And All the Saints
Michael Walsh
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2003 by Michael Walsh
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition August 2015
ISBN: 978-1-94094-144-8
Also by Michael Walsh
Exchange Alley
Who’s Afraid of Opera?
For
Patrick Joseph Walsh (1867–1931)
Joseph Patrick Walsh (1902–1979)
and
John Joseph Walsh (b. 1926)
I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
If you ever have to cock a gun in a man’s face, kill him. If you walk away without killing him after doing that, he’ll kill you the next day.
—Murray “the Camel” Humphreys
There are now no gangs in New York and no gangsters in the sense that the word has come into common use…merely young hoodlums who seek to take advantage of ancient reputations. They [have] nothing in common with such great brawling, thieving gangs as the Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys, Eastmans, Gophers and Five Pointers.
—Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (1929)
Prologue
Hot Springs, Arkansas April 1965
Lately I’ve been thinking about the Mad Mick and how he died bloody in the London call box on 23rd Street, and about Little Patsy and his gunsels, Granny and his damsels, and Texas and her brassy lungs, and about how we shot the Dutchman in the Palace john in Jersey along with his dear boy Lulu.
The Cotton Club has crossed my mind more than once, which was after it was Jack’s Club Deluxe, although if you ask me, it was never the same after they moved it from darktown to midtown and Hymie Arluck went Hollywood and turned into the Wizard of Oz. So has the Duke, for that matter, although nobody ever called him that when I was around, because I was always the real Duke, if you ask anybody who knows. Like Walter and Damon and Jimmy Hines and Joe the Boss and Arnold and Lucky and Meyer, and Estes the Senator from Tennessee and John the Senator from Arkansas, and Joe’s kids Jack and Bobby and all the rest of them who made my life so remunerative and difficult more or less at the same time. Not to mention the Kitchen gang, One Lung, Razor, Happy Jack, Art and Hoppo, but also Legs, Lucky and the Bug, the Big Fella and the Little Man.
Gone now, most of them long gone, except for old friends like Mae and Georgie, big stars now, four-letter household words. And here I sit in Bubbles, alone with Agnes and my pigeons, gazing out on North Mountain and West Mountain and the rest of the Ouachitas, which remind me of Ireland, at least the Ireland my mother used to tell me about, which was probably mostly a lie. Whereas they’ve all been plugged, fried, planted and otherwise disposed of.
When I think about them other mugs, I suppose I got off lucky, luckier than Luciano, although I never went for a ride like him, although he never got it from the Hudson Dusters like I did. Lucky ran dames, I ran after ’em, which may be the basic difference between us, when you come to think of it. And right now, who would you rather be? Me, sitting here pretty if semiventilated in Hot Springs, or Salvatore Luciano, dead on the tarmac in wopland, his nasty heart bursted wide open and his last view the phiz of a Hollywood producer, there to seek his life story? Me, I never did much worry about immortality.
Except now, when mortality’s as close as a barber’s blade. If you ask me, you could learn a thing or two about life from yours truly, if learning there is to be had from the ruminations of an old English Irishman, if you call 73 old, which I guess you have to, especially in my profession.
As far as this truthfulness stuff goes, though, I have to tell you that in my opinion truthfulness is vastly overrated, especially in a court of law, where lying is always much more efficacious, not to mention safer, not to mention profitable. Besides, lying’s something I’ve known since I was a kid, something I’ve tried to teach all my boys, on account of in our business that’s what you do if you want to stay in business. When somebody tells me how that’s different from what other businessmen do, then maybe I’ll stop. But first I’ll laugh in his face and tote up my swag one last time.
They say that every man is a hero to his dog, of which I’ve had plenty and each one of ’em a Jack Russell, but no man is a hero to his valet, of which I’ve had only one, because you can replace a mutt but not a man. I guess if I have a purpose these days, it’s to get people to remember us, our gang and our girls, recollection right and proper, givin’ the divvil his due as it were, which is why I’m summoning memories and conjuring the dead. Because when everything else has departed, slipped aside, fallen away or been blown asunder, what do we have left except remembrance? Old and fading, mayhaps, but alive and whole and full of life’s coursing blood as long as we are.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them all, and what we did and how we did it and sometimes even why. Most of all I think about them that died and those what lived, whether any of them deserved it or not, and wonder how it all turned out the way it did and why I’m still here, with five bullets in my gut and six gone but God it hurts, still hurts, fifty years on and more.
And most of all, in this month of April I think of May.
PART ONE
Monk
Chapter One
Me and Marty was up on the roof puttin’ down a sick pigeon when Ma called us in for supper.
Some folks will tell you to use an ice pick, but me I prefer to use a knife. A nice sharp knife, it has to be: real sharp, otherwise you might not kill your bird straightaway, and I always believed in being both quick and sure.
“Martin Aloysius Madden!” she shouted, and Marty’s head swiveled on his shoulders like a lazy Susan that just got spun but good. Marty was more afraid of Ma than he was of getting hit by a locomotive on Death Avenue, which was to say pretty damn afraid, because Martin never had no taste for violence or any of that sort of thing, which is also why he wasn’t helping me much with the pigeon. “Owen Vincent Madden! Both of ya get in here right this minute!”
We could tell Ma was mad because that’s what her using our two Christian names signified. In this she was pretty much like all the other Mas in the neighborhood, who would shout out the litany of given names of their miserable broods at full blast up and down the Avenue when they was especially peeved or put out.
Still and all, I didn’t much like my full moniker in them days. My dear departed Da had always called me Owney, right up to the end on the dock in Liverpool. But since Da’s death, no one else had called me that, and so it was by the name of Owen Vincent that I was first known in the great City of New York, although that was one of the things I determined to change as soon as I could, since I felt that a new land called for a new identity of my own choosing and the time to start was now.
“I’m not Owen Vincent, Ma. I’m Owney Madden of Tenth Avenue! And this here fella is me brother and sidekick, Marty.” I glanced over at Martin, who was still wrestling with the pigeon, and the pigeon was getting the upper hand.
“I don’t care who you’re after callin’ yourselves, you boy
s get down here right away,” ordered Ma, and so now Marty and I had a problem, which was to kill this bird in jig time or let him go, which was hardly bein’ merciful. Marty was all for freeing him because the bird was flopping around something fierce and trying to peck his hand, which was making it difficult for me to get the point of the knife into his mouth.
I, on the other hand, was for sending him on to the other side, because Ma was always complaining about how the pigeon shite on the windowsills looked disgusting, and here was I, trying to do her a favor, not to mention put this bird out of his misery, because that’s the kind and moral thing to do. “Hold him tight, for sweet Jesus’ sake,” I said, but Marty was having his hands full and I could see he was about to lose control.
The bird didn’t like the idea of going over to the other side any better than the rest of us, and it fought like hell, beating its wings and trying to bite my brother’s fingers off, so I grabbed it away, figuring to do the job myself. I could hear Ma’s heavy tread in the stairwell that led up to the roof from our flat on the top floor. Ma was a short woman who since our Da’s death always dressed in black and wore her hair, which was already turning white, pulled back in a bun. She seemed old to us kids, but when I think back on it, she couldn’t have been but a couple of years beyond thirty. People got older younger back then.
She poked her head through the door that led to the roof and was searching for us in the twilight, although luckily for us, her eyes were having trouble focusing in the dark. “What are you boys doin’?” she yelled. “Get down here and wash up before your supper gets cold. It’s rude to keep me and May waitin’. ” Across the North River, I could see the sun setting behind Jersey and I might have enjoyed the view if only the damn bird would keep still, cooperate and die.
“We’re over here, Ma,” piped up Marty just as that pigeon sank its beak into the heel of my thumb. I let out a yelp and dropped the knife, the knife my Da bequeathed me, which damn near flew over the edge of the roof and down the grimy ventilation shaft that must have seemed like a good idea to the reformers who built the dumbbell New Law tenements, but were mostly used as swill slops and garbage dumps by us tenants. That’s goo-goos for you: always tryin’ to fix one problem and creating two or three others. Which of course just gives them more to fix.
So there I was, one hand around the bird’s neck, the other reaching for my knife, and my brother, Marty, just standin’ there stupid.
Story of my life.
Just before the dreaded hand could clamp my ear and hoist me to my feet I managed to bring pigeon and knife together and that was the end of the job.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all t’e saints,” said Ma, looking down at the mess. “What in t’e name of God are ya doin’?”
“Nothin’, Ma,” says Marty.
Story of his life.
Then I was gone too, bein’ dragged downstairs by my Ma and into the kitchen, which is where we took all our meals and where, truth to tell, we mostly lived on account of there wasn’t much room on the top floor of 352 Tenth Avenue, New York, New York, just a tiny parlor with a stick or two of furniture; a bedroom, where Ma and my sister, May, slept alongside Ma’s steamer trunk brought over from Ireland, which doubled as her hope chest; and a little kitchen where the bathtub lived along with the rest of the family. On cold winter’s days we slept there, me, Marty, May and our Ma, boys with boys and girls with girls, wrapped up in blankets like penthouse Eskimos, which is pretty much what we felt like in the morning after the stove fire had gone out.
Now, Tenth in those days wasn’t anything like it is today, what with the West Side Highway, the Lincoln Tunnel and Dyer Avenue and all. Tenth in those days—when it really was Tenth Avenue—was lined with five-story red-brick tenements, the kind where nobody felt superior to nobody else, on account of everybody was the same, which was to say poor, except for the landlords. There was a streetcar line running down the middle of it, and the rail yards were just across the way, which maybe wasn’t so scenic, but the fact that there were fewer buildings on the west side of the avenue meant that there was a lot of light in the afternoon, and when you’ve lived in New York for a while, you realize that light is something that money can’t buy, and here we were getting it for free.
I was still thinking about that bird as Ma yanked me downstairs. “Owen,” she said, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself torturin’ t’at poor t’ing. Tomorrow you’ll go to church and say ten Hail Marys for the repose of its soul.”
“But, Ma,” I protested, “it’s free now.”
“Free as a boid, Ma,” added Marty. He had already adopted the pronunciation of the neighborhood. I never saw anybody become an American as fast as Marty did. Me, I was hedging my bets. I figured it was better if the Americans thought I was English and the Irish knew I was Irish. Safer too.
“It don’t matter whether it’s hurt or not,” replied Ma, who was never anything but Irish, even though she’d lived in England for a third of her life; like most real Irish, she never did learn to pronounce her th’s. “You was after hurtin’ t’at bird, and in God’s mind t’at’s all t’at matters.”
That didn’t make no sense to me then and it still don’t. “But if nothin’ happens, then you ain’t guilty,” I retorted as politely as I could, given that she still had me by the ear. “I mean the coppers gotta catch ya before they can arrest ya, right? Plus ya gotta’ve actually done it. Otherwise it’s just—” I looked to Marty to help me out, the dumb cluck.
“Hearsay,” says he.
“Somethin’ like that,” says I.
Ma settled this fine point of legal understanding by giving me a sharp yank on the lobe and letting me go. “Don’t talk back to your mother, boy,” she said. “God’s listenin’. And so’s Mary.”
By now we were in the kitchen, where May was slicing a potato into the soup. Like Ma her name was Mary, but we called her May, because that’s what the Irish did. “Owen, are you in trouble again?” she asked, smiling, and I guess if you asked me who was the first girl I ever loved, I would have to answer May—not in any filthy-dirty way, mind you, but purely because she was my six-year-old sister.
“I was just takin’ the air, May,” says me with a wink, and I knew that she knew I wasn’t. There was this kind of secret communication between us, which I never had with Marty. Whenever there was trouble between me and Ma, May always stuck up for me, which was more than could be said for Marty.
“Liar,” said Marty.
I threw a mock left at his head like I was the Black Prince, Peter Jackson himself, the Australian colored boy what could put down a white man with one punch. Even back then I loved the fight game, like my Da had, and couldn’t help be a little bit proud that in the very year I was born Gentleman Jim had fought Black Peter to a sixty-one-round draw on his way to the heavyweight championship of the world.
Marty tried to duck but he never could duck very well and I caught him flush on the cauliflower. I couldn’t help but follow through with a right to the old steak and chips, which dropped his jaw as he gasped for breath, and I woulda clipped him one right on the jaw, just like my Da had taught me, when…
“Ow!”
May’s hand was bleeding. The peeler had slipped as she turned to look at us, and had nicked her finger. I was at her side in a flash, squeezing the wound and holding it tight under some fresh water. May never said nothin’, just stood there very calm, letting me take care of her.
“I hope she don’t get no blood in the spuds,” said Marty, “or start into bawlin’. You know dames.”
I was about to take another poke at him when Ma said, “No more fighting, you two.” She had that tone in her voice that even the dumbest kid could understand, and I wasn’t the dumbest.
“You know what Da made us promise,” May said, her own pain forgotten.
At the mention of Da’s name, Ma’s anger was suddenly replaced by sorrow. “You know how I hate fighting,” she said softly. “You know why I hate fighting.”
We knew. Even though it was fighting what had got the Maddens, most of us, to America. And it was fighting that, I knew, was going to keep us here and help us make our way in the world. That was what I had already learned in England, and me I never had to learn things twice that really needed learning.
So we stood there, the four Maddens, a girl between me and my brother and our Ma standing off to one side, observing. Somebody had to lead and it might as well be me. “Let’s eat,” I said. The spud soup went down warm as we finished grace and we finished dinner, almost in that order.
We pushed our bowls away in anticipation of what we called the sermon, which was our mother’s post-supper words of wisdom. Mary O’Neill Madden looked every bit of her thirty-two years, an unimaginable age to us then, as she addressed us.
“Children,” she said.
It’s funny how everyone considers his life to be unique and unusual, when in fact it’s usually pretty much of the same old malarkey—absent husband, abundant alcohol, unruly offspring, bad companions, irresistible temptations, ugly sins. Then you live a few years and realize that every man jack of us is pretty much the same, with pretty much the same story, and somehow they came through it and somehow you did too, except of course for them what didn’t. But it’s the living that writes the stories.
So looking back on things, I guess Ma was no different from any of the boat women who came to America to raise their children, most often by themselves. Sure, there was kids that had fathers on our block, but most of the time the old man was either working or drinking, or both, in which case sure as shooting there would come a day when he would not come home, having fallen off a beam or drowned diggin’ a ditch. So the point of whether you had a Da or not was moot. Which meant that it was up to the Mas of our world to try and keep the kids on the straight and narrow, and not lose them to the streets, which was next to impossible. For Ma—every kid’s Ma—was Ireland, or Italy, or Germany; Ma was the old ways that had done the likes of us such dirt that we had to flee them. So we fled her, because what else could we do?
And All the Saints Page 1