Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Fourteen

Martin, ducking his head, entered the city room at pristine morning. Across the freshly oiled floor, free now from the sea of used paper, shinbone high, that would cover it nine or ten hours hence, he walked softly, playing the intruder, hoping to catch a rat in action. The room was empty except for the clacking, which never deterred the Times-Union’s rats. It was their lullaby They got to be a size, came along a pipe from out back, and ran over the heads of the working stiffs. Benson Hunt, the rewrite man, the star, moved his desk back two feet and never took off his hat again after a three-pounder lost its footing on the pipe and tumbled into his lap. Benson screamed and tipped himself over, breaking a pint of gin in his coat. Martin had no such worries, for no pipes traversed the space over his desk, and he never packed gin. But he too wore his hat to keep his scalp free of the fine rain of lead filings that filtered through the porous ceiling from the composing room overhead.

Martin paused at the sports desk to read a final edition with the story on the blackout. Some sort of sabotage, perhaps, went one theory; though the power company and the police had no culprits. The darkness blacked out, through most of Albany County, the speech by Thomas E. Dewey, aaaahhh, largely an attack on the McCall machine. Sublime. The speech was reported separately. Political monopoly in Albany. Vicious mess of corruption in the shadow of the Capitol. Vice not fit to discuss on the radio. Politics for profit. Packed grand juries. Tax assessments used to punish enemies. Vote fraud rampant. The arrest only today of several men, one for registering twenty-one times.

Martin clicked on the drop light over his own desk and prepared to write a column for the Sunday paper, his first since the kidnapping. In the days since Charlie Boy had been taken, Martin stayed busy chronicling the event as he came to know it, for use when the story finally did break. He had filled his regular space in the paper with extra columns he kept in overset for just such distracted times.

Now he wrote about Billy’s two-ninety-nine game and about Scotty dropping dead. Without malice toward Scotty, he discussed the hex, and Billy’s response to it. He viewed Billy as a strong man, indifferent to luck, a gamester who accepted the rules and played by them, but who also played above them. He wrote of Billy’s disdain of money and viewed Billy as a healthy man without need for artifice or mysticism, a serious fellow who put play in its proper place: an adjunct to breathing and eating.

By comparison, Martin wrote, I find myself an embarrassed ecclesiarch, a foolish believer in luck, fate, magicians, and divine animals. It would serve me right if I died and went to heaven and found out it was a storefront run by Hungarian palm readers. In the meantime, he concluded, I aspire to the condition of Billy Phelan, and will try to be done mollycoddling my personal spooks.

It took him half an hour to write the column. He put it in the overnight folder in a drawer of the city desk, ready for noontime scrutiny by Matt Viglucci, the city editor.

In his mailbox, he found a letter on Ten Eyck Hotel stationery, delivered by hand. Dearest Martin, I missed you at the theater. Do come and call. We have so much to talk about and I have a “gift” for you. Yours always, Melissa.

A gift, oh yes. Another ticket to lotus land? Or was there mystery lurking in those quotation marks? What son eats the body of his father in the womb of his mother? The priest, of course, devouring the host in the Holy Church. But what son is it that eats the body of his father’s sin in the womb of his father’s mistress? Suggested answer: the plenary self-indulger.

Paper rustled behind him as he stood amid the clackety lullaby. He turned noiselessly to see a large, relaxed rat walking across the scatter of early editions and old wire copy left by the nightside on top of the copy desk. The rat stopped at a paste pot on the desk and nibbled at the hardened outer crust. The pot moved, the rat inched forward, and then, with dexterous forefeet, it lifted the dauber an inch and pushed its own nose into the center of the pot, into the cool, fresh, soft, sweet stickiness of the paste.

Breakfast.

Martin counted eighteen steps going out of the building and waved at Rory Walsh, the early man in the sports department, schoolboy football specialist coming out of Steve White’s twenty-four-hour bar. Old man Ridley stood in front of his newsroom, burning yesterday’s policy slips in the gutter. The window seats of the Capitol Hotel restaurant, reserved for T-U folk, were empty. Martin’s stomach rolled at the thought of the lobster tail special, three for fifty-five cents. He stopped at Green’s stationery store and bought wrapping paper, ribbon, and a card for the present he would give Melissa, tit for tat. The horseroom upstairs over Green’s was already open for business. Across the street, Keeler’s tempted, as always, and his stomach rolled again. He had slept badly and left the house without waking Mary, without eating. Should he indulge? He did.

Perhaps his decision was colored by his having eaten here in 1928 with Melissa, two breakfasts and one dinner in three days, the only times they left the hotel room, fortifying their bodies with what he considered the equal of the best food on earth, reconstituting themselves for the return to their bed of second-generation concubinage.

He now ordered eggs Benedict, hard rolls and salt sticks, iced butter, marmalade, hashed browns, steaming coffee in the silver pot. A grumpy Jewish waiter in black jacket and long white apron, shuffling on flat feet, served the meal impeccably. Two thirty-five with tip. Gorgeous. He felt stylish, and buoyed by nostalgia. Ready for the lady.

She was registered in a twelfth-floor suite, and he approached it along the carpeted hallway, certain he would rouse her from sleep. He knocked loudly four times before she opened the door, each rap an explosion in the silent corridor.

“I came for my gift,” he said.

“You fool. Why didn’t you call? Haven’t you any thought for a lady’s condition at such an hour?”

“Your condition looks fetchingly normal to me. Dressed for bed.”

“I must look wretched.”

She left the door open and crossed the suite’s sitting room, barefoot in a white calf-length negligee, and disappeared into the bedroom. Martin entered and the door swung closed. He put his hat on the coffee table and sat in the love seat. An etching of a step-gabled Dutch house hung on one wall, a Maxfield Parrish print on another wall—Daybreak, everybody’s favorite picture fifteen years ago. The naked nymph bent over the reclining beauty waking from sleep, the mountain lake and the trees of Arcadia framing the morning confrontation, the brightening sky dappling the mountains and lighting incipient joy. Beneath it on the sideboard Martin saw his father’s notebook. It lay flat, a ledger eighteen inches long with canvas and leather cover and binding, and bearing the India ink marking his father had made to identify it by date.

Here was a contrast of low and high art by master achievers: Parrish setting out to entrap popular taste, Edward Daugherty laboring with the death throes of his soul to produce a play that reflected his supreme independence of the crowd. The ledger contained the notation of the history of a masterpiece as well as the revelations of a notorious disgrace. Daybreak, with all its dynamic symmetry, made Martin want to throttle Parrish for foisting on the millions the notion that life was tidy, life was golden. Still, the hint of Lesbos had its place on any wall of Melissa’s suite, as Edward and Martin Daugherty both knew.

Looking at the ledger, it occurred to him to take it and leave. He had often mused on burglary as a means of retrieving it. He turned his eyes from it only because Melissa reentered the room in a baby blue satin robe and matching pompommed mules. She had brushed her silvering chestnut hair, colored the cream of her cheeks with a subtle touch of rouge, lifted her eyes from sleep with pale green eye shadow, and powdered away the gleam of her shining morning brow. Her beauty, though controlled by chemistry, was a miracle at forty-nine, given the terror of personal and professional oblivion with which she had lived most of the last decade. Even her wrinkles were now seemly, allowing her to relinquish at last that girlish beauty with which she had lived far too long, keeping her on the cover of Photoplay, but sabotaging all her efforts to become a serious actress. For who could believe an anguished spirit lurked behind a face as elegant and proud of itself as Melissa’s? No one could, until her role as the cloistered Marina (Katrina) of The Flaming Corsage forced a reappraisal of her talent by the critics: Here is a totally new Melissa Spencer. . acts as if born to the stage. . confounds critics who said her voice would fail in talkies. . most fully articulated female presence on the Broadway stage this year, etc.

She went straight to the telephone and ordered breakfast for two: cantaloupe, camembert, croissants, and champagne. Of course. Then she flounced into an armchair across from Martin, framed by Daybreak and a cut-glass vase full of white roses opening to the morning with the shining sublimity of their final blooming, only hours left in their life.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“I may be recuperating, but I’m not sure.”

“That sounds dreadful, as if you’re living in some awful sanitarium.”

“That’s not far off. I’ve been on a morose spiritual jag for years, and it’s worse these past few days.”

“Is it your father? How is he?”

“It’s that, but it’s not that simple. And he’s quite senile but otherwise healthy. It’s my son going off to the priesthood, and it’s a friend just kidnapped by hoodlums.”

“A kidnapping! How fascinating!”

“Oh, Christ, Melissa.”

“Well, isn’t it fascinating?”

“Everything isn’t fascinating. Some things are serious.”

“Oh, poo.”

“Tell me about you. I suspect you’re well. I read your notices.”

“It is rather a ducky time.”

“You look very fit. For anything.”

“Don’t be forward now, lovey. It’s much too early.”

“I’ve known you, my dear, to throw away the clock.”

“Me? Not me, Martin. You must be remembering one of your casual women.”

“I could’ve sworn it was you. That week the taboos came tumbling down. The Hampton, was it?”

“Don’t be awful now. Don’t. I get shivery about that. Tell me about the play. Did you like it?”

“You were quite splendid. But then you’re always quite splendid. And I did find that wig becoming.”

“Did I look like her to you? I did try.”

“At times. But she was never quite as sensually animated as you played her.”

“She must have had her moments.”

“I think,” said Martin, and he pictured his mother coming down the back stoop naked, walking past the small garbage pail, wearing only her sunbonnet hat and her white shoes and carrying her calico handbag, “that all she ever had was her repressions.” Walking into the waiting arms of Francis Phelan? Did they ever make love after that intimacy?

“So sad,” said Melissa.

“Very sad. But that’s not one of your problems, I’ve noticed.”

“Avoiding things never made any sense to me, none whatever.”

“You’ve done it all.”

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, lovey.”

“But it must be difficult to surprise you.” Martin resented her use of “lovey.” It sounded vaguely cockney, and insufficiently intimate for what they’d had together.

“Surprises are always welcome,” said Melissa, “but they’re only the interest on the principal, and it’s the principal I’m most fond of.”

“I have a bit of a surprise for you,” Martin said.

“How delicious,” said Melissa. “When do I get it?”

“Don’t be forward now.”

When breakfast came she insisted he sit on the sofa as they had at the Hampton, and she dropped pieces of melon into his mouth, a scene, he presumed, she had copied from a Valentino or Gilbert film. She lifted champagne to his lips, gave him wafer-thin slices of camembert and croissant, and more and more champagne. He thought he had eaten his fill at Keeler’s, but satiation too has its limitations, and he accepted all that she offered.

He kissed her when both their mouths were full, shared his champagne with her. He kissed her again when their mouths were empty, stroking the breast of her robe lightly. And then he leaned away.

“What is this gift you have for me?” he said.

“Can’t you guess?”

“I’ve imagined a thing or two.”

“I hope you didn’t see it,” she said, rising from the sofa and crossing the room. She held up the ledger, giving him a full view of the cover with another of his father’s date markings: February 1908 to April 1909.

“I didn’t mean to leave it here in full view, but you caught me unawares, coming in like that. You didn’t see it before, did you?”

“No, no, I didn’t. You say you’re returning it?”

“It’s yours,” she said, coming toward him with it. “I took all I needed for my memoirs.”

“I thought you wanted it for the film.”

“It’s not necessary now. They have more than enough in the play, if they really want to do it. They don’t deserve any more than that. So it’s yours.”

“Then I must return your money.”

“Of course you must not. Absolutely you must not.”

He had charged her eight hundred dollars for the ledger, an arbitrary price from nowhere, for how could he possibly have set a true dollar value on one of his father’s notebooks? He’d said eight hundred for reasons no more explicable than his dream of rhomboids. An odd figure, she said. Oddness, he told her, is my profession.

They had been talking then on the roof garden of the Hampton, where she had taken a suite while she found a way to take possession of the ledger, whose contents she had, at moments, watched being written. The Albany sky was the darkest of blues, swept by millions of stars, the moon silvering the river and the rooftops of buildings on the Rensselaer side. From where Martin and Melissa sat, the Yacht Club, the night boat landing, the Dunn bridge, and much of lower Broadway were blocked from view by a tall, ghostly structure with window openings but no windows, with an unfinished, jagged, and roofless top. This was the “Spite Building,” built by a bitter cleric who felt the Hampton had wronged him. And when the hotel opened its roof garden to enormous crowds, the cleric erected this uninhabitable tower of vengeance. It fronted on Beaver Street and nestled back to back with the hotel, and it rose, finally, above the glamorous rooftop cafe, blocking the view and insulting the lofty crowds with its crude bricks and its grotesque eyeless sockets, where squads of verminous pigeons roosted.

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 pair 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!