Michael did not tell her about his own confusion.
On the street and in the schoolyard, he’d heard all the stories about Jews being greedy and sneaky Christ-killers. But when this man, this Jew, poor Mister G, had been beaten so savagely, Michael had felt no elation. If Jews were bad, then Frankie McCarthy should be a hero. But in that candy store, it was Mister G who had spoken up to defend Sonny. And in return Frankie had been as scary and vicious as any gangster, while Sonny ran away. Michael struggled with that confusion. He also couldn’t express his own fear, the shameful cowardice that had stopped him from trying to help the old man. He could not get around one awful fact: while Frankie McCarthy was battering Mister G, Michael said and did nothing. Sonny ran; he thought, but I froze. And when it was over, and Mister G lay bleeding, and Frankie had told me to forget what I’d seen, I just nodded my head.
“He’s a bad fella, that McCarthy,” Michael’s mother said. “He comes from bad people and he’ll end up in the gutter.”
“I think he’s a little crazy, Mom.”
“He might be,” she said. “Stay away from him.”
“But why would he do it?” the boy asked. “Why would he hurt Mister G so badly?”
“Bad people do bad things,” she said, curling her spaghetti on a fork, using a large spoon to control it.
“Was it because Mister G is a Jew?”
“I hope not.” She paused. “But from what you say, son, it sounds like that was part of it.”
She talked about Hitler then, and how he hated Jews so much he killed millions of them. The Nazis were crazy Jew-haters, she said, and before they were finished, millions of other people were dead too. Not just the Jews.
“But why did they hate Jews?” Michael said.
“Och, Michael, most of it’s plain old jealousy, if you ask me,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “They’ll give you a lot of malarkey about killing Jesus and all that, but the same idjits don’t even go to church. Hitler didn’t go to church. Neither does Frankie McCarthy, I’d bet.” She paused, picking her words carefully. “The Jews get educated, that’s one thing. Maybe that’s what makes ignorant people so mad at them. Their kids do their homework. They go to college. A lot of them, their people came here without a word of English and they ended up doctors and lawyers. I wish to God our people would do that.”
“I heard Mister G has three sons in college,” Michael said. “You know, the ones who work in the store in the summer?”
“There you go,” she said. “You’ll never hear about any of the McCarthy’s going to college. They’re a worthless lot.” She looked at him. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be like them.”
They finished the spaghetti. His mother sipped the last of the wine, then rose, took the plates, and laid them in the sink. In a quick, busy way, she fixed tea, with milk and sugar, and some Social Tea cookies, humming an Irish tune that he didn’t know. Michael thought she looked relieved to be finished with the discussion about Jews and what had happened to Mister G and he did not go on with it, even though pieces of the scene in the candy store still scribbled through his mind. When she asked Michael what else his friends were talking about, besides the blizzard, he was relieved too. The subject was all too confusing and scary. He mentioned that the Dodgers were thinking about bringing up a minor league player named Jackie Robinson, who was colored. But everybody down on the avenue said he could never make it in the major leagues.
“They say colored players aren’t as good as white players,” the boy said. “They don’t work as hard, or something.”
His mother knew little about baseball; she glanced at the photograph of Private Tommy Devlin as if wishing he were there to talk to Michael.
“Well, they wouldn’t be giving him a chance,” she said, “if he didn’t work hard to get it.” She sipped her tea and restrained him from dunking his biscuit into his own cup. “You can be sure he wasn’t standing on some street corner, making remarks, when they signed him up.”
They did the dishes together, her face very tired. As Michael dried the plates and glasses, and stacked them in the cabinet, she walked slowly into the living room. For weeks, she had been reading a fat book by a writer named A. J. Cronin, and when Michael was finished with the dishes he followed her into the living room. She was sitting in a large gray armchair with a standing lamp beside it, lost in the book. The kerosene heater made the room feel hot and close. The windows were opaque and filmy. Michael drew faces in the steam with his fingers and stared down at the snow-packed streets and wished she would tell him some Irish stories, the way she did when he was small.
Those stories were even better than the comics, better than the books at the library on Garibaldi Street. Magical tales of Finn MacCool, the great Irish warrior, who in the midst of some bloody battle had reached down, grabbed at a hill with one mighty hand, and heaved it at his enemy. Finn was so big and powerful and the hunk of earth so gigantic that when it landed in the Irish Sea it became an island, the one now known as the Isle of Man. Or Usheen, his son, who followed a woman with golden hair to the Land of Youth, where he lived for three hundred years, never growing old, until at last he grew homesick for Ireland. He was told that his white horse knew the way home but if he once dismounted, he could never return. Trying to save some poor men who were about to die under the weight of an immense flagstone, he fell from the horse and instantly became a withered, blind old man. It was like that movie he’d seen at the Venus, Lost Horizon, where everybody lived in a valley called Shangri-La and stayed young forever but got old if they left.
Or she could tell him again the story of Balor, who had an evil eye so huge that it required eight men to pry it open; when it was open the eye paralyzed every enemy warrior who dared to gaze upon it. If Balor had only been at Mister G’s, he could have paralyzed that goddamned Frankie McCarthy. And Finn MacCool could have thrown him to New Jersey. When Michael was five and six and learning to read, his mother told him of giant pots in ancient Ireland where the food was never exhausted, of silver trees with golden apples glistening in the sun, of spells cast by wizards that made men sleep for forty years, of magical swords that always found the enemy’s neck, of rainstorms turned into fire by druids and women transformed into mice, mice into warriors. There was a magic cauldron, found in a lake, into which dead warriors could be plunged to emerge alive, though unable to speak. Or she told tales of the great CúChulainn, who had seven pupils in each eye and seven fingers on each hand and seven toes on each foot and had the power to move one eye to the back of his head to watch his enemies. Or she told him about the great bull of Cooley that could carry fifty boys upon its back. All of this in Ireland, where she came from, across the foggy seas.
But Kate Devlin was tired now, her shoes off, her feet swollen and sore. He tried to remember whether his mother was there when his father told his stories of Sticky, the magic dog. No. We were in the park. It was summer. On a bench. He saw his mother nod and then snap suddenly awake. She looked at him and smiled.
“Was I asleep a long time?” she asked.
“Maybe ten seconds,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I started drifting off,” she said. “I thought I was in Ireland.”
She looked again at her book.
“Mom?”
“Yes, son?”
“The stories about Ireland,” he said. “You know, Finn MacCool and CúChulainn and Balor and all. Are they true?”
“Of course.”
“Seriously?”
She chuckled. “Well, when I heard them from my father, God rest his soul, I was told they were true.”