P A R T

F O U R

S W I N G E R S








Will I cease to be,
Or will I remember
Beyond the world,
Our last meeting together?

--Lady Izumi Shikibu


























C H A P T E R

S E V E N



ALL OF THEM KNELT IN the darkened chapel of Holy Spirit Monastery. This seemed like as good a place and as good a position as any to be in on Ash Wednesday. Ian’s eyes kept darting all over the place, taking in the little statues peering out of their grottoes, the Christ painted over the altar, the friars in their long robes, in their stalls chanting across the space of the stone floor to each other:

Hear us, O Lord, for bounteous is Your kindness;
in your great mercy turn toward us, O Lord.

Save me, O God,
for the waters threaten my life.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now
and ever shall be...

Mackenzie’s eyes were closed, and his face was in his hands. His golden hair needed cutting, and had fallen into his face, over his hands. Mackenzie was murmuring something over and over again. Ian wasn’t sure if he was alright or not. He looked across Kenzie toward Vaughan, and then Tina, to see if all Catholics looked like this. Vaughan’s rosary was draped and threaded through his fingers, the black beads shiny, but his eyes were open and there was a little smile on his face. Tina’s eyes were closed. She looked, despite the black hair, like the statue of the Virgin Mary in the corner by the altar.

The monks sang again:


Hear us, O Lord, for bounteous is Your kindness;
in your great mercy turn toward us, O Lord.

Mackenzie was murmuring quicker into his hands, and Vaughan dropped his head and closed his eyes. Beside Tina, Luke, who was also looking around, caught Ian’s eye. They were both odd men out here.


“...And this is Tina, and this is Luke.” In the common room, Vaughan introduced the last of his friends to Brother Paul.
“I’ve never been in a monastery,” Luke said, still looking around, craning his neck.
Father Julian smiled and told Luke, “You know what we call that part...? That you’re looking at?”
Luke looked at Julian, waiting for an answer.
“The ceiling.”

That evening Vaughan and Ian and Mackenzie went walking down Michael Street, past the school. The days were getting a little warmer and longer. After sunset the sky held remains of the light.
“You know, I wanted to tell him,” Mackenzie said. “I wanted to tell Brother Paul... and Father Julian too. I had this urge to put my arm around you,” he hooked an arm around Ian to demonstrate, “and say, ‘This is my boyfriend.’ ”
Ian lifted his head and hooted.
“Oh, my God, Vaughan, what would the good brothers have said to that?”
Vaughan frowned, and then said to Ian, “I don’t know that they’d be as surprised as you might think.”



WHERE’S ASHLEY?” TINA SAID AS she came into the house with Mackenzie.
“She’s spending the night with a friend,” her mother replied. “Please put the last of the dishes out. Mackenzie, pour drinks.”
“What’s his name?” Tina said, going to the cupboard.
“Tina!” Kevin: rebuking her from his seat at the table.
Avoiding her father’s gaze, Tina made a face as she pulled down four yellow plates, and heard Mackenzie cracking ice into the tray.
“She’s with Cassidy, Tina,” Aileen said, wearily.
Tina snorted.
“Your sister really does have friends,” Aileen added.
She was surprised to hear Lindsay say, “No she really doesn’t.”
Kevin looked at his youngest daughter, as if surprised she could talk at all.
“She’s got clients,” Lindsay continued, “but I don’t know about friends.”
Ross snorted at this. Kevin and Aileen said, at the same time, “Now that’s enough.”
“You’re right, it is enough,” Lindsay agreed, tiredly. “I’m sick of being good in this house, and everyone gets to do whatever they want to. Ryan over here swears up a storm.”
“Ryan has a problem,” Kevin said, not looking at his youngest son.
“And Ashley runs out and does whatever she wants to with anyone.”
“And Tina smokes, and swears, and dyes her hair black,” Ross added, “and Mackenzie and his boyfriend just...”
Whatever the rest of the phrase was, Tina had to catch the glass Mackenzie almost dropped.
“You need to shut up, Ross,” she told her brother sternly, and put a glass down in front of him.
“No, I won’t shut up. Mackenzie running around flaunting his gayness for the whole world to see is killing my social life. Next year I’m just going to be the guy with the faggot for the brother-- ”
“That’s enough,” Kevin reached across the table to hit Ross at the same time that Aileen was about to swat him.
“No one calls anyone that in this house,” Kevin said. Then he forced out the next sentence, “That kind of stuff does not go on... in this family.”
“They’re calling Tina a dyke too,” Ross said.
Tina reached out and smacked her brother square across his face.
Ross rubbed his red face and said, “It’s true. I’m not making it up. And you know it too,” he accused his father. “How can’t you? It’s all over the school. You’re just ignoring it.”
Aileen was flustered. She didn’t know what to say, so she just put down Ross’s plate in front of him, and said, “Your brother doesn’t have a boyfriend!”
Mackenzie felt as if all of this was happening around him. Pinpricks were going up and down his body. He felt like he was drowning inside of his skin. His palms did not sweat; they dried out.
Lindsay, who really didn’t have a boyfriend, said, maliciously, “Oh, yes he does.”
And then Mackenzie heard someone say in a calm, almost dead voice, “Ian Cane is my boyfriend.”
He had said it.
It seemed as if time stopped. For a timeless time there was utter silence, and then all was in an uproar, and Kevin got up to go to the phone, eyeing his oldest son the whole time.
“Kevin, sit down,” Aileen said. “What are you doing?”
“Are you lying to me?” Kevin said to Mackenzie.
“No, sir.”
“Give me that boy’s number.”
Mackenzie swallowed and said, “No, sir.”
“Aileen, give me the phone book.”
“Kevin, please, sit down.”
“Aileen!”
Aileen sighed, and reached under the island. Irritated, she flipped through the pages and read off Sam Cane’s number.
“I knew that boy was no good,” Kevin murmured dialing up the house. “He’s probably a drug addict. Forget... whatever he talked you into, son. You are not gay.”
“He didn’t talk me into anything,” Mackenzie hear himself saying. “It was me. I talked him into it. I was... that way, already. I was -- “
“We don’t raise that stuff in this house,” Kevin told his son, confidently.
“You sound just like Grandfather,” Tina said, her eyes narrowed.
“You better watch your mouth, Miss.”
To everyone’s surprise, she lowered her eyes.
“Hello,” he said to the phone. “Is this Sam Cane? Are you Ian Cane’s father? Well this is Coach Foster. This is Kevin Foster. Yes. Yes. I want to talk to you. I’ll be over there very shortly. I want to talk about your son.”
The whole time Mackenzie had said nothing. Tina stood beside her brother, equally quiet. When Kevin hung up the phone, Tina turned to Lindsay, looked her in the eye, and smacked the shit out of her.
“Martina!”
Aileen moved to pick her daughter up.
“You’re a bitch!” Tina barked at her sister. “And you’re an ungrateful little fuck,” she told Ross. She took the opportunity to shove him again.
Ryan began banging the table and shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“None of that in my house!” Kevin roared,
“And you’re worse,” Tina told her father.
“Tina this is really enough from you,” Aileen told her.
“And maybe you’re the worst,” she told her mother, “for just sitting here.”
“You will not talk to your mother that way--”
“No,” she wheeled on her father. “I’ll talk to you this way.”
“I did not ask for this shit!” Kevin shouted at the ceiling. “Aily, you should have gone to the clinic when all this shit started, just like my father said.”
And then Kevin seemed to realize what he’d said, and his daughter stared back at him with his eyes.
He didn’t know what to say. He began stammering.
Tina took in the whole mess of the kitchen with her eyes. For once she realized just how handsome her brother was with his fine bones and his sensitive face, like a statue, and as powerless to do anything. She caught his wrist, and then moved past Kevin, going out the side door.
Her brother walked beside her, wordlessly.
“Fuck’em,” Tina muttered, taking out her cigarettes. “Just fuck ‘em!”

Ashley had learned to deal with the truth that Tina’s car was not joint property. It had not even been a gift. It was Tina’s outright, and when Ashley drove, she did so on her sister’s sufferance. She was glad that her sister didn’t need it tonight. Her twin had been nicer since she’d started going to that monastery. Part of Ashley imagined herself going as wel. Maybe God could clean up some of the crap in her life.
And it was just getting crappier, I mean, really. She wished she did drugs. It was the one vice she didn’t have. She wanted to go to her cousin’s house and buy some weed, but then she’d have to learn how to smoke it. Besides, she had the feeling that something stronger might be required.
Ashley didn’t know where to get cocaine, so she waited until it was nigh, then drove over to Main Street, and parked on George, by the bus station, across the street from the tittie bar. Stearne’s car was parked in front of the apartment building, and now Ashley found herself waiting for it to go away. Every time she told herself this was foolish and desperate, that it was getting cold in the car, she would rev up the engine and warm the car up a little, then turn it off and say, “Five more minutes.” She did not look at her watch. She did not want to know how long she was waiting for Mr. Stearne to leave.


WHEN KEVIN FOSTER REACHED THE house on Sandcastle Road, Ian was sitting between his parents. Kevin remembered Sam Cane from high school, and now recalled that he had looked a little bit like Ian -- except for the spiky hair. Mrs.Cane looked older than she should. Ian looked wary.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cane,” Kevin shook their hands. He nodded, coldly, toward Ian, who did not respond.
“What’s all this, Kevin,” Sam said. He had always suspected Ian was up to something, but he didn’t like finding it out second hand.
“I think,” Kevin said, and wiped his mouth, “I think your son is seeing my son.”
“I know my son is seeing your son,” Sam said. “And my nephew is hanging out with your other son.”
“That’s... That’s not what I meant.” At his side, Kevin’s hands turned into fists, and his voice rose an octave.

When Kevin Foster became flustered, Ian noticed, he behaved a lot like Ryan. It was the only funny thing he could pick up about a man he didn’t really care for at the moment.
“What I mean,” Kevin said, “is that he’s... buying him things. Buying him fancy presents and corrupting my boy and treating him like his girlfriend. They’re hanging out all the time and...”
Mrs. Cane was looking up at her son, realizing that he had never dated a girl but Cindy, and that he had been acting -- lately -- a lot like he had with Cindy. Only it was more like Cindy was the act, like that girl, who was gone now, was the imitation.
“Are you trying to call my kid a queer?” Sam Cane cut off Kevin.
Kevin stopped talking, and his mouth hung open. His head was cocked in mid motion. It had been exactly what he was doing, but to put it that baldly!
“I... There are rumors.”
Sam turned around, dismissing Kevin Foster, whom he had never really liked anyway. Not since he’d dropped Race. Not for years. He said to Ian.
“Son, are you a faggot?”
“Sam!” his wife snapped.
“We’ll end it all right here,” Sam said, his voice level. “I don’t need someone to walk off the street and tell me stories about my only kid. I’ll just ask you to your face, E. I’ll get it from the horse’s mouth. Ian, are you a fag?”
Ian’s jaw hardened, and he looked directly at his father and said, “No, sir. But Mackenzie Foster is my boyfriend.”
Sam Cane smacked his son so hard a trickle of blood went down his lip. Ian did not move. Neither did his mother.
“I think you’d better go upstairs,” his father told him. Ian nodded, turned and headed up the steps.
For a few more minutes, Mrs. Cane looked from one man to the other, both uncivil, both murmuring about which son had screwed up the other. And then she remembered that she was Lee Cane. She had a name. Before that she’d been Lee Andrews. She had a son. She got up and went up the stairs to tap on the door.
Liz Phair was playing loudly. She tapped again above it.
“Ian, open the door!” she called.
She tried to open it and realized it was locked. This was not a surprise.
“Ian, honey, open the door,” his mother said again.
She came down the steps. Kevin Foster was gone. Lee Cane could see the lights of his car heading out of the driveway.
“He won’t open his door,” Lee said.
“The hell he won’t,” Sam Cane marched up the steps.
“Sam,” she called, but he headed up the stairs, banging on the door, while on the other side, Liz Phair sang “Johnny Feelgood... I really like it when he knocks me around... I really like it.”
He banged the door open and looked around surprised to see that no one was there and the window was wide open.
Lee Cane realized that she was not surprised at all.
Sam Cane moved to the CD player, took out Liz Phair and broke her. Lee remembered that Ian hated Liz Phair. She had been a present from Cindy. So now Lee wagered that anything that was really precious was also gone. When Sam opened the drawer that had Ian’s CDs in it, they were all gone. And now her husband’s eyes had made it to the center of the room.
As if to add insult to injury, Ian had left his bong and a bag of marijuana in the center of the bed.


WHEN SHE FINALLY SAW HIM leaving, looking short and officious as ever, Ashley muttered, “Little punk,” and revved up the engine. After his car had driven away and the red taillights were a memory, Ashley counted to about thirty, then drove across the street into the old parking space. She put every fear out of her mind and stopped the car, climbed ou,t and walked around. She ignored the drunk on the pavement, went inside the apartment building and walked up the old staircase. When she got to the third story apartment building she knocked on the door. Mick Rafferty answered, surprised.
“Ashley, it’s late-- ”
“I’m failing. You helped me with science, but I’ve screwed up in math, and now they’re saying they’ll fail me.”
“They can’t fail you for just one class.”
“It’s not just one class,” Ashley said. “It’s four years of bad classes, and me being stupid that they’re failing me for.”
“You won’t fail.”
“I won’t graduate,” her voice was hysterical. She was pretty sure that this had almost been an act, but it wasn’t anymore. No, it really never had been. If it had been an act, she wouldn’t have sat in that car for two hours, waiting for George Stearne to leave. She was sobbing now. She told him the truth.
“Ashley, that’s ridiculous,” he told her. “You should have come up.”
“He hates me, “Ashley was sobbing. “He hates me.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Mick told her.
“He does,” she sniffed. “because he knows what I am.”
The apartment next door opened, and Mrs. Henley stuck her head out, looking irritated.
“Maybe you should come on inside, Ash,” Mick Rafferty told her.
She came in, sobbing, and then he closed the door.
“Let me get you something to drink,” Mick said. He went to the refrigerator while Ashley collected herself at the entrance of the kitchen.
“Is Coke good?”
She nodded.
“Great.” Mick said, adding with a grin, “It’s all we have.” Then he said, “Hold on.” He gave her the Coke, and went to the bathroom. He came back a few seconds later with a wet cloth and said, “Wipe down your face.”
“I’m puffy and ugly.”
“You’re just puffy,” he said, smiling kindly. “And only puffy a little.”
They sat down on the couch, and Mick flicked on the television with the remote control.
“Your problem, Ashley, is that you think you can’t get away from your past,”
“You didn’t,” she said. She turned red and said, “I’m sorry.”
Mick shrugged. “Serves me right. Always telling you about getting out of Jamnia, and I’ve been here my whole life.”
“You went to college someplace else. Didn’t you teach some place else?”
Mick nodded. “Then I came back.”
She watched him, wondering what he’d do if she kissed him, and needing to be with him right now. Maybe he’d throw her out. Maybe he’d demand she leave.
Ashley got up and straddled him. Mick opened his mouth to say something, but she kissed him.
He looked at her, a little terrified, a little handsome to her. She wanted to put her hands in his small curls.
“Ashley,” his throat was dry.
His dick was hard.
“I wanted to know what you would do,” she said quietly. “What you would say. I’m almost eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in a few days,” she said.
And then she kissed him again. This time she straddled him fully. His legs came together so she dropped neatly to his lap. Ashley locked her hands in Mick Rafferty’s hair, his mouth began tasting hers, and his hands were in her hair. She began to lift up her top. She unhooked the bra. Mick didn’t say anything. He just closed his eyes and began kissing her throat and her neck. When she pulled off her bra, her breasts popped out free and firm, the nipples large and brown, and he began sucking on them, rubbing the sides of his bristly cheek along her sides, sucking her breasts again.
Clumsily, Mick put her down under him. He unhooked his pants, and pulled them down. Ashley pulled down his boxers, and he pulled off her pants and her underwear. They both gasped a little as he situated himself between her thighs, and then she guided him inside of her.
This was what she’d wanted the whole time, this was the something stronger. She murmured softly in his ears, not wanting to scare him by sounding like a tart, but wanting to urge him on, meeting him thrust for thrust, hooking her legs harder about his waist, aware of how long she’d wanted it, and aware that Mick Rafferty might be the kind of man who wouldn’t do this to her a second time. She made free caressing his ass, and running her nails down his back, taking in the dimensions of his torso, shouting out as he moved in her harder, more expertly, taking his time, knowing what he was doing, going from a gentle thrust to love making, tasting nipples and throat, pulling out to rub his face in her secret places, plunging back in, sucking and fucking, harder and harder.
They were clinging hard to each other. She shouted first. He came with a strangled shout, and then the two of them lay bunched up together.
Ashley felt sore, Mick’s large body was between her legs and across her body. His arms were around her, his heavy head, damp and gasping, lay on her shoulder.
“Let’s go to bed,” he told her.
“But my car.”
“Worry about it later.”

THERE WOULD BE NO SLEEPING IN the Fitzgerald house tonight. Tina had come over in search of Madeleine and Luke only to learn that Luke was testing out the factory to see if it was livable again. Coconut had gone with him. Madeleine was with Rodder.
“Well, then I’ll be gong, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Tina told Cedric. “Kenzie, are you staying?”
He looked at Cedric.
“Since when you have you asked my permission to stay here?”

Upstairs Kenzie was pacing up and down Vaughan’s room.
“I wish you’d quit that,” Vaughan said, looking up from his book.
Mackenzie turned to his friend.
“Did you want to go to sleep?” Mackenzie said.
“Not really, but you’re bugging the hell out of me with all that pacing.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just mad right now. I feel... I’m pissed right now.”
“This would be the time when most people break down and cry.”
“I’m not into all that,” Mackenzie said.
“I always wondered why,” said Vaughan, sitting up in bed and putting the book away.
His friend looked at him.
“No one could ever made you cry,” Vaughan said. “I always wondered why, and now I think I get it?”
“What?”
“You thought it would make you look like a sissy.”
“Isn’t that why everybody refuses to cry?”
“No, Kenzie. Everyone else refuses to cry in public. You never cry at all.”
“That one time... when I told you about me and Ian, and we fought... I almost cried. I did cry. I just didn’t gush. Do you want me to gush. You don’t either, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never seen you cry about your mother.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m expected to, and maybe you never cry because gay people are supposed to, and all other boys don’t do it because they don’t want to look gay, but you didn’t do it because you didn’t-- ”
“Want to look like myself?” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow, and gave his friend a lop sided grin.
There was a knock on the door, and Vaughan said, “Come in, Dad.”
But it was Ian, white as a sheet, with a busted lip, wide eyed and crazy.
“Oh, my God,” Vaughan got up off the bed. Mackenzie got to Ian first, the blond boy’s face hardening like an eagle’s.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said, examining Ian’s face.
“I’ll go get the peroxide,” Vaughan said, and left his room.
“Your dad came over,” Ian tried not to sound like he was blaming Mackenzie.
“It was Ross... And Lindsay. They started stuff at the house tonight. They told my parents,” Mackenzie said. “I couldn’t do anything. I --I should have called you. I-- ”
“Don’t worry,” Ian shook his head. “I know what it’s like. I know now.” he licked his busted lip, and winced.
Vaughan came back with a cotton swab and the brown bottle of peroxide. Mackenzie uncapped it, and began to work on the other boy’s lip.
“My dad knocked the shit out of me when I said you were my boyfriend,” Ian told Mackenzie with what Vaughan thought was the hint of a proud grin. “Then he told me to go upstairs. The moment he did that, I didn’t even think twice. I just packed up everything I liked, dropped it out of the window, climbed out, and got on my bike. I put my clothes and all that stuff about a block away from the house. We can get it tomorrow.”
Ian smiled, and reached into his pocket. “I took my car keys. It’s still my fucking car. But I didn’t want to make noise. So I rode the bike. I rode and rode until I got here. This was the first safe place I could think of.” He turned to Vaughan. “Can I stay here?”
Vaughan nodded solemnly, his face feeling heavy.
Ian took a deep breath and nodded too.
“You’re cold,” Mackenzie accused him. “You’re frozen.”
“I told you I’ve been riding across town.”
Mackenzie put down the bottle, and threw the bloody swabs in the trash can by the door.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
Vaughan said, “We’ll worry about all that tomorrow.”

~ ~ ~

“Officer, please don’t ticket me,” she smacked her gum and tried to flirt with him. Aunt Meghan had said something about flirting with cops, how they could not resist it.
“Let me see your license.”
“I ah... I don’t have it on me.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen?”
“Really?”
“Maybe,” she smiled.
The officer did not plan on leaving. Ashley showed him leg. He was balding, and a little fat, but still youngish. The details of the conversation faded with time, but not the feeling of it, as if power were being hurled back and forth, an exhaustion of wills.
In the end the officer was fondling her, and she couldn’t see his eyes through his shades.
“What could I do, officer? To stop you from ticketing me?”
“Well now I could arrest you for driving without a permit, driving underage, and soliciting.”
“Soliciting?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he sounded like such a rube. And then he imitated her, his voice lifting higher, “ ‘What could I do, officer? To stop you from ticketing me?’ ”
She was irritated. He reached into his jacket and laid a small baggie of white powder on the dashboard. “And I could have you on possession of illegal substances.”
Before this whole thing could turn into a desperate game of, “What do you want?” Ashley said, “I know what you want.”
And so she gave it to him in the back of Kirk’s truck. It didn’t take long. It almost felt good. It would be a long time and another person altogether before it did feel good. When he was finished, Ashley smiled and looked up at him.
“You know,” she said, satisfied, “I could have you now.”
“What?” the cop said, hitching up his pants.
“I’m fourteen,” she said.
That evening, when she came through the door after avoiding what would have been her first traffic ticket, Aileen and Kevin were sitting at the kitchen table.
“Where have you been?” her mother asked, the corner of her mouth tight on her cigarette.
“Out with Cassidy.”
“You should have called,” said her father.
“I know,” Ashley shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
His gaze was heavy and blue, but not piercing. She had always believed that gaze would pierce the truth. But now she saw that it did not.
They could not know that Ashley had been driving around in her cousin Kirk’s car for a few weeks now, unable to wait till sixteen which -- when you are fourteen -- seems like it will never come. Kirk had taught Tina and her the basic maneuvers but, for once, Tina had had the since to obey the law. She never drove by herself, and certainly never took the truck out in the open where she was visible.
Even at fourteen, what Ashley wanted was to be visible, and to be an adult.
She got pulled over to the side of the road about ten minutes outside of Bashan being visible.


~ ~ ~

Well she was nearly eighteen now, her body spooned to Mick Rafferty’s, his arm draped over her shoulder, protecting her, his gentle snoring in her ear. His body was moist and warm beside her. He and his bed smelled like iron in the room in the apartment off of Main Street. Eighteen wheelers passed through town on their way to the highway. Now she heard one roar past the building.
Ashley did not care about everything else that was going on. She had the distinct feeling right now that it would all be alright.

AILEEN FOSTER CAME DOWN THE stairs in her nightgown. Kevin was sitting up watching the television, his eyes reflecting the blue glare of the screen.
“Where are they?” he said. “Kenzie and Tina?”
“They could be any number of places,” said Aileen, “and all of them safe.”
“I ought to get up and get them,” he said. “Especially after what she said to me.”
“And what about what you said to her?” Aileen said, suddenly. Kevin turned around and looked at her.
“Oh, yes,” Aileen said. “You forgot about that whole clinic business, didn’t you?”
“Oh, shit,” Kevin said.
Aileen nodded.
“Don’t you go out of this house again tonight, Kevin Foster.” She turned around and stopped at the base of the stairs.
“You’re not the only parent here, alright? You’re not the only one who’s got shit to deal with.”
“Aily-- “
“Good night,” she said, and headed up the stairs.

SAM CANE WAS ON THE rampage that night. He drove to his sister’s and terrified the house demanding to know where Ian was.
“I don’t know,” Race said, crossing her arms over her chest.
Same told her the whole story. Roy had come down to protect his mother.
“Go back upstairs,” Race said to the boy.
Roy ignored her.
Everything Sam said he punctuated with: ”That goddamned, Kevin Foster.”
“Mr. Foster’s good,” Roy finally said.
“Oh, you think so, huh?” said Sam.
“Sam!”
“If you knew-- ” Sam began, but Race said in a deadly voice, “If you say something stupid I’ll kick you in your balls, and then while you’re rolling on the floor clip ‘em off with a butcher knife. Swear to God.”
Sam was silent. He glared at his nephew. The boy glared back.
“Race, ask your boy to tell me where my son is.”
“How should I know?” Roy snapped.
“Don’t mouth off to me,” Sam commanded.
“In this house,” Race told her brother, “the one who is mouthing off is you. Go home, Sam.”
“I’m not going--”
“I said go home,” Race said again. “Before I call the police. Or, hell, before me and Roy just get tired and beat the shit out of you. Please go home. You’ve done enough for one night.”
When her brother turned around with a curse and left, Race immediately said to her son, “Roy, will you tell me where Ian is? Do you know where he might be?”
Roy told his mother, “Ian probably went to the Fitzgeralds.”
Race smiled.
“Mr. Fitzgerald was my teacher back in high school.”
“He was?”
Race nodded, “He and his wife had their children later. There’s a considerable age difference between us. You know he and your friend Ryan’s grandmother...? They grew up together.”
“Oh.”
“Now what’s his number? I need to see if Ian’s safe. And I need to warn Cedric Fitzgerald about Sam.”

The three of them slept together that night, Mackenzie on Vaughan’s left and Ian on his right.
Vaughan awoke to Madeleine’s voice in the hallway. The light was on, and she and Cedric were talking.
“Are you serious?” she was saying. “When...? Yeah... Yeah... ”
Vaughan felt better now that his sister knew. He felt her knowing would accomplish something.
Mackenzie always slept sprawled out and on his side, mouth half open. If you had told him that he had contracted a disease whereby he would slowly turn into a rutabaga, and he only had one month left to live, he would still sleep like a baby. On his other side, Vaughan felt the rigidity of Ian, laying on his back, who was awake now. Vaughan felt that too. He turned to his other friend to see the black haired boy biting his upper lip. In what of the moonlight came through the curtains he could see his friends face wet with tears.
“Ian!” he whispered.
The other boy’s eyes opened. Slowly he sat up. Vaughan rose up slowly, trying not to wake Mackenzie who groaned in his sleep, and twisted over muttering something.
“He hit me Vaughan,” Ian said after drying his face with the end of his tee shirt. “How could he do something like that? How could you hit your own son?”


THAT MARCH MORNING CEDRIC FITZGERALD had gone through half a pack of Pall Malls before eight o’clock. To be fair, Ralph Hanley was helping him smoke them.
“Kevin Foster came by,” Cedric told him. “Real early. I threw him out. Without a word.”
“Didn’t you let him stay here when-- ”
“When his father -- the Colonel-that-son-of-a-bitch -- gave him trouble all those years ago. And he thinks I’ve changed. Mackenzie’s almost my own flesh and blood. He’s basically Vaughan’s twin, and he thinks I’m going to send him back home! Well to hell with that! To hell with him! I’m disgusted with him. And I’m a little ashamed. I told him that.
“He told me Mackenzie was gay,” Cedric said with a little chuckle.
“And... I told him I knew. He seemed surprised. Of course I knew! And he told me about Ian and I told him I knew that too. Had known for a long time.
“But then he told me about Ian’s lip, how he got it. Then I told him I should bust his lip, and I told him if Sam Cane came up here, well then I would bust his lip wide open too. And I mean it.”
Cedric shut up when he heard feet coming down the hall.
When the boys entered the kitchen, Cedric said, “You know where the food is.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald, Sir,” said Ian. “I want to thank you for letting me stay here last night.”
“You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Thank you, Sir,”
“And you can stop calling me sir, too.”
“I heard my Dad this morning,” Mackenzie said. “He... left?”
“Do you see him?”
“No, Cedric,” Mackenzie smiled and went to the refrigerator where he took out a three yogurts and handed them to his friends. “Morning, Father,” he said to Ralph. “Ian, do you know Father Ralph,” he introduced him. “My pastor. Vaughan’s goddad.”
Mackenzie addressed Cedric: “My dad-- ”
“I sent him away. I told him he had a lot of nerve. I told him that you were like my son too.”
Mackenzie put down his yogurt, and a strange look crossed his face. Then he hugged Cedric tight.
“I love, you,” Mackenzie whispered to him.
“Good, Mackenzie. I love you too. Now knock that off, alright.”
Mackenzie pulled away and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Yes, Vaughan” he said to his friend. “It does happen sometimes.”
Ian was mystified by the comment. Ralph said, “You all need to get to school.”
Vaughan nodded, and was the first out the door, murmuring, “I have a feeling sparks are going to fly today at Jamnia High.”
Madeleine was coming down the stairs now.
“Two Fitzgeralds, two Canes, six Fosters, and a boatload of drama. You bet your ass sparks are gonna fly today, baby brother!”
When they were gone, Ralph stole another one of his friend’s cigarettes and said, “That bit about letting Ian stay here as long as he wanted?”
“Um hum?”
“You might want to rethink that.”
“What?”
“Kevin won’t fight you. Sam Cane might. Sam Can might make it hell.”
“You want me to send Ian back home, Ralph? You know I’ve never turned anyone from this door.”
“And I don’t want you to send him back home. I want you to send him to my home.”
Cedric cocked his head.
“Not the rectory,” Ralph shook his head, and the cigarette smoke shook with it. “Holy Spirit. No one will ever look for him in a monastery.”







Father Julian picked up the phone.
“Ralph. Ralph? Yeah, sure. I remember him. Yeah. Send him on over. This evening. Ralph... No, I don’t care... Yeah, yeah. I’m married to a man myself.” the monk laughed and hung up.

“Well that’s that,” Ralph told Cedric, slipping on his fedora. “Ready for Mass?”
Cedric nodded, and followed his friend onto the street.
“I am glad that I know you, Ralph Hanley. You are the most amazing thing, I swear.”
“Friendship is a good thing,” Ralph said. “As we have just seen in the last hour. Those boys.... Will be friends forever.” he added. “I hope.”
Cedric looked at Ralph, and realized: “I don’t think I even remember meeting you. You were just always.... around.”
“You did meet me,” Ralph told him. I even remember the date. I was going to the movies. I still have the ticket stub somewhere in the rectory.”
“You know the date?”
“Oh, yes, “ Ralph climbed into the driver’s seat, and Cedric got in the passenger’s.
“It was October 14th, 1959.”



i i

Cedric Fitzgerald was fifteen, and well into fifteen before he remembered where and how he had met Ralph Hanley. By then it was 1965 and a number of things had changed for the Black people of Crawford Street, the first being that they were Black and no longer Negroes. Cedric had to do a lot of thinking to remember the day he’d left home in tears and walked all the way off of Crawford onto Price, where the Negroes were no longer necessarily Creole.
“What are you crying about?”
And this had startled Cedric because at the time he had thought he was alone, in the little park between the theatre and the drug store. He looked up into the tree to see another boy hanging, earnestly and admirably, by the inside of his knees.
The boy’s tone was not nasty, but concerned. His wide green eyes blinked once, twice, solemnly and slowly, waiting for the story.
“My mother left,” he said, Not “mama,” as he might have said in his house.
“Why?”
“To chase a man.” he quoted his grandmother.
“What about your Daddy?”
“She’s not married to him.”
“Did she divorce him?”
“She never married him.”
“Ohhh.” The boy took this in. He blinked his large grey-green eyes and then said, “We’re Catholic.”
“So are we. From New Orleans. My mama still chases men, though.”
The boy seemed to be considering this. In one swift moment he dropped from the tree and stood on his feet. He was a little taller than Cedric.
“My name’s Ralph,” he said.
“I’m Dominic.”
Which is a fine time to add that Cedric’s baptismal name was Dominic, and it was some time before he used Cedric and this for reasons entirely professional.
“Dominic DuFresne,” said Cedric Fitzgerald, and so now it is also time to say that it was many years before he took the name Fitzgerald, and the reasons for this come later.
This was all of their orignal encounter that either of them could remember. What Ralph could remember was telling the ersatz Dominic that he had just been to the pictures and saw a horrible film where some white woman screamed the whole time. To this day Ralph could not remember what that movie was.
Dominic returned to the house as the bells of Our Lady of Jamnia were telling the neighborhood that it was five-thirty. He couldn’t remember ever setting foot in there. It was a place Negroes did not go. They had their own church. It was beautiful. It was also inconveniently far away. When Dominic entered the house on Crawford Street it was filled with the smell of stewed shrimp and gumbo, and his grandmother said, “Don’t make any noise,” though she shouted it. “You grandfather’s saying his rosary.”
Earlier that day, when he’d come downstairs from his room, his grandmother had said, “Your mama’s left. Start saying your rosary.”
“With or without the Fatima prayer?”
“Don’t be silly!”
But he wasn’t trying to be. He really didn’t get it. He knew his father was not a Catholic, and he wondered what it would be like to be like the Negroes on Prince Street and Birnham. They had a church close by. They had two in fact, and the Baptists hooped and hollered and praised the Lord, and the Methodists got to be reserved and go to Communion once a month. In either church drinking and smoking and having a good time was pretty much a sign of being backslidden whereas, Dominic had already noticed at the age of nine that in a Catholic house these were just a way of life. Almost proof that you were Catholic. But as he set to the black beads, and trying to remember the Creed, he thought it would be nice, maybe, not to grow up having to hear about Purgatory and Limbo, to actually know what the priest was gibbering while he turned his back to you, to not have to burn your fingernail clippings and hair remains in the fire place, to not have a thousand votives lit all around the house, year round.
He would probably have to confess this to the priest, this sometimes-desire to be a Protestant.
The house on Crawford was a large, long two story, almost totally plain on the outside, square and made of red brick with a white New Orleans grille and balcony. In the summers his aunts and uncles would sit out on it while his grandmother would call them “Common and plebeian”.
“You’re just like the niggers on Price Street,” she would say, and her sister, Evelyn would say, “Yeah, Estelle, you got that shit right. We are just like the niggahs on Price Street.”
Dominic loved his aunt and hated his grandmother. The family portraits were all on the wall, and moving from over the old hutch where they kept the fine china, all across the large place that served as the living room and divided into the dining room. Through the photos you could trace the family’s history.
Even at the age of seven, looking like a light skinned witch, Dominic could see his grandmother kneeling, swathed in her white communion gown, veil pulled back from her face, the same black beads he carried now draped and threaded through her fingers.
“Estelle Sandavaul, 1902.”
She was Spanish.
Yes this was one thing Estelle always pointed out. Unlike this crass lot of niggers a generation removed from the plantation, Louisiana Negroes had race. Some were French, some were Spanish. Not a few were Indians or had kept tribal ties. Some were even Irish, but the less said about them the better. Estelle was proud of the fact that the Sandavauls had never been slaves. Many years later Cedric would learn what Dominic could not, that the Sandavauls had lost all their land and, of course, at one point in time-, someone had to have been a slave because no matter where you came from or how far you were from the plantation, how else had Negroes gotten here?
But back to Estelle.
Estelle had not seen Louisiana since she was ten, which was when the last of the Sandavaul properties had to be sold and all that was left to the family was the little house in the bayou. It was then 1905, and the family had sent her up to cousins in Indiana where-- for reasons unknown - a group of Creoles had ended up. They had a little neighborhood and a fine church.
But Creoles are Creoles and Catholics are Catholics. Negroes are Negroes. They find each other, and about the same time the community had started up in Indiana one had started up in Ohio across the river. The people of Condalisa Street in Canaan, Indiana, were frequently on Crawford Street in Jamnia, Ohio, and vice versa. So it was not too long before Estelle’s cousins --- the Raleighs, where hosting Stanley DuFresne.
No one thought it odd that he took her into his house when she was eleven. It was just as well, they didn’t need another mouth to feed. He sent her to convent school making sure she was a good Catholic. She wanted to be a nun. She expressed her intentions. Mother Superior told her this would not be possible. She was to marry. At fifteen she was turned out of the convent with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her mother sent her a gown, and she was wed to Stanley DuFresne. The man was significantly older and seemed to have spent all of his energy on first raising the girl to womanhood and next taking her virginity with a ferocious gusto.
She had no children. He had no ill will. Estelle disappeared into the fabric of the plain brick house on Crawford and no one saw her again for seven years.

It was the birth of Jasper that changed everything.
It was years before Dominic would understand that his grandmother hated Jasper. And then he believed it was because Jasper chose to dress like a woman though he was a man. Or vice versa. He was nearly a teenager before he deduced the real reason for Estelle’s hatred. It was something everyone else had always known, but never found a reason to explain to the boy.
Jasper was Stanley’s son, but he was not Estelle’s.
The moment Estelle found out about Jasper, about Stanley running around making children and sewing oats, she did what she hated. Firstly, she left the house. Secondly she left it for a place only the desperate would go. She went to visit her sister-in-law, Marie Madeleine.
Now in the same way that every Irish Catholic family has a drunk, and every Italian family -- no matter how respectable-- has a mafia connection they may not want to talk about, every Black Catholic family has at least one practitioner of the dark arts, sometimes effective, sometimes not so much.
Marie Madeleine had not darkened the stoop of or cast her shadow into the nave of a house of God since she was twelve, and a priest in Metairie Louisiana had told her she was going to hell. She spat in his face blinding him for life. She made her living selling love potions, making curses, casting spells, reading palms, cards, anything else you asked her to read and just generally frightening the hell out of people. She was a truly remarkable woman.
She was dead by the time Dominic was born, and there were no photographs of her because she believed photographs stole one’s soul -- which is why she had a photograph of everyone she hated. What fascinated Dominic about the aunt he only heard about was not that she was six foot three and dressed like a man, or that she was black as night and smelled like sage or that she had five children all by different fathers, all with unpronounceable French names which had been shortened to something stupid, but that she wore a patch over her eye, and never over the same eye two days in a row, and that she was reputed to have been bald as a cue.
Years later, Estelle commented that what was most amazing to her about Marie Madeline was that she had managed to couple with even one man, let alone five. The day Estelle finally came to her sister-in-law’s door, Flipsy, her oldest son, answered. Estelle DuFresne looked at the sister-in-law who had not troubled to make an appearance at her wedding, and privately thought that this was the ugliest woman she had ever seen.
The exact details of the story are not to be had, for it was not something Estelle liked to talk about. In fact, if not for Evelyn getting drunk one night in 1966 and spilling the beans, Dominic would certainly never have known. The rest of the family knew it because of Cousin Flipsy. He told. In the end what was known was that Estelle finally grew desperate enough to resort to witchcraft for her first child. And it worked.
It worked in pairs.
Later that year Anne and her sister, the third in a long line of Madeleines, were born. They called her Maddy. Both girls were yellow like caramel, and they had long, brown hair that was like brown sugar in your fingers, and wide green eyes. Of course this would make them think there was just nothing prettier than them. This belief helped to get Anne pregnant by the ripe age of thirteen, and she left home, though the details were not clear on which order these events had happened. Maddie was kind enough to wait until she was sixteen to really screw up, and then she ran off to Chicago. Every year or so she would come back with a present and another bastard child to grow up in the house, and then she was gone. This was just as well. Anne lived down the street near the Lebanese. Maddie was never to be seen. Both were worthless as hell.
By then Estelle’s womb was like a floodgate and she’d already had Mary Agnes, Claire whom they called Clairie, and, lastly, Gladys.
Who was currently gone.
“She,” Dominic’s grandmother informed the boy, “has been a source of endless trouble to me.”
Gladys was the one that supplied the grandchild with the least amount of scandal around his origins. She was eleven years younger than Anne and Maddie and her first memory of Anne was the year 1935. Gladys always talked about the funeral. She’d been seven then and her sister was good and grown. She remembered the black dresses and the huge hats and her sister, weeping, supported between two old cousins. And there was this little ornate coffin, the size of a shoe box.
“It was like a music box, Dom. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. No. Anne was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. When she watched them lower that boy into the ground...”
This was the beginning of Anne being an almost reformed woman.
Anne had come back in black to the brick house on Crawford Street. Estelle came up to bring her daughter meals. Anne never came down. Gladys would sneak up the stairs to catch a sight of her marvelously grief stricken sister.
“I wanted her to be my mama,” Gladys said. “she was so beautiful, and my real mama.... Your grandmother... She is one bitch, I swear.”
And so Gladys spent a long time with her oldest sister, who needed a sister and maybe a child to replace the one she’d lost. But it was not Gladys who would bring her out of the room.
It was Evelyn.

“You know she never liked me,” Evelyn said one loud Christmas night when she was filling Dominic’s glass with wine. “Drink that up, nephew. Drink it up! You’re eleven!”
Dominic always suspected Evelyn was right. Evelyn told everything. Evelyn was the source of the true story of the Sandavauls and of the DuFresnes. The Fitzgeralds too. Everyone told her their story, and what she wasn’t told she found out, And she didn’t believe in keeping secrets. Not even her own.
Evelyn was the significantly younger sister of Estelle, in fact only a year old than Anne and Maddie. She was dark as chocolate and loud as thunder, flashy as lightning, beautiful and hot as the bayou. She was spicy like New Orleans. Estelle had always hinted that her younger sister was a bastard. Evelyn looked around the table and pointed at all the brothers, sisters, cousins gathered,
“Well, who the hell here ain’t a bastard?” she demanded.
Evelyn Sandavaul had been born long after the death of Estelle’s mother, so Estelle was quick to point out they were only half sisters if that. Evelyn never seemed to mind her sister’s coldness. She’d been living on the first floor of 1133 Crawford since their father had died, leaving her the last of his money and directions to head up to Ohio.
Perhaps Evelyn didn’t mind being hated for the same reason that Estelle didn’t mind hating her, which was because old Henri DuFresne began to suggest that she might not mind coming to his bed.
“I hit that old lecherous niggah in the head with a statue of Saint Jude,” Evelyn told Dominic many years later. “No. Don’t laugh... I did. He got his shit together after that. Honestly.... running after a young tender virgin such as myself!”
It was Evelyn’s loudness that had brought Anne out of black and into dancing. Evelyn’s fantastic friends came up from New Orleans and they mixed well enough with the bad crowd from the west end of Crawford. The crowd of gamblers and the crowd of men who liked to be women and vice versa that Jasper duFresne kept company with whenever he/she chose. This was a source of endless horror for Estelle who wanted something respectable. And then, ten years before Dominic was born, Estelle lay down on her back and gave birth one last time.
This was the only son. She had such hopes for him, and named him Stephen Octavian Thaddeus. But that geichy, alligator tail eating, witch craft practicing crowd of sinners got a hold of him quickly, and before long he was rechristined “Gigelo”, later “Jigelo,” because they called him “Jig” for short.
By then Estelle did not protest. She even began calling the boy Jigelo, herself.
It was useless to fight hell sometimes.

There were a few sins that Estelle could never forgive her sister for.
There was the sin of Brown.
He had been a friend of Evelyn’s from back in the day. Brown was an insanely old man, in Estelle’s opinion, extremely geichy, who came down from Chicago, but had been living in New Orleans and for some reason appealed to Anne. He was a gambler and it was suspected that he worked outside the law. He always had presents for her. He eventually moved to Price Street. They were married at Queen of Peace. It was a huge. They never had any children; by then they were both too old for it. But they always had a spare room for Gladys, and she occupied the place of only daughter.
Estelle hated Brown until the day she died. Brown was so old he didn’t die long afterward, but there was also the sin of Flipsy.
“Flipsy is incest!” Estelle declared.
“Your husband’s nephew ain’t no blood to me!”
“Well, at least marry him, Ev.”
“Naw, ma’am, Flipsy ain’t the marrying type. And he’s not the type I’d ever want to marry. He’s got a big dick and when I put one leg in the east and one in the west he really knows how to stir my Mississippi--”
“Ev--!”
“Naw, he do, Estelle. I ain’t lying there. But that’s not enough to make a good husband, or a half decent daddy. He ain’t shit for that. And I do want kids. But I can handle that end my damn self.”
“How’s my sister feel about all this?” Grandfather asked, probably, because deep inside he still wanted a piece of Evelyn.
“Aw, shit, Marie Madeleine don’t even know she in this world! That bitch din lost her mind. Happens to all witches. Probably talking to spirits or what not.”
However anyone felt about it, Evelyn stayed with Flipsy to the tune of three children, all baptized, all sent to Catholic school, one ending up in the seminary, none known to Dominic. The youngest one, Jason, was still around, by 1950. But he had faded out of the picture by the time Dominic was old enough to know anything about life.
The last unforgivable offense was Cedric Fitzgerald. He, too, was one of those yellow niggers and what’s more-- a Methodist. He ran around with that fast crowd always smoking and drinking, gambling and carousing downstairs in Evelyn’s part of the house, but always courteous if they should ever have to come upstairs for something-- which they tried not to do because this would mean facing Estelle.
Estelle would have taken no note of him. Gladys had wondered for sometime if she’d end up a nun, like Clairie-- the good sister-- because she didn’t feel anything about anyone ever. Evelyn had taken her aside and said, “You’ll know cause you clit will light up like a junebug when you see your man. I promise.”
Gladys wandered downstairs one night at the end of 1948, and she saw Cedric Fitzgerald Senior, all broad smiles, with little moustache, brown hair in little curls. He wore silky suits and his pants fit close and when Gladys dropped the sandwich she was carrying back to her room he bent over, and she saw his marvelous ass. And it was just like that. Her clit lit up. Their eyes crossed. Whatever lit up in a man lit up in him. It was only a few days later in his room on Price Street she learned what lit up in a man, and her eyes lingered on it in wonder.
“Ain’t you ever seen this before?” he asked.
She shook her head.
And then she saw lots of it.
The pregnancy happened fairly quickly, and the whole time Cedric talked of marriage. But the night she had the baby in the house on Crawford, he waited until she fell asleep, and then climbed ouf of the window for the first train to nowhere in particular.
In a heartbroken faith that he would come back, Gladys named the baby Cedric Fitzgerald. Estelle, heartless as ever, sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, now you’re a goddamned fool for sure, girl. And in case you didn’t know, the priest will never baptize a baby with a name like Cedric.” So she added, “Dominic” to his name, and then she said, “I won’t have a Fitzgerald living in my house, and so quick as that the baby became Cedric Dominic DuFresne,” and Estelle was quick to forget the Cedric.


Evelyn desired that her nephew have a man in his life. But there was no man to be found, and then she was never a woman to solve only one person’s problem, but if she could Ev found one solution that met several needs. When she worked she worked at a cafe with a loud, crass Irish widow who had a taste for Lebanese men and swinging jazz. Evelyn never really liked Aisling (pronounced Ashleen) O’Muil, but she liked her little girl who was just dying to get away from the cafe and make a little money.
“Girl, are you afraid of Negroes?” she asked her one day.
“I ain’t afraid of nobody,” the red headed girl had said.
“You want a job? You want to baby sit my nephew? I pay good.”
The girl said she would, and the next day she fell in love with the seven year old who was fascinated by her as well, entranced by his first close up look at a white person.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Fourteen.”
“Are you Polish?”
“Hell, no! I’m not a goddamned Polock. I’m Irish!”
“You got a name?”
“My name’s Ida!”

And that’s how that whole relationship began.



THE NIGHT OF THE DAY GLADYS left, Evelyn took Dominic around town. She walked him down Michael Street. Back then there were more large houses and trees, and an old brick sanitarium that always fascinated him. It was set back at the end of a long avenue of elms under which ran the road to the entrance. The black gate was always locked, and the two posts were large and made of brick with green copper plates reading:

MORLEY SANITARIUM

“It’s like a convent for crazy folks,” Evelyn told Cedric, laughing, as they sat on the lip of one of the post. She watched a large old car roll by, the moon shining on its dovetails.
“Your mama’s a little crazy,” Evelyn told Dominic, taking out a cigarette. “You have to understand that. She’s got a fire in her, and she just wants to be loved. Now, that ain’t no excuse for a mama running off and leaving her child. But it is an explanation, and sometimes an explanation goes a long way toward healing.” Evelyn shook her head and took the boy’s hand. They walked back down Michael, north of the sanitarium, past the old quiet houses with lights winking out from behind the bushes.
“She just wants a big wedding. That’s what she wants, to wear a gown with a long white veil, and she thinks this man’ll do it for her. I hate to say it but this time your Granny’s right. She is a damned fool.”
Evelyn threw back her head and laughed.
Dominic looked up at her.
“Tell me what you want,” said Evelyn. “One thing, and I swear I’ll get it for you. Got three kids. Two are worthless as shit. Michael’s gon be a priest. I swore to God when I was with Flipsy, I said, ‘Lord, I’m gon do right by you. I’m gon give you someone someday who can love you the way I couldn’t cause I was too dirty to.”
“You’re not dirty,” Dominic insisted.
Evelyn laughed and said, “Dom, you don’t know how nasty I am. But my point is that Michael don’t need nothing I can give him. Jesus and Pope Pius’ll take care of that. So I can give to you. And besides, I like you better, anyway. Wadn’t none of my kids no fun.”
Dominic cleared his throat. There were three old houses set behind their hedges, from deep yards behind old gates. Dominic pointed at the middle one, a white Victorian with a turret, and a large grey porch with round rocks, blue, pink and grey that made up the rail and the pillars.
“Can you get me that?”
Evelyn scowled at her great-nephew.
“Boy, what you gon do with a house?”
“Live in it.”
Dominic threw up his hands, and his eyes went big, “Anyone who wants to can come and live in it with me! It’ll be like your house. Only bigger.”
“Well, hot damn!” Evelyn clapped her hands, “that’s a good enough reason for me. One day, maybe, when you’ve forgotten you asked, I’ll do what I can do. For now let’s go home.”

Gladys called every night. She talked as long as the operator would let her, and ended every phone call with “Hugs and kisses,” and “Love you baby.” She traveled with the Man whose name neither Dominic nor Dominic as Cedric was ever to learn. One night she was in Chicago. The next it was Iowa City. Then St. Louis, Kansas City, Little Rock. Places he had never heard of-- Lincoln, Cheyenne. In the end California.
And in the end she came back. Gladys locked herself in the same room that Anne had locked herself in over thirty years ago. She did not exit for three days and three nights and when she did she said, “I swear to God, I’ll never be that kind of a fool again.”
“I knew you’d come back,” Estelle said. “They always do. Just like that worthless Cedric of yours. Why don’t you go down and let him give you some comfort?”
Gladys fixed her mother with a nasty glare, and then said, “Maybe I will, old woman. Maybe I will!”
Cedric had come back. He had only been gone a year when he returned to Jamnia because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. Not that he could really make it in Jamnia, but it was the hell he knew, so... And Gladys talked of how she didn’t want him and how he was worthless, but she was still back in his bed before long. And it had to be be his bed. There was no question about any of that business going on at 1133 Crawford. Bastards might be born here, but they were never conceived.
Dominic never cared one way or the other for his father. In fact, it was a long time before Dominic understood what a father was, and then it was an understanding of himself. With the exception of Jigelo and Grandad, the whole family was female. Women had babies who turned out to be other women. Sometimes they had boys. What boys did was unknown. Sex was something that Dominic was only vaguely aware of, so he was also ignorant of the male contribution to reproduction. Grandfather was already very old when Dominic had been born. As the years passed he simply faded away, going further into the back of the house and the back of his mind. The one splash Grandfather made was in 1956 when Maddie had come home, high as a kite and fleeing the law. He had crossed the room, and knocked her to the ground with the flat of his hand. He’d gone on in Creole for a long time and ended in:
“You shan’t shame me in my house! You shan’t!”
The second splash he made was in 1961 when he died.



BY THE TIME DOMINIC was fourteen many things had changed. Ida was already married, her last name was Lawry, and she hinted that she didn’t like her husband too much. The fifties had ended and the second Vatican Council was in full swing. Estelle locked herself in the house with her rosary and the only mass she ever attended again was the one said for her funeral.
School changed. Names changed. There were no more Negroes, but whatever they were they were still Catholic and so now Dominic crossed the river into Indiana to attend St. Xavier High School.
This is how he remembered Ralph Hanley.
Ralph Hanley had no pretensions to the priesthood or even the smallest longing to attend school mass. He was also the only other Black person in their whole year, and it was either his cousin or Uncle Jigelo who drove them to school, but they went together everyday.
Ralph had instantly liked Dominic and it was he who reminded the other boy of their meeting years before. But Dominic felt dwarfed by Ralph. Ralph was taller, with a ready smile, good with girls the girls. He was quieter than Dominic around guys. Somewhere between Evelyn and his mother, Dominic had developed a foul mouth that proved beneficial in high school, but it was Ralph who had all the ladies.
In fact one experience that Dominic never forgot no matter what his name was, was learning that Ralph had already had sex. He talked about it without exaggerated stories, confidentially, without bragging about it. To a fourteen year old Dominic this was a mindshaking revelation. It was on the one hand a mortal sin, but on the other still an amazing thing. Ralph boned and boned frequently and made a comment that he wanted to bone Jigelo’s daughter, Dominic’s cousin Faustina.
Dominic realized that Ralph was asking permission.
Dominic did not really care. He didn’t like Faustina. She was yellow gone to waste, half white, half Polish no less, and named after some nun who had invented some sort of prayer that a bunch of white people got together and said in Our Lady of Jamnia.
But that was changing too. The bishop was strongly hinting, both the bishop in Fort Wayne and the one here in Ohio, that all the Black people crossing the river to attend Queen of Peace was not appreciated when they had their own Our Lady of Jamnia right here in the neighborhood. A nun actually stepped out of the convent and wrote a letter to both bishops, “Build us a church, and we’ll stay in Jamnia.”
Hard times, heady time. It was around this time that Dominic’s father died.
Cedric Senior was drunk, and he stumbled onto the train tracks of the factory he worked at, the very factory where Luke Madeary lived now. The train made quick work of him. His insurance left Gladys twenty-five thousand dollars.
“Best thing he ever did,” Gladys murmured after she told her son. “I don’t mean die. I mean that he left us this money... However... if he hadn’t of died....”
The first thing Gladys did was “Move the hell out of this house. Mama, you’re getting on my goddamned nerves. I’m thirty-six years old, and I ain’t never had a place of my own.”
So she got her first apartment, and doing right by her son split the small fortune down the middle and stuck it in a trust fund for him.
And then one day, less than three months after his father’s death, Gladys said, “Goddamn, Cedric--”
At first Dominic didn’t realize she was talking to him.
“I’m pregnant again!” she said, patting her stomach, and shaking her head.
“I’ll be damned. Fucked from the grave!”
And that was how Claudia had come into the picture.
It was as if Gladys needed a Cedric in her life, but could bear only one. Now that the first one was dead she began to slip up and call Dominic Cedric all the time, and finally Ralph said, “Well, who the hell are you? I’ll just call you Ced. Cedric’s easier than Dominic anyway. I wish I could get a new name.”

A strange rhythm developed in Cedric’s life primarily because one began to develop in his mother’s. When Gladys was pregnant with Louise she swore, “This time I’m gon do it right.”
“You should,” Estelle told her daughter. “You’re on the wrong side of thirty-five.”
“And you’re on the wrong side of the grave with one foot in it, old woman. Best make sure I don’t get frisky and push the other foot in.”
Now that Gladys had to see her less, she was less kind when she did see Estelle who was approaching seventy in a steadily emptying house. Despite Glady’s outbursts, she was determined to make a right life for herself, her new daughter and for Cedric. Now that the bishop had actually humored Crawford Street and bewildered the Irish, Lebanese, and Polish population by putting in Our Lady of Jamnia’s first Black pastor, the people of Crawford Street no longer made the sojourn to Queen of Peace. This made things hitherto unthinkable, such as daily Mass, a staple. And Gladys came, rosary in hand, though she never did learn to say one. She brought Cedric and her daughter with her, and then Cedric was off to school.
Cedric’s cousin Michael was finally ordained, and Evelyn figured she’d better start going to church and quit acting like such a heathen. He managed to get stationed at Queen of Peace and once they all went to see Michael DuFresne preach.
Cedric never did get to know his cousin well, but Ralph was entranced by him, and the two green eyed, sandy haired young men looked as if they might have been brothers. What Cedric noted was that as they progressed toward senior year, Ralph became less and less fun while Cedric, still going to daily Mass and maintaining his virginity, made sure to hit saw to hit the gambling and drinking spots at least three times a week. He had learned to drink and smoke and tell dirty stories, and it made him quite happy. It still made Ralph happy, but Ralph didn’t talk about sex anymore, though Cedric was sure he still had it.
The Black Catholic school attached to Queen of Peace went up in flames in 1968, senior year. Cedric and Ralph heard about this while they were in trigonometry. Michael DuFresne had gone in to save a little girl. She escaped. He put her out of the window just before the section he was in collapsed in flames.
The funeral at Queen of Peace was closed casket. Evelyn sat in the front, magnificent in black. She was not between her two remaining children, who were also in the pew, but between Cedric and Ralph. As the organ was thundering the beginning of the requiem, an old woman, her face hidden by the thickness of her black veil, touched Evelyn on her arm.
Evelyn looked up, pushing away her own veil.
“I do not say...” said the woman, “that it’s ever a good day to die. Or that death can be good... But,” she smiled fiercely, “whether you take comfort in it or not... he had a glorious death! And there are not many of those.”


One day, over lunch, Cedric told Ralph, “I’m not going to college.”
“What?”
“Not right now. Don’t feel like it. I’m going to Louisiana with Flipsy and Jig. I’ve been in Catholic school for twelve years. Now I’m ready to shake what my daddy gave me. And he didn’t give me shit, but I’m still gone shake it.”
“Well, I’ve decided to go to Notre Dame,” Ralph said stoutly.
Cedric snorted. “What the hell for? You can go to Georgetown. Or Xavier right here. For God’s sake you could go to Louisiana and shake your ass. The only thing you’ll shake up there is your hands trying to get warm.”
“I’m going to O.C. Been thinking about it.”
“Who’s he?”
“Not he. It’s a thing. It’s for...” Ralph sighed and said, “I’m going to be a priest.”
Much to his discredit, Cedric threw back his head and laughed in his friend’s face.
Ralph said, rather seriously, “Haven’t you ever wanted to give your life to God?”
“I’ll give my life to God in the French Quarter if I want to, Ralph. Indiana, Louisiana. Snow? Or jumbalaya? It doesn’t take a lot of thinking.”
So after senior year, they parted ways.