Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  Martin and Melissa dined and danced and drank together, abandoning the Hampton roof eventually for the privacy of Melissa’s suite. And when the morning came, Martin walked the few blocks to the newspaper, took the ledger from the bottom drawer of his desk, where he’d put it the day before, and brought it back to Melissa. In return he accepted the mysterious eight hundred, and also accepted two and a half more days of lascivious riches from this calculating, venal, and voluptuous incarnation of his psychic downfall.

  Melissa now placed the ledger on his lap and sat beside him. He opened it to a page from 1908 and read the words written in his father’s upright script, which looked like a wheat field on a windless day.

  The hero will not be a writer. Profession left vague? No. He will be Irish-American foundry owner who came up hard way in commerce, through opportunity and hard work, well educated, from family whose social pretensions were wiped out by influx of ’49. Marries daughter of aristocratic Dutch-English family (any near-autobiographical data must be transformed) and secret life of failed marriage is revealed. Wife’s aspirations for money and position, not for themselves but out of halcyon yearning, become clear; and these are ineradicable and dementing. Sexually dutiful but her wound in Delavan Hotel fire eradicates even that; early traumas only suggested, yet evident. Eventually she retreats, marriage begins to wither.

  Martin turned the pages well forward, stopped, smiled, and read out loud: “ ‘Clarissa. Valley of veneration. Cave of nuances. Isosceles jungle. Lair of the snake. Grave of the stalker.’ ” He paused to look at her.

  “I know that page by heart,” she said.

  “ ‘Grave of the stalker,’ ” Martin said. “He could be a silly man. I see an erected Hawkshaw. Tell me. Did you ever go round the clock with him for three days as you did with me?”

  “That’s a very impertinent question. Do you really think I’d tell you?”

  “I thought one day you might compare notes on us. I fantasized your reply.”

  “And naturally you win that contest.”

  “I didn’t think of it as a contest. More a contrast of styles.”

  “Let me say, and end it here, that exuberance runs in your family.”

  “Up exuberance,” he said, and drank his champagne.

  She refilled his glass and raised hers.

  “And here,” she said, “a toast to my gifts.”

  “And rare and splendid they are. Up your gifts.”

  “I was speaking of my gifts to you.”

  “Gifts, you say. Is there more than one?” And he touched the ledger.

  “One more.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “The one and only,” she said, and stood up before him and opened her robe to reveal no negligee, only that indelibly remembered torso, with its somewhat graying isosceles jungle trimmed and shaved with supreme care in the contour of a heart.

  “It’s a bit late in the year,” she said, “but will you be my valentine?”

  Martin opened his belt, the front burtons of his trousers, the three burtons of the shorts he’d put on clean this morning, and presented to her the second-generation stalker, full grown now, oh yes, wrapped in white tissue paper, tied with green ribbon, and tagged with a small card bearing the greeting: Happy Anniversary.

  As he made love to Melissa he studied that portion of her neck and breast where his mother had been scarred by the point of a flaming, flying stick in the fire that killed fifteen people, most of them Irish servant girls. Melissa bore no such marks. Her mark was her face, and he kissed it lavishly, loathing both himself and her, loving her with passionate confusion, pitying her the gift of such a face, for it had been her torment. What man could ever think he alone possessed a beauty so famed, so excessive? Who could own Botticelli’s Primavera?

  His mother’s scar had been a white oval with a scalloped circumference where the stitching had drawn her wound together. He closed his eyes as he kissed Melissa, and behind him the white scar grew by itself, a floating ovoid that became witness to his act. The scar swelled, and Martin thought of the flaming ball of tow that had marked the elder Henry James, playing in Albany Academy park, the park on which Katrina’s Elk Street home fronted. The young James, then only thirteen, had been flying hot-air balloons, which rose skyward when the flaming tow balls were placed beneath them. One James balloon ascended from the park and when the flaming tow ball fell to earth, someone kicked it and arced it into the hayloft of a livery stable across Washington Avenue. The conscientious James ran to the stable to put out the fire, but his pants leg had been splashed by turpentine from soaking the tow, and it ignited like the tail of a comet. The burns led to amputation, creating a mystic philosopher from an incipient outdoorsman, and changing the future of American culture. Serendipitous movement from Edward to Melissa to Henry to Martin. Bright flaming people in a roundelay of accidental life that alters the world.

  The scar grew behind Martin, its center becoming the most brilliant of all possible whites. Martin saw to it that the animal-child was seated on the chair beside the hotel bed in a typical spectator’s position.

  The animal-child watched the cleansing siege of the taboo, unaware the maternal flame was flirting blindly with his presence. The divine figure saw too late the advent of love’s flaming embrace, and he ignited with a rasping, crackling brilliance. He tried to scream but the sound caught in his immaterial throat, and he was suddenly ashes, a spume of sooty flakes flying upward. To heaven? To hell?

  Martin ejaculated with an onrush of benediction.

  Aware that Melissa had been shorted on the significance of the moment, Martin manipulated her vigorously into a writhing, low-level ecstasy. This, she sadly admitted, was the only estate she could inhabit since her hysterectomy four years before. When her ovaries were taken from her, something else went with them. Oh, she could approach climax, almost peak. But there was a point beyond which nothing would take her. She had tried. Oh, how she had tried. Poor little one. And now she gave what could be given, took what must be taken. Her explanation sounded vaguely biblical to Martin, as if she read Saint Augustine hopefully every time the nuances flooded her cave.

  Yet Martin could not escape the notion that his presence here at this altar of hand-me-down flesh was in some way therapistic, that he was expected to remantle the wings of Melissa’s passion, that his time with her a decade ago had been as maleficent for her as it had for him, that she was searching in his flaming ashes for a new display of her own lost fireworks. They’re not really all gone, are they, Daddy?

  He rubbed, oh, how he rubbed. She tried, oh, how she tried.

  But when she exploded it was only with exhaustion, to save her heart’s wearying ventricle.

  They dressed and rested and poured new champagne, and Melissa ate a piece of melon standing up. Martin sat on the sofa trying to understand the meaning of what he had just gone through. He was unable to grasp the significance of so many people suddenly webbed in the same small compass of events. He dismissed coincidence as a mindless explanation of anything. Was it his mind discovering patterns that had always existed but that he, in his self-absorption, had never noticed? But how? He was a fairly perceptive man. More than that, he was foresightful. Even now he had the impulse to call the newspaper, for what reason he did not know. Emory would not be in yet, and he had no reason to speak with anyone else.

  He went to Melissa’s bedroom and sat on the rumpled bed, still damp with drops of love and loathing, and asked the hotel operator to ring the Times-Union. When Madge, the crone, answered, all he could think to ask was whether anyone had left him a message. “Yes,” said Madge, “some bozo named Franny Phelan called. He’s in jail and wants you to bail him out.”

  Martin went back to the couch.

  “Did you ever hear my father speak of having a gift of foresight, or anything comparable?” he asked Melissa.

  “I remember he was superstitious,” she said. “He used to throw salt over his shoulder when it spilled and he had a lucky p
air of pants. They were green with small checks. I can still see them. He almost never wore them except when he needed money, and he swore that when he put them on, money started to trickle in. We were standing in the middle of Fourteenth Street one afternoon and he was wearing a blue suit and he didn’t have enough money to buy our lunch at Luchow’s. ‘Nobody knows I need money,’ he said. ‘How could they? I don’t have my green pants on.’ We went to his rooms and he put the pants on, and the next day he got a bank draft in the mail for eleven hundred dollars from a producer.”

  Martin felt a lazy rapture come over him looking at Melissa, the golden bird of paradise. Yet, he resented the intimacy such a story reflected, and the pain it caused his mother in her grave. It was the first time he’d ever heard of clairvoyance in anyone else in the family. But Martin quickly decided his father, through telepathy with the producer, learned of the money on the way and put on the green pants as a way of turning the vision into something magical but not quite serious. It was not the same gift as his own. No.

  “You’re going now, aren’t you?” Melissa said.

  “I had a call at the paper. An old neighbor of mine’s in jail and wants my help.”

  “I could tell by your face you were going to leave me.”

  “What is it? Do you want to talk? I don’t have to go right this minute.”

  “I don’t see you in ten years and you pop in and use me like a Klondike whore.”

  “Use you? Klondike?” Martin’s fingers still ached from the reciprocal friction.

  “You drink my champagne and eat my food and exploit my body and leave me alone with my energy. You use me.” She hurled a croissant at him. It missed him and bounced off a lampshade.

  “You crazy bitch,” he said. “You’re as crazy as my mother.”

  He pulled her robe off her shoulders, pinning her arms to her side. Then he dragged her to the floor and undid his trousers.

  How do I use thee? Let me count the ways. As a sacred vessel to be violated. As a thief of Holy Writ. As the transcendent trinity: Melissa-Katrina-Marina, which my father discovered and loved; which I now love. As my father immortalized them all, like the figures on the Grecian urn, so do I now perceive them in all their lambent lunacy. Seeing with my father’s eyes and knowing how he was victimized by glory and self-absorption, I now forgive the man his exorbitant expectations, his indifference, his absence. Once forgiven, it is a short walk to forgive myself for failing to penetrate such passionate complexity as his. Forgiving myself, I can again begin to love myself. All this, thanks to the use of the fair Melissa.

  As he pronged the dying fire, Martin sensed the presence of his parents in the room, not as flaming balls of tow this time, but as a happy couple, holding hands and watching him do diddle with Melissa for them, just as he had once done proud piddle for them in his personal pot. Clearly, they saw him as the redeemer of all their misalliances, the conqueror of incoherence, the spirit of synthesis in an anarchic family. Martin, in the consanguineous saddle, was their link with love past and future, a figure of generational communion, the father of a son en route to the priesthood, the functioning father of the senile Edward. More than that he had, here, obviously become his own father. He was Edward, son of Emmett Daugherty, father of Martin Daugherty, grandfather of Peter Daugherty, and progenitor of the unchartable Daugherty line to come. Lost son of a lost father, he was now fatherhood incarnate.

  Perceiving this, he spent himself in Melissa’s ravine of purification.

  “You are my yum-yum,” she said to him, wholly flattened, the corners of her mouth yanked downward by unseen powers at the center of the earth. She stroked the fluids at the center of herself and sucked the mixture off her middle finger, evoking in Martin a ten-year-old memory of the same act performed at the Hampton. Moved profoundly both by the act and the memory, he loathed himself for his own psychic mendacity, for trying to persuade himself he had other than venereal reasons for jingling everybody’s favorite triangle.

  Hypocrite!

  Lecher!

  My boy!

  Billy found Martin in the news coop of police headquarters playing knock rummy with Ned Curtin, the Times-Union’s police reporter. Martin saw Billy and nodded. Then he drew a card and knocked. Ned Curtin slid a dime to him across the desk.

  “How come he called you?” Billy said when Martin came out to meet him. They walked together up the stairs, Billy still smelling the pine disinfectant he always associated with this building. Billy had been here only once, five years ago, for dealing cards on Orange Street. He’d been hired by a punk who said he had Bindy’s okay to run the game, but didn’t, so they pulled everybody in and held them an hour here and then let the players go. But they kept the punk, who had to pay up and do a night in jail.

  “I saw him Thursday down in Spanish George’s,” Martin said, “and I told him to call me if he needed anything.”

  “You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

  “He didn’t want me to. When you see him, you’ll know why.”

  “Why’d you call me now?”

  “It’ll be in the paper tonight, or maybe even this afternoon, who he is and used to be. You had to know before that.”

  They sat down on a long, wooden bench in the empty courtroom. A white-haired man in shirtsleeves came in from the room behind the judge’s bench and sniffed at them, then went out again.

  “Did you ever know why he left home?” Billy asked.

  “I know the gossip. He drank, then the baby died. The one fed the other.”

  “I was nine.”

  “Do you remember him well? You could at nine.”

  “I don’t know if I remember his face from seeing it, or from the picture. There’s one home in a box of snapshots, about nineteen fifteen, the year before he left. He’s standing on our old stoop on Colonie Street.”

  “He was all done with baseball then. I can remember how he looked. He doesn’t look like that anymore.”

  With a magnifying glass, Billy had studied how his father wore his sweater, the same one he wore in the rowboat, and maybe the same cap. He studied the cut of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, and his smile, the lips open and twisted a little to the left. It was a good smile, a strong smile. But Billy’s mother said it was a weak thing to leave us and drink so much. A man shouldn’t be weak like that, she said. But, oh my, how he cried, she said. How we all cried.

  “Here,” said Martin, nudging Billy Through an open door they saw men entering the hallway behind the courtroom. One guard in blue shirt and policeman’s cap walked ahead of the prisoner, and one behind him. Billy was not prepared for this sight. It was Pete the Tramp without a hat, without the spiky mustache, without the comedy. When tramps came to the house and asked for a meal, Billy’s mother always fed them, and gave them coffee with milk. Now he knew why. Billy and Martin followed the procession. The tramp dragged his feet, slouched, shuffled on fallen arches, or maybe on stumps with toes frozen and gone. Billy kept his father’s dirty gray hair in sight. He did not remember hair on his father, he remembered a cap.

  The white-haired man who had sniffed at them turned from the large ledger in which he was writing. Billy remembered seeing the man only last month at Foley’s pit in Troy, handling fighting cocks for Patsy McCall. His name was Kelly and he was a hell of a handler.

  “What’s this?” Kelly said, pen in hand.

  “Bail. Francis Phelan,” said the first policeman.

  “Ah, you’re the one,” Kelly said, putting down his pen and sticking out his right hand to Francis. “Congratulations. Twenty-one, was it?” And everyone laughed.

  “So they say,” Francis said.

  Billy saw his father’s smile and recognized the curve of the lips, but the teeth were brown in front, and there were no teeth at all behind them. The mouth was a dark cavity. The smile was dead.

  “Somebody got bail money?” Kelly asked.

  “Here,” said Billy, and he weaved his way through the men. He counted out four hundred dollars and K
elly took it to the next room and put it in a box in the open safe. Billy looked at his father and received a stare of indifference.

  “You a bail bondsman? I don’t remember you,” Kelly said, his pen poised over the receipt book.

  “No,” Billy said. “Family.”

  Kelly handed Billy a receipt, and one of the policemen gave Francis a small white envelope with his belongings. Then both guards left the corridor. Billy, Martin, and Francis stood looking at one another until Martin said, “Let’s go,” and led the way out the door. He stopped at the top of the stairs.

  “Martin, thanks for fixing it up,” Francis said.

  “Not at all. I told you to call me.”

  “You know a lawyer who’ll take me on?”

  “I do. Marcus Gorman, the best in town. I already talked to him.”

  Francis looked at Billy and nodded his head. “You’re Billy, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Billy.

  “Thanks for that dough.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Francis nodded again. “How you been?”

  “Not bad,” Billy said. “How about yourself?”

  “Well, I ain’t in jail.” And Francis cackled a throaty laugh, showing his brown teeth and the cavity of his mouth, and fell into a cough that twisted his whole body.

  Billy offered him a Camel.

  He took it.

  They went down the stairs and out the front door onto Eagle Street, confronting a golden October afternoon, the bright sun warming the day with Indian summer’s final passion. Men were walking the street in shirtsleeves, and women’s dresses still had the look of August about them. The black mood that had fallen on Billy when he first saw his father faded into a new and more hopeful coloration under a sky so full of white, woolly clouds.

  The bail almost wiped out Billy’s bankroll, but he still had sixty-two dollars and change. It was enough to get the old man a new outfit: shoes, suit, shirt, and tie. Make him look like an American citizen again.

  When Martin told Billy about the bail, Billy had immediately said, I got it, I’ll go for it. I know it’s your money, Martin, but I’ll get more. I don’t want that money, Martin had said. Forget I ever won that bet. No, I don’t forget that, Billy said. What do you do when you lose? You pay.