What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “No, probably not,” Corky says, laughing, delighted, “—you’d have to be crazy like me.” He lowers his voice and leans toward the older man, says, “I took the ten thousand dollars, every penny of it, and bet on the Ali-Foreman fight where I got, through my bookie, I mean the guy who was my bookie then, he’s since deceased, odds of eight to one. That’s to say eight to one in favor of Foreman because he was the heavyweight champion and Ali’d been beaten by Frazier once who’d been beaten by Foreman and you know how it is in this country, everybody quick to say a guy’s washed up, over the hill?—so they were saying that about Muhammad Ali, the jerk-offs. But I figured, Ali’s a great, true champion, not a flash in the pan like Foreman or Leon Spinks, and he’s hungry as me, niggers and micks got a lot in common, both kind of crazy, eh? So I knew he was going to win, I just knew. And he did.”

  Greenbaum had ceased chewing. A tawny incredulous light in his eyes. “He did? He won? You won? Eighty thousand dollars? Like that?”

  “Of which I immediately gave twenty thousand dollars to St. Thomas Aquinas,” Corky says, the memory bringing a flush to his face as if it had taken place, not fourteen years ago, but yesterday, “—the biggest private donation, not counting the really rich alums, up to that time. In the Journal, maybe you saw it, a big photo of Father Vincent shaking my hand. I was telling him sort of half-kidding, I had to confess I didn’t get to mass much anymore, and he says, ‘Corky, next time you do go, put in a good word to Our Father for me.’ My stock went up overnight and it’s never come down.” Corky laughs like a braggart kid, sheer pleasure, it’s a fact to him, not a theory. In Union City you make your mark when you’re young and you make it in the right quarters or you never make it at all. He adds, “A few years ago when my friends got me to run for City Council, endorsed by the Democrats, they told me people still remember that twenty thousand dollars I gave to St. Thomas, though I’ve done a lot since, given away a helluva lot more since, Christ knows. What I never told anyone was how I’d cleared a cool sixty thousand dollars on the deal, minus interest.”

  Corky’s cleaning up his plate the way he’d learned to do as a kid, every morsel of the flank steak, which was delicious, except bones and the most obvious gristle. And the roasted potatoes, his favorite kind of potatoes. Theresa used to make them, the aroma filling the downstairs of the house on Barrow Street. And fried potatoes too, with onions, deep in grease, in a giant black skillet.

  Greenbaum exhales air through his wide nostrils, a whistling-wheezing sound of amazement. “Good God, Jerome!—do you mean you commonly bet such sums of money? And you win?”

  At this, though, Corky clams up. He’s the kind of guy, don’t push.

  Says, coolly, “That was then, this is now. Now,” he says, reaching for the wine bottle, “—I’m what you call established in this town.”

  There’s Tim Corcoran, at a table near the window looking out toward Union Square. Backlit by shimmering light. The man has aged with dignity, not slack-skinned and pasty like so many others who’d been young when he was, yes and he’s a big, solid man still, with wide sloping shoulders, a handsome face, gray-grizzled eyebrows and gray hair brushed back neatly from his temples. Sharp color in his cheeks, a glisten of merriment in his eyes, slaps the tabletop when he laughs, a man who enjoys a good time. He’s in the company of three other men and he wears a dark sharkskin suit, white shirt, striped tie. His son stares at him mute with longing.

  What were the last words we said to each other, I never knew.

  Then, in the midst of laughter, Tim Corcoran turns, lifts a hand to signal a waiter, his neck creases above his collar and he’s coarse-faced after all, a stranger.

  Not the first time Corky has seen Tim Corcoran in the Elm Room at the U.C.A.C. In the twilit polished-wood Allegheny Bar next door he’s seen him yet more frequently.

  White-haired sunken-cheeked Buck Glover, grown elderly, lurches to his feet at a nearby table, somebody helps him with his chair, helps him shuffle away leaning on a cane. Vain old Buck baring his dentures in a TV smile thinking the entire Elm Room is watching and about to cheer though in fact only a few diners take notice, and these frown at him in pity or vexation. Buck Glover—a defeated ex-Mayor, eased out by his own party. Dead meat. Not even history.

  It’s a shitty fact of life, Corky thinks, a man gets to be that old, no matter who he is or whose friend he was, there’s the prevailing sentiment the fucker’s getting what he deserves.

  Mayor Buck Glover was Tim Corcoran’s friend, wasn’t he. That’s a fact, isn’t it. Risking his neck, it was said, pushing for the arrest of the man who ordered Tim Corcoran killed, causing a political division in the city, a feud between the Mayor’s and the D.A.’s office but what can you do, how much can you push, Al Fenske had his lawyers and there was no evidence linking him with the crime, not even circumstantial evidence, no informers, and no witnesses to the shooting, not even to the Death Car speeding away. Our hands are tied, we’re powerless without witnesses.

  You don’t fuck with the president of the Western New York Trade Union Council unless you know you can nail him.

  One night about four months after Tim Corcoran’s murder the Mayor came out to Irish Hill to address a gathering at the Knights of Columbus to answer questions and “dispel rumors” about the police investigation. For his troubles he was heckled, cursed, spat at. Sean Corcoran stood up in his defense but the angry crowd paid him no heed. Hurriedly, probably it was funny, like a scene in a movie, the Mayor’s aides and bodyguards ushered the Mayor out of the hall, a rear exit and into his limo and away they sped, three shiny black City Hall limos like hearses, with two cops on motorcycles as escorts. On a corner of Dalkey Street Jerome Corcoran and his cousin Cormac Farley and Nick Daugherty stood watching, three kids, yelling and jeering, running after the limos in the street and they’d have thrown rocks except for the cops, they were wild rough kids sometimes, if they could get away with it.

  Had Jerome ever confided in anyone, even in Cormac, even in Nick who was his closest friend of that time, about the Death Car he hadn’t seen and could not identify. Had he ever spoken of it voluntarily to any living soul.

  Son, you’re our only witness.

  Do what you can for your father?

  Yes but he hadn’t seen. He saw, but only the blurred rushing shape of the car. He said, I told you, you don’t listen.

  Mayor Buck Glover, Tim Corcoran’s friend. Friend of the Corcorans, was he. A friend of Irish Hill where they’d helped elect him three times running. Charge of voting “irregularities” in Union City going back to the 1800s. To the victor go the spoils.

  Buck Glover, who’d begun as a ward politician on the near south side, his father a dockworker and a union man, had come of age in Union City when the party machine, that’s to say the Democratic party machine, for the Democrats then as now outnumber Republicans by a sizable majority, traded services openly, delivered and collected favors. In certain notorious cases demanded favors. A favor for you, a favor for me. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Shrewdly the party machine played segments of voters one against the other. Working-class, middle-class, “rich.” Whites, Negroes. South Union City, Shehawkin. Citizens of English, Dutch, German ancestry aligned against citizens of Irish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech ancestry: Protestants versus Catholics. And then there were Jews, and Socialists. Unknown numbers of Communists.

  In 1911, the Wobblies—the Industrial Workers of the World—were so strong in Union City, or were so perceived, there was a strike-breaking riot, police violence, eight strikers killed and many injured. “Big Bill” Haywood came to the city to unfurl the IWW red banner and was arrested for sedition. In 1919 an Irish Hill Wobbly organizer named Tumulty was elected to, but barred from, the New York State Legislature. The Corcorans and their many blood kin, Dowds, Muldoons, Donnellys, Farleys remained faithful to the Democratic party. For the party, especially during Prohibition, delivered all it promised, and occasionally more. The party was the more practical arm of the C
atholic Church. You could start out dirt-poor and with a fifth-grade education and wind up with $28,000 stuffed in a mattress. You could start out shanty Irish and wind up lace-curtain Irish. You started out living and wound up dead but that was a small price to pay.

  Always it was assumed that the men who won the Party’s nominations for offices would win the offices. And that was so. It was assumed that the men who’d done and promised to do most favors would be rewarded. But after Tim Corcoran’s death, and charges of graft, corruption, nepotism, no-show jobs and Party favoritism and “negligence,” the old era ended. The Slatterys came into ascendency, first the elder brother William, then Oscar who was a college graduate, their father a prosperous merchant, born in Irish Hill but emigrated to the north side, a big house on Riverside Drive, seven children and blessed by the Archbishop but not the kind to grovel on his knees before a plaster-of-Paris Virgin Mary. In the new decade of the 1960s, all was changed. A new style, a new way. A new music in politics. Not what you’ve done (the awarding of lucrative city contracts, beefed-up pensions, no-show jobs, a quick telephone call to the Bricklayers & Allied Craftmen’s local to make of someone’s twenty-one-year-old kid a Class-A bricklayer) but who you were, how you looked, talked, moved, came across to the League of Women Voters and the NAACP and on television. Not even the promises you made (for all politicians make promises) but your tone of voice, your vocabulary. Buck Glover lost the votes of even the loyal Democrats he’d paid off for there was Bill Slattery, forty-one years old and a two-term U.S. Congressman and one of his strengths was, he’d had no city-politics experience, no murky record his Republican opponent could throw in his face. Two years after John F. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination for President over Lyndon Johnson, Bill Slattery won the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Union City over Buck Glover. A new style, a new way. A new music.

  Corky points out Buck Glover to Howard Greenbaum, who blinks and stares after the old man. “That’s Glover?—God, I wouldn’t know him.” Then, a wistful grimace, “I voted for Glover, first time I ever voted.”

  Corky asks which term of Glover’s, he’d had three.

  Greenbaum says, “His third. Last.”

  Corky calculates, that election was 1958, say Greenbaum was twenty-one then, he’s fifty-five now. Actually looks older.

  Corky’s feeling mellow, this second bottle of wine and Greenbaum with his fastidious ways hasn’t yet finished his first glass. Are Jews genetically susceptible to alcohol, like Native Americans and the Irish?—no, it’s the opposite, Jews have a high tolerance for alcohol? Stone cold sober, Corky’d be pissed off, his luncheon companion refusing to join him in this good French wine but, right now, that isn’t a problem.

  Corky says, “It’s shitty how the Party treated Glover, tossing him out like they did. Sure, he had his faults, they all do, ‘politics is the art of compromise,’ I forget who said that maybe FDR?, but he did a helluva lot of good, he was a good man in his heart, lots of things the Slatterys inherited Buck began. People forget that.” Corky ticks off public schools policy, health services, better-trained police and firemen and people nobody thinks of like building safety inspectors, water sanitation engineers, the city coroner and his staff. He’s speaking with an urgency that must seem, to the bemused Greenbaum, out of proportion to his subject, sounds like a Democrat on TV, a Party apologist, a City Councilman being challenged. Unable too, it’s the wine gone to his head, to resist adding, “—And an uncle of mine, my father’s partner in the business, y’know we had this family business, after my father died—” rushing past this not meeting the older man’s eyes, maybe he doesn’t know and now’s not the time to go into it, “—my Uncle Sean had to sell at a loss, got sick, I mean he was sick off and on for years—” not wanting to confess his uncle was a chronic alcoholic, couldn’t hold a job even when he’d wanted one, it’s a wonder he’s lived as long as he has is everybody’s take on the old bastard, “—and Buck saw to it that my uncle was on the city payroll till he retired—Department of General Services.” Corky has ended lamely, like a man veering off a sidewalk into a mucky gutter. Shit on his shoes.

  Greenbaum says not a word.

  Corky says, just this side of belligerent, “Hell, it’s the way things were done then. Buck Glover was a fucking generous man.” Seeing Greenbaum impassive, unsmiling, do your older Jews, rabbinical-type Jews, take a high moral tone in everyday life?—look upon a man doing a favor for another man hard hit by family tragedy?—Corky goes on, “It’s the way politics go. In Union City, for sure. Or, anyway, used to be. Now, there’s a different ethics, now, I don’t know.” And lame here too, vague and faltering, asshole’d flunk a lie-detector test. Of course Corky knows: how’d he acquire certain city properties, close certain deals, at his price and not his competitors’, if not with the help of City Hall? how do certain of his rental properties pass Health, Fire & Safety inspections, if not with the help of City Hall? how’d he get on the City Council which takes up too much of his time but which he loves if not for the endorsement of City Hall?

  Corky says, “Your people have a different tradition, do they?”

  “‘My people’?”

  “The Jewish people.”

  Greenbaum smiles, startled. He’s in the midst of removing a large neatly folded and impeccably ironed cotton handkerchief from his inner coat pocket, with which he wipes his forehead, a fussy gesture. His large head does in fact seem dented, thinly covered with strands of dark hair that look as if they’ve been laid in place separately. His earlobes are long and look stretched. “A tradition of ethics, or of political expediency? Of course, we have both.”

  It’s an elegant answer. It’s a classy answer. Why he hired this guy, you pay the right price and you get high class.

  Corky wonders, though: has he been placated, or put in his place?

  Their luncheon plates have been cleared away, they’re waiting now for coffee. No dessert. Greenbaum emphatically declined, even the perusal of the menu or the celebrated Elm Room pastry cart, Corky’s disappointed but better not, he’s invited to a dinner party tonight, so late and so heavy a lunch will interfere with his appetite. Also, he’d better watch his gut. Showering at Christina’s, stooping to tenderly soap his genitalia, he’d been disgusted by the creases, hell they were bulges, in his lower gut.

  Why that woman, and other women, too, over the years, have called Corky Corcoran beautiful, he can’t know. Homely freckled mick face like a baby’s ass and stunted-short, and, since forty, growing a gut.

  Not that it’s a put-on, a ploy, as with prostitutes. Really, they seem to mean it. Poor bitches, cunts. Making as much as they can out of what they have.

  And when they stop loving you, the flattery stops too, and fast.

  Charlotte saying, and this only one of her remarks, you think you’re so good at fucking?—you’re all over everywhere like a twelve-year-old, all that rough, fast stuff, it’s boring.

  Greenbaum glances at a list, he’s been checking off topics, says, “We haven’t gotten through one-third of what I need to talk to you about, Jerome. Have your secretary call and set up an appointment for next week. In my office.”

  “You’d prefer not, another lunch?”

  “It’s more expedient, in my office.”

  “O.K.,” says Corky affably. Then, “You like that word, huh?” and as Greenbaum looks at him, “‘Expediency.’” Corky laughs, empties the wine bottle into his glass except, shit, he’s already emptied it.

  There’s Greenbaum’s wine glass, two-thirds full. Corky eyes it but no, better not.

  But, calculating: how much is he paying for the wine in that glass?

  The Elm Room’s notorious, the U.C.A.C.’s notorious, jacking up the prices of wine, liquor. Fuckers don’t think we know our asses from a hole in the ground.

  “Hell,” says Corky, grinning, “—it’s a good word. Classy. I use it all the time, myself.”

  How’s it feel to be here, kid?

  Past three P.M., half the ta
bles in the Elm Room are still occupied. Friday before a holiday weekend, anybody going away for the weekend’s gone and anybody not, is in no hurry to cut lunch short. That good humming buzz of voices, mainly male voices, laughter. It’s a signal, when you can hear the piped-in Vivaldi, the dining room’s emptying out.

  Feels just great. Now Corky Corcoran’s here, he’s here.

  The Elm Room of the U.C.A.C. One of Corky’s places. Uptown, swanky. Corky’s a guy familiar at any number of local clubs, restaurants, cocktail lounges, bars. Welcomed, well liked. Faces light up when he’s sighted. Sometimes he overhears his name as he passes a table—the murmur, the lilt—Corky Corcoran!—music to his ears.

  Greenbaum’s talking earnestly about things Corky should care about but, shit, it’s hard to make the effort. Kicked in the balls by Christina, what a joke he’d wanted to marry her, O.K. but don’t think of her now, a cunt’s a cunt, forget it. (In fact, when Corky first came in the Elm Room, he’d seen—and she’d seen him, cool and deadpan—a woman he’d been seeing, that’s to say fucking, maybe six, seven years ago, wife of a local businessman, fellow member of this club and of others to which Corky Corcoran belongs; a social friend of Charlotte’s, too. Now this woman’s a virtual stranger to Corky and he to her though friendly enough, both of them, in public—Corky makes it a point to stay on good terms with his ex-mistresses, not to mention their husbands. Never know when you need a friend, right?)

  How Corky loves the Union City Athletic Club: though guessing, now he’s here, it isn’t the same U.C.A.C. he’d stared at from the park.

  The dignified old building had been designed by a distinguished local architect under the heady spell of American neoclassicism. That era of grand buildings, both private and public, like monuments to the dead. Tombs, sepulchers. “Classical Greek” detailing: pediments, tall slender columns, lofty ceilings, and, as in the Elm Room, a showy mixture of styles, gilt ornamentation drawing the eye up to the ceiling that’s floating like something in the sky, with enormous chandeliers and filigree moldings like wedding cake. You’ve got to love it, so over-the-top—the stately, ponderous wall murals executed by long-forgotten artists, scenes of American patriotism, Corky’s gazed at them so many times he knows them by heart, wooden-faced pioneers being greeted by stony-faced Iroquois Indians in full feathered headgear, 1791; the founding of “New Amsterdam” at the confluence of Lake Erie and the Chateauguay River, 1798 (the name later changed to “Union City”); Captain Oliver H. Perry after his Lake Erie victory over the British-Canadian enemy; the completion of the Erie Canal, 1825; a Civil War scene, Union officers and enlisted men, exclusively white.