“Is he all right?” Morrison said to the manager.
“Mind your business,” snarled the manager. He then started to snarl at Immaculata for not landing more punches.
In the middle of the twelfth round, Jack McAuliffe hit Immaculata with three left hooks and the drops of sweat and water from Immaculata’s head sprayed out into the seats. Kevin Morrison, crouched at the bottom of the steps, suddenly flew up to the ring and was going through the ropes with his hands out to stop the fight by himself, when McAuliffe, working close to Immaculata, his shoes squeaking, threw a right hand that sent Immaculata onto his back. His head banged against the canvas. He died in the ring.
That night, Morrison sat in the fighter’s kitchen and ate potatoes with the jackets on while the parents prayed in the living room for their dead son and waited for St. Immaculata’s to open for the day.
At six A.M. Kevin Morrison left for work. At eleven that morning a cable slipped and a stone weighing many tons crashed onto Eddie Leary, who had been trying to guide the stone down. Leary’s right arm was under the stone. His left arm was free. The left arm whipped once through the air like a windmill. Leary’s scream ran across the rocks on the roof of the tunnel. Then Leary’s voice died and the arm stopped swinging. They kill us all over the lot, Kevin Morrison said to himself.
He had three daughters who would be married, but of course that was the mother’s worry. He waited until finally a son, Harry, arrived with the new century. A second son, Jack, was born a year later, but Kevin concentrated on Harry, who attended St. Luke’s Grammar School on East 138th Street. At night, Kevin Morrison paced the kitchen floor until Harry was finished with his homework, something Kevin had never done himself. Kevin then initialed it, placing his K.M. directly alongside the “J.M.J.” for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, which his son was obliged to use as a heading for each homework page. At graduation, Kevin Morrison stood with another proud father, a plumber. The man’s arm was draped proudly around his son George’s shoulder. George had graduated with Kevin Morrison’s son, Harry.
The man said, “He goes right into the union apprentice program. He’ll be a plumber, won’t you, son?”
George nodded happily.
Kevin Morrison said loudly, “Mine goes on to more schooling. He’s going to be the first to work in a shirt.”
He sent his son to All Hallows High School in the Bronx, and demanded that thoughts of beer, or the wrong side of a girl’s skirt, should be kept out of his mind.
Then one day in 1917, Kevin Morrison, forty-five, the second male Morrison to work at tunnels, was on a job that started in the Van Cortlandt Park section of the Bronx. One morning, the man working next to Morrison, Eddie Hughes, was walking toward a water hose, not bothering to pick his way over the rocks, but walking quickly, for he knew he had to hurry to keep his job. He slipped and fractured an ankle. Two days later, an electric cable caught fire and as smoke poured into the tunnel, the younger workers ran for the shaft and made it out, but a worker named Larkins, in his fifties, his belly heaving, collapsed and died in the fumes before they could carry him out. The miners blamed poor safety precautions. The foreman and contractors blamed Larkins’s age and weight. A month later, Kevin Morrison didn’t get his hand out of the way of a mud bucket quickly enough, and he lost the tips of two fingers. White with pain, he took the lift up to the top.
On Willis Avenue later that day, Kevin Morrison, his hand thickly bandaged, ran into Johnny McGuire, one of the foremen, who was from Donegal and thus a friend. “My kid, he can work like the wind,” Kevin said.
“That’s what a boss wants these days,” McGuire said.
At four the next morning, Kevin Morrison woke up his son Harry and handed him the rubber boots and oilskin slicker of a miner. “You can pass up school for a time; we’ve all we can do to eat in this house, even with me working,” he told the boy. Harry Morrison, seventeen, went up to the shaft, was sent down to work by McGuire, and never left the job. Following the family custom, he made it to Grand Central Station once: remaining too long at a bar near the job in the Bronx one afternoon, he fell onto a New York Central local intending to ride two stops. He fell asleep and the train came down through the Bronx and deposited him in Grand Central. As he had not showered after work, he was still covered with mud as he stood at the bar alongside commuters heading for Westchester and Connecticut. Growing more resentful by the swallow, Harry Morrison announced, “You’re all a whore’s get.”
“And you’re through for the night,” the bartender said, removing Harry’s glass.
Harry, too young for World War I, worked in a bullet factory in Yonkers, and when the shooting ended he returned to mining tunnels. He was a bit backward on dance floors, but bold in Willis Avenue saloons and downright famous for his demeanor in hallways when escorting girls home. One night, the prettiest girl on 144th Street, Emily Daly, fell in love with him even as he pushed against her so hard that she was afraid her back would splinter her own doorway. They were blessed, as were the bartenders on Willis Avenue, with only one child, a son, Jimmy, born in 1925.
Five years later, Harry’s foreman, McGuire, ran for union office and Harry Morrison participated in the election as a highly trusted worker—his young jawbone was stout enough to withstand the usual flurry of punches that was the highlight of any election meeting. Because of this, McGuire, when victorious, chose Harry to drive with him to St. Louis for a union convention in which the New York miners were attempting to break away from an international laborers’ union that was run by hoodlums out of Chicago.
After checking into the hotel in St. Louis, they drove over to the West Side, the black neighborhood, to the Castle Hotel, a three-story wood structure with a wide porch. Seated on the porch, a beer in his hand, and a couple of women looking at him speculatively, was Amos Mabry, the black delegate from the New York sandhogs. Mabry had taken the train out, for the idea of driving into a white town each night and being unable to find a room was more than he could handle. Mabry was from the island of Grenada, and he was the largest and most vocal of the blacks working the job, who kept entering the union during times when there were enough jobs atop the ground to allow whites to sneer at mining, leaving vacancies for someone like Mabry, whose first thought was a meal, not the danger involved in obtaining it.
McGuire then drove back to their hotel, and in the lobby he cautioned Morrison, “These fellows around here would take the milk out of your tea.” Later, the hoodlums from the international brought a suitcase full of money to McGuire’s hotel room. Either take the money or we come back for you with a machine gun, they intimated.
“I never took a nail off the job,” McGuire told them.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” one of the hoodlums said.
“It means you got a whore’s pay in your hands. Go out and give it to some whore.”
At that moment Harry Morrison became so overwhelmed by the purity of the experience that he was certain it would govern the rest of his life, which he felt would be an immaculate and glorious one. He then went to a speakeasy behind the hotel, where he ordered a drink. He was insulted when the bartender said that a man on the other side of the bar, one of the hoodlums from Chicago, wanted to pay for the drink. Harry Morrison threw a five-dollar bill on the bar. He immediately gagged when the bartender took a dollar five out for the drink, twice the price of the best drink on Willis Avenue. Harry Morrison finished his first drink, then sure felt like another. As he decided that his honor had been well established by now, he said to the bartender, “Now I’ll take that drink with that fellow.” Harry nodded his head toward the hoodlum on the other side of the bar.
The next day, at the opening of the convention, Harry walked into the old, smoky Labor Lyceum Hall alongside Mabry while, sitting in the rows of wooden folding chairs, squinting in the heavy smoke, strangled by shirt collars, wanting to hit somebody, the delegates from places like Cicero, Illinois, felt their insides swell in aggravation at the sight of this black nigger bastar
d walking down the aisle wearing a delegate badge.
Instantly delighted, Harry pushed his way through a crowd and found McGuire, who was standing with his ear cocked as Melvin Wise, the labor lawyer he had hired, spoke to him.
“I got something important to say,” Harry said.
McGuire looked at him.
“All the guineas are going crazy because we brought a nigger.”
“Then we ought to have more niggers,” McGuire said.
The lawyer’s lips pursed in distaste. “Don’t use that language, please.”
“What language?” Harry said.
“The type of language you just used.”
“What? That I said nigger?”
“Exactly,” Wise said.
“What else are you supposed to call them?”
“Negroes.”
“I never heard that word in my life. All I ever heard is niggers. Let me ask you a question. What am I supposed to call you?”
“What do you call me now?” Wise said.
“Jew lawyer. What do you want me to say, Catholic lawyer?”
McGuire kept his attention on the Italian delegates from Cicero who were openly rebellious at a seating arrangement that had them within a thousand yards of a black.
“If it drives them this crazy, then we should have come out here with a half a hundred niggers,” McGuire said.
He and Harry Morrison then sat on either side of Mabry and were so openly solicitous of him that an Italian from Cicero in the next row turned red as a streetlight and, clutching his chest, had to be assisted out of the row and to a water fountain in the rear. When the convention ended, McGuire returned to New York filled with resolve to see that the sandhogs not only would keep the blacks they had, but would get more, thus placing a dark spear in the side of all these labor leaders who, regarding the sandhogs as ignorant ruffians, would now have another reason to shriek. Best reason on earth, too. If there was one thing that brought everybody together, Irish bricklayer, Italian mason, Jewish cutter, it was the sight of black skin. No Gael or Spartan, no Tartar or Hun, ever was able to strike the terror that the mere sight of a black face, lips appropriately thickened, did at this time to the white labor movement. “Niggers are beautiful,” Harry Morrison declared.
In the 1930s, the sandhogs’ union in New York had an enrollment of almost thirty percent blacks. This was two decades before the subject was fit for religious sermon or political speech, before the muted expressions of conscience, sense, and then hesitant legislation. Two decades before anybody in America did anything, the sandhogs of New York had blacks all over their jobs, blacks working with whites, for the good and just reason that the blacks aggravated everybody else so much that it saved breath. The sandhogs didn’t have to shout “Fuck you!” to anybody.
“Just show them our members and watch them all fucking die,” McGuire announced at a union meeting. The members applauded, particularly the blacks, who, in the grinding thirties, were being paid the same wages as the white sandhogs.
Because of their blacks, the sandhogs suddenly became the strongest gods to the Communists in New York. The union lawyer, Wise, who throbbed at the thought of smashing industrial society, brought McGuire and Morrison to a Communist Party meeting at the Hotel Fairfax, Broadway and 93rd Street, where a room packed with about a hundred, a mixture of the very old and high school students, was elated at the presence of two rough tunnel workers.
A smiling girl in flat shoes and no make-up asked Harry Morrison, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Yes, anything you got,” Harry said.
She ducked into another room and returned with a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. Harry thanked her and went into a corner of the room and dropped the bottle into a wastebasket. He did not, however, leave the Communist movement that night; a distribution system for the party newspaper, the Daily Worker, was discussed, and Wise, the lawyer, asked McGuire and Morrison to collect monies for the paper. They began that night, picking up fifteen dollars at the meeting, which they threw onto a workers’ bar on Willis Avenue. At the end of the week, Harry Morrison went to a Young Communist meeting in the basement of a building at Columbia University, where students first asked him for his autograph, as he was the first workingman they ever had seen at a meeting, and then put up twenty dollars for subscriptions to the Daily Worker.
“Here’s to the Communists,” Harry Morrison said later that night.
“What’s so good about them?” the man next to him, McLoughlin, said.
“They’re buying us drinks.”
“That makes them good,” McLoughlin said.
When the Communists did not get their newspapers, and found that the Daily Worker circulation department had no record of their payments, there was a squall from the hierarchy, and Harry decided to leave the movement.
Harry Morrison stayed in the Bronx and worked on tunnels and lived on Willis Avenue, which had four funeral parlors and eight bars in order to keep each side of the family separated at a wake. His bachelor brother, Jack, was the first in the family to get away from mining and the Bronx. Jack became a messenger boy for a rich lawyer in Manhattan named Quinn, who was assisting with the pocketbook of William Butler Yeats, who, treated with the high honor the Dublin Irish reserve for their greatest successes—utter despisal—had arrived in New York, where lawyer Quinn had heart flutters upon being introduced to Yeats at a dinner party. Yeats moved into Quinn’s thirty-room apartment on Central Park West. The job of delivering an allowance to Yeats was given to Jack Morrison; Quinn did not want to embarrass Yeats by giving him money directly, and Yeats would perform no such demeaning act as picking up his own allowance, particularly from a lawyer, a man who had to read a rulebook to know what to think, while he, Yeats, had body fluids of madness and genius. Quinn also had a much younger woman who held his arm but kept eyes on Yeats, which caused a certain amount of unease. But Jack Morrison still was given envelopes to rush to Yeats, who would stand in the doorway and immediately rip open the envelope to make sure the insides were in order. This ripping sound stuck like a burr in Jack Morrison’s ear.
Of a spring afternoon, a Friday, Jack Morrison, the envelope for Yeats in his pocket, walked the streets toward the apartment. He remembered the ripping sound. At Columbus Circle, he took two steps to the right and into Nugent’s Gaelic House, where, rather than perform the dishonest, act of steaming open the sealed envelope, he ripped it open and spread the money onto the bar and, with a nod to the bartender, put himself in business. At sunset, a most delightful time, with the interior of the barroom the color of old gold, Jack Morrison was demanding speedier service of the bartenders. He stared at the somewhat depleted stack of money on the bar, and said grumpily, “I could make words rhyme, too, if I tried.”
Somewhere in the heart of the night, the remnants of both envelope and money were shoved under the apartment door, while Yeats inside bellowed that a grand party had been waiting for him for hours and he had been unable to join it. Yeats, a scholar of the helpless, never demanded that the messenger boy be fired, but as the deliveries thereafter became slightly sporadic, Yeats one day did say to Quinn, the benefactor-lawyer, as Quinn’s diary noted: “I just received your envelope in time and completely intact. This day therefore shall be truly known as the ‘Second Coming.’”
By the time the lawyer died, Jack Morrison was so influential in the office that he was placed in charge of the lawyer’s thirty-room apartment for several days. He had his brother Harry’s wife, Emily, come to the place and told her to take something for herself. Quinn had covered his walls with so much art that he had had to keep a stack of Renoirs under his bed. Emily Morrison looked at the Renoirs, but then saw an original Yeats manuscript, with Yeats’s editing marks on it. “Anything Irish got to be better,” Emily Morrison said, pushing a Renoir back under the bed and walking out with the Yeats manuscript. The manuscript, a sixteen-page one-act play, was folded and placed in a plain white envelope and taken back to Willis Avenue in
the Bronx, where Harry Morrison looked at it with a sandhog’s eye and wondered if he could sell it.
The Yeats manuscript remained in a cupboard and Harry Morrison assumed his place in the life of Willis Avenue, which had the highest rates of infant mortality and tuberculosis in the city. At breakfast one morning in 1942, his usual morning cough shook his body so much that the ribs sounded. He brought up enough blood to fill the bottom of his coffee cup. Seeing this, his wife Emily gasped, “You caught TB.” Her large, sad eyes could see only the shadow of the neighborhood disease. Harry Morrison, however, had been spitting blood in private for three years. He now became numb, refused to talk, and slowly forced himself to stand up and leave for work. He left his wife to clean the stove and keep the linoleum floors glistening, and three months later when Harry began to hiccup and could not cure the condition with water taken in short gulps or even with entire pitchers of icy beer, she rose to the pinnacle of usefulness and nursed her husband until his death from cancer of the esophagus.
Afterward, in a daily black dress and gray face, Emily sat waiting for her son, Jimmy, to come home. At seventeen, he had left school and thought of no other business but urban mining. As the great-grandson of Johnny Morrison, who had come from Donegal to start a line of tunnel workers in New York, with cousins in the sandhogs and in allied construction unions all over the city, he was not inclined toward accounting. Nor did his bloodlines cause him to race directly home from the job each day. If there was a family crest, it was a raised glass. So his widowed mother sat, and he threw money on the bar, holding out only enough for her household needs.
Table Money Page 4