Elaine said that was why black was capitalized these days, to show that it wasn’t about color, and Kristin said but it was about color, and Elaine agreed that everything was about color. That stopped the conversation, until Mick brought it back to Danny Boy and asked if both his parents had been black. Or Black, as you prefer.

  I said that was what I understood, although I’d never met either of them, and then I remembered something Danny Boy had told me the last time we’d spoken. “He hired a genealogist,” I said, “and traced his ancestry back to the royal family of the Kingdom of Dahomey.”

  “Is that a fact?” Mick said, and I said Danny Boy thought it was, and promised next time he’d show me a copy of the family tree the woman had drawn up for him. He didn’t say what he’d paid her, but clearly felt it was money well spent.

  “The prince,” Elaine said, “formerly known as Danny Boy.” She’d known him almost as long as I had, and she’d been sitting at his table the night I first saw her. “How is he, Matt?”

  He’d had health problems, but I don’t know many people who haven’t. But it has been a while, probably a few years, since I’d seen him. His eyes and his skin made sunlight an enemy, and all his life he’d kept vampire’s hours; nowadays I myself was increasingly early to bed and early to rise, though I can’t say the effects were as the adage promised.

  “I suppose he’s all right,” I said. “Otherwise I think I’d have heard. If he died, wouldn’t somebody have called me?”

  “Ah,” Mick said. “Unless the person who’d have called you was dead his own self, and here we are again with McCarty and McGuinness.”

  “In the very same bed,” Kristin said. “Elaine, I guess this is what you and I get for marrying a couple of old men. I was hoping for wisdom, and all I get is McGuinness and McCarty.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Age is probably a part of it. The past keeps gaining ground on the future, and part of living is outliving others, and nothing this side of dementia can keep you entirely unaware of the process. Life, even as it lengthens, becomes increasingly about death.

  And yet it seems to me that my life has always been about death. During those years when I carried an NYPD badge, it was matters of life and death that got my full attention.

  The job changed my view of the world. It generally does, from the day you first put on the blue uniform. A few years ago I heard someone use the term moral relativism, and I was interested enough to look it up. There’s a character in a French play who’s gobsmacked to learn that what he’s been speaking his whole life is called prose, and if I wasn’t quite as startled by what I read, I had much the same moment of recognition.

  A moral relativist? Moi?

  And there’s something wrong with that?

  I don’t know that cops all grow into moral relativists, and in fact I’ve known more than a few with a hard and fast, take-no-prisoners view of right and wrong. But many of us watch the moral world go in and out of focus, and learn that not all crime cries out for punishment, and not all rules need to be enforced, and that what’s right and what’s wrong depends on who you are and where you’ve planted your feet.

  Except for murder.

  Because, as I saw it, as I guess I’ve always seen it, taking a life is different. The only cases I really cared about were homicide cases. The conventional wisdom is nonsense, people do get away with murder, and it never ceased to bother me.

  Other crimes were part of the ebb and flow of urban life—and rural life too, I suppose. There were crimes without victims, prostitution and gambling and serving alcohol after hours, and they offered profit possibilities for the police officer who looked the other way. And there were endless nonviolent varieties of larceny and fraud, and how much they concerned you depended upon the strength of your commitment to law and order.

  And so on.

  But murder was something else. Taking a life was categorically different from taking a liberty or taking a wallet.

  That principle, if I can call it that, has always been part of who I am. The ways in which I see the world and my role in it are apt to change from day to day. Ages ago a waitress at Jimmy Armstrong’s asked my date of birth and told me I was a Virgo, which was hardly news to me, and that mine was one of the four mutable signs. And what did that mean? That I was changeable and adaptable and flexible, she explained, and ready for something new. As apparently was she.

  I can’t remember her name. It’ll come to me.

  Never mind. I see many things differently from time to time, little things like politics and religion—and, come to think of it, astrology.

  But, you know, the mutability stops when the man with the broad ax steps onto the stage. The phrase and image are Mick’s, it’s how he pictures Death, his take I suppose on the Grim Reaper and his scythe.

  If he’s not onstage, he’s in the wings, waiting for his cue. The bastard’s never very far away.

  Well, I suppose I come by the preoccupation honestly. I was in my teens when I lost my father and not far into my twenties when my mother followed him.

  And even before that.

  In seats at Sunnyside Gardens, between rounds: “Your mother’s never been the same after your brother died.”

  At Gleason’s, side by side in front of a closed casket: “After we lost your baby brother, he was never the same man.”

  And what of young Matthew? I’d never laid eyes on Joseph Jeremiah Scudder, was never in the same room with him, or even the same building. He came and went in a matter of days, and I’ve no memory of any of it.

  But I must have been aware, don’t you think? Back then, while it was going on. I was three years old, for God’s sake, and presumably conscious and sentient during my waking hours. I was, as I said, at Aunt Peg’s while they were in hospital, and she and Walter would surely have talked about what was going on, if in hushed tones. I’d have been told early on that I had a baby brother, and wasn’t that wonderful, and then when it ceased to be wonderful there’d have been tears and lamentations, and I’d have picked up on it.

  There was a period of time when they weren’t sure my mother would live, when it seems very possible that she’d follow her baby boy to the grave. How could you keep something like that from a three-year-old? For Christ’s sake, you couldn’t keep it from a house plant.

  Of course I’d have known. What I’d have made of it, what I might have thought about it, well, who’s to say? But I’d have to have known, however quickly it may have vanished from the Magic Slate of memory.

  “Little Matt was never the same after his baby brother died.”

  Nobody ever said that, and I don’t know that it’s true. But, you know, it’s not out of the question.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  After I’d buried my mother, one of the first things I did was go back to Railway Express. The boss there was apologetic; they’d replaced me, but as soon as they had an opening it was mine. He had my number, but it might be a good idea to check back with him from time to time.

  He never called, and neither did I, because it dawned on me that I didn’t need to work two jobs with only myself to support. And I could give our flat back to the landlord and find myself a smaller apartment.

  No hurry there. The rent was reasonable, and if the apartment still held a sickroom vibe, it also retained the virtue of familiarity. I knew the neighborhood, the bars and coffee shops, where to drop off my laundry, where to pick up a newspaper. Move more than a couple of blocks and you had to learn those things all over again.

  Speaking of learning, Harry Ziegler thought I should learn a trade. He ran a non-union crew, but he held cards himself in two craft guilds, plumbers and plasterers, and if the crew fell apart or the jobs stopped coming, he could hire on somewhere and draw union pay until it was time to start collecting a union pension.

  Plastering was a beautiful trade, he told me, and you wouldn’t want to meet a nicer guy than your average plasterer, but when was the last time anybody used lath and plaster in new construction? It was all sheetrock now, and you’d still run into signs urging you to Keep New York Plastered, but it was a lost cause.

  “But there’s gonna be jobs for plumbers, Matt, as long as you and I and everybody else find the time for a shave and a shower and so on. Until they invent something to take the place of water, you’re gonna need people to make it go in one direction and not in the other. You’re a plumber, your phone might ring in the middle of the night, which your plasterer doesn’t have to contend with, and when the day’s done you’ll spend a lot of time washing your hands, but once you’re a union plumber you’ll never miss a meal. Unless” —patting his stomach— “unless you got a wife puts you on a diet.”

  I can’t say I was caught up in the romance of plumbing, in or out of a union. But what he’d said made good sense. I had a strong back and a high school diploma, neither of which qualified me for anything in particular. Harry thought he could find somebody to take me on as an apprentice, and when I got to the end of that road I’d be employable for the rest of my life.

  It was the path of least resistance, and I could have found myself on it, even as I found myself staying on in the house where my mother had died.

  And if I had? Who knows where it might have led, or what kind of life I’d have lived. One sure thing, I’d have thought, is that I wouldn’t find myself writing about it, but I just Googled “memoirs of a plumber” and learned that there were more people than I’d have guessed who’d traded a pipe wrench for a keyboard.

  Never mind. My mother died, and six months later I sat in a roomful of men on East Twentieth Street and took the NYPD’s police officer entrance exam. I expected to pass, and I did, and a month later I reported to the same building and started my training.

  That may have been destined, if there’s such a thing as destiny. But maybe not. Family connections mean more on the other side of the law, but a lot of cops are the sons of cops, and there were no law enforcement officers on either side of my family. (Or criminals either, to my knowledge.)

  It’s my guess that anybody’s destiny works better when it gets a helping hand. Mine got a boost at my father’s funeral.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The family was there, of course, with everybody saying pretty much the same thing. Such a young man, and wasn’t it a shock, and you never know, do you. And what a good man to have such a hard life come to such an early end.

  And so on. The things you’d expect, and the people who weren’t relatives, most of them people I didn’t know, said much the same thing. A few of them told me who they were, and so I knew they’d worked alongside him, or swapped stories with him on adjacent barstools.

  “Your dad was proud of you.”

  I heard that a lot, but it came across as part of the soundtrack. Guy’s dead, managed to get himself underneath a subway car, here’s his kid, what are you gonna say to him? “Your dad was real proud of you.”

  Somewhere in the course of things, a man around my father’s age approached me on his own and told me his name was Stan Gorski. He was wearing a dark suit, I remember, which wasn’t unusual in that crowd, but it was warm at Gleason’s, and most of the men had taken off their ties, or at least loosened them.

  He hadn’t. He said, “You’re Matt, and we haven’t met, but I saw you with your dad a little over a year ago. At Saint Nick’s.”

  St. Nicholas Arena, in the West Sixties. And gone in the early Sixties, but for the preceding half century they had boxing matches there. My dad and I only went there the once. The few other fight cards we saw were at Queens, at Sunnyside Gardens.

  “I was working,” he said, “or I’d have come over and said hello. I didn’t know Charlie all that well but I liked him.”

  I remembered the names of the fighters in the main event, and seized upon that as something to talk about. Stan asked me if boxing was my favorite sport. I said I liked it, and I liked baseball and football, but not to play. I wasn’t very good at sports, I said.

  Had I ever done any boxing?

  Uh, no.

  I remember he looked me up and down, which I’ve always thought of as an expression, but he did just that, looked me up and down. He said I might like it, and talked about the Police Athletic League, and how it was all free of charge, and the training was a great way to get in shape.

  We talked for a while. A lot of people spoke to me that day, but this was the only real conversation.

  He gave me a slip of paper with his name and phone number on it, and I thought I might call, but of course I didn’t. And then one night my mother answered the phone and it was for me, which it never was, and it was Stan Gorski. He started to remind me who he was, but of course I remembered him and the conversation we’d had.

  I guess he caught me at just the right time. A day or two later I found my way to the parochial school gym where Stan put in ten or a dozen volunteer hours a week teaching high school kids how to jump rope and hit a heavy bag.

  It turned out he was right. I liked it.

  There were kids I only saw there once, and others for whom it was a daily event. I got there once or twice a week, and told myself I’d go more often, but never seemed to. Jumping rope was probably good for me physically, but I can’t say I liked it much. Working the speed bag was tricky at first, I think it is for everyone, but I got a little better with practice.

  But what I liked was the heavy bag. I’d wrap the cloth tape around my hands and slip on a pair of red Everlast gloves and get to business. I learned how to punch, how to get my jab out there, how to throw a hook or a straight right.

  “No arm punches, Matt. Punch from the shoulder, and put your whole body into it.”

  I learned how to do that. The heavy bag had nothing to worry about, it could take more than I could throw at it, and it wasn’t even breathing hard when my hands dropped and I knew I was done for the day. It was exhausting, slugging away like that, but my body responded to it, and not just the arms and chest and shoulders. I firmed up on the midsection—nobody called it the core then—and the lower body as well.

  And I don’t know how aware of it I was at the time, but I think it did something for the way I felt about myself and the world around me. My father was gone, and his legacy to me was a mix of obligations and diminished expectations, and I don’t know how much that weighed on me, but what I do know is I always felt better after a session with the heavy bag.

  Some days, if there was time, Stan would slip on a pair of mitts and catch the punches I threw at them. I enjoyed that. And sometimes he’d have two us pair off and do a little light sparring. We’d have mouthpieces and protective head gear, and nobody I ever saw at St. Margaret’s would remind you of Jack Dempsey, or showed much in the way of killer instinct.

  But I can’t say I liked it much. I didn’t care for getting hit, I felt clumsy throwing punches that didn’t find their target, and I remember landing a body punch and having the sense of accomplishment entirely erased when I saw my opponent wince. I hadn’t hit him that hard, I saved what power I had for the heavy bag, but I got him in the solar plexus, and I guess he felt it.

  There was one boy, a welterweight, who showed promise, and Stan steered him to a credentialed gym where he could get on track for the Golden Gloves. The rest of us were getting a good workout and developing some basic skills, and the year’s highlight would be a card of eight or ten matches with a similar PAL group who trained at the Elks Club in Woodside.

  I’d have been expected to take part, but it was after the school year ended, and I quit showing up at St. Margaret’s and worked construction full-time. I told Stan I’d see him in the fall, and maybe I meant it, but it didn’t happen.

  “Write something every day. Sit down at your desk, first thing in the morning’s the best time, and just write a sentence and see where it leads you.

  “And don’t go back and read what you’ve done. Just keep going forward. When you’re all done, that’ll be time enough to have a look at it.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  My instructions, and I could see the point.

  Yesterday morning I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat here at my desk. I looked at the screen for a while, wrote a sentence and deleted it, wrote another sentence and changed a couple of words around before deleting it.

  I remembered typing up my reports, as a patrolman and later as a detective. The only way to change a sentence around was to put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter and start over. It’s a lot easier now.

  I never wrote a sentence yesterday that I didn’t delete, and I didn’t try more than two or three times over ten or twenty minutes. Then I scrolled up to the top of the document and read “Hard to know where to start,” which struck me as true enough if not particularly eloquent. And I read on from there.

  Which I’d been advised not to do, but I have a mixed record when it comes to doing what I’m told.

  I read it all the way through. When I’d finished I thought about deleting all those words, or dragging the whole file into the Trash. The impulse was definitely present, but I guess I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Nan Hathaway.

  That was her name, the waitress who told me I was a mutable sign. It’s not the name she was born with, which was Polish and wouldn’t look right on a marquee. She’d come to New York to be an actress or a singer or a dancer, and I’m not sure she cared which, so long as it led to her having her name—her new name—in lights. And, while we’re dreaming, how about a nicer place to live than a West Forties rooming house on the wrong side of Ninth Avenue?

  Meanwhile, she spent her days taking classes and going to open auditions, and her nights carrying a tray at Jimmy Armstrong’s.

  Her room was all right. Small, and in a run-down building, but it had its own bathroom, and a hotplate she could use to warm up a can of soup. She kept it neat.

  We were never a couple, or even an item. This was early in my own stretch at Armstrong’s, I was quits with my marriage and the NYPD, and just beginning to find my way into what I suppose I could call “adapting my professional talents to the private sector.” Jimmy’s joint was around the corner from my hotel, and it became my living room and my office, and was where I took most of my meals, and did most of my drinking.