Absent Friends

“I'm just having coffee with Dad, then I'm going back,” she said. “Tell me what ferry you want to make, and I'll go with you.”

Sally smiled. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Tom said, “but the offer's still open. Marian, can we talk a minute?”

Sally gave them each a quick kiss. “I'll call you at your dad's,” she said to Marian, and left them.

Marian and Tom stood in the sun, and Tom told Marian about the fund that had just been created, the McCaffery Memorial Fund. Listening, Marian felt a lurch of fear. She told herself impatiently that was foolish. Jimmy was a hero. He was famous for unselfish courage. This fund would celebrate that. This was just the kind of thing New York needed right now. What was there to be afraid of?

“They made me chairman of the board,” Tom was saying. “But none of us knows anything about this. I'd like—the board would like—to ask you to be the director.”

“What? Oh, no.” Marian moved a small step back, as though fighting a magnetic field. “Tom, I can't.”

Tom gave a shake of his head. “Please.” He was handsome, as he had always been, with his dark hair and blue eyes that, when fixed on you, saw nothing else. Marian, seeking respite from Tom's eyes, glanced over the crowd. She saw Vicky on the sidewalk with her son Michael, named after Tom's father, Big Mike Molloy. When Vicky and Tom separated, Tom had been the one to move out; he'd bought a house two blocks away. Marian had asked him then if he'd considered a bigger move, a cleaner break. No, he said, sounding surprised: Pleasant Hills was where he belonged.

Marian watched Michael kiss his mother and stride away. The boy was twenty-two and looked so like Tom had looked that for a brief, disorienting moment, like a tremor or a spell, she found herself searching the crowd for Jimmy, for Markie, for herself, all of them exuberant and invincible as they had been, back then.

The moment passed, everything snapped back into focus. Marian was standing with Tom on the church steps, and Tom was speaking about the McCaffery Fund.

The idea was not Tom's, as the press later had it. Tom was inclined, as Marian was, to let Jimmy's legend rest, though his reasons were surely different. But other people—men who, as boys, had won trophies on teams Jimmy had captained; women who, when girls, had contrived innumerable accidental encounters with him in noisy school corridors, had whispered jealously to each other as Marian walked by—had elected this loss to stand for all the unbearable others. They had chosen to take action now to console themselves for their helplessness on that day, and they had come to Tom.

As he was coming to Marian.

“Please,” Tom said again. “He meant a lot to a lot of people. People want to give money—hell, it's all they can do. Think of all the good you can do with this, Marian.”

He'd smiled, and she'd had to smile, too. She was an Eskimo, and Tom knew, as he always had, just what to say so that she would be most likely to sign up for a delivery of ice.

She was nevertheless steeling herself and planning to refuse, when the church doors creaked open. She and Tom stepped aside to let a group of people pass. At their center walked Eddie Spano, talking on his right to someone Marian didn't know, while his left hand gripped the arm of his father, Aldo. Eddie was almost bald—had it been that long since she'd seen him? But it was the sight of Aldo Spano that stunned and scared her. When they all were young, Mr. Spano had been a legendary monster, lying in wait to eat you (or at least smack you, though you were not his) and teaching his two sons to be like him. Now he leaned on a cane, and on his son, his movements crabbed, imprisoned by that ferocious and insatiable jailer, age. The face she remembered as terrifyingly scarlet was dull, wrinkled, and soft, like something beginning to rot. While Marian watched, Aldo Spano looked to Eddie as though unsure what to do. Eddie spoke to his father calmly, then turned back to his conversation as though he had done this many times before. Marian drew a breath.

That Aldo Spano was no longer frightening was, to Marian, a fearful thing.

Tom watched her; Tom, because he was Tom, knew what she was thinking and how to turn it to his use.

“It's just us now, Marian,” he'd said, as they both watched the Spanos' slow progress down the stairs, Eddie half-lifting his hesitating father to each step. “There are no grown-ups anymore. It's just us. We have to do it.”

And so she'd told him she'd think about it. From the top of the steps she'd searched the crowd, found her own father in it, and hurried to him.

As Marian, still thinking of smoke and prayers, reached the door to her own office, she heard Elena call after her.

“Marian? That reporter, it was all right I gave her your cell phone? I wasn't sure, but you said, the press—”

“Yes, of course. Thank you,” Marian added with a quick smile.