LITMIR.BIZ

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me. “Listen,” she said, “are you busy tomorrow? I want to take you somewhere.”

      “Where?”

      “Are you busy, yes or no?”

      “I…no. No, I’m not busy. Except for my paper route. I can do that pretty early.”

      “Well then, is it a date?”

      The sparkle in her eyes was dazzling, almost dizzying.

      “Yeah, okay, it’s a date,” I said at last. “What should I wear?”

      “Wear your clothes.” Lynn Mahoney giggled. “Be good if you wore your clothes.”

      The next day Lynn took me to Manhattan, via bus and subway, and through tunnels and transfers she still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. I just had to stay at her side until at last we stopped walking at Eighty-second Street and Fifth Avenue.

      “We’re here,” Lynn announced, and then we were climbing the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my first time there.

      I was in Lynn’s hands, all the way. There was a Renaissance exhibition, with statues and paintings by the ancestors of me and Enrico Boccabella, long-dead Italians with the kind of talents that apparently did not survive the journey to the New World.

      Lynn came all alive as she spoke about the artists, as if they were friends she’d grown up with.

      “Are you an artist?” I asked.

      She laughed. “God, no! My brother Brendan is the artist in the family. Eight years old, and you should see his watercolors! But I love art. I want to major in art history. I’d like to teach it some day.”

      She cocked her head at me. “What do you want to do?”

      “I have no idea.”

      “Ever painted?”

      “Not since finger paints in kindergarten. I was never much good at it.”

      “Well, you might be a word person.”

      A word person. What the hell was a word person?

      Lynn continued the tour through the museum, with me following like a loyal puppy.

      “There are Little Neckers who’ve never even been here,” she marveled. “Fifteen miles from home, and they never make the trip. I think that’s so sad.”

      “Hang on a second, Lynn.”

      A painting had literally stopped me in my tracks. We were in the American wing, and I was looking at a nineteenth-century work by Winslow Homer. It showed a bunch of barefooted boys in a country field playing a game called Snap the Whip, running and tumbling with joy. A perfect portrait of an idyllic childhood, the kind nobody really has. You looked at it, and you just wanted to be there.

      “Incredible,” I breathed.

      “Yeah,” Lynn agreed, “Winslow Homer was a good painter.”

      “Is,” I gently corrected her.

      She laughed. “Mickey, look at the brass plate. He’s been dead since 1910.”

      “No, he hasn’t. Not really. See, this painting’s in our heads, now, so we keep the artist alive, you and me and everybody else who sees it. Know what I mean? So this Winslow Homer guy…he’ll never really die.”

      I couldn’t believe what I’d just said. It was a wild thought that had become verbal without my consent.

      Lynn was quiet for a long moment. Tears shone in her eyes. “I knew you’d get it,” she said. “And I think maybe I was right about you being a word person.”

      We left the museum and walked downtown through Central Park. The backs of our hands bumped and suddenly, we were holding hands, just like that. We were approaching the zoo when suddenly, Lynn came to a stop.

      “This would be a good spot,” she announced, as if we’d just reached a desirable campsite and were about to start banging tent pegs into the ground.

      I was confused. “A good spot for what?”

      “Our first kiss.”

      My blood tingled. I had never kissed a girl before. Lynn pointed straight overhead at the Delacorte clock, with its menagerie of musical animals frozen in place. It was one minute to three o’clock. I stepped closer to Lynn, but she stopped me.

      “Hang on, Mickey, not just yet. The clock’s about to strike the hour.”

      And sure enough it did, and as the animals rotated in a circle around the clock and a carnivalesque tune filled the air, Lynn Mahoney and I shared our first kiss, and nothing would ever be the same.

      A current ran through me, a true circuit, from my lips down to my toes and up my back, over the top of my head and back to my lips. My whole being hummed with the sheer joy of it, this thing I was certain nobody else in the history of the world had ever experienced quite the way I was feeling it.

      The kiss lasted as long as the music, and upon the sudden silence we at last broke apart and looked at each other, eyes and hearts wide open.

      “Wow,” I breathed.

      “Yeah,” she agreed, “I wanted our first kiss to be special, so we’d both remember it. I didn’t want it to happen on Northern Boulevard, outside Ponti’s Pizza. Aren’t you glad we waited?”

      I was. I was even gladder that she’d referred to it as our “first” kiss.

      We held hands again as we resumed our downtown walk. What Lynn and I ignited under that clock was the real deal, the only thing in the universe without a price tag, a definition, or a substitute. I was afraid to talk about it, so I talked around it.

      “I gotta say, Lynn, I’m really glad…”

      “Glad about what?”

      “Glad your father didn’t tip me. Because I wouldn’t have met you if he had.”

      A brief shadow crossed her face at the mention of her father. I wondered if maybe I’d imagined it, because it was gone so fast. It would be years before I realized I hadn’t imagined anything.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Lynn Mahoney went to an all-girl Catholic school not far from the all-boy Catholic school I attended. She lived three blocks from us with her parents and her four brothers. You should have seen the groceries that went into that house. One entire shelf in the refrigerator contained nothing but milk, carton after carton of it. Whole milk, none of that sissy skimmed stuff. They drained it every day.

      Lynn’s father was a legend in the New York City Fire Department, known far and wide as the Burning Angel. This was because of a famous photograph taken of him as a young firefighter, running from a blazing slum one cold night with a small child in his arms. His shoulders were literally on fire. The flames looked like wings. He set the child down and rolled on the snowy ground to douse the flames, but not before the picture was taken. The photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and Walter Mahoney’s fearlessness was immortalized.

      All of his sons were either firemen or on the way to becoming firemen. They were always in training for the grueling physical exam, running miles and lifting weights. Their mother was a pretty woman, nervous as a bird, and it was hard to believe that all those large boys had actually come out of her. She was constantly going down the cellar steps with baskets of sweat-soaked laundry and staggering back up with clean clothes. Every time you went to their house you heard the washing machine thumping away downstairs. The woman never got a break.

      Mrs. Mahoney liked me all right, but her husband hated my guts. I think it started when he asked me if I was going to take the fire department test, and I told him I didn’t want to be a fireman.

      “What are you gonna be, then?”

      “I’m not sure yet, sir.”

      “You

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