowd spilling out of a pub, none of whom came forward. Everyone said he deserved it for what he’d done to Timmy, but that’s what some people had said about Timmy too.

  Julie Meaney came in to Kathy’s bedside a few times, as high as a kite. I couldn’t tell if she was falling apart, shaking like a leaf and crying, for Kathy or for herself. I don’t think she knew either, high as she was. In a few years, Julie would walk into the water at Carson Beach and never come out.

  Frankie McGirk came in once with Julie. I left the room immediately, because I could feel his badness, and Ma had always said he’d gotten Kathy into the angel dust. Not long after that visit, we heard the screams come down Patterson Way when he was stabbed to death over a drug debt. Everyone said McGirk deserved what he got too. I knew some of my neighbors wanted to downplay how bad it was that someone could lie dead in a project hallway while kids played outside. I remember thinking Frankie McGirk should’ve been arrested by the cops and put in jail, not given a death sentence from people no holier than he. But that’s what some called “street justice” in Southie.

  Tommy Dooley came in too, all spiffed up in his cashmere coat, like he had to dress up for Kathy. Tommy was dating Tisha Stokes, who Kathy’d been hanging out with. Ma liked Tommy Do
oley, but she didn’t like to see Kathy with Tisha or any of the Stokes family. Tisha was heavy into the angel dust and coke, and Ma cringed every time she heard “that voice” squealing up to the window for “Kathy Mac!” When Tommy Dooley came in to see Kathy, he began by cracking jokes with her, but then he would give up like everyone else and just say a prayer over her motionless body. Two years later Tommy was killed by Tisha’s family outside Kelly’s Cork and Bull Tavern. Everyone said Joe “Stokesy” Stokes had led his brothers in kicking Tommy and beating him to death with a lead pipe. But when it came time to testify before a grand jury, when Stokesy turned himself in five years later, all the witnesses who’d been at the bar that night couldn’t remember a thing. And Stokesy’s brother Stippo was married to the niece of Detective Lumsden, the homicide investigator.

  Betty LeClair used to come in to see Kathy with her son Eddie. Betty drank a lot, but she was always there for Ma. She wasn’t like “the vultures,” as Ma called some of the older women who came to Davey’s funeral and Kathy’s bedside just to see who was grieving properly. Betty had real tears as she talked into Kathy’s ear and kissed her forehead, disobeying hospital rules to keep the surgical mask on at all times. Eddie was my age and we had hung out a lot, going to Illusions in the disco days. And he stood now at the foot of Kathy’s bed with hands clasped, doing the praying-at-a-wake thing. In a few years, his body too would be lying still like Kathy’s, but in a casket at O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor. Eddie was run over, murdered some said, at three in the morning outside a crowded bar on Dorchester Street. People kept their mouths shut about that one too.