World Without End, Amen

by Jimmy Breslin

  “What about the threesky for this one?” Dermot said.

  “We didn’t shut no gas off in this house,” the gas-company man said.

  “Yeah, but we went in there,” Dermot said.

  “The gas got to be off.”

  “Come on.”

  “Hey,” the gas-company man said. “You come on.”

  Dermot was involved in one outside activity in his life. On a Sunday in March of 1968, he and Phyllis went to mass at Holy Child Jesus Roman Catholic Church on 111th Street. The church is a tan-yellow fort. Catholic architecture is defensive. Only the gun slits are missing from most Diocese of Brooklyn complexes. Massive church, rectory, grammar school, the building sides forming walls. Young boys, altar boys and sons of Holy Name Society members, were in front of the church with leaflets. One, on green paper, announced a meeting of the Senator Joseph McCarthy Memorial Mass Association. Once the Joseph McCarthy Memorial Mass was a big thing in Queens. When Dermot was a grammar-school kid, he attended one of the masses outdoors in Forest Park when five thousand attended. This time, Dermot was not interested in the pamphlet.

  “It’s funny,” he said to Phyllis. “Look at a great man like this and I don’t even care any more. I guess it’s so long since he died now.”

  “Mother was saying the exact same thing about Roosevelt,” she said.

  He was putting the leaflet into his pocket when a young boy handed him another leaflet announcing a meeting of the South Queens Committee to Elect George Wallace President. The meeting was for Tuesday night. The address was only a few blocks from Dermot’s house. “Maybe we’ll go,” Dermot said.

  The meeting on Tuesday night was in a storefront that once was a real-estate agency. It was next door to the Triangle Hofbrau Restaurant. Chairs from O’Brien’s Funeral Home in Richmond Hill were set up. A young guy named Kelly, with a blond crew cut, a member of the Ushers’ Society of Our Lady of Grace in Howard Beach, introduced a man named George Creel, who wore two-tone shoes. He was from Montgomery, Alabama. Creel explained the mechanics of petition-carrying. He told the people sitting on the funeral chairs, pinched Richmond Hill people, that the objective this time was to put Wallace’s name on the ballot for the June Presidential primary in New York.

  “Now, we up here in overcoat country for that purpose alone,” he said. “You folks got opposition, that’s for sure. You got McCarthy people—the wrong McCarthy people, as we all know—you got Bobby Kennedy people …”

  An old man sitting behind Dermot began to hiss.

  “Now, we gonna take a second here to talk about somethin’,” Creel said. “Y’all see, Governor Wallace isn’t in politics for sport. Y’all can boo and hiss in a sportin’ game. Governor Wallace is a professional politician. Now, you been so disillusioned by politicians that you probably get nervous when you hear me say the Governor is a professional politician. But he is. Every inch of that little fightin’ rooster’s body is professional politician. That’s why we respect other politicians. We may not agree with them. The Governor get out there and attack them. But we never waste time in a closed meetin’ like this gettin’ worked up over opponents. Hell, they in the same business as we in. They out there tryin’ and workin’. A Bobby Kennedy campaign worker, they out there workin’. You got to admire anybody out there workin’. They wrong, but they think they truly tryin’ to do some good. Don’t be hissin’ at that worker. Respect that political worker. And say a little-bitty prayer that we could win that worker over. Now, don’t tell me we don’t want Kennedy workers. Every one of them come through the door here, they in trouble. Automatically. ’Cause they goin’ get loved to death by me. Anybody doin’ anything out there in politics, you can rap ’em in public in a campaign. That’s part of the business. But don’t ever take it personal.

  “Now lemme give you a little-bitty lesson about politics. In every endeavor in life, you try to succeed. Businessman tries to succeed. Student tries to succeed. Man will do certain things to succeed. But in politics, the word is survahval. You must survahve no matter what the cost. And a man does anything to survahve.”

  He pointed to the man who had hissed the Kennedy name.

  “And, mister, I take second to no man, to no man in my worry about the Kennedys with all their money and all their pointy-headed, pro-fessors. But we here this year is interested in survahval. We want to get by. And then we goin’ make George Wallace the President of the United States come nahnteen-seventy-two, or, if we got to, we can wait. We can wait until nahnteen-seventy-six. But we goin’ make him President. Right now, our job is to survahve. And to survahve, the first thing we goin’ do is go out there and shake hands with ever’ Kennedy supporter we can find. We goin’ cultivate them. We goin’ survahve.”

  He asked for questions. The man who had hissed Kennedy asked, “What about the Jews? All they ever do is mollycoddle criminals.”

  “Welfare!” a woman said. “The Jews put everybody on the welfare.”

  “That’s because the Jews got all the jobs in the Welfare Department,” a huge blond woman said.

  “Hear this now,” Creel said. “The Jew like everybody else. They keep sayin’ to you folks, ‘Open up your hearts.’ That’s fine. But you also happen to be gettin’ your haids opened up. And the Jew got a haid like anybody else. When the Jew gets his haid laid open by some bully comin’ out of a dark alley, then the Jew goin’ be out lookin’ for George Corley Wallace jes’ like you. So this is our year of survahval. And we goin’ out shakin’ hands with the Jew. Gentlemen, you goin’ to see a day in this city, in this state, in this whole country, when everybody, from Jew to the pointy-headed pro-fessor, is goin’ to be standin’ up and cheerin’ for the po-leece. Cheerin’ for them! Supportin’ ’em. The po-leece and the President of the U-nited States, George Corley Wallace.”

  When he had finished, Dermot clapped. It was the first time he had ever experienced any excitement outside of the job or watching a football game. He went up to the blond kid at the desk and signed his name and took a sheaf of green petitions.

  “I’m a policeman, am I allowed to go out with these?” Dermot asked Creel.

  “Don’t sign your name no place,” Creel said. He smiled. “But when you goin’ door-to-door, let them see your weapon. Just a little-bitty glimpse of it. People like to know that security people goin’ ’round for Governor Wallace.”

  “There’s a lot of cops around the area,” Dermot told him. “Do you pass something out in the precincts?”

  “Why don’t you write me up somethin’ to give to them?” Creel said.

  Dermot barely noticed the walk home. He was walking quickly, so quickly Phyllis had to almost trot to keep up with him. He wanted to get to the kitchen table and sit down and write something out.

  Once, in the middle of the block, he stopped. “Where’s the petitions?”

  “I have them right here. You gave them to me.”

  “Oh, Christ. I thought I left them back there. Goddam, they’re important. Don’t lose them on me. This thing could be important.”

  When they got home, he sat down and began writing, using his daughter’s looseleaf paper. The words looked strange and amateurish when he wrote them out longhand on the lined paper. They looked better when he printed them. His eyes were tired and he went to bed. He fell asleep right away. He had one idea out of the night. In the next two days, he worked on a leaflet. He finished one that said:

  Don’t tell your partner. He knows.

  Don’t tell your wife. She knows.

  TELL TO THE VOTER! HE DOESNT KNOW!

  Under the block headlines, he printed, in body type,

  A policeman of the City of New York works eight hours protecting the lives of the citizenry. Yet we are on duty twenty-four hours a day under law. Well, let’s live up to the letter of the law. Let’s protect the public from commies and rapists. Let’s finish our tours and go out and inform the public of what they can do to help us. We need their prayers. We live under God and everybody must ask His help f
or us. After prayers, we need their temporal support. The citizenry can best support their peace officers and fight commies and rapists by making Governor Wallace the President.

  He took it down to the Wallace storefront. Kelly, the one with the crew cut, gave it to a black-haired woman. She typed out a stencil. When she finished, she put it on the mimeograph machine. She pressed the button and it began flipping out neat copies of Dermot’s statement. He watched the drum spin and the paper shoot out with a squeak, and he could not take his eyes off it.

  “Gives you a feeling, doesn’t it?” the black-haired woman said.

  Dermot didn’t answer.

  “At least we’re doin’ something,” the woman said. “At least we’re just not sitting around. We’re trying to make ourselves better than what we are. That’s all we can do. Try to make ourselves better.”

  Again, when he walked home, Dermot never noticed the blocks. He could smell the air. He never remembered doing that before this. When he got home, he asked Phyllis about the petitions.

  “They’re in the kitchen cabinet,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything with them today. I had to go shoppin’.”

  In April of 1970, Dermot Davey’s life, on paper, was in the hands of Nussbaum, the lawyer, and Monsignor Carrigan of the Counseling Unit. How they handled the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division would determine Dermot’s future as a policeman. In this, he also had the tremendous help of being an Irish Roman Catholic from Queens. In any dispute between an Irish Roman Catholic policeman from Queens and a black transvestite, the policeman is a fine man, a bit mixed up but still a fine man, and the black transvestite becomes a dirty sick nigger son of a bitch who should have his balls cut off so he not only thinks he’s a cunt but he can have a cunt in the bargain.

  There was no criminal action taken against Johno and Dermot. The transvestite never appeared before a grand jury. Any grand jury would have to meet in Queens. The District Attorney in Queens, Devlin, had his family roots in Cookstown, in Northern Ireland, the center of the Devlins in that country. Dermot Davey’s father was from Maghera, in Northern Ireland. Dermot knew that his father had a brother who had moved from Maghera to Derry. He had heard this over the years. Dermot’s mother had an uncle and aunt, the Meehans, living in the Ardoyne section of Belfast. The complaint had to go through Assistant Chief Inspector McKinney, who lived in Rego Park, in Resurrection Ascension Parish, in Queens. McKinney’s grandfather came from Strabane, in Northern Ireland.

  Monsignor Carrigan’s recommendations were all Assistant Chief Inspector McKinney cared about. The Monsignor had made whisky, not assault, the problem. He noted that both men in question, Davey and O’Donnell, had entered the sanitarium in Paterson of their own accord and now were reporting to the Counseling Unit. McKinney felt this was fine. Both men were assigned to light duty in the auto-identification bureau. It was the second time Dermot had been pulled out of a precinct and put on the Bow and Arrow Squad. He hated pulling out file drawers for eight hours a day. And he regarded the Counseling Unit meetings as trips to the dentist. But he knew it all was better than what could happen to him. He had had several nightmares about being jobless and in jail since the night in the parking lot.

  Even with these natural things going for him, Dermot knew nothing was to be taken as permanent. The Irish-Americans Dermot was dealing with allowed strong bonds to dissolve rapidly. George Brennan, a business agent for the ironworkers, was probably the most popular union man in Queens. Brennan got into trouble in the Bronx. A Jewish assistant district attorney, out of the Reform Democratic movement, secured a highly questionable indictment for extortion. The ironworkers in Queens sat in bars and saw Brennan’s indictment announced on the evening news. Several of them immediately ran to the phone to begin campaigning for Brennan’s job. They now considered Brennan to be a convict. Dermot Davey understood that the protection he was being given could not be taken as final. I’m no Jew, he reminded himself. Jews know how to take care of each other. Irish are nothing, he kept saying.

  Throughout parts of Queens—Woodside, Sunnyside, Rockaway—and into Bay Ridge and Greenpoint in Brooklyn and up through the Inwood section of Manhattan and the Fordham section of the Bronx there are great outward signs of Irishness. A network of neighborhood travel agencies keeps the Irish Airlines waiting room at Kennedy Airport filled with people taking advantage of low-cost tours. Saloon after saloon has a shamrock on its neon sign. And once a year everybody stops and goes to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. After these things, it ends. Dermot Davey’s father was born in Ireland. His mother had an uncle and aunt in Belfast. This is unusual in New York. Most people in New York with Irish names go back at least three generations before they reach Irish-born in the family. The heritage of being Irish is more a toy than a reality. A drink, a couple of wooden sayings, and a great personal pride, bordering on the hysterical, in being Irish. The bloodlines were present. But they were being thinned out by time. You could count on some help if you were Irish. But there was no way to count on the help lasting forever. Dermot Davey understood the implications.

  “Thank God we’re out of that,” Johno said one day.

  “Remember Gene Monaghan?” Dermot said to him.

  “Do I,” Johno said.

  “How long did he go around saying his case was killed?”

  “Year.”

  “Then what happened to him?”

  “He got humped.”

  “Six months in the slam, that’s all he got,” Dermot said. “But they said they were sorry.”

  “So we got to be careful,” Johno said.

  “I think so,” Dermot said.

  One day when he came home from work Phyllis told him that his aunt had died. The aunt was his mother’s oldest sister and she lived in White Plains. Dermot showed no emotion about it. He tried to forget about it as quickly as his wife told him. If he had to begin thinking about his aunt, then he also had to begin thinking about growing up in the house in Jamaica. He knew he was better without any of it in his mind.

  He heard about his aunt dying on a Tuesday. He called the funeral home on Wednesday and found that the final night of the wake was to be Thursday. Dermot knew he could use work as an excuse for not attending the funeral mass on Friday morning. He had no way to get out of Thursday night. He took the car with him when he went to work at the auto-identification bureau in Manhattan on Thursday morning. He got to the funeral home in White Plains at seven o’clock. It was a floodlit white wooden house with a blacktop driveway and parking lot. Dermot sat in the car in the parking lot and had two cigarettes while he tried to get himself ready to go inside. When he finally went into the funeral home, he walked down a long carpeted hallway. Two dark-suited morticians were standing at the entrance to one of the chapels.

  “I don’t know,” one of them said.

  As Dermot walked past them, he looked into the chapel. It was small and not in use. On a couch against the wall, in dim funeral-parlor light, Dermot’s mother was asleep on her back.

  “No, she just snored,” the other mortician said.

  Dermot walked into the chapel. His mother was motionless but her breathing was whisky-heavy. A liquor smell hung over her. Her face had more paste in it, lumps of paste, than it had the last time he had seen her. The auburn hair had a change in it. The start of gray. He looked down at her and something came into him naturally. He felt sorry for her. He started to bend down to kiss her. It would be good to kiss her when she was asleep. There would be no embarrassment that way. But as his face came down, the liquor smell from his mother’s breathing was so heavy that he straightened up. He put out a finger and touched her hand.

  He went into the next chapel. There were only fifteen people sitting on folding chairs in front of a closed coffin. A few sprays of flowers were alongside the casket. Dermot knelt at the casket and said three Hail Marys. His mind wandered as he said them. He thought about walking directly out. It would be perfect, he thought, to leave while his mother w
as still asleep.

  He got up and started to walk to a seat. The faces he saw were mainly from the husband’s side of his aunt’s family. He sat on a seat for a moment, nodded at a couple of them, then got up and walked outside for a cigarette. The smoking room was down a flight of stairs.

  “Here he is.” His Uncle Tom sat on a couch with a cigar in his mouth. He was completely bald. He had several layers of pouch under each eye.

  The other uncle, Jack, said nothing. He nodded. Jack had thick gray eyebrows that kept much of his face from showing age or bad habits, both considerable.

  “How’re the kids?” Uncle Jack said.

  “The wife’s home with them,” Dermot said. He started to take off his raincoat but remembered he had no pistol. He kept it on so the uncles wouldn’t know.

  “When is she going to come up with a boy?” Uncle Jack said.

  “It’s half his decision,” Uncle Tom said.

  “Maybe he’s lettin’ his half of the decision run down his leg,” Uncle Jack said.

  The talk embarrassed Dermot.

  “We were just talking about Louis Goldstein, do you remember him?” Uncle Tom said.

  “I heard the name,” Dermot said.

  “Christ, that’s the only name you ever heard growin’ up around me,” Uncle Tom said.

  “Best Jew ever lived,” Uncle Jack said.

  “Louis Goldstein was a deputy chief. He had Brooklyn South,” Uncle Tom said. “He taught me how to steal. God Bless Louis Goldstein, I say.”

  “Oh, he was some fuckin’ Jew, Louis Goldstein was,” Uncle Jack said.

  “What did he have, the division?” Dermot asked them.

  “Christ no, he had the whole fuckin’ half a borough,” Uncle Tom said. “Stole half the fuckin’ borough too.”

  “I guess you were too young,” Uncle Jack said. “I don’t even know if you were living with us then or if you were still over in Sunnyside with your father. With Jimmy. Christ, isn’t that funny? I haven’t heard the man mentioned for years. Now I mention it here. And just a couple of weeks ago, a fella told me he was back in Ireland for a while. And here the name comes up again tonight.”