CHAPTER 34
THE EPIPHANY
POV: RONAN
I’m parked on Adams Street again.
Engine off. Lights off. Across the street, St. Agnes. Red brick, dark with wet. The bell tower gray against a white January sky. Snow on the steps.
On the third floor of the east wing, fourth window from the end, the blind is down.
Mother Clare pulled it herself, the day after Christmas. I saw it on the camera before I had the camera taken out.
Theo is in the driver’s seat. His cast is off. He’s got a brace on his arm now and a new coat, a good one, charcoal cashmere, the kind a man wears when he’s been running the port of Boston for ten days and has found out he’s good at it.
“She’s been in there forty minutes,” he says.
“I know.”
“You want me to—”
“No.”
He glances at me in the mirror. “You’re counting.”
“I’m not counting.”
“You’re counting, boss. Your lips are moving.”
I stop moving my lips.
On my phone, on my knee, a green dot sits over St. Agnes. Under it, a number.
Seventy-four.
Seventy-six.
Seventy-three.
Steady.
The ring is new. Gold. Ten beads. And the beads are onyx, because I took them off my mother’s rosary. Ten of them. One decade. I sat in the Crypt on New Year’s Eve with a jeweler’s pliers and cut them off the cord one at a time, and I didn’t let myself stop.
My mother’s rosary has four decades now. It’s still in my pocket.
The other one is on my wife’s hand.
My initial where the cross should be. Platinum under the gold. The sensor under the platinum. Heart rate. Temperature. Location. Every four seconds.
She put out her hand for it in the kitchen at Draven House on the morning of the fourth. She didn’t let me put it on her. She took it out of the box and put it on herself, and then she held her hand up to the window light and looked at it for a long time.
Then she said, “Amen.”
***
The front door of St. Agnes opens.
She comes down the steps.
Camel coat. Black veil, pinned at the crown with my mother’s two enamel pins. Boots. She walks down the steps slowly, holding the iron rail, and at the bottom she stops and turns back, and there’s a little old woman in the doorway in a gray habit, four foot eleven, with crooked glasses.
Sister Bernadette lifts one hand.
Mae lifts hers.
Then she crosses the street, through the snow, and I get out and open the door, and she gets in.
She smells like starch and bleach. Like the laundry.
“Well, dove?” I say.
She pulls off her gloves. She holds her hands out to the heater vent.
“The Magdalene Gift,” she says. “Three hundred and sixty thousand a year. Paid quarterly. Starting now. Not anonymous.” She looks at me sideways. “In my name.”
“And Clare?”
“Clare signed. She cried again. Bernadette says she cries every time she sees a checkbook now.” Mae turns her ring on her finger. “And then she knelt.”
I look at her.
“In her office,” Mae says. “In front of the crucifix. Mother Clare knelt down on the floor and asked me to forgive her.”
“Did you?”
My wife looks out the window at the convent. At the fourth window on the third floor, with its blind pulled down.
“I told her I’d think about it,” she says.
Theo, in the front seat, makes a sound that might be a laugh.
“Seaport,” I tell him.
***
The conference room on the top floor of the Seaport building has a table for twenty and a wall of glass over the harbor, and today, for the first time since I built it, every chair is full.
The harbormaster from Charlestown. My accountant, with his laptop open this time.
The two captains from the docks. The new man running the unions, who Theo picked, a quiet Portuguese guy from Fall River who has already fired six people for theft and hired eleven.
The men who run the trucks. The bars. The warehouses. The berths.
And at the far end, standing, because nobody gave him a chair, a thin gray man in a cheap suit with his hat in his hands.
Conor’s cousin. The one from Quincy. The one with the kitchen where my wife’s father slept for two weeks and waited for his money.
He’s been standing there for twenty minutes. Nobody’s spoken to him.
I sit at the head of the table.
Mae sits at my right.
Not behind me. Not in a chair against the wall. At the table, in the chair that was Theo’s for eleven years. In the camel coat, with the veil, with her hands folded on the polished wood and the gold ring on her finger catching the light from the harbor.
Theo sits on my left.
He puts a folder on the table in front of me. Thick. Forty pages. My signature on every one of them.
“It’s yours,” he says. “I was only keeping it warm.”
I don’t open it.
“It was never mine,” I say. “Not all of it.”
I slide the folder across the table. Past my own place. To her.
The room goes quiet.
Mae looks down at the folder. At my name on the cover. She doesn’t touch it.
She looks at me.
“Ours,” I say.
***
The cousin comes forward when Theo nods at him.
He’s shaking. He’s a thin man, and he’s been living on nothing for two weeks, and his cousin is at the bottom of berth eleven, and his cousin’s son is in a grave in Southie with a four-year-old girl who still asks when he’s coming back.
He stops at the end of the table. He looks at me.
“Mr. Draven,” he says. “I’ve come to—”
“Not me,” I say.
He blinks.
I tip my head to my right.
He looks at her. At the veil. At her face, the faint yellow shadow still just barely there along her cheekbone if you know where to look.
Then he does it.
He gets down on one knee on the carpet at the end of the conference table. On the carpet, in front of twenty men, in his cheap suit, with his hat in his hands.
“Mrs. Draven,” he says. His voice cracks.
“The Ironside. The bars on Broadway. The laundromat on Dot Ave. The books for all of it.” He puts a ledger on the edge of the table.
Green cloth, gone gray at the corners. The same kind as mine.
“They’re yours. Whatever you want. I just want to keep my family breathing. ”
Mae looks at the ledger.
She reaches out and pulls it toward her. She opens it.
She reads the way she read the house payroll. One finger on the top line, running down. Fast. Not stopping. Her lips move. She’s counting in Latin. Twenty men watch her do it, and nobody breathes, and the cousin stays on one knee on the carpet with sweat running down into his collar.
She turns a page. Another.
Four minutes.
She stops. Her finger rests on a line.
“You’ve been skimming from the Ironside,” she says. Not loudly. “Six hundred a week. Since March. Before any of this.”
The cousin goes white.
“From Conor,” she says. “Not from us. From your own family.”
“I—Mrs. Draven, I—”
“Keep it,” she says.
He stares at her.
“Keep Southie. Keep the bars. Keep the Ironside. Run them. Pay us what they’re worth.
” She closes the ledger. “But on the first of every month, you’ll take twenty-five hundred dollars out of your own share.
Not the business. Yours. And you’ll send it to a woman in Quincy named Byrne. Whose husband had a heart attack.”
The cousin’s mouth opens.
“For fourteen months,” she says. “Twenty-five hundred. On the first. Cash.”
The room is silent.
I watch the number go around the table. I watch the men who know what it means, and the men who don’t, and the ones who are working it out.
Theo is looking at the ceiling. His mouth is doing something.
The cousin swallows.
“Yes, Mrs. Draven,” he says.
“Then stand up,” she says.
He stands.
***
It goes around the table after that.
I don’t plan it. I don’t say anything. I sit at the head of my own table with my arm in a sling and stitches in my face, and I watch it happen.
The harbormaster first. He’s the one who signed off on the Santa Clara because he thought it was my signature. He stands up from his chair. He comes around the table. He stops beside her chair.
He doesn’t kneel. He’s sixty and his knees are bad. He bends down, stiffly, and takes her hand, the one with the ring, and puts his forehead against the back of it for a second.
Then he goes back to his chair.
The captains. The accountant. The trucks. The bars. The Portuguese union man from Fall River, who looks her in the eye and says something to her in Portuguese that I don’t understand and she does, because Rosa’s been teaching her in the kitchen.
One by one.
Twenty men.
On my phone, on the table by my hand, the number in the corner moves.
Eighty-eight.
Ninety-two.
Ninety-five.
She feels me looking at it. She turns her head, while the last captain is still bent over her hand, and she looks at the phone, and then at me.
She knows what it says.
She doesn’t care.
She smiles at me. A small smile. Not the one they taught her. Her own.
Across the table, Theo is watching us. Something in his face I haven’t seen before. He looks down at his own phone, under the edge of the table where he thinks nobody can see.
I see.
There’s a green dot on his screen. Over a street in the North End.
I don’t say anything.
The last captain goes back to his chair. The room is quiet. The harbor is white outside the glass, and the cranes stand over berth eleven like iron saints, and every man at the table is looking at the end where we sit.
Not at me.
They kneel.
Not to me.
To her.