What I Lived For Read online

  Dedication

  —for Billy Abrahams, editor and friend

  Epigraph

  He rests. He has traveled.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: December 24, 1959–December 27, 1959

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part I: Friday, May 22, 1992

  Chapter 1: “Nicest Guy in Union City, New York”

  Chapter 2: “He’s Here Now, but He’s Leaving”

  Chapter 3: The Shadow-Office

  Chapter 4: Corky Dines at the Union City Athletic Club

  Chapter 5: Corcoran, Inc.

  Chapter 6: Corky Resists Evil

  Chapter 7: Corky Commits a Felony

  Part II: Saturday, May 23, 1992

  Chapter 1: Corky, Hungover, at Home

  Chapter 2: Romance: October 1989

  Chapter 3: “Down to the Morgue”

  Chapter 4: Corky Places a Bet

  Chapter 5: Stepdaughter

  Chapter 6: Corky Clinches a Deal

  Part III: Sunday, May 24, 1992

  Chapter 1: Corky Makes a Vow

  Chapter 2: Corky Discovers a Theft

  Chapter 3: Corky Breaks Down

  Chapter 4: Corky Gears Up

  Chapter 5: A Romantic Interlude

  Chapter 6: Corky Takes Refuge

  Chapter 7: Corky at the Zanzibar

  Chapter 8: Corky on Mount Moriah

  Chapter 9: Corky in Pursuit

  Chapter 10: “The Cock Crew . . .”

  Part IV: Memorial Day 1992

  Chapter 1: The Impersonator

  Chapter 2: The Kiss

  Chapter 3: “May the Road Rise Up to Meet You . . .”

  Chapter 4: Coldcocked

  Chapter 5: “Please Forgive Me, I Love You . . .”

  Chapter 6: Rat’s Nest

  Chapter 7: In Memoriam

  Chapter 8: Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery

  Chapter 9: Corky’s Price

  Epilogue: May 25, 1992–May 28, 1992

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  December 24, 1959–December 27, 1959

  1

  God erupted in thunder and shattering glass.

  God was deafening, out of the winter sky heavy with storm clouds above Lake Erie.

  God was six staccato bursts of fire, and glass flying like crazy laughter, and the skidding of a car’s tires as a car accelerated rapidly going eastward on Schuyler.

  God struck so swiftly, and without warning. No mercy. In the lightly falling powdery-glinting snow of Christmas Eve.

  In fact it was just dusk of Christmas Eve: the brief day, overcast like ashes, was darkening early at 4:20 P.M.

  Timothy Patrick Corcoran, hanging an evergreen wreath to the front door of the residence at 8 Schuyler Place, his back to the narrow street, caught the first of the bullets in the lower back, and the second shattered several vertebrae and ripped through his lungs, and the third went wild and the fourth struck the nape of his neck and lodged in the base of his skull and by this time pop-eyed in the astonishment of Death he was falling, yanking the heavy wreath with him to the fan-shaped stoop that began to glisten immediately with his blood.

  He was coughing blood, choking in blood. The wreath too would be soaked in blood: a massive, heavy, ornamental wreath, purchased just that afternoon, rich and pungent-smelling, a beautiful wreath for the beautiful new house at 8 Schuyler Place, thirty inches across, with sprigs of berries so shinily red they might have been synthetic berries and a gaudy red satin bow so shinily red it might have been plastic.

  A wire from the wreath, dislodged by the weight of the dying man, would catch him in the left cheek, piercing the skin. When he was lifted, and turned, the wreath would lift partway with him before falling back.

  Timothy Patrick Corcoran, thirty-six years old, six feet two inches tall and 212 pounds, was a large, muscular man, a man impatient with physical incompetence, and he fell heavily and without grace, clawing first at the door against which the sledgehammer blows of the bullets had thrown him and then at the wreath and at his chest which had exploded in a pain beyond pain, collapsing, his left leg beneath him, onto the concrete stoop he’d shoveled clear of icy snow that morning and which was covered now in a thin coating of fresh powdery snow.

  The third, fifth, and sixth bullets struck the door, breaking the leaded-glass window that curved like a rising sun, lodging in a wall of the foyer inside and in the thick oak wood of the door itself.

  There was height to this door, and conspicuous pride. It boasted, beside the leaded-glass window, an oversized wrought-iron knocker in the shape of an American eagle, and a brass doorknob bright as if illuminated from within.

  The door too would be splashed with Timothy Patrick Corcoran’s blood. The vivid brass doorknob, smeared with it.

  As if the dying man, in a final spasm of his fierce and inviolable will, had seized the doorknob, meaning to open the door and reenter his house.

  His house, though he had not built it, only renovated it.

  8 Schuyler Place: the “new” Corcoran house.

  Always in family legend and in the speech of those who knew the Corcorans it would be the “new” house in Maiden Vale where Timothy Patrick Corcoran died on the eve of the first Christmas he would have spent in the house. God striking the man down on his very doorstep in a section of Union City where you would not expect God to interfere with the affairs of men at all.

  Timothy Patrick Corcoran had brought his wife Theresa and his eleven-year-old son Jerome to live at 8 Schuyler Place in January 1959. Their “old” house was 1191 Barrow Street in Irish Hill, in southwest Union City: Our Lady of Mercy parish, the sixth police precinct: bounded by Grand Boulevard to the north and the waterfront of Lake Erie to the west and the city limits of industrial Shehawkin to the south and Decatur Boulevard and the railroad and stockyards to the east. But even in Irish Hill, in these post-War years, it was rare for a man to die riddled with bullets in the back on his own front step on Christmas Eve.

  Timothy Patrick Corcoran, born Union City, New York, on November 7, 1923. Died Union City, New York, on December 24, 1959.

  Timothy Patrick Corcoran, baptized and confirmed and married in the Holy Roman Catholic faith but deprived at the hour of his death of extreme unction, the last sacrament of the Church in which in any case he had not believed since childhood though in fact when the first bullet tore into his body and he understood that this was Death, this was the explosive fiery Death he’d several times escaped in Korea, in the mute astonishment of those quick-staccato seconds preceding the obliteration of his consciousness like chalk marks erased from a blackboard he did pray God help me!

  Understanding at that moment for the first time in his life that it does not matter if you believe in God or not. Or if there is God or not.

  For what is passes so swiftly and irrevocably into what was, no human claim can be of the least significance.

  God erupted, and was gone. After the deafening thunder and shattering glass, a terrible silence.

  And in that silence, rapidly retreating, diminishing, the sound of the invisible car sharply turning the corner at Schuyler Place and careening north on Summit to the Millard Fillmore Expressway and so out of Union City as if speeding off the edge of the world even as the dying man too slipped over.

  Inside the house, a woman began to scream.

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  The child heard the gunshots, and the careening car, and he knew at once, but he hadn’t heard, hadn’t known, just stood there paralyzed.

  He was eleven years old. Now his life would be rent in two.

  What you know but can’t comprehend. What tears through you changing you utterly.

  Thunder?—and no lightning? Can there be a thunderstorm in the winter, in falling snow?

  You wanted to think it came from the sky. Not from the street.

  The fiery explosive cracks of a gun, too swift to be counted though he heard each separate and distinct and terrible, and the sudden acceleration of a car out on the street, little more than a shadowy blur glimpsed through the window—he knew, and didn’t know. He was panting, sweaty inside his clothes. Not standing at a window but back from it, maybe three feet away, having just run into his room tugging off the heavy cableknit sweater his Grandmother Corcoran had knitted for him that left him breathless—having just bounded up the back stairs heavy on his heels, his cheeks stinging numb from the cold and snowflakes melting in his hair and eyelashes and his nose running he’d been wiping on his fingers—he heard and he knew, but he hadn’t heard and didn’t know.

  He’d just entered the room that after nearly twelve months did not seem familiar to him, nor comforting, like the new house to which his father had brought them, for which he felt a kind of frightened defiant pride, but no liking, and he hadn’t switched on the light, he hadn’t intended to stay in the room but just to get rid of the heavy sweater and use the bathroom and hurry back downstairs, his head was flooded with Christmas, Christmas Eve and Christmas morning and the twelve-foot evergreen in a corner of the living room with its high churchy ceiling, glittering ornaments he’d helped his mother hang and tinsel crisscrossing like exposed nerves and silver icicles and gaudy colored “bubble” lights he’d helped his father attach by tricky springs and screws to the boughs where they were meant to simulate (last night Jerome had seen, suddenly, what everyone else must know, what was so obvious) upright flames. He’d tugged off the heavy green sweater snug and airless as armor his face flushed and nose damp and he’d tossed it carelessly in the direction of his bed, yes he’d been facing the window but seeing nothing, not a car but a vague impression of a car’s shape, a vehicle moving slowly or in fact stopped, out by the curb, beyond the snowy rectangle that was a part of the front lawn, no headlights, in the dreamily falling powdery snow, but none of this made any impression upon him, for why should it?—he was not a child who looked hard or sharply or with an impersonal curiosity at things which seemingly did not pertain to him and in that suspended moment before the stillness of Schuyler Place was rent it could not have been possible for Jerome Corcoran to guess that a shadowy vehicle at the curb could in any way pertain to him.

  (If he’d thought about it, which he had not, he’d have supposed that friends of his parents were dropping by. It was Christmas Eve, and the big day for the Corcorans was Christmas Day, forty guests for dinner? relatives, friends? and God knew how many others dropping by casually for drinks, as in previous years they’d come crowding uproariously into the house on Barrow Street, mostly men, business associates of the Corcoran brothers Timothy and Sean, wholesalers, suppliers, customers for whom Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. had built buildings, union officials, politicians, police officers, the Mayor and his family—that would be tomorrow, the Corcorans’ first Christmas Day in the new house, but this afternoon, someone might be dropping by to see his mother, or his father, in another minute the unfamiliar startling dolorous chimes of the front doorbell might sound, that was what he’d have supposed if he’d thought about it. Which he had not.)

  Standing rooted to the spot incapable of thinking at all.

  As if the incomprehensible noise, its sharp cracking volume, had blasted his head empty.

  The green-glowing numerals of the clock radio beside his bed, a kid’s toy of a clock, red plastic spaceship, his eyes took them in—4:20. Yes but he hadn’t seen. Would not remember.

  And then the car, the abrupt gunning of the motor, the skidding protest of rubber tires on pavement that, at other times, thrilled the child in the pit of the belly so he grinned with anticipation of the time when he’d be old enough to own a car like the older guys at Our Lady of Mercy, and to drive it in just such a way, burning rubber, racing other drivers from ground zero at stop signs—hearing the car take off on Schuyler Place where no one ever drove like that the panicked thought came to him They don’t belong here and Something’s wrong and his heart began to pound so his body shook and there was a pinch and a loosening in his bowels so he nearly fouled his pants but still he hadn’t known.

  Until, downstairs, his mother began to scream.

  3

  He ran to his mother, where she called for him. Though not calling his name, nor any name. Only raw anguished sound like an animal in pain.

  The floor tilted beneath his feet. His breath was ragged, panting.

  He knew, now. But could not know what he knew.

  His knees were weak, he was in terror of falling headlong down the stairs. He grabbed at something—a smooth-polished railing they called, in this house, a banister.

  A fleeting glimpse of a child’s parchment-pale face in a mirror rimmed with sprigs of holly. Tall red candles with wicks not yet burnt, to be lit for Christmas Eve. A glimpse too, through the arched doorway of the living room, of the immense gorgeous Christmas tree and the shining presents stacked beneath.

  What was the present Jerome Corcoran anticipated—a pair of new ice skates, for ice hockey?

  Already none of it mattered. It was over.

  This was not a stairs he descended in such panic but a staircase. He’d seen his father’s carpenters working on it, he’d seen the thick plush crimson wool runner hammered down, and the plasterers, one of them a black man, troweling in the elegant oyster-white ceiling and walls, still none of it looked familiar as he ran panting and whimpering. Mommy?—Mommy? Daddy?

  A scrawny undersized kid, a look of the father about the eyes and the mouth, the left front tooth just perceptibly larger than the right and serrated, and the tight-curly red-russet hair like Tim Corcoran’s, but physically he took after Theresa who was small-boned, five feet one inch, it was his secret terror that he would not grow to be of even average height among the boys of his class and of the rough and sometimes frantic schoolyard, praying to God, and to Jesus, and most passionately to Holy Mother Mary, that he would grow, he would grow inches in a single year, never would he beg for anything again. Spindly arms and legs and his ears sticking out like a donkey’s from his head when his hair was newly cut, how that infuriated him, mouthing silent obscenities at himself in the mirror which he dared not utter aloud, even to himself, because to utter such words aloud was sinful and each Saturday afternoon in the confessional he was obliged to confess all his sins to Father Sullivan for in the confessional he could not lie because to lie would be to compound the original sin and remedy nothing. And even as a young child Jerome Corcoran had inherited his father’s stubborn pride and contempt for lying, for what was lying but an admission of cowardice at being fearful of speaking Truth?

  Scared cards can’t win, a scared man can’t love.

  And, the droll tossed-off phrase Tim Corcoran would say out of the corner of his mouth, Never race a train.

  At the bottom of the staircase where the steps fanned out and widened he felt the shock of cold air (the front door must have been wide open?) and heard his mother’s breathless screams which pierced the air like a continuation of the shattering glass he now realized he’d heard at the time of the gunfire and he realized was the glass of the window of the front door only when he saw that the window was broken, glinting shards of glass on the tile floor of the entryway they called, in this new house, the foyer.

  Mommy—?

  On this afternoon of Christmas Eve 1959 there were others in the house at 8 Schuyler Place—Timothy Corcoran’s sixty-two-year-old widowed mother, Theresa
Corcoran’s cousin Agnes visiting from Albany, the shy gat-toothed Deirdre from Ballyhoura, Ireland, who helped with housework—but it was eleven-year-old Jerome Corcoran who first discovered his mother kneeling over his father’s lifeless body on the front stoop of the house amid the lightly falling snow, her hands shining with blood and blood soaked into the long tight sleeves and the pleated bosom of her lavender wool-jersey dress.

  Theresa’s eyes were opaque and blind and mad as she screamed, staring at Jerome without recognition.

  4

  Just tell us what you heard and what you saw, son.”

  “I heard the gunshots and I heard the car.”

  “You saw the car?—from this window here?”

  “No. I didn’t see the car.”

  “You heard the car, eh? The car taking off.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t hear the car pull up, you didn’t see the car, before the shots started?”

  “I guess not.”

  “How many shots were there?”

  “. . . a lot.”

  “Did you hear six shots?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then you heard the car start up. Pull away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Going in which direction?”

  “That way.”

  “That way, right. So you saw the car?”

  “I guess I saw it then, I don’t know.”

  “You saw it, or you didn’t see it, son? Which?”

  “I saw it move . . . I don’t know.”

  The child’s voice might have been a girl’s voice, thin and taut. There was the male fear that he might burst into tears, and no woman in the room to comfort him.

  McClure, the eldest of the four men in Jerome’s room, spoke in a kindly voice to him; from time to time, as now, he let his warm, heavy hand fall upon the child’s thin shoulder. Jerome had been told he’d met Detective McClure at family gatherings, McClure was a distant cousin of his mother’s, but Jerome had no memory of having met him as he had little memory of the faces of most adults.