Bright hope, then a void

By Michael Patrick MacDonald

Even with all our bad luck over the years, Johnnie was a lieutenant in the Navy Seals now, Mary was becoming a nurse so she could save some money and move from her project apartment, and Joe was in the Air Force. They were ``getting out.'' That was what people in Old Colony said in hushed tones when they didn't want anyone to hear them suggesting the neighborhood was a bad environment. And Frankie too was hoping to ``get out,'' making his way, earning honest money, and thinking about becoming a pro boxer.

And then suddenly even Kevin seemed to go straight. He'd been dating a girl named Laura, a rich girl from Wayland who was sometimes dropped off in Old Colony in a limousine. Ma said Laura was ``slumming it,'' hanging out in Old Colony, and getting in on Kevin's scams, like the time she helped him claim a back injury by walking ahead of him in a supermarket aisle, pouring liquid detergent for him to slip on. Instead the supermarket had to pay for Kevin's front teeth, which he hadn't planned on losing in the fall. Laura's father was a lawyer in the financial district, ``42 men under him,'' Ma said, and her grandfather sat on a fortune from a popular brand of tennis clothes. Her father didn't like Laura dating Kevin, and Kevin said it was because he was from the project, and because he wasn't Jewish. And that was before Laura's father found out Kevin was a criminal by trade. But by then Laura was pregnant and the two of them were getting married.

Kevin was 21 and Laura two years younger when their daughter, Katie, was born in the spring of 1984. That's when Kevin's life of crime ended, and the three of them moved into Laura's condo on Newbury Street, an ``uppity'' section of downtown, as Kevin used to call it. He got used to it, though. Kevin even looked different, when I'd bump into him walking in the Public Garden, carrying his baby girl in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other. He was getting chubby, so I didn't always recognize him before he called over to me. All he talked about was how beautiful his ``wittle wittle mosquito'' was. I was so stunned I didn't know what to say back to him. But I was glad he was going straight.

But the brightest hope of all now was Frankie, who was a neighborhood star, being looked at by boxing manager Lou Duva, who managed Evander Holyfield. Frankie wasn't sure if he wanted to go pro, though. He talked to Ma about it, just like he talked to her about almost everything. Ma and Frankie were more like best friends than mother and son. We all knew Frankie was Ma's favorite, but no one seemed jealous about that. It was just accepted; ``two peas in a pod'' is what Ma herself called their relationship. Frankie was solid, a foundation everyone felt anchored to. And Ma loved Frankie for that.

Frankie had gotten a flashy new Lincoln Continental, the size of a boat, from working in the Carpenters Union, working nights at the Rat, and saving his money. He spent any free time he had piling Seamus and Stevie and all their friends into his car -- which they called a limo -- for ice cream at Frosty Village, or taking Kathy to her physical therapy appointments, or kidnapping me on Dorchester Street on my way out of Southie, to lock me up in his room and make me punch the heavy bag hanging lopsided from his ceiling. And he drove Ma everywhere, taking her slowly down Broadway, waving to admiring kids, and stopping to talk to men about town like Pole Cat Moore. ``Hey Ma, you wanna go to the graves?'' Frankie would offer to take Ma to breakfast and then to visit Patrick and Davey at the cemetery. They were buried all the way across Boston, at St. Joseph's in West Roxbury, nearly impossible for Ma to get to before Frankie bought his Lincoln.

But Frankie wanted to give even more to Ma -- and to Seamus and Stevie, who loved sleeping over at his apartment, and bragging to their friends the next day about how much weight their boxing hero could bench-press, or what he ate for breakfast. Frank told Ma about his plans to take the little kids to Disney World, a dream most of us growing up had never even bothered fantasizing about when we saw the ads on TV. One day Frankie took Ma to Mary Kelly's house in the suburbs. Ma loved showing off her greatest joy, her son the champion boxer, handsome, built, and driving a Lincoln Continental. Sitting at the picnic table in our cousins' yard, Frank drifted away from the sisters' conversation, and came back saying, ``Hey Ma, wouldn't it be nice to have a place like this someday, once I get some money? A house with a yard?'' Ma just brushed the comment off, saying in front of her sister that Old Colony Project was the best place in the world, with the beach nearby, and parks, and plenty of things for the kids to do.

It was driving back from that trip that Frankie told Ma he'd had a dream. They both thought they were psychic, and Ma paid close attention to dreams. Frankie said he'd dreamed of the whole family at the cemetery for another burial. Ma told Frankie then that just a week earlier, a crow had come through our window and had flown through the house before crashing into Ma's head and flying back out the same window. ``I'll tell you, it knocked me for a loop,'' Ma said. She said she lay down then and slept for hours. The Irish have this thing about birds inside houses; when I was little I couldn't bring in even a picture of one. Once I gave Ma a glass bird to hang on our silver disco Christmas tree, and she threw it into the trash, saying it was bad luck. Ma thought for sure after the big black bird invaded our home, that someone would die, and in the car that day she and Frankie both hoped that it would be Grandpa. ``That old [expletive] has lived a good long life now,'' Ma said. ``. . . I hope I don't live to be as old as that.'' They both laughed and drove down Broadway as Frank waved to more admiring eyes.

July 17 was Ma's birthday, which she never wanted us to celebrate, because she hated to think she was getting older. She was turning 50 in 1984, but she still told everyone that she was having a hard time turning 40. She put out the TV after watching the 11 o'clock news report of an armored car heist in Medford that had left one dead. The robber was unidentified. He had burned off his fingerprints with acid prior to the robbery, to prevent identification.

The next day Mary came over with Seamus and Steven after keeping them overnight to play with her own two kids. She had already told them the news, and they were both crying. Now Mary had to tell Ma. Ma saw the little kids crying and just looked at Mary. ``It's Frankie,'' Mary said. ``He was killed yesterday.'' Ma collapsed on the floor. Frankie was 24 years old.

THE LINES WENT AROUND the block and up the hill, to Jackie O'Brien's funeral parlor. Of all Southie's wakes, this was the most people I'd ever seen come to pay respects, and I was proud to be from a neighborhood that cared so much about my brother. But I still wasn't going to believe Frankie was in that casket until I saw him, even though his body had been identified, and even though I'd seen Kevin at the house with baby Katie since the death. At first I was sure that it must have been Kevin who'd been killed robbing the Wells Fargo armored car. Frankie? Robbing a bank truck? Kevin maybe, but not Frank. I didn't want Kevin to have been the one shot down in the afternoon ambush; I just wanted to know the truth. Now I knew Kevin was alive, but I still wanted to see if it was Frankie in the casket. I know Ma was thinking the same thing, and that's why she fell apart when she finally saw her favorite son, the shell of her favorite son, laid out with his huge boxing fists folded and wrapped in rosary beads. Ma knocked over the people in her way to climb on top of the casket, and she put her arms around Frankie's neck, pulling him up and out of the box. It took Johnnie and four muscled gangsters to tear Ma away from her Frankie. The casket wheeled a few feet, with the strength of Ma's grip. The O'Briens had to send everyone into the other room so that they could reassemble Frank's limbs and straighten out the purple satin robe he was being buried in.

I DON'T KNOW HOW WE MADE it to the funeral in the morning, after about an hour of sleep. My head was pounding as I sat in an aisle next to Frankie's casket. I thought we might have to catch Ma as she walked slowly up to the altar, holding onto any church fixtures she could grab. Ma had written a song that she wanted to read. I knew it was important to her to show she could still ``hold her head high'' in front of everyone.

Although it broke my heart to see our fun-loving hell-raising mother all dressed in black and reading about her dead son, I don't remember much about that funeral. But I do remember that Frankie's casket weighed an awful lot. Frankie was like a rock. My head was pounding, and I couldn't believe that he was really lying there inside the Irish flag-draped box, never again to play with Seamus and Stevie, never again to drive Ma to breakfast or to the cemetery, never again to be seen by any of us.

That night Ma was standing in the kitchen, looking out the back window. She usually looked out the front window, but I figured she probably didn't want to do that now, and see Frankie's empty looking apartment across the street. ``Frick . . . ah . . . frack . . . n . . . pfft.'' Ma looked fine -- she was smiling -- but she was talking gibberish. She forced some real words out of her mouth slowly, but said she couldn't feel her left arm. I told her to lie on the couch and I called Mary, who said Ma was probably having a stroke. Ma insisted she was just tired and refused to go to the hospital that night, no matter how much I begged. I was relieved to see her awake later that night. She got up around midnight, flicked on the kitchen light, and started pummeling the ground with her bare hands, killing cockroaches with a vengeance.

The next morning, with the funeral over, and Frankie buried, and the crowds gone, I opened my eyes and looked up from my mattress on the parlor floor to find Ma crying and clawing at the curtains, trying to tear them down to get a better view of Frankie's apartment. We'd always been able to see him in his kitchen window, cooking or shadowboxing, and Ma was looking for him once more. But he wasn't there. His kitchen light bulb was still on, shining dimly onto yellow cement walls and open cabinets. Ma saw that I was awake but just fell to her knees at the window, looking for Frankie, and saying over and over, ``He was such a beautiful kid, he was such a beautiful [expletive] kid.'' Her wailing went right through me. I cried inside, but Ma couldn't hold her pain in any longer. It all spilled out that morning, and I could hardly bear to see it.

Kevin started coming around the house with Laura and Katie, getting closer to Ma after Frankie died. That's when Ma began to get some of the answers she was desperately looking for about Frankie's death. Kevin blamed himself. ``It should've been me,'' he said. He'd been part of the planning for the job, and then he went straight, just like Frankie had always wanted him to, he wanted nothing to do with it. But he didn't know how to get out of it. In the end, Kevin was replaced by Frankie, who wanted nothing more than to get the family out of the projects, and saw before him what was supposed to be a simple job. And the more coke Frankie was doing, the more simple the job must have looked, and the more invincible Frankie must have felt. Because Frankie had gotten heavy into coke in the last months of his life. After his death we heard about the all-night parties in his apartment with all the boys around and mountains of cocaine on the tables, and all kinds of plans being laid out for that simple job. Frankie went in on it with his friend Ricky, the former state trooper from the Rat, and some 19-year-old named Chico we'd never heard of, from the D Street Project.

The rest of the story Ma got from the detectives who'd started coming around, telling Ma everything while I listened from the back room. Frankie's job was to get the loot, to jump into the Wells Fargo truck while one of the guys put a gun to the back of a security guard, and the other guy sat in the car with a shotgun aimed. Frankie got shot by the Wells Fargo driver when he jumped out of the back of the truck, taking a bullet in his upper back. Frankie ran and made it all the way to the getaway car, along with a bag of loot, in the middle of a wild shoot-out. The worst thing for us was that it was a minor wound. Frankie could have lived for hours, and likely survived, if there'd been any attempt to save his life. Even if they'd dumped him off on a highway where he might have been picked up, he could have lived. But of course if he had, there was a chance the bandits and the entire ring would have been caught. Frankie might have talked. So his friends had stuffed his head in trash bags and pushed him under the seat to keep him hidden and quiet, before fleeing with $100,000 to the second getaway car waiting for them. But the real story Ma found out from the coroner: Frankie had a veil of blood in his face and hand marks on his neck. Someone had strangled him.

Reprinted from "All Souls: A Family Story from Southie" by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Copyright 1999 by Michael Patrick MacDonald. By permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

This story ran on page B7 of the Boston Globe on 09/19/1999.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.