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By Root 677 0

and he held out his cone. As I leaned in, he took the chance to dab my nose with green. “Hey!” I said, looking up. He was thrilled that I had fallen for his trick, one that had been played on him by countless cousins when he was young. I brushed the ice cream from my nose, and we continued up Seventh Avenue, passing cafés and secondhand shops and looking in windows. We talked about our grandfathers. He told me that Joe Kennedy had prized mystery in a woman, and I smiled, imagining myself a siren. I told him that my Irish grandfather had been a rancher who had moonlighted as a Prohibition bootlegger and kept stills in Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota. He liked that. “We have something in common,” he said. “Word is mine was, too.” Larger territory, I suggested slyly.

My grandmother had died that May near the Nebraska homestead where my mother had been born. I’d gone back for the funeral. I told him about the land that seemed to stretch forever, land that was as wide and as rolling as the sea. I described the shock of its beauty—how you knew it in the roller-coaster dips of the dirt country roads and the burnt-yellow fields broken only by barbed wire, cattle, and a windmill here and there; by the massive snowdrifts in winter; and, in spring, by the lilac shelterbelts, some twelve feet high, planted during the Dust Bowl to keep the soil down. He stopped for a moment and with surprising urgency said, “You know the heartland. You don’t understand how lucky you are.”

I remember being struck by the phrase, its quaintness, and realizing that I didn’t know him as well as I had thought. I was sure I saw something in his eyes then, a yearning for a kind of life he had missed, for spaciousness. But when I look back now, I think of the black-and-white photographs of his father and his uncle Bobby, shirtsleeves rolled up, receiving hands reaching to them from the crowds, the faces weeping, smiling, believing. I think of the weight of those images and imagine that the call of service might have been there for him—was always there for him—even as he walked the city on a warm spring day with a girl he had known for years.

By Fourteenth Street, we had finished our ice cream. He asked if I wanted to keep going, and for no reason, we cut over to Sixth Avenue. The incidental music to our production was all early Beatles—Rubber Soul and Help!—and as we walked, we sang, mangling lyrics to “I’m Looking Through You” and “Ticket to Ride.” We left the Village, with its kaleidoscope of lanes and avenues, and the buildings grew higher and the streets quieter. In 1985, that span of blocks had not yet been gentrified. Bed Bath & Beyond, Filene’s, Burlington Coat Factory, and the crowds they engendered were a thing of the future. On that day in June, the streets were ours, and the city looked new. At the Twenty-third Street stop, he didn’t leap on his bike and I didn’t say goodbye. We didn’t even think about it.

Earlier, during rehearsal, Robin had informed us that she’d found the right venue for the play. We’d be performing it in early August in a seventy-five-seat black box theater at the Irish Arts Center, a nonprofit cultural institution in Hell’s Kitchen. There would be six performances for an invitation-only audience. John didn’t want any publicity and Robin had ended an association with another theater when an item was leaked to Page Six. We were both excited about the news and discussed it as we walked north. It meant that in July, we would begin rehearsing five nights a week.

We passed through Herald Square—lines converging and the noise and color of traffic—and kept on going, through the Garment District and past the Broadway theaters. Finally, we found ourselves at Columbus Circle, flushed and fifty blocks from where we’d started. The sun was going down behind the Coliseum. I looked up past the monument of the famed explorer that stands in the center of the circle and took in the fact that we had not stopped talking for the entire walk. Now, at Merchants’ Gate, the southwestern entrance to Central Park, we were quiet.

It had gotten cooler,