Mortal Friends, page 35
“And,” the announcer blared, “in the dark trunks, Class of Forty-two, from Brookline, Massachusetts, M. Collins Brady!”
The applause was equally vigorous.
Brady stood up to see his son.
A very tall young man with bushy brown hair and a huge smile, wearing a robe like Otis’s, walked slowly into the hall and up to the ring. He did not hurry or jog. The poise with which he entered made his father think, despite himself, that by God the kid looked like a champion. Upon entering the ring Collins nodded at the crowd and then at Otis as if they were friends. And then, while listening to the referee drone the usual rules, young Brady’s eyes began to cross the crowd. He could not see past the first few rows of tables, but Colman saw him looking and, knowing, began to wave wildly.
“Sit down, Colman,” Maeve said, tugging at his sleeve. “He can’t see you way back here.”
“He’s got the other bloke on size, doesn’t he?”
“He does,” Amory said. “Your boy looks the stronger. My money’s on him.”
“Smart money, Mr. Amory,” Colman winked and sat.
“Call me Fritz now, won’t you?”
Collins was still trying to pick his father out of the crowd when he returned to his corner to await the bell. He leaned against the ropes, barely listening to what his second was telling him. His second was a short young man who wore a white sweater with the red “H” on its breast.
The bell rang. A modest roar of interest went up from the crowd.
Otis and Brady approached each other similarly; circling in small, gliding steps, each moving opposite his opponent’s crooked left arm, each one’s left elbow down in front of his left ribs, each one’s left hand extended shoulder-high a foot, each one’s right hand cocked back below his right cheek ready to attack or defend.
Otis had his chin pressed down on his chest bone. Brady’s chin was thrust forward. His father was instantly aware of this flaw in his stance and alarmed by it. Bad coaching. The chin must always be down. Like Otis’s.
Otis saw the easy target too and moved in on it. Unlike Brady’s, Otis’s head had no singular action of its own, did not bob or weave, but worked along with his entire body. A shorter man, more solid than lean, he crouched forward in what Colman saw even from the rear of the room was a left feint before a hook.
Colman was on his feet. “Get your chin down!” he wanted to yell. “Get your chin down!”
Otis stepped inside Brady and exploded upward, leading with his left hand in a skillful, perfectly timed attack against Collins’s chin, which hung in the air like a clay pigeon. Collins looked inept and vulnerable, Otis smart and quick.
Otis’s glove smashed in on its target. The force of the blow could have jarred Brady to the point of finishing him.
But the left hook missed. Brady’s chin was gone. He had drawn it in at the last possible instant and Otis’s punch went harmlessly by.
While everyone was watching the hook to Brady’s chin, Brady was driving a low right cross into Otis’s midsection. His blow landed. He buried his glove in his opponent’s stomach and the crowd could hear Otis’s grotesque intake of breath.
Brady had given Otis the false lead of his chin. Otis had taken it. Brady had scored, a brilliant move, a great opening.
The crowd applauded.
Colman cheered, remaining on his feet.
Otis backed off.
Brady, with his chin firmly on his chest, moved in on him, leading with his left, jabbing and stepping back; jabbing and stepping back again—a classic tactic against a shorter opponent. It allowed Brady the full advantage of his superior height and reach. Jab and step back. Forward, jab, and back. An elegant sequence of moves; this Brady was a boxer.
The bell rang. The three minutes had seemed like seconds. The boxers retreated to their corners.
Colman Brady sat down and reached for the last of his wine. He was hoarse.
“By Jove, Brady!” Amory said. “What a boxer! Splendid boxer!”
“Isn’t he great?”
Colman looked at Maeve, who was nervously lighting a cigarette. Her weak eyes told him she had nothing to say. But she spoke nonetheless.
“How many rounds?”
“Seven more.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“He’ll be fine.”
“What about the other fellow? Are we supposed to pray Micko kills him?”
“Now, Maeve, stop it.”
“Don’t ‘now’ me! This entire thing is perverse. Your son is their gladiator.”
The bell rang.
The boxers engaged immediately. Otis drew Brady’s left lead as the latter attempted to resume his tactic of jabbing and stepping back. But that was a mistake on Brady’s part, too predictable. Now Otis was ready for it and, having drawn the lead, he slipped inside it, crouching forward and bringing both hands upward in sharp short blows to Brady’s body. Brady should have gone into a clinch at once, but he tried to back off, allowing Otis to continue his rapid hitting in close pursuit. Otis had employed the classic infight tactic against an opponent who is taller. By the time Brady slid his gloves around Otis’s waist to end the assault it was an act more of desperation than skill.
The bell rang.
Round two to Otis. The applause was vigorous and sustained as the men went back to their corners.
No one at the table spoke. The Amorys were embarrassed by Maeve’s outburst. Maeve was trying to decide whether to leave altogether or wait for her brother in the lobby.
Colman was worried about the fight. Micko had blown the round badly, not out of lack of skill or strength, but out of cockiness. Otis had landed solid, damaging punches to the boy’s body. And now Micko was sitting on his stool visibly stunned and, instead of listening to his second or concentrating on Otis across the ring, he was looking out at the crowd, still trying to find his father. Colman recognized the look in his eye—it was born of the old pathetic fear that his father was displeased. “Don’t think about me, kiddo!” Colman wanted to yell. “Think about him!”
The bell rang.
Collins Brady was slower coming out this time. Otis carried the fight to him.
Now more and more of the crowd was on its feet. At a table near ringside someone knocked a wine bottle to the floor and its crash was audible above the fight noises. An elderly man at a table near Brady was yelling, “Smash him, Phelps! Smash him, Phelps!”
Otis lunged forward toward Brady’s chin, which was exposed again. Only this time it remained exposed to Otis’s strongest and best blow, a straight right, which he threw with all he had, leaving himself wide open if this was another Brady feint. But it was not. All of Otis’s weight was on his forward left foot, his right foot having twisted high into the air behind him. When the punch landed, Brady’s two feet left the floor as he crashed down backward, slamming the canvas with his tailbone and then his head.
The bell rang.
“Stop it!” Maeve screamed at Colman over the noise.
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“He’s only up there because of you!”
“That’s not true.” It was true.
“They’ll kill him! They’ll kill him!”
“He’s only fighting one man, Maeve!” But he knew what she was saying. The crowd was entirely mad now with its desire for Otis’s victory. Blood was in the air.
“Dear God, it’s your son!”
“I know who it is! Don’t you tell me who it is!”
“Stop it, Colman!”
“Woman, you stop it! I can’t!”
Maeve hurled her wrung napkin at him and stood and bolted from the table.
Brady stared down into his brandy.
Fritz Amory whispered to his wife, “Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever saw? I could just weep for them.”
Maeve made her way as quickly as she could to the women’s lounge. As she pushed the door open she heard the bell clang and she groaned aloud. In the lounge another woman was seated in a low chair at the great mirror, hunched over. She had long blond hair and wore an amber velvet dress with a deep scoop down the back that made her appear slightly too naked, altogether vulnerable. Maeve was so struck by her that, for a moment she forgot herself and her nephew. The woman raised her head, displaying in the mirror the wreckage of her mascara. She had been weeping. Her brows, pencil thin, were smeared down into the dark pools of her lids. Her face was etched.
“Isn’t it awful?” she said to Maeve. Her voice was raspy and deep.
Maeve nodded, barely controlling herself, and took the settee next to her.
“I know that boy,” the woman said.
Maeve looked at her sharply. “Which one?”
“The Irish boy. Brady.”
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
“They’re killing him.”
“I know it. I know it.”
“I’ve never seen such vicious evil people, never,” said Maeve.
The woman turned away from the mirror to look at Maeve in the flesh. “I can’t help noticing your accent. You’re Irish.”
Maeve nodded.
The bell rang.
And it rang again. Instead of stopping after its first sharp report, it continued to clang for some seconds. The roar of the crowd was louder than ever.
The two women went into the lobby and listened.
“The winner, by technical knockout, in two minutes, eleven seconds of the fourth round, Phelps Otis!”
Everyone in Harvard Hall was on his feet applauding.
Suddenly Collins Brady, his shoulders draped with the crimson robe and supported by the sweatered youth who’d been in his corner, burst into the lobby from the hall. He walked briskly toward the stairs that led down to the squash courts and locker rooms. There was blood on his face and his hair was matted, obscuring his eyes, but he seemed alright.
He walked within ten feet of Maeve. It was not clear whether he did not see her or was ignoring her.
“Oh, dear God,” Maeve said after he had passed. Tears came into her eyes. The woman with her pressed her arm reassuringly.
Phelps Otis, waving and smiling, came out of the hall. The applause and whistling were deafening. As he crossed the lobby to the stairs, accompanied by his second and followed by the referee, he waved at the two women.
They only stared at him.
Colman Brady was the first one out after the boxers. He nearly bumped into Maeve on his way across the lobby. He was going after Collins.
“Maeve!”
She had rarely seen him so agitated.
When Brady saw the woman Maeve was with his jaw dropped. “Mrs. Thomson!”
“Mr. Brady.”
Maeve removed Madeline Thomson’s hand from her arm.
“You’ve met?” Colman asked.
“Met?” Madeline was as confused as he was. She looked at Maeve, whose glare was fixed on Brady. “Are you with him?” Madeline asked.
“Yes.” Maeve did not look at her.
“Oh, God,” Madeline said, closing her eyes, bridging her forehead with her thumb and finger, a dramatic, affected gesture. “I apologize, Mrs. Brady . . .”
“Not Mrs. Brady,” Maeve said. “The boy is my nephew, though his father is no brother of mine.” With that, Maeve turned abruptly and headed against the crowd into the hall to retrieve her purse.
Colman and Madeline stood facing each other as the swirl of fans made its way in eddies past them.
“You came with your husband.”
“Yes.”
“You remembered my son.”
She nodded and looked at him directly. She did not look away in an instant as women usually did. There was nothing coy in her at that moment.
“Your son is alright.”
“I know.”
“I saw him looking for you. I knew you’d be here.”
Colman shrugged.
“Is your wife with you?”
“My wife is dead.”
Madeline Thomson did not reply to that.
“She’s been dead for eighteen years.”
“You must have been very young.”
Brady nodded.
Perhaps it was the rare explicit reference to Nellie that did it. He found himself drawn inextricably into Mrs. Thomson’s gaze. Her ruined eyes held him. He realized she had been weeping. For Micko?
She lowered her eyes. He dropped his, allowing them to fall along the lines of her body. The amber dress showed her breasts. Her figure was alluring, youthful. He guessed she was forty, but she looked younger, much younger. He had thought of her once as an aging flapper. Now she reminded him of Nell.
“I told you I would visit you. For my ax.”
“I believed you. I wanted you to come.”
“There’s never enough time. It passes quickly.”
“Doesn’t it?” She raised her chin at him, leading with it, recalling Micko’s feint, Micko’s error. She had a wonderful chin, a perfect tight neck. The wrinkles of her face and throat were too fine to add anything but texture to her skin.
“Do you still live in Beverly?” He could feel his caution evaporating.
“Pride’s Crossing.”
“Might I . . . ?” He let the question hang. Would she require a more circuitous approach? Apparently not, because she nodded, then said softly, “Please do.”
She turned and retreated into the women’s lounge.
He forced his way through the crowd to the stairs leading down to the lockers.
He found his son seated on a low bench, his head back, face up to an attendant who was applying Merthiolate to a one-inch cut inside his mouth. His left eye was swollen purple. Otis had finished him off with a series of sharp blows to the face that so bloodied him the referee had intervened.
His eyes were closed.
Colman put his hand on the back of his son’s neck and pressed gently.
The boy opened his eyes.
“Oh, Dad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Colman leaned down to kiss him on the brow, “Son, you showed real courage. That’s what counts.”
The boy’s eyes were overflowing, which only made his self-loathing sharper.
Colman stroked the flesh in back of his son’s neck. “I was proud of you, amico.”
2
On the tip of Eastern Point in Gloucester there was a modest weathered pavilion to which the residents of the peninsula went in summer for band concerts. In early April the large houses on the rocky coast were still vacant. An eeriness hung over the place, twin to the fog which clung to the glistening low shrubbery.
Colman Brady waited for Madeline Gardner Thomson to appear. He leaned with his back to the ocean against a slatted bench and watched the road. The only movements were the undulations of the gray sea, of which he was only vaguely aware, and the sharp darting of wet gulls, which made periodic demands on his attention. The gulls were feeding on crabs left behind helpless by the tide. Once they chewed the legs away from the body they lifted the impenetrable shell to a height of fifty or seventy feet and dropped it, swooping down afterward to see if the fall had given them the crack they needed. The ingenuity of hunger.
Time seemed to Brady like a shell that refused to split. He refused to look at his watch, but still saw the slow, silent sweep that, over and over, traced its pattern precisely, achieving in her absence an exquisite futility.
They had arranged their rendezvous when he called the day after the fight. Madeline did not want to receive him at her home after all. He proposed the pavilion. She knew the place. Meeting there meant a plunge directly into the surreptitious, and her willingness excited him and made him anxious.
“When shall we meet then?” he had asked, thinking, Perhaps this afternoon.
“A week from Thursday,” she’d said, crushing him.
And now no sign of her.
What woman could charm him away from that incomprehensible world in which he lived? Why had he allowed the impassioned hope of his youth to bubble up again, leaving him motionless and disengaged, gazing at a figure in his mind, hers, and thinking perhaps there are oases after all?
The week and a half since she’d given her promise had been filled with a happiness. He had been thinking continually, I will be with her. As long as she did not come he had the pleasure of his own highly concentrated anticipation. Even as he stared down the misty road it seemed to him his watching was of such an intensity that her coming would be somehow deflating. He was absorbed. In such a state of mind, satisfaction and resolution were not to be hoped for—only the prolongation of this new feeling. He had harbored nothing like it before, not even with Nellie, unless the haze across his memory misled him. With Nellie there had been desire and anticipation—he could summon those still by picturing her naked on the floor before the fire—but never this unsettling, paralyzing expectation which invests everything in the future, thereby destroying the present and, peculiarly, thereby making the present more intensely felt than ever.
What woman? What woman could charm him away from that incomprehensible world in which he lived? Perhaps this one. Why? Her modish slouch, the way her body wore its despair. The world-weariness of the young getting old. An aging woman in a gorgeous body. Her bronze and marble skin. Her confidence and brain.
Brady recalled standing with her on the steps of Widener overlooking the Tercentenary. It made him think of standing with Nellie before the altar stone of the Druid tumulus looking out over the Nire Valley. Was it that Madeline and he had seen the same thing when they looked at Harvard? Brady had seen a world of achievement and excellence which he admired but suspected, and in which he could never be at home. Though it was the world into which Madeline had been born, it was, he guessed, as alien to her as it was to him. She saw through its smug arrogance even more than he did. Brady recalled then standing alone in Louisburg Square overwhelmed by the perfection of it. He admitted to himself that he was attracted to this woman in exactly the way he’d been attracted to that place. But he was meeting her because of the ways they were like each other, not different. He had been of Ireland and South Boston, and he had with an enormous unforgotten pain left them both behind. She was of Pride’s Crossing and Beacon Hill and she had—with like pain?—left them behind. Colman guessed that they had both transcended boundaries and limits, which accounted for that strength they shared and for that bottomless loneliness in the way she aimed its trembling at him, omnivorously, as if it would eat its object, him. He wondered if she knew of his loneliness.
