Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  “That’s all. Yeah.”

  And Billy crossed Clinton toward the alley beside Nick’s haberdashery, where Nick, Footers O’Brien, and Morrie Berman were talking. Martin walked up the other side of the street, past the Pruyn Library, and crossed to The Grand Theater when he saw the Laughton film on the marquee. He looked back at the library corner and remembered the death of youth: his cousin’s suicide in the wagon. Sudden behavior and pervasive silence. But sometimes living men tell no tales either. Francis Phelan suddenly gone and still no word why. The Beachcomber. Martin hadn’t told Billy that his father was back in town. Duplicity and the code of silence. Who was honored by this? What higher morality was Martin preserving by keeping Billy ignorant of a fact so potentially significant to him? We are all in a conspiracy against the next man. Duplicity And Billy Phelan saw through you, Martin: errand boy for the McCalls. Duplicity at every turn. Melissa back in town to remind you of how deep it goes. Oh yes, Martin Daugherty, you are one duplicitous son of a bitch.

  In the drugstore next to The Grand, Martin phoned Patsy McCall.

  “Do you have any news, Patsy?”

  “No news.”

  “I made that contact we talked about, and it went just about the way I thought it would. He didn’t like the idea. I don’t think you can look for much information there.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s just got a feeling about that kind of thing. Some people do.”

  “That’s all he’s got a feeling for?”

  “It gets sticky, Patsy. He’s a good fellow, and he might well come up with something. He didn’t say no entirely. But I thought you ought to know his reaction and maybe put somebody else on it if you think it’s important.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Patsy said curtly and hung up.

  Martin called the Times-Union and got Emory. Yes, the lid was still on the Charlie story. “Everybody went along,” Emory said, “including Dunsbach. I seared his ass all right. He wouldn’t touch the story now with rubber gloves.”

  “Heroic, Em. I knew you could do it.”

  “Have you smoked out any kidnappers yet?”

  “You know I don’t smoke, Em. What happened with the A.L.P.?”

  “I don’t give a damn about that piss-ant stuff when I’ve got a story like this. Here. Talk to Viglucci.”

  Viglucci, the city editor, explained that some twelve hundred new voters had enrolled in the A.L.P, twice as many as necessary for Patsy McCall to control the young party. No, the desk hadn’t reached Jake Berman, the phone constantly busy at the A.L.P. office. Martin volunteered to go there personally, being only two blocks away. Fine.

  Jake Berman had been barely a specter all day for Martin, whose sympathy was all with the McCalls because of Charlie. But now Jake could surely use a little consolation. Martin had known Jake for years and liked him, a decent man, a lawyer for the poor, knew him when he was a city judge, appointed by McCall fiat as a sop to the Albany Jews. But that didn’t last, for Jake refused to throw out a case against a gouging landlord, an untouchable who was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party. Jake quit the bench and the party, and went back to practicing law.

  In 1935, when the A.L.P. was founded to gain another line for Roosevelt’s second run, Jake spearheaded the party locally and opened headquarters in his father’s old tailor shop on Sheridan Avenue, just off North Pearl Street. Old Socialists and laboring men, who wanted nothing to do with the Democrats but liked F.D.R.’s New Deal, made the new party their own, and by 1936 the Albany branch had one hundred and eighty-four members. Patsy McCall tolerated it because it was a stepchild of the Democratic Party, even though he had no use for Roosevelt, the snob son of a bitch. The Catholic Church grew restless with the new party, however, as its ranks fattened with anti-Franco radicals and socialist intellectuals who spat on God. What’s more, it promised the kind of growth that one day could be a power balance in local elections, and so Patsy decided it was time to pull the plug.

  The word went out to the aldermen and ward leaders of the city’s nineteen wards that some sixty voters in each ward should change their enrollment from Democrat to American Labor. As enrolled members, they would then be entitled to vote at A.L.P. meetings, and would vote as Patsy told them to. Jake Berman’s few hundred regulars would be dwarfed by the influx, and Jake’s chairmanship negated. In time, all in good time, Patsy’s majority, of which Chickie Phelan was now one, would elect a new party chairman.

  The garmentless tailor’s dummy that had been in Berman’s tailor shop for as long as Martin could remember was still visible behind the Lehman-for-Governor posters taped to the old store window. The shop had stood empty for several years after the death of old Ben Berman, a socialist since the turn of the century and a leader in the New York City garment industry’s labor struggle until strikebreakers fractured his skull. He came to Albany to put his life and his head back together and eventually opened this shop, just off Pearl Street at the edge of an old Irish slum, Sheridan Hollow, where Lackey Quinlan once advertised in the paper to rent a house with running water, and curious applicants found he had built his shack over a narrow spot in the old Canal Street creek. This was the running water, and in it Lackey kept his goose and his gander.

  Ben Berman worked as a tailor in the neighborhood, though his clients came from all parts of the city, until he lost most of his eyesight and could no longer sew. He died soon after that, and then his son Jacob rented the shop to another tailor, who ran it for several years. But the new man was inferior to Ben Berman with the needle, and the trade fell away. It remained for the A.L.P. to reopen the shop, and now it looked as if its days were again numbered.

  Martin pushed open the door, remembering when Ben Berman made suits and coats for his own father, those days when the Daughertys lived under the money tree. Martin could vividly recall Edward Daugherty standing in this room trying on a tan, speckled suit with knickers and a belt in the back, mottled buttons, and a brown, nonmatching vest. Martin mused again on how he had inherited none of his father’s foppery, never owned a tailor-made suit or coat, lived off the rack, satisfied with ready-made. A woman Martin did not know was coming down the inside stairs as he entered. She looked about forty, a matron in style. She was weeping and her hat looked crooked to Martin.

  “Jake upstairs?”

  She nodded, sniffled, wiped an eye. Martin yearned to console her with gentle fondling.

  “Can I help you?” he asked her.

  She laughed once and shook her head, then went out. Martin climbed the old stairs and found Jake Berman leaning back in a swivel chair, hands behind head, feet propped up on an open rolltop desk. Jake had a thick gray mustache and wore his hair long, like a serious musician. The elbow was out of his gray sweater, and he was tieless. The desk dominated the room, two rooms really, with the adjoining wall knocked out. Folding chairs cluttered both rooms, and at a long table two men younger than Jake sat tallying numbers on pink pads. The phone on Jake’s desk was off the hook.

  “Why don’t you answer your phone?” Martin asked.

  “I’m too busy,” Jake said. He moved only his lips and eyes to say that. “What can I do for you?”

  “I heard the results.”

  “You did. And did they surprise you?”

  “Quite a heavy enrollment. I was told twelve hundred plus. Is that accurate?”

  “Your information is as good as mine. Better. You get yours from McCall headquarters.”

  “I got mine from the city desk.”

  “Same thing really, isn’t it, Martin?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. The McCalls do have some support there.”

  “Some?”

  “I for one don’t see myself a total McCaller.”

  “Yes, you write some risky things now and then, Martin. You’re quite an independent-minded man in your way But I didn’t see you or anybody else reporting about the plan to take us over. Didn’t anybody down on that reactionary rag know about i
t?”

  “Did you?”

  “I knew this morning,” said Jake. “I knew when I saw it happening. Fat old Irishmen who loathe us, drunken bums from the gutter, little German hausfraus enrolling with us. Up until then, the subversion was a well-kept secret.”

  Jake’s face was battered, his eyes asymmetric, one lower than the other, his mustache trimmed too high on one side. In anger, his lower lip tightened to the left. His face was as off balance as his father’s battered and dusty samovar, which sat behind him on a table, a fractured sculpture with spigot, one handle, and one leg broken. Another fractured face for Martin in a matter of hours: Charlie when Scotty died; Patsy and Matt this morning; and now Jake, victim of the McCalls. Interlocking trouble. Binding ironies. Martin felt sympathy for them all, had a fondness for them all, gave allegiance to none. Yet, now he was being accused, for the second time in half an hour, of being in league with the McCall machine. And was he not? Oh, duplicitous man, are you not?

  “I came for a statement, Jake. Do you have one?”

  “Very brief. May the McCalls be boiled in dead men’s piss.”

  A young man at the tabulating table, bald at twenty-five, threw down his pencil and stood up. “And you can tell the Irish in this town to go fuck a duck.”

  “That’s two unprintable statements,” said Martin. “Shall we try for three?”

  “Always a joke, Martin. Everything is comic to you.”

  “Some things are comic, Jake. When a man tells me with high seriousness to go fuck a duck, even though I’m only half Irish, I’m amused somewhere.”

  The young man, in shirtsleeves, and with Ben Franklin spectacles poised halfway down his nose, came to the desk, hovering over Martin. “It’s the religion, isn’t it?” he said. “Political Jews stand as an affront to the McCalls and their priests, priests no better than the fascist-dog Catholics who kiss the boots of Franco and Mussolini.”

  Martin made a squiggle on his notepad.

  “Quote it about the fascists,” said the young man.

  “Do you think the McCalls are fascists, Jake?” Martin asked.

  “I know a Jew who’s been with them almost since the beginning,” said Jake. “He works for a few pennies more than he started for in nineteen twenty-two, sixteen years of penurious loyalty and he never asked for a raise, or threatened to quit over money. ‘If I do,’ he once said to me, ‘you know what they’ll tell me? The same they told Levy, the accountant. Quit, then, you Jew fuck.’ He is a man in fear, a man without spirit.”

  “People who don’t promote Jews, are they fascists, or are they anti-Semites?”

  “The same thing. The fascists exist because of all those good people, like those sheep who enrolled with us today, all full of passive hate, waiting for the catalyst to activate it.”

  “Your point is clear, Jake, but I still want a statement.”

  “Print this. That I’m not dead, not even defeated, that I’ll take the party’s case to court, and that we’ll win. If ever the right to free elections was violated, then it was violated today in Albany with this farcical maneuver.”

  “The McCalls own the courts, too,” said the young man. “Even the Federal court.”

  “There are honest judges. We’ll find one,” Jake said.

  “We won’t yield to mob rule,” the young man said.

  “He’s right,” Jake said. “We will not. You know an Irish mob threw my grandfather out a third-story window in New York during the Civil War. They were protesting against their great enemy back then, the niggers, but they killed a pious old Jew. He tried to reason with them, with the mob. He thought they would listen to reason, for, after all, he was an intelligent man and had nothing to do with the war, or the niggers. He was merely living upstairs over the draft office. Nevertheless, they threw him down onto the street and let him lie there twitching, dying, for hours. They wouldn’t let anyone pick him up or even help him, and so he died, simply because he lived over the draft office. It was a moment of monstrous ethnic truth in American history, my friend, the persecuted Irish throwing a persecuted Jew out the window in protest against drafting Irishmen into the Union Army to help liberate the persecuted Negro.

  “But the enormous irony hasn’t led to wisdom, only to self-preservation and the awareness of the truth of mobs. My father told me that story after another mob set fire to paper bags on our front porch, and, when my father came out to stomp out the flames, the bags broke and human excrement squirted everywhere. A brilliant stroke by the mob. They were waiting with their portable flaming cross to watch my father dance on the fire and the shit. Fire and shit, my friend, fire and shit. Needless to say, we moved soon thereafter.”

  “The Klan’s an old friend of mine, too, Jake,” Martin said. “They burned a cross in front of my house and fired a shot through our front window because of what I wrote in support of Al Smith. You can’t blame the Klan on the Irish. Maybe the Irish were crazy, but they were also used as cannon fodder in the Civil War. I could match grandfathers with you. One of mine was killed at Antietam, fighting for the niggers.”

  Jake held a letter opener in his hand like a knife. He poked the point of it lightly at the exposed desk top. Then his arm went rigid. “Goddamn it, Martin, this is a stinking, lousy existence. Goddamn its stink! Goddamn all of it!” And with sudden force he drove the point of the letter opener into the desk top. The point stuck but the blade broke and pierced the muscle of his thumb.

  “Perfect,” he said, and held his hand in front of his face and watched it bleed. The young man ran to the bathroom for a towel. He wrapped the wound tightly as Jake slumped in his chair.

  “Violence solves it all,” Jake said. “I no longer feel the need to say anything.”

  “We’ll talk another night,” Martin said.

  “I won’t be less bitter.”

  “Maybe less bloody.”

  “And unbowed.”

  “There’s something else, Jake, and you ought to know. It’ll be in the paper tonight. Your son, Morrie, is named as a possible intermediary in a kidnapping.”

  “Repeat that, Martin.”

  “Bindy McCall’s son, Charlie, was kidnapped this morning and the ransom demand is a quarter of a million. The McCalls are publishing a list of names in a simple code, names of men they view as potential go-betweens for the kidnappers to pick from. Morrie is one of twelve.”

  “God is just,” said Jake’s young aide. “The McCalls are now getting theirs back.”

  “Stupid, stupid to say such a thing,” Jake snapped. “Know when to be angry.”

  “I just saw Morrie,” Martin said, “getting ready to go into a card game.”

  “Naturally,” said Jake.

  “I may see him later. Do you have any message?”

  “We no longer talk. I have three daughters, all gold, and I have Morris, a lead slug.”

  Martin suddenly pictured Jake with a flowing beard, knife in hand on Mount Moriah, cutting out the heart of his son.

  “I just had a vision of you holding that letter opener,” Martin said to Jake. “You look very much like an engraving of Abraham I’ve looked at for years in the family Bible. Your hair, your forehead.”

  “Abraham with the blade.”

  “And Isaac beneath it,” said Martin. He could not bring himself to mention the dissection of Isaac. “The likeness of you to that drawing of Abraham is amazing.”

  As he said this Martin was withholding; for he now had a clear memory of the biblical engraving and it wasn’t like Jake at all. Abraham’s was a face of weakness, a face full of faith and anguish, but no bitterness, no defiance. And the knife did not touch Isaac. Abraham’s beard then disappeared in the vision. Where he gripped the sacrificial knife, part of a finger was missing. Isaac bore the face of a goat. The vision changed. The goat became a bawling infant, then a bleating lamb. Martin shut his eyes to stop the pictures. He looked at the samovar.

  “Isaac,” Jake was saying. “God loves the Isaacs of the world. But he wouldn’t hav
e bothered to ask Abraham to sacrifice a son as worthless as my Morris.”

  “Now you even know what God asks,” Martin said.

  “I withdraw the remark.”

  With his gaze, Martin restored the samovar, new leg, new handle, new spigot. Steam came from it once again. He looked up to see the 1936 poster: Roosevelt, the Working Man’s President. Out of the spigot came the hot blood of centuries.

  Bump Oliver was a dapper little guy with a new haircut who played cards with his hat on. Billy met him when he sat down at the table in Nick Levine’s cellar, just under the electric meter and kitty-corner from the old asbestos coal furnace which smudged up the cellar air but didn’t heat it enough so you could take off your suit coat. New man on Broadway, Nick said of Bump when he introduced him to Billy; no more than that and who needs to know more?

  And yet after Bump had dealt twice, Billy did want to know more. Because he sensed a cheater. Why? Don’t ask Billy to be precise about such things. He has been listening to cheater stories for ten years, has even seen some in action and found out about it later, to his chagrin. He has watched Ace Reilly, a would-be cheater, practicing his second-card deal for hours in front of a mirror. Billy even tried that one himself to see how it went, but didn’t like it, didn’t have the patience or the vocation for it. Because cheaters, you see, already know how it’s going to end, and what the hell good is that? Also, Billy saw a cheater caught once: a salesman who played in Corky Ronan’s clubroom on Van Woert Street, and when Corky saw he was using a shiner, he grabbed the cheater’s hand and showed everybody how he wore it, a little bit of a mirror under a long fingernail. Joe Dembski reached over and punched the cheater on the side of the neck, and the others were ready to move in for their licks, but Corky said never mind that, just take his money and he won’t come back, and they let the cheater go. Why? Well, Corky’s idea was that everybody’s got a trade, and that’s Billy’s idea too, now.

  So Billy has seen all this and has thought about it, and because he knows so well how things should be when everything is straight, he also thinks he knows when it’s off center, even when it’s only a cunt hair off. That’s how sensitive Billy’s apparatus is. Maybe it was the way Bump beveled the deck and crooked a finger around it, or maybe it was his eyes and the fact that he was new on Broadway. Whatever it was, even though Bump lost twelve straight hands, Billy didn’t trust him.