The Shadow Box (33 page)

“Beg pardon?”

“It's Cole.”

“U
m
. . . you want me to get you a sweater?”

“No.
Cole.
You asked my name. It's Megan Cole.”

“Oh.”

Nice to know you, Megan Cole.

He knew that Megan would have understood about his
birthday. She has her hang-ups, he's allowed to have his.

She would tell him that it's time to let that go and that
what happened then, on his twelfth birthday, had nothing
to do with any other.

Easy for you to say.

Year after year,
Uncle Jake had done his best to blur
the memory. He had planned some spectacular birthdays.
There were parties, sports outings, even a three-day cruise
to Bermuda when he turned sixteen. But nothing really
worked. Fallon blamed himself for what happened that day
and he probably always would. That he was only a kid
didn't matter. He should have see
n
it coming.
His mother had been gone for a year by then and, in
some ways, her going was a relief. Until about a year
before that, his parents' marriage had seemed as solid, or
as routine, as any other. His mother had a mouth and some
strong opinions. She also had trouble cutting a little slack
and letting boys be boys, or men be men, but she was
never really mean about it. She could be kind, she could
be funny, and she was totally devoted to her family. Fam
ily was everything to her. Well . . . family and the church.

You wouldn't know it to look at her, though. Anne
Murray was black Irish. Spanish blood in her veins. Some ancestor had to have been a shipwrecked sailor from the
Spanish Armada who washed up on the Irish coast and
said the hell with it, I'm staying right here. She had very
dark hair, flashing brown eyes, and a trim, lithe figure.
Put her in the right kind of dress and she could easily
have been a flamenco dancer. Maybe in a past
life
she was.

They had, by most standards, a pretty nice life. A six-
room
h
igh-rise on Horatio Street in Greenwich
Village.
A
little place on Fire Island. Boxing and the GI Bill had put
his father through college—the first ever in the Fallon
family—and through graduate school where he studied to
become a certified public accountant.

Maybe that was at the root of it somewhere. Becoming
an accountant. Michael understood that it was no mean
accomplishment to become a CPA but, still, it must have
been a come-down after such an adventurous young-man
hood. His Bronze Star, his Purple Hearts, and his several
campaign medals were kept framed on the wall of the
room Pop used as an office. Around it were photographs
of himself and his tank crew and one in which Eisenhower
himself had stopped to shoot the breeze with them during
a lull in the fighting.

There were other photos from his boxing days, most of
them clipped from newspapers. In one, he stood in the
ring, arms raised, over a prostrate fighter named Buddy
Nash. The headline was “Nash Mashed.” His father had
seemed so full of
lif
e back then. Always that grin.

Working as a CPA wasn't exactly stultifying either. He
did a good deal of traveling and much of it was glamorous.
None of the other kids' fathers got to travel to Germany,
Switzerland, even to India a few times. Working for Eagle
Sales wasn't crossing the Rhine or mashing Nash, but
then, few jobs are.

Michael came along late, in the sixth year of their mar
riage. By that time, his father was doing pretty well. The
Horatio Street building was one of the few in the whole
Village with a full-time doorman.

The change, when it came, seemed almost overnight.
Michael was eleven. The arguments suddenly became
nasty. At one point, he thought it was because his father had stopped going to church. His mother would nag him
for not going to Mass but, when he did go just to shut
her up, she would ask how he dared show his face to God.
She threatened, one time, to have her policeman cousins
come over and slap some sense into him. Michael was
never clear on what he'd done to deserve such contempt.
But it hurt him that his father would just take it. He wanted
him to say, “If your cousins come through that door, I
will kick their asses all the way back to Queens.”

And he could have. But he didn't say that.

Instead, he asked, “You didn't tell them, did you?”

Her answer was, “I'd die of shame.”

Uncle Jake, those days, didn't seem to have much use
for his younger brother either. His attitude, however,
seemed to be more of a wistfulness, an unspoken sadness,
than an active contempt. More than once, in the years since, Uncle Jake would begin to remark on the sort of
man Tom Fallon might have been, and once was. But he
would always stop himself.

“Don't judge him too harshly, lad,” was all he'd say. That and, “We all lose our way sometimes. We have to
find our own way back.”

Nor would Moon shed much light on the subject.

“Moon? Was my father a crook?”

“That ain't the word, exactly.”

“What is the word?”

“He . . . got caught up in something. I don't know the
whole of it but I'll tell you this. There was never a time
when he decided to do bad. It just kinda grew. It got away
from him. You get older, you're gonna see how easy that
can happen.”

His mother had never approved of Uncle Jake. She was
never all that crazy about Moon either—she considered
him a thug—but she was never deliberately rude to him.
She said that God might have mercy on Moon, he might
consider what it's like to grow up black, but Uncle Jake
would have no such excuse. Jake Fallon was an irredeem
able rogue who should count himself lucky to get off with an eon or two in purgatory and was certainly no fit exam
ple for a growing boy.

“But I'll say this for him,” he once heard her say to
his father. “He's not a coward. Corrupt and a hypocrite,
surely, but at least he's a man.”

Michael did not let on that he heard. What made Uncle
Jake a hypocrite in her eyes was that he was a grafter
who had cops and judges in his pocket and yet still went
to Mass. Mass wasn't the half of it. Uncle Jake marched
in parades at the head of the Knights of Columbus. Uncle
Jake boozed with bishops. Cardinal Spellman used to sit
in Jake's box at the Polo Grounds. This made his
mother crazy.

Michael did not understand, however, how she could
call his father a coward. Cowards don't become prize
fighters. They don't win the Bronze Star.

And then one day his mother was gone. No note. Not
even to her parents. That letter came later. His father was
never the same.

He didn't work. He rarely left the apartment. He bathed
erratically. He spent his days, usually drunk, watching tele
vision in a ratty bathrobe. And yet there was plenty of
money.

He would pay the rent, with cash, only when the build
ing's agent came to the door, and he'd tip him for his
trouble. He would pay for liquor deliveries the same way.
It was Michael who saw that there was food in the apart
ment. The money came from various wads that his father
kept in cereal boxes, coffee cans, and old shoes, and with
the fifty-dollar bills that were pressed inside nearly every
book his father owned. Years would pass before it struck
Michael that not everyone kept that much money at home.

His mother being gone, Uncle Jake went out of his way to fill some of the void. He would take Michael to muse
ums and bring him books to read. These were things that
his mother had always done and that Uncle Jake learned to do by quietly consulting with Michael's grade school nuns.

But his mother, unlike Uncle Jake, never took him to the Friday night fights at St. Nicholas Arena and to Sunnyside
Gardens where his father had once fought. His mother
never took him to Mets and Yankee games. She never
introduced him to the players, many of whom knew Uncle
Jake, or got them to sign baseballs for him.

Jake would show up at the apartment every week or so
with his own housekeeper in tow. They would stay until
the place was in order. He never had much to say to
his brother.

By his twelfth birthday, which fell on a Sunday, Mi
chael knew better than to expect a gift from his father or
even for him to remember what day it was. But his father had gotten up early, had showered and shaved, and was
making breakfast with trembling hands when Michael
emerged from his room. He said he thought they might
go shopping together, buy some new clothes for school,
and then maybe go to the Radio City Music Hall, see
Funny Girl
with Barbra Streisand.

Michael was embarrassed for him.

For one thing,
Funny Girl`s
run at Radio City had ended
almost six months before. For another, he'd already seen
it because everyone said the Nicky Arnstein character was
so much like Uncle Jake. Fine figure of a man, great smile,
an inveterate rascal, could charm the devil himself.

More to the point, Uncle Jake was coming by at noon
to take him to a Yankee/Red Sox game followed by dinner
at Toots Shor's, where Mickey Mantle had promised to
stop by their table. This, Michael told his father, had been
planned for weeks. His father said that he understood,
poured himself a drink, turned on the TV, left Michael's
breakfast in the pan.