Forever Young by William Sylvester Noonan & Robert Huber

Author:William Sylvester Noonan & Robert Huber [Noonan, William Sylvester & Huber, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

THAT SEPTEMBER, T.X. Cronin died. He’d been a World War II naval officer, graduated from the Harvard School of Business, and made a fortune in electronics in the sixties. When one of his sons married my sister, my father and T.X. became business partners, and when my father died, he became a surrogate father to me, a man who would take me to communion breakfasts, to football banquets—things a father would do with a son. It was T.X. who had taken me to Europe in 1974 with his son Philip.

It’s something John and I talked about. He once asked me, “How much do you think about it?”—meaning the absence of our fathers.

“Every day.”

“When does it bother you the most?”

“Father-son events. When everybody else’s father is around….”

Loads of people, naturally, would have jumped at the chance to fill that role with John, but Jackie was cautious about letting anyone get close for the wrong reasons. Teddy, after Bobby’s death, would have been the obvious choice, but he had far too many responsibilities as a senator and head of the Kennedy family to take on that role. Jackie turned to Jack Walsh, the Secret Service agent from Boston, a tough, charming ex-marine with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair—he was called the “Silver Fox.” Mr. Walsh (Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t allow him to be called “Jack,” as that hit a little too close to home) would play the surrogate dad with John, who looked up to him.

Now Mr. Cronin was inadvertently going to help me once again. On the way to his funeral, I picked up Dennis Maguire, who was also close to the Cronins, at his family’s plumbing-and-heating shop in Newton. His mother was there with his younger sister, Kathleen, who we used to babysit when we were in high school. My God, how she had grown up! I remembered a freckle-faced tomboy; now she was a long-legged marathon runner.

When I brought up how stunning Kathleen had become, Dennis grunted something about her dating some jerk and maybe I should take her out. A date? My friendship with Dennis went back to high school—I didn’t think it was a good idea to risk that. Plus, I had just gotten out of a bad relationship and wasn’t interested in rebounding into another. And with my mother sick, I had my hands full.

I few days later, I saw Dennis again. “Listen, Billy,” he told me, “I cleared it with my family, especially my mother, who said that it was okay to take Kathleen out.”

“Okay. Did you happen to mention it to her?”

Apparently she was up for it. I demurred. He called again.

On an October night, under a nearly full harvest moon, I called her, and we went out.

With the right person, everything becomes simple. She was one of my own. Hell, I once helped her assemble a maze for hamsters one Christmas a long time ago.

She invited me to a harvest-moon party two nights later. I explained I had a friend coming into town with his girlfriend and that we were going out to dinner.

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