The Son of John Devlin (10 page)

“I thought the boy was dead,” one of the parents said in court.

“How much worse?” Emily asked.

“He hit his head,” Devlin said. “He fell unconscious and they took him to the hospital. In the fall, his skull was fractured.”

Jack frowned and looked away when he saw the horror on Emily’s face.

“My God,” she whispered, putting her hand to her mouth. “You must have been terrified.”

He considered that. “I wish I could say I had been,” he said. “I wasn’t.”

She was surprised.

“I didn’t care,” he said.

Emily was shocked. “At all?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, regretfully.

“I don’t get it.”

“I just didn’t care,” he said. “About anything.”

She shook her head slowly in amazement.

“They took me into juvenile court and had a hearing, and I was found guilty of criminal assault. They put me on probation and required that I go through a program of counseling with a therapist at a state clinic in Boston. Which I did.”

“And what happened there?” she asked.

“I’d talk with the psychologist, and he would ask me questions and we’d discuss anger and I would say, ‘Yes, I feel betrayed,’ and ‘Yes, I despise my father for abandoning me,’ and ‘No, I wouldn’t hate him if he had had a heart attack and died or been struck by lightning, but he wasn’t, he took his own life, and that’s more than I can
handle.’ And on and on and around and around, never getting anywhere.”

“And did it help?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Did it help really or did I pretend that it helped?”

“Which was it?” she asked.

“I pretended,” he said. “I was kicked off the hockey team, of course, which at the time was the worst thing about it. And they said that if I went to every counseling session and stayed out of trouble, they would consider taking me back onto the team the following year. Fortunately, I was able to skate with some guys on a club team three times a week, and so I stayed in shape. And since the only thing that mattered to me was playing hockey, I did what I had to do. Every Wednesday I rode the subway to the Hurley Building and had a session with a therapist, and I stayed out of trouble. And in the fall they let me back on the team.”

They stared at each other throughout a long pause in the conversation.

“But you hadn’t changed?” she finally asked.

Jack shook his head no. “I was exactly the same angry young man. I couldn’t fight anymore because I knew that would get me kicked off the team. So I looked for other ways to be defiant. And when my aunt told me one day that we would all be going to my father’s grave on the anniversary of his death, I had one. We had gone every year since his death, me and Aunt Sheila. And I had just always gone along because she said I should. But this year—my senior year in high school—I said no. I said I’d had it with remembering him and he had done what he’d done and that was it.

“And so on the day of the anniversary she ordered me
to go with her, and I refused, and she threatened to call the probation officer and the school principal.”

He stopped talking and shrugged.

“And?”

“And I said that if she did that I would take off and no one would ever hear from me again. And my aunt Sheila knew I was capable of it and so she let it go.”

Emily studied him carefully. “And you would have, wouldn’t you?”

He squinted as though the light were too harsh, then slowly nodded.

She could not sleep. After they had talked until two, she had cleaned up the kitchen and gone to bed, but once there, she had tossed and turned and eventually, she lay on her back, hands folded behind her head, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. After a while she got out of bed, put on her robe and slippers, and went downstairs. There were embers in the fireplace, a bright red illumination from within the charcoal-gray ash.

She flicked on a reading lamp and picked up a magazine, but her mind was racing and she was unable to concentrate. She paced the room and walked to the sliding glass doors that led outside to the deck. Putting on her down parka, she unlocked the door and went outside. She stood on the deck, arms folded across her chest, gazing out over the golf course. The moon seemed huge, and it cast a wide swath of gold light on the fairway. She looked up, and as her eyes adjusted she was able to see the stars.

She could not understand her agitation, and then was struck with the thought that her agitation was excitement, because of Jack.

That’s it! she realized. She felt a sense of possibility, of potential. She’d been mesmerized as Jack spoke about his upbringing. Her heart had ached when he’d told her about his father and mother, and she’d been stunned at his tale of violence.

I can help him! Emily thought. I can help him! And she felt a surge of triumph at the thought. She was exultant that she might be able to help ease the suffering to which he’d been subjected. She thought of the fullness of her own childhood, the opportunities that had been open to her as an adolescent and a young woman, in contrast to what Jack had struggled through, and she was humbled by the difference. Would she have been able to do what he had done under those circumstances?

She stood shivering against the cold, and yet she smiled, thinking that there was something here, something that could grow and develop. And part of the nurturing of it could be that she would help him. Because she had learned a great deal about Jack Devlin during the course of this evening: that he’d suffered, but more than that, he suffered still.

J
ack remembered the day years earlier when his life had changed. He had walked along Batterymarch Street, checking the numbers on the buildings as he went. The noontime crush of office workers crowded the narrow sidewalk. People moved briskly in the chill of the gray November day, the dense, leaden clouds preventing the sun from warming the cold heart of Boston.

He had been a third-year law student at the time, a week shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. As he walked, Jack thought about the telephone call he’d gotten the previous week. The caller had identified himself as Thomas Fallon, a Boston lawyer.

“My father, Thomas Fallon, Sr., was a lawyer for many years as well,” Fallon had said. “And when he died I took over the practice. There were many files accumulated by my father over the years, Mr. Devlin, and one of them involves you.”

“In what way?” Jack had asked.

“I won’t go into it over the phone, Mr. Devlin,” the lawyer said, “except to say that the document has remained in the trust of this law firm and it is intended for you. If you come by, I will explain further.”

“Can’t you just tell me now?” Jack had asked, irritated.

“It must be done in person, Mr. Devlin,” Fallon replied. “It is a document I have to pass along to you, for one thing. I would much prefer to do it in person.”

Jack was annoyed. “At least tell me who the document is from,” Jack asked.

Thomas Fallon paused for a moment before responding. “The document, Mr. Devlin, is from your father.”

Thomas Fallon, Jr., was a small man with pale skin and thin lips. He was in his mid-forties, but appeared much older. His wispy, dark reddish hair had been carefully combed. He wore a starched white shirt with a navy-blue necktie with minute white polka dots. Fallon sat with excellent posture across a conference table in a glasswalled room of his law firm. A man with a precise, formal manner, he set a single file folder on the table in front of him.

“I had been in practice with my father and another associate for a number of years, Mr. Devlin,” he said, “until my father died over a year ago. After he passed, I decided to hire an additional lawyer and to move our offices. We had been in cramped quarters on School Street, and I selected this space. When we moved, I undertook to review the contents of a safe that had been my father’s. It was quite a large safe, a Mosler, which he had used for many, many years for filing and storage of various documents. I had never had occasion to look in it before because files common to firm business were contained in other file cabinets to which I had access.

“But after my father passed, and in concert with our move, I took it upon myself to review and organize the contents of the safe. As you might imagine, many of the documents it contained were quite old and out of date.
Many were of little if any value to anyone. Some of the material was of a personal or financial nature. But most were things that could easily have been disposed of long, long ago.

“Among the items was an envelope,” Fallon said. He opened the file folder and removed a large manila envelope with a string that affixed a wide flap.

“Here is how it was labeled,” Fallon said, turning the envelope around and holding it so Jack could read it. There was a plain white label in the center of the envelope on which had been typed:
Re: John Devlin Sr. Correspondence to John Devlin Jr.: Transmit Nov. 3, 1984
.

“As you can see, Mr. Devlin, this was to have been transmitted to you on your twenty-first birthday,” the lawyer said. “Unfortunately, that did not occur. I understand any distress you may feel as a result of this delay and I apologize. But I have undertaken to present it to you as soon as the error was discovered.”

Jack began to reach for the envelope, but the lawyer drew it back. “When I found this, it meant nothing to me,” Fallon said. “Opening it, I found a memorandum dictated by my father to the file.”

Fallon unwound the string from around a round clasp on the body of the envelope. He opened the flap, reached inside, and withdrew a single sheet of yellowed paper.

“This is rather fragile, Mr. Devlin, so you won’t mind if I handle it myself,” Fallon said. “Permit me to read it to you. It is on the letterhead of the law firm. It reads:

    Fallon set aside his father’s memorandum. He was about to speak, then hesitated.

“What’s the date on your father’s memo to the file?” Jack asked.

“Yes, Mr. Devlin,” Fallon said. “I was coming to that.
The date my father wrote this—the date your father came to see him—was November eleventh, 1972.”

Jack thought of his father, and for some reason remembered his father’s hands. They were very large and thick, exceptionally powerful. He’d been a physically strong man, and he had inherited his father’s physical characteristics. Jack thought of his father taking a pen in hand, sitting down with a sheet of paper and writing out a letter to his son, a letter intended for delivery twelve years later. His Dad had written this letter, brought it to the lawyer, gone home, and a mere three weeks later he was dead.

“As you can see,” Fallon said, his voice soft, respectful, “this envelope remains sealed.”

The lawyer removed an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch envelope on which was written by hand:
To my son Jack on his twenty-first birthday
.

Fallon was saying something about the paper, lack of moisture in the safe, and the passage of years, but Jack did not hear him. He was aware, instead, that he held in his hands an envelope with his father’s handwriting, a message to him. He was twenty-five years old and had been through a great deal in his life. But nothing had prepared him for this moment.

He felt a sudden surge of anxiety as his chest tightened, and he struggled to take a deep breath. He felt angry that he was being confronted with this after so many years. He’d struggled to deal with his father’s death, and had somehow come to an accommodation with it. He had by no means fully accepted it, but he’d put it in the back of his mind, a terrible thing that happened so very long ago to a child.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said, looking up, hearing the lawyer once more. “I didn’t …”

Fallon rose from the table. “I assumed you would want some privacy,” he said.

Jack sat very still and thought about this. “I’ll take it with me,” he finally said in a whisper.

“Fine,” Fallon said. “I’m sorry, obviously, that this did not reach you—”

Jack waved away his apology. “I understand,” he said. “Things get lost through the years and—”

“If you would be kind enough to sign this form acknowledging receipt of the document,” Fallon said. He slid a single sheet of paper in front of Jack and handed him a pen. Jack scrawled his name, thanked Fallon, and, grasping the envelope in his right hand, left the office.

He walked down Batterymarch to Franklin and cut over to Arch Street. He entered the Arch Street chapel through the main door and walked all the way down to the left, to the far corner of the church. There were only a half-dozen people in the place, no one any closer than fifty feet away from where Jack seated himself, in a wooden pew two rows from the front. Dozens of small votive candles on the edge of the altar sent shadows dancing up the cool stone walls.