The Christmas Kid

’S Wonderful

ALMOST EVERYBODY LOVED WONDERFUL Kelly. He had a wonderful wife and three wonderful kids and lived in a wonderful house on Fuller Place, two blocks from Holy Infant Church. They thought he was wonderful at the church, too; he was an usher at two Masses every Sunday, he helped coach the eighth-grade softball team in the spring and the football team in the fall. In the summer, he always volunteered to take the poorest kids to Coney Island or the Sunset Pool. He had a good job in one of the neighborhood banks. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. Just a wonderful guy.

“You’re so lucky, Carol,” the women would say to Kelly’s pretty young wife. “You’ve got a wonderful guy. Not like some of the bums we married.”

Carol Kelly would smile in a shy way and keep walking up the avenue to the meat market or the hardware store, trailing her wonderful children. There were, of course, some neighborhood dissenters. Most of them could be found on a Saturday afternoon in winter, peering through the steam-fogged windows of Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, while Wonderful Kelly strode along the avenue. Dinny Collins, the bus driver, was one of them.

“Lookit this guy,” Dinny said one afternoon. “Walking along, bouncing on the balls of his feet, breathing in that clean winter air, his skin all pink and healthy. Lookit the hair. The guy’s forty but his hair’s black and he looks twenty-five. It makes you sick.”

“Come on, Dinny. Everybody says he’s a wonderful guy.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d he ever do for you that’s so wonderful? I’ll tell you. He did for you exactly what he did for me. Nothing. So how wonderful can Mr. Wonderful be? Could he make me fifteen years old again? Can he get me a raise? Can he pick me a winner at Belmont? What is this ‘wonderful’ crap, anyway?”

“The wives like him.”

“They would,” said Dinny Collins, who lived alone, a knockout victim in the marriage tournament. “They’ll like him even more when he goes to heaven.”

That summer, Wonderful Kelly extended his good works into the saloons. He said he was shocked by the high rate of neighborhood drunkenness, especially among married men. And he convinced the church to host a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in a large basement room on Tuesday nights. Then he started touring the bars, talking to each drunk in his quietly wonderful way about the evils of John Barleycorn, as he called it. Dinny Collins, of course, ignored him. What did Wonderful Kelly know about drinking? He’d never even been a drunk. But Wonderful did recruit some of the men, and when the existence of the AA meeting became known, a number of the wives issued ultimatums to their husbands: join AA or sleep in the subway.

After several weeks, a few former drunks could be seen nursing club sodas at the bars, even in Rattigan’s. They told stories about the meetings, how everybody got up to describe what alcohol had done to them, the wreckage it had caused, the chaos it had fueled. Coffee and tea and doughnuts were served, and priests were available for those who wanted to make general confessions, cleaning their slates of decades of mortal and venial sins. Kelly was, of course, delighted.

“I feel like a million bucks,” Charlie Deane said one night. “I’ll never touch this stuff again.” He was sitting on his usual stool at the bar. His pants were pressed, his hair neatly trimmed, his face closely shaved. “The wife even talks to me now. First time in three years.”

Dinny Collins scoffed. “Wait’ll you hear what she’s been saying. You’ll want to get stewed another three years.”

A few of the converts did fall off the wagon; but many stayed dry. Kelly’s stock in the neighborhood rose even higher. The monsignor of the church wrote a note to the archbishop, telling him how wonderful this fellow Kelly was; the archbishop wrote the bishop, and the bishop wrote to the president of Kelly’s bank. Within the month, Kelly had been named manager of the neighborhood branch. Everybody thought this was wonderful. Wives streamed into the branch to congratulate Kelly, and dozens moved their small accounts to Kelly’s bank. The first sign of Kelly’s wider prosperity was a new car. A small trophy, to be sure, but too much for Dinny Collins.

“Well, he got himself an early Christmas present,” Dinny said one Saturday afternoon that winter, watching Kelly drive by, his wife and kids in the car. “What’s next?”

At the AA meetings, Kelly gradually displayed other changes. His hair was more carefully cut; he had two new suits, wonderfully tailored, and had replaced his old Thom McAn brogans with some wonderfully polished English shoes. He was a banker now; a watch fob appeared in his vest; a smile was permanently pasted to his face. Since he could help with loans, everybody was polite to him; some even fawned. The ability to grant a loan, or forgive a bounced check, was, of course, a form of power. Wonderful Kelly used that power judiciously, urging his supplicants to give up the sauce, to go back to church, to be kinder to their wives.

Then one Friday evening in the spring, Carol Kelly appeared in the door of Rattigan’s. The bar was almost empty. Dinny Collins was playing a game on the shuffleboard machine with JoJo Mullarkey, who used to get drunk and eat glasses before joining AA. Dinny looked at the woman, who had never been in Rattigan’s before, and nodded. Her hair was blowsy, her light spring coat open, her eyes scared.

“Uh, er, uh, excuse me, but, uh…have you seen my husband?” she said.

“You mean Wonderful Kelly?” Dinny Collins said. “No, ma’am, I can’t say as I have. He doesn’t come in that often, and when he does, it’s bad for business.”

“I see…”

“You try up the church?” JoJo Mullarkey said. “I mean, that’s where he is lots of the time.”

“Yes, I…well, thank you, gents.”

Dinny came closer. “Is there anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I er, uh—”

And she hurried into the night. An hour later, Father Donnelly came in, also looking for Wonderful Kelly. They learned that Wonderful had gone out for lunch that day and had never come back. By midnight, two detectives from the 72nd Precinct had been in, and there had been two more calls from Carol. But nobody had seen Wonderful Kelly.

They didn’t see him that weekend, and he didn’t come to work that Monday. And when the cops descended upon the bank, and the big shots came over from the main office in Manhattan, and the examiners were finally called in, they all knew why. There was $276,000 missing from the bank, along with Wonderful Kelly.

This news appeared on page 1 of the Brooklyn Eagle, and its first effect was to destroy the AA meeting that night. Many of the men felt they would rather be honest drunks than disciples of an embezzler. Others felt that Wonderful Kelly had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. Rattigan’s was packed that night, loud with the sounds of men falling off wagons. Dinny Collins sat in righteous splendor at the bar.

“Hitler didn’t drink,” he said. “Stalin didn’t drink. And neither did Wonderful Kelly. You don’t have to be a genius to see the moral of this story, do you?”

When the details emerged, so did the neighborhood’s anger. Kelly had worked out a system of faking the paperwork on loans. People from the neighborhood would sit at his desk and sign for a $3,000 loan, and when they were gone, Kelly would change the paperwork and make it $5,000. The bank said it would not hold the customers to the phony figures, of course; but many people felt that Wonderful Kelly had used them for his own gain. There was no pity for him, and very little for his wife and children. After a week, the wife stopped coming to church; the children were teased terribly in school, and there was talk that they were all going to move. And there wasn’t a word from Wonderful Kelly. He seemed to have vanished from the earth.

Then one snowy Saturday morning the following February, Dinny Collins walked into Rattigan’s with a Daily News. He held it up for all to see. “Will you look at this?” he said. And they all gazed at a picture of Wonderful Kelly on page 4, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy, handcuffed blonde beside him. The story was out of Tampa, Florida, under a headline that read: EXEC, STRIPPER NABBED IN BANK THEFT. The men standing grimly behind Kelly were FBI agents.

“He ran off with a stripper?” JoJo Mullarkey said.

“He sure did,” Dinny Collins said. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing he ever did.”