Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  You couldn’t shut them up once they got going, said Martin.

  Balance: that was what he wanted to induce in Peter. Be reverent also in the presence of the absence of God.

  “I just don’t want them to drown him in their holy water,” Martin said to Mary Daugherty. “And I don’t want him to be afraid to tell them to shove their incense up their chalices if he feels like coming home. There’ll be none of that failed priest business in this house the way it was with Chickie Phelan.” (And Martin then sensed, unreasonably, that Chick would call him on the telephone, soon; perhaps this morning.) “His mother and sisters wanted Chick to bring a little bit of heaven into the back parlor, and when he couldn’t do it, they never forgave him. And another thing. I always wanted Peter to grow up here, grow up and beget. I don’t want to see the end of the Daughertys after the trouble of centuries took us this far.”

  “You want another Daugherty? Another son? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

  “It’s that I hate to see the end of a line. Any line. Think of all the Daughertys back beyond Patrick. Pirates stole him you know, made him a slave. That’s how he got into the saint business.”

  “Ah,” said Mary, “you’re a talky man.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you through now?”

  “I am.”

  “Why don’t you be talky like that with the boy?”

  “I was.”

  “You told him all that?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then?” said the wife and mother of the family. “Well?”

  “Just about right,” said Martin.

  The talk had calmed him, and real and present things took his attention: his wife and her behind, jiggling while she stirred the eggs. Those splendid puffs of Irish history, those sweet curves of the Western world, sloping imagistically toward him: roundaceous beneath the black and yellow kimono he’d given her for the New York vacation. The memory of coupling in their stateroom on the night boat, the memory of their most recent coupling—was it three, four days ago?—suggested to Martin that screwing your wife is like striking out the pitcher. Martin’s attitude, however, was that there was little point in screwing anyone else. Was this a moralistic judgment because of his trauma with Melissa Spencer, or merely an apology for apathetic constancy? Melissa in his mind again. She would be in town now with the pseudoscandalous show. She would not call him. He would not call her. Yet he felt they would very probably meet.

  The phone rang and Miss Irish Ass of 1919 callipygiated across the room and answered it. “Oh yes, yes, Chick, he’s here, yes. Imagine that, and he was just talking about you.”

  “Well, Chickie,” said Martin, “are you ready for the big move today? Is your pencil sharpened?”

  “Something big, Martin, really big.”

  “Big enough,” said Martin; for Chick had been the first to reveal to him the plan concocted by Patsy McCall, leader of the Albany Democratic Party, to take control of the American Labor Party’s local wing on this, the final day of voter registration. Loyal Democrats, of which Chick was one, would register A.L.P, infiltrate the ranks, and push out the vile Bolsheviks and godless socialists who stank up the city with their radical ways. Patsy McCall and his Democrats would save the city from the red stink.

  “No, Martin, it’s not that,” Chick said. “It’s Charlie Boy. The police are next door, and Maloney too. Him and half the damn McCall family’s been coming and going over here all night long. He’s gone, Martin. Charlie’s gone. I think they grabbed him.”

  “Grabbed him?”

  “Kidnapped. They’ve been using the phone here since four-thirty this morning. A regular parade. They’ll be back, I know it, but you’re the one should know about this. I owe you that.”

  “Are you sure of this, Chickie?”

  “They’re on the way back now. I see Maloney coming down their stoop. Martin, they took Charlie out of his car about four o’clock this morning. His mother got up in the night and saw the car door wide open and nobody inside. A bunch of cigarettes on the running board. And he’s gone. I heard them say that. Now, you don’t know nothing from here, don’t you know, and say a prayer for the boy, Martin, say a prayer. Oh Jesus, the things that go on.”

  And Chick hung up.

  Martin looked at the kitchen wall, dirty tan, needing paint. Shabby wall. Shabby story. Charlie Boy taken. The loss, the theft of children. Charlie was hardly a child, yet his father, Bindy McCall, would still think of him as one.

  “What was that?” Mary asked.

  “Just some talk about a story.”

  “Who or what was grabbed? I heard you say grabbed.”

  “You’re fond of that word, are you?”

  “It’s got a bit of a ring to it.”

  “You don’t have to wait for a ring to get grabbed.”

  “I knew that good and early, thanks be to God.”

  And then, Martin grabbed the queenly rump he had lived with for sixteen years, massaged it through the kimono, and walked quickly out of the kitchen to his study. He sat in the reading rocker alongside a stack of Albany newspapers taller than a small boy, and reached for the phone. Already he could see the front pages, the splash, boom, bang, the sad, sad whoopee of the headlines. The extras. The photos. These are the McCall brothers. Here a recap of their extraordinary control of Albany for seventeen years. Here their simple homes. And now this. Here Charlie Boy’s car. Here the spot where. Here the running board where the cigarettes fell. Here some famous kidnappings. Wheeeeee.

  Martin dialed.

  “Yeah,” said Patsy McCall’s unmistakable sandpaper voice box after the phone rang once.

  “Martin Daugherty, Patsy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hear there’s been some trouble.”

  Silence.

  “Is that right or wrong?”

  “No trouble here.”

  “I hear there’s a lot of activity over at your place and that maybe something bad happened.”

  Silence.

  “Is that right or wrong, Patsy?”

  “No trouble here.”

  “Are you going to be there a while? All right if I come down?”

  “Come down if you like, Martin. Bulldogs wouldn’t keep the likes of you off the stoop.”

  “That’s right, Patsy. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Ten.”

  “There’s nothing going on here.”

  “Right, Patsy, see you in a little while.”

  “Don’t bring nobody.”

  In his bedroom, moving at full speed, Martin took off his blue flannel bathrobe, spotted with egg drippings and coffee dribbles, pulled on his pants over the underwear he’d slept in and decided not to tell his wife the news. She was a remote cousin to Charlie’s mother and would want to lend whatever strength she had to the troubled family, a surge of good will that would now be intrusive.

  The McCalls’ loss intensified Martin’s own. But where his was merely doleful, theirs was potentially tragic. Trouble. People he knew, sometimes his kin, deeply in trouble, was what had often generated his inexplicable visions. Ten years without this kind of divination, now suddenly back: the certainty Chick would call; the bizarre bedside visitor heralding the unknown; the death of Scotty followed by the kidnapping of Charlie. Coincidental trouble.

  The inexplicable had first appeared a quarter century ago in late October, 1913, when, fresh from a six-month journalistic foray in England and Ireland, Martin found himself in Albany, walking purposefully but against logic north on North Pearl Street, when he should have been walking west on State Street toward the Capitol, where he had an appointment to interview the new governor, a namesake, Martin H. Glynn, an Albany editor, politician, and orator interested in Ireland’s troubles. But a counterimpulse was on him and he continued on Pearl Street to the Pruyn Library, where he saw his cousin, a fireman with steamer eight, sitting on the family wagon, the reins of the old horse sitting loosely on his knees. He was wearing his knitted blue watch cap, a f
amiliar garment to Martin. As their eyes met, the cousin smiled, lifted a pistol from his lap, pointed it at the horse, then turned it to his right temple and pulled the trigger. He died without further ado, leaving the family no explanation for his act, and was smiling still when Martin caught the reins of the startled horse and reached his cousin’s side.

  Nothing like that happened to Martin again until 1925, the year he published his collection of short stories. But he recognized the same irrational impulse when he was drawn, without reason, to visit the lawyer handling his father’s libel suit against an Albany newspaper, which had resurrected the old man’s scandal with Melissa. Martin found the lawyer at home, in robust health, and they talked of Martin’s father, who at that point was living in New York City. Two hours after their talk the lawyer died of a heart attack walking up Maiden Lane, and the task of finding a new lawyer for his father fell to Martin.

  That same year Martin tuned in the radio at mid-morning, an uncharacteristic move, and heard of the sinking of the excursion steamer Sweethearts in the Hudson River below Kingston. He later learned that a girl he once loved had gone down with the boat. He began after this to perceive also things not related to trouble. He foresaw by a week that a Times-Union photographer would win six thousand dollars in the Albany baseball pool. He was off by only one day in his prediction of when his father would win the libel suit. He knew a love affair would develop between his wife’s niece from Galway and an Albany bartender, two months before the niece arrived in Albany. He predicted that on the day of that love’s first bloom it would be raining, a thunderstorm, and so it was.

  Martin’s insights took the shape of crude imagery, like photographs intuited from the radio. He came to consider himself a mystical naturalist, insisting to himself and to others that he did not seriously believe in ghosts, miracles, resurrection, heaven, or hell. He seasoned any account of his beliefs and his bizarre intuition with a remark he credited to his mother: There’s no Santa Claus and there’s no devil. Your father’s both. He dwelled on his visions and found them comforting, even when they were false and led him nowhere and revealed nothing. He felt they put him in touch with life in a way he had never experienced it before, possessor of a power which not even his famous and notorious father, in whose humiliating shadow he had lived all his years, understood. His father was possessed rather by concrete visions of the Irish in the New World, struggling to throw off the filth of poverty, oppression, and degradation, and rising to a higher plane of life, where they would be the equals of all those arrived Americans who manipulated the nation’s power, wealth, and culture. Martin was bored with the yearnings of the immigrant hordes and sought something more abstract: to love oneself and one’s opposite. He preferred personal insight to social justice, though he wrote of both frequently in his column, which was a confusion of radicalism, spiritual exploration, and foolery. He was a comedian who sympathized with Heywood Broun, Tom Mooney, and all Wobblies, who drank champagne with John McCormack, beer with Mencken, went to the track with Damon Runyon, wrote public love letters to Marlene Dietrich whenever her films played Albany, and who viewed America’s detachment from the Spanish Civil War as an exercise in evil by omission.

  He also wrote endlessly on a novel, a work he hoped would convey his version of the meaning of his father’s scandalous life. He had written twelve hundred pages, aspiring to perhaps two hundred or less, and could not finish it. At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He seriously valued almost nothing he wrote, except for the unfinished novel.

  He was viewed by the readers of the Times-Union, which carried his column five days a week, as a mundane poet, a penny-whistle philosopher, a provocative half-radical man nobody had to take seriously, for he wasn’t quite serious about himself. He championed dowsing and ouija boards and sought to rehabilitate Henry James, Sr., the noted Albanian and Swedenborgian. He claimed that men of truest vision were, like James, always considered freaks, and he formed the International Brotherhood of Crackpots by way of giving them a bargaining agent, and attracted two thousand members.

  His column was frequently reprinted nationally, but he chose not to syndicate it, fearing he would lose his strength, which was his Albany constituency, if his subject matter went national. He never wrote of his own gift of foresight.

  The true scope of that gift was known to no one, and only his family and a few friends knew it existed at all. The source of it was wondered at suspiciously by his Irish-born wife, who had been taught in the rocky wastes of Connemara that druids roamed the land, even to this day.

  The gift left Martin in 1928 after his fortieth birthday debauch with Melissa, the actress, his father’s erstwhile mistress, the woman who was the cause of the paternal scandal. Martin returned home from the debauch, stinking of simony, and severely ill with what the family doctor simplistically diagnosed as alcoholic soak. Within a week Martin accurately sensed that his mystical talent was gone. He recuperated from the ensuing depression after a week, but rid himself of the simoniacal stink only when he acceded to his wife’s suggestion, and, after a decade of considering himself not only not a Catholic but not even a Christian, he sought out the priest in the Lithuanian church who spoke and understood English only primitively, uttered a confession of absurd sins (I burned my wife’s toenail parings three times) and then made his Easter Duty at Sacred Heart Church, driving out the odor of simony with ritual sacrilege.

  He shoved his arms into the fresh shirt Mary Daugherty had ironed. A fresh shirt every day, Mary insisted, or you’ll blow us all out the window with the B.O. Martin pushed into his black shoes, gone gray with months of scuffs and the denial of polish, threw a tie once around his neck in a loose knot, and thrust himself into his much abused suit coat. A sughan, Mary said. You’ve made a sughan of it. Ah well, all things come alike to all, the clean and the unclean, the pressed and the unimpressed.

  In the bathroom he brushed away the taste of oatmeal, splashed his face with cold water, flattened his cowlick with the hairbrush, and then salt-stepped down the stairs, saying as he sped through the kitchen: “I’ve got a hell of a story, I think, Mary. I’ll call you.”

  “What about your coffee? What about your eggs?”

  But he was already gone, this aging firefly who never seemed to his wife to have grown up quite like other men, gone on another story.

  Martin Daugherty had once lived in Arbor Hill, where the McCalls and the Phelans lived, but fire destroyed the house of his childhood and adolescence, and the smoke poisoned Katrina Daugherty, his mother, who escaped the flames only to die on the sidewalk of Colonie Street in her husband’s arms, quoting Verlaine to him: “. . . you loved me so!” “Quite likely—I forget.” The fire began in the Christian Brothers School next door, old Brother William turned to a kneeling cinder by the hellish flames. The fire leaped across the alley and consumed the Daugherty house, claiming not only its second victim in Martin’s mother, but also his father’s accumulation of a lifetime of books, papers, and clippings that attested to his fame and infamy, and two unfinished plays. Edward Daugherty left Arbor Hill forever after the fire and moved into the North End of the city, politely evicting the tenants in his own father’s former home on Main Street.

  This was the house Edward Daugherty’s parents had built on the edge of the Erie Canal the year before Martin was born, and had lived in until they died. After Edward’s first stroke, Martin moved into the house also, with his wife and son, to nurse his father back to independence. But the man was never to be well again, and Martin remained in the house even until now, curator of what he had come to call the Daugherty Museum.

  Martin parked his car on Colonie Street in front of the vacant lot where his former home had stood before it burned. He stepp
ed out onto the sidewalk where he’d once pitched pennies and election cards, and the charred roots of his early life moved beneath his feet. Chick Phelan peered out of the upstairs bay window of the house next to the empty lot. Martin did not wave. He looked fleetingly at the outline of the foundation of the old place, slowly being buried by the sod of time.

  Patsy McCall’s house was kitty-corner to the empty lot and Martin crossed the street and climbed the stoop. He, the Phelans, the McCalls (Bindy lived two doors above Patsy), and all the other youths of the street had spent uncountable nights on this stoop, talking, it now seemed, of three subjects: baseball, the inaccessibility of the myriad burgeoning breasts that were poking themselves into the eyeballs and fluid dreams of every boy on the street, and politics: Would you work for Billy Barnes? Never. Packy McCabe? Sure. Who’s the man this election? Did you hear how the Wally-Os stole a ballot box in the Fifth Ward and Corky Ronan chased ’em and got it back and bit off one of their ears?

  Martin looked at his watch: eight thirty-five. He rang the doorbell and Dick Maloney, district attorney of Albany County, a short, squat man with an argumentive mouth, answered.

  “You’re up early, Dick, me boy.”

  “Am I?”

  “Are you in possession of any news?”

  “There’s no news I know of.”

  And Maloney pointed toward the dining room, where Martin found Patsy and Matt McCall, the political leaders of the city and county for seventeen years. Cronies of both brothers sat with them at the huge round table, its white tablecloth soiled with coffee stains and littered with cups, ashes, and butts. On the wall the painted fruit was ripening in the bowl and the folks were still up at Golgotha. Alongside hung framed, autographed photos of Jim Jeffries, Charlie Murphy of Tammany, Al Smith as presidential candidate, and James Oliver Plunkett, who had inscribed the photo with one of his more memorable lines: “Government of the people, by the people who were elected to govern them.”

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Martin said with somber restraint.

  “We’re not offering coffee,” said Patsy, looking his usual, overstuffed self. With his tight haircut, rounded jowls, and steel-rimmed specs, this Irish-American chieftain looked very like a Prussian puffball out of uniform.