Coming Home (13 page)

Rob said, “It’s not Danny’s fault.  Really,” at the same time
Danny said, “Honey, it’s not as bad as it looks.”  And then they both fell
silent.

“I’m not even going to dignify this with a comment,” she said. 
“What I am going to do is turn around and walk back out that door.  And when I
come back—”  She closed her eyes and shuddered.  “And when I come back, this
unspeakable mess had better be cleaned.  Got that, boys?”

She slammed the door in their faces.

Mary MacKenzie was delighted to see her.  The matronly redhead
folded Casey into her arms.  “Come in, come in.  I was just about to make tea.”

While the water heated, she told Rob’s mother about the condition
she’d found her apartment in.  Mary clucked in sympathy.  “They’ll clean it,”
she said, pouring hot water into Casey’s cup.  “Both of those boys worship the
ground you walk on.  Men!  You can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. 
Well, never mind them.  Tell me about your sister’s new baby.”

Casey launched eagerly into a description of Mikey’s sterling
qualities.  “He’s gorgeous,” she said.  “And so strong!  When he was only four
days old, he pushed himself upright in my lap.”  She subsided into a thoughtful
silence.  “You know,” she said, squeezing her teabag with her spoon, “I envy
her.  When I held that baby in my arms, the most incredible feeling came over
me.”

“Baby hunger,” Mary said authoritatively.

“I know having a baby is out of the question for now,” she said. 
“With our crazy lifestyle, it would be an impossibility.  But it doesn’t stop
me from wishing.”

“Does Danny know how you feel?” Mary asked.

“No.  And I can’t tell him.  It would be selfish of me—”

“Selfish?  To have a wee babe to hold in your arms?”

She tried to explain.  “Danny’s so needy.  He wants so much.  And
I want for him, so bad it aches.  Until he gets what he wants, he has to come
first.”

“He’s a lucky young man.  I hope you know how extraordinary you
are, my girl.”

It was dusk when she entered her apartment to the soothing strains
of Mantovani and the mingled odors of roast beef and Lysol.  The floor had been
scrubbed, the furniture polished to a high sheen.  The table was set for two,
with twin white tapers waiting to be lit.  Danny came into the room, carrying
matching wine glasses.  He stopped when he saw her.  “Hi,” he said.

She took off her jacket slowly.  “Hi.”

He cleared his throat.  “I started dinner.”

“Where I come from, big boy, we call it supper.”

He scowled.  “Damn Yankees.”

She dropped the jacket on the back of a chair.  Softly, she said,
“I missed you dreadfully.”

“Maybe I can make it up to you,” he said, twirling a wine glass by
its stem.  “Somehow.”

“Somehow,” she echoed.

He moved a step closer.  “I slept on the same pillow cases the
whole time you were gone, because I could smell your perfume on them.”

“I slept in your old B.U. sweatshirt every night.”

He opened his arms.  “Come here,” he said.

“God help me,” she said as she walked into his arms.  “When it
comes to you, I have no shame.”

***

An hour later, she said against his bare shoulder, “If I keep
skipping meals like this, I’ll waste away to nothing.”

 “There isn’t much of you now.”  Danny shoved aside the bedding, reached
out an arm and rummaged on the night stand, returning with an article he’d torn
from the
Globe
.  “I have something I want you to read.”

She sat up in bed and read aloud.  “
’Fiore manages, through
skillful artistry, to combine the raw, pulsating vitality of a Jagger with the
silken smoothness of a Sam Cooke.’
  Wow.  Who wrote this?”

   “If I knew,” he said dryly, “I’d kiss the guy.”

   She read and re-read the clipping, then folded her arms around
her knees.  “Danny,” she said, “I’ve given this a great deal of thought.  I
think it’s time to move to New York.”

He got up from the bed and walked naked to the dresser and lit a
cigarette.  “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

“There’s only so far you can go here.  And with things up in the
air with the band, now is probably the time to make the break.”

He blew out a cloud of smoke.  “We have a real following here,” he
said.   “People know who we are.  In New York, that won’t mean shit.  I’d be
starting all over again at the bottom of the ladder.”

“You did it before,” she said.  “You can do it again.”

He spent a few minutes digesting her words.  “It’s a big
decision,” he said.  “It’ll mean breaking up the band.”

“The band’s disintegrating right in front of your eyes, Danny. 
It’s time to move on.”

“Even if it means cutting somebody else’s throat?”

“It’s not a matter of cutting anybody’s throat.  It’s a matter of
survival.  It all depends on what you want.”

His words were clean and clipped, beautiful in their simplicity. 
“I want it all.”  He crushed out his cigarette.  “The whole nine yards. 
Immortality.  I’ve been kissing asses all my life.  I want them to kiss my
ass.  I want to prove I’m more than just some bastard wop kid from Boston’s
Little Italy.”

“You are more,” she said.  “Much, much more.”

He returned to the bed, stretched out beside her.  “This is no
kind of life for you.”

She stopped him with a hand on his mouth.  “We agreed that I
belong wherever you are.  Remember?”

He kissed her fingers, one by one.  “Some day, by God, I’ll have
it all.  And when that happens, I’ll make it up to you.  I’ll make it all up to
you.”

***

Six weeks later, Danny stood before the fireplace, leaning
casually against the mantel.  Dryly, he said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I
called you all here tonight.”

“Great opening line, Fiore,” Travis said.  “Now let’s get to the
point.”

Casey shot a quick glance at Rob, who was perched on the arm of a
chair, cleaning his fingernails with a guitar pick.  He held her glance for a
few seconds, then returned to his manicure.  Danny sat down beside her and took
her hand.  “Casey and I,” he said, “have made a decision that affects us all. 
We’re moving to New York.”

Stunned silence greeted his announcement.  “We’d like to keep the
band intact,” he said, “but we recognize that your priorities may not be the
same as ours.”

“With or without you,” Casey added, “Danny and I are going.”

The silence built.  They were all looking at Danny, Travis
glaring, Pete stunned, Rob impassive, his manicure forgotten.  Danny lit a
cigarette.

“Why?” Travis demanded.  “We have a good thing going here.”

“I’ve never made any secret of my ambitions.”  Danny drew deeply
on his cigarette and exhaled slowly.  “New York has clubs, agents, record
companies.  Casey and I are convinced that this is the right move to make.”

“
Casey and I
?” Travis said.  “You’re letting my sister run
your life now?  Jesus Christ, man, if she told you to jump off the Tobin
Bridge, would you do it?”

Danny crushed out his cigarette.  “Her judgment is infallible.”

“And the Titanic was unsinkable!”

“Subtle, Bradley, but I think we have an inkling of how you feel.”

“Damn it, Danny, do you realize what you’re up against?”

“Trav, try to understand:  I didn’t pick music.  It picked me.”

“Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going along with this.  It’s the
craziest thing I ever heard.”

Danny shrugged and met Casey’s eyes.  “That’s one county heard
from.  Who wants to be next?”

Rob and Pete exchanged glances.  And Pete shook his head.  “I feel
like a rat deserting a sinking ship—”

“You’ve got it wrong, Pete.  I’m not the Titanic.  This ship isn’t
going down.”

“I’m getting married in a couple of months.  Ginger would blow a
gasket if I asked her to move to New York.”

Danny buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes, and Casey
squeezed his shoulder.  He looked back up.  “Wiz?” he said.  “Are you in or
out?”

Rob had returned to his manicure, and for the long moment in which
he didn’t answer, Casey held her breath.  Then he slipped the guitar pick into
his pocket.  “I’ve had my bags packed for a month,” he said.  And grinned.  “When
do we leave?”

***

The day she quit her job, Travis raised the roof.  “No sister of
mine,” he roared, “is going to take off in a crummy Chevy with two half-baked
assholes who think they’re musicians!”

Casey ignored him and continued packing.

“Damn it, Casey, do you have any idea how many unemployed
musicians there are sleeping on the streets of New York?”

She picked up the framed photo of Mama that she kept prominently
displayed on her bedroom dresser.  Touching a finger to the glass, she traced
Ellen Bradley’s sweet smile.  And squared her shoulders.  “I won’t end up
sleeping on the streets.”

“Oh, Jesus.”  Travis ran a bony hand through his wavy hair.  “Are
you hearing anything I’m saying?”

“Let’s turn the tables.  Are you hearing anything I’m saying?”

“To hell with you!  Rot in the gutter!  See if I give a damn!” 
And he slammed out of her apartment.

She fumed for days.  “He’ll come around,” Danny told her.  “He’s
just stubborn.”

Rob wrote her a dirty limerick to cheer her up.  Danny donated his
piano to a storefront church on Tremont Street.  Casey packed the clothes they
needed and shipped the rest to the Salvation Army.

The day before they left, she answered the door to find her
brother standing in the hall.  She greeted him coolly, not sure what to
expect.  He was gruff, not quite ready to forgive.  They spoke to the air
somewhere to the left of each other’s heads.  After a few minutes of this, he
abruptly thrust an envelope into her hands.  “Take care,” he said, “and don’t
make a damn fool of yourself.”                         

The envelope contained five hundred dollars.

Casey was stunned.  Five hundred dollars might as well have been a
million.  Intuition told her to hide it away and tell neither of the men.  If
she was the only one who knew of its existence, it wouldn’t be frittered away
on non-essentials.  When it was needed (she was somehow sure it would be when,
not if), the money would be there to fall back on.

On a cloudless morning, the three of them squeezed into the Chevy
amid guitars, clothes, sleeping bags, and assorted household items, and took
the expressway south.  Casey looked back once at the skyline dominated by the
Pru and the brand-new John Hancock tower.  And then she put the past behind her
and concentrated on the future.  With Danny at the wheel, Rob’s arm across the
back of the seat behind her, and “The Ballad of John and Yoko” on the radio,
they cranked the volume and sang their way out of Boston.

BOOK TWO

New York City

Summer, 1978

The apartment was in the Village, upstairs over Wong’s Tea House,
where the mingled odors of soy sauce, fried pork, and strong Chinese tea
drifted up the gloomy stairwell and through the open windows.  The rent was
exorbitant, the toilet ran steadily, and cockroaches roamed at night as though
they had a lifetime lease.  There was only one bedroom, so Rob slept on the
couch that Casey picked up for twenty dollars at a secondhand shop.  He got the
best of the deal, because the bedroom window was painted shut.  Casey and Danny
sweated away the summer nights, while Rob lay in semi-comfort beneath an open
window.

They pooled their money in a communal fund, with Casey as the
designated bookkeeper.  New York was not a cheap place to live.  When the first
of each month came around, Casey often had to scrape to make ends meet.  Some
months they didn’t quite meet.  At other times, when one of them had an
unexpected windfall, there was money for extras, as well as money to put away
for the next dry spell.  Casey was a quick learner.  Creative financing (also
known as robbing Peter to pay Paul) became her
modus operandi
, and the
two men, with their implicit trust in her, never questioned her judgment.  If
Casey said, “We can’t afford...” they both knew the issue was closed to further
discussion.

The one luxury she allowed was a telephone, because no working
musician could survive without a point of contact.  She bought whole-wheat
flour from the natural foods store down the street and made her own bread in
the antiquated oven that every so often belched clouds of black smoke.  Late
into the nights, they drank cheap Chianti and played their music, talked and
laughed and laid out elaborate career strategies, dreamed aloud their
impossible dreams.