Free A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne Page B

she had discovered something secret in him.
    Fearing she had upset him, she mocked herself. “Youlack my inner peace,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her and assuming an expression of nunlike humility.
    “Fuck you,” he replied, good-naturedly. They both roared with laughter.
    Bridey, the cook, wanted to serve us our meals in the dining room, with candles and flowers, but Constant said he preferred to eat on tables in front of the television set. A few times Fatty and Sis Malloy came by for lunch or dinner. Their lives were pointedly different from the Bradley kind of life, and they seemed pathetically grateful to be included in anything at the grand house in Scarborough Hill. Fatty worshipped Constant and seemed not to mind when Constant teased him unmercifully.
    “I ran for the car as soon as I got your call,” said Fatty.
    “The last time Fatty ran was when he missed the ice cream truck,” Constant said to me.
    “I think you hurt his feelings,” I said later to Constant.
    “Fatty’s used to having his feelings hurt. He knows we all love him,” said Constant.
    On the day of the night of Weegie Somerset’s dance, catering and florist trucks began arriving early in the morning at the great gray stone house next door to the Bradleys’. Delivery men carrying armloads of pink roses scurried into the house. Several hundred gold ballroom chairs were stacked in the driveway in front of the house while the trucks were being unloaded. Constant stood in the window of his parents’ bedroom and watched the activity. In the late morning he had a long talk on the telephone with his father in Florida. When he came back into the room, he said, “Come on. You’ve got work to do.”
    “What?”
    “Every year at Christmas my father gives turkeys and food packages and oranges to the poor of the city, and shoes to the little children. They traipse us down there every year,my brothers and sisters and me, all dressed up in our best clothes, and we hand out the stuff, and my father makes a speech, and my mother sits there in her mink coat like the queen, and the priests thank everybody. This year, my father says, I have to do it, and he says that you have to write me something to say.”
    “Like what? I wouldn’t know what to write,” I said.
    “Yes, you do. Christmas and peace and giving and loving and family, and all that shit. My father said anything about family always gets them. Work up a tear. Nothing long. Just a few paragraphs. You know how to do it. Oh, and get something in about Sandro running for Congress.”
    “Shouldn’t he be here, preparing for his campaign?”
    “He will be. After Florida. Then full steam ahead. Pa will call in the heavy artillery. They all owe him favors, all those politicians.”
    Fatty and Sis went with us to the auditorium of the Malachy Bradley School, named for Gerald’s father, in the section of the city called Bog Meadow. There were hundreds of bags of groceries, and turkeys, and crates of oranges, and boxes of children’s shoes. Fatty and Sis and the priests and nuns lined up the people and passed out the goods, but most of them wanted to receive their packages and their turkeys directly from the handsome young Bradley boy, so smartly dressed in his blue blazer and gray flannels from J. Press. A photographer appeared, and a cameraman from the local television station.
    “I see a resemblance in you to your grandfather,” an old woman said to him. “I’m Agnes O’Toole. Your grandfather Malloy, God rest his soul, lived right near us over on Front Street when they came over from the old country. God bless you, Constant. We’re grateful to your wonderful family.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. O’Toole,” said Constant, smiling and friendly. At times like that, he was condescendingly good-naturedto his inferiors, and they, in turn, were enchanted. “Certainly, I’ve heard my mother speak of you and your family.”
    “My late husband, Francis X. Moriarity, worked for your