"Oh, Ed, you don't know beans about Jack. You never did."

McConkey ignored this. "When I was in high school I was thumbing up 9W from Selkirk one time, and this guy gives me a lift and tries to get funny.

'You fool around?' he says. 'Hey, don't you like to fool around with the boys once in a while?' Well, hell, that guy got a split lip, that's the kind of foolin' around he got from me, I'll tell you. Big bruiser, too, he was. But I was so ticked he's lucky he didn't get worse, I'll tell you."

I said, "Couldn't you just have said, 'No, thank you'?"

McConkey looked at me as if I was a spaniel who had just peed on the rug.

"Ed, Jack didn't do that type of thing," Corrine said with an exasperated sigh. "I know, because I asked him one time, and he told me he never bothered school kids, he wasn't interested. In fact, he acted insulted that I should ask. What happened to you twenty-five years ago doesn't have anything to do with anything. Heavens, Ed!"

Shaking his head, McConkey said, "You've never been a man, Corrine, and you don't know. There's an awful lot that goes on out there that you just don't know about. You wait, the cops'll find out. It's either queers or drug pushers did it. You wait."

Her jaw tightened but she said nothing. McConkey threw up his hands and strode off toward the back of the house.

I said, "You seem to have known your brother pretty well, Mrs. McConkey.

Did you see a lot of each other?"

"Oh yes, Jack and I were close in our way too. Not like Jack and Ma, but close. Last fall, now that was real nice. Jack was over this way quite a bit helping Dad around the house, so we saw a lot of him back then. We sort of got to know each other all over again."

"I'm sorry, but I thought your father was dead."

"He is. No, that's Pa. Pa died in 1967 from an ailment. No, I meant Dad Lenihan, my grandfather, who lives a block over on Pearl Street. Jack did some cleaning and painting for Dad, and sometimes he'd stop afterwards at our place for supper. Jack quit over at Dad's, though, one day in October, and we didn't see much of him after that. But it was fun for a little while."

"I'd gotten the impression that Jack and his grandfather didn't get along. Is that not so?"

She tilted her head and let loose with a strange little half-smile. "Well, let's just say they didn't see eye to eye about a lot of things. But family is important to Jack, the way it is to Dad. They argued a lot, sure they did. The nurse who's with Dad during the day told me Jack and Dad went at it tooth and nail, and she was always surprised when Jack would show up again the next day. They got along in their fashion, I guess you could say."

"What kinds of things did they argue about?"

She smiled again, almost laughed. "Politics. Jack was a Lenihan, wasn't he?"

"It seems he was, at that. Why did Jack quit working for his grandfather in October? Did he say?"

"No, I guess they'd just had enough of each other for a while. It was around then that Jack dropped out of business school too. That was a big disappointment to all of us. Just when he seemed to be finding himself.

Jack said he didn't have the time, but I think that was just an excuse. What else did he have to do with his spare time? I think he just got in a mood. He was always like that."

"Jack's death must have hit Grandfather Lenihan hard. He's quite old, isn't he?"

"Ninety-six last month. When I told him-I had to tell him because he looks at the news on the TV-and when I went over and told Dad, he cried. He just looked out the window and cried like a baby. I never saw him do that before, even when Pa passed on. People think Dad's such a tough guy, but he's not such a toughie anymore, poor old thing."

"When did you last see Jack?"

"New Year's Day he dropped by. He watched the game with Ed for a while.

But he was in a mood and didn't have too much to say. Jack had been kind of quiet the last couple of times we saw him, as a matter of fact. Maybe he missed his friend Warren, I don't know. He and Warren were so close, and Warren had been so good for Jack, I thought. Warren is just so settled and considerate. Whatever was on Jack's mind, he didn't mention it. You know, I'm sure going to miss Jack. After all, he was my baby brother. Ed and I were never blessed, so Jack and Ma and Dad Lenihan were the only family I had left. Family's always been important to the Lenihans."

"It must be hard for you that your mother won't be able to come home for the funeral."

She forced a smile but couldn't keep it, and her chin wobbled. "Yes, if I could just-hug her. Just put my arms around Ma and hold on. That's what I keep feeling I want to do. Ma and I don't-we haven't been together since Pa passed on and Ma moved away. Ma tried to get Ed and I to move out there, but of course Ed has his ties here. And he takes good care and he doesn't go out. Ma's paying for the funeral, thank the Lord. Ed was laid off last spring out at Green Island Ford, so this hasn't been an easy year for Ed and I. I clerk out at Feigelbaums in ladies' undergarments, but you know how that is. You don't get rich slaving away for Hal and Bernice."

"Uh-huh."

"They gave me the rest of the week off with pay, though. That was real nice of them. The funeral's on Sunday."

The door bell rattled and Ed McConkey reappeared to usher in three heavily bundled elderly women bearing casserole dishes. I offered a few more lame expressions of condolence, excused myself, retrieved my mountaineering outfit from the hall radiator, and burned my fingers on the hot zipper. I went back and asked which house on Pearl was Dad Lenihan's and Corrine described it. "He won't let you in though," she said. "Dad's kind of crabby with people he doesn't know. To tell you the truth, he's kind of crabby with everybody. I guess it's all his aches and pains makes him that way. And now with Jack passing on, Dad's weaker than ever, poor old thing."

Pug Lenihan's place was a small 1920s brown brick bungalow across from the deserted Immaculate Conception School. The Lenihan homestead had a brightly painted front porch and looked well kept up. Parked in the narrow driveway was a maroon Pontiac Firebird, which I supposed belonged to Pug's nurse. I paused for a few seconds on the well-plowed street-Pearl was almost completely snowless here-then drove back toward the interstate.

My visit to the North End seemed not to have been illuminating, except in a general way, and I guessed I'd visit the neighborhood again once I figured out which questions to ask, and which house to ask them in. I now knew for certain only that something had happened to Jack Lenihan in October that had changed his life and three months later had ended it.

SEVEN

The landscape along I-90 was an eye-aching white under the January ice ball of a sun, but as I drove west through gray slush, the traffic charging up and down the roadway around me was filthy. I could sense the road salt eating away at my axle beam and remembered a newspaper story about a man tooling along at sixty when the driver's seat dropped out the bottom of his '71 Honda. Eyewitnesses were said to have screamed, then laughed, then screamed again. I held on to the steering wheel hard.

From the Northway I headed east on Albany-Shaker Road and made my way past the new residential developments that catered to a mix of yuppies and retirees from the state bureaucracies who'd opted for the high rentals and maintenance fees out in nature's neatly bulldozed bosom, where they hoped to find a life of quietude and cleanliness, not that I didn't know people who lived noisily and dirtily in the suburbs.