Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Eleven

Martin, thinking of his father, of Charlie Boy, of Noah, all spread-eagled on their beds, of Melissa spread-eagled naked in fatigue on the floor of her suite at the Hampton Hotel, failed to sleep. He faced downward and leftward into the pillow, a trick he played on the fluids of his brain that generally brought sleep, but not now. And so he faced upward, rightward. He closed his eyes, fixating on a point just above his nose, behind the frontal bone, trying to drive out thoughts as they appeared.

But this also failed, and he saw the lonely, driven figure entering the wholly darkened tunnel, so narrow no man could survive the train should it come roaring through before he reached the far exit. He would be crushed by the wheels or squeezed to juice and pulp against the wall. The figure reached the trestle that spanned the bottomless canyon and began to inch across it on hands and knees, fearful of falling, fearful the train would come from beyond the forest curve and bear down on him at mid-trestle. No chance then for backward flight, no chance to sidestep, only to hang from trestle’s edge by fingertips. Would vertigo then claim him? Would his fingers hold him?

He sat up and lit the bedside lamp and began to count the ceiling panels again, eleven horizontal, twelve vertical. He multiplied. One hundred and thirty-two panels, including fragments. He counted the sides of the dresser, the number of edges on the six drawers: twenty-four. He counted the edges on the decorative trim on Mary Daugherty’s closet. He totaled the edge count: two-seventy-eight. He counted the edges on the ceiling molding. He counted the backs, fronts, and sides of books on his dresser. He lost track of the total.

He could never contain the numbers, nor did he want to. He usually counted sidewalk cracks when he walked, telephone poles when he drove. He remembered no totals except the eighteen steps to the city room, twelve to the upstairs of this house, and remembered these only after years of repetition. If he miscounted either staircase, he would recount carefully on the return trip. He once viewed the counting as a private way of demarcating his place in the world, numbering all boundaries, four counts to the edge of a drawer, four to the perimeter of a tile, an act of personal coherence. On the day he awoke and drawer edges were worth three, tile perimeters five, he would know the rules of his civilization had been superseded.

He switched off the lamp, closed his eyes, and found a staircase. He climbed it and at the turning saw the hag squirming on the wide step, caught in an enormous cobweb which covered all of her except her legs. Beneath her thighs, two dozen white baby shoes were in constant motion, being hatched.

I don’t like what everybody is doing to me, she said.

The hag reached a hand out to Martin, who fled up the stairs in terror, a wisp of cobweb caught on his sleeve.

He plucked himself from the scene without moving and felt panic in his heartbeat. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Confiteor. Deliver us from evil. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Mea maxima culpa. He had not prayed in twenty-five years except for knee-jerk recitations at funerals, and did not now believe in these or any other prayers. Yet as he prayed, his pulse slowly slackened, his eyes stayed closed. And as he moved into sleep, he knew that despite his infidel ways, the remnants of tattered faith still had power over his mind.

He knew his mind had no interest in the genuineness of faith, that it fed on the imagery of any conflict that touched the deepest layers of his history. Years ago, he’d dreamed repeatedly of hexagons, rhomboids, and threes, and still had no idea why. He understood almost none of the fragmented pictures his mind created, but he knew now for the first time that it was possible to trick the apparatus. He had done it. He was moving into a peaceful sleep, his first since the departure of Peter. And as he did, he understood the message the images had sent him. He would go to Harmanus Bleecker Hall and watch Melissa impersonate his mother on stage. Then, all in good time, he would find a way to make love to Melissa again, in the way a one-legged man carves a crutch from the fallen tree that crushed his leg.

The fountain cherub, small boy in full pee, greeted Martin as he walked through the Hall’s foyer. Psssss. The Golden Bowlful, by Henry Pease Lotz. Martin remembered seeing Bert Lytell here, the Barrymores and Mrs. Fiske strutting on this cultural altar. He saw the young Jolson here, and the great Isadora, and when he was only thirteen he saw a play called The Ten-Ton Door, in which a man strapped to that huge door was exploded across the stage by a great blast, an epic moment.

“So you made it,” said Agnes, the hennaed gum chewer in the Hall’s box office. “We expected you last night.”

“I was up in Troy last night,” Martin said, “walking the duck.”

“The duck?”

Martin smiled and looked at his ticket, B–108 center, and then he entered the Hall, a quarter century after the premiere that never was. Edward Sheldon’s Romance premiered here in 1913 instead of The Flaming Corsage, and Sheldon’s reputation blossomed. But when the priests and Grundys killed Edward Daugherty’s play, calling it the work of a scandalous, vice-ridden man, they made Edward a pariah in the theater for years to come.

In 1928, a bad year for some, Melissa set out to convert the play to a talking picture in which she would star as the mistress, her long-standing dream. She wanted Von Stroheim to direct, appreciative of his sexual candor, but the studios found both the play and the scandal dated, and dated, too, Melissa, the idea of you as a young mistress.

Aging but undauntable, Melissa turned up then with something not so old: Edward Daugherty’s journal from the years just before and just after the scandal, full of the drama and eroticism of the famous event, in case, chums, you can’t find enough in the play. Still, no studio was interested, for Melissa was a fading emblem of a waning era, her voice adjudged too quirky for talkies, her imperious and litigious ways (when in doubt she sued) too much of a liability for the moguls.

And so The Flaming Corsage continued unproduced either as play or film until the Daugherty renaissance, which began with an obscure New York mounting of his 1902 work, The Car Barns. George Jean Nathan saw that production and wrote that here was a writer many cuts above Gillette, Belasco, Fitch, and others, more significantly Irish-American than Boucicault or Sheldon, for he is tapping deeper currents, and superior to any of the raffish Marxist didacticists currently cluttering up the boards. Was this neglected writer an American O’Casey or Pirandello? Another O’Neill? No, said Nathan, he’s merely original, which serious men should find sufficient.

The Car Barns revival was followed by The Masks of Pyramis, Edward Daugherty’s one venture into symbolism. It provoked a great public yawn and slowed the renaissance. The Baron of Ten Broeck Street followed within a year, a play with the capitalist as villain and tragic figure, the protagonist patterned after Katrina Daugherty’s father, an Albany lumber baron. Reaction to the play was positive, but the renaissance might have halted there had not Melissa’s need to see herself transfigured on stage been so unyielding.

Six more years would pass before The Flaming Corsage entered its new age. By then, three decades after its inspiration, it had become a wholly new play, its old sin now the stuff of myth, its antique realism now an exquisite parody of bitter love and foolish death. The New York production was a spectacular success. Melissa made her comeback, and Edward Daugherty strode into the dimension he had sought for a lifetime as an artist. But he strode with a partial mind. He beamed at the telling when Martin brought the news, but minutes later he had forgotten that he had ever written that play, or any other. What would please him most, he said, squirming in his leather armchair in the old house on Main Street, would be a hot cup of tea, son, with lemon if you’d be so kind, and a sugar cookie.

The theater was already two-thirds full and more were still arriving to see the famed beauty in the infamous play about Albany. Martin positioned himself at the head of an aisle, holding his battered hat in hand, standing out of the way as the playgoers seated themselves. Joe Morrissey nodded to him, ex-assemblyman, tight as a teacup, who lived near Sacred Heart; when the pastor asked him to donate his house to the nuns, old Joe sold the place immediately and moved out of the parish. And there, moving down front, Tip Mooney, the roofer, with the adopted daughter everybody chucklingly says is his mistress. Taboo. Ooo-ooo. The zest for it. And here, as the houselights dim, stands the fellow out for redemption. I’m just as big a sinner as you, Dad. Playboy of the North End, but keeping it in the family. Here to see everybody’s favorite honeycomb, who, as Marlene, the reporter, wrote, is out to prove she can plumb the depths of the human heart with her acting, even as she keeps the human spirit all aglow with her dancing, and the human imagination fevered merely by her well-known sensual presence, etc.

The lights went all the way down, the curtain rose and the Daugherty living room on Colonie Street was magically reconstituted from thirty years past, even to the Edison phonograph and its cylinders, the Tiffany butterfly lamp from Van Heusen Charles, the Hudson River landscape on the far wall, and all the other meticulously copied details demanded by the author; for those possessions were inseparable from the woman who sits there among them: the simulated Katrina, remarkably reincarnated by Melissa in a blondish gray wig, upswept into a perfect Katrina crown, her glasses on, her lavender shawl over her legs as she sits in the black rocker, book open in her lap, hands crossed upon it.

“Where will you go?” she asks the young man standing by the bay window.

And the young man, in whom Martin does not recognize anything of his disordered self of 1908, replies, “Someplace where they don’t snigger when my name is mentioned.”

“Will you go to Paris?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know.”

“It must be dreary there without Baudelaire and Rimbaud.”

“They have that tower now.”

“Your father will want to know where you are.”

“Perhaps I’ll go to Versailles and see where the king kept Marie Antoinette.”

“Yes, do that. Send your father a postcard.”

And Melissa put her book aside and stood up, sweeping her hand up behind her neck, tapping the wig, smoothing the rattled mind. The gesture was not Katrina’s but Melissa’s, which generated confusion in Martin. He felt impatient with the play, half fearful of seeing the development a few scenes hence when his father would enter with the awful dialogue of duplicity and defeat, to be met by the witty near-madness of Katrina.

Now the dialogue of mother and son moved the play on toward that moment, but Martin closed out all the talk and watched the silent movement of Melissa, not at all like Katrina, and remembered her in her voluptuary state, drenched in sweat, oozing his semen. The Olmecs built a monument of a sacred jaguar mating with a lustful woman. A male offspring of such a mating would have been half-jaguar, half-boy, a divine creature. The boy-animal of Martin’s morning vision, perhaps? Is your mind telling you, Martin, that you’re the divine progeny of a sacred mating? But which one? Your father’s with your mother? Your father’s with Melissa? Your own with Melissa?

The corruption he felt after his time with Melissa came back now with full power: the simoniac being paid off with venereal gifts. He stayed with her three days, she securing her purchase with a lust that soared beyond his own. That body, now walking across the stage, he saw walking the length of the sitting room in The Hampton to stand naked by the window and peer through the curtains at the movement on Broadway and State Street below. He stood beside her and with a compulsion grown weary, slid his hand between her thighs as a gesture. They looked down together, connected to the traffic of other men and women in transit toward and away from their lust. He would stay in the room with her another day, until she said, Now I want a woman. And then Martin went away.

Through the years since then he insisted he would never touch her sexually again. But perceiving now that a second infusion of pain distracts the brain and reduces the pain of the first and more grievous wound, he would, yes, make love to Melissa as soon as possible. He might ask her to wear the blond wig. That would appeal to her twist. He might even call her Katrina. She could call him Edward.

They would pretend it was 1887 and that this was a true wedding of sacred figures. He would tell her of the Olmecs, and of the divine progeny. He would tell her his dream of the divine animal at bedside and suggest that it was perhaps himself in a new stage of being. As they made their fierce and fraudulent love, they would become jaguar and lustful partner entwined. Both would know that a new Martin Daugherty would be the offspring of this divine mating.

The quest to love yourself is a moral quest.

How simple this psychic game is, once you know the rules.