by Betty Smith
come into Mike's fortune. The reform party won the next
election, and, true to its platform, the new administration
started the Big Cleanup. The bright, new District Attorney
polished up his armor, buckled himself into it and went
out after the grafters crying, "Corruption! Corruption! " all
the way. Little grafters ran for their holes. Medium-sized
grafters, like Moriarity, couldn't find holes tc, hide in.
The Big Cheese saved his rind, that is, his skin, by
turning state's evidence. Officious men came to Mike
Moriarity's house and shook rattling papers in his face and
attached everything he had: his house and furniture and
stable and horses and carriage and even Mary's piano.
Too late, Mike wished he had let Mary take it with her.
The men busted open the locked door of his desk and
attached deeds, notes, stocks and bonds. They even
attached a couple of bankbooks stamped Accost Canceled.
One reformer, a plainclothes man, found Mike's last
withdrawal in an old sock under Mike's mattress. The sock
held two thousand dollars in small bills. The reformer
pocketed the money and neglected to give Mike a receipt.
Probably he neglected to turn in the money, too.
The only things they couldn't touch were the house that
Mike had deeded over to Mary and Patsy, and a paid-up
life-insurance policy in The Missus' name.
Moriarity, along with a dozen others, was indicted. It
was in all the papers.
Patsy, commenting on the indictment to Mary, said: "So
I was never good enough for your father. So he always
looked down on me. But I'm the one what's looking down
on him, now. The thief!"
"Oh, Patrick," she said, tears coming to her eyes, "don't
call him that."
[ 7S ]
He felt ashamed. Wl~y do I say things like that to her,
he thought. I get no satisfactioiZ alit of it. It Flakes me feel
like Jack the Ripper, or somebody.
"There now, Mary," he said. "Who am I to talk? Did not
one of me own relations steal a pig in Ireland? Yes."
She smiled through her tears and looked up at him with
her hands clasped appealingly on her breast. "Did he,
Patrick? Did he? "
"Sure," he said. "But be was a relation by marriage only."
So Mike was indicted for graft and corruption. But he
never stood trial. Just before the trial. he had a stroke and
his "ticker" gave out.
It was nearly night when they got home from the
funeral. Mary sat in the dark kitchen. Her face was pale
and drawn. Patsy tried to find something ~ omforting to
say to her.
"After all, he was your father," he said.
"Yes."
"And he was good to you."
"Not always, Patrick I remember 1 must have been
about ten years old when I thought I didn't like him. I
thought he wasn't nice to my mother and it seemed that
he was always punishing me or scolding me.
"One night, I suppose he got free tickets somewhere, he
took me over to Manhattan to hear a singer. I remember
it was snowing and everything looked so beautiful. I had
a little white muff and tippet with ermine tails. There was
an old woman selling violets on the street. I remember the
cold, sweet smell. He bought a bunch and pinned them to
my muff. He gave the old woman a bill and he wouldn't
take his change.
"He had a friend who had a high-class saloon. We sat in
the ladies' back parlor, of course. My father introduced
me to the man as though I were a grown-up lady. The
man bowed as he shook my hand. He served me a big
glass of lemonade on a silver tray. There was a tablespoon
of claret in the lemonade to make it pink and a cherry on
top. I thought it was wonderful. Papa and the man had a
brandy together and talked about old times in Ireland.
1-6 1
"The man had left the door leading into the saloon open
and I saw it all. The bar was beautiful! All the shining
cut-glass decanters on the shelves with silver stoppers and
glasses as thin as bubbles and that big mirror over the bar
with a filigreed brass frame and oh, the chandelier with
cut-glass crystals, or do they call them prisms? It was so
beautiful with the gas lights in ruby bowls here and
there....
"Then we went to the concert. I don't remember now
what the lady sang, except her encore song, 'The Last
Rose of Summer.' I saw Papa take out his handkerchief
and wipe his eyes.
"After the concert we were walking down to the cab
stand and there was this little store still open. They sold
trinkets and things. Papa took me in and told me to pick
out a little bracelet or a locket. But there was a pair of
side combs in the showcase. They were tortoiseshell and
all full of rhinestones. I couldn't stop looking at them.
"Papa said, 'You know you're too little to wear them
and they'll be out of style by the time you grow up. Now
here's a nice little locket. It opens. . . ' But I couldn't take
my eyes off the combs.
"Then Papa said: 'You krlow you can't wear them. What
do you want them fort' I said I didn't know. Then he said:
'You want them just to have them, don't you?' I said, yes,
and he told the lady to wrap them up
"I loved my father that night. I loved him so much I
didn't know what to do.
"That was the only time he ever took me out. Well,
there came times after that night when I felt I didn't like
him very much. When I got that feeling, I'd go and take
the combs out of the tissue paper and hold them and I'd
feel the same love I felt that night when he took me to the
concert."
After the funeral, The Missus took her insurance money
and went to Boston to live cut her days there with
Henrietta, her widowed sister. Patsy W1S sorry to see her
go. This contrary man really loved his mother-in-law.
"She's like me own mother was," Patsy told his wife.
"She sees no fault in me."
~ 7~ ]
Well, after the reform administration cleaned out all the
Tammany grafters, they put in their own grafters. Once
more, tithes were collected from the brothels. Once again,
small storekeepers paid "insurance" against plate-glass
windows being broken. Again, the poor Jewish merchants
whose pushcarts lined both side of the curbs on Moore,
Siegal and McKibben Streets, paid protection "rent"
against their pushcarts being overturned and the
merchandise trampled in the dirty gutters. The rent was
fifty cents a week but often the grafters settled for a
quarter.
The citizens didn't like the new administration. They
stood around on corners and in the saloons and sat on
where grass should have been in the public parks and
knocked the reformers.
; "It stands to reason Where there is politics, there's graft.
Right? "
"Right."
"So we expect graft Rio matter what party's in. Right?"
"Right. '
"But when TammanN collected graft we got something
back `'ut of its'
"That's right."
"Yeah. Like they ran block parties for us and paid the
band."
"And they ran free excursions up the Hudson and
everything on the house."
"Sure."
'Take me: The time I was laid Up with my broken leg.
Why, they sent over a basket of groceries every week."
"Take this guy: I forgot his name. They paid to bury
him when he died with no insurance and his wife divas
afraid she'd have to plant him in Potter's Field."
"Why sure! Many's the ton of coal they gave me that
hard vinter when I couldn't get work."
"Well, this here party what's in noNv takes graft but
what do we get out of it?"
"Nothing. Just plain nothing.'
So when the time came, these complaining citizens went
to the polls and voted out the reform parts and got the
old ticket bac
in again. And some of them were so anxious to get
Tammany back in again that they voted two or three times
the way they had been taught to do by the Machine.
L~? 1
Well before this time, Patrick Dennis Moore put away
all his dreams and hopes. He hated his job but wouldn't
dare give it up with no other work to be had. He was
grudgingly grateful that he was working for the city and
couldn't be laid off because times were hard. He realized,
nova, that he would always be a street cleaner. That was
all he had to look forward to. He would always have to
live in the shabby house on Ewen Street.
His last dream had died out when his mother-in-law
went to live with her sister in Boston- instead of with
him and Mary and took all her insurance motley with
her.
~ CHAPTER TWELVE >~
MARY kept the upstairs rented and banked the rent
money and used it throughout the years to keep the taxes
and the interest on the mortgage paid up and sometimes
she was able to pay a little on the principal. She was liked
and respected on Ewen Street (which, for some reason,
was now called Manhattan Avenue). The neighbors
referred to her as "that refined schoolteacher what's
married to that slob yore know. The street cleaner? "
Mary became friends with Father Flynn, the priest who
had performed her marriage ceremony and never criticized
her and Patsy for having a civil ceremony first. One time
when his housekeeper took a week off to visit a married
daughter in Albany, Mary went to the parish house every
day and cooked the priest's food and laundered his collars
and mended the torn lace on his alb. Thereafter, she
visited him once in a while or he came to her home. They
exchanged opinions on the news of the day and analyzed
the rapid changes that were taking place that would
eventually change the once dreamy village of Williamsburg
into a city slum.
They had something in common in that both were
strangers in the neighborhood, she having come from the
prosperous and fashionable Bushwick set tion, and he
from the Middle West.
~ ~9 1
Father Flynn had been born and reared in a small town
in Minnesota. He had been educated in Midwestern
schools. At college he had excelled in sports: football,
baseball, basketball, hockey and especially skiing. He had
been popular with faculty and classmates.
The time came, while he was still young, to put aside his
dearly loved sports and his no less dearly loved
contemporaries and, as an ordained priest, to take up his
life and his work in an alien place. His Bishop had said:
"You'll have your work cut out for you there." It was true.
It was a swarming neighborhood. Fifty per cent of the
population were Irish and Gcrman with a few English and
Scottish families. l here was a neighborhood saying that
the Irish and the Germans "got along good together."
Evidently this was so as there was a great deal of
intermarriage between the Germans and the Irish.
The Jews and Italian; were called foreigners by the Irish
and Germans, presumably because they were not Nordic.
There were some Dutch families left over from the time
when Brooklyn had been called Breuckelen. They were
classified with the Germans. Because there vrere some
similarities in the languages, Germans were called
Dutchmen. Then there were Poles, Hungarians, Swedes,
some Chinese who lived among bundles of laundry in
rooms back of one-windowed stores, sloe-eyed Armenians
and swarthy Greeks.
There revere even some Indians. They were of the
Canarsie tribe and they made their homes in run-down,
abandoned, onewindowed stores. The ot'Tier nationalities
looked down on them. No one believed they were Indians
because they dressed like everyone else and did not wear
feathers in their hair. They were called gypsies.
There divas a small colony that was hard to classify.
They had their own small neighborhood within the larger
neighborhood. All the men worked in a one-story factory,
where, stripped to the waist, they stood iTI lurid firelight
blowing their lives into long tubes with a glob of molten
glass on the end, to make green beer bottles. They wen
loosely classified as Bohemians and referred to as
Bobunks.
To add to the confusion, the nationalities were split up
among
~ y 1
themselves. The Jews, although of the same race and
religion, had the patina of diverse nationalities. There
were English Jews and German Jews; Russian Jews, Polish
Jews and Armenian Jews. There were dark-haired,
dark-eyed nervous Germans and placid, flaxen-haired,
blue-eyed Germans. Some were Catholic, some were
Lutherans. There were Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish
and they were continually breaking each other's heads over
Irish freedom and religion and opinions of Great Britain.
Also, there were the much-feared Sicilian Italians, who
were always making vendettas against other Italians the
aftermath of some internecine warfare back in Italy's
history. Many a kid in the neighborhood was kept in line
by his parents telling him that the Blackhand would get
him if he didn't watch out.
There were many churches: Roman and Greek Catholic
and Russian Orthodox. There was a Polish Catholic
church where the priest spoke Polish. There was the high
church of England and the low church. There were
Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Unitarians
and many other sects. All scattered over Brooklyn.
Th
e steamship companies dumped all races, all creeds
onto Ellis Island. Many of the immigrants went out to the
Middle West and the West and a few went South. But
many of them settled in Brooklyn: first because they
wanted to be among Lands7na7777 who were already
there, and second because they didn't have the means to
go any farther.
Whenever a few people of one sect got together, they
built a church forthwith. There was a place of worship on
nearly every block. There were temples or synagogues,
twin-spired stone churches, modest wooden churches, a
mosaic-domed church, a religious meeting place in a
vacant store with a whitewashed cross on the window, a
gathering in a hall over a beer saloon. For a while, a few
people gathered in a tent set up on a vacant lot to worship
in their own shouting way and to roll on the sawdusted
ground in their religious ecstasy. And there were wan-
dering evangelists who stood on street confers angrily
shouting out The Message.
Brooklyn was truly the city of churches.
There were so many races; so many creeds and sects all
huddled together in an area not more than a mile square.
The people
[81 1
called each other names: Mick, Heinie, Guinea, Hunky,
Polack, Wop, Sheeny, Squarehead, Bohunk, Chink and
Greaseball. They called the few Indians, who they believed
were really gypsies, riggers.
Mary was of great help to Father Flynn. During her
years of teaching public school, she'd had pupils of many
nationalities and faiths. She had a general knowledge of
the habits, temperaments and customs of various races
and religions through her contact with her pupils. Father
Flynn drew on her knowledge. He was grateful to her for
it. It made his parish work somewhat simpler.
Although Mary loved her home and loved her husband,
she wasn't happy in her marriage. She was unhappy
because Patrick did not love her. He was considerate
toward her as considerate as a person of his cynical
nature could be but he simply did not love her and she
knew he never would. Withdrawn and sad after her
father's disgrace and death, and lonesome after her
mother had moved to Boston, she turned more and more
to her church, where she always found comfort.
She went to Mass each morning and lit a candle daily to
the Virgin Mary and prayed for a child.
~ CHAP7~ER THIRTEEN ~
MARY and Patrick had been married nearly three and a
half years when she gave birth to a daughter. She had a
very hard time. It was a dry birth and she was in agonising
labor for two days. Her doctor told her not to have any
more children. He told her that she wasn't built for
childbearing.
His warning meant nothing to Mary at that time. She
was so quietly and intensely happy. Father Flynn came to
the nursing home to bless the baby and to pray for the
mother's speedy recovery. He gave her a small medal of
the Holy Child to pin to her baby's shirt. She said:
"I have something all of my own, Father. A child to love
and to care for . . . a child who will grow to love me."
[ 82 ]
Patsy suggested that Mary name the child after her
mother. "That's nice of you, Patrick, but I don't want to
call her Molly even if it is a nickname for Mary."
"Mary, then," he said. "There is no grander name."
"No."
"Me mother's name was Lizzie," he said tentatively.
"Elizabeth's a good name."
"Patrick, I'd like to name her after the one who sort of
brought us together."
"Biddy?" he asked horrified.
"Oh, no!" She smiled. "After that girl you liked so . . .
you know, Margaret Rose? It's such a pretty name. And
I'm so happy that I have a baby now that I want to give
her the name as a present to you, sort of."
She saw his eyes flicker when she mentioned the name.
She didn't know whether it was from surprise, pleasure,
anger or memories.
"You will please yourself," he said brusquely.
"We'll have to get godparents," she said. "I don't know