ECLIPSE by Richard North Patterson Read Free Book Online

Damon. “My mother cried, she tells me.”
    Damon nodded. “As did my father.”
    “But he still thought you were lucky?”
    Pierce smiled a little. “It became part of the myth. For a time he pondered whether his prayer dwelt too much on me, and had failed Robert Kennedy. But he was quite sure that Kennedy had kept his end of the bargain.
    “In the end, he concluded that I had gotten all the luck two men’s prayers could give me—and the luck meant for Bobby Kennedy, as well. Everything that’s happened since persuades him that he’s right. For him, my success in life is less an achievement than a gift.”
    Marissa tilted her head. “Not an expectation?”
    Pierce sipped from his glass of rich Brunello di Montalcino, the last of the bottle they shared. “You have to understand my world, Marissa. Did your parents go to college?”
    “That and more. My father has a PhD in English, my mom a master’s in social work. I’ve got no room to be a wonder.”
    Pierce briefly scanned the dwindling crowd, so clearly of the rarefied environment spawned by the Berkeley campus, so far from the pubs of Dorchester. “Neither of my parents got past grade school. Their world was a bounded one, their greatest fear that us kids would be tainted by malign influences.” A memory made Damon smile wryly. “So they were mortified when my sister Meg applied for a scholarship to Barnard.”
    Marissa looked amused. “An all-girls school? What could possibly go wrong?”
    “It was in
New York,
may the saints preserve us. So my parents enlistedthe help of the mother superior. As Meg tells it, Sister Agnes warned her in sepulchral tones that a priest in New York reported that any girl who went to Barnard lost her faith
and
her virginity within six months.” Pierce grinned. “For a rapturous moment my sister was galvanized by visions of sexual deliverance. But, for our parents, that was that. They dispatched her to Boston College, where she met the man she married before they settled down close to home. Life was like that.”
    Marissa finished her wine. “But not yours?”
    “I was the youngest, and a boy. Still, until I was eighteen all my friends had names like Milligan and McNamara, and the biggest event in our lives before then was when Pope John Paul said Mass for a hundred thousand of us on Boston Common. Now all but a handful are firemen or cops or in their father’s construction business and, with variations in piety, still Catholic.”
    “Aren’t you?”
    “Only when I visit my parents. Like Meg, all that sexual repression got to me, but with a healthier result—a quiet but
very
persistent rebellion.”
    Marissa touched a curled finger to her lips, her narrowing eyes signaling a speculative amusement. “So now you’re cured?”
    “Mostly. Though whenever there’s a news flash about some sexual deviant being caught, my first reflex is that he’s Catholic.”
    She laughed, displaying even white teeth whose only imperfection, the slightest gap in front, Pierce found charming. “I know about guilt,” she said, “if not repression. My father’s side is Jewish.”
    “Lucky for you. In my observation, Jewish kids grow up believing that aspiration is not only good but imperative—you
must
be educated, you
can
succeed, you
will
outstrip your parents—”
    “Who,”
Marissa interrupted, “will never believe you’ve achieved enough.”
    For the moment, Pierce suppressed his curiosity. “Maybe. But the voice my friends and I too often heard said, ‘Don’t aim too high or stray too far when the greatest aspiration is the afterlife.’ And so I, like my sister, went to Boston College. Then I graduated summa cum laude and really
did
rebel.”
    “You decided to become Jack Kerouac?”
    Pierce shook his head. “In the end, I was too steeped in practicality. But,to my parents’ horror, I decided on Harvard Law School, that coven of atheists. Instead of going to B.C. law school on the scholarship they