the cops to show up. It was an accident, he told us, as if he were practicing for his interrogation. He never meant to hurt the guy. It was self-defense, he added, suddenly inspired.
He hesitated at the door, shuffling his feet. “Well, later then,” he murmured, and disappeared.
Mac had gone into one of the bedrooms to sleep off his drunk. He would either not remember or pretend it had never happened; that was his way.
I decided I should go also; perhaps the south of France was a better idea, after all. Doyle walked me to my car and leaned in through the driver’s-side window as I rolled it down. “Just know this,” he said. “This isn’t over.”
He wrote his phone number in Charlestown on a corner of my map and I gave him my mother’s phone and address in the city. I promised to call him as soon as I got back to college and had a number of my own. He tapped the roof of the Rabbit lightly a couple of times, and I drove off.
While I was a senior in college and then a graduate student at Columbia, I would go up to Boston on occasion to see him. Once, we rented a motel room off the interstate, and another time we spent a warm spring afternoon driving around Charlestown in my VW Rabbit, Doyle behind the wheel. The Mile of Terror, the townies called it. He showed me Bunker Hill. No one was home at the apartment where he’d been born—the Doyles didn’t trust hospitals, he explained—and he still lived with his family on Dunstable Street, in a complex of two-story condominiums with gray aluminum siding, all the units exactly alike. In the living room, on the wall above the gas fireplace, hung a family portrait of all six Doyles: father, mother, three sisters, and Bill, sitting in a field of flowers with an unlikely blue sky and white puffy clouds overhead. The artist had painted in Doyle’s missing tooth.
He told me that night in another motel room that he was thinking of taking a trip across the country. I never found out if he went.
Many months later, when I was beginning my serious downward spiral, Doyle called me one morning in my apartment near Columbia.
“I got a big favor to ask you. If you can’t do it, just say so. I need three hundred dollars,” he said. “I got a debt to pay.”
“Who do you owe?” I asked.
“Filene’s Basement. I ran up a credit card.”
I wasn’t rolling in money, but it wouldn’t be a hardship to give it to him. “How do you want me to send it to you? Is a check okay, or do you need cash?”
“I can cash a check in the bar where I work.” After a pause, he added, “Thank you, Liz. I knew you’d come through, and I’ll never forget it. If you ever need anything, you know where I am.”
A year passed and I was working nights as a temp in a law firm, trying to finish law school. I was sort of seeing a guy I’d met in the Marlin, a bar on 110th and Broadway, around the corner from my apartment. Drinking close to home, it was easier to stay out of trouble. Joe Giorno had a black mustache and a Datsun 280z and lived in Hoboken. He worked for a moving company and dealt a little cocaine to Columbia students on the side. He said dealing coke was a lot easier and more lucrative than humping furniture around the city. One night we were in his 280z on our way to his place in Hoboken when he said he had to make a little detour. He drove down a street in the West 40s, slowing as we passed a parked car. There was a guy behind the wheel who wasn’t moving, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. There was a muddy smear of blood on the window.
“Shit,” Joe said. Then he turned to me: “If anybody asks, I was with you all night, you understand? All night.”
I dug Doyle’s phone number out of an old address book and called him as soon as I got home the next morning.
“Doyle,” I said, and he knew who it was. I started crying. He asked me for the details calmly, like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms. He wanted Joe’s full name and exact address.
“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Don’t worry about it anymore.