“Give yourself time.” Matt was sitting on the edge of my couch, leaning forward, his face showing concern.
“I guess he was telling me that Al was set up to be killed, but the ones responsible are all dead, or almost all dead, and, anyway, I think I’m through with this.”
“So you’re not going to hit me up for a copy of the notebook?”
“No,” I said, probably taking him more seriously than he intended. “I still have some questions, of course, like what had Al done to deserve being killed, and is anyone else in that book besides Rocky alive today. But I’m definitely ready to file this away.”
As I rambled, I sipped my coffee and stared past Matt, at the tops of the snowy trees outside my window. A streetlight in front of the building cast a yellowish glow over my white drapes, and I imagined I was looking at a very old photograph.
Matt drained his cup and stood to leave. I realized I’d lost track of his presence.
“I’m going to be on my way,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Right,” I said, as if I’d been thinking of Vincent Cavallo and his helium report all along. “One o’clock.”
“And, best of all, I’ll see you Saturday evening,” he said.
“I’m really looking forward to that, too.”
I smiled, but Matt’s comment didn’t have half the effect it would have under different circumstances.
“Be good to yourself, Gloria,” Matt said, giving me a brief, one-armed hug as he walked past me out the door.
I went back to my rocker, with no inclination either to sleep or to do anything useful. I rubbed my ring finger as if to awaken more memories, or to put order into the ones I had. I drifted far away, back to 1962.
I’m with Al Gravese, at a flower show. I don’t especially like attending flower shows, but it’s one of Al’s passions, and I’m happy to be his date. I’m bored by the talks on the latest in mulch or crossbreeding tulips, and all the different breeds of orchids look alike to me, but I smile a lot and fix my hair and make sure my lipstick is even.
I’m fishing with Al Gravese. I hate being out on the water in a small boat, and I can’t stand the sight of worms or the smell of dead fish, but I laugh and snap Al’s picture and say what fun it is.
I’m at a baseball game with Al Gravese and his buddies. I’d rather be at the museum or a concert, but I eat hot dogs and yell at the umpire, and cheer when the Red Sox score a run.
Al was crazy about the girl on his arm, I thought, but Al didn’t know me any more than I knew him.
I turned out the lights in the living room, and went in to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
I noticed more activity than usual for a weekday in front of St. Anthony’s Church as I left my building on Thursday morning, December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I recalled a time when I believed that an eternal pit of fire awaited those who missed mass on this day. I wondered if the parishioners filing into church in the 1990s believed that, and I also wondered exactly what I believed now.
On the way to my meeting with Peter and Patrick Gallagher I made a detour to a small coffee shop on Beach Street. It was a new café, with modern furniture and espresso machines, but its freshly painted walls were covered with old photographs of Revere Beach in its heyday. In spite of the frigid morning air outside and the Christmas music inside, I was brought back to hot, humid summer days as I walked around and studied the enlarged black-and-white snapshots—a pony diving from a forty-foot platform into a tank of water on the Boulevard, shapely young women in modest black swimsuits lined up for a bathing beauty contest, a man shot from a cannon, flying one hundred feet into the sky.
At the table next to mine was a young mother and her daughter, wearing nearly identical pink quilted nylon jackets. As I sipped espresso through a thick layer of foam, I watched them out of the corner of my eye. They worked together on a page in a coloring book, giggling over a silly picture, their matching blond hair falling onto their work. I could smell the little girl’s hot chocolate and wished I could tell her how lucky she was.
As hard as I’d tried over the years, I could never remember a time when Josephine and I laughed together, or even colored together. I was sure that her own Depression-era youth held few joys, and I tried to forgive her for not recovering in time to give me a childhood. It’s never too late for a happy childhood, pop psychologists claimed, but I was too busy working on a happy adulthood.
The Revere High School building was brand new, as far as I was concerned, having been built long after I’d left for California. I met Peter in the main office, where I signed a clipboard at the reception desk. His mood was about as cool as his crisp white shirt, but he warmed up a bit when I gave him a steaming decaf mocha, a bag of biscotti, and an outline for six more guest appearances in his class.