“So you cut class.” Just because his brother went to Northeastern didn’t mean he didn’t have to show up. In Tip’s food chain, academics sat on the top and everything else was there to be eaten. In Teddy’s food chain, nothing even came close to their uncle. “Why doesn’t he just tell these lunatics he can’t actually cure the sick?”
“He tells them every day. He tells everyone who walks in the door.”
“Well, he ought to be more convincing. And you ought to go to class.” Tip could not abide the Regina Cleri home. There was some vague antiseptic odor in the hallways that all but brought him to his knees. Tip, who spent half his life elbow deep in dead fishes, could not endure the smell of old people.
“Didn’t you hear the weather report?” Teddy said. “We were supposed to get covered up. I didn’t think I’d be able to get there tomorrow, maybe not even the next day.”
Tip locked the final door behind him and together they walked out of the museum and into the clear winter night. “So where’s the snow?”
Teddy looked up at the sky. Both boys had wanted the same thing: to be stranded in the place that they loved, to have the situation taken out of their control by nature. “The storm missed us.”
“Well, tell it to Da, he’s the one who’s going to be pissed off.”
“Take my hat,” Teddy said, reaching up for his stocking cap. The air was hurtful, too cold to breathe.
“I’m not taking your hat,” Tip said. He had found a pair of mittens in his pockets. At least that was something.
Doyle would be irritated that the boys were late, but it was Tip who was angry, not really at his brother but angry because he hadn’t paid attention to the weather and it was at least twenty degrees colder now than it had been when he’d left for class that morning. Without his winter coat the wind fell down the back of his collar like handfuls of snow. He was angry to have to leave his work unfinished, and with every step they took towards the Kennedy School he thought of something else in the lab that needed his attention, another set of notes that deserved review. How much longer could he afford to waste all this time on his father’s naïve obsession with politics? It was one thing when they were little boys, a captive audience happy to be dragged along in tow, but now Tip had other things to do. He started to grouse about it all to Teddy, but when he looked back he saw his brother was lagging, nothing more than an outline behind him. He squinted. It was already dark as midnight.
“Hurry up!” Tip waited until Teddy trotted up beside him. “Do you think we need to be later than we are?”
Teddy was almost too preoccupied with his own thoughts to walk a straight line, but he kept quiet about it now.
The farther they went, through the cluster of chem labs, the music practice hall with four bars of music slipping out a half-open window (it was Schubert, a piano sonata, but Tip could not think which one), the applied science center, and the economics building, the more they passed, the more certain he was that tonight was the night he would tell his father, Enough, this had to stop. He could barely manage the work he had. He couldn’t keep dropping everything to hear some politician who hadn’t been viable for twenty years just because it was what his father felt like doing on a Tuesday night. If he had gone to Stanford, every minute of his day would have been his own. Even at Princeton he would have stayed mostly out of reach. But no, he had let his father propagandize the superiority of Harvard as a means of keeping him close. Tip and his brother had been dragged to lectures since a time before memory, lectures and City Council meetings and rallies and funerals. Oh, did his father love funerals! The countless city fathers, sons of Boston, and daughters of Massachusetts whom they had laid to rest. How Doyle loved to explain the importance of the deceased on the drive to various churches, what the dead had done and why they merited respect. Well, Tip was sick of it. And yet when the next streetlight swept over him, he held up his wrist reflexively and checked the time. He felt sick to see the hands tilted past the place they should have been. “We’re already eight minutes late.”
“So run,” Teddy said. “I’m freezing anyway.”
They ran. Both of the brothers were fast, long legged and graceful. They had both been on track teams at different times. Tip had quit after his freshman year of college. Even when there were drills and meets and hours of practice, running always felt like playing around. Teddy was thrown off the team while he was still in high school. Fast as he was, he had no talent for showing up. All through childhood they had run together, as far back as those first days on the beaches of Cape Cod. Sometimes in the summer they would drive all the way to Provincetown to spend the day at Race Point, a famous beach, Doyle told them, where boys came to race. And so they raced each other back and forth from towel to towel, first Tip winning and then Teddy, though Tip always suspected his brother of throwing a few of the wins to him. Doyle stood in the bright sun, pale as a fish and clapping, cheering his sons on. They thought of that now, both of them separately, wordlessly, as they cut through the yard, passing the freshman dorms, avoiding the hard white lumps of old snow frozen solid to the tough winter grass. They thought of their father clapping his hands and shouting their names as they pumped their legs up higher and finished with a long kick back. As they ran down JFK and turned onto Eliot Street they remembered being children and the feeling of running barefoot in soft, hot sand. They remembered their father’s cheering voice, his pride in them, and so for the moment Tip didn’t feel as bad about leaving his work and Teddy didn’t feel as bad about leaving his uncle. They saw the crowds of people still pouring into the building and were pleased to think they weren’t going to be so late after all. Teddy and Tip went through the double doors at the Kennedy School like they were breaking tape at a finish line. They stood panting in the bright crush of students: quilted parkas and Polarfleece pullovers, magenta stocking caps with floppy yellow pom-poms that did not call serious intellectual pursuits to mind. Everyone was talking, waving, all of them pushing forward like a tide. There were too many winterized bodies smashed together, the sharp intersection of the too-cold night and the too-warm room. The crowd spilled out in every direction. For Jackson? Tip pushed his way forward, kept his head down like a swimmer. There were more black students in the lobby than a person usually saw around this place. Most of the time they were diffuse, scattered, always in the landscape, never all together. But tonight they held a slight majority. Tip would have said it made no difference to him, when in fact that alertness he always carried in his neck, the alertness that stayed with him so consistently he never even noticed it anymore, temporarily released its grip and disappeared.
If they were late then everyone was late. The entire evening was late. There were so many people milling around looking for seats that they had a hard time even finding Doyle, but he was there, two-thirds of the way down, saving the seat on either side of him with a coat on one chair and the blue scarf Bernadette had knitted him for a Christmas twenty years before across the other. Half a dozen young people, hopeful that he was merely being thoughtless and spreading out his winter baggage, had asked him if the seats were taken. One young man went ahead and sat on the scarf without a word and Doyle had to tell him to move. Standing in the aisle not ten feet in front of Teddy and Tip was a girl with a head full of long braids and a piece of fabric wrapped around her neck that was covered in tiny round mirrors. She was asking Doyle about the availability of the seat while throwing little circles of light around the room.
“My sons are late,” Doyle said.
“Your sons are here,” Teddy said, and he smiled at the girl. She eyed them skeptically. She started to say something but sighed and turned away instead, taking her little rings of light with her.
“Not very friendly,” Tip said, watching her go.
“Of course she isn’t friendly,” Doyle said. “She doesn’t have a place to sit. She doesn’t have a father who gets there early to save her a seat.”
Teddy leaned in from the aisle to kiss his father on the hea
d. “I’m sorry we’re late.”
“You’re always late.” Doyle reached over and pulled his coat into his lap.
“But so is everyone else,” Tip said. He let Teddy scoot past their father’s knees and took the aisle seat for himself on the off chance an opportunity for an exit might be presented.
“The program starts at seven-thirty,” Doyle said.
“You said seven,” Tip said and dropped into the chair with all the heaviness his thin frame would allow.
“I know.”
Tip looked at his watch. Seven twenty-three. His father had finally found a way to beat the system. Bernard Doyle was sixty-three years old. He was five foot nine inches tall. He tried very hard to think of ways to keep ahead of his sons.
Doyle touched the back of his hand to Tip’s cheek. “You’re frozen. Why aren’t you wearing a coat?”
Tip inhaled slowly, deeply, trying to bring his pulse down. He still felt like he was running. “It wasn’t all that cold this morning.”
“Didn’t you know the weather was going to be bad?” One of the countless outcomes of Bernadette dying when the boys were small was that it had had the effect of turning Doyle into something of a hen.
“If the weather was going to be so bad then what are we doing here?”
Doyle sighed. “You’d think I was dragging you to Providence for a boat show.”
“I need to finish my work,” Tip said.
“Work never gets finished. I walked out on a stack of incorporation papers. My secretary chased me down to the elevator with letters to sign. I imagine it will all still be there tomorrow. Jesse Jackson will not be.”
“He was great the first time. I’m sure he’ll be great again.” Teddy nodded to the stage, the empty podium, a glass of water reflecting light balanced on top.
Doyle shook his head. “You saw Jackson at the ’88 convention. You don’t remember seeing him in ’88.”
“Everybody remembers Jackson.” Teddy didn’t want to be there any more than his brother did but there he was and he was going to make the best of it.
“You were five,” Doyle said. “You remember him from television, not San Francisco.”
“COMMON GROUND!…” Teddy said, his voice too loud even in the crowded hall. “Easier said than done. Where do you find common ground? At the point of challenge.” His eyes fixed on Doyle’s. Tip turned away in his seat, twisted his torso to face the aisle as Teddy filled his voice with a preacher’s articulation. “This campaign has shown that politics need not be marketed by politicians, packaged by pollsters and pundits. Politics can be a moral arena where people come together to find a common ground.” He had the intonation in his pocket, the heartfelt power rising to the end of every sentence. People turned around and looked at the young black man reciting Jackson’s convention speech to the older white man. Jackson himself in the front row turned back and looked over the top of his narrow glasses to see who was using his voice. He nodded at Teddy, who smiled and gave a small but enthusiastic wave in return. The people in the auditorium wondered if the younger man was mocking Jackson or if he was crazy. There was always at least one crazy person at these talks. They wondered if he was making the older man uncomfortable. No one coming in late, searching for a seat that was not there, wondered if they were father and son.
“Why do we need to stay for Jackson when Teddy can do the whole show over dinner?” Tip said.
“You can recite it on the way home,” Doyle told him in a low voice. He had come in the car and as far as Doyle was concerned Teddy could say anything he felt like saying in the car. Teddy often worked on his memorization while riding back and forth on the T. He thought it was a good use of time, but Doyle worried that people would take his son for a schizophrenic.
Teddy shook his head. “I don’t know the whole thing.” But when he thought about it, he had almost all of it. Only the part about Michael Dukakis was a little fuzzy.
“This is insane,” Tip said to no one. “It’s reading period.” But no sooner had he spoken than the lights dimmed briefly and came back up again, signaling the audience for their attention. The ones who were still milling around created a fire hazard by sitting down in the aisles where they stood. Teddy was going over the rest of the speech in his head. There were so many different versions. He knew it was time to stop talking and so he mouthed the words silently: My right and my privilege to stand here before you has been won, won in my lifetime, by the blood and the sweat of the innocent. Doyle didn’t hear his other son, the one who was longing for fishes, because his attention was now on the front of the room and what was to come.
The man in the herringbone jacket who approached the podium was Lawrence Simons, called Lawrence and never Larry, a friend of Doyle’s. He stood motionless, staring out into the crowd, until the audience noticed him, finished the last half of the sentence they were speaking, and quieted down. Lawrence Simons was the one who had told Doyle about Jackson’s lecture, knowing that he was always looking for things like this for Teddy and Tip. Doyle had a fondness for politicians when they weren’t running for anything, when they were out of the game altogether. That was when they were willing to take the kinds of impossible moral stands that would get a man thrown out of Iowa in the first week. Lawrence Simons, a professor at the Kennedy School, was making his introduction in a voice that could not affect enthusiasm even though he admired the speaker and had taken a hefty chunk out of the lecture budget to bring him there. Like Doyle, he was white, past sixty, and dependent on a pair of heavy glasses that corrected an astigmatism. He catalogued Jackson’s life into the microphone, checking off the major points on the list: poor childhood, Dr. King, run for president, peace negotiator. All the while Jackson sat in the front row, listening to the litany for what must have been the thousandth time. How many times had he been introduced? Doyle remembered the feeling, the stages he had waited on, the head tables where he turned his gaze down the long row of glistening water glasses to the speakers who were speaking of him. It was like reading your own obituary over and over again.
Not that Doyle was ever introduced anymore. Not only was he never the speaker, he was not spoken of. He was no longer a source of reverence or scandal or pity. It was very rare that someone who passed him would turn around to look again or lean in to whisper some version of his story to the person beside them when he walked into a restaurant. After so many years people had forgotten about the adoptions and the death of his wife and the scandal surrounding his oldest son. They had long forgotten anything he had ever accomplished for their city. In fact, Bernard Doyle had slipped so completely from the public consciousness that on the rare occasion some stranger said, “Hello, Mr. Mayor,” he found himself brightening inordinately. It was that last vestige of his own vanity that struck him as the most humiliating thing of all.
“We are Democrats,” Jackson said urgently from the stage. “We have a responsibility.”
Doyle gave one small, reflexive nod of agreement. It was that sense of responsibility that made him continue to drag Tip and Teddy towards the cause of leadership. They didn’t want to go, but then they never liked having their teeth cleaned either. It wasn’t entirely up to the child to be free to decide what was best. Doyle knew these were the last moments of his ability to exert any sort of parental authority. Most parents had lost theirs years before, some as far back as junior high school. It was the essential closeness he had always shared with his boys that had allowed this to go on for as long as it had, the closeness that was born out of their own bad luck. Both of the boys allowed themselves to be pulled around by Doyle now only because they had clung to him for so long. Their loyalty had become their habit. As children they had been so eager to please him that they had spoiled him into thinking that they would grow up to be exactly the men he wanted them to be. Even now, when it was abundantly clear that Doyle had failed, he could not entirely abandon his drive to shape them. They should be leaders, smart boys like these, boys with lives of such advantage. The call to se
rvice should be coded in their bones. But Tip could not seem to extend himself past the lower vertebrates. He reserved what little passion life afforded him for the jaw structure of teleosts. Doyle felt the cold prick of a headache just thinking of it. What profits a man if he saves a fish and yet loses his soul? That of course led him to Teddy, the sweetheart, the darling, who was poised to give his most valuable of souls away to the Catholics. Had Doyle known what would be enticing to boys, he would never have shown them the Cathedral of the Holy Cross or the Atlantic Ocean, for that matter. Doyle blamed his late wife’s uncle John Sullivan for Teddy’s dreamy infatuation with the Roman Church, though Father Sullivan always replied to the charge with a big song and dance about having a calling and how he wasn’t in the business of minting priests. These days, according to what one reads in the paper, he was in the trickier business of raising the dead, and Teddy could not get enough of it. Lose Teddy and you’ll find him sticking around for the second mass of Sunday morning, or visiting the sick in the home for decrepit clergy. He had to be pulled out of there the way boys of Doyle’s generation were collected from pool halls. If Teddy was given to leading, couldn’t he think to lead something more ambitious than a Boston flock?
Doyle sighed and shifted in his seat. And then of course there was Sullivan, but where Sullivan was concerned even Doyle was a realist. Teddy and Tip would each hold a second term in office before his oldest child ever managed to become a notary public.
“Suffering breeds character,” Jackson said from the stage, “character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint.”
Teddy leaned over and whispered in his father’s ear. “He said that in ’88.”
Doyle nodded, not wanting to encourage whispering. With the noticeable exception of his own sons, whose eyes glazed over the moment the lights dimmed, the audience was rapt. None of the other children were rustling in their seats. Jackson didn’t lecture so much as hypnotize. Once you gave over to the swinging cadence of his oratory you found yourself agreeing with ideas you could never completely remember. Bit by bit Jackson took over Doyle, washed him down in the waves of mellifluous repetition until the speaker and the listener were one.