Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  “Then thanks for nothing,” said Martin.

  The cronies, Poop Powell, an ex-hurley player and ex-cop who drove for the McCalls, and Freddie Gallagher, a childhood pal of Mart’s who found that this friendship alone was the secret of survival in the world, rose from the table and went into the parlor without a word or a nod. Martin sat in a vacated chair and said to Patsy, “There’s something tough going on, I understand.”

  “No, nothing,” said Patsy.

  The McCalls’ faces were abulge with uncompromising gravity. For all their power they seemed suddenly powerless confronting personal loss. But many men had passed into oblivion for misjudging the McCalls’ way with power. Patsy demonstrated it first in 1919 when he campaigned in his sailor suit for the post of city assessor and won, oh wondrous victory. It was the wedge which broke the hold the dirty black Republican sons of bitches had had on the city since ’99. Into the chink Patsy made in the old machine, the Democrats, two years later, drove a new machine, the Nonesuch, with the McCalls at the wheel: Patsy, the savior, the sine qua non, becoming the party leader and patron; Matt, the lawyer, becoming the political strategist and spokesman; and Benjamin, called Bindy, the sport, taking over as Mayor of Nighttime City.

  The three brothers, in an alliance with a handful of Protestant Yankee aristocrats who ran the formal business of the city, developed a stupendous omnipotence over both county and city, which vibrated power strings even to the White House. Democratic aspirants made indispensable quadrennial pilgrimages to genuflect in the McCall cathedral and plead for support. The machine brushed the lives of every Albany citizen from diapers to dotage. George Quinn often talked of the day he leaped off the train at Van Woert Street, coming back in uniform from France, and was asked for five dollars by John Kelleher on behalf of Patsy’s campaign for the assessorship. George gave not five but fifteen and had that to brag about for the rest of his life.

  “I have to say it,” Martin said, looking at Patsy, his closest friend among the brothers. “There’s a rumor around that Charlie was kidnapped last night.”

  The gravity of the faces did not change, nor did the noncommittal expressions.

  “Nothing to that,” said Matt, a tall, solid man, still looking like the fullback he once was, never a puffball; handsome and with a movie actor’s crop of black hair. When he gained power, Matt put his college football coach on the Supreme Court bench.

  “Is Charlie here?” Martin asked him.

  “He went to New York,” Matt said.

  “When was that?”

  “None of your goddamn business,” said Patsy.

  “Patsy, listen. I’m telling you the rumor is out. If it’s fake and you don’t squelch it, you’ll have reporters crawling in the windows.”

  “Not these windows I won’t. And why should I deny something that hasn’t happened? What the hell do you think I am, a goddamn fool?”

  The rising anger. Familiar. The man was a paragon of wrath when cornered. Unreason itself. He put Jigger Begley in tears for coming drunk to a rally, and a week later Jigger, Patsy’s lifelong friend, quit his job in the soap factory, moved to Cleveland, and for all anybody knew was there yet. Power in the voice.

  Martin’s personal view was this: that I do not fear the McCalls; that this is my town as much as theirs and I won’t leave it for any of them. Martin had committed himself to Albany in part because of the McCalls, because of the promise of a city run by his childhood friends. But he’d also come back to his native city in 1921, after two years with the A.E.F. and a year and a half in Ireland and England after that, because he sensed he would be nothing without his roots, and when, in 1922, he was certain of this truth he went back to Ireland and brought Maire Kiley out of her Gaelic wilderness in Carraroe, married her in Galway, and came to Albany forever, or at least sixteen years now seemed like forever. So to hell with Patsy and his mouth and the whole bunch of them and their power. Martin Daugherty’s complacency is superior to whatever abstract whip they hold over him. But then again, old fellow, there’s no need to make enemies needlessly, or to let the tone of a man’s voice turn your head.

  “One question then,” Martin said with his mildest voice, “and then I’m done with questions.”

  The brothers waited solemnly.

  “Is Bindy in town?”

  “He’s in Baltimore,” said Matt. “At the races with his wife.”

  Martin nodded, waited, then said, “Patsy, Matt. You say there’s nothing going on and I have to accept that, even though Maloney looks like he’s about to have twins on the stair carpet. But very obviously something is happening, and you don’t want it out. All right, so be it. I give you my word, and I pledge Em Jones’s word, that the Times-Union will not print a line about this thing, whatever it is. Not the rumor, not the denial of the rumor, not any speculation. We will not mention Charlie, or Bindy, or either of you in any context other than conventional history, until you give the go-ahead. I don’t break confidences without good reason and you both know that about me all my life. And I’ll tell you one more thing. Emory will do anything in his power to put the newspaper behind you in any situation such as the hypothetical one we’ve not been discussing here. I repeat. Not discussing. Under no circumstances have we been discussing anything here this morning. But if the paper can do anything at all, then it will. I pledge that as true as I stand here talking about nothing whatsoever.”

  The faces remained grave. Then Patsy’s mouth wrinkled sideways into the makings of a small grin.

  “You’re all right, Martin,” he said. “For a North Ender.”

  Martin stood and shook Mart’s hand, then Patsy’s.

  “If anything should come up we’ll let you know,” Matt said. “And thanks.”

  “It’s what’s right,” Martin said, standing up, thinking: I’ve still got the gift of tongues. For it was as true as love that by talking a bit of gibberish he had verified, beyond doubt, that Charlie Boy McCall had, indeed, been grabbed.

  “You know I saw Charlie last night down at the Downtown alleys. We were there when Scotty Streck dropped dead. I suppose you know about that one.”

  “We knew he was there,” Patsy said. “We didn’t know who else.”

  “We’re working on that,” Matt said.

  “I can tell you who was there to the man,” Martin said, and he ticked off names of all present except the sweeper and one bar customer, whom he identified by looks. Matt made notes on it all.

  “What was Berman doing there?” Patsy asked.

  “I don’t know. He just turned up at the bar.”

  “Was he there before Charlie got there?”

  “I can’t be sure of that.”

  “Do you think he knew Charlie would be at the alleys?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Do you know Berman?”

  “I’ve been in his company, but we’re not close.”

  “Who is close to him?”

  Martin shook his head, thinking of faces but connecting no one intimately to the man. Then he said, “Billy Phelan seems to know him. Berman backed him in last night’s match and did the same once before, when Billy played pool. He seems to like Billy.”

  “Do you trust Phelan?” Matt asked.

  “No man in his right mind would trust him with his woman, but otherwise he’s as good as gold, solid as they come.”

  “We want to keep tabs on that Berman fellow,” Patsy said.

  “You think he’s connected to this situation?” and both Patsy and Matt shrugged without incriminating Berman, but clearly admitting there certainly was a situation.

  “We’re keeping tabs on a lot of people,” Patsy said. “Can you ask young Phelan to hang around a while with Berman, the next few days, say, and let us know where he goes and what he says?”

  “Ahhhhh,” said Martin, “that’s tricky but I guess I can ask.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll do it?”

  “I wouldn’t know, but it is touchy. Being an informer’s not Billy�
��s style.”

  “Informer?” said Patsy, bristling.

  “It’s how he might look at it.”

  “That’s not how I look at it.”

  “I’ll ask him,” Martin said. “I can certainly ask him.”

  “We’ll take good care of him if he helps us,” Matt said. “He can count on that.”

  “I don’t think he’s after that either.”

  “Everybody’s after that,” Patsy said.

  “Billy’s headstrong,” Martin said, standing up.

  “So am I,” said Patsy. “Keep in touch.”

  “Bulldogs,” said Martin.

  Martin drove downtown and parked on Broadway near the Plaza, as usual, and headed, he thought, for the Times-Union. But instead of turning up Beaver Street, he walked south on Broadway, all the way to Madison Avenue. He turned up Madison, realizing then that he was bound for Spanish George’s bar. He had no urge to drink and certainly no reason to confront either George or any of his customers, especially at this hour. George, notorious in the city’s South End, ran a bar and flophouse in Shanks’s old three-story livery stable. He had come to America from Spain to build the Barge Canal and stayed on to establish an empire in the dregs, where winos paid to collapse on his cots after they had all but croaked on his wine.

  The sour air assaulted Martin as he stepped inside the bar, but he understood the impulse that was on him and did not retreat. His will seemed unfettered, yet somehow suspended. He knew he was obeying something other than will and that it might, or might not, reveal its purpose. In the years when this came as a regular impulse, he often found himself sitting in churches, standing in front of grocery stores, or riding trolleys, waiting for revelation. But the trolley often reached the end of the line and took him back to his starting point without producing an encounter, and he would resume the previous path of his day, feeling duped by useless caprice. Yet the encounters which did prove meaningful, or even prophetic of disaster or good fortune, were of such weight that he could not help but follow the impulse once he recognized it for what it was. He came to believe that the useless journeys did not arise from the same source as those with genuine meaning, but were rather his misreadings of his own mood, his own imagination, a duping of self with counterfeit expectations. Five such fruitless trips in four days after his debauch made him aware his gift had fled. Now, as he gagged on the wine-pukish rancidity of George’s, on the dead-rat stink and the vile-body decay that entered your system with every breath, he was certain that the impulse was the same as it had always been, whether true or false; and what he was doing was giving his mystical renewal a chance to prove itself. He ordered a bottle of beer and when George was looking elsewhere he wiped its neck clean with his handkerchief and drank from the bottle.

  “I don’t see you too much,” George said to him.

  George was, as usual, wearing his filthy sombrero and his six-gun in the embroidered leather holster, and looked very like a Mexican bandido. The gun, presumably, was not loaded, or so the police had ordered. But any wino aggressive on muscatel could not be so sure of that, and so George, by force of costume alone, maintained order on his premises.

  “That’s true, George,” Martin said. “I keep pretty busy uptown. Not much on this edge of things lately.”

  “I see you writing in the paper.”

  “Still at it. Right you are.”

  “You never write me a story any more.”

  “I’ve done you, George, again and again. You’ve ceased to be newsy. If you decide to renovate the premises and put in a bridal suite, then maybe I’ll work up a story.”

  “No money in that stuff.”

  “You’re probably right. Honeymooners are bum spenders. But business is good, I suppose?”

  “Always lousy. You like a sandwich? Fry an egg for you?”

  “I just had breakfast, thanks. The beer is fine.”

  “Okay,” George said, and he pushed Martin’s dollar back to him.

  Martin sensed a presence then and looked toward the door to see a tall, shambling man in a suit coat of brown twill, collar up, lighting a cigarette as he moved toward the bar. Despite what the years had done to the man, Martin instantly recognized Francis Phelan, Billy’s father, and he knew his own presence here had a purpose. Forced confluence of Martin and the Phelans: Billy and Chick, now Francis, and yet more than that. The McCalls were part of it. And Martin’s father, too, in his bed of senility; and Melissa, in town in the old man’s play. A labyrinth.

  “Francis,” said Martin, and Francis turned and squinted through half-waking eyes, pitiable visage. Martin vividly remembered the original: Franny Phelan: Albany’s best-known ball player in his time. And he remembered too the dreadful day in 1901 when the scabs and the militia were trying to drive a single trolley through a mob on Broadway in front of Union Station, and Franny, in front of the Railroad YMCA, hurling a smooth round stone like a fast ball, and laying open the skull of the scab conductor. The militia fired wildly into the crowd as other stones flew, and in retaliation for the dead scab, two men who had nothing to do with the violence, a businessman and a shopper, were shot dead. And Franny became a fugitive, his exile proving to be the compost for his talent. He fled west, using an alias, and got a job in Dayton playing pro ball. When he came home again to live, he returned to life on the road every summer for years, the last three as a big leaguer with Washington. Franny Phelan, a razzmatazz third baseman, maestro of the hidden ball trick.

  Such a long time ago. And now Franny is back, the bloom of drink in every pore, the flesh ready to bleed through the sheerest of skin. He puffed his cigarette, dropped the lit match to the floor, inhaled, and then looked searchingly at Martin, who followed the progress of the match, watched its flame slowly burn out on the grease of George’s floor.

  “Ah, how are you, Martin?” Francis said.

  “I’m well enough, Fran, and how are you keeping yourself?”

  “Keeping?” He smiled. “Orange soda, with ice,” he told George.

  “What color orange has your money got?” George said.

  “Take it here,” said Martin, pushing the dollar back to George. And George then poured Francis a glass of soda over ice, a jelly glass with a ridged rim.

  “It’s been years,” Martin said. “Years and years.”

  “I guess so,” said Francis. He sipped the soda, once, twice. “Goddamn throat’s burning up.” He raised the glass. “Cheers.”

  “To you,” Martin said, raising the bottle, “back in Albany.”

  “I only came to vote,” said Francis, smiling.

  “To vote?”

  “To register. They still pay for that here, don’t they?”

  “Ah, yes, of course. I understand. Yes, I believe they do.”

  “I did it before. Registered fourteen times one year. Twenty-eight bucks.”

  “The price is up to five now. It must’ve been a long while ago you did that.”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember much of anything anymore.”

  “How long has it been? Twenty years, it must be.”

  “Twenty-two. I do remember that. Nineteen-sixteen.”

  “Twenty-two years. You see the family?”

  “No, I don’t go through that business.”

  “I talked to Chick this morning.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “Well, I always get along pretty well with him. And he always thought well of you.”

  “Fuck ’em all.”

  “You don’t see your kids either?”

  “No, I don’t see nobody.” He sipped the soda. “You see the boy?”

  “Quite often. He’s a first-rate citizen, and good looking, with some of your features. I was with him last night. He bowled two-ninety-nine in a match game.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to see him? I could set that up.”

  “No, hell no. None of that old shit. That’s old shit. I’m out of it, Martin. Don’t do nothin’ like that to me.”

&n
bsp; “If you say so.”

  “Yeah, I do. No percentage in that.”

  “You here for a while?”

  “No, passing through, that’s all. Get the money and get gone.”

  “Very strange development, running into you here. Anything I can do for you, Franny?” Franny, the public name. What a hell of a ball player, gone to hell.

  “I could use a pack of smokes.”

  “What’s your brand?”

  Francis snorted. “Old Golds. Why not?”

  Martin pushed a quarter at George and George fished for the cigarettes and bounced them on the bar in front of Francis.

  “That’s two I owe you, Martin. What’re you doin’ for yourself?”

  “I write for the morning paper, a daily column.”

  “A writer like your father.”

  “No, not like that. Not anything like that. Just a column.”

  “You were always a smart kid. You always wrote something. Your father still alive?”

  “Oh yes,” and ancient times rolled back, the years before and after the turn of the century when the Phelans and Daughertys were next-door neighbors and Martin’s mother was alive in her eccentric isolation. Francis was the handyman who fixed whatever went wrong in the Daugherty home, Edward Daugherty cosmically beyond manual labor, Martin a boyish student of Francis’s carpentry skills as he put on the new roof or enlarged the barn to house two carriages instead of one. He was installing a new railing on the back stoop the summer morning Martin’s mother came down that same stoop naked, bound for the carriage barn with her shopping bag. Francis wrapped her in a piece of awning and walked her back into the house, the first indication to anyone except Edward Daugherty that something was distracting her.

  Edward Daugherty used Francis as the prototype for the fugitive hero in his play about the trolley strike, The Car Barns, in which heroic Francis, the scab-killer, was immortalized. Legends and destinies worked out over the back fence. Or over a beer and an orange soda.