Ah, he knew this game. It was called, Can You Top This? And he never could, because it would have been rude as hell to have said, Listen, Mrs. Genovese, if your sons are happy, living their lives in their safe little ruts, that's okay with me but I need more than that. I always did.
"Oh, this and that," he said pleasantly.
"That's nice." Annie Genovese's plump chest seemed to expand. "I'll be sure and tell my boys I saw you, Conor."
"You do that."
"Joey's teaching at Cornell. I suppose you've heard of it?"
Conor smiled. "I think so," he said. "Well, it's been nice talking with you—"
"Danny's opening his own business, did your father tell you?"
"No, no, he didn't."
"You know how it is. Why should a CPA work for anybody else?"
"Right," Conor said. "Well, you take care, Mrs.—"
"And Frank's a partner in a practice up on Pelham Parkway. Of course, he could have gone anywhere, bein' he's such a wonderful doctor."
"Optometrist," Conor said politely.
Mrs. Genovese flushed. "It's the same thing."
"Sure. You tell your boys I said hello, will you?"
"Certainly," Mrs. Genovese said, and looked coldly away.
Amazing. He'd managed to silence the old biddy. Conor whistled softly as he headed up the steps of the next building, the one where he'd lived until he turned eighteen.
Some things never changed.
Mrs. Genovese, for example, with her incessant boasting.
Her boys, too. He grinned as he pushed open the door and stepped inside the vestibule of the six-story walk-up. He'd bet his last dollar that Joey was still a nice guy, happier talking Shakespeare than baseball, that Danny could still add up ten numbers in his head before you could blink, and that Frank was still called, by those who knew him and detested him, A Four-Eyed Little Fuck.
The street hadn't changed much, either. In his time, it had been mostly Irish and Italian; now, it was mostly Puerto Rican but the Irish and the Italians were still hanging in. It made for an interesting mix, typically New York, though he suspected his father didn't think so.
His father.
Conor stared at the brass panel on the vestibule wall. There were twenty-five buttons on it, one for each apartment and one for the super, all neatly labeled. You had to ring to be buzzed past the locked inner door but his father didn't even know he was coming. He hadn't phoned to tell him. That would have made it seem too much like a real visit and he hadn't visited the old man in, what, maybe two years.
The vestibule door swung open. A couple of kids came out, carrying bats and gloves. Conor scooted inside before the door could close and started up the stairs.
They spoke on the telephone, he and his father, every couple of months or so. And last winter—or was it last fall?—they'd met for supper at a cop bar in the forties, the kind of place where everybody except the waitresses carried a shield and a gun. His father had come as close to having a good time as Conor had ever seen him, though it had had nothing to do with him. It had been being back among men who were still on the job that had made the old man smile.
Conor hadn't been to the apartment in a long time. His father never invited him and he had no wish to drop by. There was nothing here, not a memory worth keeping or a feeling worth cherishing. There were only old hurts and old angers, and the knowledge that they'd never go away.
He reached the fourth floor landing. His father's health was good but a man his age would surely feel this climb. Well, that was the old man's problem, not his. He'd mentioned it, the last time he'd come by, and gotten his head bitten off for his trouble. He'd mentioned, as well, that most of the people his father had known had moved away.
"Maybe you ought to look for another apartment, Dad," he'd said.
John O'Neil had fixed him with a look Conor knew from his childhood and said that this apartment and this street suited him just fine.
"Despite what you may think," he'd snapped, "I'm not ready for a rocking chair at some old folks' home."
Conor had started to say that he hadn't been thinking of that at all, he'd only meant that just because a person had lived in one place most of his life didn't mean he had to stay in that place forever. And then he'd realized that for somebody like John O'Neil, it meant exactly that.