Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  “He’s in a nursing home now,” Martin said of his father. “Pretty senile, but he has his moments when a good deal of it comes back. Those are the worst times.”

  “That’s how it goes,” Francis said.

  “For some people.”

  “Yeah. Some don’t get that far.”

  “I have the feeling I ought to do something for you, Fran,” Martin said. “Something besides a pack of cigarettes and a glass of soda. Why do I feel that?”

  “Damned if I know, Martin. Nothing I want out of you.”

  “Well, I’m around. I’m in the book, up on Main Street in the North End now. And you can always leave a message at the Times-Union.”

  “Okay, Martin, and thanks for that,” and Francis extended his right hand, which was missing two joints on the index finger. He will throw no more baseballs. Martin shook the hand and its stumpy digit.

  “Don’t blow any whistles on me, Martin. I don’t need that kind of scene.”

  “It’s your life,” Martin said, but even as he said it he was adding silently: but not entirely yours. Life hardly goes by ones.

  Martin bought an Armstrong at Jerry’s newsroom, just up from the paper, and then an egg sandwich and coffee to go at Farrell’s lunchroom, three doors down, and with breakfast and horses in hand he crossed Beaver Street, climbed the paintless, gray, footworn, and crooked staircase to the Times-Union city room, and settled in at his desk, a bruised oak antique at which the Albany contemporaries of Mark Twain might have worked. Across the room Joe Leahy, the only other citizen on duty and a squeaker of a kid, was opening mail at the city desk and tending the early phone. The only other life sign was the clacking of the Associated Press and International News Service teletypes, plus the Hearst wire, which carried the words of The Chief: editorials, advisories, exclusive stories on Marion Davies.

  Martin never looked at the machine without remembering the night Willie Powers, the night slot man, went to lunch and came back pickled, then failed to notice an advisory that The Chief was changing his front-page editorial on Roosevelt, changing it drastically from soft- to hard-line antipathy, for the following day. Willie failed to notice not only the advisory but also the editorial which followed it, and so the Times-Union the next morning carried The Chief’s qualified praise of F.D.R., while the rest of the Hearst press across the nation carried The Chief’s virulent attack on the president, his ancestors, his wife, his children, his dog.

  There is no record of Hearst’s ever having visited the Times-Union city room, but a week later, during a stopover at the Albany station on the Twentieth Century, The Chief received Emory Jones, who presented him with the day’s final edition, an especially handsome, newsy product by local standards. The Chief looked at the paper, then without a word let it fall to the floor of his private compartment, and jumped up and down on it with both feet until Emory fled in terror.

  Martin fished up salt, pepper, saccharin, and spoon to garnish his sandwich and coffee and, as he ate, studied the entries in the Armstrong. There in the third at Laurel loomed a hunch, if ever a hunch there was: Charley Horse, seven-to-one on the morning line. He circled it, uncradled the phone receiver and dialed the operator: Madge, lively crone.

  “Any messages for me, kiddo?”

  “Who’d call you, you old bastard? Wait while I look. Yes, Chick Phelan called. Not that long ago. He didn’t leave a number.”

  “You heard from Emory? He coming in?”

  “Not a word from him.”

  “Then give me a line.”

  Martin dialed home and told Mary the news and swore her to secrecy. Then he called Chick’s home. The phone rang but nobody answered. He dialed the home of Emory Jones, the Welsh rarebit, the boss of bosses, editor of editors, a heroic Hearstian for almost as many years as Hearst had owned newspapers, a man who lived and died for the big story, who coveted the Pulitzer Prize he would never win and hooted the boot-lickers and eggsuckers who waltzed off with it year after year. Martin would now bring him the word on the Charlie Boy story, fracture his morning serenity.

  Martin remembered the last big Albany story, the night word arrived that a local man wanted for a triple murder in Canada would probably try to return to the U.S. Which border crossing he had in mind was uncertain, so Em Jones studied the map and decided the fellow would cross at Montreal. But on the off chance he would go elsewhere Emory also alerted border police at Niagara Falls, Baudette, Minnesota, and Blaine, Washington, to our man perhaps en route. When the four calls were made Emory sat down at the city desk, lit up a stogie, and propped up his feet to wait for the capture. We got him surrounded, he said.

  “Em, that you?”

  “Ynnnnnh.”

  “I’ve got a bit of news.”

  “Ynnnh.”

  “Charlie McCall was kidnapped during the night.”

  Emory yawned. “You drunken son of a bitch.”

  “I’m not drunk, nor have I been, nor will I be.”

  “Then you mean it? You mean it?” Emory stood up. Even through the telephone, Martin observed that.

  “I just left Patsy and Matt, and Maloney too, all at Patsy’s house, and I pledged in your name we wouldn’t run a story on it.”

  “Now I know you’re lying.” Emory sat down.

  “Emory, you better get down here. This town is getting ready to turn itself inside out.”

  The editor of editors fell silent.

  “You really do mean it?”

  “Whoever grabbed Charlie meant it, too.”

  “But you didn’t tell Patsy that about no story. You wouldn’t say that.”

  “I did.”

  “You needle-brained meathead. What in the sweet Christ’s name possessed you?”

  “My Celtic wisdom.”

  “Your Celtic ass is right between your eyes, that’s your wisdom. I’m coming down. And you better figure a way to undo that pledge, for your own sake. And this better be real. Is it real?”

  “Em, are your teeth real?”

  “Half and half.”

  “Then Em, this story is even more real than your teeth.”

  Martin found two more Chuck and Charlie horses in the Armstrong, checked his wallet, and lumped all but his last ten on the bunch, across the board, plus a parlay. Never a hunch like this one. He called the bets in to Billy Phelan, the opening move in his effort to bring Billy into the McCall camp, not that Billy would require much persuasion. Billy was a Colonie Streeter, was he not? Grew up three doors up from Patsy and next door to Bindy, knew Charlie Boy all his life. But Billy was an odd duck, a loner, you bet, erratic in a way Martin was not. Billy was self-possessed, even as a boy, but then again he had to be, did he not? Fatherless from age nine, when Francis Phelan left home, left wife, son, and daughter forever, or at least until this morning.

  Martin’s problem was similar, but turned inside out: too much father, too much influence, too much fame, too much scandal, but also too much absence as the great man pursued his greatness. And these, my friends, are forces that deprived a young man of self-possession and defined his life as a question mark, unlike Billy Phelan’s forces, which defined his life as an exclamation point.

  When his bets were made Martin swallowed the last of his coffee and went to the morgue and pulled all files on the McCalls. They should have had a file cabinet to themselves, given the coverage of their lives through the years, but thieves walked abroad. No clips remained of Patsy’s victory in 1919, or even of the Democratic sweep of the city in 1921. Stories on the 1931 legislative probe into the city’s assessment racket were gone. So were all reports on Patsy’s doing six months for contempt in the baseball-pool scandal.

  This was historical revisionism through burglary. Had freelancers looking for yet another magazine piece on the notorious McCalls done the filching? Or was it McCall loyalist reporters, who doubled on the city payroll as sidewalk inspectors? The lightfingering effectively kept past history out of the ready reach of reform-minded newsmen, or others snooping on behalf of u
plift: Tom Dewey, the redoubtable D.A., for instance, who was making noises like a governor: Elect me, folks, and I’ll send the McCall bunch swirling down the sinkhole of their own oily unguents.

  Joe Leahy saw Martin shuffling through the McCall files and wondered aloud, “What’s up with them?”

  “Ahh,” said Martin with theatrical weariness, “a backgrounder on them and the A.L.P Big power move that comes to a head tonight when the enrollment figures come in.”

  “The McCalls taking on the reds? Can they really do it?”

  “The power of prayer is with them. The bishop’s behind Patsy all the way.”

  “You writing something for the first edition?”

  “Nothing for the first. When it happens, it happens.”

  Martin turned back to the folders and Leahy walked off, a good Catholic boy who loved Franco and hated the reds. Untrustworthy with anything meaningful. Martin leafed through the Charlie Boy file, all innocuous stuff. Promoted to major in the National Guard. Engaged to sweet-faced Patricia Brennan. Initiated into the B.P.O.E. lodge number forty-nine. Named vice-president of the family brewery. Shown visiting Jimmy Braddock in his dressing room in Chicago before the fight with Joe Louis. Shown with his favorite riding horse, a thoroughbred named Macushla, birthday gift from Uncle Patsy of political fame, who keeps horses on a small Virginia farm.

  Charlie was pudgy, the face of a smiling marshmallow on the torso of a left tackle. There he stood in his major’s suit, all Sam Browne and no wrinkles. Where are you this minute, Charlie Boy? Tied to a bed? Gun at your brain? How much do they say your life is worth? Have they already killed you?

  Martin remembered Charlie’s confirmation, the boy kissing the bishop’s ring; then at the party Bindy gave afterward at the Hampton Hotel, the bishop kissing Bindy’s foot. That was the year the McCalls all but donated the old city almshouse to the Catholic diocese as a site for the new Christian Brothers Academy, the military high school where Charlie would become a cadet captain. Martin’s wife, Maire, now called Mary, a third or maybe fourth cousin to Bindy’s wife, sang “Come Back to Erin” at the confirmation party, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Dillon, the organist at St. Joseph’s Church, whose son was simple-minded. And Mary, when the bishop congratulated her on her voice and parted her on the hand, felt fully at home in America for the first time since Martin had snatched her away from Ireland.

  Martin’s recollection of Charlie Boy on that afternoon was obscured by memories of Bindy and Patsy and Matt, whom he saw yet at a table in a far corner, objects of veneration, Albany’s own Trinity.

  The perils of being born, like himself, to a man of such fame and notoriety sent Martin into commiseration with Charlie. Bindy was an eminence, the power on the street. “Celebrated sporting figure” and “a member of the downtown fraternity” was as far as the papers ever went by way of identifying him. Cautious journalism. No one mentioned his direct power over the city’s illegal gambling. No editor would let a writer write it. It was the received wisdom that no one minds the elephant in the parlor if nobody mentions it’s there. Martin’s own decision to tell Patsy there would be no story on the kidnapping: Was that conspiratorial genuflection? No end to the veneration of power, for the news is out: The McCalls hurl thunderbolts when affronted.

  The memory of their confrontation with The Albany Sentinel was still fresh. The Sentinel had prospered as an opposition voice to the McCalls in the early days of the machine, but its success was due less to its political point of view than to the gossip it carried. In 1925 the paper dredged up “The Love Nest Tragedy of 1908” involving Edward Daugherty and Melissa Spencer, purporting to have discovered two dozen torchy love letters from the famous playwright to the now beloved star of the silent screen. The letters were crude forgeries and Melissa ignored them. But Edward Daugherty halted their publication with an injunction and a libel suit. Patsy McCall saw to it that the judge in the case was attuned to the local realities, saw to it also that a hand-picked jury gave proper consideration to Patsy’s former Colonie Street neighbor. The Sentinel publicly admitted the forgery and paid nominal libel damages. But it then found its advertisers withdrawing en masse and its tax assessment quintupled. Within a month the ragbag sons of bitches closed up shop and left town, and moral serenity returned to Albany as McCall Democracy won the day.

  “Aren’t you a little early this morning?”

  Marlene Whiteson, a reporter whose stories were so sugary that you risked diabetic coma if you read them regularly, stood in front of Martin’s desk, inside her unnecessary girdle, oozing even at this hour the desire but not quite the will, never quite the will, to shed those restrictive stays, leap onto the desk, and do a goat dance with him, or with anyone. But Marlene was an illusionist, her sexuality the disappearing rabbit: Now you see it, now you don’t. Reach out to touch and find it gone, back inside her hat. The city room was full of hopefuls, ready to do Marlene, but as far as Martin knew, he himself came closest to trapping the rabbit on a night six years past when both of them worked late and he drove her home, circuitously. Need one explain why he stopped the car, stroked her cheek? She volunteered a small gift of smooch and said into his ear, Oh, Martin, you’re the man I’d like to go to Pago Pago with. Whereupon he reached for her portions, only to be pushed away, while she continued nevertheless with bottomless smooch. Twist my tongue but stroke me never. Oh the anomaly. Coquettes of the world, disband; you have nothing to gain but saliva.

  “What goodies do you have for us today?” Martin asked her.

  “I have a message for you, as a matter of fact. Did you see this morning’s paper?”

  “I was just about to crack it.”

  “I have a story in about Melissa Spencer. She sends you greetings and hopes she gets a chance to see you. She also asked about your father.”

  “Ah. And is she well?”

  “She looks absolutely gorgeous. For forty-nine. She is some sexy dame.”

  “How long will she be here?”

  “Just a week.”

  Martin knew that. He had known for weeks she was starring in the touring production of his father’s great work, The Flaming Corsage, the play Edward Daugherty had written in order to transform his melodramatic scandal with Melissa and her jealous lesbian lover, and the consequent destruction of his career and his wife, into anguished theatrical harmony. He used both Martin’s mother, Katrina, and the young Melissa as models for the two principal women in the play, and, not unnaturally, Melissa, as a young actress, yearned to incarnate the role she had inspired in life.

  Now, at forty-nine, no longer disguisable as the pristine Melissa of 1908, she was appearing in the play for the first time, but as the hero’s reclusive, middle-aged wife. The casting, the result of assiduous pursuit of the part by Melissa herself, had the quality of aged perfume about it: yesterday’s scarlet tragedy revived for an audience which no longer remembered this flaming, bygone sin, but for whom the reversal of roles by the famed Melissa was still quaintly scandalous. Melissa had acted in the play for six months on Broadway before taking it on the road, her comeback after a decade of invisibility: one of the most animatedly lovely stars of the silent screen back once more in the American embrace, this time visible, all but palpable, in the flesh.

  “She really is interested in seeing you,” Marlene said, opening the morning paper to her interview with Melissa and spreading it on Martin’s desk. “She’s keeping a ticket in your name at the box office, and she wants you to go backstage after the curtain.” Marlene smiled and raised her sexual eyebrow. “You devil,” she said, moving away from Martin’s desk.

  Martin barely managed a smile for the world champion of sexual fatuity. How surprised she would be at what Melissa could do with the same anatomical gifts as her own. He looked at Melissa’s photo in the paper and saw Marlene was right. Melissa was still beautiful. When time descends, the ego forfends. But Martin could not read her story now. Too distracted to resurrect old shame, old pleasure. But Martin, you will go backsta
ge one night this week, will you not? He conjured the vision of the naked, spread-eagled Melissa and his phone rang. Chick Phelan on the line.

  “I saw you go in across the street, Martin. What’d they say?”

  “Not much except to confirm what you said.”

  “Now they’ve cut off all the phones on the block. I’m in Tony Looby’s store down on Pearl Street.”

  Chick, the snoop, grateful to Martin for introducing him to Evelyn Hurley, the love of his life, whom he is incapable of marrying. Chick will reciprocate the favor as long as love lasts.

  “They probably don’t want any busybodies monitoring their moves and spreading the word all over town. Anything else going on?”

  “People coming in here know something’s up but they don’t know what.”

  “Just keep what you know under your hat, Chickie, for Charlie’s sake as well as your own. My guess is they’re afraid for his life. And keep me posted.”

  Martin called Walter Bradley, the Albany police chief.

  “Walter, I hear the phones are out on Colonie Street.”

  “What’s that to me? Call the phone company.”

  “We’ve been told, Walter, that something happened to Charlie McCall. I figured you’d know about it.”

  “Charlie? I don’t know anything about that at all. I’m sure Patsy’d tell me if something was going on. I talk to Patsy every morning.”

  “I talked to him myself just a while ago, Walter. And you say there’s nothing new? No kidnapping for instance?”

  “No, no, no, no kidnapping, for chrissake, Martin. No kidnapping, nothing. Nothing at all. Everything’s quiet and let’s keep it that way.”

  “You get any other calls about Charlie?”

  “No, goddamn it, no. I said nothing’s going on and that’s all there is to it. Now I’m busy, Martin.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Walter.”

  In minutes Martin’s phone rang again, Freddie Dunsbach of the United Press.

  “Martin, we’ve had a tip Patsy McCall’s nephew was kidnapped.”

  “Is that so?”