Memorial Bridge (14 page)

But Cass announced with pride then, "My grandmother was one of the canary ladies."

"What?"

"The women who kept the canaries."

"I don't follow you."

"I thought you said you knew."

"Maybe you'd better tell me."

"The place was dubbed Canaryville because so many women that close to the rail links raised canaries in their homes."

"When was this?"

"My grandmother's day, turn of the century. They sold them to the B-and-O railroad men whose lines took them down to West Virginia and Pennsylvania where the coal mines are." Cass could tell from Dillon's expression that he'd never heard this before, so she went on with energy. "The miners took the canaries into the tunnels with them because canaries stop singing when the oxygen gets low, and the miners know they have to get out."

"The canaries die."

"That's right. Maybe that's why they don't use them anymore. They haven't in years. But we still live in 'Canaryville.'"

He'd taken her for such a knowing girl that this display of naïveté charmed him. Did she really believe miners would stop using canaries because their function killed them? Did she really believe, for that matter, that Canaryville had taken its name from such a poignant cottage industry? He liked her and showed it when he said, "It's a sweet, melancholy story."

"It's true! I've seen pictures of my grandmother by her cages!"

Dillon laughed. "Now those I know about, the cages."

"Well, why do
you
think it's called Canaryville?" She stopped walking and waited for him to stop too. A new, high-toned pleasantness had bloomed between them.

Dillon knew better than to spoil it by offering his far cruder—and, to him, truer—explanation. Seeds in manure was for the blottos in Doran's, who loved to emphasize that the shit eaters were English. He answered lightly, with the first other thing that came to mind. "I thought it must have been Capone or Dillinger or someone. Don't the hoods use the word 'canary'? Of course, when they do, they mean rat."

Cass's face darkened, a sudden shift in mood, which Dillon regretted. She said, "They would say that's what you are."

"Except they never heard of me."

"They will now."

He shrugged. "Another reason to blow Canaryville. I shouldn't have
gone back once I started coming up here for those bottles. You were smart."

"But you're the one who's been going to school all this time."

"Just another way of collecting bottles."

"But how did you do it? You've been working at the yards all this time? And you made it to law school?"

Dillon resumed walking. She was asking where he'd gone to college, what had qualified him for Loyola. And he did not want to tell her.

Cass followed, perplexed that he'd hopped away like a skittish cat.

It was Dillon who stopped again. He would not treat the largest part of his own biography as shameful, even if everyone else who knew him did. He said, "I did my undergraduate studies in theology and philosophy at a place called Quigley."

Cass looked at him blankly.

"That's the seminary."

"I know it is."

"I was studying to be a priest. The Church gave me my entire education; it's why I have one. At the last minute, just before my vows, I quit." He waited for her to flinch or blush or look away. But she did none of those things. "I got my job at the stockyards, and started at Loyola the next year."

Cass smiled. "And you've been collecting bottles ever since."

Dillon nearly blurted out, You mean you're not shocked?

She touched his arm. "I used to think I would be a Sister when I grew up." She felt closer to him than she had before, the generosity his story implied, and also the suffering. Her eyes glinted when she added, "But then I realized I
was
grown up. I mean, I am."

"You are."

Now, because of the affection she saw in him, affection for her, she did blush. "What next? You're almost finished, aren't you?"

"I'll take the bar. But there are still no jobs, not even for lawyers." His mind flew for an instant to what the dean had promised, the interview with Lambert, Rowe.

Would he call himself John? Well, hell, maybe he should.

He turned from her and stared back at the wall of downtown buildings. The nearest was the pyramid-roofed Drake Tower, where he had thought to take this woman dancing, only he couldn't dance, he couldn't pay the cover.

In his face, as he looked back at the city, Cass saw the hint of the ache that made her want to understand him. All that he'd been through, all that he had done and failed to do—but what Cass saw was an image of him as a young boy collecting bottles here and wanting only, as she had herself, to be close to God.

She had hardly given a thought to his situation, so full of her own grief had she been. It shocked her to see only now what this man was doing for her. "And your chances of getting a job are even worse, aren't they?"

"What do you mean?"

"As a lawyer. That list of Buckley's 'Special Friends.' They're the people who hire lawyers in Chicago."

It was true, of course. Not even Swift's would hire a man who'd made enemies of Kelly and Nash. Dillon was as capable of feeling the job-panic as anyone, and it amazed him now to realize how unprotective of his future he had been. What he wanted to protect was this woman.

Touching her arm, he turned her back toward the city, to walk. "I can always collect bottles."

"Are you really so unafraid?"

He did not know what to say. They continued to walk, Sean holding her arm. As man and woman, they had no training in speech of this kind. But Cass had broken the silence even as it had begun to flow back toward them. He was unprepared to feel this connection, a connection of common history and of wanting to break out of it.

"I am afraid," he said finally, "but not in any way that presents me with decisions. I'm not afraid of a man like Buckley. And I'm not afraid of losing a job I haven't been offered yet."

"So?"

Dillon laughed. "You want me to say what I am afraid of?"

She laughed too. It did seem ridiculous, as if they were school chums daring each other into some display of intimacy. But she had the sense also of standing with him on the edge of a very real taboo. In moving into an active assault against Buckley, they were violating the rule of their kind: at work and on the street and even in church, the message was, Suffer in silence.

But it was more than what they'd just begun with Buckley. They were close to some violation with each other too, something personal.

"I'm afraid of the water," Dillon said as he grabbed her hand and
forced her into a run with him. At first it took a great effort, running through the sand. Cass pulled her hand free—to refuse his impulse, he thought. But she stooped quickly and removed her shoes, then took hold again, and they were off, heading for the gentle surf. He hadn't run like that in years, and soon it was as if they had left the ground together.

Running hand in hand, with the same wind in their faces, the same sand springing beneath them—it was a purgation, a ritual action dividing the first phase of their relationship, when a focus on who they were to each other was out of place, from the second, when nothing else would be as important. No wonder gravity fell away! No wonder it felt like flying!

At the water Dillon stopped, but Cass, letting go of him and veering away, kept running along the shallows, soaking her stockings, splashing the hem of her dress. Dillon was aware all at once of how much farther into the moment she had gone. He was still in his damn shoes. He was still dry.

She came back laughing. "You are afraid of water?"

"I never learned to swim."

The simple admission jolted Cass. She heard it for the preamble it was. She stopped laughing.

"I was out there on a boat once, a measly rowboat. My friend"—Sean stared out at the very spot—"my friend stood up and the boat tilted. He fell out. I tried to pull him back into the boat. Then I fell out. I thought we both would drown."

"But you didn't."

"No." Dillon had never described that event to anyone, not even his mother. His friend and he had not mentioned it again. "We hung on to the boat until somebody came along. We didn't drown because it wasn't that dangerous. But you asked me what I am afraid of. You're standing in it."

Cass looked down at her feet. "Oh, my..." She stepped out of the water, wringing her hem with her free hand. She looked up at him. "Are you afraid of drowning, or only of getting wet?"

She meant nothing by the question, but its relevance slapped him. Despite appearances, he
was
getting wet, with her. He did not answer.

The sudden gravity of his silence drew her. She straightened again, aware that, after all, he had something more to say.

"Back there at Loyola, I listened to the priest and the cop tell you they were sorry about your uncle. I realized I had yet to tell you that I am
sorry too. I sensed how important he was to you." His words hung in the bright air between them. The breeze flapped Dillon's tie up into his face. He caught it and buttoned his jacket.

Cass caught her breath, to be back to that. "He'd become my father to me, my second father. Now I've lost him too."

"I know what you mean. That is, I ... I wanted to tell you how, about a hundred years ago when I was maybe ten—it was the same summer I was out here in that boat—I came home and found the breakfast dishes still in the sink. My mother wasn't there. My sister told me she was at the trolley shed on Archer Avenue where my father worked. I ran there. I found my mother sitting on the step of the shed's main door, dry-eyed, stunned-looking. Before I could ask what had happened, she told me to get home and watch my sister. I asked her what had happened. She wouldn't answer me."

"What was it?"

"My father had gone to work sick. He took a nap in the shade of one of the idle trolley cars. He was asleep when some other driver got in to move it, not knowing my father was underneath." Dillon looked sharply away. His eyes went to the skyline, the Drake, the huge Palmolive Building topped by the Lindbergh Light.

When Cass touched his arm, it seemed she could feel the blood pulsing through the sleeve of his coat.

"I never saw him again. I never saw the ... remains." He looked back at her. "I think that's why I felt ... Maybe I sensed your uncle was someone's Pa, and I could do for him what I never got to do for my own. I don't know." Dillon closed his eyes.

Cass could have touched his chest, which moved, just perceptibly, as he breathed. He seemed the very soul of self-possession to her. She said quietly, "I wondered why you are with me in this."

"Now you know, and now I know too."

Sean put his hand on her shoulder, pressed it lightly, the most natural thing in the world, a chaste communion. If they had broken something, it was no taboo, but the habit—the false taboo of their kind—of solitude.

"You are a good man, Sean," she said. He did not answer.

They stood like that, in the wind, at the edge of the lake, her feet wet, his not, the weight of the city accumulating against them.

***

After walking Cass Ryan to the Switchboards Building, Dillon set off for the stockyards, intending to work the rest of his shift. Not that he thought he could slip back into his old routine, but he had yet to imagine an alternative to it. His long-standing fallback plan to stay on at Swift's remained in place, the beam of his ambition, even if he had sawed half through it. For now that meant donning his overalls, holding Hanley's tools, breathing through clenched teeth; the years had given him nothing if not will.

The South Side El was uncrowded in the middle of the day, yet its run out of the Loop, past Soldier Field and the fairgrounds, down to Archer, seemed to take forever. Approaching his own district, Dillon couldn't help but see the rickety wooden rear balconies of the tenements lining the tracks as the slatwork, yes, of cages. He felt like a pigeon compulsively heading home—pigeon, canary, sparrow, rat—without a thought as to whether it was where he wanted to go. When he saw the great, familiar billboard, "We Feed The World," he imagined those scrawny brown birds, a wing of them, darkening the sky, swarming down on the dried crusty piles overflowing the collection pens.

He laughed at what Cass had said. He had seen the "canaries" with his own eyes, would see them this afternoon. They were the opposite of the martyr birds whose memory the martyr women of St. Gabriel's revered. He chastised himself for the rush of disdain he felt, as if the extremes represented by Cass's story and his weren't the limits of the world to which
he
was born; as if its people were only either scavengers or victims. What about St. Bede's sparrow?

Dillon's mind went at last to Dr. Riley.
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
He felt a pang that the blunt, avenging weapon he and Cass had raised above Raymond Buckley—how bold of them!—was the timid, wet-eyed Riley himself.

He checked his watch. It would add less than half an hour to his tardiness—tardiness again!—to go to the yards dispensary first, to put a firm hand on the man's shoulder. Dr. Riley, more than any of them now, was the sparrow. And if he was the sparrow—Dillon wished for a way to say this to him—he was soaring.

The dispensary was housed in a low, one-story whitewashed building behind the looming fertilizer factory. A pair of brick smokestacks towered over the medical hut, spewing gas. As Dillon went through the flimsy glass-paneled door into the clinic itself, the stench of an am
monia-based disinfectant hit him. But it smelled sweet compared to the air outside.

A man in a black rubber butcher's apron and knee boots was sitting on one of the benches in the hallway, cradling one arm in the other. Blood showed through the heavy gauze bandage below his elbow. Dillon caught the poor bastard's eye and nodded as he passed. The nurse was behind a table near a door that led to the examining room, but she was fingering through a drawer of folders. Dillon went by without her seeing him.

Dr. Riley was alone in the room at a small metal desk in the corner. He was bent over a sheaf of forms, pen in hand. One wall was lined with shelves holding various-sized bottles, cartons and packed bandages. On another was a pair of charts, one showing the entire human anatomy, the other a page of text labeled "Eight Kinds of First Aid That You Can Do."