“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“Second, and I’m afraid about as obvious, I do better with other people’s childhoods than I do with my own.”
“Don’t we all,” I said.
“I was brought up in a well-related suburb by affluent parents. My father went to business, my mother stayed home with the children. My father’s consuming passion was business; my mother’s was homemaking. I was expected to marry a man who went to business and loved it, to stay home with the children, and make a home.”
I didn’t say anything. Pearl lay still on the couch, her back legs stretched straight out, her head on her front paws, motionless except for her eyes, which watched us carefully.
“And I did,” Susan said. She drank another swallow of champagne, and put the glass back on the counter and looked into the glass where the bubbles drifted toward the surface.
“Except that the marriage was awful and there were no children, and I got divorced and had to work and met you.”
“‘Bye-’bye, Miss American Pie,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“Most of the rest you know,” she said. “We both know. When I left Sunnybrook Farm I left with a vengeance the job, then the Ph.D., moving to the city. Part of your charm at first was that you were so unsuburban. You were dangerous, you were your own and not someone else’s. And you gave me room.”
I poured some more champagne in her glass, carefully, so it wouldn’t foam up and overflow.
“But always I was failing. I wasn’t keeping house, I wasn’t raising children. I wasn’t doing it right. It’s one of the reasons I left you.”
“For a while,” I said.
“And it’s the reason I wanted you to live with me.
“Not because I am cuter than a bug’s ear?”
“That too,” Susan said. “But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.”
“Which is to say, your mother,” I said.
Susan smiled again.
“I’ll bet you can claim the thickest neck of any Freudian in the country,” she said.
“I’m not sure that’s a challenge,” I said. “Joyce Brothers is probably second.”
“And I strong-armed you into moving in, and it hasn’t been any fun at all.”
“Except maybe last Sunday morning after I let Pearl out,” I said.
“Except for that.”
We were quiet while we each had some more champagne.
“So what’s your plan?” I said.
“I think we should live separately,” Susan said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I think we should continue to live intimately, and monogamously… but not quite so proximate.”
“Proximate,” I said.
Susan laughed, though only a little.
“Yes,” she said, “proximate. I do, after all, have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.
“How do you feel about it, living apart again?” Susan said.
“I agree with your analysis and share your conclusion.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, I like it.”
“It’ll be the way it was.”
“Maybe better,” I said. “You won’t be wishing we could live together.”
“Where will you go?” Susan said.
“I kept my apartment,” I said.
Susan widened her eyes at me.
“Did you really?” she said.
I nodded and drank some more champagne and offered to pour some more in her glass; she shook her head, still looking at me.
“Not quite a ringing endorsement of the original move,” she said.
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I kept quiet. I have rarely regretted keeping quiet. I promised myself to work on it.
“You knew I was a goddamned fool,” she said.
“I knew it was important to you. I trusted you to work it out.”
She reached out and patted my hand.
“I did not make a mistake in you,” she said.
“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”
The doorbell rang.
Susan said, “I wanted a last supper as roommates.”
She smiled a wide genuine smile.
“But I’ve abandoned, pretense. It’s the Chinese place in Inman Square that delivers.”
I raised my champagne glass. “A votre sante,” I said.
Susan went down and brought up the food in a big white paper sack and put it on top of the refrigerator where Pearl couldn’t reach it.
“Before we dine,” Susan said, “I thought we might wish to screw our brains out.”
“Kind of a salute to freedom,” I said.
“Exactly,” Susan said.
CHAPTER 41
The Fenway is part of what Frederick Law Olmsted called the emerald necklace when he designed it in the nineteenth century-an uninterrupted stretch of green space following the Charles River and branching off along the Muddy River to Jamaica Pond, and continuing, with modest interference from the city, to Franklin Park and the Arboretum. It was a democratic green space and it remained pleasant through demographic shifts which moved the necklace in and out of bad neighborhoods. Along the Park Drive section of the Fenway the neighborhood was what the urban planners probably called transitional. There were apartments full of nurses and graduate students along Park Drive, and across the Fenway there was the proud rear end of the Museum of Fine Arts. Simmons College was on a stretch of Fenway, and Northeastern University was a block away and just up the street was Harvard Medical School.
But the Fenway itself was a kind of Riviera for both black and Hispanic gangs taking occasional leave from their duties in the ghetto. And they didn’t have to go far. The ghetto spread sullenly beyond the Museum and behind the University. The stadium at the southwest end of the Fenway midsection was dense with gang graffiti.
At two minutes to five in the morning, Hawk and I parked up on the grass near the Victory Gardens where Park Drive branches off Boylston Street. We thought it would be wise to walk in from this end and get a look at things as we came. There wasn’t much traffic yet, and as we walked into the Fenway the grass was still wet. A hint of vapor hovered over the Muddy River, and two early ducks floated pleasantly out from under the arched fieldstone bridge.
“We figured out exactly what we’re doing?” I said.
I had on a blue sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, and jeans, and white leather New Balance gym shoes. I wore a Browning 9mm pistol in a brown leather holster tipped a little forward on my right hip, and a pair of drop-dead Ray Ban sunglasses.
“Thinking ‘bout making a citizen’s arrest,” Hawk said.
He was wearing Asics Tiger gels, and a black satin-finish Adidas warm-up suit with red trim. The jacket was half zipped, and the butt of something that appeared to be an antitank gun showed under his left arm.
“I don’t want to kill him if we don’t have to,” I said.
“He’s in the way,” Hawk said. “We don’t get him out the way we got problems at Double Deuce. Plus he buzzes three people and he strolls?”
“If he really buzzed three,” I said.
“He did, ‘less you find me somebody better.”
“I’m working on that,” I said.
“Better hurry,” Hawk said. “Got about thirty-five seconds ‘fore the gate opens.”
Ahead of us was the stadium, poured concrete with bleacher seats rising up at either end. A skin baseball diamond was at the near end. Another diamond wedged in against the stadium administrative tower at the far end. The place must have been built in the thirties. It had, on a small scale, that neo-Roman look like the LA Coliseum. The tower was closed. It had always been closed. I had never seen it open.
As we came into the open end of the stadium from the north, I could see maybe twenty black kids in Raiders caps sitting in a single line, not talking, in the top row of the bleachers on the east side of the stadium, the sun half risen behind them. We kept coming, and as we did, Major appeared from behind the tower, walking slowly toward us.
Hawk laughed softly.
“Major been watching those Western movies,” Hawk said.