“Is that right, a novel, Pat. Like a book that keeps you turning over the pages in deep suspense.”
“Yes, I hope so.”
Hardly more was said. But toward the end of the same week, I found myself confronted by a gentleman who’d been led down from the fencing room to the other end of the fourth-floor corridor, and who in his athletic gear was shown into the boxing room to meet me. His name was Charles Rolo, who was on the board as a judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the well-known bonanza for authors and publishers. One most politely bowed and shook hands with Mr. Rolo, who in turn let me know that he’d heard from Frank Fulham of the brilliant novel I’d written which Frank informed him would have people standing on their chairs cheering and be a certain bestseller, Frank Fulham of course not having read a single word of the book. However, the friendly Mr. Rolo did caution that it was a long way up to this position but he’d be more than glad on Frank’s recommendation to see the work and if promising recommend it to a publisher. It was such gesture as that made by Frank Fulham that gave me glimmers of hope against all the odds that I instinctively felt were accumulating and against which my own confidence was more and more desperately exerting itself. And I was even vaguely toying with taking up professional prizefighting, with Fulham as usual providing his ready course of action.
“No problem, Pat. Take your weight down to middleweight, that means no butter and no sugar. And we’ll get you just the right kind of warm-up fights to take you right up to the championship.”
There were others who took their steps to glory from the help that seemed available through the good offices of Frank Fulham and percolated through from many sources in the boxing room. Favors and influence could be traded amid the brewers of beer, makers of whiskey, owners of cotton and silk mills, male heads of modeling agencies and the odd tabloid newspaper publishers. There were also champions from nearly every sport, who also liked to be able to use their fists when necessary. One, such as Lawrence Tierney, a champion runner with an unpredictably serious temper which he indulged in the boxing ring and later in Hollywood when he authentically played the role on screen of the famed gangster John Dillinger. There was such as my own namesake, Brian Donlevy, the actor who portrayed many a tough-guy role in Hollywood. But if you weren’t planning to set out to the West Coast for movie fame and fortune, there was Commodore Bayliss, always available, who headed the coast guard and could cruise you around New York Harbor, and even a prominent undertaker or two if you needed such service. I even felt that had I mentioned to Frank Fulham that I was intending to qualify as a mortician that he would have had in short order an arrangement ready for me to apprentice at an embalming table in one of your better New York funeral parlors, one or two of the proprietors of which, under Fulham’s tutelage, liked to be handy with their fists. It not being totally unknown, according to one undertaker, for a corpse with rigor mortis settling in, to stiff-arm the embalmer one in the eye.
Although a club employee, Fulham, with his charm and influence, was more like this vast club’s honorary deputy president, and he could sometimes be found in the lobby making introductions. But of the many good fights that could be witnessed in the boxing room, nearly all the best involved Fulham. And were generally fought with those few he was not exactly enamored of and who in turn did not disguise the fact that they would dearly love to knock Fulham out if not exactly kill him. However, such folk ended up coming out between the ropes from their encounter, faces and ears well reddened. But not all such protagonists were Adonis-like ex-football stars and all-around skilled athletes and famed for swan-diving at least once a year from the highest point on the Brooklyn Bridge. There was another with whom Fulham engaged in loathing contention, but this was limited to nonviolent exchanges of sarcastic words. The battle would commence whenever the bow-tied Ivy Leaguer Horace Bigelow would appear at the boxing room door. Bigelow, club librarian and the official chess instructor, ran the chess room on the ninth floor and would, as a brilliant player, have simultaneous games with seven or eight club members and beat most in less than a dozen moves. But in exchanging unparliamentary language with Fulham, Bigelow, with all his erudition, was no match. One would listen avidly to the parry and thrust of the cant and argot, not to mention an occasional Fulham obscenity.
And there was
Never any question
That this was
An athletic club
Which included words
As well as muscles
For exercise
14
ODD URGENT MESSAGES were now arriving from Gainor Stephen Crist, heralding his escape from Europe and his intention to come settle in Spanish Harlem. I was already homesick for Ireland and the Isle of Man, and, although I did not know how things were in Spanish Harlem, I wrote back warnings that dollar bills were not like autumn leaves falling off the trees. And that there was little evidence of this being the land of milk and honey and that if he arrived he would be strictly on his own. But in the old white house atop the hill, I had now settled down to a routine of sorts which daily came ablaze with my determination to write on with The Ginger Man. With a certain degree of silence I kept counsel with myself, taking orange juice, sausages, All-Bran, coffee and whole-wheat toast and grape jelly for breakfast. My religious application to my typewriter every morning, if nothing else, seemed to impress the household. A childhood friend up the street, Gerald McKernan, came to see me, with whom I had while growing up indulged in many a back yard adventure, invading the neighbors’ privacy with creative vandalism. But there were not that many words between us before my nonconformity became grievously obvious and it became clear that I “wasn’t the same Paddy Donleavy” he used to know and was instead shaking a fist in the face of the status quo. However, my childhood friend, who was handsome, charming and a brilliant athlete, was now equally so as a hearty handshaking executive. But back in our early Woodlawn days, he had no peer in imitating a back yard midnight cat fight to the extent of having every shoe in a person’s bedroom flung out the window at him, nor as an outstanding middle distance runner could he ever be caught had a neighbor given chase for the more disruptive misdeeds we committed.
However, not all were as deeply suspicious of me. In the opposite direction, another couple of houses away, lived another handsome and charming childhood pal, Richard Gallagher, who’d had, more than the rest of us, to fend for himself, his father dying and leaving a family of seven children to be raised by a valiant mother. With a quiet, respectable dignity, they resided in their small house set back nearly out of sight from the street. Of a strangely humane and fair-minded intelligence, Gallagher, in spite of economy of means, paid fastidious attention to his clothes. Always presenting himself with a certain stylish elegance in immaculate shirtings and splendid sports jackets. His gray flannel trousers were always sharply creased, and his argyle socks and gleaming loafers dazzled the eye. All helping to give Woodlawn a modest reputation for the best-dressed young men. The only harsh words I ever heard him speak were once when he was considerably sick with flu and holed up in his tiny bedroom and I came visiting him one afternoon with another friend, who brought him a dirty book to read. He was appreciative of the dirty book, but when I handed him a Catholic pamphlet on how to have a happy death, he angrily opened its pages and said,
“So this is the kind of thing you bring somebody who is sick. It shows you who your friends really are.”
I suppose that my sense of humor, based as it was on the last resort, was more easily indulged while I was able to spend my time off playing tennis or golf and could remain a carefree believer in one’s ultimate millionaireship. Whereas Gallagher, in his young life, was pressed much closer to the realities of survival. One Christmas Eve, having worked overtime in the bowels of a post office downtown, sorting packages till three A.M. and not paid yet, he found when it was time to go home that he had no subway or bus fare. With only a few left at the sorting office and too proud to approach anyone to borrow from, he set out to walk penniless
through the falling snow northward along the famed boulevard of Broadway. Gallagher trudged the more than twelve miles up across Manhattan Island, through Harlem and the Bronx, to reach Woodlawn at dawn. A feat no less dangerous or arduous than the last dozen miles to the North Pole.
Unlike me, Gallagher seemed to have no glamorous illusions about America or the life it might present. He had, as I also temporarily had, till fired, a newspaper route delivering the Bronx Home News. This daily family newspaper made it its policy to instill in its delivery boys an entrepreneurial sense of taking of one’s first steps that a Bronx boy might take toward tycoonery or being president of the United States. To give one the sense of being in business for oneself, you bought your own newspapers from the publisher and were also presented with free samples to give away in order to find new customers and expand. Gallagher, neat, prompt and businesslike, had his route running like clockwork. Whereas mine, once prosperous under its former proprietor, was quickly diminishing in profit and customers, due to late or missed deliveries, or my flung folded papers flying misjudged into the wrong doorways. Or, as my aim became that of a marksman, knocking over objets d’art as I sailed my missile through a window opened a crack. As complaints began to pour in, the superintendent of routes, a Mr. Baumgartner, was incensed enough to raise his voice and say,
“Confound you, Donleavy, must I always have to find fault with you. You’re giving the Bronx Home News a bad name.”
Plus my aggrieved, irate tax-paying pillars of the community who subscribed to the paper shook their fists at me from their front porches. And admittedly, I would shake a fist back. But what seemed most to add to their further fury was, when I wasn’t paid on time or at all, I would write my own editorial in large block letters across the top of the front page:
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO CHEAT A CHILD
But as Gallagher, hearing I was back from Europe, came this day to visit me, he did in finding me changed not particularly find fault as well. He listened sympathetically as I spoke about how things had been in Ireland and what my plans were in the United States. He had himself, after serving in the Second World War in the marine corps, joined the New York police force. He was to become lieutenant, head of the Riverfront Squad and later of homicide in Midtown Manhattan. Over the years he provided a needed escort off the big liners and through waterfront obstacles for a friend or two. Then, confronting the aftermath of hundreds of murders, Gallagher was to become, as he has occasionally described himself, a book actor. Which in Gallagher’s case made him one of New York’s most written about and imitated characters. And whose humanity, compassion and understanding saved many from needless anguish. A lifelong friend, Gallagher was to be, aside from Frank Fulham, one of the very few to accept me without reservations on my return to America. And years later as he sat over his whiskey at my fireside in Ireland, I asked him, a man about whom everyone had a good opinion, did he ever want one of his children to become a policeman like himself. And when he said no, I asked him why.
“Because, J.P., it gives you a bad opinion of people.”
But as I ventured on my daily walk through the city down on the island of Manhattan, I did meet one other former childhood friend. After my eight o’clock breakfast routine, I touch-typed about four foolscap pages on the new typewriter I had bought myself on my last trip to London. Then, dressing in jacket, collar and tie, I descended the steep hill to wait for the bus which ran along Katonah Avenue. This short thoroughfare was mostly made up of shops and houses with a bakery, library, a grocery, two bars and two candy stores, plus a public secondary school and a few vacant lots. The bus took one to the terminus of the elevated train and passed on the way the fire station, where on lonely summer evenings I would, as a child, be given a nickel or dime by my father when I had walked the few blocks there to bring him sandwiches as he sat on his fire watch just inside the firehouse doors, tabulating the bells ringing in from around New York. My father, unmindful that I was a midnight scourge of the neighborhood, invariably treated me as a dutiful son, often patting me on the head and calling me by his own pet name, announcing to anyone interested to listen,
“Jim’s a good boy.”
But as odd familiar Woodlawn citizens climbed aboard or were seen on the road as one passed, there was on this bus journey always one or two emotional shocks rearing up ghostly out of the past. The first girl ever to declare her love for me stepped aboard and sat just in front across the aisle, where I was able to see her face. When we were nearly thirteen years old and blushing with her shyness, she handed me a printed-out note at class in school which she signed.
I Love You
Charlotte Gray
Quiet and reserved, she was, despite her hauntingly simple name, of some exotic middle European stock. Now a mature woman, slender and tall, she was, with her pale silken skin and exquisite face, stunningly beautiful. I then heard, when I inquired, that she had married into one of a clannish group of families of her own ethnic origin. She was a girl whose young loveliness I had never forgotten. And endured a terrible regret that I had been too shy to say I loved her as well.
While riding the elevated train I could look down into the monument mason’s yards, which supplied Woodlawn Cemetery with gravestones. And then passing along by Mosholu Golf Course and above the crowded streets of the Bronx, one would pass the anonymous apartment house windows and see into all the chocolate-colored boardinghouse rooms into which failure could sentence you. If it didn’t do even worse and leave you a vagrant on the street. But once deep into the city, I would more optimistically walk, mile after mile, wandering in any random direction. Astonished and stopping and staring at what I never imagined could be thought to be a beautiful city. The mysterious source of wealth of its anonymous inhabitants stacked on top of one another along Park and Fifth avenues. The utter variety of grandiose architecture, which could vie with that of Europe and which other pedestrians seemed not to notice or care about. Each intent upon getting to appointments and, if not having one, pretending they had, as I did, so as not to be arrested as I loitered. Until when the time approached three-thirty o’clock and I would move lonely in the direction of the New York Athletic Club.
But one balmily sunny day, as I was heading east and about to cross Madison Avenue on Fifty-seventh Street, I saw an unmistakable flaming red head of hair approaching, periscoped above the crowd. I stopped and waited as the figure neared and confronted me. It was none other than another childhood friend, John Duffy, with whom, in the neighborhood of Woodlawn I had shared many a momentous emotional growing-up pain. And I was not too sure that I did not see at first in his eyes a tendency for some means of escape. But always a polite and gentle gentleman unless provoked, he was on the occasion, if surprised, perfectly glad to see me. And I was now to find in him a kindred spirit and a companion with whom to stroll the New York streets and who had an encyclopedic knowledge of and love of this city.
As we spoke cautiously upon our first meeting, I should have realized that Duffy would be as different now as he was then growing up. For shortly after my arrival back from Europe, I had found myself wandering across McLean Avenue north beyond Woodlawn into Yonkers, where I had my newspaper round. As the evening was darkening, I passed by the house to which the remainder of Duffy’s large family, originally of thirteen children, had moved away from Woodlawn and saw Jack, as he was called, seated under the leaves of potted palms inside the sun porch poring over a desk. With the then communist exposing mood of America and the witch-hunting across the nation, even intellectual exercise was by many assumed a sign of the liberal-minded and was un-American and unpatriotic. And with myself already stared at and regarded as suspicious by all and sundry everywhere I went, I was surprised Duffy was letting himself be seen by passersby in the street. But as I was now able to learn from the horse’s mouth, this childhood friend of mine was as good a citizen as any and was writing music, having taken up the vocation of composer.
Duffy and I had been in many a growing-up scrape togethe
r, once purloining sherry and other spirits from his family’s wine cellar and drinking away the night in the woods. When one of our number keeled over, he was revived by the remaining gathering pissing on him, which always led to a miraculous if violent recovery of consciousness. Then in a friendly shoving match one day outside the local sweetshop, Stellings, I, not totally accidentally, sent Duffy through a large plate glass window. No one was injured, but, as the proprietress and her sister were dignified Swiss ladies who made wonderful pineapple and strawberry sodas, it caused a scandal of sorts and considerable expensive damage for which our parent guardians had to pay. In another escapade, we aided and abetted another mutual pal to squander his prep school tuition entrusted to him by his impecunious mother. Traveling downtown to conduct an extravagant drinking spree around Times Square and repeatedly consuming a cocktail called Tom Collins. While our poor mutual pal spent days hiding out in the huge attics and cellars of his house avoiding the wrath of his mother.
My bad influence on others may have stemmed from my academic status, which had always been precarious. Having been left back and demoted once in grade school, I had always sat in dread as the dumb boy in the class. With only one other boy thought dumber and who was called Dirty Harold, was accused and reproached and blamed for everything. The whole class turning to look at him as he sat in the back in his ill-fitting and unpressed clothes, and the class, in answer to any misdemeanor, pointing fingers and accusing him in unison. Then one day, a mile away from Woodlawn, in the wasteland of Yonkers, I happened to be passing by his house, a rambling, disordered clapboard structure conspicuous in a large lot and surrounded by what seemed to be discarded and broken bits of machinery. And there was Dirty Harold standing there on a bald patch of his lawn and obviously waiting for me to be disagreeable. But I was anxious to know the purpose of one convoluted contraption, which looked useless in the extreme. But Dirty Harold launched into a most marvelously useless explanation, which then continued as to the value of each piece of rusting scrap metal and abandoned junk. When he was finished telling me of this treasure trove surrounding his house, it so impressed me that I realized I was listening to one of the most intelligent people in the class. And that seated rearward and assessed dumb like him, I must also be a victim of my repressed intelligence. And at least Dirty Harold later became a scrap metal merchant millionaire.
The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Page 17
