We were on the move again.

"Come on man, let's put this hellhole behind us," Rollo said as we jumped on the back of an MTA streetcar on Huntington Ave. He was the explorer among us, always planning his great escape from the brick jungle. When he had a particularly strong urge to travel, I would find him at the end of my bed after he scaled the 15-foot wall outside my window. I wondered, at times, if he was a chink, an enigma, that never evolved from our ancestors who swung from trees. He kind of resembled a Neanderthal: prominent skull, large gapped teeth, and hairy. Because of Rollo, my father, and the late-night orgies of Tobin Court, I seemed to be fasting from sleep.

Rollo Richardson, Oakie O'Keefe, and I were on an excursion chugging our way to a bookstore near Northeastern University.

"Tell me again where we're going," Oakie screamed into my face from his stoop below the rear window.

"The whiz kid needs to pick up a book for a chemistry course he's taking. Got big plans, going to BC next year," I hollered.

"Yeah. And who's going to pay for that."

"On the installment plan, man, no money down--catch him for the rest. Right, Rollo?"

"I'm getting out and the only way is through the books," he crowed to the gawkers on the sidewalks.

We flashed by Wentworth Institute, its gray facade an out-of-focus background to slow-motioned pedestrians. Then I whooped for our eternal brother, sitting upon his steed, as he made his "Appeal to the Great Spirit" at the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts, recalling how I held his waist in the middle of the night and accompanied him on his melancholy ride.

When the slowing streetcar failed to stop at the little Greek restaurant where my mother waited on tables and served head-bent students cramming for exams, Oakie peeked through the back window and said, "Oh shit! There's nobody on this thing; we hopped a 'no stops.' It's going into the tunnel."

"Jump!"

Rollo and I went airborne from either side of the streetcar as Oakie shifted to the outside of the car's coupling, then grabbed for air. In midflight, he hugged a telephone pole and slid down it, monkey-like, and crash-landed on his butt. Because of the speed of the trolley, I thumped to the ground in a sprint and ran by him as he toppled over like a bag of soiled laundry. Our excursion took a detour to Boston City Hospital.

In the zoo, the housing authority always built things to last. The steel doors at the buildings' entrances were color coded with the names of the ways: Tobin Court was red, and the metal apartment doors were battleship gray. The yard, containing the basketball courts, with their broken rims, and the cement picnic benches, was the approximate shape and size of a football field. Instead of grass, it was paved in green asphalt. A chain-link fence enclosed our games.

On Friday and Saturday nights, the gangs owned Tobin Court, the physical center of the project. From my apartment at number 32, I had become a connoisseur of its comings and goings and knew when a game of roundball could be played uninterrupted by a brawl. Several empty bottles of Ripple, thrown under the benches, told me that this was an opportune time to play. The Vipers would not return until the afternoon sun had run between the brick buildings and had silhouetted our images on the tarred surface.

The steamy July morning simmered, and the radiated heat penetrated our sneakers and climbed our gangling bodies the summer after we graduated from high school. We were playing inside the fence on courts that had their own unique rules, some of which had nothing to do with the sport of basketball. The guys who got to the hoops early were the first to play unless members of the presiding gang showed. There were some privileges to being a member of the Vipers. Unfortunately, my friends and I were not members, but because it was before noon on a Saturday, we were pretty sure the courts were ours for a little while.

There were five of us shooting for sides to decide who would sit out the first game, and Charlie O'Rourke was holding the ball, his black canvas sneakers cheating the foul line. Rollo Richardson and Jimmy Smith were taking off their T-shirts, exposing albino and lean upper bodies over garrison belts holding up Wrangler dungarees just below the cracks in their asses.

"Come on, Charlie, shoot the goddamn ball."

"Shut up Jimmy!"

"I'd like to play the game sometime before I turn 19."

A squinting Buddy Ford, who couldn't see without his glasses, looked down the end of Tobin Court and said, "Here comes Barry Donovan. He'll play and we won't have to wait for shithead to take his shot."

I turned to tell Barry to hustle up when I realized that the guy coming toward us wasn't Donovan but what looked like some old wino. Although about 85 degrees, the old drunk wore a long horseblanket of an overcoat over gray sweatpants with a ragged towel wrapped around his neck and a black stocking cap on his head. The ensemble was topped off with a short stub of an El Producto drooling from the corner of his mouth. When he walked, the lower parts of his legs looked like they were about to come unhinged at the knees. His upper body was definitely playing a different tune than his lower, but somehow or other he was in sync and had symmetry of movement like a piece of Dave Brubeck jazz.

When he approached me from the other side of the fence, I expected to smell the ripe odor of body stink but instead my eyes watered with a Bengay and cigar-smoke concoction. He peered through the metal fence like he was looking at an exhibit and bellowed from inside his personal sauna, "How are ya?" It was a sing-song voice, the kind that told stories about Galway Bay and Michael Collins in most of the apartments in the Mission Hill Housing Project during the 1950s. "Do you have room for one more?"

I cast a glance at Rollo, and he gave me the "He ain't on my team!" look.

The voice from the horseblanket added, "I can't move like I used to, but I can still shoot pretty well."

Charlie retreated to the other side of the court like the old guy was a pervert and said, "If you want him, Tommy, he's yours."

"All right, I'll take him and Jimmy and we'll still beat your asses. And for being the good Samaritans, we'll take the ball out first." I looked over at the old man who was on the other side of 50. Stripped of about 20 pounds of clothing, he was another albino body in a white T-shirt, only this one was covered with brown liver sores, freckles, and surfaced veins.

"We ready," I yelled from the top of the key. "Half court, game of 11, single points; in case of a tie, you have to win by two." Jimmy picked off Buddy, and I took about a ten-foot jumpshot that clanged off the metal rim and fell short, an omen for most of the game. We couldn't get near the basket because O'Rourke had plunked his refrigerator-large carcass inside the lane where no three-second rule existed. But soon we found our secret weapon. Every time we got stuffed inside, Jimmy or I would pitch the ball back to the old man who would shoot a rainbow followed by a swish.

Dungarees were sweated to our legs and our bodies were washed in exertion when the ball spun off Jimmy's fingers and rolled to the opening in the fence where a pair of engineer boots was filled with Bevo O'Malley. We saw that we had attracted an audience and realized that the Vipers were up early. Beside O'Malley, Buster Marino and Pauly Fitzgerald leaned against the chain-link enclosure. In a place where a nickname identified who you were and gave the owner a measure of toughness, Pauly didn't need one. The boss of the Vipers wasn't a particularly large guy, about 5 feet 9 inches and 170 pounds, but most of his weight was carried in his legs, which stressed the seams of his dungarees and gave him a solid foundation for taking and giving punishment. The upper body was cat-like and always seemed to be in position to battle at a moment's notice. His fists were scarred and like the heads of sledgehammers, and his eyes had a Stoic glaze to them.

Unlike some of the weasels that hung on the fringes of the Vipers, who would sucker punch a kid or wait until he was on the ground, chucking boots to his face and body, Pauly wasn't a bully or a harasser. It was strictly business. He enforced the territorial rules: the Mission Hill Housing Project belonged to the Vipers, and he was chief executive. To Pauly, it made no difference whom he had to convince: residents, gang members, and, at times, even the cops who entered the project only in a mob.

My friends and I were standing there like cornered dogs waiting for someone to make the first move when the old man barked, "Good morning, Pauly. I'll be with you in a minute." Then, turning toward me, he said, "Let's finish the game."

I'm thinking: Good morning Pauly? What the hell is this? I knew "horseblanket" wasn't Pauly's father because it was common knowledge in the project that his old man was doing time along with his uncle, "Trigger" Burke, after they and some of their friends had made an unauthorized withdrawal of about a million dollars from the Brink's Company and got grabbed just before the statute of limitations was about to run out.

The game ended quickly with an uncontested lay-up. As I was pulling my T-shirt over my head, "Thanks for letting me play" was plastered across my face in cigar breath. I opened my eyes to see the old man's blotchy white kisser smiling in front of me.

"I'm Jim," he said as he extended his hand.

"Oh, yeah, sure. I'm Tommy Farrell," I answered, keeping my eyes on the three Vipers as they entered the court. "You live around here?" I asked, not out of an interest in Jim, but as an excuse to exit with cool.

"I just moved into 1545 Tremont Street, and I'm still getting to know the neighborhood. Well, hopefully, I can join you guys in another game sometime," Jim said as he pulled on his stocking cap over a shock of salt and pepper hair. "Thanks, again."

I watched Jimmy, Charlie, Rollo, and Buddy saunter over to us with an obvious air of badness, bobbing their bodies as they walked, and wondered if I looked as ridiculous as they did. "Yeah . . . Maybe we'll see you around. You guys ready to go?"

Pauly and his pals kept their distance until we began to walk away. Jim stood in the center of the basketball court and waved the Vipers to him. We passed them, our eyes locked into theirs. From behind my back, Pauly hollered, "Hey, Farrell." When I turned quickly expecting the "Farrell" to be followed by a fist, he said with a wry grin, "Nice game."

As we approached the picnic benches in front of my building, I looked back to see the new guy to the neighborhood in deep conversation with the three gang members and said, "Must be a new bookie on the Hill and he's recruiting runners."

The following Sunday I was sitting with my younger brother, Ikie, in the back row of cathedral-large Mission Church trying to catch a couple of z's when Father Salter introduced the new parish pastor. Looking through the smallest opening allowed by my eyelids, the walk got my attention first as the priest approached the pulpit, the upper body in three-quarter time while the lower part was improvising with erratic beats. I sat up and craned my neck for a better view. Once he spoke, I had no doubt about "Jim" and his real profession.

"My name is Father James Connolly. And you can consider me your waiter. . . ."

Dressed in his black cassock, white surplice, and stole, he seemed younger than when we met on the basketball court, a little taller too. Even from my seat at the back of the church, I could see that his face had a ruggedness that I hadn't noticed before. He placed his hands on the pulpit railing and leaned closer to the parishioners. I watched his expression, brightened by the overhead reading lamp, as he turned slowly and scanned the congregation.

". . . and I'm here to serve you," he said.

I looked at the faces in the pews around me and saw curiosity as he spoke with enthusiasm to the people about how it was his responsibility to help them find a spiritual and meaningful life.

"When a person strives to make another human being's life better, he becomes closer to God, and his life is fulfilled," he said.

After the mass, the new pastor stood on the top step and greeted the congregation as they left the church. "Tommy, we'll have to play another game," he said as my brother and I passed him.

"Yeah, sure, Father. By the way, how did you know Pauly Fitzgerald, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Oh, that. I was just able to provide some service to the lads. That's all."

The people who lived in the project prided themselves in two ways: keeping their own business to themselves and, at the same time, learning everyone else's business. So, it wasn't long before word filtered through the courts that Pauly and his friends had broken into Shapiro's Market on Saint Alphonsus Street and were grabbed by the Boston cops. The story going around was that one of Father Connolly's first stops upon arrival to his new assignment was to visit Station 10 in Roxbury Crossing, introduce himself to the precinct Captain, and leave his name and number in the event that one of his parishioners went astray. Mr. Shapiro, who had been part of the neighborhood for many years, was willing, "this time only," to let the boys work off their punishment with some service to the community.

We stood on the back of a truck, hands jammed in pockets, catching air on the fifth consecutive day of 90 degrees or better, looking for relief. Once the heat got into the brick, cement, and steel, the project became an oven, cooking its occupants and driving them to the coolness of the night.

"Let's camp out at the Brookline reservoir tonight like Indians.

It's too goddamn hot in that dump and we'll just sweat our balls off," Rollo said.

"Count me in," I answered. "What about you, Buddy?"

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ball of knotted fishing line. "No problem. I'll catch us breakfast."

When the truck stopped for the traffic light at the intersection with the West Roxbury Parkway, I pounded on the roof of the cab with my fist signaling the driver that this was our stop. After spilling onto Route 9 and crossing the divided highway, we climbed the embankment to the reservoir to find that we were not the only ones interested in keeping cool. Sitting on blankets and sipping from brown paper bags were six guys and girls who looked a couple of years older than us. They had laid claim to the best patch of grass around the water. As we passed them to find our own little piece of heaven, one of the girls stood in front of Buddy and asked him if he wanted to wet his whistle. He leered into her eyes as he brought the bag to his lips.

"Make it a short drink and screw," said the mountain of a boyfriend as he stood over Buddy and glared, fists doubled up at his side.

"Hey, take it easy, pal. Do you know where we're from?" Buddy said. This was his favorite line when we got into a jam outside of our neighborhood, thinking that just the name "Roxbury" would give us an edge in a fight.

"I don't give a shit where you're from, asshole," the boyfriend said.

The girl gave Buddy a come-on wink and said, "Oh, leave them alone, Ralphie. They're just high school kids."

After begging their pardon, we walked to the other side of the reservoir, where we piled our clothes under a tree and dove into the forbidden blackness of Brookline's drinking water. Only our heads broke the surface as the cool refreshing liquid tempered our seething bodies and, for a moment, freed us of the heat of the tiny apartments stuffed with humanity.

I floated to Rollo on my back while searching the sky for the North Star. "Do you think the citizens of Brookline will complain about a funny taste in their water?"

"I'm sure they'll be bitching about the high salt content after the piss I just took."

We joined Buddy on the shore who was having his 20th Camel for the night, chain-smoking, but never taking more than five drags on each cigarette before lighting the next one. Following his father's tradition, his forehead had grown steadily into his hairline, developing the eventual baldness of all the Ford men. As Rollo and I approached him, he combed his hair and twisted a Tony Curtis curl on the front of his forehead and brushed a duck's ass from his ears to the back of his neck.

He was shorter and leaner at 5' 8" than the rest of us, but stronger because he was two years older. His parents started him in kindergarten a year later than most kids his age because of his epilepsy, and he repeated a year for the same reason. But because of his maturity and the experience of overcoming his illness, he had a confidence that the rest of us lacked. Especially if he forgot to take his medication. I thought he had killed himself one night at the Smith Street playground after he leaped off a 20-foot wall into a pile of snow that a bunch of us had pushed together. He hung against the fence and leaned out over the powdery hill as kids dared him to jump.

"How much you betting," he yelled from his perch.

"A pack of Lucky Strikes," a kid from Racine Court answered as his buddies chanted, "No balls, No balls."

"Hey screw them, Buddy. Let's see the smokes," I said to the kid. But before he could produce them, Buddy flew like a bird, a soaring albatross above us, then plummeted to earth like he was shot out of the sky, the snow swallowing him whole except for his stocking cap that remained on the surface. When he didn't emerge from the drift, friends and enemies alike raced to the mound and began to tear it apart with their hands. At the bottom of the pile, Buddy was in his perfect but unconscious form. The snow was packed into his bloody mouth, his ears and nose, and his face was scarlet like he had fallen asleep on his back on a hot summer day at the beach.

We pulled him from the pile, shook this snowman, and poked him until he coughed, "Who's got the Lucky Strikes?"

Now as I looked at this naked flyer sitting on the embankment of the reservoir, he seemed none the worse for wear. Rollo and I sat down next to him as he flicked his ashes into the water. "What are you going to do in the fall?" I asked.

"My Dad's going to get me on the T."

"Has he got that kind of pull?"

"Yeah, he's an officer in the union now. He told me I could start at the car barns cleaning out trains on the graveyard shift. Most of the work is done by three in the morning." Making a pillow of his arms, Buddy lay back and mimicked his idea of the ideal employment. "And the rest of the time I'll be catching z's."

"Right up your alley," Richardson said. "On the government tit."

"Well, we're not all as smart as you, Roland," Buddy said. "What about you, Tommy?"

"I don't know. With all the crap going on in the house, I haven't been able to think about it much. Maybe I'll keep my job at the Baptist Hospital; someone's got to dump the shitty potties." I lay back and stared at the sky. "But in the meantime, I think I'm just going to enjoy the quiet here."

We sat speechless in the darkness and listened to the sound of nothing.

Burrowed beneath the sheets, I was sleeping a watchman's slumber when my father's red stubble pressed into my ear and sanded my face. He reminded me in a slur, "I'll piss on your grave before you replace me." Though half asleep, I knew he was reclaiming his title of head of the house after a day and a night with Mr. Budweiser and Mr. Jack Daniels. Another paycheck down the gullet and another night of listening to his ragtime. I rolled over and decided I was not playing his game this night, but he shook my shoulder.

"Come on, get up," he said.

I slowly raised my head and saw his profile at the end of my bed, his face lit up by the orange ember of a cigarette. He was wearing his ever present scally with the Local 25 Teamsters button pinned on the side.

"What do you want, Dad?"

"I need some help. Will you help me out?"

"What are you talking about?" This conversation usually ended in an argument about why I wouldn't give him any money for cigarettes.

But he floored me when he said, "I need help getting up to the priest's house. I want to go to confession."

"No priest is going to hear your confession while you're drunk. Go to bed. I'll take you in the morning." Looking out at the darkness through a shadeless window, I said, "Besides, it's the middle of the night." Of course I knew that if he went to sleep and woke up sober, the idea of going to confession would lose its appeal. But when Dad got something on his mind, he could be a pain in the ass, and it was obvious that he wasn't about to budge from my room. So I gave him conditions: shower, shave, and coffee. Then I rolled over and listened to the first few drops of a summer rain.

An hour later, my lanky, angular father led the charge, pumping elbows and slapping puddles along the way. I followed closely behind, shoulders forward, hands stuffed into my jacket. Heads down, we plodded on our crusade up the hill to the twin-spired basilica. As absurd as this pilgrimage was, it was the only thing that we had done together that hadn't ended in an argument since my father started drinking again or since I had become one of those "juvenile delinquents."

Dad rang the bell to the rectory, and when no one came to the door, I banged on it with the heel of my hand. The light in the lobby flicked on and I pressed my face to the wet glass as the wind slapped our backs with driving rain. I saw my pimpled face in the pane, and in the distance, a distorted shadow approached. The large wooden door had swelled in its frame, and the person on the other side pushed and pulled several times before it opened. I sniffed the faint odor of cigar smoke.

"Agh, boy that door is tough! I need to have someone take a look at that divil," the open-collared Father Connolly said with his usual loud voice muffled by a phlegm-filled throat. "Come on in," he said as he looked at our water-soaked bodies. "You guys picked a fine night to come out and see me. What time is it anyway?" he said as he put his shoulder to the door.

"Hmm. It's about three," I said as I stepped into the lobby. "This is my Dad and . . ." I turned and pointed to my father with an open hand. ". . . he would like to go to confession."

He smiled, his face a permanent flush scored with broken lines, and gave me an approving tip of his head with hair that looked like a frightened black and gray cat. Then he stepped toward Dad with an extended hand and said, "Pleased to meet you, Mr. Farrell." As he and my father walked into one of the side offices, he paused and said, "Make yourself comfortable, Tommy." Then he shut the door behind them.

Father Connolly met with Dad until the rain stopped and the dawn arrived. As I stood with the priest at the rectory door, I nodded to my now sober father standing at the gate and said, "Thanks."

"For some of us, the road is steeper, Tommy. There are very few saints; the idea is to strive to be one."

On the way home, my father complained about the penance he was given and lamented, "I'll have to borrow your mother's rosary beads."

"It's for you," my sister Ann scowled as I lay on my bed and listened to Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra dismantle the Red Sox again. "Hurry up. I'm waiting for a call from Teresa."

The black, rotary telephone in our apartment had its own assigned number, but we shared the line with the McGilicuddy family from Horadan Way. Between the lock my parents had placed on the phone to keep us kids from running up the bill, and the six McGilicuddy girls, I never used it much and just ignored it when it rang. My friends lived so close that we always arrived unannounced at each other's doorsteps. So I was surprised when she told me that the call was for me and even more surprised when I learned who was on the other end.

"Tommy. This is Father Connolly. I have a proposition for you."

At eight o'clock the next morning, Rollo, Buddy, and I reported for work: cleaning up the property around the church because the groundskeeper, Stumpy Bufford, had broken his arm in a fall. It wasn't difficult to convince the other two that we should help out the father and earn a little extra cash at the same time. Rollo made scrounging for bread a full-time job, saving every cent for college. He and I already were working the evening shift in the kitchen at the Baptist, washing dishes and cleaning the hot carts that carried food to the patients' rooms. Buddy's motivation was simple: he needed to fund his smoking habit. He was, as they say, between jobs, living on Asian time, a nightcrawler, who loved to spin old stories and sleep most days until mid-afternoon.

"Remember our eighth grade and the day we peppered Stumpy Bufford with snowballs," he said.

"That was your idea, Tommy," Rollo added as he pushed an old wheelbarrow toward us that squealed with each turn of the tire. "As I recall, we ended up in Sister Reginald's office."

"The Stump had it coming," I said. "Whacking us on the keister with his yardstick for eight years, every time we went to take a leak in 'his' bathroom, then standing on the landing outside the lavatory door looking down on us in the schoolyard like a guard in a tower. Even now, it takes me a week to take a piss."

"Come on you little shits, get in and get out. If you pee outside the urinal or on my polished floor, I'll beat your backsides purple," Buddy mimicked in a guttural growl, humpbacked and dragging one side of his body like Quasimodo.

Laughing at Buddy, I thought of Stumpy cowering in the corner of the landing that day. "Well, we got our payback. I don't remember who locked the door behind him, but once the first snowball went up, the attack became a frenzy with every purple-ass kid in the yard getting in his shots."

Rollo dropped a load of trash in a pile where Buddy and I were raking. "Hey, how 'bout the time in fourth grade when he came in cocked to Sister Aloysius' class and began to sing 'Won't You Take Me Home, Kathleen' to her. Did you see her face?"

"Yeah, I remember. She ran to the back of the class, her habit sailing out from her sides looking like a penguin from the South Pole, and beat on the door to Sister Walter's sixth grade classroom to escape. I wonder what the old Stump would say if he knew it was us who were filling in for him."

"There you go, Tommy, 'Temporary Chief Custodian.' It has a nice ring to it," said Father Connolly who had been standing behind us dressed in old work pants, black hightops, a white T-shirt, and a white floppy hat. He was leaning on a rake like a crutch, while lighting the stub of a cigar. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, boys, but you fellas were in such a transcendental state recalling the demise of a boyhood nightmare, I didn't want to disturb you."

"Geez, Father, we didn't know you were standing there. It's just . . ."

"No one likes a bully or someone who terrorizes little people, Tommy. We'll leave it at that. How are we coming with the cleanup?" He inspected our work and then crossed the job off a list that he carried in his back pocket. "You guys did a pretty good job, and it looks like I've got enough work for a couple of months. You interested?"

We tackled the list, which grew to four tattered pages that hung out of Father Connolly's gray and paint-stained pocket, over the summer while we argued with him over the best all-around baseball player, whether rock 'n' roll was music, and the need for air-raid drills. Sandwiched between these discussions were on-the-spot sermons that often came when we were taking a break from the task at hand.

The air was thick and warm and the sun was brilliant in the August sky when we stopped for lunch on our last day of work with Father Connolly. He seemed quieter than usual, not inviting argument over the best of anything. The twinkle is his face had been replaced by a sad, wrinkled gray. His eyes were heavy and slightly closed, and bags of flesh hung under them. Buddy and I were sitting on the stone wall that separated the church grounds from the schoolyard while Rollo stood behind us toweling his body of sweat. Father Connolly slowly walked over to us as if he were stepping in and out of mud. He lowered himself as if he were a camel. First to his knees, and then, supporting his upper body with his right arm, he swung his legs over the wall and took a seat a few feet away from us. Opening the bottle of water he brought each day, he quietly said, "What do you guys think of when I say 'Marilyn Monroe'?"

A smirk lit up the corner of my mouth as I immediately thought of her blown-up dress over a New York subway grate. Buddy must have been having the same image because he said, "Va-va-va voom!"

"I thought that would be your reaction, boys. The fact is she is a beautiful creature of God as are all women, whether they're Hollywood actresses or your mothers. Don't ever forget it."

From behind us, Rollo snapped his towel at Buddy's back and said, "Come on, Father. You're giving us a sermon on our last day? It's not Sunday, you know."

I looked at Father Connolly as he began to take a long drink out of the jar. He lowered the jar, while water ran down his dimpled chin, and held it away from him with a suntanned hand as if he were about to propose a toast.

"Hah! That hits the spot." He began to look at the contents of the jar as if he were a chemist examining a beaker in a scientific experiment. Without turning his eyes from their inspection, he said, "Souls aren't saved only on Sundays, you know."

Then he lifted the bottle to his lips and emptied it, saying no more.

The following Sunday, instead of giving his sermon from the pulpit, Father Connolly walked off the altar and stood in the aisle. "Do you know . . ." he began, his arms under the chasuble with his thumbs hooked into the cincture, ". . . from time to time, my job can be quite pleasant."

But his face didn't speak of pleasantness. It had an angry flush, and his lips were thinly pressed together. His gray eyes were squinted sternly, chiseling lines into his temples. The white vestments rose with a deep breath, and as he slowly exhaled, he rested one of his large, weathered hands on the end of the pew.

"Yesterday, I married a handsome couple who vowed to love one another 'til death do us part.' But we all know, that with time, the marriage will become work, and things will not always go smoothly."

He walked up the aisle a short distance and stopped, folded his arms, and looked into the benches. "What are you going to do when the groom comes to you and says, 'I need to talk to you about Mary?' Are you going to say, 'Sorry, Joe, but I'm going golfing today and don't have the time?'"

Father Connolly turned and faced the people on the other side of the aisle. "What are you going to do when Mary comes over for a cup of tea, crying and sporting a mouse under one of her eyes? Are you going to say, 'It's not my affair?'" He walked to the altar and climbed the steps. Then turning to the people he said, "A few days ago, I went to the home of a young girl who died because everyone said they were too busy or it was not their affair."

I listened to a church-full of empty sound as he raised his hands and extended them to us. "It's all of our affairs."

After mass when the lights were turned down, I remained in the church and watched an old woman struggle to light an offertory candle. The lighted taper shook with her aged hand as the feathery flame sputtered in flight and a vibrating spark passed from the wick to the waxen candle. She wheezed as she snuffed out the taper with her breath and knelt before the altar in prayer. With a childlike grin, she watched the candle's light grow until it burned brightly with the others.

As I walked up the aisle of the spacious church, I thought about the old woman and my family and my friends. I wondered if life could be that simple.

Buddy, Oakie, and I imagined that we were Vikings rolling a battering ram against an enemy's castle door, crying for strength from Odin, while we pushed the Richardson's family wagon out onto Saint Alphonsus Street. We drove with our shoulders as Rollo steered the fuel-starved Olds with his right hand while holding the driver's door open with his left and grunted, "Push, huh. Push, huh . . ." We were keeping the Oldsmobubble from a date with the Repo Man so Mr. Richardson could have wheels to get to his job at the Quincy Shipyard.

"Push, huh. Push, huh," we sang from the rear as the car began to roll down the hill. Rollo jumped in behind the wheel and Buddy and I piled into the rear seat. Oakie ran along the right side trying to open the door but Buddy slammed down the lock with his fist and pressed his face against the glass with his middle finger extended next to his nose. From the rear window, he and I laughed maliciously and read Oakie's lips, "You assholes." The three of us rocked the two-tone green Olds to the bottom of the hill and into the Merit gas station.

"Give me 53 cents of the cheap stuff," I said through the side window to Brownie who was working the pumps.

"You boys are planning a big night I can see, really digging into those Rockerfella bank accounts," Brownie said, flashing his one fang-like snaggle tooth at us.

Rollo dumped the change into Brownie's grease-blackened hand. "Got to keep the old man working or my college career will be over before it begins. Need to hide the wagon for a few days at Oakie's until we can make a payment."

"Your timing is impeccable as the rich people like to say. I saw Bimbo's towing a couple of cars out of McGreevey Way yesterday morning at about four o'clock."

"Thanks for the tip, Brownie," Rollo said to the grimy coveralls at the window as he fired up the beast. Oakie arrived in time to jump into the front seat of the Olds as it smoked its way out of the station. At the top of Mission Hill it coasted on fumes to the steps outside of the O'Keefe's two-family home on Calumet Street, where it coughed to a stop.

The brown shingled house was bright with a fresh coat of paint and pale blue door. The neatly trimmed hedges welcomed its guests and guided them along the brick walk to the entrance as did all of the homes on the street. The houses on the O'Keefe side were turned away from the granite ledges and the housing project below them. Oakie's mother invited us to the back porch where she served cokes, bologna sandwiches, and chips as we began our all-night poker game.

"Give me three," Buddy whispered 5 hours later as he blew smoke rings across the table. We kept playing cards, determined to see the sunrise, while Rollo and Oakie slept on the floor, jacket collars pulled up and arms folded tight.

I peeled off three cards from the deck and pushed them across the table. "You better get that job with the T man because if I cash in all of these toothpicks you're going to owe me a fortune."

"After next week who will care. Rollo and Oakie are shoving off to college on Monday and Jimmy's going in the Corps the following week. The gang is breaking up." He slowly fanned his cards in front of his face, then folded them down on the table. "Looks like you get my firstborn."

"No loss to you, knowing your love life lately," I laughed quietly.

We turned our chairs to the east and the ledges, and the twin spires below them, and, at the bottom of the hill, the brick buildings we called home. In the blackness of the night, the slender steeples were silhouetted against the Boston skyline and they looked like a giant mother's arms gently cradling the housing project. Starring down at the darkened buildings below, Buddy licked his fingers of the last few crumbs of potato chips and said, "I can't wait to get out of that goddamned place. As soon as I get a few bucks, I'm out of there."

I rocked back on my chair and propped my feet on the porch railing. "Where are you going, pal?"

"I can catch the T to work from Roslindale, JP, West Roxbury . . ." He raised his voice like a conductor. ". . . and all points in between." He paused, as if he was reflecting on what he had said, then continued, "Maybe, I can get Flubber and my mother and brothers to go too. But with or without them, I'm gone."

From our perch, high on the hill, I followed with my eyes the lighting of rooms and hallways and front steps of the priests' house, which created an illuminated runway to the church. "I know who that is."

"Where?" Buddy said as he shook his head when he started to doze.

"There." I pointed to indistinguishable shadow movements at the rectory door. "That's Father Connolly going to say mass for the nuns at the chapel."

Buddy scratched his head and yawned, "He's a good guy, you know. We could use a few more like him."

"Yeah. You're right."

"What did you think of his sermon last week on vocations. Different, huh?" Feigning the gravel-voiced priest, he mimicked, "You'll meet the rich and the poor, the sinner and the saint, people on the way up and on the way down. You'll have a front row seat in the theater of life, like the ringmaster in a three-ring circus. . . . He makes it appealing doesn't he, Tommy?"

I gazed at the distorted shadow as it moved in its herky-jerky way down the rectory steps to the front gate. "Yeah. He does."

Pulling his jacket collar up, Buddy folded his arms and wiggled in his chair to get comfortable. "I never would make a good priest because I could never remember the Latin prayers at the beginning of mass. That's why I flunked out of altar boy school. Especially that Confiteor, Confutabor . . . whatever. You were an altar boy. Do you remember it?"

"Yeah," I said as I stood and gazed out over the ledges, my thumbs hung on the pockets of my dungarees. "Spera in Deo, quoniam adhuc confitebor illi."

"Yeah, that's it. You got it pretty good, Tommy."

Photo by Jeffry Pike
Copyright © 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Fri, Oct 6, 2000.