Phyllis had light-brown hair that she had brushed the same way for so long that it was almost unnoticeable to Dermot. Her face was still thin and together enough to be acceptable for a twenty-eight-year-old. The extra years were in the eyes. A greeting would produce some reaction. A conversation with her about anything would produce almost no movement, no brightening or dimming, no coupling of her eyes with anybody else’s to show interest. Always, no matter what was going on, she was a woman staring at the stove waiting for coffee water to boil.
Her body fell apart at the hips. Three children had weakened the muscles, and the weight spread her hips and went down through the tops of her thighs. From behind she began to look like a bell buoy. What saved her was her legs from the knees down. They had the form and spring of youth. When she walked through the house quickly, she made Dermot remember Sunday afternoons, walking in Forest Park, before they were married.
The afternoon Dermot was taken in by the Internal Affairs Division, two detectives from the IAD came to the house to talk to Phyllis. One of them had a briefcase. He put his hand inside it, but never took any papers out. They asked Phyllis if she had noticed anything abnormal about Dermot’s sexual instincts. They asked her if Dermot had undergone any psychiatric treatment.
When Dermot finally was allowed to leave the IAD office on Poplar Street that night, he came home and found Phyllis in the kitchen in silence. The next afternoon they started an argument about newspapers on the floor. During the argument, Phyllis did not look at Dermot. Through the weeks that followed she rarely looked at him the few times they talked while they were alone.
The catechisms in the higher grades began to intermingle conservative religion, patriotism, and obedience and produced the special doctrine of Diocese of Brooklyn Roman Catholic American.
Essay question:
Giles is murdered by a Communist just as he leaves the church after his confession. Giles has been away from the church for 28 years. He just about satisfied the requirements for a good confession, having only imperfect contrition, aroused during this week’s mission. The Communist demanded to know if Giles was a Catholic, threatening to kill him if he was. Fearlessly, Giles said, “Yes, thank God!” The Communist murdered Giles. Did Giles go immediately to Heaven, or did he go to Purgatory for a while? Given a reason for your answer.
Nobody in Dermot’s class ever considered Giles as anything but a martyr who ascended to heaven immediately. All people killed while resisting Communists essentially were Catholic saints and needed only the publicity drive to force Rome to recognize them as such, according to the priests and nuns in charge of schools when Dermot attended.
Giles is murdered by a Communist.
Other questions had their own answers underneath.
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Q Does the Fourth Commandment oblige us to respect and obey others besides our parents?
A Besides our parents, the Fourth Commandment obliges us to respect and to obey all our lawful superiors. All are obliged to respect and to obey legitimate civil and ecclesiastical authorities when they discharge lawfully their official duties.
Q Name three moral virtues under the Fourth Commandment.
A Obedience, which disposes us to do the will of our superiors.
Liberality, which disposes us rightly to use worldly goods.
Chastity, or purity, which disposes us to be pure in mind and body.
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Q What are we commanded by the Fifth Commandment?
A By the Fifth Commandment we are commanded to take proper care of our spiritual and bodily well-being and that of our neighbor.
(a) Man does not have supreme dominion over his own life; he was not the cause of its beginning nor may he be the deliberate cause of its end. Man must use the ordinary means to preserve life. He is not, however, obliged to use extraordinary means which would involve relatively great expense or intolerable pain or shame.
(b) The life of another person may lawfully be taken: first, in order to protect one’s own life or that of a neighbor, or a serious amount of possessions from an unjust aggressor, provided no other means of protection is effective;
second, by a soldier fighting a just war;
third, by a duly appointed executioner of the state when he metes out a just punishment for a crime.
The rest of Dermot’s education, the nonreligious topics, prepared him for nothing but a badge.
Dermot Davey’s grandmother, who owned the house he grew up in, was a widow. She died when he was ten. One of his uncles’ wives came running into the hospital room, Mary Immaculate in Jamaica, hysterical. She had an enormous black crucifix in her hands as a gift. She thrust the crucifix at the grandmother. The grandmother thought the crucifix meant she was dying, and she fainted and died later that night. At the funeral, they began to talk of the grandfather. Dermot didn’t remember him. He had worked as a messenger for a big Wall Street lawyer named Dufficey. The lawyer used to help support Irish actors and poets. When Yeats came to New York, the lawyer subsidized him. Dermot’s grandfather had the job of delivering the envelopes to Yeats. In an album they were showing around during the wake, there was one newspaper clipping which mentioned Dermot’s grandfather. That got Dermot’s mother excited about Yeats. Then when some old relative from Brooklyn said that somebody else on the grandfather’s side had been the editor of a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn, Dermot’s mother began talking of her family as if she were a Pulitzer.
She took Dermot into the living room on a few Saturday mornings and had him read from a book of Yeats poems. She wanted him to read out loud so he would memorize it. She was always tense in the morning. Tense and snappish. Dermot would have his thoughts on playing ball in a lot down by the railroad tracks and his mother would be snapping at him and making herself nervous and her son nervous and trying to learn “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan.” It was, Dermot remembers, a fuck of a way to learn and of course he never did.
In St. Monica’s school one day in June, in the last week of school when Dermot was in the seventh grade, the nun was trying to spend the day collecting books and putting them away for the summer and she had to keep the class busy so she had them write a composition on anything they wanted. Dermot put down his “JMJ” heading, which means Jesus, Mary, and Joseph bless this work. He started doing something he never had done before in school. In St. Monica’s all the composition topics were mandatory. They were all of the “My Trip to the Planetarium” type. Dermot started to write about an old man who worked at the stables at Jamaica Race Track. The track is gone now. When he was growing up all the kids used to play baseball in an empty lot in the stable area. There was an old man who used to stomp around on a wooden leg. He used to have a big tub of boiling water. The lower part of a race horse’s legs are so thin that almost no blood circulates. A race horse can have something bad the matter with his ankle and never feel it and keep walking on it until he starts dying of gangrene. So the old man used this boiling water on leg injuries, and it was fine except his stable was right by the fence. Just outside the fence was a bus stop. All the people looking out the windows of the bus would see was an old man torturing a horse with boiling water. People bombarded the ASPCA with phone calls. Finally, the ASPCA sent inspectors to the stable. The old man started fighting with them. All the kids came over from the baseball lot and watched. In the middle of the argument, the old man said, Here, I’ll show you the water doesn’t hurt anybody. He walked over to the tub and put his leg into it. The people from the ASPCA, particularly this one woman, got hysterical. They didn’t know it was a wooden leg the old man was sticking into the water. All the kids were jumping up and down.
So on this day in St. Monica’s school Dermot began to write a composition about the old man. He couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the things he wanted to put down. After a while his hand started to hurt because he was gripping the pen so hard. When he finished, he took the composition up and put it on the Sister’s desk. He slid it right in front of her and stood waiting
.
“Well,” she said. She began reading. When she finished the second side, she told Dermot to take it to Sister Rita, the eighth-grade teacher. He ran it down the hall to Sister Rita’s room. Usually he was nervous about opening the door and walking into another class, the whole room always looked at you, but this time he couldn’t wait to get the composition onto Sister Rita’s desk.
She took it and read the one side so quickly he couldn’t understand how anybody could be that fast, and when she turned it over and only glanced at the second side, and when he saw she wasn’t reading, the bottom fell out of him.
“Well,” she said.
“Yes, Sister.”
“Do you know why Sister had you bring this up to me?”
“No, Sister.”
“Well. Come over here. Look at this handwriting. Just look at this handwriting. Do you call this penmanship?”
“No, Sister.”
“Well. Neither do I. And neither does Sister. Do you know why she sent this up to show me? Because she was so ashamed of such a sloppy piece of work. She wanted to know just what kind of sloppy boy I am getting in my class next fall. Now let me warn you about something. The summer goes very fast. And then you are going to be sitting right here in this class with me. So you better not embarrass Sister and arrive here next fall from her class and not have better penmanship than what you have just shown us here with this.”
Most policemen, particularly, policemen out of parochial schools in Queens, have language problems along with their penmanship problems. Their word usage, restricted so much in grammar school by stilted religious phrases, rarely improves once out of grammar school. In preparing for the police examinations, they attend schools that specialize in Civil Service tests. The schools teach such phrasing as “apprehend the perpetrator” and the policemen cling to the official language. Dermot was in court one day when Harry Feeney of the 112th Squad, testifying in a homicide, referred to the dead man as “the alleged victim.” They rarely read anything at all. In a room where there are both police and defendants, the common rule is that if the Daily News is opened to the centerfold, the picture spreads, it has just been thumbed through by a policeman. If the News is open to a page with stories on it, a defendant has been reading it.
One day while he was working in the 125, there was a call from the subway station at Myrtle and Wyckoff. When Dermot came downstairs to the change booth a doorman from one of the trains was holding a little bald man against the wall. A Puerto Rican girl was standing to the side. She was looking down at her coat, a black cloth coat. The doorman said the little bald man had been sitting next to the girl on the train. “The man playin’ with himself behind the newspaper, you know, and then he let go of the newspaper and come all over this poor little girl’s coat. She called me then.”
Dermot noticed a miraculous medal around the Puerto Rican girl’s neck. She had her handkerchief out, trying to clean her coat. Dermot told her to stop. The coat was evidence.
Ray McBride, the second cop to get to the change booth, gave the little bald man a shove.
“Cut it out,” the bald man said.
Ray grabbed him again and threw him against the wall. “He just resisted arrest.”
“Shit, yeah,” the doorman said.
Dermot handcuffed the bald man. They walked him upstairs, the Puerto Rican girl behind them. The temperature was close to ten degrees. Dermot stopped to button the collar of his overcoat. The girl was holding her handbag over the spot on the coat, down at the bottom. But when she came up into the lights of the pizza stand alongside the subway steps, Dermot could see the purse wasn’t enough. The stuff was all the way to the hem of the coat. Dermot said to himself, This filthy old bum must have had to get off something fierce. He also knew he could not have her walking around like that. The coat was black cloth gook, Dermot said to himself, little kids in the street could see the gook and know what it is. He told the Puerto Rican girl to take off her coat, “I’ll carry it for you,” he said. The girl had on a thin yellow dress underneath. She crossed her arms and closed her eyes against the cold. Dermot held the coat way out in front of him and the girl and he stood on the corner in the ten-degree cold waiting for a patrol car to come for them. Dermot thought it was better for her to freeze than to have people see her in the coat with the come on it.
At the precinct, Dermot looked up the charges. Harry Myers was the name of the little bald man. Dermot charged him with assault in the third, PL 120.10 in his book; sexual abuse, PL 130.55; disconduct, PL 240.20; and resisting arrest, PL 205.30. McBride wanted to charge Myers with assault on an officer but the desk lieutenant said he needed some marks as proof. McBride put his hand into his mouth and bit down on it. The lieutenant shook his head no.
“It’s all right,” Dermot said to McBride. “We got this degenerate good.”
Dermot walked down to the end of the long desk to where Jerry Ahearn, who was the 124 man on this day, sat at an old typewriter. A 124 man is the clerical man. He types out the arrest charges. When Jerry Ahearn types out a normal arrest, a stabbing or a robbery, he doesn’t put anything in capital letters. Even proper names are always in small letters. As Dermot started to give him the case, Jerry Ahearn typed out the complainant as “juanita rivera” and the person arrested, “harry myers” and the arresting officer, “dermot davey.” He kept going as Dermot told him about the case. Dermot looked over his shoulder at the arrest sheet in the typewriter.
complainant juanita rivera states that on the 16th day of february, 1968, the defendant harry myers did commit a violation of section 130.55 of the penal law in that he did place himself on a seat alongside and next to said complainant miss rivera on the bmt subway train, said complainant charges that as said subway train was approaching the subway station at myrtle and wyckoff avenues in ridgewood, queens, said defendant myers
As Dermot went on with what had happened, the red flushed through Ahearn’s face. Ahearn types with two fingers. He usually holds the fingers a half inch or so off the keys and flicks them out after he hears you say something. This time his shoulders drew back and his fingers began coming higher off the keys and pretty soon he was pulling his fingers back all the way to his shoulders and punching so hard at the keys Dermot thought he was going to bang right through the typewriter.
did have his trousers open and his PENIS IN HIS HAND and said defendant myers’ did then work HIS PENIS BACK AND FORTH! said defendant myers’ said PENIS was in proximity to said complainant’s coat, said defendant myers then did CONTINUE WORKING HIS PENIS BACK AND FORTH UNTIL SAID PENIS of said defendant myers DID EJACULATE! SAID EJACULATION CAME ALL OVER THE COAT OF SAID COMPLAINANT WHO WAS ASSAULTED BY SAID EJACULATION! SAID EJACULATION WAS IN THE GENERAL PORTION OF SAID COMPLAINANT’S COAT COVERING SAID COMPLAINANT’S VIRGINIA!
When the case went to court, the judge was shaking his head as he read the arrest sheet. He set a date and let the defendant out on his own recognizance.
Dermot became angry. “How can you let a pervert bastard like this out on the street?” he said to the assistant district attorney. “Now they’ll let him take a plea for being fucking alive.”
The judge couldn’t hear Dermot, but he saw his face. After Myers walked free, the judge called Dermot up to the bench.
“Officer, the way you fellows treat this thing, you’d think it was a homicide. I haven’t seen this many exclamation points since I did a paper on comic books when I was in college. One thing perhaps you should think of, officer. Did it ever occur to you that sometimes a case like this might be love?”
3
WHEN HE HAD STARTED, when he was twenty-one and clean and still trim and strong, Dermot Davey walked the beat with the same feeling that he had when he came home from receiving Communion. He felt as if he was somebody in the uniform, and that he was doing something worthwhile. He had tried a construction job when he finished high school. He had a temporary book in the Operating Engineers Union. He ran a hoist on the construction of a new building.
All day he sat in a plywood booth watching a huge drum of cable which ran an elevator up and down the side of the building site. The elevator was for materials only. Bells on the wall of Dermot’s shack told him which floor to run the elevator up to. He never saw the elevator or any of the men working. He simply sat in a shack, with the drum of cable, a clutch and brake, and watched the cable come in or go out, white chalk lines on the cable showing him the distance between floors. He found the job boring.
The idea of being the one who pushed through the crowd to see what was going on instead of just another person in the crowd was important. He was elated the day he left the shack for the last time. Now, eight years later, Dermot wondered how it had happened to him. How the cleanliness had been covered over with a layer of slime. All he held important now was his pension. Half pay at twenty years.
It was different when he started. He was on the job seven months in the 83rd in Brooklyn, walking Knickerbocker Avenue on a midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift on a Saturday night. It was in February. The sidewalk had a thin covering of crusted snow. Near the end of one block, a lot of Puerto Ricans were out on the sidewalk in front of an apartment house. The street was lined with six-story apartment houses that had a piss smell in the hallways. The Puertos were babbling. The hallway on the ground floor was crowded with them too. Dermot pushed into the building and through the people in the hallway and came to the open doorway of the superintendent’s apartment. The door opened into the kitchen. The super, a black Puerto Rican, was at the window in the kitchen. The window opened onto a courtyard. The courtyard really was just a wide air shaft. Pieces of wood and an old door, faded yellow and dirty, were ugly on top of the snow. In the middle of the wood was the body of a woman all huddled together, on her side, and next to her, a thin line of snow separating them, was a baby in pajamas with feet. The baby’s head was split to the white. The superintendent leaned out the window and pointed up in the blackness to an open window with light showing in it on the top floor of the building. Dermot stood with the super and kept staring at the pajamas with feet.
World Without End, Amen Page 7