“What about your coffee? What about your eggs?”
But he was already gone, this aging firefly who never seemed to his wife to have grown up quite like other men, gone on another story.
Martin Daugherty had once lived in Arbor Hill, where the McCalls and the Phelans lived, but fire destroyed the house of his childhood and adolescence, and the smoke poisoned Katrina Daugherty, his mother, who escaped the flames only to die on the sidewalk of Colonie Street in her husband’s arms, quoting Verlaine to him: “. . you loved me so!” “Quite likely — I forget.” The fire began in the Christian Brothers School next door, old Brother William turned to a kneeling cinder by the hellish flames. The fire leaped across the alley and consumed the Daugherty house, claiming not only its second victim in Martin’s mother, but also his father’s accumulation of a lifetime of books, papers, and clippings that attested to his fame and infamy, and two unfinished plays. Edward Daugherty left Arbor Hill forever after the fire and moved into the North End of the city, politely evicting the tenants in his own father’s former home on Main Street.
This was the house Edward Daugherty’s parents had built on the edge of the Erie Canal the year before Martin was born, and had lived in until they died. After Edward’s first stroke, Martin moved into the house also, with his wife and son, to nurse his father back to independence. But the man was never to be well again, and Martin remained in the house even until now, curator of what he had come to call the Daugherty Museum.
Martin parked his car on Colonie Street in front of the vacant lot where his former home had stood before it burned. He stepped out onto the sidewalk where he’d once pitched pennies and election cards, and the charred roots of his early life moved beneath his feet. Chick Phelan peered out of the upstairs bay window of the house next to the empty lot. Martin did not wave. He looked fleetingly at the outline of the foundation of the old place, slowly being buried by the sod of time.
Patsy McCall’s house was kitty-corner to the empty lot and Martin crossed the street and climbed the stoop. He, the Phelans, the McCalls (Bindy lived two doors above Patsy), and all the other youths of the street had spent uncountable nights on this stoop, talking, it now seemed, of three subjects: baseball, the inaccessibility of the myriad burgeoning breasts that were poking themselves into the eyeballs and fluid dreams of every boy on the street, and politics: Would you work for Billy Barnes? Never. Packy McCabe? Sure. Who’s the man this election? Did you hear how the Wally-Os stole a ballot box in the Fifth Ward and Corky Ronan chased ’em and got it back and bit off one of their ears?
Martin looked at his watch: eight thirty-five. He rang the doorbell and Dick Maloney, district attorney of Albany County, a short, squat man with an argumentive mouth, answered.
“You’re up early, Dick, me boy.”
“Am I?”
“Are you in possession of any news?”
“There’s no news I know of.”
And Maloney pointed toward the dining room, where Martin found Patsy and Matt McCall, the political leaders of the city and county for seventeen years. Cronies of both brothers sat with them at the huge round table, its white tablecloth soiled with coffee stains and littered with cups, ashes, and butts. On the wall the painted fruit was ripening in the bowl and the folks were still up at Golgotha. Alongside hung framed, autographed photos of Jim Jeffries, Charlie Murphy of Tammany, Al Smith as presidential candidate, and James Oliver Plunkett, who had inscribed the photo with one of his more memorable lines: “Government of the people, by the people who were elected to govern them.”
“Morning, gentlemen,” Martin said with somber restraint.
“We’re not offering coffee,” said Patsy, looking his usual, overstuffed self. With his tight haircut, rounded jowls, and steel-rimmed specs, this Irish-American chieftain looked very like a Prussian puffball out of uniform.
“Then thanks for nothing,” said Martin.
The cronies, Poop Powell, an ex-hurley player and ex-cop who drove for the McCalls, and Freddie Gallagher, a childhood pal of Mart’s who found that this friendship alone was the secret of survival in the world, rose from the table and went into the parlor without a word or a nod. Martin sat in a vacated chair and said to Patsy, “There’s something tough going on, I understand.”
“No, nothing,” said Patsy.
The McCalls’ faces were abulge with uncompromising gravity. For all their power they seemed suddenly powerless confronting personal loss. But many men had passed into oblivion for misjudging the McCalls’ way with power. Patsy demonstrated it first in 1919 when he campaigned in his sailor suit for the post of city assessor and won, oh wondrous victory. It was the wedge which broke the hold the dirty black Republican sons of bitches had had on the city since ’99. Into the chink Patsy made in the old machine, the Democrats, two years later, drove a new machine, the Nonesuch, with the McCalls at the wheeclass="underline" Patsy, the savior, the sine qua non, becoming the party leader and patron; Matt, the lawyer, becoming the political strategist and spokesman; and Benjamin, called Bindy, the sport, taking over as Mayor of Nighttime City.
The three brothers, in an alliance with a handful of Protestant Yankee aristocrats who ran the formal business of the city, developed a stupendous omnipotence over both county and city, which vibrated power strings even to the White House. Democratic aspirants made indispensable quadrennial pilgrimages to genuflect in the McCall cathedral and plead for support. The machine brushed the lives of every Albany citizen from diapers to dotage. George Quinn often talked of the day he leaped off the train at Van Woert Street, coming back in uniform from France, and was asked for five dollars by John Kelleher on behalf of Patsy’s campaign for the assessorship. George gave not five but fifteen and had that to brag about for the rest of his life.
“I have to say it,” Martin said, looking at Patsy, his closest friend among the brothers. “There’s a rumor around that Charlie was kidnapped last night.”
The gravity of the faces did not change, nor did the noncommittal expressions.
“Nothing to that,” said Matt, a tall, solid man, still looking like the fullback he once was, never a puffball; handsome and with a movie actor’s crop of black hair. When he gained power, Matt put his college football coach on the Supreme Court bench.
“Is Charlie here?” Martin asked him.
“He went to New York,” Matt said.
“When was that?”
“None of your goddamn business,” said Patsy.
“Patsy, listen. I’m telling you the rumor is out. If it’s fake and you don’t squelch it, you’ll have reporters crawling in the windows.”
“Not these windows I won’t. And why should I deny something that hasn’t happened? What the hell do you think I am, a goddamn fool?”
The rising anger. Familiar. The man was a paragon of wrath when cornered. Unreason itself. He put Jigger Begley in tears for coming drunk to a rally, and a week later Jigger, Patsy’s lifelong friend, quit his job in the soap factory, moved to Cleveland, and for all anybody knew was there yet. Power in the voice.
Martin’s personal view was this: that I do not fear the McCalls; that this is my town as much as theirs and I won’t leave it for any of them. Martin had committed himself to Albany in part because of the McCalls, because of the promise of a city run by his childhood friends. But he’d also come back to his native city in 1921, after two years with the A.E.F. and a year and a half in Ireland and England after that, because he sensed he would be nothing without his roots, and when, in 1922, he was certain of this truth he went back to Ireland and brought Maire Kiley out of her Gaelic wilderness in Carraroe, married her in Galway, and came to Albany forever, or at least sixteen years now seemed like forever. So to hell with Patsy and his mouth and the whole bunch of them and their power. Martin Daugherty’s complacency is superior to whatever abstract whip they hold over him. But then again, old fellow, there’s no need to make enemies needlessly, or to let the tone of a man’s voice turn your head.