Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

by William Kennedy

  “Nngggggnnnhhh,” said Daddy Big.

  The policeman frowned at Martin and got behind the wheel.

  “He don’t have any teeth,” Billy said. Billy found the teeth on the edge of the curb, where a dog was licking the vomit. Billy reached in through the car window and put the teeth in Daddy Big’s shirt pocket. As the crowd moved back toward Martha’s, Martin saw another car pull up behind the police car, Poop Powell at the wheel.

  “Hey, Phelan,” Poop called, and both Billy and Martin then saw Bindy McCall in the front seat alongside Poop. Martin parted Billy gently on the shoulder.

  “You do lead a full life, Billy,” he said.

  Martin sat in Martha’s window looking at Billy standing in the middle of Broadway, his back to traffic, talking into Bindy’s window. The neon sign, which spelled Martha’s name backward, gave off a humming, crackling sound, flaming gas contained, controlled. Martin drank his beer and considered the combustibility of men. Billy on fire going through the emotions of whoring for Bindy when he understood nothing about how it was done. It was not done out of need. It rose out of the talent for assuming the position before whoremongers. Billy lacked such talent. He was so innocent of whoring he could worry over lead slugs.

  Slopie played “Lullaby of Broadway,” a seductive tune. Slopie was now playing in a world never meant to be, a world he couldn’t have imagined when he had both his legs and Bessie on his arm. Yet, he’d arrived here in Martha’s, where Billy and Martin had also arrived. The music brought back Gold Diggers of some year gone. Winnie Shaw singing and dancing the “Lullaby.” Come and dance, said the hoofers, cajoling her, and she danced with them through all those early mornings. Broadway Baby couldn’t sleep till break of dawn, and so she danced, but fled them finally. Please let me rest, she pleaded from her balcony refuge. Dick Powell kissed her through the balcony door, all the hoofers pleading, beckoning. Dance with us, Baby. And they pushed open the door. She backed away from them, back, back, and ooooh, over the railing she went. There goes Broadway Baby, falling, poor Baby, falling, falling, and gone. Good night, Baby.

  Spud, the paper boy, came into Martha’s with a stack of Times-Unions under his right arm, glasses sliding down his nose, cap on, his car running outside behind Bindy’s, with doors open, hundreds more papers on the back seat.

  “Paper,” Martin said. He gave Spud the nickel and turned to the classifieds, found the second code ad. Footers O’Brien was the top name, then Benny Goldberg, who wrote a big numbers book in Albany and whose brother was shot in his Schenectady roadhouse for having five jacks in a house deck. Martin lost patience translating the names in the dim light and turned to the front page. No story on Charlie Boy, but the Vatican was probing a new sale of indulgences in the U.S. And across the top a promotion headline screamed: “Coming Sunday in the Times-Union: How and Why We Piss.”

  Billy went straight to the men’s room when he came back into Martha’s and washed off Daddy Big’s stink. Then he ordered a double scotch and sat down.

  “So I told him about Newark,” he said.

  “You did? Was he pleased?”

  “He wanted more, but I told him straight. I can’t do this no more, Bin. I ain’t cut out to be a squealer.”

  “Did he accept that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why don’t you think so?”

  “Because he says to me, All right, hotshot, you’re all by yourself, and he rolls up the window.”

  Martin, ducking his head, entered the city room at pristine morning. Across the freshly oiled floor, free now from the sea of used paper, shinbone high, that would cover it nine or ten hours hence, he walked softly, playing the intruder, hoping to catch a rat in action. The room was empty except for the clacking, which never deterred the Times-Union’s rats. It was their lullaby They got to be a size, came along a pipe from out back, and ran over the heads of the working stiffs. Benson Hunt, the rewrite man, the star, moved his desk back two feet and never took off his hat again after a three-pounder lost its footing on the pipe and tumbled into his lap. Benson screamed and tipped himself over, breaking a pint of gin in his coat. Martin had no such worries, for no pipes traversed the space over his desk, and he never packed gin. But he too wore his hat to keep his scalp free of the fine rain of lead filings that filtered through the porous ceiling from the composing room overhead.

  Martin paused at the sports desk to read a final edition with the story on the blackout. Some sort of sabotage, perhaps, went one theory; though the power company and the police had no culprits. The darkness blacked out, through most of Albany County, the speech by Thomas E. Dewey, aaaahhh, largely an attack on the McCall machine. Sublime. The speech was reported separately. Political monopoly in Albany. Vicious mess of corruption in the shadow of the Capitol. Vice not fit to discuss on the radio. Politics for profit. Packed grand juries. Tax assessments used to punish enemies. Vote fraud rampant. The arrest only today of several men, one for registering twenty-one times.

  Martin clicked on the drop light over his own desk and prepared to write a column for the Sunday paper, his first since the kidnapping. In the days since Charlie Boy had been taken, Martin stayed busy chronicling the event as he came to know it, for use when the story finally did break. He had filled his regular space in the paper with extra columns he kept in overset for just such distracted times.

  Now he wrote about Billy’s two-ninety-nine game and about Scotty dropping dead. Without malice toward Scotty, he discussed the hex, and Billy’s response to it. He viewed Billy as a strong man, indifferent to luck, a gamester who accepted the rules and played by them, but who also played above them. He wrote of Billy’s disdain of money and viewed Billy as a healthy man without need for artifice or mysticism, a serious fellow who put play in its proper place: an adjunct to breathing and eating.

  By comparison, Martin wrote, I find myself an embarrassed ecclesiarch, a foolish believer in luck, fate, magicians, and divine animals. It would serve me right if I died and went to heaven and found out it was a storefront run by Hungarian palm readers. In the meantime, he concluded, I aspire to the condition of Billy Phelan, and will try to be done mollycoddling my personal spooks.

  It took him half an hour to write the column. He put it in the overnight folder in a drawer of the city desk, ready for noontime scrutiny by Matt Viglucci, the city editor.

  In his mailbox, he found a letter on Ten Eyck Hotel stationery, delivered by hand. Dearest Martin, I missed you at the theater. Do come and call. We have so much to talk about and I have a “gift” for you. Yours always, Melissa.

  A gift, oh yes. Another ticket to lotus land? Or was there mystery lurking in those quotation marks? What son eats the body of his father in the womb of his mother? The priest, of course, devouring the host in the Holy Church. But what son is it that eats the body of his father’s sin in the womb of his father’s mistress? Suggested answer: the plenary self-indulger.

  Paper rustled behind him as he stood amid the clackety lullaby. He turned noiselessly to see a large, relaxed rat walking across the scatter of early editions and old wire copy left by the nightside on top of the copy desk. The rat stopped at a paste pot on the desk and nibbled at the hardened outer crust. The pot moved, the rat inched forward, and then, with dexterous forefeet, it lifted the dauber an inch and pushed its own nose into the center of the pot, into the cool, fresh, soft, sweet stickiness of the paste.

  Breakfast.

  Martin counted eighteen steps going out of the building and waved at Rory Walsh, the early man in the sports department, schoolboy football specialist coming out of Steve White’s twenty-four-hour bar. Old man Ridley stood in front of his newsroom, burning yesterday’s policy slips in the gutter. The window seats of the Capitol Hotel restaurant, reserved for T-U folk, were empty. Martin’s stomach rolled at the thought of the lobster tail special, three for fifty-five cents. He stopped at Green’s stationery store and bought wrapping paper, ribbon, and a card for the present he would give Melissa, tit for t
at. The horseroom upstairs over Green’s was already open for business. Across the street, Keeler’s tempted, as always, and his stomach rolled again. He had slept badly and left the house without waking Mary, without eating. Should he indulge? He did.

  Perhaps his decision was colored by his having eaten here in 1928 with Melissa, two breakfasts and one dinner in three days, the only times they left the hotel room, fortifying their bodies with what he considered the equal of the best food on earth, reconstituting themselves for the return to their bed of second-generation concubinage.

  He now ordered eggs Benedict, hard rolls and salt sticks, iced butter, marmalade, hashed browns, steaming coffee in the silver pot. A grumpy Jewish waiter in black jacket and long white apron, shuffling on flat feet, served the meal impeccably. Two thirty-five with tip. Gorgeous. He felt stylish, and buoyed by nostalgia. Ready for the lady.

  She was registered in a twelfth-floor suite, and he approached it along the carpeted hallway, certain he would rouse her from sleep. He knocked loudly four times before she opened the door, each rap an explosion in the silent corridor.

  “I came for my gift,” he said.

  “You fool. Why didn’t you call? Haven’t you any thought for a lady’s condition at such an hour?”

  “Your condition looks fetchingly normal to me. Dressed for bed.”

  “I must look wretched.”

  She left the door open and crossed the suite’s sitting room, barefoot in a white calf-length negligee, and disappeared into the bedroom. Martin entered and the door swung closed. He put his hat on the coffee table and sat in the love seat. An etching of a step-gabled Dutch house hung on one wall, a Maxfield Parrish print on another wall—Daybreak, everybody’s favorite picture fifteen years ago. The naked nymph bent over the reclining beauty waking from sleep, the mountain lake and the trees of Arcadia framing the morning confrontation, the brightening sky dappling the mountains and lighting incipient joy. Beneath it on the sideboard Martin saw his father’s notebook. It lay flat, a ledger eighteen inches long with canvas and leather cover and binding, and bearing the India ink marking his father had made to identify it by date.

  Here was a contrast of low and high art by master achievers: Parrish setting out to entrap popular taste, Edward Daugherty laboring with the death throes of his soul to produce a play that reflected his supreme independence of the crowd. The ledger contained the notation of the history of a masterpiece as well as the revelations of a notorious disgrace. Daybreak, with all its dynamic symmetry, made Martin want to throttle Parrish for foisting on the millions the notion that life was tidy, life was golden. Still, the hint of Lesbos had its place on any wall of Melissa’s suite, as Edward and Martin Daugherty both knew.

  Looking at the ledger, it occurred to him to take it and leave. He had often mused on burglary as a means of retrieving it. He turned his eyes from it only because Melissa reentered the room in a baby blue satin robe and matching pompommed mules. She had brushed her silvering chestnut hair, colored the cream of her cheeks with a subtle touch of rouge, lifted her eyes from sleep with pale green eye shadow, and powdered away the gleam of her shining morning brow. Her beauty, though controlled by chemistry, was a miracle at forty-nine, given the terror of personal and professional oblivion with which she had lived most of the last decade. Even her wrinkles were now seemly, allowing her to relinquish at last that girlish beauty with which she had lived far too long, keeping her on the cover of Photoplay, but sabotaging all her efforts to become a serious actress. For who could believe an anguished spirit lurked behind a face as elegant and proud of itself as Melissa’s? No one could, until her role as the cloistered Marina (Katrina) of The Flaming Corsage forced a reappraisal of her talent by the critics: Here is a totally new Melissa Spencer . . . acts as if born to the stage . . . confounds critics who said her voice would fail in talkies . . . most fully articulated female presence on the Broadway stage this year, etc.

  She went straight to the telephone and ordered breakfast for two: cantaloupe, camembert, croissants, and champagne. Of course. Then she flounced into an armchair across from Martin, framed by Daybreak and a cut-glass vase full of white roses opening to the morning with the shining sublimity of their final blooming, only hours left in their life.

  “Are you well?” she asked.

  “I may be recuperating, but I’m not sure.”

  “That sounds dreadful, as if you’re living in some awful sanitarium.”

  “That’s not far off. I’ve been on a morose spiritual jag for years, and it’s worse these past few days.”

  “Is it your father? How is he?”

  “It’s that, but it’s not that simple. And he’s quite senile but otherwise healthy. It’s my son going off to the priesthood, and it’s a friend just kidnapped by hoodlums.”

  “A kidnapping! How fascinating!”

  “Oh, Christ, Melissa.”

  “Well, isn’t it fascinating?”

  “Everything isn’t fascinating. Some things are serious.”

  “Oh, poo.”

  “Tell me about you. I suspect you’re well. I read your notices.”

  “It is rather a ducky time.”

  “You look very fit. For anything.”

  “Don’t be forward now, lovey. It’s much too early.”

  “I’ve known you, my dear, to throw away the clock.”

  “Me? Not me, Martin. You must be remembering one of your casual women.”

  “I could’ve sworn it was you. That week the taboos came tumbling down. The Hampton, was it?”

  “Don’t be awful now. Don’t. I get shivery about that. Tell me about the play. Did you like it?”

  “You were quite splendid. But then you’re always quite splendid. And I did find that wig becoming.”

  “Did I look like her to you? I did try.”

  “At times. But she was never quite as sensually animated as you played her.”

  “She must have had her moments.”

  “I think,” said Martin, and he pictured his mother coming down the back stoop naked, walking past the small garbage pail, wearing only her sunbonnet hat and her white shoes and carrying her calico handbag, “that all she ever had was her repressions.” Walking into the waiting arms of Francis Phelan? Did they ever make love after that intimacy?

  “So sad,” said Melissa.

  “Very sad. But that’s not one of your problems, I’ve noticed.”

  “Avoiding things never made any sense to me, none whatever.”

  “You’ve done it all.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, lovey.”

  “But it must be difficult to surprise you.” Martin resented her use of “lovey.” It sounded vaguely cockney, and insufficiently intimate for what they’d had together.

  “Surprises are always welcome,” said Melissa, “but they’re only the interest on the principal, and it’s the principal I’m most fond of.”

  “I have a bit of a surprise for you,” Martin said.

  “How delicious,” said Melissa. “When do I get it?”

  “Don’t be forward now.”

  When breakfast came she insisted he sit on the sofa as they had at the Hampton, and she dropped pieces of melon into his mouth, a scene, he presumed, she had copied from a Valentino or Gilbert film. She lifted champagne to his lips, gave him wafer-thin slices of camembert and croissant, and more and more champagne. He thought he had eaten his fill at Keeler’s, but satiation too has its limitations, and he accepted all that she offered.

  He kissed her when both their mouths were full, shared his champagne with her. He kissed her again when their mouths were empty, stroking the breast of her robe lightly. And then he leaned away.

  “What is this gift you have for me?” he said.

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “I’ve imagined a thing or two.”

  “I hope you didn’t see it,” she said, rising from the sofa and crossing the room. She held up the ledger, giving him a full view of the cover with another
of his father’s date markings: February 1908 to April 1909.

  “I didn’t mean to leave it here in full view, but you caught me unawares, coming in like that. You didn’t see it before, did you?”

  “No, no, I didn’t. You say you’re returning it?”

  “It’s yours,” she said, coming toward him with it. “I took all I needed for my memoirs.”

  “I thought you wanted it for the film.”

  “It’s not necessary now. They have more than enough in the play, if they really want to do it. They don’t deserve any more than that. So it’s yours.”

  “Then I must return your money.”

  “Of course you must not. Absolutely you must not.”

  He had charged her eight hundred dollars for the ledger, an arbitrary price from nowhere, for how could he possibly have set a true dollar value on one of his father’s notebooks? He’d said eight hundred for reasons no more explicable than his dream of rhomboids. An odd figure, she said. Oddness, he told her, is my profession.

  They had been talking then on the roof garden of the Hampton, where she had taken a suite while she found a way to take possession of the ledger, whose contents she had, at moments, watched being written. The Albany sky was the darkest of blues, swept by millions of stars, the moon silvering the river and the rooftops of buildings on the Rensselaer side. From where Martin and Melissa sat, the Yacht Club, the night boat landing, the Dunn bridge, and much of lower Broadway were blocked from view by a tall, ghostly structure with window openings but no windows, with an unfinished, jagged, and roofless top. This was the “Spite Building,” built by a bitter cleric who felt the Hampton had wronged him. And when the hotel opened its roof garden to enormous crowds, the cleric erected this uninhabitable tower of vengeance. It fronted on Beaver Street and nestled back to back with the hotel, and it rose, finally, above the glamorous rooftop cafe, blocking the view and insulting the lofty crowds with its crude bricks and its grotesque eyeless sockets, where squads of verminous pigeons roosted.