Balance of Power

    Kerry did not know how long his father stayed, mumbling resentful fragments. Kerry dared not fall asleep.

    After this, Kerry never knew when it would happen. On some nights his father would come home and beat his mother. On others he would open Kerry's door and pour out his wounds and angers. Kerry learned to make some sound or comment so that Michael thought he was listening, to fight sleep or any sign of inattention that might set his father off. Michael never touched him.

    As long as Kerry listened, he knew that his father would not beat Mary Kilcannon.

* * *

As deeply as Kerry feared his father, he loved his mother.

    What Michael imposed on them at night was a shameful secret, never to be discussed. Kerry knew that his mother could not ask the police for help. Michael Kilcannon was the police: to tell his friends would shame him, perhaps make him even more brutal. Within the tight community of Vailsburg, where a quiet word from a policeman was enough to nip trouble in the bud, Michael treasured his reputation.

Every morning Mary Kilcannon prayed at Sacred Heart.

    In the half-lit vastness of the church, Kerry would watch her rapt profile. Kerry, too, found the church consoling—its hush, its seventy-foot ceilings and beautiful stained-glass windows, its marble altar framed by a fresco of Jesus ascending. Sometimes they stayed for an hour.

    One snowy winter morning, they wended their way home. They made a game of it, Kerry trying to walk in his mother's bigger footprints without making footprints of his own.

    His prize was a cup of hot chocolate. As they sat at the kitchen table, his mother smiling at him, Kerry felt he would burst with love. But it was she who said, "I love you more than words can tell, Kerry Francis."

    Tears came to his eyes. As if reading his mind, Mary Kilcannon said softly, "Your father's a good man when he's sober. He takes good care of us. He's only frustrated, afraid he won't succeed as he deserves."

    The words were meant as comfort. But what Kerry heard was that they were trapped: from the long nights with his father, he sensed that the reasons for Michael's failure to rise were the same as for his abusiveness, and that this would never end until someone ended it.

    Kerry squeezed his mother's hand.

* * *

    But outside their home, Kerry knew, Mary Kilcannon would always be known as James's mother.

    It began with how much Jamie favored her, so closely that only his maleness made him handsome instead of beautiful. By seventeen, Jamie was six feet one, with an easy grace and with hazel eyes which seemed to take in everything around him. Vailsburg thought Jamie close to perfect: he was student body president of Seton Hall Prep; captain of its football team; second in his class. Jamie's clothes were always neat and pressed, nothing out of place. Girls adored him. Like most obvious expressions of emotion, this seemed to amuse Jamie and, perhaps, to frighten him.

    This was Jamie's secret—his ability to withdraw. To Kerry, Jamie seemed driven by a silent contempt for both parents, the need to be nothing like them. From an early age, Jamie was too successful for Michael Kilcannon to disparage. Because of Jamie's size and his attainments, their father came to observe a sort of resentful truce with his older son: Michael received praise in public, was reminded in private of his own inadequacy. But Jamie did not raise his hand, or his voice, to help his mother.

    When Jamie left for Princeton on a full scholarship, he would not let his parents drive him there.

    Jamie did well at college, played defensive halfback on the football team, became involved in campus politics. His much younger brother dimly imagined classmates thinking that Jamie did this easily. But Kerry knew that as he fearfully waited for his father to climb the stairs, he would sometimes hear his brother through the thin wall between their bedrooms, practicing his speeches, testing phrases, pauses . . .

    Kerry never forgot the Christmas vacation of Jamie's second year away.

    Jamie was running for something. He practiced a speech late into the night; sleepless, Kerry listened to his brother's muffled voice.

    Michael Kilcannon came home.

    Hearing his father's footsteps, Kerry wondered whether Michael would open the door or go to his mother's bedroom. He sat up in bed, expectant, as Michael's footsteps passed.

    A moment later, Mary Kilcannon cried out in pain.

    The only sign that Jamie heard was the silence on the other side of the wall. Tears ran down Kerry's face.

    No, he would never be his brother James.

* * *

    In school, Kerry became contentious, angry, picking fights with older and stronger boys who often beat him badly. And then Liam Dunn, his godfather, took him to the CYO to learn boxing.

    Boxing became his salvation—what Kerry lacked in athleticism, he made up in resolve, and then self-discipline. He stopped fighting outside the ring; by seventeen, weary of his own violence, he stopped fighting at all.