inadequacies. The individual members of the department had not aged well. They were choleric, flushed with self-importance, and obsessed with the onset of hypertension and other scary hints of mortality. It was possible that the spring of intellectual inquiry had, at one time, flowed in the History Department. I had only known it as the academic equivalent of a salt pan.
A friend had managed to get me an administrative position with the new Asian Studies Institute at Dorian, but it hadn’t lasted long. The faculty weren’t crazy about me. I worked dutifully at my desk all day, Monday through Friday. But my years with Yamashita have changed me. I used to think of myself as an academic pursuing a research interest in the Asian martial arts. I have come to realize instead that I am a martial artist with an advanced degree. It provided me with a sense of distance from my colleagues at Dorian. I couldn’t share the university-wide fascination with minutia and self-importance. The dojo has taught me that there are more vital things in the world than convoluted social science fads or the latest campus vendetta. People there found me utterly incomprehensible. And, ultimately, the mad dictator who was Dorian’s president decided to sacrifice me in some administrative gambit I still wasn’t too clear about. Not that it mattered. I was back to part-time teaching, cobbling together a living in a way that was depressingly familiar.
All of which helped to explain why I was late for Micky’s party. Long Island, where we both grew up and he still lived, was the Land of the Car. Those condemned to the netherworld of mass transit did not fare well. On that fish-shaped island, three railroad spines stretch from New York City to points east, but they are designed like pistons to ram huge numbers of commuters into and out of Manhattan during the workweek, nothing more. It makes other complex forms of travel difficult.
But I persevered. I got off the train and stood for a moment on the raised platform, looking down on suburbia. The South Shore of Long Island is flat. You can look out into the hazy distance and see row after row of rooftops, their shingles glittering through the trees. Water towers pop up at intervals in the landscape, pale blue towers standing watch over strip malls and playgrounds. I walked down the concrete steps and into the streets of Micky’s neighborhood.
It was familiar territory. We had grown up in a place much like this one: ranches and cape cods and split level homes lined up like so many dominoes in the developments that scrolled out along the flat, swampy terrain. Belts of scrubby woods separated the neighborhoods. Occasional shallow reservoirs that caught the runoff from the blacktopped streets were set like muddy blue jewels along the railroad line that linked the towns to Manhattan. As you rode the train east out of the city, the flash of green and blue in the window—patches of trees and water—lasted longer and longer as you traveled east through Nassau County. It created the illusion that the area hadn’t been overdeveloped. But it was just that: an illusion.
You could flee Metropolis by train and pass town after town where the details varied, but not by much. The differences were so subtle that more than one commuter who fell asleep on the way home and woke with a start somewhere along the line couldn’t tell from looking out the window which community was which. It was why the seasoned commuters had the litany of towns memorized, so that the call of Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, and so on was a hypnotist’s instruction, a subliminal cadence count that prodded you awake when it was time to get off at your stop.
My walk was a step back into the past. Aboveground pools hulked in yards, sealed up for the winter with chemically aromatic blue plastic covers. Piles of leaves humped along the roadside and kids threw themselves into them, oblivious to dire parental warnings about what lay, wet and slimy, below the surface. I passed the local school, and way out on the playing fields red-faced kids were playing touch football on tired looking grass: I saw someone hook the runner’s coat and swing him to the ground. The sky was clear, and high up you could see the jet contrails leading into Kennedy airport. Some days, I miss it all.
Cars were parked along all the available curb space near Micky’s house. There were three or four in the driveway, packed in tight, with the last one jutting out onto the sidewalk. I walked up the path to the front door. It was a cold day, and the glass in the storm door was fogged up from all the people inside. I could hear the kids screaming in the backyard, despite the stockade fence Micky employed in a vain attempt at kid control.
Inside, there were people all over the place. I have two brothers and three sisters and they all seem bent on providing the world with as many young Burkes as is possible. I kissed my sisters Irene, Mary, and Kate hello and gave my mom a hug. My dad’s been dead for a while now, but I never come to these things and don’t imagine that I catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I watch my mother sitting at gatherings like this and, in her unguarded moments, I imagine I see the brief light in her eyes, and I know she is feeling the same. Then there is a subtle sagging in her form as the illusion fades. I held on to her then, for a minute, feeling the bird-like fragility of her form.
But her eyes were clear and sharp, when she asked, “How have you been?” She worries.
I grinned and shrugged. “Good, Mom. It’s working out.” My mother has concerns about my career prospects. She was elated when I got the job at the university and was more upset than I was when I got canned. I think she worries that my youngest brother Jimmy will never leave her house and is terrified at the thought that I might return there as well.
I made reassuring small talk with her, letting her know I was keeping busy. I used to assure her I was staying out of trouble, but she talks to Micky and there’s no sense in lying to her. She’d find out anyway.
Deirdre was in the kitchen. She’s got high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, and it makes her seem as if she looks at the world with a great deal of skepticism. She married my brother Micky, so the appearance probably has some basis in reality. Dee is a product of the same Irish-American stew as the rest of us. She was smart enough to know life doesn’t always live up to our expectations, but deep down she was good enough never to entirely surrender the hope.
“Hey, Dee,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek and a bouquet of flowers.
“Aww,” she said, “you didn’t have to do that. . . . ” She was pleased, but I could also see her eyes working. Dee worries about me, too. She’s convinced I’m living on the edge of destitution. I had no doubt that she and my mother would force a shopping bag of leftovers on me when I went home. I could see myself staggering down a train platform in Brooklyn, loaded down with excess rolls, meats, and other surprises. It was somewhat embarrassing. Connor Burke: scholar, martial artist, bagman.
“Michael,” she called out the window into the backyard.
“Wha!” a voice demanded.
“Connor’s here,” Dee called with a heavy Long Island accent. When she said my name, it sounded like ‘Kahna.’ Her kids said it the same way. Dee jerked her head toward the backyard. “Go see him. I’m gonna get a vase for these.”
The backyard was where the men and children hid from women, the controlling elements in their lives. Even in the cold, Micky was out there, hovering over a barbecue. He wasn’t alone. Our brother Tommy was huffing across the yard, clutching a football while three small children clung, screaming, to his legs. They were having the time of their lives, but Tommy, never in the best of shape, looked like he was going to die. Off in the far corner of the yard, some older Burke kids were murmuring to each other and pressing the toes of their sneakers against the thin sheet of ice that had formed on a shallow puddle. They looked like prisoners planning the Big Break.
I came out the door and Micky glanced at me. “Finally,” he said. “Now we can eat.” Micky is whipcord thin with a patch of white in his dark reddish-brown hair. He has a military mustache that bristles with energy. As a homicide cop he’s seen lots of things, the kind most of us don’t want to know about.
