Bear and His Daughter (5 page)

On the St. Patrick’s Day in question, Mackay was drunk and unhappy. He picked a fight with his friend Kiernan in a poolroom on East Eighty-sixth Street. Kiernan, with what Mackay always felt was a lucky punch, stretched him out cold on the poolroom floor. He actually lay unconscious for a minute or two, whereupon the proprietors of the poolroom ejected him from the premises by throwing him down the many steps that led to the street. Mackay, tasting defeat, learned a certain embittered caution. Kiernan, on the other hand, came to regard his own belligerence too indulgently, as events years later would make clear.

In his last year of high school, Mackay joined the navy. He was fond of sea stories. He took the subway to South Ferry and signed the necessary papers in the offices at Whitehall Street, and by the end of the day he was on his way to the naval training center at Bainbridge, Maryland.

The navy Mackay joined in the mid-fifties was the navy of World War II, a tradition-minded, conservative service that prided itself on stiff discipline. It sought to produce individuals who could perform technical tasks under pressure, and its training procedures reflected this requirement. Every morning recruits turned out for inspection. It was summer and whites were the uniform of the day. The whites could not be machine washed or ironed. They were hand washed with a scrub brush and a bar of Ivory soap, then rolled in the regulation manner. If any part of a recruit’s uniform was imperfectly washed or in some way out of order, the drill instructors would make him regret it.

In the second week of boot camp, during a performance of the manual of arms, a drill instructor named Igo discovered Mackay’s cringe. Igo was a first-class boatswain’s mate.

“My word!” Igo exclaimed. He enjoyed using this mild expletive because of the contrast it made with the rest of his vocabulary. “My word! This recruit has the attitude of a dog.”

Mackay himself was surprised. He had never noticed himself cringing.

Igo took to addressing Mackay as “Pooch.” He announced that he would drill the cringe out of him. He made things very unpleasant. Every morning after the training company was dismissed from inspection, Igo would drill him in the manual of arms.

“Here, Pooch,” he would call amiably, to summon Mackay.

At one point Mackay told himself that if Igo called him Pooch once more, he would bash the boatswain’s mate’s brains out with his useless Springfield training rifle. He decided instead to interpret Igo’s drilling as being in his own best interest. He had noticed that in the navy people were rarely actually struck; in that way the navy was unlike St. Michael’s. He noticed also that the food was good, better than he had ever had anywhere.

Every morning he drilled with Igo. When they had gone through the manual of arms, Igo would menace him by waving a variety of objects over his head and try to catch him cringing. It was absurd and comical. Still, Mackay found it very hard to stare straight ahead and not to wince at the expected blows. Mackay thought of his cringe as a rat that lived near his heart, a rat with his own face. He hated it far worse than he hated Igo.

By the time he left boot camp for the fleet, he was able to stare the boatswain’s mate down.

“Congratulations, sailor,” Igo said to Mackay. “You’re too scared to cringe.”

Mastering the shameful reflex had been instructive, and Mackay never forgot it. He often wondered if everyone had a rat at his heart to kill.

Six years or so out of the navy, Mackay beheld himself a family man, married and the father of a baby boy. His mother was dead. Through good luck he was able to find a job as a photographer’s assistant. Eventually the job would lead to his working as a news photographer and then to his becoming an artist, but it was a hard job with long hours and low pay. Mackay enjoyed it nonetheless and supplemented his income by working as a house painter. He lived with his family in a pleasant apartment on the West Side near Central Park. His wife was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and of Reed College. Their friends were people of spirit and artistic interest. It was the early sixties and a good time to be young in New York. Mackay felt that the city in which he lived was a different city from the one in which he had grown up.

On a bright autumn Saturday Mackay walked over to Columbus Avenue for the morning paper and discovered that there was a picture of his old friend Chris Kiernan on the front page of the
Daily News.
The accompanying headline read:
SAMARITAN KILLED IN SUBWAY SLAYING.

Kiernan had been riding the Seventh Avenue Express down from his in-laws’ new apartment in the north Bronx. His Korean-American wife and their infant child were with him. At the 145th Street station a young man had boarded the train and begun harassing passengers. The young man was an unemployed immigrant from Ecuador and he had been drinking. He went through the cars from one end of the train to the other, making menacing gestures and cursing the subway riders in Spanish. Reaching the car in which Kiernan and his family were riding, he passed by them without comment. But in the same car he began to abuse a lone middle-aged woman. The woman looked at Kiernan, a big man with a practical face, plainly a husband and father wearing a suit and tie. She called to him begging for help. As the train pulled into the 125th Street station, Kiernan went over to the young man and began to struggle with him. When the doors opened Kiernan wrestled him out onto the platform.

“You’re getting off here,” Kiernan was reported to have told the man. He gave the Ecuadorian a shove that sent him flying and returned to sit beside his wife. A ragged cheer went up.

The car doors should have closed then but they did not. Instead of continuing on to 116th Street, the train remained in the 125th Street station and the doors stayed open. Out on the platform the angry Ecuadorian struggled to his feet. According to witnesses, he went halfway up the stairs to the next level but then seemed to change his mind and came back down. Still the doors failed to close. The drunk young man got back on the express and stabbed Kiernan through the heart. Kiernan stood up and tried to chase him. The man fled up the stairs. Kiernan fell dead on the station platform in what the
Daily News
described as “a pool of blood.”

Mackay stood transfixed on the corner of Columbus Avenue in the rare autumn sunshine reading about Kiernan’s murder. He and Chris Kiernan had known each other since they were both six years old. The
Daily News
story mentioned the fact that Kiernan had once been a scholar at St. Michael’s. He had gone on to attend St. Peter’s College in New Jersey and later became an army officer. At the time of his death he was an account executive at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. His friends were quoted regarding his excellence of character.

Mackay was shaken. A thrill of fear went through him as he picked up the
Times
and paid for both papers and started home. Although they had not seen each other for ten years they had once been very close. They had suffered shame and pain together that could never be explained to anyone. They were of the same stuff. Mackay felt his existence threatened by Kiernan’s death. He felt diminished.

In Albany, a legislator introduced a bill to benefit the survivors of people who incurred injury or death assisting their fellow citizens in an emergency. It was referred to as the “Christopher Kiernan Bill.” Reading about it all, Mackay smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. Kiernan had always had naive notions of high life. He was terribly ashamed of his origins and even ashamed of his Irish name. He had dressed in a collegiate manner and attempted to eliminate his New York accent. Mackay believed that Kiernan would have changed his face if he could. Like Mackay, he had wanted to leave a great deal behind. How he would have hated the Tammany politician’s “Christopher Kiernan Bill,” Mackay thought. How he must have hated to die in the subway.

It occurred to Mackay over the weekend that he ought somehow to honor Kiernan’s memory. He thought about going to the funeral, about writing to Kiernan’s wife or stopping by the wake to sign the book. In the end he did nothing. He did not want the world of his childhood to touch him. He wanted it gone, buried with Kiernan. It seemed to him that Kiernan would have been the first to understand.

Afterward Mackay would wonder if the bits and pieces of violence he and Kiernan had lived out together had not conditioned the future and led Kiernan to his death. He suspected that past successes had encouraged Kiernan to action. Of course, it had been the right thing, the brave thing. But in spite of his horror, Mackay felt himself considering Kiernan’s undoing with a fascination that might be mistaken for guilty satisfaction.

One thing he knew for certain was that he wanted no part of violence anymore, on any scale. He swore that he would never strike his children or allow them to be hit by anyone. He adopted a mode of politics he believed would place him in opposition to war. He felt a deep commitment to the good causes of the sixties. He felt as though he had earned the right to work for peace and human brotherhood. He embraced those things with joy.

Mackay could not know then that he would one day take a coarse satisfaction in the middle-class elegance of his grown children, whom he would raise in an atmosphere of progressive right-mindedness that would present them with problems of their own. Or that he would brag to them of the rigors of his own upbringing. His life was not to be the irresistible moral progress for which he might have hoped.

The year after Kiernan’s death, Mackay was painting and papering an apartment on Jane Street. About four in the afternoon on a Thursday in March, the first warm spring day of the year, he walked to the Fourteenth Street station and boarded the IRT uptown express for home. A few minutes later he got out at Seventy-second Street to change for the local train.

Standing near him on the platform was an elderly woman in a black cloth coat. She appeared very frail and a little confused. Mackay, perhaps thinking of his mother felt well disposed toward her.

A tall, fair-skinned man in a light-colored plaid suit came walking down the platform. For some reason, Mackay noticed him at once. The man was whistling between his teeth as he went. He seemed to be looking for someone. His manner was ebullient. Every once in a while he would stop and appear to chat with someone waiting for the local. The people addressed would either look away or simply stare at him expressionless. He had gray hair, a lean foxy face and lively blue eyes.

As Mackay watched, the man approached the elderly woman nearby. Mackay saw him speak to her and saw her look away. The man appeared to be delivering himself of some casual pleasantry, but the woman ignored him and moved down the platform. The tall man followed her; smiling, and spoke to her again. At first Mackay thought that the two must know each other. Then he saw that the woman was frightened. She tried to step around the man and move toward Mackay. The man blocked her way and laughed. Mackay could not hear the words the tall man spoke but he heard the laugh. It was loud and witless. The elderly woman turned her back on her tormentor hugging her pocketbook close. The laughing man stepped around to face her. Mackay drew nearer and quietly moved where he could see the old woman’s face. He saw it convulsed with feat; sheeplike, vacant and repellent. The man reached out and touched an ornament on the woman’s coat collar.

The Seventy-second Street IRT station was the one from which Mackay, not yet dispossessed of his cringe, had set out to enlist in the navy. Its platforms were narrow. Its stairways ascended from the middle of the platform to form a central pyramid, so that there was really only one way out. Fifteen feet from where he stood, Mackay saw the old woman begin to cry. She was trying to pull away. The man held her by the coat ornament. Her loose aged lips were trembling. The platform was crowded with people but, looking about him again, Mackay realized that no one else was watching.

Mackay stepped forward. He still hoped that somehow the situation would unmake itself, that some word or action would occur to show its normalcy and innocence. Just before intervening, Mackay took a last decisive look at the man on the platform. What he saw gave him pause. Although he was a day or two unshaven, there was something rather distinguished about the man’s appearance. His bearing was firm and confident. His features were delicate and more pleasant than otherwise. He was neatly and tastefully dressed in a jacket and tie. His hair was wavy and slightly long in the back like an old-fashioned Middle European musician’s. His eyes were happy, although wide and staring.

“Anything wrong?” Mackay asked the elderly woman. She looked at him in desperation.

When the tall man turned to him, Mackay saw that the man was sturdier and younger than he had appeared at a distance. He was looking at Mackay in blue-eyed amazement.

“You!” he said. As though he knew Mackay and recognized him. “You!” the man half screamed. His cry of recognition seemed to transcend the merely personal. He seemed indeed to be recognizing in the person of Mackay everything that had ever been wrong with his life, which Mackay suspected had been quite a lot.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mackay saw the woman who had been menaced edging away.

“Take a walk,” Mackay told the man sternly. Immediately he regretted the pathetic suburban bravado of his words. In his own ears his voice had the quality of a dream. It was as though, upon addressing the man, he had entered something like a dream state. Events thereafter seemed lit in an unnatural light.

“You are from Doc,” the man said. He spoke with a Germanic accent. At first it sounded as though he had said, “You are from God.” When the man repeated it, Mackay got it straight. “You are from Doc.”