We Were Kings (3 page)

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Dudley Square

AT DUSK THE
streets still carried the heat of the day but there was a welcome relief when the sun went down. Young men and women filled Dudley Square for the Saturday-night dances. The sidewalks were so packed with people that many moved into the road, and cars had to slow to accommodate them. They came off streetcars and trolleys and off the Dudley Square El, heading to the Intercontinental, the Hibernian, the Rose Croix, Winslow Hall, the Silver Ballroom, and the Tuxedo Ballroom, the women flitting like moths in the late night as the streetlights buzzed on, their crinoline skirts bouncing and swirling as they walked in groups, heels clacking along the pavement as incessant as a streetcar's wheels upon the rails.

It had been years since Cal had come into Dudley for the dance clubs, and the area still surprised him. The last time he'd been here had been with Lynne, before the war—God, had that much time passed? They'd been in their mid-twenties. Back then they'd often step out in Dudley Square; it had one of the best club scenes in town. And he was amazed to see how it had grown and thrived since then, stunned as he often was to find that the world had continued to exist without him. Dudley had even changed in his absence and become something other, something of which he no longer felt a part.

The streets were thronged with hundreds of people. Listening to the accents, he felt as if he'd been transported back to Ireland. He could tell that some of them were fresh off the boat.

He saw Dante and Claudia on the street walking from their car and he called out to them and strode to catch up. Owen and Anne were waiting for them at the entrance to the Intercontinental. Anne kissed Cal and Dante on the cheek and then took Claudia's hands in hers and made her spin so that she could admire her dress. Owen looked pale; a sheen of sweat shone on his forehead. Anne squeezed his waist and teased him about his birthday and his age, and he smiled vainly. Just inside the door an Irish cop, who seemed to recognize Owen, tipped his cap to them and, having heard their talk, shouted merrily, “Happy birthday, Detective!” and this seemed to bring a genuine smile to Owen's face as they paid the doorman and climbed the stairs to the Crystal Ballroom. There was another cop at the door and at different points about the room tuxedoed men observed the crowd, all watching for anyone getting too loud or physical or trying to sneak in a bottle from the bar downstairs. They all knew the rules: No drinking in the dance halls and, above all, show respect to the women.

They took a table before the dance floor and sat for a moment. On the stage a dozen or so musicians played a slow Irish ballad that Cal had some vague memory of—it was an old air, something his mother and father had once danced to in the good days, but done in a contemporary way. With the steady bass and snare accompaniment, the flourishes of trumpet and saxophone, it had an unmistakable drive to it, and it showed in how the dancers sped to grab dancing partners. He watched the hundreds of couples flowing across the floor and the sense of them filling the space with heat and energy. Above them a crystal ball spun slowly, reflecting the four filtered spotlights cast upon it, and showered the dancers with diamondlike prisms of soft light, as if it were raining.

Claudia reached for Dante's hand. “Let's dance!” she said, but Dante shook her hand off. “I can't dance to this,” he said. “It's not my thing.”

“Oh, you,” she said, but not angrily. “You can dance to anything if it's got music in it—dance this waltz with me, please.”

Dante shook his head. “Ahh, give it a rest.” He nodded to the men about the room. “If I dance with you they'll think we're a couple; you'll lose your chance with one of these lucky stiffs.”

Undeterred, Claudia turned to Cal. “What about you?”

“With these legs, Claudia? My dancing days are long over.”

“Go on, Cal,” Anne urged as she took Owen's hand and he rose from the table. “Nobody sits here.”

“Nobody but me. Tonight I'd rather watch.”

For a while the three of them sat and looked on as Owen and Anne danced but when it became clear that Claudia was a woman without any attachments—Cal and Dante had been discussing Dante's need for work and his recent job hunt—men began coming to the table. Now the dance floor filled as men walked from their chairs and asked the women sitting on the opposite side of the room to dance.

A young Irishman with black hair greased back with Brylcreem approached their table, and his pale cheeks flushed with blood.

“Would you mind?” he said, and the three of them looked at him as he held out his hand to Claudia. “I mean, might you be up for taking a spin on the floor?”

He glanced at Dante and Cal, who smiled encouragingly, and Claudia said: “Of course!” And, grinning, the young man took her hand, and they joined the crowd as the band began another waltz.

After the waltz, the music picked up, Irish-inflected big band merging with jazz and bop, and a thousand pairs of feet banged the wood so that the room seemed to vibrate as if from distant thunder, and Dante watched Claudia with her dancing partner and saw the carefree way she now had about her and something stiffened inside him. He realized he resented this new Claudia, so capable of throwing off her yoke of martyrdom. How easy she made it look—she was almost flaunting this new person in his face. It was as if he were looking at a stranger; he didn't recognize this woman at all. Gone was her grief, her need to exist in solitude and pain. Gone was her desire to inflict suffering upon herself, to descend into her despair and isolation, her spinsterhood, as if it were somehow a badge of honor.

He stared at her in the dress he hadn't even known she had as she spun beneath the shafts of reflected light. Her petticoat swirled back and forth about her wide hips. He looked at her face, smiling and then laughing at something her dancing partner said to her. The way she placed her hand partially over that smile in mock horror at what he'd said. Dante realized that Claudia's newfound freedom and the release of inhibitions that came with it was a sort of betrayal.

Cal nudged him. “Claudia,” he said, “she's a fine dancer. I never knew she could dance like that. You should get her out more often. She looks like she's having the time of her life; I've never seen her so happy.”

“She thinks she's Irene Dunne in
Anna and the King of Siam
.”

“And what's the matter with that? Can't she be whoever she wants to be? Look at her. She's having a ball, for Christ's sake.”

“Jesus, since when did you become so chipper?”

The room was sweltering, the air hot and still with hundreds of bodies pressed together. Cal didn't know how they could all fit in the room. The tuxedoed attendants and the cops were lost in the throng. Up on the stage the band worked furiously; above their jacket lapels, the collars of their dress shirts had darkened with sweat.

Cal looked at the dancers moving across the parquet. He felt the familiar dissonance now, keenly, and tried to contain it, ensure that it did not affect Owen's birthday celebrations, but every time he looked at the dance floor and the dancers there, he was transported to a time ten years before with Lynne—only the clothes and music had changed slightly; it was like looking at two images superimposed over each other until you could no longer clearly make out either. The important parts were gone. Lynne's face was gone.

There was a reverberation of sound, the treble created by two identical records playing on phonographs alongside each other, their music half a second apart and so creating a partial echo. The lights and sounds and movement of people blurred; everything was shuddering. The edges of his world were turning black, as so often happened, the darkness moving slowly inward toward the center of his vision. He took some bennies from his pocket and popped them back quickly with a glass of water before Dante could notice his shaking hand, then with a smile plastered to his face he focused on a straight line toward a single spot—through the crowd to where the band played upon the stage; he focused first on the pianist, then the fiddler, the horn section, the drummer, the bass player, the accordionist, and gradually the room widened, the blackness at its edges retreated, and he saw the world fully again.

At the intermission between sets, while Owen was in the restroom, Anne took Cal aside. She wore a blue sequined dress that sparkled and shone under the light. Her red hair was done up in a bun and she had large, wide, and serious eyes. But there was almost nothing serious or demure about Anne Kelly—she'd grown up in a family of all boys, most of them firemen now, and she had a flippant sense of humor that Cal enjoyed.

“Cal,” she said, “would you do me a favor and take Owen down to the bar? It's his birthday but you would think someone had died—buy him a couple of drinks, cheer him up. I want him to have a good time. Us ladies, we'll be just fine.”

When Owen came back to the table he looked a hundred times worse. Anne, who was talking with Claudia, pretended as if nothing were wrong, but she glanced at Cal and he got the hint.

“Owen,” he said. “You look as if you're gonna puke. C'mon, you need a drink. Let's you and me and Dante go down to McPherson's. I'm dying of the heat in here myself.”

Downstairs, the long bar at McPherson's stretched the length of the building and men were lined up at it five deep. Fans turned slowly above their heads. They were putting back their drinks, loosening up their feet and tongues to go talk to women and ask them to dance. It was after ten o'clock and soon most of them would file out in anticipation of the band's playlist, which they knew down to the minute. As the three of them made their way to the back of the bar someone shouted from the hallway, “They're playing ‘The Star of the County Down'!” and half the men put back their pints and began moving toward the door.

At the end of the bar Cal ordered them each a beer and a whiskey and when the drinks came he and Dante raised their glasses to Owen and drank them down and then Cal ordered them another round. Above their heads they could feel the vibrations from the ballroom. The strains of the fiddle, blasts from the trumpets, and the steady boom of the bass drum tremored throughout the building. Owen and Dante lit cigarettes and Cal took off his jacket, loosened his tie. Sweat stained his pale blue shirt dark beneath his arms and along his spine.

Cal looked at Owen. “Owen, you're as pale as a ghost.”

“Ah, I'm fine. It's just this fucking heat.”

“Anne thinks you're not having a good time. It's your birthday, she wants you to have a good time.”

“I am having a good time, it's a fucking gas.” Owen shook his head in frustration, lifted his glass, and finished his whiskey.

Dante raised his hand to the barkeep for another round.

“Drink isn't going to help,” Owen said.

“Have one anyway,” Dante said. “It's too hot not to.”

Owen took a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaled, tapped the butt end into an ashtray, and left it smoldering on the rim. “We set up a net to catch a boat coming into Charlestown this morning,” he said. “We received a tip that it was carrying guns, possibly other contraband, for the IRA. We had the whole harbor locked down.”

“Sounds like you didn't find out what they were carrying. Did they figure you?”

“They sure did—they knew we would be waiting and came in sometime last night instead. We found the boat empty, tied up at Ross Wharf. The harbormaster said he had no records of it coming in. We know it's from New York but we're still trying to find out who the owner is.”

“And no one saw any of its crew leaving the docks?”

“We think someone might have, but that someone is dead. We've got a body but no ID yet. They tarred and feathered him, shot him in the head, and left his corpse tied to the Charlestown locks.”

Owen picked up his cigarette from the ashtray and sucked on it.

“What's the meaning of that?” Dante said.

“It means,” said Cal as he finished his whiskey and signaled the barkeep again, “that he was a rat, an informer, or at least they believed he was.”

“Yeah, that's exactly what it means.” Owen ran a hand through his hair; some color had returned to his face with the whiskey.

Dante frowned. “The IRA in Boston? I've never heard of it.”

“Neither have I. Not since my father's day, anyway. And it worries me—if there's a boat that was supposed to be going somewhere and it doesn't get there and the IRA's involved…”

“There's going to be payback—but do you really think they're that organized? Aren't they mostly just shooting at their own or blowing themselves up?”

“Some of the Feds I talked to seemed to think so, say that they've seen more and more arms being smuggled out of the country to Ireland in the last six months, that something is about to happen. Which is the last thing we need here. The town's a powder keg already with every gangster and his brother thinking he's the next Blackie Foley, all trying to get a piece of what he left behind.”

Dante and Cal exchanged a look. It had been two years since any of them had mentioned Blackie's name, although whenever they saw one another, the weight of the thing left unsaid was like a tenuous chain that bound them all—that and Sheila's daughter, Maria. After Blackie's death, Sully had taken back some of his dealings and territories that, over the years, his general had gradually adopted as his own, and for the first year, with Shaw at his side, Sully had seemed like the Sully of old, a force to be reckoned with, someone not even the mob or the new gangs emerging in Roxbury and Chinatown would mess with. But in the past eight months, his mind had begun to deteriorate—he was suffering from the early onset of dementia—and with his mind went his ability to manage the town. Now, on the days when he could remember who he was and he wasn't shitting himself, Sully ran everything out of a nursing home in Dorchester, up on the hill, in Mount Bowdoin, above Ronan Park, with Shaw as his errand boy, and the only thing he seemed to care about was clean sheets.