The Senator remains at the bedroom door until she senses him standing behind her. She says his name, unlatches the child from the changing table, swaddles the boy in a blanket. She laughs and steps across the fine carpet, still carrying the soiled diaper.
— You forget something?
— No.
He kisses her. Then his son. He pinches the boy playfully on the toes. The roll of soft skin at his fingers.
He takes the diaper — still warm to the touch — and drops it in the diaper pail. Life, he thinks, is still capable of the most extraordinary quips. A warm diaper. At sixty-four.
Heather walks him back to the elevator, takes the flap end of his suit jacket, draws him close. The scent of their son on both their hands. The elevator cables pitch their mourn.
WHAT SHE WORRIES most of all is that he will become the flesh at the end of an assassin’s bullet.
SO MANY MURDERS arrive out of the blue. The young Catholic woman with the British soldier slumped over her child, a hiss of air from the bullet wound in his back. The man in the taxicab with the cold steel at his neck. The bomb left outside the barracks in Newtownards. The girl in Manchester thrown twenty feet in the air, her legs separating from her as she flew. The forty-seven-year-old woman tarred and feathered and left tied to a lamppost on the Ormeau Road. The postman blinded by the letter bomb. The teenager with a six-pack of bullet holes in his knees, his ankles, his elbows.
When she was with him in Northern Ireland, last July, it chilled Heather to see wheeled mirrors being slid in under the car before they drove off. George said it was just a formality. Nothing for her to worry about. He had an air about him, a midcentury dignity that dismissed most danger.
She liked to watch him in a crowd. The way he could forget himself, dissolve and allow everyone else a sense of their own importance. He believed in people, he listened well. Nothing false or politic about it. It was simply the way he went about things. He disappeared amongst them. His tall hunch, his glasses. Even the fine cut of his suit would vanish. Sometimes she could find herself looking for him, and he would be tucked in the corner, talking with the most unlikely of people. He was given to sudden, close leanings. A touching of arms. An unexpected laugh. It unnerved his bodyguards no end. It didn’t matter whom. It was his failure, too, of course: the inability to say no. So hard for him to turn away. An old-fashioned politeness. His New England air. She would watch the party drift: a small pool of water, unknown to itself, shifting sideways. More and more people gathering around him. At the end of an evening she would watch him try to row himself out: that hopelessly surrounded swimmer, bashful now, ready to leave, tired, trying to pull himself up from the deep end, eager not to disappoint.
She holds her foot in the elevator door for a moment longer than she should. But then it closes and he is gone, and all she can hear is the electronic pulleys as he descends through the heart of the building. He will be home in two weeks. By Easter Sunday. He has made a promise.
She hears the faint ting of the elevator bell below.
THE LINCOLN CENTER traffic. The merge of the avenues. The bustle. Dancers hurrying across the plaza. The buskers beneath the awning, tromboning the raindrops down.
He likes it here on the West Side, though sometimes he wishes they could live farther east, just to make it easier to get to the airport. A simple, sharp practicality: to save half a travel hour, to be with her and Andrew just a moment or two longer.
Out onto Broadway. Left onto Sixty-Seventh Street. They turn onto Amsterdam and head uptown. If Ramon catches the lights properly they can go all the way, transform it into an avenue of yellow awnings. Past the cathedral. East, through Harlem. The whirl of faces and umbrellas. Onto 124th Street. The Bobby Sands mural on the wall near the police station. He has been meaning to find out who painted it, and why. Odd to have a mural in New York. Saoirse painted in bright letters above the hunger striker’s face. A word he has learned over the past few years. The streets of Belfast, too, are covered in murals: King, Kennedy, Cromwell, Che Guevara, the Queen painted huge on gable-ends and walls.
A quick merge and swerve. Onto the Triborough Bridge. A glimpse of water. In the distance, somewhere up the river, is Yankee Stadium. He is all of a sudden back at Fenway Park, thirteen years old: the great swell and hush of green as he steps into the top tier of seats, his first flash of ballpark, Birdie Tebbetts, Rudy York, Johnny Pesky at shortstop. A country boy. First time in the city. Watching Ted Williams step up to the plate. The Kid, the Thumper, the Splendid Splinter. He can hear the crack of the first ball cut across the floodlights. Good days, those. Long ago, not far away.
He leans against the cool of the seat. He has traveled in all manner of cavalcades, processions, parades down through the years, but what he likes most of all is this silence. To travel under the radar. If even just for an hour or two.
He opens the briefcase. They cross the bridge at a clip. Ramon has a badge that he flashes at the tollbooth. Sometimes the police try to peer inside, past the dark glass, as if they are looking beneath the surface of a river. To gauge the importance of the catch. Only me, I’m afraid. His staff is already in Belfast and Dublin. And he has refused security while at home in New York, Washington, Maine. No need. They will hardly strap a bomb beneath his lawn mower anyway.
There is much to catch up on. A report from Stormont. An internal memo on decommissioning. A file that came through from MI-5 on the prisoner release. All the secret histories. The ancient longings. The violence of feeble men. He is weary of it all, tired of the permutations. What he wants is a clear, fine skyline. He puts the files aside a moment, looks out the rain-hammered window at the riffle of New York. All the grays and yellows. The concrete cubes of Queens. The broken neon signs. The leaning water towers with their rotting wood. The spindlework of the elevated trains. It’s a primitive city, aware of its own shortcomings, its shirt stained, its teeth plaqued, its fly open. But it is Heather’s city. She loves it. She wants to be here. And he has to admit that there is something grudgingly attractive about it. It is not quite Maine, but nothing is ever Maine.
He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried. He knows his spot already, on the cliff, looking out to sea, Mount Desert Island, the deep green, the curve of horizon, the angled rock, the waves spindrifting upwards. Give him a small square of grass over the cove, a low white fence around it. A few sharp rocks to dig into his back. Sow my soul in the rugged red soil. Let me rest there, happy, watching the lift of the lobster pots, the slow saunter of seacaps, the curl of the gulls. But have some patience, please, Lord. Another twenty years at least. Thirty, even. Thirty-five, why not? Many mornings yet left. He might as well crawl up towards the full century.
The hiss of rainwater sounds underneath the tires. Ramon has a heavy foot when it comes to highways. Onto the Grand Central Parkway. From lane to lane. The brief thwap of dryness beneath the underpasses. Out towards the Van Wyck. No going back. The light fading through the slender shoulders of afternoon rain.
Easter two weeks away.
Last chance.
Si vispacem, para bellum.
YESTERDAY, IN CENTRAL Park, in the yellow sunlight, she reached for a backhand, caught it perfectly, sliced the racquet so that the ball floated a moment and dropped just over the net, and he lurched forward, laughing at the audacity of the shot, the perfect backwards spin, as he went crashing into the net. All around, the applause of the city, in the leaves and trees and buildings, and a red-tail hawk shooting over the courts, and some clouds skillful overhead in the blue, and the babysitter in the background, rocking the carriage, and he had the fleeting desire to make the phone calls to Stormont, leave it all at deuce.