Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Nineteen

Free the children. The phrase commanded the attention of Martin’s head the way a war slogan might. Stop the fascists.

Charlie McCall was the child uppermost in his thought, but he kept receiving images of Peter as a priest in a long, black cassock, blessing the world. He’d be good at that. Free Peter. Let him bless anybody he wants to bless.

It was three o’clock Monday morning and Martin was sitting alone in Morrie’s DeSoto in an empty lot on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, Patsy’s loaded pistol in his right coat pocket. Hudson Street was deserted, and in the forty minutes he’d been sitting here, only two cars had passed.

This was the finale. Perhaps.

With Morrie, he’d left Albany and driven to Red Hook and then onto the Taconic Parkway. They stopped at the second gas station on the parkway and waited half an hour by the pay phone for a call. The caller told them to go to the Harding Hotel on 54th and Broadway in Manhattan, check in, and wait for another call. They did. They listened to “The Shadow” on the radio, and dance music by Richard Himber and the orchestra, and ordered coffee and sandwiches sent up. They played blackjack for a nickel and Martin won four dollars. Jimmie Fiddler was bringing them news of Hollywood when the phone rang and Morrie was given a circuitous route to deliver the money. Change cabs here and then there, take a bus, take two more cabs, get out at this place and wait to be picked up. Morrie was gone two hours and came back with the money.

“They threw it at me,” he said. “They looked at it once and saw right away it was marked.”

Martin called Patsy, who took two hours to call back. Go to a Wall Street bank on Sunday morning and the manager will give you new, unmarked money. Martin and Morrie slept and in the morning went together to the bank. They were watched, they later learned, by New York detectives, and also by the kidnappers, whose car Morrie recognized. With the new money, Morrie set off again on a new route given in another call. He was back at noon and said they took the money and would call with directions on where to get Charlie.

Martin and Morrie ate in the room and slept some more and exhausted all card games and the radio. Martin ordered a bottle of sherry, which Morrie would not drink. Martin sipped it and grew inquisitive.

“Why did they pick you, Morrie?”

“They know my rep.”

“You know them?”

“Never saw any of them before.”

“What’s your rep?”

“I hung around with guys like them a few years back, tough guys who died with their shoes on. And I did a little time for impersonating a Federal officer during Prohibition. I even fooled Jack Diamond with that one. Our boys had the truck half loaded with his booze when he caught on.”

“What’d he do?”

“He congratulated me, with a pistol in his hand. I knew him later and he bought me a drink.”

“Were you a street kid?”

“Yeah. My old man wanted me to study politics, but I always knew politics was for chumps.”

“The McCalls do all right with it.”

“What they do ain’t politics.”

“What would you call it?”

“They got a goddamn Roman empire. They own all the people, they own the churches, they even own most of the Jews in town.”

“They don’t own your father.”

“No. What’d he tell you when you talked to him?”

“I already gave you that rundown. He said you two didn’t get along, but he gets along with your sisters.”

“When my mother died, they worked like slaves around the house for him. But he was never there when I was a kid. He worked two jobs and went to college nights. I had to find a way to amuse myself.”

“You believe in luck, Morrie?”

“You ever know a gambler who didn’t?”

“How’s your luck?”

“It’s runnin’.”

“How’s Charlie’s luck?”

“He’s all right.”

“You saw him?”

“They told me.”

“And you believe them?”

“Those fellas wouldn’t lie.”

To free the children it is necessary to rupture the conspiracy against them. We are all in conspiracy against the children. Fathers, mothers, teachers, priests, bankers, politicians, gods, and prophets. For Abraham of the upraised knife, prototypical fascist father, Isaac was only a means to an enhanced status as a believer. Go fuck yourself with your knife, Abe.

When Martin was eight, he watched his mother watching Brother William chastising fourth graders with a ruler. She watched it for two days from the back parlor and then opened her window and yelled into the open window of the Brothers School: If you strike any more of those children, I’m coming in after you. Brother William closed the window of his classroom and resumed his whipping.

She went out the front door and Martin followed her. She went down the stoop empty-handed and up the stoop of the school and down the corridor into the classroom opposite the Daugherty back parlor. She went directly to the Brother, yanked the ruler out of his hand, and hit him on his bald head with it. She slapped him on the ear with her left hand and slapped his right shoulder and arm with the ruler. He backed away from her, but she pursued him, and he ran. She ran after him and caught him at a door and hit him again on his bald head and drew blood. Brother William opened the chapel door and ran across the altar and escaped. Katrina Daugherty went back to the classroom and told the boys: Go home and tell your parents what happened here. The student who was being whipped when she came in stopped to thank her. Thank you, mum, he said, and half genuflected.

The last time Martin went to Hibernian Hall for Saint Patrick’s Day a woman danced for an hour with her mongoloid son, who was wearing a green derby on his enormous head. When the music stopped, the boy bayed like a hound.

The call about Charlie came at midnight. Go to Hudson Street near the meat market with your friend and park in the empty lot. Your friend stays in the car. You walk to Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue and get a cab and go such and such a route. You should be back in maybe an hour with the property.

Martin felt the need to walk. He got out of Morrie’s car and crossed the empty lot. He looked across the street at a car and saw its back window being lowered. Resting on the window as it rolled downward were the double barrels of a shotgun. Martin felt the useless weight of Patsy’s pistol in his pocket, and he walked back to the DeSoto.

At four-fifteen a taxi pulled up to the lot and stopped. When two men got out, the shotgun car screeched off in the direction of the Battery Martin opened the back door of the DeSoto and helped Charlie Boy to climb in and sit down. Martin snapped on the interior light and saw Charlie’s face was covered with insect bites. The perimeter of his mouth was dotted with a rash where adhesive tape had been. He reeked of whiskey, which Morrie said the kidnappers used to revive him from the stupor into which he had sunk.

“Are you hurt anyplace?” Martin asked him. “This is Martin Daugherty, Charlie. Are you hurt?”

“Martin. No. They treated me all right.”

“He’s hungry,” Morrie said. “He wants a corned beef sandwich. He said he’s been thinking about a corned beef sandwich for three days.”

“Is my father with you, Martin?”

“He’s in Albany waiting for you. Your mother, too. And Patsy. Your whole family.”

“It’s good to see you fellows.”

“Charlie,” said Martin, “the whole world’s waiting for you to go home.”

“They hit me on the head and then kept me tied to a bed.”

“Is your head all right?”

“One of them put ice cubes on the bump. I want to call up home.”

“Were they tough on you?” Morrie asked.

“They fed me and one of them even went out and got me a couple of bottles of ale. But after I’d eat, they’d tie me down again. My legs don’t work right.”

Martin’s vision of his own life was at times hateful. Then a new fact would enter and he would see that it was not his life itself that was hateful but only his temporary vision of it. The problem rests in being freed from the omnipotence of thought, he decided. The avenue of my liberation may well lie in the overthrow of my logic. Not until Charlie Boy was kidnapped did Patsy and Bindy think of electrifying the windows of their homes. Given the benign nature of most evenings on Colonie Street, there is a logic to living with nonelectrified windows. But, of course, it is a dangerously bizarre logic.

“It’s time to move,” Martin said, and he put out the car light and sat alongside Charlie Boy in the back seat. Morrie took the wheel and moved the DeSoto out of darkness onto the West Side Highway. It now seemed they were all safe and that no one would die. History would continue.

“Stop at the first place that looks like it’s got a telephone,” said Martin, to whom the expedition now belonged.

We move north on the Henry Hudson Parkway. When we free the children we also drown Narcissus in his pool.

On the day after Charlie Boy returned home, Honey Curry was shot dead in Newark during a gun battle with police, Hubert Maloy was wounded, and ten thousand dollars of ransom money, identifiable by the serial numbers of the bills as recorded by the Wall Street bank, was found in their pockets.

When Charlie Boy was returned to Patsy McCall’s cabin in the Helderberg Mountains, Morrie Berman and Martin Daugherty became instant celebrities. The press tracked them everywhere, and even Damon Runyon sought out Martin to interview him on the climactic moments on Hudson Street.

“Martin Daugherty,” wrote Runyon, “climbs out of the DeSoto with the aim of stretching his legs. But he does not get very far with his stretching before he is greeted by a double-breasted hello from a sawed-off shotgun peeking out of the window of a parked car. Being respectful of double-breasted hellos of such size and shape, Martin Daugherty goes back where he comes from and ponders the curious ways kidnappers have of taking out insurance on their investments.”

Eight hours after Charlie Boy’s return, the Albany police arrested Morrie Berman at the ticket office in Union Station, just after he had purchased a ticket to Providence. He was taken to the McCall camp for interrogation, and, Martin later learned, dunked in Patsy’s new swimming pool, which was partly filled for the occasion, until he revealed the kidnappers’ names. Curry and Maloy were among the names he disclosed, along with the nicknames of four hoodlums from New Jersey and Rhode Island.

The Newark shootout proved not to be the result of Morrie’s disclosures, for no amount of dunking could have forced him to reveal a fact he did not know. He thought Maloy and Curry had gone to Providence. Maloy, under interrogation on what he erroneously thought was his death bed, said his flight with Curry from Greenwich Village to Newark was his own decision. He was tired and did not want to drive all the way to Rhode Island at such an hour.

None of the kidnappers had been in Newark before, during, or after the kidnapping. None of them had any way of knowing that the hangouts of criminals in that city had been under the most intensive surveillance for several days.

When Martin heard of Billy’s status as a pariah on Broadway, he wrote a column about it, telling the full story, including how Berman saved Billy’s life in a brawl, and wondering: “Is betrayal what Billy should have done for Berman by way of saying thank you?” He argued that Billy’s information on Newark, and only Billy’s information, brought Maloy and Curry to justice and saved the McCalls ten thousand dollars. Yet even this was not a betrayal of Berman, for Berman had told Billy the truth about Newark: Maloy was not there, and had no plans to go there.

“Though I doubt he believes it,” Martin wrote, “Billy knew Maloy would go to Newark at some point. He knew this intuitively, his insight as much touched with magic, or spiritual penetration of the future, as was any utterance of the biblical prophets which time has proved true. Billy Phelan is not only the true hero of this whole sordid business, he is an ontological hero as well.

“Is it the policy of the McCall brothers to reward their benefactors with punishment and ostracism? Is this how the fabled McCalls gained and kept power in this city of churches for seventeen years? Does their exalted omnipotence in this city now have a life of its own, independent of the values for which so many men have struggled so long in this country? If the McCalls are the forthright men I’ve always known them to be, they will recognize that what is being done to Billy Phelan is not only the grossest kind of tyranny over the individual, but also a very smelly bag of very small potatoes.”

Emory Jones refused to print the column.

“If you think I’m going to get my ass into a buzz saw by taking on the McCalls over a two-bit pool hustler,” he explained, “you’re a certifiable lunatic.”

Martin considered his alternatives.

He could resign indignantly, the way Heywood Broun had quit The World over the Sacco-Vanzetti business. But this was not in character for Martin, and he did like his job.

He could send the column in the mail to Patsy or Bindy, or handcarry it to them and argue the case in person. Possible.

He could put it in the drawer and forget about it and recognize that children must free themselves. True, but no.

The condition of being a powerless Albany Irishman ate holes in his forbearance. Piss-ant martyr to the rapine culture, to the hypocritical handshakers, the priest suckups, the nigger-hating cops, the lace-curtain Grundys and the cut-glass banker-thieves who marked his city lousy. Are you from Albany? Yes. How can you stand it? I was there once and it’s the asshole of the northeast. One of the ten bottom places of the earth.

Was it possible to escape the stereotypes and be proud of being an Albany Irishman?

Martin awoke late one morning, hung over and late for a doctor’s appointment. He dressed and rushed and when he stripped for the examination by the doctor, a stranger, he could smell the stink of his own undershirt. He yearned to apologize, to explain that he was not one of the unwashed. Sorry I stink, Doc, but I had no time to change. I got up late because I was drunk last night. Oh yes.

The quest to love yourself is also an absurd quest.

Martin called Patsy and told him he was wrong in what he was doing to Billy.

“I am like hell,” said Patsy, and he hung up in Martin’s ear.

Mary Daugherty agreed with Patsy McCall.

She sat in the Daugherty living room, reading in the evening paper the latest story on the kidnap gang. When Martin raised the issue of Billy Phelan by way of making polite conversation, she dropped the paper in her lap and looked at him through the top of her bifocals, her gaze defining him as a booster for the anti-Christ.

“The boy is evil,” she said. “Only an evil person would refuse to help bring back young Charles from the clutches of demons.”

“But Billy gave them the information that caught the demons,” Martin said.

“He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Of course he knew. He knew he was informing, which was why he refused to inform any further.”

“Let him go to hell with his evil friends.”

“Your tone lacks charity.”

“Charity begins at home,” said Mary, “and I feel first for young Charles, my own flesh and blood, and for his father and his uncles. Better men never drew breath.”

Martin silently charted the difference between his wife and Melissa. Michelangelo and Hieronymus Bosch, Saint Theresa and Sally Rand. In the sweetness of her latter-day bovinity, Mary Daugherty swathed herself in immaculate conceptions and divine pleasure. And with recourse to such wonders, who has need of soiled visions? Life is clean if you keep it clean. Hire the priests to sweep up and there will be no disease. Joan of Arc and Joan Crawford. Hell hath no fury like a zealous virgin.

“What are we having for dinner?” Martin inquired.

Martin decided to send the column to Damon Runyon, for the recent edict from Hearst on Runyon was still fresh in his mind. Runyon was now the oriflamme of the Hearst newspapers, and yet editors across the country were cutting and shaving his column regularly. “Run Runyon uncut,” came the word from The Chief when he heard what was happening.

“If you find a way to get this piece into print,” Martin wrote Runyon, “I will try to find it in my heart to forgive you for those four bum tips you gave me at Saratoga in August.”

And so, on a morning a week after he wrote it, Martin’s defense of Billy Phelan appeared in Runyon’s column in full, with a preface reminding his readers who Martin was, and suggesting that if he only gambled as well as he wrote, he would very soon make Nick the Greek look like a second-class sausage salesman.

The day it appeared in the Times-Union, the word went out to Broadway: Billy Phelan is all right. Don’t give him any more grief.

Red Tom called Billy with the news and Billy called George Quinn at the Hendrick Hudson Hotel in Troy and told him to come home.

And Martin Daugherty bought himself six new sets of underwear.

Martin visited his father in the nursing home the afternoon the Runyon column appeared. His purpose was to read the old man a letter from Peter. Martin found his father sitting in a wheelchair with a retractable side table, having lunch. His hair had been combed but he needed a shave, his white whiskers sticking out of his chin like bleached grass waiting for the pure white lawnmower.

“Papa,” he said, “how are you feeling?”

“Glmbvvvvv,” said the old man, his mouth full of potatoes.

By his eyes, by the movement of his hands over the bread, by the controlled hoisting of the fork to his mouth, Martin perceived that the old man was clear-headed, as clear-headed as he would ever again be.

“Did I tell you I had lunch with Henry James?” the old man said, when he had swallowed the potatoes.

“No, Papa, when was that?”

“Nineteen-oh-three, I think. He and I had just published some of our work in the North American Review, and the editor dropped me a note saying James was coming to America and wanted to talk to me. He was interested in Elk Street. His aunt had lived there when she married Martin Van Buren’s son, and he wanted news of the Coopers and the Pruyns and others. I had written about life on Elk Street and he remembered the street fondly, even though he loathed Albany. We had lunch at Delmonico’s and he had turtle soup. He talked about nothing but his varicose veins. An eccentric man.”

“Mary and I had a letter from Peter,” Martin said.

“Peter?”

“Your grandson.”

“Oh yes.”

“He’s gone off to become a priest.”

“Has he?”

“He likes the idea of being good.”

“Quite a novel pursuit.”

“It is. He thinks of Saint Francis as his hero.”

“Saint Francis. A noble fellow but rather seedy.”

“The boy is out of my hands, at any rate. Somebody else will shape him from now on.”

“I hope it’s not the Christian Brothers. Your mother was very distrustful of the Christian Brothers.”

“It’s the Franciscans.”

“Well they’re grotesque but they have the advantage of not being bellicose.”

“How is the food these days, Papa?”

“It’s fine but I long for some duck. Your mother was always very fond of duck à l’orange. She could never cook it. She could never cook anything very well.”

“Melissa was in town this week.”

“Melissa was in town?”

“She appeared in your play.”

“Which play?”

“The Flaming Corsage.”

“Melissa appeared in The Flaming Corsage?”

“At Harmanus Bleecker Hall. It was quite a success. Well attended, good reviews, and quite a handsome production. I saw it, of course.”

“What was Melissa’s last name?”

“Spencer.”

“Ah yes. Melissa Spencer. Quite a nice girl. Well rounded. She could command the attention of an entire dinner table.”

“She asked for you.”

“Did she?”

“She’s writing her memoirs. I presume you’ll figure in them somewhere.”

“Will I? How so?”

“I couldn’t say. I’ll get a copy as soon as they’re published.”

“I remember her profile. She had a nose like Madame Albani. Exactly like Madame Albani. I remarked on that frequently. I was there the night Albani came to Albany and sang at the Music Hall on South Pearl Street. In ’eighty-three it was. She drew the largest crowd they ever had there. Did you know she lived in Arbor Hill for a time? She played the organ at St. Joseph’s Church. She always denied she was named for Albany, but she wouldn’t have used the name if she hadn’t had a fondness for the city.”

“Papa, you’re full of stories today.”

“Am I? I didn’t realize.”

“Would you like to hear Peter’s letter?”

“Peter who?”

“Your grandson.”

“Oh, by all means.”

“I won’t read it all, it’s full of trivial detail about his trip, but at the end he says this: ‘Please tell Grandpa that I already miss him and that I am going to pray every day for his good health. I look forward to the day when I will be able to lay my anointed hands on his head in priestly blessing so that he may have the benefit, in the next, of my vocation. I know that you, Papa, and Grandpa, too, have been worldly men. But for me, I am committed to the way of the Cross. “Live in the world but be no part of it,” is what I have been instructed and I will try with all my heart and soul to follow that guidance. I love you and Mother and bless you all and long for the time when next we meet. Your loving son, Peter.’ ”

“Who wrote that?” the old man asked.

“Peter.”

“Peter who?”

“Peter Daugherty.”

“He’s full of medieval bullshit.”

“Yes, I’m afraid he is.”

“It’s a nice letter, however.”

“The sentiment is real.”

“What was his name?”

“Peter Daugherty.”

“Daugherty. That’s the same name as mine.”

“Yes, it is. Quite a coincidence.”

“The Irish always wrote good letters. If they could write.”

Martin’s view of his meeting with his father was this: that all sons are Isaac, all fathers are Abraham, and that all Isaacs become Abrahams if they work at it long enough.

He decided: We are only as possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as we move.