"You still going to school?" It was a stupid question; he knew Patrick was enrolled in the John Marshall College of Criminal Justice and that he was carrying a heavy load of courses toward his degree.

"Well, yeah, sure. New semester starts in a couple of weeks."

With an inexplicably urgent need to impress his son, Brian said, "You know, I'm gonna give a couple of lectures at the college in the spring semester. I'm preparing a few talks on how to deal with the news media. If we like the way it goes, I might schedule a regular course as part of the curriculum at the Police Academy for the next class."

"Well, that's fine, Dad."

They ran out of small talk, empty words, statements, vague questions. Brian put his glass down and leaned forward and held his son's eye. "Pat, how's it going? Really?"

"Okay."

The cool remote gray eyes focused on him with a familiar year-spanning challenge; the pale face sharpened his memory of a child who had confronted him, feared him but confronted him. It would always be between them, preventing them from talking the way other men could talk. For them, it had to be question and answer: father and son. He didn't want it to be that way, didn't think his son wanted it to be that way, yet he felt helpless to do anything to change it. In a sudden burst of anger, explosive, too long held in, he abandoned resolve that he would be careful.

"What do you mean 'okay'? What the hell happened at the Twenty-fifth?"

"You were told about it, weren't you? Why ask me?"

"I am asking you."

Absolute circle. Complete. Cut the shit. Father and son.

"Okay," Patrick said. "Some guy pushed me too hard, so I decked him." He said it in a tough, casual, offhand way. "That's it. That's all."

Brian jammed his hands in his pockets, moved his fingers among keys and coins to keep from smacking his son, this steely-eyed kid, this baby-faced, cold-voiced, closed-up stranger. This was who the kid had always been; he'd lived here with him, seen him every day. But he'd just seen his surface, had never been able to get more than a quick fleeting glimpse of what was inside. He wanted to ask Patrick the circumstances, wanted a chance to understand. But the mask was rigid and impenetrable.

"You don't want to screw up, Pat," Brian said softly, surprised by his own sound. It was almost a plea.

"No. I don't want to screw up, Dad."

Impulsively, Brian asked, "What do you want, Pat?"

The kid blinked, looked away, bit his lip. His face changed. Unguarded for just a moment, he had that pale weary boy's look of realization that no matter how hard he tried, how much he struggled against it, the two long hot streams of tears would slide down his face and betray him. But there were no boyhood tears; there was a man's quick adjusting of his features. He exhaled through his teeth in a thin whistling sound, stood up, shrugged.

"Maybe just to be left alone."

"Okay," Brian said.

"Hey look, Dad, I hate to eat and run, but I've got a date."

"Yeah, okay. Well, look, make sure you tell your mother good-by. And...don't be such a stranger."

"Yeah, well, with the job and school and all..."

"Yeah, right, sure."

A brief, mutual but unconnecting shoulder slap, hands quickly withdrawn before they might demand something from each other. He walked into the hallway with his son.

"Pat, listen..."

The familiar face set into a resigned neutral pleasantness, a remote polite smile, the dark-blond brows rose patiently, waiting. "Look, Pat, if there's anything I can do, I mean, at any time..."

"Right, Dad, thanks."

He tried to draw something from the fact that the kid hadn't come to him. Had handled it himself, even if that meant messing it up, screwing it, blowing it. He'd done it by himself, on his own.

But Christ, Brian couldn't understand why his son was digging his heels in at all the wrong places.

The two kids sat at the kitchen table working carefully with crayons in their coloring books. Mary Ellen and Maureen were doing the dishes, and when he came into the room, mother and daughter exchanged worried glances. He could tell that his daughter had been crying.

"Any coffee left?"

Mary Ellen prepared the coffee for him. She cleared the children from the table. "Come on Patty and Timmy, let's you and Grandma go inside and I'll read you stories from that new storybook I got you."

"Gonna have some coffee with me?" he asked his daughter. Her hands trembled as she folded the dish towel neatly, matching corner to corner. It was funny how he could see himself in her face; she had his features, smaller, finer, modified. She reminded him of a photograph of himself when he was a child. "Okay. Wanna talk?"

She suddenly pressed the damp towel against her face tightly, held it for a moment and when her face emerged it was red and distorted.

She sat across from him and her small hands twisted the towel as though she didn't know she was doing it.

"Daddy, I want to leave him. I can't live with him anymore."

He knew they'd been fighting; he'd heard the car drive off. The little bastard would probably drive around for a while to cool off.

"Come on, honey, everybody has a blowup now and then. It'll pass."

He wasn't prepared for her passion. Her small hand clenched into a fist and she pounded the table. "No, Daddy, it's not just that, not just a blowup. It's...it's become a whole way of life. It's become all there is and it just isn't enough. There just isn't anything, not anything anymore."

"There are two kids, Maureen," he pointed out quietly.

"Oh, Daddy, it's all turned into a great big blank zero, everything, my whole life. It's as though I'm dead. I'm nobody. I'm not a person anymore; I don't even know who I am or who I was supposed to be."

There was a note of rising hysteria, a glimpse of the stranger who was his daughter, who had been hiding all this time behind a well-known, well-loved, familiar, safe and reliable girl. If his son had shown him too little, his daughter was offering too much.

"You don't know who you are? You're Maureen O'Malley Logan, that's who the hell you are." He pointed at her, then jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "You're the mother of those two kids in there and the wife of the man who went storming out of here a while ago. You've got a beautiful home in Westchester and your husband has a damn good income and you've all got your health and you don't know what the hell trouble is, Maureen. I mean, you'd really have to go out looking for it because you don't really know."

"Can't you understand?" she asked vehemently. "Can't you see? I'm just, just...I cook and clean and I wipe up and I chauffeur those kids back and forth, back and forth. And I keep my figure"-she lightly touched her tiny neat waist-"and I entertain beautifully. I say all the right things to his friends and he's very proud of me. I do him justice and it's all like being a shadow, like not being a real person. Like being without any substance, it's...it's all him and Daddy," she bit her lip, shook her head, whispered to the table, "there's really nothing to him. Just talk and brag and he doesn't come near me. I mean, I just can't take it anymore." She rubbed her fists into her eyes, then looked at her father. "I'm still young. God, I'm only twenty-eight. It doesn't all have to be over for me, does it?"

"What the hell did you expect it to be?" Brian said bitterly, then aware of what he'd said from the shocked, injured look on his daughter's face, he reached for her hands and softened, as he always did where Maureen was concerned. "Oh, look, honey, we all have ups and downs, good days, bad days. Come on, you're a big girl now. Ride it out. It'll be okay." Then firmly, "Maureen, you've got two kids. You don't break up a home because you're feeling sorry for yourself. You have to think of them before yourself."

In a cold and unexpected voice, she said, "Yes, I guess that's the way you always figured it, Dad." She withdrew her hands, clenched the dish towel.

"What the hell does that mean? Look, where do you get off, saying something like that? Your mother and I have a good life together. You and Patrick had a good home."

She nodded and started washing cups and saucers.

Mary Ellen looked up at him and the two kids, large-eyed, expectant, tense, glanced from their storybook, leaned a little closer into her, one on each side of her. Mary Ellen signaled to him, just a slight pursing of her lips to indicate their innocent presence.

"Look," he told his wife, "I'm going to take that TV set down to Mom's. If Maureen wants to stay overnight, she's welcome."

Mary Ellen released her breath slowly, drew her arms tighter around her grandchildren, looked young enough, scared enough, small enough to be their mother. They nestled protectively close to her. "Won't that be fun? Timmy, you and Patty can sleep in Uncle Patrick's room. The room he had when he was just a little boy, like you."

"Mary Ellen," he said carefully, "just for tonight."

Brian leaned his head back against the old familiar chair, stretched his legs to the hassock, closed his eyes and could almost feel time slip away. His mother's voice came from the kitchen. There were the scuffling sounds of boys, the warning note in his mother's voice; an argument in high thin voices: "It was him; he did it."

"No, it was him, not me."

"Go on in now and tell Uncle Brian good night," his mother instructed and he pulled himself up as the two boys entered the living room.

Jesus, they were practically black: dark-brown faces, bright-black eyes suddenly gone shy when confronted by him. His mother casually shoved them forward.

"Come on now, say your good nights properly."

"Good night, Uncle Brian," said Juan, the oldest, twelve.

"Good night, Uncle Brian." That was Jose, his brother, just ten.

Uncle Brian. Christ. Well, yeah, I guess they have to call me something and mister was too formal and he'd be damned if they'd just casually call him by his first name.

"Good night, boys. You guys been behaving yourselves? Not getting into any trouble?"

They nodded earnestly, poked at each other, jabbed and chased and darted into the bedroom. His mother smiled and looked after them for a minute, listened to them hit the bed in flying leaps.

"Mind those bedsprings in there, you hear?"

"Okay, Grandma." Giggles, scuffles, punches, grunts.

"Well, they're a fine pair, aren't they?" she said fondly.

He leaned back and considered her. "Aren't they too much for you, Mom? They seem like real live wires."

"Oh, Brian, it was something terrible before they came. The quiet after Maria and Rose and Mathilda went back to their mother. Though I'll tell you, God's truth, I much prefer to have boys about than girls. I don't mind the rough-and-tumble; God knows you boys were holy terrors. But with girls"-she touched a stray lock of white hair and with a firm hand put it back into place-"ah, the girls. It's argue and bicker all day long. Oh, and they can be that mean to each other, and the tears flowing and the hurt feelings. They're good boys, poor little fellas. Kit and Murray had them up to the lake for the whole weekend with their own brood so they're all wound up and exhausted now. They'll settle down in a short while, you'll see."

Kit had brought the first kid home as though it was a wounded bird. A little girl, two years old, no English, no father, the mother put away with T.B. and the kid with nowhere to go. Hell, he told Kit, all the kids in the foundling hospital have nowhere else to go, but Kit said, "This one is something special, Brian," and she said, "Mom needs something too, Brian. That apartment is so damned empty."

Kit's house was never empty. A large, old frame house in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. She and her husband, Dr. Murray Weinstein, filled that house with an assortment of strays, a mixed group of foundlings, some of whom they adopted and some who stayed until ill or departed parents were able to care for them. Kit's career as a social worker among the poor of the Bronx put her in touch with the needy of all kinds. Although she'd quit her job at the foundling hospital, staying home and taking care of stray kids who had a way of collecting stray animals didn't seem enough. Kit became active in politics as a way to combat the problems which caused the abundance of children she found in dire need of services which weren't available or adequate. She was winding up her third term as state congresswoman for her district and planning to run for the state senate.

Brian had been against his mother taking in children. She was too old, for Christ's sake; she was seventy years old. He'd been after her for years to give up the apartment and come and live with them. They had more than enough room, what with Maureen married, Patrick off to the service, then off to his own life. He didn't like the idea of her living on Ryer Avenue anymore. Hell, the way the neighborhood changed, you could hardly see white for black and Puerto Rican. There was talk of closing down St. Simon's because the new parishioners couldn't support it. Hell, they couldn't support themselves, half of them were on welfare.

He'd have thought his mother would be glad to have some peace and quiet up in Riverdale. All her life, she'd been so surrounded by all of them, all their commotion, but Kit said, "Let her try it, Brian. I've just got a feeling about it."

Well, his mother took to it all right and they moved in and out of her life in a steady stream. Let Kit tell her there was a bunch of little sisters or brothers who were going to be split up and his mother somehow managed to find the room: "It's fine; it'll work out. We'll manage just fine. It keeps me busy and, oh, Brian, it fills the house again."

He wondered if sometimes when she sat up at night, her hands busy with the sewing and the knitting and the ironing of small clothes, he wondered if she ever pretended that the soft child noises from the other rooms were her own children: Roseanne, dreaming of romance; Kit, laughing in her sleep at her own secret triumphs; Martin, quiet and peaceful; Kevin, tossing and turning; and himself. He wondered what memory she had of him at ten, twelve years old.

"I got the letter from Roseanne with their Billy's wedding pictures," she said. "It's somewhere around here. Now where did I put it?"

"I know, Ma, you showed me before."

"Did I? Did I now? Isn't that terrible? I must be getting simple, saying the same things twice. Well, she's a nice-looking girl, all tan and healthy. I saw in a magazine the other day, they're all like that in California. They grow up like oranges out there, it said in the magazine, all fine and healthy. Well, Billy's bride looked like one of the magazine girls, and he so tall himself, so I guess it's true enough."

She polished her eyeglasses on her apron, smeared them so that when she put them back on they glistened with something oily. She squinted and said, "You know who I saw, Brian, the other day just outside of Alexander's on Fordham Road?"

"Give them here, Mom. I'll clean them for you."

"Eh? Oh, yes, well. Do you remember Mrs. Phelan? Oh, you do, Brian. You remember Buddy Phelan; you were in his class all through school. Go on now, you were."

He shook his head, held the glasses to the light, attacked them with a clean handkerchief. "Kevin was in Buddy Phelan's class, not me."

"Oh," she said thoughtfully, "was Buddy younger than you? That's funny."

"He was always younger than me, so what's so funny?"

"Oh, you." She reached over and slapped his knee at his teasing. "Well, I saw Mrs. Phelan anyway and she told me that she's living right down the street from Anna Caprobella, Brian. You remember Anna that was sweet on our poor John? They live in Yonkers, the Phelans, and that's where Anna lives now, only of course she's not Caprobella but some other long Italian name I've forgotten. She's four or five children, all boys, Mrs. Phelan said, and her husband is an electrician. I guess her children are mostly grown now." She reached for the glasses, hesitated for a moment before putting them on. "It's a funny thing, isn't it, Brian, how things come out?" She put her glasses on and touched her white hair off her thin cheek. "I'll make you some nice strong tea. You just lean back there now and relax a while. You look a bit tired. I'll bring it when it's ready and some nice nutcake I made fresh just this morning."

He settled back into the chair: the old chair, covered and recovered, old stuffing ripped out, renewed, replaced. It was funny about the chair, the way she held on to it. All the other furniture had been discarded and replaced through the years, but not the chair and the hassock. He'd never seen his mother sit in it. It had been his father's; then his; then all the kids, whoever got there first; but his mother never sat in it.

Christ Almighty, the ceiling patterns never changed; plastered and scraped and smoothed and painted over, they came back persistent as time, forced themselves back into this room. The minute he saw them, traced and recognized and remembered them, he could be transported back as though the world began and ended here in this room, this apartment, this home base. Maybe that was why she wouldn't leave. It was too filled with familiar patterns; she could travel back and hold on to whatever meant most to her.

He didn't really know what her memories were, what all the events were that centered here in this place. His father's wake, of course. His grandmother died in this room; just she and his mother alone, here, during the war. But there were other events, conversations, decisions, sorrows and pleasures here in this room that only she knew about.

She'd sat at the little lamp table against the wall and written her letters to them all through the war years, keeping them up to date: -Nana died two nights ago, at home. She hadn't been sick and it was peaceful and she seemed to know what was happening. She was very old and the new priest, Father Kelly, said Mass. I'd always thought Father Donlon would be around forever, I guess. But Father Kelly is quite nice.

-Billy Delaney was given a medal over there, somewhere in Italy his letter says.

-Roseanne and the children (her little girl's a beauty, dark curly hair and Roseanne's eyes) are going to live with me the while Billy's at war. There's no sense at all to her keeping her place with the house empty, now you've all gone.

-Kit will graduate school this June and was thinking about nursing school.

-Your cousin Billy O'Malley was killed at a place called Guadalcanal.

-Your brother Martin has been assigned a parish somewhere in Brooklyn; I'm not sure where, it's such a complicated place.

-Your brother Kevin was home on leave and he looks to be taller than you but still too thin, those uniforms make him look so scrawny.

-My brother Jimmie John is dead.

-Matthew's gone. It was his heart. My sister Ellen is not the same, first Billy, then Matt She's gotten thin, and used to be so hearty.

-Your Mary Ellen had the baby last night, a lovely small girl, and she looks just like you did at birth, Brian, so alike it was amazing. The old man had forty fits, he was that mad for a grandson, the old fool...

There were huge gaps in her life that he never thought about, could not account for, periods of time, years, collections of sorrows, illnesses, worries, losses. And all the time, she had lived here, never left. Seen them all leave, her children, her grandchildren, her sister gone off to live with a daughter-in-law and son in Jersey and wasting away and dying. All familiar faces gone, leaving behind change.

Large apartments that had been filled with huge families were divided into small apartments that were filled with huge families and all of them strangers. No one came back, nobody's children came back from their houses in the suburbs.

There was a handful of them left, the old neighbors, and when they met on the street, outside the stores, hurrying along in the late afternoon, anxious to get home before it got dark (there was another lady got hit in the face and her pocketbook grabbed right around the corner on Valentine Avenue, wasn't it terrible though?), they exchanged information and gossip and news and none of it was good. They seized new information voraciously and passed it along at every opportunity to whoever would listen.

"Do you remember Mrs. Hagan, Brian?" She came in from the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron. "The one used to live at 2108 and had that fat son Michael? Sure you do, you were there when he fell down the stairs and broke the dozen eggs that time, great clumsy boy he was. Well, she was hit by a car and killed, Mrs. Hagan was, right on the Grand Concourse, poor soul. Nearly eighty she was, what a shame."