All Souls (23 page)

Frankie and Kevin got into fights over Kevin's criminal enterprises, which always seemed to get Frankie into the mix. Frankie gave him a beating when he found out that Kevin had used his name again after being arrested, and then skipped bail. In the end, though, they always made up and were the best of friends.

Kevin started to go to the Rathskeller downtown, where Frankie along with some of the other boxers and some of the boys were working as bouncers. They were big and tough looking, and good for keeping the college students and punk rock types in line. Frank's corner man, Pole Cat Moore, worked at the Rat, and introduced Frankie to Ricky Marino, an ex-state trooper, who became Frankie's best friend. Then there was Kevin “Andre the Giant” McDonald, not to be confused with my brother Kevin “Mini Mac” MacDonald. He was a Southie champion too. Ricky and Paul Moore were pretty high up in what the papers in later years would call the “Southie underworld.” But Frankie knew his little brother wasn't going to get involved in their plans, no matter how much he wanted to. They were too high up to be bothered with Kevin, who despite his involvement in some of the big stuff was still just a kid to guys like these. They also had a position to maintain, and weren't about to bring someone with Kevin's potential into their rackets.

My brother Joe would go to the Rat too, whenever he was on leave from the Air Force. Joe told Ma it was weird how Frankie's friends pulled each other aside when they were “talking business.” We all knew Joe was the tattletale in our family—he told Ma everything—and the boys must have sensed this too. But one night at the Rat, he did overhear Pole Cat Moore telling Ricky that he'd be getting his cocaine directly through Whitey's Colombian connections, rather than going through Ricky. Pole Cat had a job with the Boston Housing Authority, and an apartment with his brother, right next to ours on 8 Patterson Way. Pole Cat never touched the stuff. He was too into his body, coming and going from our building with a gym bag and a clean white towel around his neck. But he was starting to make a killing on the coke, by the looks of the number of kids knocking on his door day and night. Joe said he would know if Frankie was into that stuff, though, and that Frankie had never been involved in Pole Cat's huddled conversations with Ricky at the Rat.

Then I started showing up at the back door of the Rat most nights. Ever since I was fifteen I'd gone there to see bands. Frankie's friends knew who I was, and snuck me downstairs through the piss-puddled hallways, to where the bands played. Frankie snuck me in too, but he didn't know I was there on weeknights, and I told his friends to keep it quiet. I hadn't returned to Latin School since Kathy's coma. They'd tried to make a deal with me that I could be promoted, despite all my absences, if I left Latin and went to Madison Park High School in Roxbury. “Yeah, right,” I said, “and be the only white kid in the class.”

Latin had been my only escape from the busing, and now I felt guilty for messing it up. I couldn't believe I was a high school dropout. I'd always been the straight-A student Ma bragged about, along with Johnnie, and Davey. For a while I was still pretending to go to school, even after Kathy was out of the coma. I'd wander around Boston all day, freezing at bus stops when I didn't have money for the three-hour-long coffee refills at Mug and Muffin, trying to stay awake after a night at the Rat. Ma eventually found a letter I'd written to myself about my guilt for being a dropout, and she was bullshit that I had pulled one over on her. She confronted me about it and said I'd have to go right to work the next day. She too knew high school in Roxbury wasn't an option. That's when I switched from pretending to go out to school every day to pretending to go out looking for a job. I was still freezing at bus stops, or getting warm at Mug and Muffin; and I still snuck out of the house at night to go to the Rat.

I had my own group of friends at the Rat. While Frankie, Pole Cat, Andre the Giant, and the rest of the gang hung out upstairs, I was down in the basement with misfits from all walks of life. Some were working-class kids, others were suburban white-picket-fence types, and others were rich. “What's a trust fund?” I remember asking. “Ah, man, it's nothing—just 'cause my dad's rich doesn't mean I am. I gotta wait on it. Got a dollar for a beer, dude?” But wherever these people came from, they didn't like it. I'd always preferred black music—soul, then disco, and now hip-hop and rap. The words made more sense to me. But I also liked the energy and rage of punk rock; I just couldn't relate to the lyrics about life in the suburbs, and having strict parents. Then I discovered the original version of punk, from England. I'd never thought about the fact that there were poor and working-class English people who hated the Queen, and her mother, and the whole British establishment. I could get into that. This was a movement of people who didn't fit in where they came from, and they'd made that cool. I could get into that too.

Punk music became an escape for me, but I still had to come back to Old Colony every night. I often hitched a ride with Frankie's friends, the whole way home not knowing what to say to men as powerful as “the boys.” Other times I had punk rockers drop me off on the outskirts of Southie, so they wouldn't see that I lived in the project, or accuse me of being a racist for living in my neighborhood. But I was protecting them too; I didn't want them to get bottles thrown at them for being different in Southie.

Even with all our bad luck over the years, Johnnie was a lieutenant in the Navy Seals now, Mary was becoming a nurse so she could save some money and move from her project apartment, and Joe was in the Air Force. They were “getting out.” That was what people in Old Colony said in hushed tones when they didn't want anyone to hear them suggesting the neighborhood was a bad environment. And Frankie too was hoping to “get out,” making his way, earning honest money, and thinking about becoming a pro boxer.

And then suddenly even Kevin seemed to go straight. He'd been dating a girl named Laura, a rich girl from Wayland who was sometimes dropped off in Old Colony in a limousine. Ma said Laura was “slumming it,” hanging out in Old Colony and getting in on Kevin's scams, like the time she helped him claim a back injury by walking ahead of him in a supermarket aisle, pouring liquid detergent for him to slip on. Instead the supermarket had to pay for Kevin's front teeth, which he hadn't planned on losing in the fall. Laura's father was a lawyer in the financial district, “forty-two men under him,” Ma said, and her grandfather sat on a fortune from a popular brand of tennis clothes. Her father didn't like Laura dating Kevin, and Kevin said it was because he was from the project, and because he wasn't Jewish. And that was before Laura's father found out Kevin was a criminal by trade. But by then Laura was pregnant, and the two of them were getting married. None of us knew of the wedding. They just got married one day, and when Ma asked about it, Kevin told her only that Whitey Bulger had been his best man.

Kevin was twenty-one and Laura two years younger when their daughter, Katie, was born in the spring of 1984. That's when Kevin's life of crime ended, and the three of them moved into Laura's condo on Newbury Street, an “uppity” section of downtown, as Kevin used to call it. He got used to it, though. Kevin even looked different, when I'd bump into him walking through the Public Garden, carrying his baby girl in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. He was getting chubby, so I didn't always recognize him before he called over to me. All he talked about was how beautiful his “wittle wittle mosquito” was. I was so stunned I didn't know what to say back to him. But I was glad he was going straight.

But the brightest hope of all now was Frankie, who was a neighborhood star, being looked at by boxing manager Lou Duva, who managed Evander Holyfield. Frankie wasn't sure if he wanted to go pro, though. He talked to Ma about it, just like he talked to her about almost everything. Ma and Frankie were more like best friends than mother and son. We all knew Frankie was Ma's favorite, but no one seemed jealous about that. It was just accepted; “two peas in a pod” is what Ma herself called their relationship. Frankie was solid, a foundation everyone felt anchored to. And Ma loved Frankie for that.

Frankie had gotten a flashy new Lincoln Continental, the size of a boat, from working in the Carpenters Union, working nights at the Rat, and saving his money. He spent any free time he had piling Seamus and Stevie and all their friends into his car—which they called a limo—for ice cream at Frosty Village, or taking Kathy to her physical therapy appointments, or kidnapping me on Dorchester Street on my way out of Southie, to lock me up in his room and make me punch the heavy bag hanging lopsided from his ceiling. And he drove Ma everywhere, taking her slowly down Broadway, waving to admiring kids, and stopping to talk to men-about-town like Pole Cat Moore. “Hey Ma, you wanna go to the graves?” Frankie would offer to take Ma to breakfast, and then to visit Patrick and Davey at the cemetery. They were buried all the way across Boston, at St. Joseph's in West Roxbury, nearly impossible for Ma to get to before Frankie bought his Lincoln.

But Frankie wanted to give even more to Ma—and to Seamus and Stevie, who loved sleeping over at his apartment, and bragging to their friends the next day about how much weight their boxing hero could bench press, or what he ate for breakfast. Frank told Ma about his plans to take the little kids to Disney World, a dream most of us growing up had never even bothered fantasizing about when we saw the ads on TV. One day Frankie took Ma to Mary Kelly's house in the suburbs. Ma loved showing off her greatest joy, her son the champion boxer, handsome, built, and driving a Lincoln Continental. Sitting at the picnic table in our cousins' yard, Frank drifted away from the sisters' conversation, and came back saying, “Hey Ma, wouldn't it be nice to have a place like this some day, once I get some money? A house with a yard?” Ma just brushed the comment off, saying in front of her sister that Old Colony Project was the best place in the world, with the beach nearby, and parks, and plenty of things for the kids to do.

It was driving back from that trip that Frankie told Ma he'd had a dream. They both thought they were psychic, and Ma paid close attention to dreams. Frankie said he'd dreamed of the whole family at the cemetery for another burial. Ma told Frankie then that just a week earlier, a crow had come through our window, and had flown through the house before crashing into Ma's head and flying back out the same window. “I'll tell you, it knocked me for a loop,” Ma said. She said she lay down then and slept for hours. The Irish have this thing about birds inside houses; when I was little I couldn't bring in even a picture of one. Once I gave Ma a glass bird to hang on our silver disco Christmas tree, and she threw it into the trash, saying it was bad luck. Ma thought for sure after the big black bird invaded our home, that someone would die, and in the car that day she and Frankie both hoped that it would be Grandpa. “That old bastard has lived a good long life now,” Ma said. “Christ, I hope I don't live to be as old as that.” They both laughed and drove down Broadway as Frank waved to more admiring eyes.

July 17th was Ma's birthday, which she never wanted us to celebrate because she hated to think she was getting older. She was turning fifty in 1984, but she still told everyone that she was having a hard time turning forty. She put out the TV after watching the eleven o'clock news report of an armored car heist in Medford that had left one dead. The robber was unidentified. He had burned off his fingerprints with acid prior to the robbery, to prevent identification.

The next day Mary came over with Seamus and Steven after keeping them overnight to play with her own two kids. She had already told them the news, and they were both crying. Now Mary had to tell Ma. Ma saw the little kids crying and just looked at Mary. “It's Frankie,” Mary said. “He was killed yesterday.” Ma collapsed on the floor. Frankie was twenty-four years old.

The lines went around the block and up the hill, to Jackie O'Brien's Funeral Parlor. Of all Southie's wakes, this was the most people I'd ever seen come to pay respects, and I was proud to be from a neighborhood that cared so much about my brother. But I still wasn't going to believe Frankie was in that casket until I saw him, even though his body had been identified, and even though I'd seen Kevin at the house with baby Katie since the death. At first I was sure that it must have been Kevin who'd been killed robbing the Wells Fargo armored car. Frankie? Robbing a bank truck? Kevin maybe, but not Frank. I didn't want Kevin to have been the one shot down in the afternoon ambush; I just wanted to know the truth. Now I knew Kevin was alive, but I still wanted to see if it was Frankie in the casket. I know Ma was thinking the same thing, and that's why she fell apart when she finally saw her favorite son, the shell of her favorite son, laid out with his huge boxing fists folded and wrapped in Rosary beads. Ma knocked over the people in her way to climb on top of the casket, and she put her arms around Frankie's neck, pulling him up and out of the box. It took Johnnie and four muscled gangsters to tear Ma away from her Frankie. The casket wheeled a few feet, with the strength of Ma's grip. The O'Briens had to send everyone into the other room so that they could reassemble Frank's limbs and straighten out the purple satin robe he was being buried in.

Before the wake, Kevin had run around making the arrangements for Frankie, and everyone agreed that he should be buried in his Golden Gloves championship robe. The rest was the usual for Southie's buried children: Rosary beads, Irish flags, and shamrock trinkets collected from the annual St. Paddy's Day parade. But Frankie's purple robe made him look like royalty. Grandpa didn't get it, though. In a room packed to capacity with people telling stories about Frankie's boxing matches, and reenacting them with slow motion blows to the air, Grandpa walked up to Frankie's body and held his hand. The room got quieter. Grandpa turned around and said to himself, in the loudest of Irish whispers, “That's an awful fuckin' shame! A handsome man like that being buried in an old bathrobe.” Ma cracked up laughing then. The whole family did. Later that night Grandpa said to Ma, “I only wish I'd known him better.”