Charlie was pudgy, the face of a smiling marshmallow on the torso of a left tackle. There he stood in his major’s suit, all Sam Browne and no wrinkles. Where are you this minute, Charlie Boy? Tied to a bed? Gun at your brain? How much do they say your life is worth? Have they already killed you?
Martin remembered Charlie’s confirmation, the boy kissing the bishop’s ring; then at the party Bindy gave afterward at the Hampton Hotel, the bishop kissing Bindy’s foot. That was the year the McCalls all but donated the old city almshouse to the Catholic diocese as a site for the new Christian Brothers Academy, the military high school where Charlie would become a cadet captain. Martin’s wife, Maire, now called Mary, a third or maybe fourth cousin to Bindy’s wife, sang “Come Back to Erin” at the confirmation party, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Dillon, the organist at St. Joseph’s Church, whose son was simple-minded. And Mary, when the bishop congratulated her on her voice and parted her on the hand, felt fully at home in America for the first time since Martin had snatched her away from Ireland.
Martin’s recollection of Charlie Boy on that afternoon was obscured by memories of Bindy and Patsy and Matt, whom he saw yet at a table in a far corner, objects of veneration, Albany’s own Trinity.
The perils of being born, like himself, to a man of such fame and notoriety sent Martin into commiseration with Charlie. Bindy was an eminence, the power on the street. “Celebrated sporting figure” and “a member of the downtown fraternity” was as far as the papers ever went by way of identifying him. Cautious journalism. No one mentioned his direct power over the city’s illegal gambling. No editor would let a writer write it. It was the received wisdom that no one minds the elephant in the parlor if nobody mentions it’s there. Martin’s own decision to tell Patsy there would be no story on the kidnapping: Was that conspiratorial genuflection? No end to the veneration of power, for the news is out: The McCalls hurl thunderbolts when affronted.
The memory of their confrontation with The Albany Sentinel was still fresh. The Sentinel had prospered as an opposition voice to the McCalls in the early days of the machine, but its success was due less to its political point of view than to the gossip it carried. In 1925 the paper dredged up “The Love Nest Tragedy of 1908” involving Edward Daugherty and Melissa Spencer, purporting to have discovered two dozen torchy love letters from the famous playwright to the now beloved star of the silent screen. The letters were crude forgeries and Melissa ignored them. But Edward Daugherty halted their publication with an injunction and a libel suit. Patsy McCall saw to it that the judge in the case was attuned to the local realities, saw to it also that a hand-picked jury gave proper consideration to Patsy’s former Colonie Street neighbor. The Sentinel publicly admitted the forgery and paid nominal libel damages. But it then found its advertisers withdrawing en masse and its tax assessment quintupled. Within a month the ragbag sons of bitches closed up shop and left town, and moral serenity returned to Albany as McCall Democracy won the day.
“Aren’t you a little early this morning?”
Marlene Whiteson, a reporter whose stories were so sugary that you risked diabetic coma if you read them regularly, stood in front of Martin’s desk, inside her unnecessary girdle, oozing even at this hour the desire but not quite the will, never quite the will, to shed those restrictive stays, leap onto the desk, and do a goat dance with him, or with anyone. But Marlene was an illusionist, her sexuality the disappearing rabbit: Now you see it, now you don’t. Reach out to touch and find it gone, back inside her hat. The city room was full of hopefuls, ready to do Marlene, but as far as Martin knew, he himself came closest to trapping the rabbit on a night six years past when both of them worked late and he drove her home, circuitously. Need one explain why he stopped the car, stroked her cheek? She volunteered a small gift of smooch and said into his ear, Oh, Martin, you’re the man I’d like to go to Pago Pago with. Whereupon he reached for her portions, only to be pushed away, while she continued nevertheless with bottomless smooch. Twist my tongue but stroke me never. Oh the anomaly. Coquettes of the world, disband; you have nothing to gain but saliva.
“What goodies do you have for us today?” Martin asked her.
“I have a message for you, as a matter of fact. Did you see this morning’s paper?”
“I was just about to crack it.”
“I have a story in about Melissa Spencer. She sends you greetings and hopes she gets a chance to see you. She also asked about your father.”
“Ah. And is she well?”
“She looks absolutely gorgeous. For forty-nine. She is some sexy dame.”
“How long will she be here?”
“Just a week.”
Martin knew that. He had known for weeks she was starring in the touring production of his father’s great work, The Flaming Corsage, the play Edward Daugherty had written in order to transform his melodramatic scandal with Melissa and her jealous lesbian lover, and the consequent destruction of his career and his wife, into anguished theatrical harmony. He used both Martin’s mother, Katrina, and the young Melissa as models for the two principal women in the play, and, not unnaturally, Melissa, as a young actress, yearned to incarnate the role she had inspired in life.
Now, at forty-nine, no longer disguisable as the pristine Melissa of 1908, she was appearing in the play for the first time, but as the hero’s reclusive, middle-aged wife. The casting, the result of assiduous pursuit of the part by Melissa herself, had the quality of aged perfume about it: yesterday’s scarlet tragedy revived for an audience which no longer remembered this flaming, bygone sin, but for whom the reversal of roles by the famed Melissa was still quaintly scandalous. Melissa had acted in the play for six months on Broadway before taking it on the road, her comeback after a decade of invisibility: one of the most animatedly lovely stars of the silent screen back once more in the American embrace, this time visible, all but palpable, in the flesh.
“She really is interested in seeing you,” Marlene said, opening the morning paper to her interview with Melissa and spreading it on Martin’s desk. “She’s keeping a ticket in your name at the box office, and she wants you to go backstage after the curtain.” Marlene smiled and raised her sexual eyebrow. “You devil,” she said, moving away from Martin’s desk.
Martin barely managed a smile for the world champion of sexual fatuity. How surprised she would be at what Melissa could do with the same anatomical gifts as her own. He looked at Melissa’s photo in the paper and saw Marlene was right. Melissa was still beautiful. When time descends, the ego forfends. But Martin could not read her story now. Too distracted to resurrect old shame, old pleasure. But Martin, you will go backstage one night this week, will you not? He conjured the vision of the naked, spread-eagled Melissa and his phone rang. Chick Phelan on the line.
“I saw you go in across the street, Martin. What’d they say?”
“Not much except to confirm what you said.”
“Now they’ve cut off all the phones on the block. I’m in Tony Looby’s store down on Pearl Street.”