Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “A name,” he said.

  “Martinson, sir. Yes, that’s it. Martinson. Frankie Martinson, sir…”

  “Of course. Frankie Martinson. That hopeless Know-Nothing idiot.”

  Tweed called to Luke for a glass of water.

  “Frankie Martinson,” he said. “Wasn’t that the man?”

  “That was the man, all right,” Cormac said. “And I remember how you thanked the fella for his cooperation.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus…”

  Cormac saw young Tweed step back, gaze down at the man for a moment, then grab his ankles and drag him roughly down the steps and out into the street. Tweed was laughing a deep, excited laugh. Holding each ankle, he swung the boy around, once, twice, three times, and then let him go. The young man sailed a few feet and then skidded through mud and horseshit and was still.

  “Now,” Tweed said, turning to Cormac. “I believe I owe you a drink.”

  He draped a large hand on Cormac’s shoulder (he was taller than Cormac by at least two inches) and they began moving toward the Bowery. Tweed laughed and said he knew Martinson from the endless arguments between the fire companies. Tweed was with the Big Six on Gouverneur Street. Martinson was a big shot with Engine Company 40, who called themselves the Lady Washingtons after the wife of the first president. Tweed had infuriated the man for arguing against the lunatics among the nativists and then laughing at his stupidity. He laughed harder that night at the memory of the three men laid out in the mud and fog of Grand Street; laughed, and said they should have delivered the wrecked trio to Engine Company 40; laughed, and then asked Cormac for his name. He told him his true name and Tweed said his.

  “You’re a good man,” Bill Tweed said. “I think I’ve found a friend.”

  Now that Tweed’s life was in ruins, Cormac could trace that friendship through all its labyrinthine ways; through the rise from the firehouse on Cherry Street that gave Tweed life and a sense of power, into politics as it was, not as he wished it could be. Tweed was like all the others in that New York who lived in the worst places or had the wrong names. They wanted some taste of power, to level out the rules of the game, and Cormac felt what they felt, and so did Bill Tweed. You have the banks, they said together, and you have the churches, and you have the mighty sailing fleets, and you have the deeds to land and the finest houses and servants and water; fair enough: But we have the votes.

  “I can count,” said Bill Tweed when Cormac asked him one night why he supported the Irish against the Know-Nothings. Then laughed. Then looked down Orange Street and said, “Somebody better fight for the poor bastards.”

  Cormac learned a few days after meeting Bill Tweed that the big man was also quite serious about fighting other enemies. The proof was in a brief note in the Herald: the saloon owned by one Francis Martinson, a volunteer fire captain of Little Water Street, had burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was being investigated. After that, Frankie Martinson was said to have moved to Albany. He was never again seen in the Five Points.

  “Don’t get mad,” Tweed said one night, in a philosophical mood. “Get even.”

  In the years that followed, Cormac often roamed the night town with Tweed, stopping in saloons, listening to the gossip and the jokes, hearing the tales of faction fights and endless schism. Almost always, Tweed was the man who suggested compromise, conciliation, the smooth solution of a decent job. He was big; the most violent men were all small. On these pilgrimages, Cormac tried to remain a shadow, someone who helped watch Bill Tweed’s back but who never stepped forward to insist on his own importance. And he never asked for anything. Not a job. Not a payday. And when Tweed rose and started consolidating his contacts and powers, when he sold the chair-making shop on Cherry Street to become a full-time politician (heavier now, craftier, measuring every uttered word), when he was elected to Congress for a term, Cormac continued asking for nothing.

  “Where, for Christ’s sake, do you live?” Tweed asked one night. “I’ve known you for three years and don’t have a clue.”

  He insisted on being taken to the flat on Mott Street. Cormac did not say that this was the room where he had tried to write a true novel, and failed, and where he had begun to write dime novels while working days as a laborer. Tweed stepped into the room in a clumsy way, glanced at the stacked books and clothes hanging from pegs, and a trapped look darted through his eyes.

  “It’s like a cell,” he said.

  Cormac laughed. “Just what I deserve.”

  Tweed picked up a sheaf of Cormac’s drawings.

  “These are yours?”

  “What I do to keep out of a real cell, Bill.”

  “They’re very, very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why don’t you paint? You’d be a bloody good painter.”

  “I couldn’t get a chair into this room,” Cormac said, “never mind an easel.”

  “Well, get the hell out of here. I can find you a place. We can find one where you don’t even pay rent. Where—”

  “Thanks, Bill. This’ll do me fine. Let’s take a walk. Get something to eat. It’s a lovely night.”

  “I’m buying,” Tweed said.

  Now Luke went to the door in the bedroom, and two more men arrived. Both were dressed in well-cut worsted suits, and they lifted their derbies as they entered. Cormac had met them both. One was a small precise Madison Avenue doctor named Frank Cahill. The other was Billy Edelstein, one of the first of Tweed’s lawyers after the fall, and now surely the last. Edelstein was plumper than Cahill and had a weary sardonic voice.

  “A doctor, a lawyer, and me,” Tweed said. “The last living Indian chief.”

  They laughed, since both were Tammany loyalists, members of the Society of Saint Tamenend, an Indian chief who had never existed. The Tammany headquarters in Fourteenth Street was known by friends and foes as the Wigwam.

  “No law talk tonight, boys,” Tweed said, his face brightening. “No talk about my ailing heart. Just food, boys, and fun.”

  “Fair enough,” Cahill said. “But not too much food, Bill.”

  They all knew that for Bill Tweed food was fuel, pleasure, and even the producer of meaning. An extravagant meal told Tweed that he existed. He didn’t drink much, except for iced light Rhinelander wine. But in the glory days, he would have six eggs for breakfast with a slab of ham; three steaks for lunch; bowls of soup, loaves of bread, and buckets of butter with every meal. As he grew older and the power came, the appetite did not vanish. He could never name the void that he could not fill and neither could Cormac. He had one wife, eight children, two mistresses, three houses. Enough wasn’t ever enough.

  “Sometimes I think this is all there is,” he said with a smile, twelve years after they met, as they settled into an immense platter of chilled oysters. “All the rest might be bullshit.”

  Cormac heard that glorious word for the first time in the 1850s, and it came to epitomize for him all of New York’s rough skepticism. It had much greater weight than the word horseshit. Horseshit was flaky and without substance; it dried in the sun and was blown away in a high wind. Preachers were the masters of horseshit. But bullshit was heavier, filled with crude truth, a kind of black cement. The voters knew the difference and they appreciated bullshit when practiced by a master. Any politician who used God in a speech was practicing horseshit. When he talked about building schools, getting water into Chatham Square, or lighting the darkest streets, Bill Tweed was practicing bullshit. If a third of the bullshit actually came into existence, their lives were made better. Tweed, as he moved up in the system, was a master of bullshit.

  The world in which he worked his public arts and his private craft had been formed years earlier by a political enemy named Fernando Wood, who would serve as mayor three times. Wood was a genius, the creator of alliances and secret agendas, his system’s machinery based on the understanding that politics was just another profession and the men who practiced it were entitled to rewards. The hard truth was known by a
ll; to think otherwise was horseshit. Wood just didn’t have an idea in his head and made nothing happen.

  When Tweed took power as head of Tammany Hall, he presented plans for water, for housing, for schools, for decent wages, for the right to form unions among tradesmen and mechanics; in some way, those ambitions were shared by all of the Tammany professionals, so much so that the principles were seldom mentioned. To talk too much about them would be bullshit. Cormac sometimes drew up the plans, making them at once precise and vague, and gave them to Bill Tweed and stood in the shadows as Tweed tried to make at least parts of them real. Tweed’s friends and associates listened, calculated, made swollen budgets and phony invoices to include their personal shares, and then sighed. They would need money to pay off the upstate Republicans. They would need money to pay off those who lived in the way of the street that must be widened. And of course they needed money for themselves and their boys. To Cormac, the Tammany sachems were like worldly archbishops who no longer believed in God.

  In private, or over oysters, Cormac argued the issues of slavery with Tweed but was greeted with a shrug. “It’s an injustice, the whole goddamned thing,” Tweed said. “No doubt about it. But there’s nothing to be done. It’s the way things are.” They would walk along South Street at lunch hour, and Tweed would point at the endless rows of masts and the small armies of stevedores and say: “All from the South, brother. Cotton, sugar, all of it… If we lose that trade, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Cormac said, “If you keep it, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Tweed said nothing, as they walked among the Irish and the Africans on a day when Cormac did not hear a single word in Irish or Yoruba, in the city whose past was swiftly sliding away.

  All of that seemed long ago, in this room in the Ludlow Street Jail. The table was set for five, and when Luke Grant went to pick up the food, the fifth man arrived: Charlie Butts, former head-breaker from the Cherry Street days of Tweed’s youth, now the owner of a livery business with 109 carriages. Butts had a thick neck, broad shoulders, fierce mustaches dyed black, hard gray eyes, and short legs. He was carrying a cardboard box, which held the birthday cake.

  “Charlie, you know everybody here?”

  “I do.”

  “Could you do us a favor and fix some drinks for them that’s drinking? Luke’s gone for the chops.”

  Butts lifted a bottle of Rhinelander wine from the glass ice bucket (no silver allowed in Ludlow Street) and gave Cormac a squinty look. They’d been seeing each other for twenty years in the company of Bill Tweed.

  “You still a newspaperman, Cormac?”

  “No, not for a long time.”

  “Good. What’s said here is between us.”

  Tweed said: “He doesn’t have to be reminded of the rules, Charlie. We’ve been friends longer than I’ve known you.”

  “He looks too young for that.”

  “He’s a freak of nature,” Tweed said, sipping his water.

  Cahill, the doctor, leaned forward, trying to lighten the moment.

  “He’s not a freak of nature,” he said. “He’s Irish. When they don’t drink, they look good forever. In Mayo, there’s a guy a hundred and nine years old, and not a white hair on his head.”

  “Is he still fucking?” said Billy Edelstein.

  “Only nuns,” Cahill said, and Tweed laughed and wheezed and grabbed at his chest until the doctor’s face went pale. He held Tweed’s wrist, he patted his back.

  “For Chrissakes, Bill, we don’t want you dying over a hundred-and-nine-year-old Mick fucking nuns.”

  That set Tweed going again, his eyes dancing with laughter, but the huge body wracked and hurting. He coughed a wad of phlegm into a handkerchief. Cormac saw a few spots of blood.

  “Will somebody please talk about the fucking water problem?” Butts said.

  “Or that rat Dick Connolly?” said Edelstein. “Blabbing away and living free in Paris.”

  “Not till after dinner, for Jaysus’ sake,” Butts said.

  The mention of Connolly calmed them all down. They knew that everyone else in the Ring was free, and only Tweed was in jail. Connolly was indeed in Paris, carrying with him six million dollars. Elegant Oakey Hall, the former mayor, supreme horse-shit artist (as the Boss called him), was off in London, charming the British. Brains Sweeny had paid a fat fine and was dozing in the country. Tweed was the only one of them in jail. And the attorney general, Charles S. Fairchild, had double-crossed the Boss, promising him freedom in exchange for some sort of confession. Tweed had confessed, and stayed in jail. There was a minute of somber silence as the faces of their old friends passed among them.

  Then Luke returned with the food.

  “Salvation, gentlemen,” Tweed said.

  Luke laid out the veal chops, corn, asparagus, and roasted potatoes. He put a basket of bread on the small table, and a small tub of butter and slabs of cheese. Everybody got up, except Tweed. He tried, but fell back, and Cormac took one elbow, and Butts the other and they lifted him out of the Windsor chair. He shuffled to the head of the table. Cormac noticed that he gave off a moldy odor, as if something had exuded through his pores and dried on his skin.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said in a feeble way. “Jesus Christ…”

  They all carved away at the chops, remarking on their tenderness, while Tweed grunted and chewed. Cahill tried to guide the talk away from anything upsetting. They chatted about this fellow Edison who had invented a sealed light bulb, with some kind of filament inside that made fire impossible. “He’ll get rich on that one,” Edelstein said, “as long as he got it copyrighted.” Butts said they’d never get enough electric lights in New York to light a single avenue, and Tweed whispered, “You’re wrong, Charlie, you’re wrong. They’re gonna light up the whole city. There’ll be no such thing as night.”

  “There’ll be subways too, Charlie,” Cahill said. “You’ll be out of business with the carriages if you don’t get a piece of them.”

  “People won’t ride under the fucking ground.”

  “They’re doing it in England.”

  “New Yorkers will never do it. It’s like being in a tomb.”

  “Or the Tombs,” Tweed said, and smiled.

  “What do you hear from the wife, Bill?” Cahill said.

  “She’s fine, she’s fine. You know, I just wanted her to be away from all the flying shit here if, if… She’s taken care of no matter what happens.”

  He paused, the knife and fork in his hands.

  “But listen to this,” he said. “She’s in Paris, right, with the young children? And she goes to the opera with some friend of hers. And who’s sitting in the twelfth row? Connolly. Slippery Dick himself.”

  “Jaysus.”

  “So at the interval, she goes right to him. He looks shocked to see her, but she says to him, ‘You, sir, are a cur.’ And walks out.”

  “Good woman.”

  “Bravo.”

  A pause.

  “I hope to join her there soon,” Tweed said. “If I get sprung.” “We’re working on it,” said Edelstein. “And we’ve got some chance. The public is outraged over Fairchild’s double-cross. They want the state to spring you.”

  “I should have built this goddamned jail on Spring Street,” Tweed said, and they all laughed.

  “Let’s talk about something else, Bill,” Cahill said. “I don’t want your blood pressure to go through the roof.”

  “I wish I could go through the roof!”

  Then he led them again into the food, like a commander set against a foe, eating with a kind of frenzy. Once Cahill placed a hand on his wrist, as if to slow him down, and he waited, inhaled, sipped some water, gave Cahill a filthy look, and went on. Edelstein said the corn was delicious. Tweed said, “I don’t have the teeth for it anymore.” He cleaned his plate with buttered bread. Then turned to Cormac.

  “Where is that ice cream store, anyway?”

  “Two blocks from here, Delancey and Essex.”

  “Luke!”

  They cl
eaned their own plates in the sink while Luke went for the ice cream. Then they helped Tweed back to his Windsor chair and sat facing him. He looked at Butts, and then at Cahill and Edelstein, and turned his face toward the barred window with the flowered cretonne curtains moving languidly in a breeze. Cormac noted their grave faces. Finally Tweed whispered, “I’m never getting out of here alive, am I?”

  Ah, Bill, Cormac thought. Ah, you goddamned fool. God damn it all to Hell.

  Tweed had helped him more than once, had helped them all, the way he’d helped thousands of people in the bad parts of town. He had paid for medical school for Cahill and law school for Edelstein. He’d arranged a place for Cahill on the staff of St. Luke’s and got Edelstein into a good law firm. Neither man was part of the Ring. They didn’t vote early and often. They didn’t line up with the shoulder hitters to intimidate voters on election days. They gave Tweed something in return that he needed more than cash or votes. They gave him unconditional loyalty, which was another way of saying that they loved him. In a way, that was all he truly wanted.

  “I’d take a bullet for the man,” Cahill said one night after Tweed had been through a day of agony in a courtroom. “I mean it. I’d take the bullet.”

  “He’s the only true Christian I’ve ever met,” Edelstein said on another night, silent with snow. “Jews don’t meet many of them.”

  They knew, and Cormac knew, that Tweed was presiding over the most corrupt system in New York history. He didn’t tell them this, never brought them into the system. But they all read the newspapers, and particularly the New York Times, which had all the documents, and saw the Startling Revelations after 1871 about how Tweed took 25 percent of all city contracts, which were inflated by the contractors to cover the bribes (while Slippery Dick Connolly, as controller, took down his own 10 percent). Money was flowing everywhere in New York after the Civil War, and the Ring took its piece. The newspapers seldom mentioned that the system was invented in the 1840s by Fernando Wood, who was thinner than Tweed and slicker and knew as much about loyalty as an oyster. Tweed was in the business of politics and he would end up convicted of standard business practices. The newspapers didn’t mention that most of the swag, about twenty million dollars of it, went to the Republicans in Albany, because Tweed could get nothing done without their approval. New York was the only city in the state that could not levy taxes without the permission of Albany, and the upstaters would never give up such a cash cow. If Tweed wanted money for New York City schools, he had to bribe the Republicans. If he wanted Croton water to flow into the streets where the poor lived, he had to pay off Republicans. One night before it all went bad, Tweed paused over a meal at the Astor House and said, “It’s cheaper to buy the legislature than to elect it.” And laughed and laughed.