What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Sean’s cursing under his breath—“God damn! Son of a bitch!” Turning his heel in the graveled path, puffing like a fat man. An angry fat man.

  Sean begins to say something, then stops; begins again, and stops. Corky’s exhaling smoke watching him worriedly not knowing what the fuck he might do if his uncle just walks away—run after him? He’s in a state so close to flipping, if the old bastard turns his back on him he might just kick him in the ass.

  So Sean surprises Corky saying finally, slowly, “Yes—you could say it was Fenske. It was Fenske. Sure. Like everybody knew except we couldn’t prove it. You know that.” Pausing not looking at Corky to let that sink in. “And the fucker paid for it, only not right away. They got him a couple of years later. Remember?”

  Corky says quickly, “Sure, I remember. But who’s ‘they’?”

  Sean shrugs. “The next guy, taking over the union. There’s always a next guy. Or was. The trade unions had everybody over a barrel then—now, they’re shit. Al Fenske had Tim Corcoran killed but it wasn’t like he had any choice, his back was against the wall. It didn’t have to happen.”

  Sean speaks bitterly, with an air of satisfaction. He isn’t looking at Corky but at the straw hat he’s turning in his hand.

  Corky asks, “What? What didn’t have to happen?”

  “Your father getting killed. Like he did. Hit. God damn, it wouldn’t have happened, if he’d listened to me.”

  “If who’d listened to you?”

  Sean cuts his eyes at Corky exasperated. “Your father! Who the hell else? We’re talking about ‘Daddy,’ aren’t we talking about ‘Daddy’? Eh?”

  “I—don’t know what we’re talking about,” Corky says. His breath is coming so quick and shallow, it’s like he’s about to keel over. Like the ground is tilting beneath his feet. “You tell me.”

  Sean turns his hat in his hand not seeming to know what he’s doing. His rheumy-blue eyes glaring at Corky. And there’s a sudden dip to his voice, he gestures toward Theresa’s grave marker, “Your mother was a lovely woman, Corky. She never should have married into the Corcorans. Never should’ve married him.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it upped the ante. Because they were crazy about each other and it blew things out of proportion—how Tim saw himself, or wanted to see himself. How he had to play things out, with her looking on. Like in the war, too, he never got over that. Everything meant too much!” Sean’s speaking more and more rapidly, shaking his head so his jowls tremble. His voice takes on a tone of bitter mockery. “Like nothing could be the way other people did it, running a business where you compromise, make deals, get along. The way everybody else did it including our own father—that’s why! Because he got himself killed, that’s fucking why! Never thought it could really happen like he was some hot-shit hero in a movie, just couldn’t believe what everybody else knew including me but would he listen? So all of it, everything that happened afterward, Buck Glover and those other cocksuckers selling us out, the family losing the business, Theresa breaking down—it was your father’s fault. Don’t look at me like some asshole, you hear what I’m saying?”

  Scared Corky says, stammering, “I—don’t know. What—?”

  “—Because it wasn’t like we hadn’t paid Fenske, and a dozen other guys, before. Like our father did, and everybody else. It wasn’t any different from paying taxes, you hear what I’m saying? Commissions you pay some fancy fucking broker for a piece of paper going over his desk, fees, percentages, ‘kickbacks’—it’s just a word. It’s shit. How’d you think we got the contract for the City Hall addition?—we weren’t the low bid. So it wasn’t like Tim couldn’t play the hand like everybody else. Sure, he could. If he couldn’t, I could. I did. You pay them, and they pay you. You know this, you’re not a jerk-off kid any longer. Right? It’s business and it’s got to run like on a greased track and even if there’s a D.A. making a stink about it once in a while that’s got to run smooth, too, you hear what I’m saying? So if somebody fucks it up grandstanding like Tim Corcoran he’s got to be talked to seriously and if he doesn’t listen he’s got to be stopped. Simple as that. I talked to him, myself. Fensake talked to me, and I talked to Tim not once but a dozen times, it was about all we were talking about at the end, not him hiring nonunion niggers but him not paying Fenske what Fenske asked for that privilege, which would’ve been to our advantage anyway, which he knew, but there he was so proud, hot-shit buying a new house borrowing a hundred thousand dollars from the bank to buy into Maiden Vale like nobody’s know where he came from if he could just get there by the Union City Golf Club maybe they’d vote him in, eh?—him! A Corcoran! A mick from Irish Hill! What a laugh!” Sean screws up his face like he’s going to spit. Corky has never seen his uncle so passionate.

  “Wait,” says Corky. “What’re you telling me? I always thought—”

  “You always thought ‘Daddy’ was a big deal, ‘Daddy’ was a hero,” Sean says contemptuously. “Well, it’s like that Lieutenant What’s-his-name was saying just now, his speech—maybe we don’t need no more big deals, heroes, people getting killed when they don’t need to get killed and the rest of us cleaning up the mess. Maybe it’s a lot of bullshit, dying when you don’t need to.”

  “But—”

  “Look, I loved him, too. I loved my brother. I don’t even think of him like he’s dead—” gesturing toward Tim Corcoran’s grave, crinkling his face, “—that’s just what happened. That isn’t him. I loved him but he wouldn’t listen to me, like I say I talked to him a dozen times and the last time, it was the morning he was killed, I said to him, ‘You’re pushing Al in a corner, he’s got no way out except to hurt you,’ and he said, like it’s a joke, ‘Nobody’s going to hurt me, not in this town’—because we were in tight with Glover, or he thought we were. We were, but it didn’t last. After you’re dead all your deals are canceled, you hear what I’m saying?”

  Forlornly, sucking at his cigarette like it’s a straw to the air and he’s a drowning man, Corky says, “I—guess I do.” Though really he doesn’t. His instinct is to push past his uncle and run out of the cemetery and get in his car and escape. Anywhere!

  Sean says bitterly, “The things Tim said to me, maybe he was joking but I never laughed, calling me a ‘mick scumbag’ and pat-slapping me on the cheek like I was a woman—I’d’ve killed him myself, if he’d pulled that shit in front of witnesses! In front of your mother, for instance. All that crap I had to take that Tim was my younger brother, and he’s the smart one, he’s got the ideas, he’s the boss—I swallowed it to keep peace, we were building up the business. And we’d have done O.K. except he always wanted more. Expanding operations, buying more equipment, borrowing money. He’d take on more work than we could do, take the client’s money and start digging then move on to another job and juggle the two and then it’s three, sure everybody in the trade does it but Tim really pushed. And his personal style—he always had to throw money around, whether he had it or not. At restaurants, clubs. Paying the bills for guys who really had dough. Had to be in tight with City Hall and cops and every realtor and lawyer he thought had influence and ward heelers and gamblers and bookies and sucks! Him and Al Fenske, they were two of a kind, they came up at about the same time never letting each other out of their sight like two boxers in the same weight division fighting other opponents but knowing they’re going to fight each other eventually—which they did.” Sean’s puffing, turning his straw hat in his hands not knowing what he’s doing then clamps it on his head, hard, almost breaking the brim. “So they both lost.”

  Corky says, “What the fuck, they both lost?—Fenske killed my father!”

  But must be he’s looking so dazed and pleading the old man takes pity on him and shuts up. Turns, and walks away. And Corky’s standing there like a man trying to decipher the meaning of a sound so loud it’s deafening, it’s blown him away without his knowing.

  Then, this: uncle and nephew talk together in Corky’s car for
the next hour until the first hard splotches of rain strike the Caddy’s cobweb-cracked windshield at 5:20 P.M. Reluctant to take the old man home Corky drives the sloping streets of Irish Hill slowly and with the air of a dazed or drunken man to whom the navigation of the physical world is not merely a challenge but a tonic, a stimulant. Clamoring in his ears the drumbeat A drink! a drink! he no longer hears as we no longer hear the blood’s pulse in the ears. Yet at the same time managing to ask pertinent questions, intelligent and even shrewd questions. And Sean Corcoran’s replies are intelligent too, detailed and passionate. All this happened so long ago: thirty years. Yesterday.

  Corky learns what he seems not to have known nor even guessed: Tim Corcoran brought his own death upon himself, yet not intentionally, seeming not to know he would die, even as he seems to have willed his death.

  An inevitable death. Yet in its way accidental.

  Corky learns that Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. refused to pay an unofficial “fee” to the president of the Western New York Trade Union Council that would have exempted them from being required to employ union help. The payment of such “fees” was strictly illegal, in violation of trade union legislation, for it allowed certain companies to hire nonunion workers at lower wages and for fewer benefits thus putting them in the position of being able to underbid legitimate competitors—the union officials were selling out their own men. In refusing the deal, Tim Corcoran put himself at a double disadvantage: in hiring (nonunion) black workers, he was defying the union; yet, since ninety to ninety-five percent of his workers were in fact (union) whites, he had to pay competitive wages including time-and-a-half for overtime and Saturdays. And so his bids for jobs were higher than they might have been, or, if lower, disadvantageously lower. To get a lucrative government contract, Tim had to pay “fees” to government officials, which seemed to him a different matter from paying “fees” to trade union officials who were selling out their own men. But the ultimate advantage of Corcoran Brothers’ integrity—in Tim Corcoran’s eyes at least—was that he maintained good relations with the trade unions’ rank-and-file membership, the men who actually worked; they, and their sons, would understand his position, and respect him, and in the future when the current corrupt union officials lost power, and were replaced by others more liberal and more democratic, less racially bigoted, the advantage would be his.

  His mistake, says Sean, was he wouldn’t live that long.

  Getting killed was something Tim Corcoran hadn’t factored in.

  And afterward: Union City government officials and the district attorney made a deal with union officials—and the mob behind the unions?—to go easy on the investigation into the killing in return for political support from the unions; and with the promise that, within a year or two, Al Fenske, the president of the Western New York Trade Union Council, would be out. If records of the Trade Union Council were subpoenaed by the D.A.’s office they were “lost”—the prosecution never presented a case to the county grand jury. Informers gave police conflicting accounts of who had hired who to do the killing and their testimonies were considered proof of the difficulty of the case—conflicting, contradictory, thus canceling one another out, thus worthless in court. Fenske and his men were questioned by police but always in the presence of their lawyers and there were never to be any arrests, still less any indictments.

  So far as Sean knew, there was no deal made with Fenske himself—for Fenske, having ordered Tim Corcoran killed, had sealed his own death warrant. The question was simply when, and how.

  In Irish Hill, it was commonly believed that the Mayor of Union City, Buck Glover, himself of Irish Hill, had betrayed his own people. Yet those with some inside knowledge understood that in fact the prosecution had no case—there were no eyewitnesses to the crime, and there were no reliable informers. There was certainly no evidence linking Al Fenske to the killing.

  At 4:20 P.M. of December 24, 1959, Fenske was in Miami Beach, at the Fontainebleau. He and his family and a half dozen relatives booked in for a solid week.

  Months later, Sean Corcoran himself publicly supported Buck Glover and his administration, when the Mayor came to Irish Hill to answer questions from voters. This, for the look of things. While secretly he hated Glover’s guts. Hated all of them. They sold us out, Sean tells Corky. And that goes for the Slatterys, too—Bill, and Oscar—just getting in solid in the party at that time. They gave money, they got involved in a big way, backing Glover and the old-line Democrats, using them until they could dump them and take control for themselves.

  That’s what a politician is, Sean tells Corky. A guy who uses you then dumps you then climbs on your dead body to raise himself.

  But maybe you know that already?

  And then in a different voice entirely Sean speaks of Theresa so Corky understands his uncle was in love with his mother, and he wonders if Theresa knew this, or if Sean Corcoran himself knew, or knows. Sean speaks of how it hadn’t had to happen, none of it had to happen, and just to blame Tim is maybe wrong, but to blame Theresa in any way is certainly wrong. Because the love that was between Tim and Theresa—so far as he, an outsider, could know—was so much between them, and nobody else exactly mattered to them, except their kid who was you, Jerome, the only kid they ever had though they tried, God knows they tried, but it didn’t work out. Sean doesn’t speak at much length of Theresa, he’s silent for long moments working his mouth, drawing his sleeve roughly across his nostrils, saying several times she was a lovely woman he’d known her as a girl so he doesn’t think of her as dead exactly even now for when you’re his age so many people you’ve known and loved are dead it’s like the center of gravity is somewhere else that’s more real than where you are. So you don’t give a name to it, to diminish it. For to diminish it is to diminish yourself.

  Corky listens, nods. He’s been driving slowly up Dalkey hill from the deserted warehouse district at the lakeshore back up into the neighborhood listening to his uncle with such concentration he hardly knows where he is, or why; what this day is, and where it began; where it will lead. Except as always that panicked sensation he has somewhere else to be, soon. Somewhere else he has to be, and soon.

  Sean has asked to be let off, not at his house, but at a tavern up ahead. One of the old neighborhood taverns, so many of them in Irish Hill, never less than one and often two taverns on every commercial block. This is Killian’s Red Star where Corky used to drop in but hasn’t for a long time, in fact years. Actually he’s surprised to see Killian’s Red Star is still there at the corner of Dalkey and Ontario. Front door wide open, rummy-looking oldish white guys lounging in the doorway. An invitation in.

  Sean’s thanking Corky for the afternoon, not shaking his hand because the Corcorans don’t do that, but gripping his forearm with surprising strength, and Corky, still emotional, grips his uncle’s forearm in turn. Sean says, “At my age you learn to get used to people looking through you unless they’re going to mug you, or crack your head. Once you get old it happens you’re invisible and if you don’t have money you don’t have power and even to people who like you O.K. you’re not worth shit and it’s a matter of getting used to it, you hear what I’m saying? I’m not complaining!” chuckling so Corky who’s been nodding sympathetically, guiltily doesn’t know what the hell he’s agreeing with, puts him in an awkward position. As Sean slides out the door, turning back for a moment, “—Yes, lad, and I appreciate you giving me advice about the house, too. I’ll look into that. I don’t know what I’ll do but I’ll look into it. At my age God damn it you hate like hell to be pushed out of your own home by—” pausing frowning what’s he mean to say, niggers? hillbillies? then giving up on it and heaving himself up out of the Caddy, and goodbye.

  Corky leans over watching Sean walk toward the darkened interior of Killian’s Red Star. Bulky-chested old guy thin in the legs, some stiffness in the walk but good posture for his age, and that dapper straw hat, he’ll outlive me. Greeting the old rummies in the doorway and being
greeted by them like they’re long-lost brothers then turning to wave at Corky. Must be Sean’s bragging to the other old men that that’s his nephew in the Caddy, his big-shot nephew so the old men wave at Corky, too.

  9

  Corky’s Price

  Corky in his tux by Valentino makes his first mistake of the evening swinging by 19 Lakeshore Drive to see Ross Drummond on his way to the Chateauguay Country Club. Put the bite on the old bastard, why the hell not. Fucker owes me. He’d set up this quick meeting at the last minute and now wishes he hadn’t, his heart isn’t in it, too much to think about, his Uncle Sean’s words ringing in his ears and his old passion for The Bull’s Eye quaintly remote to him now—6:40 P.M.—as the memory of one of those numerous girls he was crazy for as a teenager then couldn’t remember her name a few months later. Because he got himself killed. It was your father’s fault. You hear what I’m saying? Corky shakes his head to clear it. Except he can’t.

  Also, Lakeshore Drive is out of the way, an extra eight miles or so, and as usual he’s running late. With commingled excitement and dread anticipating the speech he’s obliged to give tonight in honor of Vic Slattery his oldest and dearest friend which he might not be giving; and hasn’t in any case prepared, as Mike Rooney feared. Incapable of sitting at his desk nor even of standing in one place to skim through the fifty or more pages of PR material U.S. CONGRESSMAN VIC SLATTERY: A PROFILE Rooney sent him by messenger the other day.

  Too much to think about, his head’s going to explode. One thing at a time as, in the handball court, or in the ring, it’s one move at a time, and your eye never leaving your opponent. Not for a split second for it’s in that split second you’re fucked.

  And here’s Corky’s ex-father-in-law Ross Drummond greeting him in the doorway of his house before Corky even presses the doorbell.

  But too late to turn back. As soon as you register danger, already it’s too late.