If Maryellen was the princess, her mother the self-possessed mother superior, and Joe and Jack the goofy, energetic pups, then old Jim was bigger than a king, a kind of god in his own right. The rest of the family teased him and laughed at him behind his back, but Devlin thought he recognized cowed behavior when he saw it. Brennan ruled his roost. He had the voice for it, the chesty growl of an old street animal. Even when he was asking only for more iced tea, he sounded as if he were running down the assignments in a bank heist. Everyone deferred to him. The iced tea appeared in his hand, the English butler lit the fat Cuban cigar, the barber, manicurist, and masseur always arrived early. Brennan’s laugh could be heard all over the house, and Devlin could imitate it perfectly. Devlin had Brennan’s act down pat. Brennan was six feet two, two hundred and twenty pounds, and wore silk shirts, pajamas, and underwear. Sensitive skin, Devlin was told. Devlin’s father said that Jim Brennan had a hundred custom-tailored suits. After six weeks in Brennan’s house and shadow, Devlin thought the estimate low by two-thirds. All the Brennans, king, mother superior, the pups, and the princess, lived in unashamed luxury. Devlin had never seen anything like it. He had never imagined anything like it. He puzzled through Maryellen’s mercurial behavior, trying to make sense of it, calculating the quality and intensity of the unhappiness and pain concomitant with knowing her at all. He wasn’t sure where brothers Jack and Joe would place in his catalogue of woes, but he guessed that their position would be somewhere between the butler’s postnasal drip and Maryellen’s own unpredictable episodes of humorlessness. Did Devlin know about Hadley? The Brennan brothers weren’t sounding Devlin out on their father’s instruction—old Jim was much too subtle and well-connected for that—but toying with their sister’s new friend, they thought, the way a cat played with a bloody mouse shivering in terminal shock.

They thought.

Now, on the gray television screen above the end of the dreary bar, the Detroit pitcher made a mistake, threw one low and inside and, as anybody who had been following the Yankees for the past fourteen years figured at once, Berra golfed it into the stadium’s short right-field porch.

In the bar, guys cheered.

Devlin was just drunk enough to think he was waiting for an opportunity to show the Brennan brothers that he could handle them and Hadley—and, for that matter, Maryellen, too. Their money made them think they were better than he was. Sunnyside, one year in City College, and the N.Y.P.D. were inferior, second-rate—low class. Devlin had never seen himself in these terms before, and he disliked it so much his skin itched.