The Shadow Box (34 page)

When Uncle Jake arrived, his father, already well on
his way, did not look up. Michael thought of asking him
to join them. Uncle Jake saw it on his face.

“We'll stay if you wish, lad,” he told Michael. “But
let's not take him out until he's had a nap.”

“Pop?”
             
.

“You go, Mike. Your uncle knows best. Your uncle
always
knows best.”

He got up and went into his office.

“I've got something downstairs for you,” Jake said to
Michael. “Let's see if it'll cheer you up.”

In the taxi, waiting at the curb, a genuine team-issue
Yankees jacket was hanging from the coat hook. Michael
gaped when he saw it. He wanted to try it on at once. As
he did so, on the sidewalk, he happened to glance up. He
saw his father looking down at him from their sixth floor
window. His father raised a hand, gave him a little salute.
It was the last time he saw his father alive. Tom Fallon,
according to neighbors who heard him hit, must have jumped within minutes of that cab pulling away.

“Megan?”

“U
m
?”

  
“When is your birthday?”

  
“July fourth. It's very widely celebrated.”

  
“How old are you, by the way? I mean, now that I
know your last name and all . . .”

  
A small hesitation. Just a beat. “I'll be twenty-seven.”

 
“Let's do something special.”

 
“If you're there, it will be special.”

Uncle Jake, himself a widower—Aunt Bess died young
of breast cancer—took Michael into his home. The Brook
lyn Heights town house was a handsome ivy-clad brown-
stone, four stories high, with twelve-foot ceilings on the
first three floors. But by far its best feature was that collec
tion of his. For a twelve-year-old kid, Jake's house was
like Cooperstown and Massillon combined.

That stuff aside, Jake undertook to raise and educate
Michael. He took the job seriously.

Jake Fallon loved the Jesuits. He especially believed in
Jesuit discipline. Accordingly, Jake had him take the e
n
trance exam for St. Francis Xavier High School, a military
school for day students. Xavier always marched in New
York's parades. Jake Fallon loved parades.

Michael was accepted. His uncle then hired tutors to
assure top grades, and trainers to make sure that he could
win a spot on any team he wished to try out for. Xavier
didn't have a boxing team. That led to the great Golden
Gloves debate and Moon becoming his newest trainer. He
always wondered whether Uncle Jake really knew what
sort of things Moon was teaching him. It was some pretty
brutal shit.

“Doctors learn to cut off a leg,” Moon pointed out. “That doesn't mean they'll jump at the chance to do it.”

Michael lettered in three sports, made cadet major, and got to salute the cardinal with his saber as his battalion
marched past St. Patrick's Cathedral. And to wink at Uncle
Jake, who was usually up there with him.

While still a junior, Michael thought he might try to get
into Yale or Harvard. He had the grades and his uncle
had said that money was not a problem. But Jake hated
the idea.

For openers, he said, those schools can be real snotty
about whom they take and he might need to call in a
marker here and there to get him admitted. Michael would
then spend his next four years trying to live down not
having gone to Andover or Choate and being frozen out
by those who had. People go to those schools, he said, to
make connections. They graduate, they spend the rest of
their lives sitting in meetings and joining clubs that keep
everyone else out. Go where you learn to
do
things. Go
where a quick mind and a good set of balls counts for
more than who your father is.

Unsaid, according to Moon, was the fear that Uncle
Jake might lose his nephew to the cucumber-sandwich set.
Fat chance.

In the end, his choices narrowed to Notre Dame and
Villanova. As for Villanova, Rocco Giordano's son,
Johnny, was in his second year there after failing to get
accepted by Notre Dame. Johnny had aced their entrance
exam and his SAT scores were in the top ten percent. Still, they passed on him. Michael learned, much later,
that it was because of talk that his father was about to
be indicted.

At the time, Jake didn't realize that either. So it became
a sort of competition. Jake lobbied hard for Notre Dame.

“The only pain in the ass,” he told Michael, “is that
for the rest of your life everyone will ask if you played
football there. Otherwise it's perfect. Everyone trusts a
man who went to Notre Dame.”

“Michael?”

Megan was staring at the horizon. She had an odd,
dreamy look.

“Yes'm.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“U
m
. . . what made you ask that? I mean, just now,
out of the blue.”

An innocent shrug. “Just wondered.”

“Notre Dame. I went to Notre Dame.”

Uncle Jake threw a party when the letter of acceptance
came. It was an embarrassingly expensive affair at the
River Club. Moon said don't worry about it. He said,
“Your uncle won some bet with Rocco Giordano.”

Jake's pleasure didn't last, however.
During Michael's
first two months in South Bend he was suspended over one
incident, then arrested and nearly expelled over another.

He had barely moved into the freshman dormitory when,
while he attended an orientation lecture, his new electric
typewriter, his stereo and two new sport jackets were sto
len from his room. Several freshmen had similar losses.

Two weeks later, he spotted one of his jackets. The
student who was wearing it, upon learning that it was
stolen, was as angry as he was. He said that he bought it
from a senior, a scholarship hurdler on the track team,
who told him that the jacket was a gift from an alumnus
but the sleeves were too short for him.

The hurdler lived off campus. Michael went to his apart
ment complex and knocked on the door. No one answered.
The door was locked. He went back outside, climbed in
through a window, and found his typewriter, two TV sets,
and several clock radios and pocket calculators. His stereo
and his other jacket had apparently been sold. He waited
for the athlete to return.

The thief opened the door, found Michael standing amid
the loot, went pale for an instant, then proceeded to deny
that any of that stuff has been stolen. Michael said fine,
we'll call campus security. He stepped toward the phone
on the kitchen wall but the hurdler blocked his path. He
told Michael that he could have his typewriter back. But
if he said one word, made one accusation, the player had friends who would beat him bloody every day that he was
still at Notre Dame.

Michael ended the hurdler's career with two kicks to
the knee. He was promptly suspended.

The suspension was soon lifted, however, after an in
ventory of the stolen goods and after other students came
forward to claim items that had been stolen from them.
The thief and his roommate had made a specialty of rob
bing incoming freshmen because more of their possessions
tended to be new and because freshmen were more eas
ily intimidated.

Michael became something of a hero to his class. Stories
about the episode, some wildly exaggerated, spread
through the dorms. Michael would try to shrug them off. Moon had always said, “You put a man down, never crow
about it. It comes back to haunt you.” But his reluctance to speak only added to his reputation.

This led, indirectly, to a second incident several weeks
later. On a Friday night in November, Michael had gone
to an off-campus pizza parlor with two other freshmen
and their dates. The place was patronized largely by fac
tory workers, most of them under thirty. Friday was pay day. Several had been celebrating.

Two men, early twenties, were staring at the girls at
Michael's table. They wore work boots and jeans. Michael noticed but paid no attention. The two men began needling
them, offering their opinions of Notre Dame football, then
of Notre Dame in general, and then of Catholics in gen
eral. Nothing need have come of it. It must happen in
college towns everywhere. But one of the freshmen made
a reference to “hard hats, hard heads.” The two came
over, beers in hand, and asked him to repeat it.