Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (41 page)

Quinn sat on the aisle in the third row of chairs set up in the First Church’s basement. He heard Claudia’s voice and turned to greet her. She was enormous in a starched pink and white vertical-striped, short-sleeved cotton housedress to her ankles, her hair rolled in thick waves, and Quinn thought her flamboyantly lovely. She took his hand and shook her head at this mess, it never ends, then sat in a chair to the rear of the dais, staring into the crowd, her small smile missing, her lips moving in a silent whisper.

The protest had been conceived by Baron Roland to mount grievances against landlords and police—black youths beaten and jailed as gangs, the Brothers harassed, social agencies punished for helping groups like Claudia’s, riots elsewhere bringing change from City Hall, but not here. Then Matt was silenced and Bobby shot, and Claudia marshaled her troops to raise hell—and here they came—three hundred in a room for two hundred. Three TV stations and both newspapers here to cover it.

Penny, who this afternoon predicted a disaster to Matt, was sitting with a young black man Quinn didn’t know, both talking with Roland who looked roosterish with a forum this large. Quinn counted at least two spies from the Albany machine, plus half a dozen white and black clerics, two Franciscan priests and a cluster of students from Siena supporting Matt, the campus hero, and three College of Saint Rose nuns who supported everything Claudia did, and Father Howard Hubbard, just out of the seminary and grad school, working out of Holy Cross with the neighborhood groups, including Claudia’s. Quinn saw a sizeable number of white first-timers he assumed were Catholics outraged over diocesan toadying to City Hall. Half the crowd was black, mostly women from seven neighborhood groups like Claudia’s, for whom this was a major moment, and—can it be, just inside the door, Tremont, is that you?

Baron Roland spoke first, how great so many are here to stand for Father Matt. Tomorrow morning we picket both the diocese and City Hall, please join us. He gave the latest word on Bobby and said he believed he was shot because he had become a spokesman for the black race, just as Martin Luther King was killed because he had become the black messiah. Women were weeping in Rio de Janeiro, Ralph Abernathy was leading prayers at the Poor People’s Campaign in Resurrection City, Willy Brandt had likened Bobby’s shooting to Greek tragedy, and the president of Chile said it has caused all men in the world to tremble. Roland asked for a silent prayer, then introduced Claudia, the outstanding leader of Better Streets, the group Father Matthew worked with. Claudia stood up so quickly her chair fell backward; but with fervid purpose she moved her great weight to the microphone, made her hands into fists and shook them.

“I’m mad, I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m sorry because when I asked the Mayor to come to the South End and see how bad things were he said he already knew, and I said I hope he chokes. I don’t mean that. When I said that the devil had a hold of me. I also said I’m goin’ up there and throw a brick through his window, but that was the devil again. I don’t wish no bad things for the Mayor. I gotta die myself. S’pose I died with that statement on me. I’d bust hell wide open.

“I’m mad ’cause they’re takin’ Father Matt away from us. They say he can’t come see us no more. When this man walk our streets it’s like he’s blessin’ ’em, like he’s blessin’ us all. He been down here a year helpin’ make those old houses somethin’ we can live in, roofs leakin’, rats runnin’, so cold in winter the water pipes bust. Kids sleigh-ride in the hall and tell their teachers they sleep in a room with diamonds, which is ice. You go out in the mornin’ and gangsters hustlin’ our kids to buy their junk. Wineheads sleepin’ on the street and you can’t leave no clothes on the line ’cause they steal everything.

“So I go to this meetin’ and they all talkin’ about getting organized and we say what we want to do and some of ’em laugh and say landlords won’t ever listen to you and you never gonna get no playground. But we knocked on doors and we got us some action and Father Matt was with us, chasin’ those fools away, gettin’ landlords to fix the pipes, tryna get a health clinic. He even walk into the Mayor’s office with us to get the garbage off our streets, which the city won’t do. But they don’t want him speakin’ up for us, the bishop don’t. Bishop say he gotta keep quiet what’s goin’ on in the South End. Father Matt knows everybody and everybody loves him and we don’t want him to go away. They took Martin Luther King and maybe they takin’ Bobby Kennedy and now our Father Matt who ain’t done nothin’ but good. That’s why I’m ashamed. But it’s the bishop oughta be ashamed, good holy man playin’ footsie with politicians. Father Matt bein’ punished for what he say about vote buyin’ and about the Mayor not doin’ nothin’, and they punishin’ us ’cause we tryin’ to make things better and they don’t want that. You stay where you are is what they’re tellin’ us. You live there and die there just the way it is. This ain’t any church talkin’ I ever know about.”

Father Thomas Tooher, a tall, fair-skinned man in his sixties, glasses, white hair, white collar, stood up from his seat in a middle row. Until two years ago he’d been pastor of a suburban parish with horseshows and celebrity parties if he needed money, but then he asked to be pastor of St. Joseph’s on Albany’s Arbor Hill, where he’d been raised when it was heavily Irish, but now was mostly black with a sparse congregation. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, “I’d like to say a word about the bishop.”

Claudia nodded to him.

“The bishop didn’t silence Father Matthew Daugherty,” he said. “The bishop is a very sick man and hasn’t been in touch with diocesan business for months. He doesn’t know what happened on your streets that led to Father Matthew’s silencing. That order came from the diocese in his name, but it didn’t come from him. I say this now because I can’t bear to hear one more attack on this very good, very sick man.”

“If he didn’t do it, who did?” Claudia asked.

“I have nothing to say on that,” Father Tooher said, and he sat down.

A voice called out, “It was Callaghan,” and Quinn remembered Matt’s whorehouse list and Monsignor Callaghan, the diocesan chancellor, calling Matt a Republican troublemaker.

“It wasn’t the bishop?” Claudia said. “Just one of his flackeys? I know that bozo Callaghan, and he be the one sayin’ Father Matt gotta be punished for sassin’ the politicians? He be the one lettin’ politicians tell the church which is right and which is wrong?”

Claudia speeded up her words, volume rising.

“He tellin’ this saint of a priest we can’t see him no more? This little bozo, he be the one cut off Father’s head so he can’t see us no more?”

Then she screamed: “They cut off his head! They hate us. They hate us’cause we black. THEY HATE US!” She jumped straight up with both feet, fists pumping, then jumped again, screaming, “We black and they hate us!” She jumped and jumped, her face streaming with tears. She jumped and no words now, just a long cry of rage and a long wail, and then she stood still, weeping. A nun came and gripped her huge left arm with both hands and led her to her chair. Claudia sat and could not stop weeping.

First Presbyterian pastor Bob Lamar stood and sang and the crowd joined him:

“Oh-o freedom, Oh-o freedom,
Oh freedom over me, over me.
And before I be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord and be free, and be free . . .”

When the song had run its course another voice rose from the back: Tremont’s.

“Hey! Mighty powerful, Claudia,” he said. “What you said about bein’ black, I’m black, and my daddy was blacker than me. I love that song about bein’ a slave. Slaves need them songs. My daddy was born and raised in Albany and he got slave ancestors back to the old timey Dutch who built this church we in. My daddy was a vaudeville singer and everybody knew him as Big Jimmy Van. He sang all over this country, made money, come home and went into politics. Wasn’t no politician in this town he didn’t call by his first name. He had power and he said a whole lot of what he wanted to say by singin’, and I want to sing one of his songs, which he got a big kick out of ’cause hardly anybody liked it. But it was one of the biggest song hits in this country.” And Tremont sang:

“. . . My gal she took a notion against the colored race.
She said if I would win her I’d have to change my face.
She said if she should wed me that she’d regret it soon,
And now I’m shook, yes good and hard, because I am a coon.
Coon, coon, coon, I wish my color would fade,
Coon, coon, coon, I’d like a different shade.
Coon, coon, coon, mornin’, night and noon,
I wish I was a white man ’stead of a coon, coon, coon.

“Hey, all you coons,” Tremont said.

People were hissing and booing, standing up to get a look at this maniac, who the hell is he? But Tremont saw Claudia smiling, and then Quinn was pulling him by the arm, moving him through the crowd into the vestibule and up the stairs to the street.

“You gotta get out of here before they lynch you,” Quinn said.

“Lynch me, lynch my daddy,” Tremont said.

Quinn saw Tremont was drunk, again, but drunk now doing an encore for Big Jimmy, suicide by music, a new way to go.

At the DeWitt Clinton Matt went in with Vivian and George to make sure nobody got lost again. In the lobby George looked around at the marble walls and said, “This is the DeWitt. Jimmy Walker lived here. His wife was never with him. He’d say to her, let’s go out and see a show, let’s go to a nightclub, but she wouldn’t go out of the house. That’s what happened to him.”

“What happened to him?” Vivian asked.

“He went out with somebody else,” George said.

The ballroom was full of people eating dinner, but Quinn wasn’t here and neither was Tremont. A six-piece band was playing the “Beale Street Blues.” Vivian negotiated with somebody in charge of tickets.

“Thank you for a lovely evening, Father,” Vivian said.

“You knew Martin in the old days,” Matt said.

“For a few years. We went to the same places, dances, excursions on the boats. He was well known, famous, really, after the McCall kidnapping. He brought the kidnapped boy home to his father. I read his column all the time. Everybody did.”

“You know he’d probably like this concert, if he’s up for it. If he is will you keep an eye on him?”

“That would be lovely,” Vivian said. “He’ll be my second date.”

Matt checked the front desk for room rates and availability, park him here for tonight, why not? All Matt needed was money. He’d borrow it from Quinn, or somebody. He liked all this—instant shelter, dinner, distraction, and Cody’s great piano. He booked a double room, maybe he’d stay here himself. He told Martin the plan, which jazzed him.

“You live a hurly-burly life for a monk,” Martin said.

Matt checked him in, sent his bags upstairs, gave his last twenty to the ticket-taker, and, penniless, walked his father into the ballroom for dinner, a concert, and a radical transformation of his evening.

Martin had been at the Ann Lee Home six months, a casualty of age, time, bad knees, retirement from the newspaper, inability to write anything else, and the death of his wife, friends, and ambition. He had never saved money, and retired on Social Security and periodic royalties from revivals of the plays of his father, Edward Daugherty, mostly
The Flaming Corsage
, his scandalous masterpiece. Martin’s own books were all out of print. He gave up on living alone and cooking for himself and moved into the Ann Lee Home for the aged run by the Albany County Democratic machine, which took him in as a guest, one of their own, after a lifetime of association with the party’s high and low, from machine boss Patsy McCall down to the exercise therapist who worked on his knees. As a guest he did not have to sign over his Social Security to the County as inmates did; he kept it in a savings account that Matt monitored. He viewed the Ann Lee as an inexpensive hostel. He could come and go if he could walk, and he still could, with difficulty. He went out for occasional dinners with Matt, who visited often and was on tap for emergencies, except today when he had an emergency of his own. When Martin moved in he knew a dozen or more guests and inmates, a few of them gone mindless, some still ready to talk politics and history, but he needed conversation less and less.

“This is probably Cody’s last concert,” Matt said as he walked Martin to George and Vivian’s table. “He’s dying.”

“He doesn’t have a corner on that market,” said Martin.

“The concert’s a fund-raiser for his medical bills.”

“So this is ‘So long, Cody,’ a wake while he’s still alive.”

“I guess that’s it.”

“A work of mercy. Celebrate what’s left of the man.”

The band struck up a fast version of “Twelfth Street Rag.”

“Are you really up for this action?” Matt asked.

“I didn’t think I’d be in a scene like this again. I think it quickens my pulse.”