Bear and His Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

little wingless birds. In bed, in the darkness, they would moan with pain and rage against the state of things, against Brother Francis and God’s will, against their alcoholic fathers, feckless mothers or stepparents. Children can never imagine a suffering greater than their own.
    Mackay was an intelligent child who liked books and so was able to mythologize his experience. One of the favorite myths informing his early childhood was the Dickensian one of the highborn orphan, fallen among brutish commoners. Sometimes he would try to identify and encourage in himself those traits of character that gave evidence of his lost eminence. The question of his own courage in the face of danger and enmity often occupied his thoughts. Years later, in navy boot camp, Mackay would discover that in the course of his years at St. Michael’s he had acquired an instinctive cringe. This would be the first indication in adult life that he had not passed altogether unmarked through his early education.

    When Mackay’s mother was released from the hospital, Mackay left St. Michael’s and went to live with her in a single bathless room at a welfare hotel on the West Side. He spent as much time as possible out of the room, on the street. In his second year of high school, he began to cut classes. He had become a “junior” of a West Side gang and spent much time drinking beer in Central Park at night and smoking, with a sense of abandon, the occasional reefer.
    Once, in the dead hours of a summer night, he was drinking Scotch and Pepsi-Cola with four other youths around the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park called Cleopatra’s Needle when a hostile band happened by. One of Mackay’s friends had a knife, and in the fight that ensued a boy of the other party was stabbed. It was impossible to see everything in the darkness. The fight was almost silent. Mackay found that adrenaline worked against the sense of time; time advanced with his pulse beats, moment by moment. There was a cry of “Shank!” The stabbed boy cursed and groaned. At the height of the battle two mounted policemen from the Central Park precinct came galloping across the Great Lawn, bearing down on the combatants. Everyone scattered for cover.
    Mackay and Chris Kiernan escaped over a wall and onto the transverse road across the park at Seventy-ninth Street. There they found the teenager who had been stabbed, standing by the curb watching glassy-eyed as cars sped past him. He had been stabbed twice in the arm, warding off thrusts at his body. The wounds seemed deep and, Mackay thought, might well have killed had they been placed as intended.
    The stabbed youth cursed them. Mackay and Kiernan felt compromised. Custom discouraged the promiscuous use of knives against white enemies. It seemed impossible to just leave him there, so they decided to help. Mackay and Kiernan made a tourniquet of his bloody white shirt. They walked him, talking encouragement, to the door of the nearest hospital, a luxurious private establishment off Madison Avenue. His shirt had become suffused with blood. Blood ran off his sneakers onto the pavement. As they approached the inner glass door of the hospital a man in white came forward from behind a reception desk and locked the door. When they protested, the man in white simply shook his head. Mackay and Kiernan somehow got the youth to Bellevue, left him outside Emergency and fled.
    The following March, on St. Patrick’s Day, Mackay was one of the drunken youths who, then as now, made the Upper East Side horrible with their carousing after the parade. His mother was back in the hospital and he was staying in an apartment in East Harlem with half a dozen other dropouts. Parents, not unwisely, cautioned their teenage children against association with him.
    On the St. Patrick’s Day in question, Mackay was drunk and unhappy. He picked a fight with his friend Kiernan in a poolroom on East Eighty-sixth Street. Kiernan, with what Mackay always felt was a