Summit (15 page)

"Look, Dad, it says this guy signed the Declaration of Independence!"

"Awesome!" Bill Sullivan glanced at the gravestone, but all he really wanted to do was look at his son, standing next to him in the Old Granary Burial Ground.

"Dad, how much of a dead body is left after it's been buried for a couple hundred years?"

"Not very much, I think. Depends on if you have an airtight casket, I suppose. But I guess they didn't have them back then anyway."

"I guess not."

They moved on to another grave.

Maureen could veto New York, but she couldn't really object to Boston. Boston had more history in it than a dozen New Yorks—and it had Danny's grandmother, as well. So that's where Sullivan took his son on vacation.

Vacations weren't often enough to see your only son, and that's why Sullivan stared so hard at him as they wandered through the cemetery with all the other tourists; the memories would have to suffice during a dozen long-distance calls. Danny had grown, of course, but what fascinated Sullivan was the way his features seemed to change while staying recognizably the same. At Christmas Danny had looked like his mother, with his blond hair and blue eyes and big ears. Now the Sullivan genes seemed to be asserting themselves—the hair was darker, the nose was thinner, and the ears approached normality, thank God. He was deeply tanned from the Florida sun, and he was lean and muscular from his swimming (although not as muscular as he'd be if he were still a left wing). He was the best-looking kid Sullivan had ever seen.

"Okay, what's next?" Danny asked when they had seen all the graves worth seeing.

"I dunno. We just follow the line on the sidewalk and see where it takes us."

They were walking the Freedom Trail, and Sullivan was pretending to be an expert on American history, as well as all the other subjects that fathers were supposed to be experts on. It thrilled him that Danny was so interested in his country; there were no signs in him of the sullen MTV-sated mall-crawling creature that was Sullivan's image of the typical American youth. Was there anything that could give more satisfaction than producing a child you were proud of?

Sullivan thought of his own father, and felt more emotions than he had time to sort out. "Want an ice cream, Danny?"

"Sure."

He bought Danny a chocolate-covered from a guy wearing a red bandanna and one huge earring. "Am I spoiling you yet?" Sullivan asked Danny.

"Nope."

"Be sure and let me know if I start spoiling you, okay? I'm not supposed to do that."

"Sure thing, Dad." Danny laughed. He was missing a couple of teeth.

Sullivan felt as if his heart were about to burst.

* * *

"And I suppose you bought him all sorts of junk to eat?"

"No, Ma. Just enough to keep body and soul together. Isn't that right, Danny?"

Danny nodded. "That's right, Dad."

Mrs. Sullivan shook her head darkly. "We'll see what kind of appetite he has for my roast beef."

"I've got plenty of room for roast beef, Nana."

"Well it won't be your fault if you don't, I'm sure. We'll be eating at five-thirty, which is when your father ate when he was growing up. Isn't that right, Billy?"

Sullivan grinned. "I can't imagine eating supper any other time."

Mrs. Sullivan still lived in the three-decker where he had grown up. It was in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston that had its share of crime and racial tension. Once a year, tired of her complaints about what was happening to the neighborhood, he made the ritual suggestion that she move, and once a year she told him that this was her home, and she wasn't going to leave until they carried her out.

It made Sullivan curiously uneasy that his boyhood home still existed, virtually unchanged, like a shrine. It was as if everything he had done and everywhere he had lived since he left could vanish in an instant if he chose to return here for good. Just visiting on vacation made his adult life seem insubstantial, a trivial afterthought to the true reality. The out-of-tune spinet with the Infant of Prague on top, the
Reader's Digest
condensed books in the mahogany bookcase, the dark hallway lined with faded photographs of marriages and births and graduations, the smell of corned beef and cabbage being cooked by Mrs. Kelly downstairs—these were the things that really mattered, that would always matter. Remembering them was powerful enough; experiencing them again was almost too much.

Danny thought the three-decker was neat, although it was as alien to his experience as a Russian
izba.
It didn't strike him as odd that his father had grown up in this place, so different from a Virginia ranch house or a Florida apartment complex. He did, however, find it extremely funny that his father had once been young, and he laughed uproariously at Nana's stories of young Billy's escapades.

At supper, Danny did a creditable job on his roast beef, and then went off to watch TV. Sullivan and his mother cleared the dishes, then had tea and Jell-O at the kitchen table. The sound of kids playing street hockey wafted in through the open window, and Sullivan half wanted to ask if he could be excused so he could go out and join them.

"Isn't he a nice boy," Mrs. Sullivan said.

"He sure is."

"Maureen is doing a good job with him."

"Uh-huh." Sullivan knew where the conversation was heading, and he was helpless to stop it.

"How are things between you two?"

"We're divorced, Ma. There are no things between us, except Danny."

His mother sighed a where-did-I-go-wrong sigh. "Everything seemed fine, even with all your traveling, and then all of a sudden you're getting divorced. I just don't understand it."

Sullivan was not about to explain it to her. "Maybe everything was fine
because
I was traveling, and we didn't have to see each other much. These things happen, Ma."

"I suppose." She didn't sound convinced. She sipped her tea and stared out the window. She looked very old.

Sometimes she surprised Sullivan with how liberal her views were. Once she said that the pope had his head up his ass for opposing birth control. "Let him try being a woman in the real world for a while, and see how quick he changes his mind." And she never saw the sense of the Vietnam war, even before Sullivan's older brother died in it.

But they were the liberal views of someone who never had to
do
anything about them. At bottom, she felt comfortable submitting to authority—her husband, her church, her country. She could believe whatever she wanted, knowing that they ruled her life. And it made her feel like a failure when her children refused to be the same.

They had all tried, one way or another, Sullivan thought, and, one way or another, they had failed. He had been her last hope. His brother Danny enlisted to save the world from communism, and promptly got himself killed in a Saigon bar under circumstances that were never cleared up. Veronica entered the convent, stuck it out until she thought she'd go insane, then jumped ship, married a Pakistani, and moved to LA, where she didn't seem to be any happier.

So the burden had fallen on Billy, and he too had tried. And he had no one but himself to blame for his failure. Maureen had put up with all the travel and the secrecy, and they had both longed for the time when he could settle down. But the settling down hadn't come the way it should have, and instead of pleasing him, it turned him into a self-pitying alcoholic wreck trying to find someone besides himself to blame. He hadn't succeeded; he had succeeded only in driving away the two people he loved most in this world. Nice work, Billy.

He stifled a sigh.

"Another Jell-O?" his mother asked.

He shook his head. He hated Jell-O, but it seemed to be too late in the game to tell his mother that.

She brought their empty dishes over to the sink. "Billy?" she said, her back turned to him.

"Yeah, Ma?"

"Do me a favor?"

"Sure."

"While you're here, don't take him... you know where."

Sullivan knew. And he agreed with her, though for reasons he figured were very different from her own. But he didn't see how he could avoid it. "He's asked already, Ma. It's a big deal for a kid his age. It'll just get bigger if I don't take him."

His mother turned back to him, and she looked afraid. Old and afraid. "If you have to go, just don't tell me about it. Okay?"

"Okay, Ma. I understand."

She turned back to the sink again and started to do the dishes. He figured he should offer to help. But he knew she wouldn't let him, so he didn't bother. After a while he left her to her work, and went into the living room to watch TV with his son.

* * *

Sullivan didn't sleep well in his old bedroom; it held far too many ghosts. He tried to escape from his past by thinking about work, but that wasn't much better.

He had followed the Fulton story in the newspapers. The pianist's decision to play in Moscow was big news for a few days, and some congressmen made outraged statements about it. But Fulton refused to speak to the press, and the story eventually died for lack of a new angle.

Sullivan heard nothing further about the operation at headquarters. That was to be expected, of course; it wasn't any of his business, as Houghton had been kind enough to point out. In Moscow, Osipov had seen Doctor Chukova once more, and she told him that another target had been scheduled for after the Peace Festival. As usual, she didn't know who it would be, but she did know that it was going to take place in London—the first time they would venture outside the Soviet Union. Sullivan sent in his report and heard nothing more about it. He
had
been told that Dieter Schmidt, far from becoming a Soviet double agent as a result of his encounter with Borisova, had promptly written a complete report about the experience. Bonn would keep an eye on him, but for now they were satisfied he was loyal.

Sometimes Sullivan thought there was nothing to any of this: the Company hadn't launched the operation he had proposed, Borisova had no powers, parapsychology was a fantasy dreamed up by people who wanted life to be more interesting, and his job was just what he thought it was—a sinecure for washed-up case officers.

Wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if
he
had psychic powers, so that he could find out what Borisova was really doing, so that he could change Culpepper and Houghton's minds about him and make them put him back out into the field. So that he could change the past and, most of all, change himself.

But he had no powers. The past wouldn't change, and he would remain what the past had made him. He fell asleep finally in the midst of the past and dreamed, as usual, of ice, and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

* * *

"How come it's called Boston College, if it isn't even in Boston?"

"Well, um, it used to be in Boston, and then they just kept the name when they moved, I guess."

"Was it in Boston when you went to college?"

Sullivan smiled. "No, this is where I went. The towers on the Heights. It's changed a lot, though."

"And Mom went here too?"

"That's right."

"Wow."

They were silent for a while as they walked through this latest prehistoric site, a combination of neo-Gothic grandeur and concrete-and-glass modernity in a fancy suburb next door to the city. Danny was obviously pondering the strange, misty time when his parents did not know each other. "You met at a hockey game, I bet," he said finally.

"You lose. Your mother hates hockey, remember?"

"Oh. Right. I give up, then."

"We were in physics class together. I was trying to fulfill my science requirement, and I thought it was supposed to be an easy course. It wasn't. Your mother tutored me. I never would've graduated without her."

"But I thought you were smart."

Sullivan laughed. "People are smart in different ways, Danny. Ask me anything you want about Russia, just don't ask me about physics." And he thought of Maureen, gorgeous in her plaid skirt and white sweater, trying to explain angular momentum to him while he was imagining her naked on his bed in the dorm. Ah, college. "There's the hockey rink over next to the football stadium, Danny."

"Oh, wow." Danny raced ahead and tried the door, but it was locked. Not much doing at a hockey rink in August. He looked disappointed. "Is this where you won the Beanpot, Dad?"

"Actually no, that was intown at the Garden, where the Bruins play."

"Tell me the story."

Sullivan tried to conceal his delight. "Oh, come on, Danny, I've told you that story a hundred times."

"Tell it again."

"It's still the same story. It hasn't changed."

"Doesn't matter."

Sullivan shrugged with false modesty. "If you insist." They walked past the rink in the hot sun, and he thought of the smell of sweat and oranges in the locker room, the tension, the exhaustion, the joy. That was one part of the past he didn't want changed. "It was the finals of the Beanpot, right? Boston Garden, fifteen thousand people, BC versus Harvard for the championship. Who goes to Harvard, Danny?"