Once more fellow freemen, we’ve met on that day,
That reminds us of times that have long passed away . . .
“I recognize that air,” said the mother. “‘Sprig of Shillelah.’”
“But different words,” said Timothy.
“She has a nice voice, just the same,” said the mother.
“I say she sings like a rusty gate,” said Eddie, then he turned to his father. “Hey, Pa, can we buy some firecrackers?”
“In a few minutes, Eddie. Your mother and me needs to have a talk.”
“A talk?” The mother turned to her husband.
In most families, having a talk meant trouble.
See Jefferson’s pen Independence declare.
Dick Riley raised the lid of his wife’s sewing machine, took out the mahogany box, and set it on the table.
“What’s this, then?” asked Mary Riley.
Meanwhile to support it our forefathers swear,
In Seventy-six on the Fourth of July . . .
Timothy had not seen his father take the box from under the floorboards or carry it out right under Uncle Billy’s nose. But there it was, polished and shining.
Dick Riley nodded for his wife to open it.
She wiped her hands on her apron.
And Washington, prompt at his country’s call,
Timothy drew closer.
Both parents shot glances at the boy, then at each other, and an agreement passed between them. He’s old enough. The father pulled out a chair and told him to sit.
Unsheathed the bright sword and urged on one and all
Like her husband, Mary Donovan Riley was nearing forty. But where Six-Pound was skinny and solid, Mary carried extra weight through her hips and across her chest. And where he was a talker, she had little to say, so that what she said carried extra weight, too. And it was tinged with the brogue she had brought from Donegal as a girl. Six-Pound, for all his Irish sentiment, was all New York with a New York accent.
The mother raised the lid, and there were the small paper notes.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!
“Wow!” cried Eddie. “A whole string, right down on the street. Let’s go, Pa!”
“In a minute, son.”
While we chant in full chorus on the Fourth of July . . .
Timothy listened to his parents talk their way toward understanding what they had found: twenty thousand dollars worth of old bonds, bearer bonds, which meant that whoever held them could cash them, if they were still good. The bonds had been issued during the Revolution with five-year maturities at 5 percent interest.
The father asked the boy, “What’s twenty thousand at five percent for five years?”
“Twenty-five thousand.” Timothy didn’t need a pencil. “Simple interest.”
“Did you tell Billy about this?” asked the mother.
“No,” said the father. “He’d blab.”
“True enough,” she said.
“But if there’s somethin’ here,” added the father, “he’ll get his share. Whether he banks it or drinks it is his own business.”
She fingered the bonds. “This looks like a considerable lot of money.”
“If it is money,” said the father, “and even more considerable if it’s what they call compound interest.”
“Well, I don’t know nothin’ about compound interest,” she said. “My bank has a snout on its face and a slot in its back.”
Columbia will honor the Fourth of July.
Timothy had all but forgotten the angelic sound of Doreen’s voice, which was still shimmering in the air above Forty-eighth Street.
The father said to him, “Do the compound interest for five years.”
Timothy took a pencil and paper and wrote a few figures. “Twenty-five thousand five hundred twenty-five dollars and sixty-three cents.”
“You know, Dick,” said the mother softly, “with this kind of money, we could move to a first-floor flat with runnin’ water.”
The father pulled out a red handkerchief and mopped his brow.
The mother picked up a bond. “But how could things so flimsy be worth so much?”
“Don’t get all excited just yet,” said the father. “They could be as worthless as—”
The mother raised a finger. “Don’t say it, Dick!”
Timothy had often heard his father call something “as worthless as Billy Donovan.” And while his mother generally agreed with the sentiment, she did not like it spoken aloud.
“I was going to say they could be as worthless as a Continental. Ain’t you ever heard that expression about money from the Revolution?”
“No, I ain’t.” She put the bond back, studied the box, drummed her fingers on the table, and finally said, “I think you should talk to himself.”
“The sachem? I could. I could do that. I could talk to him tomorrow.”
“On the Fourth?” she asked. “Can you get close to him on the Fourth?”
“I’ve been wantin’ to introduce him to Timothy—”
“You’re bringin’ the boy to Tammany Hall? To hear all that windy speechifyin’ and witness all that hard drinkin’?”
Timothy immediately said he’d love to go.
“See that,” said the father. “He’d love to go. And it’s good for the local boss to see that your son’s growin’ straight and tall.
By the Union we live, for the Union we’ll die;
We’ll remember our sires of the Fourth of July—
iii.
Father and son dressed in their Sunday best—jackets, celluloid collars, ties, clean trousers. The boy was wearing mostly hand-me-downs from his father, so his tie was stained and his trousers did not reach to his ankles. He refused, however, to wear knickers and kneesocks to his first Fourth of July at Tammany Hall.
And the father agreed. “He’s a workin’ man now. And he’s got Doreen Walsh on the brain.” The father winked at his son and poured coffee. “So I’d say he’s growin’ up. And Doreen is . . . developin’ . . . quite nicely.”
Eddie gave out with a guffaw. “Timmy says she’s growin’ nice bubbies, too.”
“None of that talk, now,” said the mother. “Not at the kitchen table.”
She fed them bacon and eggs and after a warning about imbibing too much Tammany spirit or saying the word “bonds” too loudly in public, she sent Dick and Timothy on their way.
The father asked Eddie to come, too. But Eddie said he would stay home to keep his mother company and play his harmonica, because Eddie hated going into crowds.
A THUNDERSTORM HAD blown through overnight and scrubbed the air clean. So everything glimmered, every brick on every building, every cast-iron pillar and plate glass window, every length of trolley track and every horse turd, for as far as they could see.
A walk down Broadway, the father said, led through the heart of his city, “where the fine folks shop and eat and play.” And on a day like that, it would be a sin not to walk what he called the greatest street in the world. So down Broadway they went.
They passed through Madison Square, home of the famous Garden, and the boy gazed up at the yellow brick mass, the arches, the tower, the weathervane statue of Diana. As always, he slowed to admire the huntress, who happened to be naked.
“Come on, Tim. We need to see the sachem before he goes into the hall, because afterward, the high mucky-mucks have a private lunch and you can’t get near them.”
South of Madison Square was the Ladies’ Mile, a stretch of expensive shops and giant retail emporiums called department stores, where pennants fluttered from rooftops, colorful awnings shaded the street, and anyone—lady or gentleman—could buy almost anything from almost anywhere in the world. It was an easy walk from Hell’s Kitchen, but this magical neighborhood seemed to the boy as if it existed on another planet.
At Twentieth Street, the father pointed out the façade of Lord and Taylor’s, wrapping the southwest corner in five stories of shimmering glass, cast-iron pillars, wrought-i
ron trim work, and a shiny coat of beige paint.
“There’s the handsomest building in New York,” he said, “and a sad thing it is that your mother never come here to shop. But if them bonds is worth anything, I’ll have her down here faster than a nun can say Hail Mary. She can ride the steam elevator all day, and buy herself a bustle and a parasol and the fanciest hat in the window.”
“I think she’d just like a new sewin’ machine.”
“Well, she won’t need to be takin’ in sewin’, either. Money’ll make her a fine lady. Money’s the thing, son.”
“But you said respect was the thing.”
“I said every man deserves respect till he proves he don’t. But not every man thinks like me. In this world, you have to earn respect. Better to get it by usin’ a good brain to make money than by usin’ a six-pound sledge to beat fellers senseless.”
As they passed Brooks Brothers and Bonwit’s, the crowd began to build. Then the boy heard music thumping up Broadway, something by Sousa, and it made his heart pound. The spectacle was near.
At Union Square, the father headed straight for the statue of George Washington, where the trumpeters of the Sixty-ninth Regimental Band were playing a flourish, calling the sachems and braves to take their places for the parade down Fourteenth Street to the wigwam.
Sachems, wigwams, braves . . . this Tammany organization, which had been taking care of New York Democrats for over a century, took its name from the famous Delaware Indian Sachem, Chief Tamanend. And to its “braves,” it was a true tribe.
That’s what the father said as he jostled and glad-handed his way across the sun-drenched square. Clustered around the statue were the twenty-four top hats worn by the sachems of the twenty-four New York assembly districts. Some of them were ceremonial figures, but most were also district bosses, the ones who could always help, no matter the problem, because they knew everyone in their districts and had done favors for most of them. And if their top hats were not enough to identify them in a sea of derbies and straw boaters, they all wore white aprons over their swallow-tail coats, aprons edged in gold-threaded fringe and bearing an image of the chief himself.
“Mr. Plunkitt! Mr. Plunkitt!” cried the father.
At the sound of his name, a man with gray hair and a black mustache turned and pasted a smile onto his face.
At the same moment, the boy thought he saw Uncle Billy pushing toward them. But then the crowd shifted and Uncle Billy disappeared.
The sachem took Dick Riley’s hand. “How’s the best salvage man in Hell’s Kitchen, and his handsome son, too?”
Timothy Riley took off his New York Giants hat and said, “Hello, Your Honor,” just as his father had coached him.
“We’re fine, sir. Fine,” shouted Six-Pound Dick over the noise. “I’ve brung Timothy to meet you. This is his first time celebratin’ the glorious Fourth at the hall.”
George Washington Plunkitt offered his hand to the boy. Though the sachem was shorter than the father, his grip was even stronger.
“Are you marchin’,” asked Plunkitt, “or goin’ ahead to get a seat?”
“We’re after seats down front,” said Six-Pound. “I want the boy to hear every word of the Declaration.”
“Well, that’s just grand. Every boy should know it by heart.” And the sachem began to turn away.
“Mr. Plunkitt, sir,” said Six-Pound, “I need a bit of advice.”
The trumpets played another call, and the bandleader urged the sachems to fall in.
Plunkitt’s smile dropped off his face. “Now, Six-Pound, this ain’t the time or the place for business. If it’s a job you need—”
Six-Pound Dick took off his hat, looked around to make sure that no one was paying attention, and pointed into the crown. “It’s this.”
Plunkitt looked in, then reached in and lifted out a small piece of paper.
Six-Pound said, “I was hopin’ you’d know what I should do with it.”
Plunkitt read the bond, front and back. “Where did you get this?”
“Well, let’s just say—”
“Now, Six-Pound,” said Plunkitt, “you’re workin’ in the old Daggett Tavern. Is that where you found this?”
“How did you know I was workin’ up there? It ain’t even in the district.”
“Who do you think put in a word with the owner?”
As the men talked, the boy was looking around at the crowd and up at the statue, and for a moment, he thought that he saw Uncle Billy peering down from the base of Washington’s pedestal. But the crowd shifted again, and Billy was gone.
Plunkitt slipped the note into his jacket pocket. “Come and see me at my office on Monday and we’ll figure this out.” Then he turned to the boy. “You know where my office is, son?”
Timothy shook his head.
“Afternoons, I’m in the district at Washington Hall. But every mornin’, you’ll find me down at the County Courthouse, at the bootblack stand. That’s where a man of the people does the people’s business, out in the open, out where the people can see him.”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy.
“Oh, and Dick, do you have more of these things?”
“Unh . . . just a few.”
“Well, hold onto ’em till Monday,” said Plunkitt. “And don’t show ’em around.”
“One, two, three!” cried the bandleader, then the brass strains of “Washington Post” all but blasted the boy’s hat off.
As the parade began to move, the father just stood there in front of the statue of Washington.
So the boy asked, “How come you didn’t tell him there was two hundred bonds?”
“Well, son, if the day ever comes that I’m not around to help you, he’s the man to go to. But don’t ever trust him . . . or any other powerful man.”
“Do you think he’ll help?”
“Unless there’s better reason not to.” The father clapped the boy on the shoulder. “Now, then, let’s go and enjoy the show.”
As they pushed into the crowd, the boy saw Uncle Billy again. He said, “Pa—”
The father stopped and turned. “What?”
“Uncle Billy been watchin’ us ever since we come into the square, and whenever I see him, he ain’t lookin’ happy.”
“He won’t be happy if he thinks we’re goin’ behind his back. He’s touchy that way. Come on.”
FATHER AND SON hurried down Fifteenth Street, slipped down Irving Place, and beat the parade to Tammany Hall, known to the braves as the wigwam.
This wigwam was no Indian tent, but a handsome three-story building topped with a statue of Chief Tamanend. The domed ceiling and grand chandelier in the auditorium reminded the boy of the medieval halls he had read about, though there was nothing medieval about the flags and bunting that hung everywhere, even from the window shades.
“If you could turn color into gas,” said the father, as he jostled toward a pair of seats halfway down on the left side, “we could cut this building loose, and all the red, white, and blue would float us right over to Brooklyn.”
The ceremonies began with resounding music as the sachems took their places on the stage and joined in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then came the resounding words, “When in the course of human events . . . ,” followed by the resounding cheers, then the resoundingly boring speeches, first from the long talkers—two politicians who spoke on big issues that the boy did not understand—then from the short talkers. He liked them better because they were, well . . . short.
Still, it was four hours before the Tammany Glee Club launched into the closing anthem, and the boy was swept up by the energy of all those hungry, thirsty, sweaty, cigar-smokey men singing along:
Columbia the gem of the ocean! The home of the brave and the free.
The hungriest and thirstiest began to slide toward the exits.
The shrine of each patriot’s devotion.
But the rest continued to sing, though all knew that downstairs there were a hundred cases of cham
pagne and two hundred kegs of beer . . . just waiting.
A world offers homage to thee.
The boy was amazed to hear his father singing, so he joined in.
Thy mandates make heroes assemble,
Then his father stopped singing and looked seven or eight rows ahead.
When Liberty’s form stands in view.
A scrawny little man with a bashed-in face had turned and was looking at the Rileys through the haze of cigar smoke. Slick McGillicuddy. And he was whispering into the ear of a big man in a checkered suit. His brother, Strong.
Thy banners make tyranny tremble
Dick Riley tipped his derby to the McGillicuddys and finished the song.
When borne by the red, white, and blue.
Ten minutes later, the Rileys found a spot in the corner of the huge lunchroom, elbow to elbow with braves from across the city. The beer barrels and the champagne cases were rising from the subbasement called “the spring.” Negro waiters were sending food flying along all the tables and countertops—knockwurst and beef tongue and pickled eggs and pig’s feet and ham sandwiches. And all the booming laughter and big talk and backslapping were making the windows rattle.
The boy had never felt more of a man, especially when the father put a mug into his hand.
“Your first beer, Timmy. Don’t tell your mother.”
The boy tapped his mug against his father’s, watched his father blow the foam off the top of his, and did the same.
That was when Uncle Billy found them. “Dick, I been looking all over for you.”
The father’s mug stopped at his lips. “Get yourself a beer, Billy, and calm down.”
“I already had a beer. With Strong McGillicuddy himself.”
“Strong McGillicuddy?”
Again the boy sensed a catch in his father’s voice, a note of concern.
“Me and Strong had a fine talk,” said Billy.
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