Peter sketched Chick at sixteen, in the black suit, Panama hat, and priestly collar he wore in the seminary, and hung the sketch in the front hallway, next to the autographed photo of Bishop T. M. A. Burke, former pastor of St. Joseph’s, whose sermon in 1900, on the fortieth anniversary of the church, inspired the fourteen-year-old Chick to devote his already pious life unreservedly to God. The parental sketches hung between the two windows of the dining room: Kathryn in the laundry of St. Peter’s Hospital on Broadway, which she worked in as a girl, then supervised for three years until the birth of Peter, after which she never worked; and Michael in his coveralls, at trackside with his gandy dancers, and with the same engine that killed him sitting benignly on the tracks behind him.
Only Tommy’s sketch was upstairs (Peter did numerous self-portraits but hung none of them), hanging in his old room, which I occupied when I moved in to take care of Peter. Tommy is moon-faced and young and has already gone bald in the sketch, and his mouth is screwed rightward in a smile that makes him look both happy and brainless at the same time. Sarah was Tommy’s caretaker, and though Tommy went to work every day as a sweeper in the North Albany (water) Filtration Plant, a major achievement in coherence for Tom, Sarah viewed it otherwise. She had a theme: “Oh God let me outlive Tommy, for he can’t survive alone.” But then she died and Tommy didn’t, and Peter became his brother’s keeper.
This was in the fall of 1954 and Peter was nearly destitute, a recurring condition; and so he welcomed a place to live rent-free. He moved up from Greenwich Village and settled back into the homestead. His old bedroom fronted on Colonie Street and, because its three bay windows offered the best light in the house, he turned it into his studio. He took down all the drapes, curtains, and dark green shades with which his mother and Sarah had kept out the light of the world for so long, and by so doing he let in not only the sunshine but also the nonplussed gazes of Arbor Hill rubbernecks who went out of their way to watch crazy old Peter Phelan, artist without a shirt, standing morning and afternoon with his expansive back to the open windows, forever dabbing paint onto his great canvases. Not like it used to be, the Phelan place.
When I moved into Tommy’s room I swept out the cobwebs and dingbats, took off the old Tommy bedclothes, heavy with dust, and discovered the Tommy treasure under the bed: dozens of packages just as they’d been when he’d bought them at Whitney’s and Myers’ and other Downtown stores where he spent his wages. I opened one box and found white kid gloves, size four, petite, lovely, brand new in white tissue paper; opened another and found a beige slip with lace bodice; opened a third, a fourth, found pink panties, a pink brassiere.
“He gave them away to ladies,” Peter told me. “He did that all his life until he ran out of ladies.”
Did you buy on spec, Tom, you old dog? Did you then walk the town till you found the hand, the bodice, the thighs that fit the garment?
— Excuse me, ma’am, but I bought you a little gift.
— A gift, for me? Who are you? I don’t know you.
— That’s all right, ma’am, you don’t have to know me.
And you tip your cap and move on, leaving the woman holding the bra.
“The three Foley sisters up the street,” Peter said. “They were his ladies before the war.” And I tried to imagine what they gave Tommy in return for his gifts. Did they model the garment? Give him a bit of stocking, a bit of white thigh? Could he have handled more? Whatever the Foley sights, they were not unfamiliar sights to many men in Arbor Hill, or so Peter said. But then one day Tommy’s Tommy-love went unrequited by all Foleys — the sap bereft — and the gifts piled up under the bed.
I began to create this memoir five years ago among the pines and hemlocks of a summer hotel on the shore of Saratoga Lake, not knowing what its design would be. It began as a work of memory, passed through stages of fantasy, and emerged, I hope, as an act of the imagination. Freud wrote of imaginative artists that they could, through artistic illusion, produce emotional effects that seemed real, and so, he said, they could justly be compared to magicians.
Never mind art or justice, but I am a bit of a magician, having been exposed to the wisdom of the hand, the innocence of the eye, at an early age: when my mother was an assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent, a mediocre illusionist in the age of vaudeville. But I also learned magic by studying Peter Phelan, for, while Manfredo played tricks on the gullible, fantasy-ridden public, Peter pursued freedom from cheap illusion and untrustworthy instincts by trying for a lifetime to find magic in what was real in the world and in his heart, ultimately reaching a depth of the self that others rarely achieve. I tried this myself, went through my theatrical double breakdowns in Germany and Manhattan in the process, and have now produced this cautionary tale of diseased self-contemplation — my own and others’.
I’ve often used my talent as a magician, that is as a card manipulator, to entertain, but only rarely for personal gain. The first time I did that I was finishing my bachelor’s degree at Albany State after the war and found myself welcome at the tables of Fobie McManus’s blackout poker game on Sheridan Avenue.
Fobie was a mean-spirited erstwhile burglar who ran a saloon that catered chiefly to newspaper people. He furnished them with drink and warmth until closing, then offered them the solace of dollar-limit poker until dawn. I was working weekends as a nightside rewrite man on the Times-Union, trying to pay my tuition. But the wages were puny and I would’ve quit if I hadn’t discovered Fobie’s game.
It was peopled with printers, reporters, and copy editors who fancied themselves gamesters of a high order. But there was only one minor-league thief (he hid cards) among them, a few anal retentives who nurtured their secret straights with confessional glee, and an assortment of barflies whose beer intake spurred them to ever greater mismanagement of their hands.
I was light-years beyond them all in handling both the deck and myself, for I had learned from Manfredo that a magician is also an actor; and so I considered my financial gain from those ink-stained wretches to be fair exchange for a thespian’s risky performance. Some nights I chose to lose heavily at the outset, though good luck would usually stalk my later play. On occasions I might even drop thirty dollars on the night to prove my vulnerability, but by so doing was then free at the next sitting to fleece again those good- and well-tempered suckers. Thus did I move ever closer to my degree in education.
I interrupted my college career to enlist in the army in 1942, when I turned eighteen, gained a lieutenancy, and in ’44 I landed at Normandy with replacement troops after the heroes and martyrs had taken the high ground as well as the beach. I was seldom in danger from then on but could not let go of the universal fantasy that death was a land mine ten steps ahead. I walked the wrong way to die, it turned out, and after the war I went back to Albany to finish my degree in three years instead of four. After graduation, instead of teaching, I found a job with the Manhattan publishing house where my father had worked as an illustrator.
Idiotically, I’d stayed in the reserve after the war, so when Korea erupted I turned into a retread. We started at Fort Benning, creating an infantry division from scratch. The Captain who had been assigned to establish the Public Information Office, the division’s press section, liked my record: precocious scholar, sometime newsman, editor of books, working on a book of my own, and, on top of it all, a line officer in the big war. What can I say?