Exile on Bridge Street (26 page)

“May your boy rejoice in His kingdom where all our tears are wiped away,” I offer.

“Oh,” she says awkwardly, and looks up. “What a kind t'ing to say. May God be with you too, William.”

I bow and move on but I can't help but feel so proud of myself for touching her, and the humility in it and pride in myself mix together and make me feel so wonderful that I almost cry too, if it wouldn't be so selfish to do so. But quickly I am taken away from my own feelings of greatness, for when I see Anna the first time on this day I am shocked by the blackening of her eyes and swollen nose. Behind her is the shamed father leaning his elbows on his knees in a chair pointed toward a side wall. Some say that Anna's father punched her for not taking Tiny Thomas to the hospital, but most know that when John Lonergan found out about the boy's death he drank himself violent, as he often does. I can see that Anna is forced to breathe through her mouth and it is only afterward that I notice her wearing a new dress. She is not as sad as her mother, though, and instead carries an air of forthright responsibility to her.

“My most heartfelt condolences to you and yours,” I say to her.

“Thanks, Liam,” she says while looking past me to the person behind with a sternness I don't expect.

In the kitchen are the young males quietly peopling the table on the other side of the parlor wall. Abe Harms and Richie Lonergan look up at me distrustfully as I walk by, and as I notice Petey Behan, who is looking away angrily, I feel Vincent Maher pull me from the line to where, standing on the other side of the kitchen, are the men of The White Hand huddled closely together. I can see as well as the others that the Lonergan band across the small kitchen are a disconcerted bunch. Frankie Byrne and his men stand behind them, along with the older brothers Behan and Quilty. That they feel bitter on our having a claim on the family by our reaching out to them—providing casket, flowers, dresses, and little suits for all, and a grave. Showing up in our great numbers too, while Lovett sits in a cell at our benefit. Richie himself is the most egregious looking of the bunch, shooting his eyes away and cracking his knuckles and wrists on the table nervously. As I mix in with The Swede, Maher, Harry Reynolds, and others, Dinny approaches the sulky table of youthful males with hat in hand and his cousin at his side, Mickey Kane. A round of handshakes is accomplished, though the boys do not stand at Dinny's reaching out to them. They are whispering to each other and with the plaintive, keening women at their singing, I cannot hear a thing said but I know it is of business that they speak. With Dinny and Mickey's back to us, I see Richie's eyes look around them toward me, then look away.

The line of inquisitive visitants peering in on the dead child continues to move slowly, eerily. Blessing child and mother as a matter of routine. Their humility related more to the shame of curiosity than sorrow for the family's loss, and it is Anna that seems most put out by it. Her hair off and over her shoulders is a silky, strawberry-yellow swirl so lucid that it seems to be from another place, certainly not from this dark den where so many malnourished children flop in a two-room flat a block away from the old slaughterhouse on Tillary Street and the elevated trains. With her hair up, the skin of her neckline is revealed as a deep, unsullied milky hue and with a new dress on her, she is a beauty of uncommon genius, if not for the blackened eyes. And although she seems the picture of youthful elegance with her small shoulders and slight overbite and an upper lip that is full and bright, there is disgust churning in her as she sees us manning the kitchen. She moves from her place in the grieving line and holds Dinny's arm firmly, looking up to his head.

“Ya can all go now,” she says with a flinty and lowered voice that threatens a break into screams. “I thank yaz all very much for what ya offered. We all thank ya, but it's our home and our grievin' and we have the right to do it the way we wish ourselves to do it. In our fashion.”

“Anna?” Mary yells toward her. “Let the men stay, oh. Oh Lord above us. Why all this . . .”

“We'll go,” Dinny says humbly, turning his attention away from Richie. “I'm sorry to offend.”

“It's fine,” Anna breaks in with Mary wailing loudly, drowning everyone else's voice in her tears. “We'll see ya at Mass afterward . . . and thank you. . . . Shut up, Ma!”

Mary howls louder still at this affront from her own daughter, as Anna turns red in the face, then screeches to Dinny, who is bowing away humbly, “Yeah, and if ya so concerned, Dennis Meehan, then why not tell ya witnesses to go away then? Yeah? That's how ya can help our fam'ly . . .”

“Anna,” Mary yells.

“I'll never consider this child as a proper man for me,” Anna says pointing at me, her face red and shaking. “Let Bill go—he's a real friend of our fam'ly. Get out. Out.”

Dinny nods calmly and we leave the kitchen, entering the line toward the door and the hallway. Behind us we can hear Anna raising her voice over her slouching mother who stares into the candle, “We've got our pride, Mother, and we'll keep it. Upon all of us there still lies the curse of Cromwell for as long as we are under that Dinny Meehan!”

“For the pity of Jesus on his cross, not so cruel, Anna,” Mrs. Lonergan whines, heaving and sobbing to the tune of the old women's keening at her side.

As we come outside I look back and see Richie and Abe and Petey and Matty Martin and Tim Quilty standing in the doorway looking on us. The older brothers and Frankie Byrne's boys behind them. And in the air we can hear a block or two away, even out here on Johnson Street, the dull
farumping
of bass drums, the tint pulses of snares, and the patriotic trills of half-keyed bugles among some claps and muted roars of happy Americans. Though we don't respond to the boys staring us down, The Swede says, “Can't let Lovett go, ever.” But the only thing I see on Dinny's face is loss. Although we have Lovett, it does not seem we have the future, for it's in those boys where his plan resides.

A few hours afterward, Richie began yelling at Anna by the casket as mother Mary ran through the house. Richie then floored his father before bolting south with his followers helter-skelter, where they went drinking down on Union Street, which confused the locals who thought a deal had been struck. Confused by the slurs of the young Irish boys that upbraided and abused men on the street. The ginzo-hunting spree left some fifteen innocent Italians with broken teeth and arms. For their efforts, all were taken to the Fifth Street Jail where Lovett was being held for murder.

CHAPTER 22

Work 'til Holes Are Filled

J
ULY
, 1917

A
ND
THEN
SOMETHING
HAPPENED
THAT
I'
D
never experienced before. Believing in God, I certainly feel as though there are things in this life that are bigger than myself. That I can't control. In my youth, however, I only half-believed in these larger powers. But as it is in this life, you only hear about these types of things after the fact. And at our level down in the bottom, as usual, we are the last to know about big changes. The reverberations of great decisions in New York City starting at the top, eventually make it down to the flesh of the lowly, where we dwell. The arrangements made by the rich and the aims and conclusions reached will affect our lives mostly, yet of course, we were never queried as to our thoughts. Instead we find out by the great big and impersonal, untouchable manner of the secondhand.

Since Beat McGarry does not know how, I read the newspaper aloud to him and Ragtime Howard and Paddy Keenan at the Dock Loaders' Club.

From on high, among the clouds above Wall Street in Manhattan, looking down at us and across the East River as if soaring, or like God commanding his flock, is Jonathan G. Wolcott among his own class. The last we had heard, he resigned from his position at the New York Dock Company as Vice President of Wage & Labor. Having had his strongman Silverman murdered, his confederate on the Red Hook docks Bill Lovett arrested, and being left only with the lump Wisniewski at his side, Wolcott had lost to Dinny Meehan and the International Longshoremen's Association. Without a plan to win back dock labor, we saw his resignation as his ruin. But that was not the case at all, at all. Born and raised among the Anglo owning class, his resurrection is not quite as humble as that of Jesus of Nazareth, but resurrected he is. Brought back to the top without question of his failing, as if failing weren't a measure he is held to in the first place. He's held high no matter of standards or merit, for their standards of merit have nothing to do with success or failure as we know it.

“A Waterfront Assembly has been formed on Wall Street to oversee all future building contracts on the Brooklyn waterfront,” I read aloud.

The board of directors is a collection of landowners in Brooklyn, executives of big businesses, the waterfront commissioner, and a few select Brooklyn politicians. All the shipping companies and dock and warehouse and factory owners, box companies, coffee and tobacco companies, and local weapons manufacturers, and tenement landlords are on the board. Utilities too—like the gas works, industrial rail, trolley, and electric companies. Even Hanan Shoes. If it is big business, it has a representative on the board of the Waterfront Assembly. With Wall Street as its home, up there in the clouds above us, looking down as if we are ants, its plan is to make the Brooklyn waterfront bow to the gods of efficiency.

“In the past,” the newspaper quoted from a press release. “Companies on the Brooklyn waterfront grabbed up land as needed and made whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted without consideration of the big picture. What we propose to do is to replace the old plan of pell-mell, helter-skelter construction and oversee a larger plan for industrial growth. The future is coming, and we must prepare. New York is the biggest port in the world, but Brooklyn, one of the main points of exchange of sea-going goods, is increasingly inefficient, slow and clogged, which creates long wait times for ships that load locally manufactured goods and unload goods from abroad there, costing millions of dollars. The Waterfront Assembly's goal is to modernize Brooklyn's port terminals with stronger lines of communication between major stakeholders in the area and come to agreements on how all future construction can create a more efficient workspace. The board is funded by local businesses for the future of a new Brooklyn waterfront.”

And of course, this press release was signed by the fat, monocled man Jonathan G. Wolcott himself, who was voted by the board to be president of this newly created Waterfront Assembly.

It seems an innocuous quotation and plan, on the face of it. But knowing Wolcott as we all do down on the docks of Brooklyn gives us to thinking that the future of our neighborhoods is now in the hands of the one man who hates us more than any other. I only met the man once in his office above the Buttermilk Channel in Red Hook, but remember him I do. The man who called Dinny Meehan a “Luddite.” Who feigned an English accent. Who compared us and our ways to thieving monkeys. Who snorted and sarcastically referenced our being Roman Catholic. Who made fun of The Swede without his understanding it. Who boasted of his direct male lineage to that of the original Puritan ships that came from England in the 1600s. Who hinted at making a deal with the Italians in the south, then did make a deal with Bill Lovett. And who paid Dinny to kill the ILA recruiter Thos Carmody. Of course Carmody was never killed, but most importantly, and one of the biggest reasons Wolcott resigned was because Dinny had made a deal with both the Italians and the ILA against him. This is the man that is in charge of future contracts in our neighborhoods.

“Ya think he won't have a say on labor?” Beat asks. “Think about it. All these business-minded men, and they're only thinkin' about contracts? Nah, that's how they do. They say one thing, but mean another. Their main goal is to break up organized labor. Ya can read, William, sure, that's fine, but read between them words and what do ya hear?”

“It's true what he says,” Paddy agrees.

In our world down here, when a man quits he never shows his face again, for his honor is stained forever. But in the world of business, apparently, there is no place for honor or sincerity, as we know it. The New York Dock Company—Wolcott's former employer—that owns more land than any other waterfront corporation in Brooklyn, is a member of the Waterfront Assembly, of course. So we can only assume the company is complicit in Wolcott's becoming an even larger figure in Brooklyn than he was as their vice president. But overlooking us now from the safety of Wall Street in Manhattan, forty floors up. His Anglo-American absenteeism and control reigning from above. His idea of Americanism, temperance, sedition, corporate efficiency, and anti-labor gathering strength, yet beyond reach. I'd only seen the man once before, as mentioned, but I'd never see him again. He'll reign from above, unseen. Our greatest enemy from this point forward, yet his throne resides in a safe distance across a body of water, up high where the future will be orchestrated. I can see in the eyes of Paddy and Beat and Ragtime that the history we know is again repeating itself in the now. As it always does. Like Williamites or English civil servants or colonial administrators of the past, our fate will be decided by an untouchable enemy.

I put the paper down after reading it a second time. The candles on the bar turn sideways and hiss when the front door of the Dock Loaders' Club opens, the clamoring
cha-chum, cha-chum, cha-chum
of the Manhattan Bridge above us ringing out until the door is shut. I'd secretly hoped that with Bill Lovett under lock and key, we'd be left alone to live our lives on the waterfront the way we want it. That a great abeyance would come upon us. That all we would do is work hard in the wind and in the morning, the soldiers of the dawn. To make our money, even though we don't need a lot of it. But to share it with the families that need help, and move on peacefully. But I begin to see the larger powers that are collecting against us. Things we can't challenge or fight, like time. Things we can't even see or completely understand, like change.

In his office, Dinny knows all of this. He sees it and understands it better than any of us. That from above they attack. Their misleading, dispassionate, and banal declarations about contracts on the docks are like a predator's hiding in the bright of the sun as it swoops from the air. Our history speaking to us, to the depths of us, we see Wolcott from the fear of our stories of men who, with an incredible indifference for humanity, starve us. Starve us and send us off the land for our not bowing to their ways. Ignore the evidence against their cleansing, exterminating us, and simply continue piling up dead mothers and children by the thousands while continuing to strictly adhere to their economic policies. Bending law to their demands. Bending law so far that its strength is that only of the will of those who live in the detached distance, beyond sight and high above us, unaccountable.

In his own way, Dinny decides to fight back by going directly to the people that love him. Dinny Meehan has proven to me many times that he is a great leader and knows how to clear the way for us. That he has a keen sense of how to fashion and maintain our power. In April of 1916, when it was a day for legends that we fought off the many that sought our seat at the head of Brooklyn labor, it was Dinny that came up with an ingenious plan. Then a year later in the spring of 1917 after losing Red Hook, again Dinny Meehan came out on top, even if he was forced to cut a deal with the ILA and allow the Italian to cross the Gowanus. Over and over, he proves himself a leader against absurd odds. And now, seeing a new enemy, he gives his next order. Which comes in the form of boots.

Harry Reynolds and myself are waiting on Atlantic Avenue in the middle of the night when an automobile truck driven by James Hart pulls up. He looks at us and smiles, and from the passenger seat we hear Dinny, whose face pops out, “Let's go.”

Harry and I jump in the back where the Simpson brothers, Baron and Whitey, as well as The Lark and Big Dick are sitting with growlers in their fists and big smiles on their faces. We pick up Chisel MaGuire and Dance Gillen too, then meet up with two other trucks filled with our like and head north as the grinding of gears and the squeaking fan belts ricochet off the night's barren tenement streets. We drive all the way up just a block and a half from our headquarters to a building I'd seen many times on the corner of Bridge and Water Streets.

“Hanan & Son,” Harry whispers to me.

“I don't want to get caught,” I whisper back.

“We won't.”

“If a patrolman happens by, what are we saying? What is it we are doing, thirty men in three trucks?”

“Won't happen.”

“I need to keep working and saving money, Harry. What good is fixing up the place by Prospect Park if I'm in jail? And what if the war ends and my mom and sisters can come and . . .”

“The guys o' Poplar Street already know. Brosnan'n Culkin're keepin' watch, uhright?”

“How do we know they aren't double dipping and plan to arrest us? Didn't you read about Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly?”

“That's a good point,” someone says.

“We can still trust them,” Harry says. “They won't turn on us, yet.”

“Yet,” I repeat.

An old man is waiting outside the shoe factory, and when he hears us, he twirls an about-face and pushes up a bay door, waves us in. He is the night security at Hanan & Son and when I see his face I recognize it as the Corkonian who regularly visits the Dock Loaders' Club on Saturdays, sitting between Beat McGarry and Ragtime Howard and is friendly with Paddy Keenan too.

As we stuff the trucks, slinging pairs of boots tied together by their laces, the old man pulls on his pipe and gives a turn.

“Heared about that Lovett,” he says in his Cork burr. “Heared he made a deal widat Dishtrict Attorney to g'off to war with time served as his penalty. Up wit' the 77th Infantry Division, ye know he went. And that he wants ol' Non Connors goin' wid' 'em too. Wasn'til later, after signin' the deal that the DA finds out Connors is up in the shtir, Sing Sing way, so the judge turns angrily and says to Lovett, ‘Well why don'che bend me over an' call me Mary, why don'che?'”

“That's not true, is it?” I ask.

“Beat told me it jush t'day,” the man swears with a high pitch.

“Is that what really happened?” I ask Dinny.

Dinny looks back to me as he is slinging boots and boxes, though he does not seem all that happy about the deal sending Lovett to the war.

“Say ga'bye to Bill fookin' Lovett,” The Lark turns his hat goofy and salutes with the hand that has only two fingers left on it.

“Fookin' asshole that one,” Big Dick mumbles.

Within an hour all three trucks are packed so tightly that we have to run alongside them in the middle of the night east on Flushing Avenue past the Navy Yard in south Williamsburg. At a restaurant, Lumpy Gilchrist is outside standing dumbly as a man next to him directs us to an alley where we unload the shoes into the basement through a storm door. Lumpy's brother, the owner, wipes a hand through his hair in frustration until Dinny walks up to him, reminding him of why such a thing occurred. Lumpy, though, the poor fellow, has no idea what is happening. Only gifted in life to do one thing, he is without clue on any other topic. As we unload the trucks, Lumpy stands awkwardly in our path and counts the shoes with a finger in front of his face, stopping only to push his glasses up.

“Watch out,” Big Dick says, bumping him out of our way, though Lumpy never loses count.

Regardless of what happens to him, he never loses concentration. Dinny stops and helps him to his feet, “Up ya go, Eddie,” but Lumpy does not thank or even take notice. Just counts with a bent finger in front of his glasses and an open, muttering gob.

A few days after that, everyone in Irishtown and beyond has new pairs of boots with the Hanan & Sons emblem embroidered on the sides of them and the newspapers go batty over it, for no one in the neighborhoods know where they came from, even though everyone knows.

“I couldn't say from where they come,” said Mrs. Lonergan in the morning edition a couple days later. “But they're Heaven-sent, surely. Whoever t'was t'ought of us after the passing of Tiny Thomas, my poor child of only six years, is certainly the most t'oughtful o' gentlemen, even if they are stolen from that fact'ry who couldn't t'ink of givin' alms themselfs.”