Patrick Driscoll won the tub race. After many attempts to capture the flag on the greasy pole, John Masterson succeeded and won the prize.
The officials were: Referee, Dan Daly; starter, Henry J. Finn; timekeepers, P. J. Cotter and H. J. Durst; judges at finish, J. Meyer of the Celtic R. C. and D. J. Hayes and J. Devine of the M. R. C; Judges at turn, J. Byrens, Daniel Sullivan, and Dan Kelly of the Mutuals and Frank Peterson of the Celtic Rowing Club.
The regatta was in every way a success and the committee in charge, William M. Aman, chairman, did his work well. A much commended feature of the preparations was the printing of a programme for distribution in the crowd which enabled spectators to follow the events closely.
The Mutual Rowing Club will celebrate its 22nd anniversary on August 2d with a regatta and a field day of athletic sports. They will have their new park adjoining the boathouse ready by that time. In the evening hours there will be fireworks. The annual club picnic causes next Saturday at New Seneca Park.
Francis
◆◆◆
He’d lived but six days.
Cerebritis is an infection of the brain that normally leads to the formation of an abscess within the cerebellum. Annie Sullivan agonized and panicked and wailed, watching helplessly as her newborn convulsed, his tiny brain ravaged by the insidious malady. Hannah was there to help, to nurse, to comfort. She lost herself in the work, pushing away the surfacing memories of her own babies dying right before her eyes, she so helpless back then to prevent any of it. Hannah was certain upon first hearing the pain-racked cries of her little nephew that he was not long for this world. She silently prayed for a rapid end both for the child’s sake and his mother’s.
Uncharacteristically, the alderman stayed home, fretting and hovering, calling in one doctor after another, desperate to save his son. Nothing at all could be done. They dressed Francis in his white christening robe and laid him out in a tiny white casket in the front parlor. People came and went as if they were ghosts, so in a haze was the baby’s grieving mother. The funeral notice was prominently displayed in the newspapers. Annie found the condolences intrusive and overwhelming. She almost brained him when the vile former alderman, John Sheehan, took her hand and offered with a ludicrous piety that the baby’s passing was “part of God’s Plan.” She pulled her hand from his with such ferocity that he startled. Hannah witnessed the incident from just feet away. When unfeeling unthinking people had offered this exact brutish platitude to her in their asinine attempt to offer comfort for her unfathomable losses, Hannah had crossed them off her list with finality. She took Annie by the arm and led her away from Sheehan. “Some people are just too stupid to be allowed to walk free,”she sneered to him.
Annie had lost Baby Michael similarly six years previous. She had counted herself lucky even then, comparing her single loss to Hannah’s four. As terrible as Michael’s’ death was, Annie was given no time to get to know him as an individual. Not that a mother doesn’t come to intimate terms carrying a human life within her for nine months. But once Michael was out, he didn’t even have the strength to cry, and before she could even catch her breath he was gone. Now Francis was gone as well.
Hannah on the other hand had enjoyed years with her babies, time enough to appreciate their uniqueness and their special qualities. Their personalities. Long enough to discern certain talents and attributes emerging, and thus fashion dreams for their future. It was only through the loss of her own babies that Annie finally realized the silent bottomless depths of despair that must have surely overtaken Hannah.
At Holy Cross cemetery, as they walked away from the little grave, Annie lay her head on Hannah’s shoulder and said apologetically, “I don’t know now how you ever managed it, Hannah. I really don’t.”
Baby Skin
◆◆◆
“But why not, Mama?’ implored Hannah Sullivan’s daughter Mary Ellen. “It’s the least I can do!”
Hannah knew that the little girl would in all likelihood die. Two long months had passed and she was yet in agony. Some of the grafts had failed. She weighed but forty pounds. Dr. Burwell himself had told her as much.
“Because it is extremely painful, Nellie! Because you could get an infection on top of that, and all your trouble would be for naught. You could even die. I don’t want you to do it, and that’s my last word!”
Hannah’s loss of four of her seven children ruled her every waking decision. She was religious these days to an ever-vacillating degree, her beliefs having flowed and ebbed and become desperately tangled in the confusing roots of Catholicism as her life’s tragedies multiplied. She often lay awake at night thinking about her dead babies. Recently she surmised something new and terrible: that she might be to blame for it all by naming three of her lost children after others who were also dead and gone too soon. Catherine was named for her younger sister Cate who died at age three. Johnny had been named for his grandfather dead in the Civil War at age 39. Daniel was named after his uncle Daniel Halloran, dead of consumption at age 22. And little Hannah had been named after herself, a woman cursed, a woman besieged by misfortune. A woman who sometimes felt dead inside.
Isabelle Dyer had been dancing around a bonfire in Black Rock with her friends when her skirts caught fire and she was burned from head to toe. Not expected to live through the night, heroic methods were adopted by Dr. Edward Haley of Riverside Hospital. The resolution was reached to try to save Isabelle by grafting skin cut fresh from the arms of the children who had known her in her Sunday school and public school life.
A dozen little ones responded to the call instantaneously. On the first day there were revealed examples of juvenile bravery and generosity which astonished the surgeons. Tiny boys and delicate little girls went into the operating room at the hospital, bared their arms, and with ashen faces submitted to the slicing away of strips of their skin.
Two separate rounds had been performed, but now the same call went out yet again. Two hundred square inches of skin had already been grafted onto Belle’s wasting little body, which was almost skeletal at this point, two months after the accident. But it was still not enough.
“But two girls from my school are doing it right now, Mama! Right this very moment! I need to help save her!” pleaded Mary Ellen.
“I said no, Nellie! Now just go to the market for me like you promised!”
With numbing guilt, after Nellie had walked out the door, Hannah stood watching at the window. Her only daughter stalked away from the house angrily up Hamburg Street.
Hannah said to herself aloud, “No man would want to marry you, Nellie, having terrible scars like that.
◆◆◆
Through bombastic means, William C. Warren, Proprietor of the Buffalo Commercial newspaper, had gotten Republican candidate Erastus C. Knight elected mayor. Taking a page from the blueprint of the notorious Sheehan brothers’ political machine, Warren expected full and ongoing reciprocity from Knight. So in a bold move Mayor Knight demoted six of the Buffalo Police department’s longest serving and most capable detectives: Mack, Lynch, Kennedy, Morgenstern, Quinn and Sullivan.
It wasn’t the first time Hannah Sullivan had contemplated taking an axe to someone’s skull who’d injured her family, and it wasn’t to be the last. She fumed in silence over this blasphemy since its wounding of her husband was so severe, not that he allowed it to show. She saved her blow-up for when she could sneak next door to the Alderman’s house to vent her spleen on Annie. “Twenty-two years of loyal service to this city, and thousands of arrests, and this is how they thank him and all the others?” she exploded. “Even Pat Cusak! You have to tell JP that he must do something about this!”
Detective Sergeant Jim Sullivan joined five of his cohorts in being reduced in rank, and thus too in salary, without any provocation other than being Democrats who had not supported Mayor Knight’s candidacy.
In his Courier newspaper Fingy Conners ran the story in bold angry headlines, not so much because he had any renewed affecti
on for Jim Sullivan or the others, but because he so despised Warren, his direct newspaper competitor and a particularly vile Republican.
In a sidebar piece printed alongside the main article, Fingy’s newspaper detailed an arrest made by Jim Sullivan on his last day as a detective, of two men, pockets bulging and arms laden with brass valves stolen from a building contractor. It was the sort of routine arrest Jim Sullivan executed almost daily, intentionally made remarkable by Fingy simply to underscore the fact that despite his advanced age of 52, Sullivan was as productive and heroic a police officer as ever.
Of the six new men promoted in the demoted detectives’ places, Superintendent Bull, whose own job was also in jeopardy, and deservedly so, expressed his opinion in print of the gross incompetency of three of the new promotees scheduled to take the place of the demoted six.
Fast on the heels of this news came another announcement from Mayor Knight. It was nothing less than the forwarding of a bill to the Common Council for transmission to Albany which proposed to abolish the office of Assistant Police Superintendent, a position currently held by Patrick V. Cusak. The bill provided for the honorable dismissal from the police force any member who shall have served for a period of thirty five years or upward. The sole intent of the bill, in the shape of a charter amendment, was to retire Cusak, who was in his thirty-eighth year of service. Cusak was the oldest and best known detective in the United States, but his humiliating mishandling of the recent and infamous Marian Murphy, Franz and Johanna Frehr, and Edwin Burdick murder investigations, all within just a little over a year of each other, had placed his career in dire peril. The notorious murders had each made headlines for weeks internationally, and the stories of police misconduct and incompetency surrounding those three investigations reverberated yet. The episodes had reinforced the Buffalo Police Department’s reputation as a national laughing stock, thus providing political momentum for the bill that would rid the department of Cusak.
Police Commissioner Dougherty stated: “We believe that by substituting some of the younger blood of the department for the old men that the efficiency of the Bureau of Detectives might be increased. While no complaints have been made to us directly of the present staff of detectives, we believe that the younger men will infuse new life into the department. The reduced men are all good but we wish to try others.”
The news of Nellie’s father’s newest troubles cast a further pall over the house at No. 16 Hamburg Street, coming as it did on the same day as the announcement of the death of little Isabelle Dyer. Nellie dressed herself in black and took the trolley to Thompson Street. There, children gathered tearfully outside the home of their little friend. Isabelle’s widowed mother at first refused them, concerned for their tender youth and fearing their reaction to seeing the raw-fleshed decimated child in the casket. But when the children rolled up their sleeves to reveal their scars, she was forced to relent. Nellie, watching as the children displayed their badges of honor, deeply regretting her failure to contribute, felt personally responsible for Isabelle’s death.
The funeral was held from the Church of Christ. Belle’s body was buried at Forest Lawn, the casket transported by eight little boys, fresh scars marking their arms.
“Nothing at all could have saved that little girl, Nellie,” Hannah told her daughter in an attempt to justify her decision to disallow Nellie from undergoing the procedure. But in her troubled heart Hannah couldn’t help but wonder if it might have made all the difference.
That same evening the family was scheduled to attend the ceremony up the street at P.S. 34 honoring those who had won the Jesse Ketchum Award for Scholastic Excellence. The Alderman’s second daughter Anne Virginia was to be awarded the Silver. Between Jim’s demotion weighing heavily on the entire family and Nellie’s mourning Isabelle Dyer, neither wanted to attend. Back in her day as a schoolgirl, Hannah had won the Gold. She had always encouraged all the girls in their studies. She possessed the foresight to know that in tomorrow’s world, their scholastic achievements would actually mean something and could be put to fruitful use, unlike back when she received the award. She announced to them assuredly, “Once women get the vote, there’ll be no goin’ back for us.”
Jim was moping around. Nellie was depressed.
“We have to go. There’s no getting around it. We’re family after all. It’ll help take our minds off our troubles,” reasoned Hannah, “and it’ll help Aunt Annie and Uncle JP take their minds off theirs. They need something to celebrate.”
Hannah was talking about the death of baby Francis.
“All right,” they agreed.
The Elevator
◆◆◆
“I can buy all the brains I need. Brains comes cheap as ten-penny nails,” snarked Fingy Conners, his fried potato spittle peppering the white tablecloth. It was an utterance Conners had blustered loudly and often over the years, a phrase he’d adopted as a diametric to counter the public’s impression of him as stupid. He always spat it out with a precise measure of disdain.
Alderman JP Sullivan had long since tired of hearing it.
“If Fingy was as smart as he thinks he is he’d know that repeating this only polishes the perception people already hold of him,” JP complained to Alderman John Kennedy.
“If Sullivan was as smart as he thinks he is, he wouldn’t tell me things he knows might get back to you,” Kennedy had in turn complained to Fingy Conners.
“Maybe that’s exactly his plan,” postulated Fingy to Kennedy in reply, “We all know what a blabbermouth you are, Kennedy.”
Fingy continued attacking his lunch.
“If them fellas was as smart as they t’ink they are, then why ain’t they rich like me? Answer me that, Sully,” continued Fingy.
He wiped his buttery fingers on his bib before having another go at the second claw. The last time he’d ordered the lobster the heavy shell cracker had shot out of his greasy thumbless grip and nearly beaned the alderman who was presently observing Fingy’s furtive attempts with caution.
Fingy was lunching at Ellsworth Statler’s upstairs restaurant in the Ellicott Square with Alderman John P. Sullivan. Fingy liked the place for its 35 cent lunch with a free 10 cent cigar included. But today he splurged on the 75 cent whole lobster. The thrifty Alderman used the last of his $1.75 book of five meal tickets for the standard lunch. He got the chicken.
The general perception was that Sullivan and Conners were sworn enemies, judging mostly by the way Conners attacked the alderman bitterly in bold headlines in his Buffalo Courier newspaper. But in private, both in business and in politics, they were something quite a bit more mysterious.
Sullivan had his own truism, one that defined his personal philosophy concerning success: “I can fight under any flag. I can play on any man’s team.”
He repeated it as often as required. It was his mantra. To the ever-wavering, flip-flopping alderman, loyalty was a personality defect found mostly in ne’er-do-wells and fools.
“Looks like that Feldman’s plannin’ on comin’’ after bot’ of us,” declared Conners.
Sullivan nodded in agreement. “Sure looks that way,” he mumbled.
Fingy gazed across the room. The targets of his attention nodded and smiled at their boss as they enjoyed their lunch a few tables away. Fingy’s underlings sat on Statler’s sturdy Craftsman-style oak dining chairs pulled up to linen-clothed oaken tables, perturbed that they had been seated so close to one of the central serving stations’ unceasing activity and clatter. The large room was brightly lit by copper-chained frosted glass Arts & Crafts chandeliers designed by Elbert Hubbard himself at his Roycroft facility in East Aurora. Unsmiling, Fingy nodded back at his employees while making his mind up. Richard White and John H. O’Brien were the top-ranked editors at Fingy’s Buffalo Courier newspaper. Their able brains had cost Conners quite a bit more dearly than the price of ten-penny nails.
After a few moments’ fixing his predatory gaze upon them, Fingy coldly came to a decision.
/> JP watched with some fascination as Fingy clutched his fork in his thumbless left hand, grasping it somewhat like a hawk having captured a prairie dog in its talons. He determinedly anchored his lobster with the left while he violently sawed through the shell like a lumberjack with his fully-digited right. As Conners waved off a hovering waiter wanting to refill his half-empty water glass, a piece of crustacean flew off his fork. The waiter cautiously bent down to pick it up, careful not to turn his back. Having heard the stories, he kept one eye trained on his customer.
This was not the first time or place Conners had encountered his two employees, in addition to his managing editor Samuel G. Blythe, frequenting the very same restaurants and resorts that he himself favored. The week previous Blythe had been someone’s guest at the Buffalo Club, the last place on earth Conners ever expected to encounter a mere hireling. He was quite irked by this. JP realized that he’d lost Fingy from the conversation a few minutes back and was now basically just talking to himself. Sullivan paused to follow the trajectory of Conners’ stare.
“I must be payin’ me men too much if they can afford to entertain themselves in the same resorts as me, Sully.”
Having known Fingy since boyhood, JP Sullivan was only too familiar with the primitive processes churning around inside the skull of the much-feared dock walloper, having suffered the consequences himself in the past personally and often. The alderman, sensing that the men Fingy had locked in his sights were doomed, went back to eating his chicken fricassee.
“Yer lookin’ a little shaggy there, Sully,” said Conners. “Yous could do wit’ a trim.”
“You and me both,” replied JP.
Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins Page 16