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when I was with my father, so I made an effort to include him in whatever we were planning to do together. My father, who liked to eat as much as Tommy did, usually obliged. When that happened, the smile was quick to return.
    While Michael seemed older than his years, Tommy seemed far younger than eleven. He had a little boy’saffability and eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback, and never forgot a joke. His pranks were tinged with innocence. Tommy would never want to be leader of the group, never would have been comfortable with the burden. It was more in keeping with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen, and, always, to laugh.
    He also had a natural ability to build things, working away on a discarded piece of wood or an old length of pipe from which would emerge a wooden train or a makeshift flute. He never kept his creations and never took money for his work. Many of the pieces he made were mailed to his father in prison. He was never told if his father received them and he never asked.
    John Reilly was raised by his mother, an attractive woman with little time to devote to anything other than church, her work as a Broadway theater usher, and her boyfriends. John’s father was a petty hood shot and killed in a foiled armored truck heist in New Jersey less than a week after his son was born. John knew nothing of the man. “There were no photos,” he once told me. “No wedding picture, no shots of him in the navy. Nobody talked about him or mentioned his name. It was as if he never existed.”
    John earned his discipline from the hands of his mother’s various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a boy. He seldom spoke about the beatings, but we all knew they took place.
    Even though he was only four months younger than Michael, John was the smallest of the group and was nicknamed the Count, due to his fascination with
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which was also my favorite book. John was brash and had the sharpest sense of humor of any of us. He loved comedy and would spend hours debating whether the Three Stooges were gifted comedians or just jerks who beat each other up.
    He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile and a wink to extricate himself from trouble. He loved to draw, sketching sailboats and cruise ships onto thin strips of fine paper with a dark pencil. He would spend afternoons down by the piers feeding pigeons, watching waves lap against the dock, and drawing colorful pictures of the ocean liners in port, filling their decks with the familiar faces of the neighborhood.
    He was a born mimic, ordering slices of pizza as John Wayne, asking for a library book like James Cagney, and talking to a girl in the school yard sounding like Humphrey Bogart. Each situation brought about its intended smile, allowing John to walk away content, his mission accomplished. He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind a shield of jokes. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his own everyday moments. John, more than any one of us, was always in need of someone else’s smile.
    Together, the four of us found in one another the solace and security we could not find anywhere else. We trusted each other and knew there would never be an act of betrayal among us. We had nothing else—no money, no bikes, no summer camps, no vacations. Nothing, except one another.
    To us, that was all that mattered.

3
    T HE C ATHOLIC C HURCH played a large part in our lives. Sacred Heart was the center of the neighborhood, serving as a neutral meeting ground, a peaceful sanctuary where problems could be discussed and emotions calmed. The priests and nuns of the area were a visible presence and commanded our attention, if not always our respect.
    My friends and I attended Sacred Heart Grammar School on West 50th Street, a large redbrick building directly across from