Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (27 page)

“You’re going now, aren’t you?” Melissa said.

“I had a call at the paper. An old neighbor of mine’s in jail and wants my help.”

“I could tell by your face you were going to leave me.”

“What is it? Do you want to talk? I don’t have to go right this minute.”

“I don’t see you in ten years and you pop in and use me like a Klondike whore.”

“Use you? Klondike?” Martin’s fingers still ached from the reciprocal friction.

“You drink my champagne and eat my food and exploit my body and leave me alone with my energy. You use me.” She hurled a croissant at him. It missed him and bounced off a
lampshade.

“You crazy bitch,” he said. “You’re as crazy as my mother.”

He pulled her robe off her shoulders, pinning her arms to her side. Then he dragged her to the floor and undid his trousers.

How do I use thee? Let me count the ways. As a sacred vessel to be violated. As a thief of Holy Writ. As the transcendent trinity: Melissa-Katrina-Marina, which my father
discovered and loved; which I now love. As my father immortalized them all, like the figures on the Grecian urn, so do I now perceive them in all their lambent lunacy. Seeing with my father’s
eyes and knowing how he was victimized by glory and self-absorption, I now forgive the man his exorbitant expectations, his indifference, his absence. Once forgiven, it is a short walk to forgive
myself for failing to penetrate such passionate complexity as his. Forgiving myself, I can again begin to love myself. All this, thanks to the use of the fair Melissa.

As he pronged the dying fire, Martin sensed the presence of his parents in the room, not as flaming balls of tow this time, but as a happy couple, holding hands and watching him do diddle with
Melissa for them, just as he had once done proud piddle for them in his personal pot. Clearly, they saw him as the redeemer of all their misalliances, the conqueror of incoherence, the spirit of
synthesis in an anarchic family. Martin, in the consanguineous saddle, was their link with love past and future, a figure of generational communion, the father of a son en route to the priesthood,
the functioning father of the senile Edward. More than that he had, here, obviously become his own father. He was Edward, son of Emmett Daugherty, father of Martin Daugherty, grandfather of Peter
Daugherty, and progenitor of the unchartable Daugherty line to come. Lost son of a lost father, he was now fatherhood incarnate.

Perceiving this, he spent himself in Melissa’s ravine of purification.

“You are my yum-yum,” she said to him, wholly flattened, the corners of her mouth yanked downward by unseen powers at the center of the earth. She stroked the fluids at the center of
herself and sucked the mixture off her middle finger, evoking in Martin a ten-year-old memory of the same act performed at the Hampton. Moved profoundly both by the act and the memory, he loathed
himself for his own psychic mendacity, for trying to persuade himself he had other than venereal reasons for jingling everybody’s favorite triangle.

Hypocrite!

Lecher!

My boy!

Billy found Martin in the news coop of police headquarters playing knock rummy with Ned Curtin, the
Times-Union’s
police reporter. Martin saw Billy and nodded.
Then he drew a card and knocked. Ned Curtin slid a dime to him across the desk.

“How come he called you?” Billy said when Martin came out to meet him. They walked together up the stairs, Billy still smelling the pine disinfectant he always associated with this
building. Billy had been here only once, five years ago, for dealing cards on Orange Street. He’d been hired by a punk who said he had Bindy’s okay to run the game, but didn’t, so
they pulled everybody in and held them an hour here and then let the players go. But they kept the punk, who had to pay up and do a night in jail.

“I saw him Thursday down in Spanish George’s,” Martin said, “and I told him to call me if he needed anything.”

“You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

“He didn’t want me to. When you see him, you’ll know why.”

“Why’d you call me now?”

“It’ll be in the paper tonight, or maybe even this afternoon, who he is and used to be. You had to know before that.”

They sat down on a long, wooden bench in the empty courtroom. A white-haired man in shirtsleeves came in from the room behind the judge’s bench and sniffed at them, then went out
again.

“Did you ever know why he left home?” Billy asked.

“I know the gossip. He drank, then the baby died. The one fed the other.”

“I was nine.”

“Do you remember him well? You could at nine.”

“I don’t know if I remember his face from seeing it, or from the picture. There’s one home in a box of snapshots, about nineteen fifteen, the year before he left. He’s
standing on our old stoop on Colonie Street.”

“He was all done with baseball then. I can remember how he looked. He doesn’t look like that anymore.”

With a magnifying glass, Billy had studied how his father wore his sweater, the same one he wore in the rowboat, and maybe the same cap. He studied the cut of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, and
his smile, the lips open and twisted a little to the left. It was a good smile, a strong smile. But Billy’s mother said it was a weak thing to leave us and drink so much. A man
shouldn’t be weak like that, she said. But, oh my, how he cried, she said. How we all cried.

“Here,” said Martin, nudging Billy Through an open door they saw men entering the hallway behind the courtroom. One guard in blue shirt and policeman’s cap walked ahead of the
prisoner, and one behind him. Billy was not prepared for this sight. It was Pete the Tramp without a hat, without the spiky mustache, without the comedy. When tramps came to the house and asked for
a meal, Billy’s mother always fed them, and gave them coffee with milk. Now he knew why. Billy and Martin followed the procession. The tramp dragged his feet, slouched, shuffled on fallen
arches, or maybe on stumps with toes frozen and gone. Billy kept his father’s dirty gray hair in sight. He did not remember hair on his father, he remembered a cap.

The white-haired man who had sniffed at them turned from the large ledger in which he was writing. Billy remembered seeing the man only last month at Foley’s pit in Troy, handling fighting
cocks for Patsy McCall. His name was Kelly and he was a hell of a handler.

“What’s this?” Kelly said, pen in hand.

“Bail. Francis Phelan,” said the first policeman.

“Ah, you’re the one,” Kelly said, putting down his pen and sticking out his right hand to Francis. “Congratulations. Twenty-one, was it?” And everyone laughed.

“So they say,” Francis said.

Billy saw his father’s smile and recognized the curve of the lips, but the teeth were brown in front, and there were no teeth at all behind them. The mouth was a dark cavity. The smile was
dead.

“Somebody got bail money?” Kelly asked.

“Here,” said Billy, and he weaved his way through the men. He counted out four hundred dollars and Kelly took it to the next room and put it in a box in the open safe. Billy looked
at his father and received a stare of indifference.

“You a bail bondsman? I don’t remember you,” Kelly said, his pen poised over the receipt book.

“No,” Billy said. “Family.”

Kelly handed Billy a receipt, and one of the policemen gave Francis a small white envelope with his belongings. Then both guards left the corridor. Billy, Martin, and Francis stood looking at
one another until Martin said, “Let’s go,” and led the way out the door. He stopped at the top of the stairs.

“Martin, thanks for fixing it up,” Francis said.

“Not at all. I told you to call me.”

“You know a lawyer who’ll take me on?”

“I do. Marcus Gorman, the best in town. I already talked to him.”

Francis looked at Billy and nodded his head. “You’re Billy, ain’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“Thanks for that dough.”

“My pleasure.”

Francis nodded again. “How you been?”

“Not bad,” Billy said. “How about yourself?”

“Well, I ain’t in jail.” And Francis cackled a throaty laugh, showing his brown teeth and the cavity of his mouth, and fell into a cough that twisted his whole body.

Billy offered him a Camel.

He took it.

They went down the stairs and out the front door onto Eagle Street, confronting a golden October afternoon, the bright sun warming the day with Indian summer’s final
passion. Men were walking the street in shirtsleeves, and women’s dresses still had the look of August about them. The black mood that had fallen on Billy when he first saw his father faded
into a new and more hopeful coloration under a sky so full of white, woolly clouds.

The bail almost wiped out Billy’s bankroll, but he still had sixty-two dollars and change. It was enough to get the old man a new outfit: shoes, suit, shirt, and tie. Make him look like an
American citizen again.

When Martin told Billy about the bail, Billy had immediately said, I got it, I’ll go for it. I know it’s your money, Martin, but I’ll get more. I don’t want that money,
Martin had said. Forget I ever won that bet. No, I don’t forget that, Billy said. What do you do when you lose? You pay.

“I gotta get something in my stomach,” Francis said. “I ain’t et in two days.”

“Didn’t they feed you out there in the can?” Billy asked.

“Nothin’d stay down. I still ain’t right.”

“We can go home. I’ll call Peg at the office and have her whip up a meal. She cooks good.”

“No,” Francis said. “No thanks, no. No.”

“Then what do you want?” asked Billy.

“Garlic soup,” Francis said. “You know an Italian place? They always got garlic.”

“Garlic soup?”

“Lombardo’s,” Martin said. “First-rate place.”

“I don’t want no meal,” said Francis. “Just garlic soup. Fixes up the stomach. A Mexican bum taught me that in Texas.”

“They’ll make whatever you want at Lombardo’s,” said Martin. “But listen, I’ve got appointments. I’ll leave you all to solve the garlic
problem.”

“No, stick around,” Francis said.

“I’ve got work to do, Fran.”

“Nah, nah, nah,” said Francis and he grabbed Martin’s arm and started to walk with him. “Nah, nah. Stick around a while. It ain’t gonna kill you to be seen with an
old bum.”

“Some of my best friends are bums,” said Martin. “The newspaper specializes in them.”

“So stick around, stick around.”

Billy followed the two men as they all walked down Eagle Street, his father’s slouch not so pronounced now, but his shuffle clearly the gimp’s gait, left leg dragging. Billy
remembered somebody in the family saying Francis was lame, very lame, when he came back to Albany in thirty-five. Whatever it was, he’s still got a little of it.

They turned down Hudson Avenue and walked toward the Italian neighborhood, through the farmers’ market with its half a hundred trucks, and a scattering of horses and wagons. This had been
the city produce market since the days before Francis was born, when everything here was horses and wagons. Billy was maybe six or seven when he gripped his father’s hand as they walked among
the animals here, smelling the fresh and decaying produce, the fresh and decaying manure, a fluid stench Billy remembered now as clearly as he’d remembered the pine disinfectant. They walked
past a spavined animal in its traces, chomping at the feed bag, mashing its leavings with its hind feet, and Billy looked at his father’s right hand, the back of it bulging with blue veins
and scars Billy did not remember. Then he saw the first two joints were gone from the first finger. Billy pictured them curving around the hand-sewn and soap-rubbed seams of a baseball when his
father was instructing him in the ways of an outcurve.

“What happened to your finger?” Billy asked. They were three abreast and he was beside his father.

“What finger?”

“The one that ain’t there.”

“Oh, that. Some wine bum went nuts and chopped it off. Tried to cut my feet off with a cleaver, but all he got was a piece of the finger.”

“Why’d he come after you?”

“He wanted my shoes. I had good-lookin’ shoes on and he didn’t have none.”

“What’d you do to him?”

“I think he went in the river. Somebody told me that.”

“When was all this?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Ten, twelve years ago. Colorado, I think. Or maybe Idaho.”

“You got around some.”

“Yowsah. Trains go everywhere.”

“Lunch is on me,” Billy said.

“Okay by me, Bill.”

Bill. That didn’t sound right to Billy. People who didn’t know him called him Bill. But that’s the way it is. He don’t know me at all. It then occurred to Billy that
he’d known for a day and a half that his father was in town and that he’d made no effort to find him. No effort. None.

“I was never here,” Francis said when they walked into the bar of Lombardo’s restaurant. “How long’s it been here?”

“Must be twenty years,” Martin said. “You shouldn’t stay away so long.”

“Got great Italian roast beef, best in town,” Billy said.

“No beef, just soup,” Francis said.

They sat in a booth in the bar area, Martin seating himself first, Francis sliding in beside him. At the bar, three young men with black hair and pure white shirts were talking to the bartender.
The bar mirror was spotless, and so were the white floor tiles. Only thing old man Lombardo don’t have in the joint is dirt. Billy, in his gray gabardine, new last month, and a fresh silk
shirt, felt clean to the skin. His father looked dirtier now than he had on the street.