****
Antonio V. “Big Tony” Amarazzo, proprietor of Tony’s Barbershop, stood behind the barber chair, swinging it from side to side so that the man in the chair could admire his handiwork. He had given the large man under the striped bib his very first haircut, twenty years before, the day before he started kindergarten.
Officer Charles McFadden looked into the mirror. The mirror was partly covered by the front page of the Four Star Edition of the Bulletin, with his picture on it, which had been taped to the mirror below the legend (lettered with shoe whitener) “OUR NEIGHBORHOOD HERO CHARLEY MCFADDEN.”
“Looks fine, Mr. Amarazzo,” Charley said. “Thank you.”
“ ‘Mister Amarazzo’?” Big Tony replied. “You sore at me or what? We haven’t been friends since God only knows how long?”
Charley, who could not think of a response, smiled at Big Tony’s reflection in the mirror.
“And now we’re gonna give you a shave that’ll turn your chin into a baby’s bottom,” Big Tony said.
“Oh, I don’t want a shave,” Charley protested.
“You can’t go to Saint Dominic’s needing a shave,” Big Tony said, as he pushed Charley back in the chair and draped his face in a hot towel, “and don’t worry, it’s on the house. My privilege.”
Ninety seconds later, as Charley wondered how long (he had never had a barbershop shave before) Big Tony was going to keep the towels on his face, someone else came into the barbershop.
“You know who’s in the chair, under the towels?” Charley heard Big Tony say. “Charley McFadden, that’s who. You seen the Bulletin?”
“I seen it,” an unfamiliar voice said. “I’ll be goddamned.”
Charley had folded his hands over his stomach. He was startled when his right hand was picked up, and vigorously shaken by two hands.
“Good for you, Charley,” the voice said. “I was just telling the wife, when we seen the paper, that if there was more cops like you, and more shitasses killed like the one you killed, Philly’d be a hell of a lot better off. We’re all proud of you, boy.”
“I knew all along,” Charley heard Big Tony say, “that Charley was a cop. I couldn’t say anything, of course.”
When Big Tony pulled the hot towel off, and started to lather Charley’s face, there were three other men from the neighborhood standing behind the chair, waiting to shake his hand.
****
It was a pleasant spring morning, and the Payne family was having breakfast outside, on a flagstone patio. The whole family, for the first time in a long time, was all home at once. Foster J. Payne, twenty-five, who looked very much like his father, had come home from Cambridge, where he had just completed his second year at Harvard Law; and Amelia Alice “Amy” Payne, twenty-seven, who had three years before—the youngest in her Johns Hopkins class—earned the right to append “M.D.” after her name, had just completed her residency in psychiatry at the Louisiana State University Medical Center, and had come home to find a place for herself in Philadelphia. Brewster C. Payne III, eighteen, who had just graduated from Episcopal Academy, had commuted to school; but he was, after spending the summer in Europe (his graduation present), going to Dartmouth; and Patricia Payne was very aware that the nest would then be forever empty.
Amy was petite and intense, not a pretty girl, but an attractive, natural one. In judging his children intellectually (and of course, privately) Brewster Payne had rated his daughter first, then Matt, then Foster, and finally Brewster, who was known as “B.C.” Just as privately, Patricia Payne had done the same thing, with the same result, except that she had rated B.C. ahead of Foster.
Amy was very smart, perhaps even brilliant. She had been astonishingly precocious, and as astonishingly determined from the time she had been a little girl. Patricia worried that it might cause her trouble when she married, until she learned to adapt to her husband, or perhaps to the more general principle that it is sometimes far wiser to keep your mouth shut than to persist in trying to correct someone else’s erroneous notions.
Matt was bright. He had never had any trouble in school, and there had been at least a dozen letters from teachers and headmasters saying essentially the same thing, that if he applied himself, he could be an A student. He never applied himself (Patricia was convinced he had never done an hour’s honest homework in his life) and he had never been an A student.
Foster was, but Foster had to work at it. By definition, Foster was the only student among the three of them. Amy rarely had to crack a book, Matt was never willing to, and Foster seldom had his nose out of one. B.C. had been a 3.5 average student at Episcopal without ever
having brought a book home from school.
The patio was furnished with a long, wrought-iron, mottled-glass-topped table, with eight cushioned wrought-iron chairs. Two smaller matching tables sat against the fieldstone, slate-topped patio wall. Two electric frying pans had been set up on one of them, and it also held a bowl of eggs and a plate with bacon and Taylor ham. The other held an electric percolator, a pitcher of milk, a toaster, bread and muffins, and a pitcher of orange juice.
Patricia Payne had decided, when the kids were growing up, that the solution to everybody’s sauntering down to breakfast in their own good time was, rather than shouted entreaties and threats up the kitchen stairwell, a cafeteria-style buffet. The kids came down when they wanted, and cooked their own eggs. In the old days, too, there had been two newspapers, which at least partially solved the question of who got what section when.
There was something bittersweet about today’s breakfast, Patricia thought: fond memories of breakfasts past, pleasure that everyone was once again having breakfast together again, and a disquieting fear that today, or at least the next week or so, might be the very last time it would happen.
“That’s absolute bullshit!” Matthew Payne said, furiously.
Everybody looked at him. He was on the right side of the far end of the table, bent over a folded copy of the Ledger.
“Matt!” Patricia Payne said.
“Did you see this?” Matt asked, rhetorically.