Read Online The City Below by James Carroll - Free Book Online Page A

were dressed like women in magazines or, even, movies; not like students. They wore a lot of makeup, dresses with petticoats and cinched waists, hats, and, some of them, gloves. They must spend most of what they earn, he thought, at Jordan's or Filene's.
    He didn't see her. He dropped his cigarette and pushed clear of the car, pulling himself to his fall height. Had she quit? he wondered suddenly. He hadn't seen Didi Mullen, except from a distance, since the May afternoon on Bunker Hill, and if her life had changed as much as his had—
    But then he saw that hair in the grand doorway. She had it pulled back in a ponytail, but still it framed her face and set her apart, as it always had. Her hair was the color of the sky at the end of Boylston Street.
    "Didi!" He called her name twice more as he cut through the crowd, waving. The girls made way for him. "Hey, Didi!"
    She stopped on the stairs. Other office girls flowed around her. Terry crossed to stand on the pavement just below. "Hi," he said.
    "Charlie!" she said, with an air of Anything can happen downtown.
    He raised his fist in mock anger.
    "Okay, okay." She laughed. "Terence." Her eyes sparkled behind the big round lenses of her glasses. Her arms went out He thought for a moment she was going to leap, hugging him, which made him pull back. He couldn't help it, but his first feeling was disappointment He had remembered her as pretty, but she just wasn't Now that he saw her face again—her pointed chin, her big lips with the wrong lipstick, her gangly neck, even her smile, which seemed goofy—it all made a sharp contrast to the pert good looks of the girls at the campaign.
    "Hey, Didi."
    "Hay is for horses."
    He felt himself blushing. "How you doing?"
    "Good, Terry.
Really
good." She hunched her shoulders girlishly, an unconscious emphasis of what could only have been happiness.
    "You
look
good," he said, and as if his statement had changed her, he saw the way in which she did look good, her face transparent with affection, shining with feeling, unprotected. Her eyeglasses moved and he thought, Dragonfly! Their cigarettes touching, how foolishly sexual he'd felt for a minute that late afternoon, and how the sweetness of their accidental, unrepeated intimacy had lingered. Now she didn't seem at all older than him, and the connection between them seemed far closer than the fact of her being the sister of his brother's friend.
    "What are you doing here?"
    "I came to find you."
    "Me?"
    "Didi, I need a favor. I'm in really big trouble."
    "You are?"
    "Did you know I work for Jack Kennedy?"
    "I thought you went to college."
    "I do. I go to BC. But I'm a volunteer in the campaign, and we're in the homestretch now, and—"
    "He's going to win, isn't he? Everybody says he's going to win."
    "The polls don't say that Ike is working hard for Nixon now, and with Lodge, even Massachusetts—"
    "But
you!
You said
you're
in trouble."
    The office workers were still streaming around them.
    "Which way do you go?" Doyle asked.
    "The MTA at the library."
    "Shall I walk you?"
    Didi fell into step beside him, but she kept her eyes fixed on his face, and walking was awkward. As they headed across Copley Square in the wrong direction, away from the campaign, Terry felt stupid. How had he ever imagined that she would agree to drop everything and rush to Tremont Street? Or, if she would, that she could handle what went on there?
    "What trouble?" She asked this with such earnest alarm that he realized he had conveyed the wrong thing. She thought he was talking about himself. Hon, he wanted to say, in politics we always talk personal, urgent, end of the world. Relax.
    She continued looking at him while they were walking, and he had to nudge her once to keep her from bumping someone. He fell back on a briefer's neutral tone. "My office in the campaign coordinates getting college students onto the bandwagon."
    "I'm not a college student."
    "I know. That's not why, I mean ... we hit a major snag today."