Inside the O'Briens (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

I
t's a cool Sunday morning, and Joe is walking the dog while Rosie is at church. He used to go with her and the kids whenever he had off, but after Katie received her confirmation, that was the end of it. Now only Rosie goes, and she's disgusted with the whole pathetic, sinful lot of them. A big fan of tradition, an unfortunate quality for someone who only gets a full weekend off every seven and a half weeks and hasn't seen Christmas morning with his family in six years, Joe will still attend Mass on Christmas Eve and Easter when he can, but he's done with the weekly sacrament.

It's not that he doesn't believe in God. Heaven and hell. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Shame still guides many of his daily decisions.
God can see you. God can hear what you're thinking. God loves you, but if you fuck up, you're gonna burn in hell.
The nuns spent his entire youth hammering those paranoid beliefs through his thick skull, right between the eyes. It's all still rattling around in there with no way out.

But God must know that Joe's a good man. And if He doesn't, then one hour once a week spent kneeling, sitting, and standing in St. Francis Church ain't going to save Joe's immortal soul now.

While he'll still put his money on God, it's the Catholic Church as an institution that he's lost faith in. Too many priests diddling too many little boys; too many bishops and
cardinals and even the Pope covering up the whole disgraceful mess. And Joe's no feminist, but they don't do right by women, if you ask him. No birth control, for one thing. Come on, is this really a mandate from Jesus? If Rosie wasn't on the pill, they'd probably have a dozen kids by now, and she'd have at least one foot in the grave. God bless modern medicine.

That's why they have a dog. After Katie, he told Rosie no more. Four is enough. Rosie got pregnant with JJ the summer after they graduated from high school (they were lucky pulling out worked as long as it did), so they had a shotgun wedding and a baby before they turned nineteen. JJ and Patrick were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Meghan arrived fifteen months after Patrick, and Katie came screaming into this world eighteen months after Meghan.

As the kids got older and went to school, life got easier, but those early years were ugly. He remembers giving Rosie many unreciprocated kisses good-bye, leaving her home alone with four kids under the age of five, three of them still in diapers, grateful to have a legitimate reason to get the hell out of there, but he worried every day that she might not make it to the end of his shift. He actually imagined her doing something dreadful, his experience on the job or stories of what his fellow officers had seen fueling his worst fears. Regular people end up doing some crazy shit when pushed to their limits. Rosie probably didn't get a full night's sleep for a decade, and their kids were a handful. It's a miracle they're all still alive.

Rosie wasn't on board at first with the Infield Plan, as Joe called it. Insanely, she wanted more babies. She wanted to add at least a pitcher and a catcher to the O'Brien roster. She's the youngest of seven kids, the only girl, and even though she hardly ever sees her brothers now, she likes being from a big family.

But Joe made his decision, and that was that. He wasn't budging, and for the first time in his life, he actually refused
to have sex until she agreed with him. That was a tense three months. He had been prepared to take care of business in the shower indefinitely when he noticed a flat, circular container on his pillow. Inside, he found a ring of pills, a week's worth already punched out. Against God's will, Rosie ended their cold war. He couldn't take her clothes off fast enough.

But if she couldn't have any more babies, she wanted a dog. Fair enough. She came home from the animal shelter with a shih tzu. He still thinks she did that just to spite him, her way of getting in the last word. Joe's a Boston cop, for cripes sake. He should be the proud owner of a Labrador or a Bernese mountain dog or an Akita. He agreed to getting a dog, a real dog, not a prissy little rat. He was not pleased.

Rosie named him Yaz, which at least made the mutt tolerable. Joe used to hate walking Yaz alone, out in public together. Made him feel like a pussy. But at some point he got over it. Yaz is a good dog, and Joe is man enough to be seen out in Charlestown walking a shih tzu. As long as Rosie doesn't dress the pooch in one of those friggin' sweaters.

He likes walking through Town when he's off duty. Even though everyone here knows he's a cop, and he's carrying his gun concealed beneath his untucked shirt, he feels unburdened when he's not wearing his tough police persona along with the uniform and badge that make him a visible target. He's always a cop, but off duty, he's also just a regular guy walking his dog in his neighborhood. And that feels good.

Everyone here calls the place Town, but Charlestown isn't really a town, or a city for that matter. It's a neighborhood of Boston, and a small one at that, only one square mile of land tucked between the Charles and Mystic Rivers. But, as any Irishman will tell you about his manhood, what it lacks in size, it makes up for in personality.

The Charlestown Joe grew up in was unofficially divided into two neighborhoods. The Bottom of the Hill was where
the poor Irish lived, and the Top of the Hill, up by St. Francis Church, was home to the Lace Curtain Irish. People at the Top of the Hill could be just as poor as the bastards at the Bottom, and in most cases they probably were, but the perception was that they were better off. People here still think that.

There were also a few black families in the projects and some Italians who spilled over from the North End, but other­wise Charlestown was a homogenous hill of working-class Micks and their families living in tight rows of colonial and triple-decker houses. The Townies. And every Townie knew everyone in Town. If Joe was ever doing anything out of line as a kid, which was often, he'd hear somebody yelling from a stoop or open window,
Joseph O'Brien! I see you, and I know your mother!
People didn't have to involve the police back then. Kids feared their parents more than they did the authorities. Joe feared his mother more than anyone.

Twenty years ago, Charlestown was all Townies. But the place has changed a lot in recent years. Joe and Yaz plod up the hill, up Cordis Street, and it's as if they've turned the corner and stepped into another zip code. The town houses on this street have all been refurbished. They're either brick or painted in a glossy palette of approved historical colors. The doors are new, the windows have been replaced, neat rows of flowers bloom in copper window boxes, and the sidewalks are dotted with charming gas lamps. He checks out the make of each parked car as he presses on up the steep hill—Mercedes, BMW, Volvo. It's like Beacon Fuckin' Hill here.

Welcome to the Invasion of the Toonies. He doesn't blame them for coming. Charlestown is perfectly situated—on the water, a quick hop over the Zakim Bridge to downtown Boston, the Tobin Bridge to the north of the city, the tunnel to the South Shore, a quaint ferry ride to Faneuil Hall. So they started coming, with their fancy corporate jobs and their fat wallets, buying up the real estate and classing up the joint.

But the Toonies don't typically stay. When they first come, most of them are DINKs—Double Income, No Kids. Then, in a couple of years, they might have a baby, maybe one more to balance things out. When the oldest is ready for kindergarten, that's when they leave for the suburbs.

So it's all temporary from the start, and they don't care about where they live as much as people do when they know they're staying until they get put in a box. The Toonies don't volunteer at the Y or coach the Little League teams, and most of them are Presbyterian or Unitarian or vegetarian or whatever friggin' wacky thing they are, and so they don't support the Catholic churches here, which is why St. Catherine's closed. They don't really become part of the community.

But the bigger problem is the Toonies have made Charlestown desirable to outsiders, and they've bloated the housing market. A person has to be rich to live in Charlestown now. Townies are a lot of great things, but unless they've robbed a bank, none of them are rich.

Joe is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. His grand­father, Patrick Xavier O'Brien, came over from Ireland in 1936 and worked in the Navy Yard as a longshoreman, supporting a family of ten on forty dollars a week. Joe's father, Francis, also worked in the Navy Yard, earning a hard but respectable living repairing ships. Joe's not breaking the bank on a cop's salary, but they get by. They've never felt poor here. Most of the next-generation Townies, however, no matter what they do for work, will never be able to afford to live here. It's a real shame.

He passes a
FOR SALE
sign in front of a freestanding colonial, one of the rare few with a courtyard, and tries to guess the outrageous listing price. Joe's father bought their house, a triple-decker at the Bottom of the Hill, in 1963 for ten grand. A similar triple-decker two streets over from Joe and Rosie sold last week for a cool million. Every time he thinks about that, it blows his friggin' mind. Sometimes he and Rosie talk about
selling their place, a giddy, fantastical conversation that sounds a lot like imagining what they'd do if they won the lottery.

Joe would get a new car. A black Porsche. Rosie doesn't drive, but she'd get new clothes and shoes and some real jewelry.

But where would they live? They wouldn't move to some monstrous house in the suburbs with lots of land. He'd have to get a lawn mower. Rosie's brothers all live in rural towns at least forty-five minutes outside of Boston and seem to spend every weekend weeding and mulching and doing something labor-intensive to grass. Who wants that? And he'd have to leave the Boston Police Department if they moved to a suburb. That ain't happening. And realistically, he can't drive that kind of car around here. Talk about being a target. So he really wouldn't get the car, and Rosie is fine with her fake diamonds. Who wants to worry about lost or stolen jewelry? So although the conversation starts out heady, it always loops into a big circle that lands them firmly right back where they are. They both love it here, and for all the money in the world wouldn't live anywhere else. Not even Southie.

They're lucky to have inherited the triple-decker. When Joe's father died nine years ago, he left the house to Joe and Joe's only sibling, his sister, Maggie. It took some serious detective work to track Maggie down. Always Joe's opposite, she made it her mission to leave Charlestown immediately after high school and never returned. He found her living in Southern California, divorced, no kids, and wanting nothing to do with the house. Joe understands.

He and Rosie live on the first floor, and twenty-three-year-old Patrick still lives with them. Their other son, JJ, and his wife, Colleen, live on the second floor. Katie and Meghan are roommates on the third floor. Everyone but Patrick pays Joe and Rosie rent, but it's minimal, way below market value, just something to keep them all responsible. And it helps pay off
the mortgage. They had to refinance a couple of times to put all four kids through parochial school. That was a huge nut, but there was no way in hell his kids were getting bused to Dorchester or Roxbury.

Joe turns the corner and decides to cut through Doherty Park. Charlestown is quiet at this sleepy hour on a Sunday morning. Clougherty Pool is closed. The basketball courts are empty. The kids are all either in church or still in bed. Other than an occasional passing car, the only sounds are the jingling of Yaz's tags and the change in Joe's front pocket playing together like a song.

As expected, he finds eighty-three-year-old Michael Murphy sitting on the far bench in the shade. He's got his cane and his brown bag of stale bread for the birds. He sits there all day, every day, except for when the weather is particularly lousy, and watches over things. He's seen it all.

“How are ya today, Mayor?” asks Joe.

Everyone calls Murphy Mayor.

“Better than most women deserve,” says Murphy.

“So true,” chuckles Joe, even though this is Mayor's verbatim reply to this same question about every third time Joe asks.

“How's the First Lady?” asks Murphy.

Murphy calls Joe Mr. President. The nickname began ages ago as Mr. Kennedy, a reference to Joe and Rose, and then at some point it morphed, skipping from father to son, defying actual US political history, and Mr. Joseph Kennedy became Mr. President. And that, of course, makes Rosie the First Lady.

“Good. She's at church praying for me.”

“Gonna be there a long time, then.”

“Yup. Have a good one, Mayor.”

Joe continues along the path, taking in the distant view from this hill of the industrial silos and the Everett shipyard on the other side of the Mystic River. Most people would say the view is nothing special and might even think it's an eye
sore. He'll probably never find a painter parked on this spot with an easel, but Joe sees a kind of urban beauty here.