CHAPTER 26
THE FATHER’S HAND
POV: RONAN
Theo lays his phone on my desk with his good hand and says, “You need to hear this sitting down.”
I’m already sitting down.
It’s Tuesday morning. The twenty-second.
Two days to Christmas Eve. Theo’s been out of the hospital since Sunday, against advice, with his left arm in a cast from the shoulder to the knuckles and a sling that he keeps taking off because it gets in his way.
He looks like he hasn’t slept since the diner.
He probably hasn’t.
“Where’d you get it?” I ask.
“Your father’s driver.”
I look up.
My father’s driver in Boston is a man named Kevin who has been driving Dravens since before I was born. He drove my mother to St. Agnes every Sunday. He drove her to the hospital at the end. He drove her in the hearse.
He’s been on my payroll, not my father’s, since the day after the funeral.
My father has never checked.
“Kevin wired the car in October,” Theo says. “Standard. Like you asked. We never listened to it. Your father only drives to the club and the doctor.” He pauses. “Last night he drove to the club on Commonwealth. Kevin waited outside. Two men got in the back with your father for twenty minutes.”
“Conor.”
“And the Bishop.”
I don’t say anything.
Theo presses the screen.
***
Road noise. The tick of a turn signal. The soft thump of a car door closing.
Then Conor Kavanagh’s voice, rough, close to the microphone.
“—my son, Conrad. My son. In a fish locker, with half his face gone.”
My father: “I know.”
“You told me you could handle him.”
“I told you I’d try. He’s his mother’s boy. I’ve told you that for thirty years.”
A third voice. Warm milk.
“Gentlemen. Please. It’s Advent.”
Crewe.
Conor: “Fuck Advent. I want the girl on my boat Christmas Eve, and I want him to know it was me.”
My father: “You’ll have her. I’ll see to it.”
A pause. A long one. Then Conor, slower, suspicious:
“Why? What’s in it for you? She’s your daughter-in-law.”
My father laughs. The laugh I grew up with. The one that came before a backhand.
“She’s a nun from Dorchester with a gambler for a father.
She’s a chip, Conor. She’s the chip my son pushed into the middle of the table because he thinks with his mother’s heart.
I take the chip off the table, and the game stops.
You get your peace. You get berth eleven.
You get the girl.” A rustle. The crinkle of leather seats. “And I get my son back.”
Conor: “And what makes you think he’ll come back?”
My father: “He came back after the piano.”
The car is quiet for a moment.
I hear Theo breathe beside me.
Crewe, gently: “The annulment’s already filed, Conrad. I did it myself on Friday. Fraud and duress. By Easter, in the eyes of God, she was never married. She was a frightened young postulant taken from her convent by force.” A small, sad sigh. “It happens so often.”
My father: “And the reception?”
Crewe: “She’s agreed. Mother Clare brought her answer Saturday. She wept, apparently. She’s been so afraid.” A pause, and I can hear the smile in it. “She’ll come to my study at eleven for a blessing. My man will be at the side door with the car. Conrad, you’ll keep your son occupied.”
My father: “I’ll keep him occupied.”
Conor: “How?”
My father: “I’ll ask him to forgive me.”
A beat of silence. Then Conor laughs, short and ugly. Then Crewe laughs too, softer.
My father doesn’t laugh.
“He’s always wanted me to ask,” he says. “He’ll stand there with his mouth open for five minutes. That’s all you’ll need.”
The recording ends with a car door opening. Cold air. Kevin’s voice, faint: Goodnight, Mr. Draven.
***
Theo takes the phone back.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look at me. He stands at the window with his cast held against his chest and looks down at the snow on Louisburg Square, and he waits.
I sit very still.
He came back after the piano.
I was fourteen. The blood ran into the keys. I heard her on the stairs, crying, and then I didn’t hear her laugh for a year, and the next morning at six my father knocked on my door and said, The car’s outside. The docks, and I got up, and I put on the coat he’d laid out, and I went.
I went every day for twenty-one years.
He’s right. I came back.
“Boss,” Theo says quietly.
“I know.”
“He’s going to—”
“I know what he’s going to do.” I stand up. “Declan knew. That’s what Crewe knows meant. That’s why he looked at me like that on the floor.”
Theo turns from the window.
“What do you want?”
I think about it.
I think about my father at the head of the dining room table, looking at the blood from Hurley’s nose. Last chance, Ronan. I think about him in the doorway, looking down at her. Pretty. Your voice was prettier.
I think about him asking me to forgive him.
“Nothing,” I say.
Theo frowns.
“Nothing changes,” I say. “Kevin keeps driving. The wire stays in. My father thinks it’s going to work. Crewe thinks it’s going to work. Conor thinks it’s going to work.” I pick up my mother’s rosary from the desk. “Let them all think it.”
“And Christmas Eve?”
“On Christmas Eve, I’m going to a reception at the Chancery with my wife.”
“And your father?”
I look down at the beads in my hand.
“My father has until midnight Mass,” I say.
***
I tell her at lunch.
I don’t know how else to do it. I’ve never told anyone anything about my father.
Not Theo, not my mother, not the priest who heard my first confession.
I sit across from her at the long table in the kitchen, with Rosa gone and the radio off, and I tell her flat, in order, the way I’d read her a ledger.
The club. The car. The three voices. The chip. The piano.
I’ll ask him to forgive me.
She listens without moving. The bruise on her cheek has gone yellow and green now, almost gone. The gauze is off her wrists. There are pink healing rings where the plastic was.
When I’m done, she’s quiet for a long time.
“He’ll be there,” she says finally. “At the Chancery.”
“Yes.”
“While I’m in the study with Crewe.”
“Yes.”
“Keeping you occupied.”
“Yes.”
She looks down at her plate. At the pear. She picks up one slice and doesn’t eat it.
“Is there enough,” she says slowly, “in the fold of paper. For two glasses.”
I look at her.
She looks back at me. Her face is very calm. Her eyes aren’t.
“No,” I say.
“I could—”
“No.” I reach across the table and put my hand over hers, the hand with the pear in it. “Crewe is yours. I gave him to you. My father is mine.”
She’s still.
“He hit you with his ring,” she says.
“Yes.”
“He took your mother up the stairs.”
“Yes.”
“He’s going to stand in front of you at Christmas and ask you to forgive him so a man can take me out a side door to a boat.”
“Yes.”
She turns her hand under mine. She laces her fingers through my fingers. She holds on.
“Then he’s yours,” she says.
***
That afternoon, my father calls.
I’m in the Crypt. I watch his name come up on the phone on the desk. Conrad. I let it ring three times.
I answer.
“Ronan.” His voice is warm. The famous warmth. The one he used on judges and harbormasters and my mother, once, a long time ago. “Son. I’ve been thinking.”
“Have you.”
“I’ve been thinking about your mother. About Christmas. About what she’d want.” A pause, beautifully timed. “I said things at the house that I regret. About your wife. About you. I was angry about the warehouse. I’m an old man, Ronan. I get angry.”
“You do.”
“The Chancery’s having its reception Thursday night before midnight Mass.
Crewe’s asked me to come. I’d like you to come too.
Bring her.” Another pause. Softer. “I’d like to meet her properly.
I’d like to start over. I’d like—” He stops.
His breath catches on the line. It’s very good.
It’s the best I’ve ever heard him do it.
“There are things I’d like to say to you.
Things I should have said a long time ago. ”
I look up at the screens.
Bottom row, center. The chapel. She’s there, on the prie-dieu, with her breviary open on the wooden rest in front of her. She isn’t reading it. She’s looking at something tucked between the pages. A small fold of brown paper.
“All right,” I say.
“You’ll come?”
“We’ll come.”
“Thank you, son.” His voice is thick. “Thank you. You don’t know what that means to me.”
“I think I do,” I say.
I hang up.
I sit in the dark in front of the nine screens and watch my wife in my mother’s chapel, turning a little square of brown paper over and over in her fingers.
I push one bead along the cord.
My father has until midnight Mass.