Jack put a hand on O’Connor’s shoulder. Conn was ashamed to feel himself shaking beneath that hand.
“He’s a smart kid,” Jack said. “Why don’t you be smart, too, Mitch?”
Yeager gave a small nod. “Sure. A smart man can wait for what he wants. Someday you’ll find out just how smart I can be, Jack Corrigan.”
He turned and walked away.
“Who told him?” Conn asked, his mouth dry.
“I don’t know, Conn,” Jack said. “Could have been someone on the paper, or a cop, or someone in the D.A.’s office…” He frowned, then sighed. “No, it’s probably my fault.”
“Your fault? No!” he said fiercely. “You never would have peached on me to the likes of Mitch Yeager!”
Jack smiled ruefully. “Appreciate the faith, kid, but my guess would be that Lillian told Mitch just to spite me. She’s a little irritated at me.”
“What does she care? She’s married now. To that rich Linworth fellow.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“She wanted to marry you,” O’Connor said, deciding to get something that had been troubling him out in the open, “but she doesn’t like me. I made her mad at you.”
“No, kid. No, that’s not true. As far as Lily was concerned, I was just fun and games. Hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, that’s all. She flirted with men like me and Mitch because it was exciting to her, but she was always going to marry money. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
“Does it make you sad?”
“Hell, no,” Jack said.
After a moment, O’Connor ventured to say, “I’m glad you didn’t marry her.”
Jack laughed. “So am I. She’s got one hell of temper, and she’s probably mad at both of us. At Mitch, too. Probably told him that a kid caught him at his game-kind of thing she’d do, just to piss him off.”
The memories of those early days with Corrigan were bittersweet to O’Connor. The years had brought many changes in his life, some good, some bad. Jack Corrigan’s friendship had remained a constant.
“Through the best of times, and the worst of times,”he said softly to himself.
Some of the worst came quickly to mind. Jack’s near-fatal car accident, which left him with the limp that kept him out of the service. A dozen other dark days, but without any hesitation he could name the worst of these: April 6,1945.
Maureen and his mother had both found high-paying jobs at one of the war plants-Mercury Aircraft. It had allowed the family to move into a nicer place. Maureen worked days, then took care of their father in the evenings while their mother worked second shift. O’Connor worked part-time, from six to eleven, four evenings a week at the Express-by then he was a copyboy, and had even sold a few stories to the paper. Despite the late nights, he did well in school and was close to graduating.
He remained devoted to his sister, and protective of her. Every evening, when Maureen’s shift ended at five, he was there at the gates of Mercury Aircraft, waiting to walk her home. Often, a neighbor who worked at the plant would join them on this walk, but he liked it best when it was just the two of them, away from their neighbor and away from their parents, able to talk and dream of the future. They did that more often in those early days of April. The war was coming to an end, it seemed-the Allies had crossed the Rhine.
O’Connor knew the end of the war meant that men would be coming home and taking their jobs back, and that Maureen and his mother might lose their jobs, but he couldn’t be sorry about it. Who could think of that after all these years of war? When you saw Gold Stars hanging in windows of those who’d lost loved ones, who didn’t wish for every mother’s son to come back home safely? One of his older sisters was a war widow. O’Connor’s only regret was that it looked as if it would all be over before he was old enough to enlist.
If the war didn’t end soon, though, he feared Maureen would end up an old maid, taking care of their parents until she was past the age of marrying. He was seventeen, and felt sure that Maureen was nearly at a nuptial dead- line-that she only had until she was about twenty-two to find a husband. His mother and older sisters had all been married before the age of nineteen.
It was just the two of them still at home, Conn and Maureen. Dermot had moved out to a place of his own years ago. Most of the care of their father had fallen to Maureen and his mother, although O’Connor shaved him. He also took on many of the household tasks that might have otherwise been his father’s.
O’Connor had been glad when Maureen took the job in the factory, thinking she’d meet more fellows. She had a job in purchasing, so she got to wear a dress to work-his mother had a higher-paying job, on the line, and wore slacks, which had nearly thrown Da into a fit until he saw the check she brought home.
Dresses or no, he lost hope for Maureen-he soon realized that with the war on, it was nothing but women and old men there at the aircraft plant, anyway. She hadn’t a chance of meeting a man who was near her age, unless he had some problem that made him 4-F. She told him that he was judging them too harshly, and that if he didn’t stop standing by the gates of Mercury Aircraft, scowling at every man who talked to her after work, she’d never meet anyone.
Once, when he complained that one of her dates was 4-F, she reminded him that Jack was 4-F because of his ankle-but the moment she said it, she apologized. They both knew how hard it was for Jack not to be able to enlist. After that, O’Connor never used a man’s handicap to as a reason for Maureen not to date him. Since he was good at finding information on people, it wasn’t too difficult for him to find other reasons to criticize a would-be suitor.
He began to suspect that she had stopped telling him about the men she was interested in. Lately, he noticed she wore a heart-shaped locket, hidden beneath her blouse, but he saw it fall free of its hiding place when she bent to pick up a paper she had dropped. He questioned her about it, and she told him she had purchased it herself to keep men from annoying her-told them she had a steady beau. “Who’s annoying you?” he wanted to know, firing up.
“You are!” she told him.
That Friday night in April, he didn’t meet her after work. He had a night off from his job at the Express, and he had a date. For months now, he had been one of the many young men who sought the attention of another high school senior, Ethel Gibbs, and she had finally agreed to go out with O’Connor, surely the shyest member of her court. Maureen had been more excited about the prospect of her brother going on a date than perhaps he had been himself. A vicarious bit of pleasure for her, he thought, since she seldom dated.
Looking back on it now, he could not remember where he had planned to take Ethel. He hardly remembered why he had wanted to date her, what it was that had seemed so attractive about her. He could only vaguely recall her face.
He could, however, recall perfectly that moment when her mother opened the front door and looked in a puzzled way at the young man who stood before her, wearing his best clothes, smelling of his father’s cologne. He remembered Mrs. Gibbs’s blushes as she stammered confused apologies on her daughter’s behalf. Ethel had left an hour ago, she said in dismay, with- but she halted mid-sentence, not naming O’Connor’s rival. O’Connor had felt his own face redden and only managed to murmur, “My mistake, I’m sure.”
He had delayed going back home, had wandered around the streets of downtown Las Piernas for a couple of hours before deciding that he might as well swallow his shame and let Maureen know that Ethel had stood him up. Going up the steps of the porch, he wondered how she would take it. Probably be more disappointed than he was, really.
As he opened the front door, he saw that although there was no blackout ordered that night, the house was nearly in total darkness. He heard his father shout frantically, “Maureen! Maureen! Is that you?”