On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  Uncle Frank tightened his gun belt around his waist. “It’s a world with Christians, you c’n go that far. It’s pretty tough sleddin’ for ’em here in Bohegan—and I don’t know if we’re any worse ’n the West Side or Staten Island or Brooklyn. It all stinks to high heaven.”

  He turned to go, back to the night desk and the unprotected crimes that could be brought safely to justice.

  “Thanks, Uncle Frank, thanks for being so truthful,” Katie said.

  Uncle Frank, a small worn cog in the wheel of Bohegan justice, turned to warn her. “Katie, I didn’t tell you all this to steam you up. It was to make you see how hopeless it is, so you’ll take this as you’ve got to take it. In pain and resignation, Katie, pain and resignation. Some day, maybe, it’ll be different. I mean better. Maybe you, or your children, will be seein’ this social justice our Holy Fathers have been talkin’ about. Maybe it’ll take Christ Himself to come back like He promised. But God knows, and I mean God knows there aint no brotherhood now, nor love ’n justice in Bohegan. That’s why nobody talks. That’s why I can’t arrest a two-bit chiseler on River Street. Donnelly”—years of humiliation and frustration were boiling up in Sergeant Frank Doyle—“I hope he burns in hell.”

  He pulled his belt a notch tighter, taking a deep breath, a deep inhaling sigh. “Remember what I told you now, Katie. This is just between us, so you’ll know to do what your old man says and not push into it any further. If you mention I told you, whfff” (he made a whistling sound) “goes my pension.”

  Then he trudged on down the stairs.

  On the second landing Katie could hear Uncle Frank say, “Evenin’, Father,” with the note of boyish respect that Irish males always put on when addressing a priest. A moment later Father Barry came into view as he mounted the stairs at his usual rapid pace. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Katie saw him remove it, snuff the lighted end and drop it into his pocket to save for later. He was a chain smoker (two packs a day minimum) who felt guilty at spending fifty cents daily on this luxurious vice. He had convinced himself that it helped him in his work. High-keyed, furiously energetic, he needed something in his hands or in his mouth to keep him occupied while he went full-speed about his parish duties. Caught between two vices, he had to choose between spending and begging, so he had become an accomplished cadger of cigarettes.

  Father Barry, a pretty good ball player and something of an amateur boxer in his college days, took the stairs two at a time until he reached the fourth-floor landing.

  “Well, Katie,” he said when he saw the girl standing alone in the rear of the hallway, “I’d hardly recognize you since the summer. You’ve grown up.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said, in no mood for small talk.

  “It’s rough about Joey,” Father Barry said. “He was the best. We’re all gonna miss him. But …”

  He groped for something consoling, some assuaging promise of the hereafter, but he was a product of the Bohegan banks, raised tough and poor and he couldn’t help being a realist. No use filling them with a lot of high-sounding pap, he had often told the pastor, Father Donoghue, whom he assisted at St. Timothy’s. These were plain-talking people. They deserved plain answers.

  The priest and the girl looked at each other and he hung his head, seeing impatience in her eyes and sensing it was a time for saying nothing.

  “Pop is inside,” she said. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

  “How’s he takin’ it?” Father Barry asked.

  Katie shrugged. “He’s all right. He’s taking it.”

  “I’ll be sayin’ the Rosary in a couple of minutes,” Father Barry said as he went in.

  “I’ll be there, Father,” Katie said. But she lingered in the hall, with tears stinging the corners of her eyes. She waited until she was sure she had herself under control before walking back through the kitchen to the front bedroom. There Pop and his friends and the well-wishing neighbors were grouped around Father Barry. The priest would have looked and sounded like a tall, rangy, ruddy-faced longshoreman except for his shiny-worn black suit and the turned-around collar damp from body-sweat and soiled because he had been too rushed all afternoon to go back to his room for a change.

  The beads in the hands of the priest were not beads but progressive stations in their Lord’s tortured last miles to Golgotha. Katie, as she responded in muffled, chanting tones with the others, lived again the five sorrowful mysteries, the sweating of blood and the scourging at the pillar, the piercing pain of the crown of thorns, the weight of the cross and the final agony of flesh and bone hanging from the crude, cruel nails. In real pain, with her heart crying tears for Joey Joey, she chanted the Our Fathers and Hail Marys and those mysteriously soothing words as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end Amen …

  The saying of the Rosary came to an end, with Father Barry talking rapidly and slightly out of the corner of his mouth, in the nervous rhythm of the Irish lower class, sounding much as he did when he discussed the chances of his beloved Giants, but yet with the feeling there for all to sense. He didn’t know how to pretend with these Bohegan riverfronters, how to sound pious or deliberate or even priestly.

  When it was over Mrs. Gallagher brought the Father a ham sandwich and Runty said, “Here, Father, here’s something to wash it down with,” and stuck a can of beer into his face. Father Barry took it gladly, and even eyed the bottle of Paddy’s Irish, a beverage he was overfond of and had to struggle against. He unbuttoned his collar at the back and sat down to relax a little, a roughneck at heart but a shrewd, strong-minded, dedicated one.

  The saying of the Rosary and the physical presence of a priest had eased Pop’s mind. Father Barry felt he had accomplished what he could. They would meet again in Paradise, he had assured them. What more could he say?

  Father Barry allowed himself a second and final beer and a cheese sandwich. He was a ready eater even if his body, going soft only slightly at the waist, belied this. The fat was burned off in nervous energy. Then he set the time for Joey’s Requiem Mass, gave Pop his blessing, slapped him forcefully on the shoulder and hurried toward the door. Mrs. Glennon, around the corner, was on her way out with cancer. Her husband, Beanie Glennon, a longshore casual, wasn’t much of a provider and five kids, from two to thirteen, were going to need plenty of help.

  As Father Barry took his leave with a snappy “So long,” and “See ya, now,” and “Be good, Jimmy,” and a last buck-up-God-bless for Pop, Katie followed him out into the hallway.

  “Father …”

  Father Barry wheeled as he was starting quickly down the stairs. He wasn’t prepared for this unexpected delay. He had strong, personal feelings about the violent passing of young Doyle, but he was a professional man too, and he had been here almost an hour. It had been a particularly demanding day, and there was this Glennon call, sure to be a trial, before he finally got a chance to flop down on his bed and read the bulldog edition sport pages until it fell out of his hands and he was deep in his six-hour sleep.

  “Yes, Katie?”

  “Father, Joey was pushed, you know that, don’t you?” She was trembling with a helpless, dry-sobbing anger. “Don’t you know that? Don’t you?”

  Her rage found him and lashed him. He put his hand out to soothe her.

  “Take it easy, Katie. I know it’s rough. I can’t give you the easy answers. But time and faith … time and faith are great healers.”

  “Time and faith!” Katie flung his own words back at him so hard that they had the impact of a sudden blow that knocked him off balance. No ordinary Marygrove freshman would defy a priest. “Time and faith. My brother’s dead, pushed off this roof by beasts who hate the face of God. And you stand here talking drivel about time and faith.”

  “It may not be enough, Katie, but I do what I can.”

  Her eyes blazed. “Are you sure, Father? Are you sure?”

  The way she breathed fire into the words made him unsure.

  “Katie, be reasonable. All I
can do is help the family. Pray with you and—try to ease the loss.”

  But she would not be held off. “Only God has the power to give and take a life. Isn’t that true, Father?”

  “Of course, Katie, you know that.”

  “So if—if those filthy animals take Joey’s life, and the police—Uncle Frank told me—just turn their backs and forget about it, isn’t it up to you to do something about it? To try and do something about it? If somebody takes a life, if there’s all this evil on the waterfront, how can you pretend you’ve got a Christian parish—and, and all those fine things we’re supposed to be learning?”

  Father Barry took a step backwards down the stairs, as if increasing the distance between them would diminish the sting.

  “Katie, the Glennons are waiting for me. I’ll be glad to discuss this with you any time. As I was saying, I want to do what I can. I’ll be in the church whenever you need me.”

  Katie glared at him and then laughed angrily. The blow of Joey’s death and the sickening resignation of her father and the painful flash of insight into Bohegan justice her uncle had just given her had all combined to depress her to the point where she no longer knew what she was saying.

  “In the church when you need me,” she repeated, in a way that made Father Barry wince. “Was there ever a saint who hid in the church?”

  The question spun the priest around as if he’d been struck by one of Specs Flavin’s .38 slugs. He went rapidly down the stairs and did not look back.

  “O Mother, Mother of God, help me,” Katie said aloud.

  Inside they were singing an old song that Runty’s father had passed on to him, “The Green Above the Red.” Runty Nolan was fond of saying, “My entire inheritance consisted of The History of Ireland, a bottle of Irish whiskey and the ability to absorb punishment like a sponge sucks up water.” Katie listened, resentfully, to the bleary voices trying to lift the spirits of the house:

  “… and freely as we lift our heads

  We vow our blood to shed

  Once ’n forever more t’ raise

  The green above the red…”

  It was an old song of Irish independence and it said something about the universal yearning of man to be free, but it sounded to Katie like a hymn of lost causes, a whistling in the dark, as Pop and Runty and Moose and the rest of them made the long hard journey through the black tunnel in which they had trapped themselves.

  “Mother, our Mother, help me find a way,” Katie prayed.

  A block away the wide black river bowled its deafening answer along the giant alley of water between the Jersey and Manhattan shores as another transatlantic liner (one every fifty minutes, day in, day out) swept down river to the open sea.

  Seven

  MRS. GLENNON WAS DYING in front of Father Barry’s eyes, a little each day, and her kids were dirty and poorly dressed. Beanie Glennon had been down in the corner bar when Father Pete—as the Glennons called him—arrived, and the oldest boy had been sent down as usual to fetch the old man. The priest dreaded what would happen to the kids when Mrs. Glennon checked out. And he wondered why it should have to be so hard for Mrs. Glennon, suffering illness and poverty and, worst of all, uncertainty for the five kids. He had tried to comfort her, assure her, and his words had helped a little. But again, as with Katie Doyle, were these only words? Was there more he could be doing? Sure it was a hard day, a long day, from five A.M., when he began with his own prayers and his preparations for six-o’clock Mass to this last family call at eleven. And an almost endless chain of chores and services performed along the way, a fairly average day in the life of a parish priest in a working-class neighborhood. But doubt nagged him in his end-of-day weariness. Was there more he could be doing? Weren’t these more than a continuous series of needy individual cases? Wasn’t there a pattern here of insecurity, lawlessness, of Cain-and-Abel destruction?

  He could have reached the rectory by walking the several blocks along Market Street, but he felt himself drawn down to River Street. The events of the day cut into his mind with sharp edges. He looked into the bleary faces of the men who wandered past him and he wondered: why are they drinking their lives away? Why are there six bars, at least, in every block? Bars, and no playgrounds, no tennis courts, no reading centers? No place to go on the Bohegan waterfront except into a bar or a church? Father Barry’s mind was tired, but the persistent questions would not let him rest. Everything is wrong as hell, and it is more than physical poverty closing in over the port, apathy, amorality. These were fancy words and he didn’t go in for them. Hell, he was a Bohegan kid himself. Who was he trying to fool? It plain and simple stank. A good boy like Joey Doyle could be knocked off and nobody lifts a finger. The men themselves accepted murder as if it was nothing worse than a black eye. Catholics, a good ninety-five per cent of them had accustomed themselves to the idea that a member of the Mystical Body of Christ could be violently removed from its other living parts without their feeling called upon to cry out against this violation of His precious gift. He had felt defensive when Katie had slugged her question at him, Was there ever a saint who hid in the church? His immediate reaction had been, Get off my back, sister. You call this hiding? After a tough day I’m here at the wake and then off to the Glennons’. I’ve sat in the kitchens of hundreds of families, and not only the God-seeking ones but the backsliders and forsakers. You don’t have to take my word for it. The Pastor can tell you I’m tryin’ to do a job down here.

  Was there ever a saint who hid in the church? The simple question nagged him and ragged him. It was almost too simple. And yet that Doyle kid had a point. Name five saints and at least three of them make you think of trouble. They knew danger. They were independent souls skirting the abyss of heresy and excommunication. They were desperate men and women, defiers and innovators, reaching out, plunging deeper, taking terrible chances, as Paul chanced, and Stephen and the first Ignatius. And now, on Bohegan’s ginmill row, around this harbor, through the great city and in the sink holes of the world, that kid’s question was actually a charge that we are defaulting the spiritual vitality that had spread the idea of love through the whole world. Father Barry had reached the park in front of his old red-brick church, but he kept on walking.

  Outside the Crow’s Nest, a popular bar next to the Sailor’s Home, two burly drunks were pummelling each other’s faces. The smaller of the two was knocked down and as he rose from the pavement he snarled at his assailant through his bloody teeth. “I’ll kill you, ya son of a bitch.” In a moment he was knocked down again. The bigger man laughed. “I’ll fix that sonofabitchin strike-breakin’ sailor. Went through our lines in Fifty-one, huh? Git up ya bum, I aint finished with ya.”

  Father Barry could not bear to see the smaller man punished any further, so, somewhat against his better judgment, he moved in like a referee, “Okay, you fellers, break it up. What d’ya say?”

  To his surprise it was the smaller, far more battered one who most resented the intrusion. “What’re you doin’ here, Father? Why doncha get back to ya choich where ya belong? Comin’ down here ’n buttin’ in.”

  The bigger man, with whom the priest had expected to have the trouble, was apologetic.

  “Don’ mind him, Father. He’s been at it all day. He don’ know what he’s sayin’. He’ll sober up in time for Mass, you watch ’n see, Father.”

  “Okay, boys, the fight’s over. Go back to your corners.” Father Barry pulled out of it and walked on, with the same long, rapid stride he always used, as if he still had a half dozen calls to make. He was tired in his head and his muscles from the long physically and emotionally draining day. But he wasn’t ready for bed. The questions nagging him were a bottle full of Benzedrine.

  Take those two rummies beating each other’s heads in. Probably perfectly good Catholics, in a formal way. Go to Mass every Sunday, well, nearly every, and receive the Eucharist to fulfill their Easter duty. This is my body which is being given for you … Good God, we go looking for pagans in Africa
and China and our own neighborhood parish is overflowing with them. If you do it to the least of mine you do it to me. How deeply Father Barry had felt that once! But how easy it had become to say it, recite it, without feeling it, without living it. Just as the stolid, sleepy faces at the six-o’clock Mass received Christ in an obedient way, merely because they had been baptized and had made their First Communion. But ours is the religion that preaches and teaches the dignity of man, the preciousness of man. What was it St. Bernard had called him, a noble creature with a majestic destiny? Get a load of these noble creatures! Here is our flock. This is what they’ve come to, defeated, drowning their miseries, bashing each other’s faces generation on generation. How, this priest was asking himself, can we figure our batting average: by the number of worshippers tradition pulls in on a Sunday morning? Or do we score our cards according to the quality of the lives they are living in this dark corner of the harbor? “If somebody takes a life,” the girl had lowered the boom on him, “if there’s all this evil on the waterfront, how can you pretend you’ve got a Christian parish?”

  He was close to the water now and could hear its rippling against the shore. At the next pier down a freighter was working under powerful lights. What were the dangers of working the bottom of the hatch at night? What was their overtime for keeping the cargo moving while the city slept? Was it true that every one of them had to buy his job each day from this fellow Johnny Friendly? But Father Barry had heard Monsignor O’Hare speak very well of Johnny Friendly as a generous contributor to Catholic causes. Was the opposition to Johnny Friendly “a bunch of Communists,” as the Monsignor had suggested? If Joey Doyle was a leader of the local opposition, he was indeed a strange breed of Communist, never missing Confession and dying in a state of grace.

  Pete, stay with this, he was thinking. You’re catching hold of something. Hang on to it, Pete. He had been feeling a vague dissatisfaction with the routine of the Masses for the past year and had even talked to Father Donoghue about introducing the dialogue Mass, so as to intensify its meaning for the parishoners. But now the angry eyes of Katie Doyle were looking into his mind. They were accusing him of failure. Never mind the mere improvement of the Mass. Had he brought Christ and what He stood (and died) for into the lives of these people? Had he, Father Pete Barry, made them aware of Him and each other here on the waterfront. Hell, every family he touched was affected by this problem, the question of whether or not they worked, and how they worked. Under what conditions of degradation, and to what extent they were in danger for daring to improve those conditions. This was no political problem to be piously avoided by smoke-pot swingers. Hell, no, this was a moral-religious problem! And you, Pete, you’ve been ducking it. You’ve been afraid to plunge in. The river was dark and treacherous and unknowable, like the river of humanity into which Paul plunged when he went out from Jerusalem into the unfriendly gentile currents in search of brothers.