The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [113]
Linda, in a white noise of mortification, watches as from a distance. Watches Thomas shed his coat and bend over from the sofa to race tiny metal cars with Jack. Watches an eerily knowing glance pass between the aunt and Thomas. Watches as Patty and Erin, saddled with dish duty in the kitchen, peek in from time to time, clearly intrigued by the handsome boy.
In an hour, Thomas has Jack on his knee, and they are listening to Bing Crosby.
Thomas stays until the aunt begins ordering the cousins to dress for the cold. They will take the bus to church for midnight Mass, she says, Thomas pointedly uninvited.
Before they all leave, Thomas and Linda kiss behind the kitchen door. “Merry Christmas,” Thomas whispers, a sentimental boy after all. Even for all the Lowell and the O’Neill.
“Thank you for the cross,” she says. “I’ll always wear it.”
“I like your cousins,” he says. “Jack especially.”
She nods. “He’s a good boy.”
“Your aunt doesn’t like me,” he says.
“It has nothing to do with you,” she says.
“Can you get away tomorrow?” he asks.
She thinks. “In the afternoon, maybe.”
“I’ll pick you up at one o’clock,” he says. “We’ll go to Boston.”
“Boston?”
“I love the city when it’s shut down,” he says.
______
In the hallway, after Thomas has left, the aunt slips on her coat and says so that only Linda can hear, “He’s the type that’ll break your heart.”
______
They walk empty streets, the rest of the world trapped inside by the cold that whistles in from the harbor and snakes through the narrow lanes of the North End. Christmas trees are lit in windows, even in the middle of the day. Linda imagines mountains of torn wrapping paper, toys hidden underfoot, a scene she’s just come from herself. Eileen gave her a tie-dye shirt; Michael a Beatles album; Erin a hat she knit herself. The aunt gave her sensible cotton underwear bought on discount at the department store and a missal with her name printed in gold letters in the lower right-hand corner. Linda M. Fallon. The M. for Marie, a confirmation name she never uses.
Linda shivers, the peacoat hopelessly inadequate in the chill. She has on Erin’s hat, but her hair flies in the wind all the same. She has deliberately not worn a scarf so that the cross will show, but now she has to hold her coat closed with her hand. With her other hand, she holds Thomas’s. Glove to glove.
The emptiness is strange and magnificent. Snow falls and sticks to eyelashes. The entire city is ensconced within a bubble of intense quiet, with only the odd, slow rolling of chains on the tires of the intermittent cabs. It’s not hard to imagine the city as a stage set, with all the shops shuttered, the cafés closed. People existing only in the imagination. All the bustle and the smell of coffee needing to be guessed at.
“This is perfect,” Linda says to Thomas. “Absolutely perfect.” She means the sense of endless time, the promise of possibility, the clarity of the air.
They walk up the back end of Beacon Hill and then down Beacon Street itself. They stroll along the tree belt on Commonwealth Avenue and imagine what it would be like to have an apartment in one of the townhouses. They have vivid imaginations and describe to each other the mantels, the covers on the bed, the books in the bookcase. They agree they will always be friends, no matter what happens to them. They walk along Boylston Street and up Tremont along the Common and stop in at the only place that is open, a Bickford’s across from the Park Street subway station.
Stragglers and winos sit in chairs set apart from each other, their watch caps still on, the tips missing from their mittens. They have come in to get out of the cold, and one of them is drinking milk. The smell in the restaurant is of unwashed bodies, old bacon, and sadness. The bacon, doubtless cooked earlier in the day, lingers like