Eileen Dewhurst - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

The line came from White Heat, from the great, fiery ending of that movie, and although Mike didn’t incinerate himself the way Cagney did, he burned with a raging desire to own the High Cliff Restaurant. His wish made a certain amount of sense, too, because the restaurant had a For Sale sign in its cobwebbed front window.

Now, anyone who has driven through this area of upstate New York has passed the restaurant. Perched on the edge of a high cliff, it overlooks a broad, lush valley that the Iroquois once roamed. The valley is placid these days, but in Revolutionary times a bitter struggle for it took place.

The nearest town is Finleysburg, which in the late 1800s was a bustling rail center but today is slumberous. A river, the Tionega, threads its way down from the west, catching the sun and shooting up diamonds from its surface. A motorist standing near the restaurant, high above the valley, can easily imagine history and legend spread out in a gleaming tapestry below.

The O’Sheas, whose ancestors had marched with General Sullivan in the Revolutionary War, owned a number of businesses in the Buffalo-to-Rochester area. A shrewd and aggressive family, they took care of their own. Mike, a star third baseman in high school but a failed minor leaguer at the age of twenty-two, was casting about for the right business to buy and operate.

When he saw the boffo scenery from that lookout platform on the mountain, he knew what he wanted. He wanted what he saw. He fell in love with the place, fell in love with a dream, the dream of a classy new High Cliff Restaurant looking down on the idyllic countryside. He said so to his traveling companion.

His mother (for she was his traveling companion) pronounced herself less than impressed.

“Why do you want a run-down hash house in the boondocks?” she asked him in her solicitous, motherly way as the two of them motored away, she peeling rubber in her Packard ragtop. “It’s just another greasy spoon in need of repairs. Use your coconut, Mike. Restaurants are headaches. The hired help always turns out to be more hurt than help. Take my advice, son. Forget it. There’s a nice twenty-stool bar for sale in downtown Batavia. You can’t go wrong with a gin mill, as your late father, bless his failed liver, used to say.”

Mike, appalled at her reaction, shot back, “But you saw the scenery, Ma! The river. The green farmland. You know how I love pretty sights. The building needs a lot of work, sure, but the view — It’s fantastic! There’s none better. Ma, I’ll fix up that eatery and herd ’em into it like ants at a picnic!”

His mother stared hard at the unreeling highway. “You might make a go of it at that,” she mused, biting off a plug of her favorite chewing tobacco. “With luck and a sixteen-hour workday. A fancy restaurant. I don’t know. People go for the damnedest things nowadays. You’ll have to charge plenty for the chow.”

“What do you say, Ma? Can I do it?”

“Okay, Mike. I’ll stake you.”

She proved as good as her word, slipping him the needed moola only ten days before she died tragically in a fall from the Dipsy-Doodle Fun Ride at the family-owned Cascade of Light Amusement Park outside of Niagara Falls.

He took possession of the High Cliff Restaurant, rebuilt it, modernized it, cantilevered its main dining room out into space, raised a bigger and higher lookout platform above its slanting roof, and with more pride than actual genius renamed it The Vista O’Shea.

The new restaurant prospered. Critics rated the food fair, the view fabulous. During the years of Eisenhower golf and Kennedy touch football, O’Shea’s became the picture postcard pride of little Finleysburg. Local bigs who wanted to be seen would hide themselves off to The Vista O’Shea, get a table near the tall windows, and pensively survey the Tionega Valley while their lesser peers admired, envied, or tried to ignore them against the backdrop of amethyst mountains, emerald farms, and the looping, silver river.

Mike became sharply possessive of the scenery. That view belonged to him, all of it. He merely leased it out for a time to his paying customers. The broad, enchanting valley had been the first great vision of his life, his first great love — even greater than the movies — and he was its protector.

Speaking of love—

The second great vision in Mike’s life was also a stunning sight, an enchanting redhead by the name of Kathleen Fergus. She ascended to the restaurant one autumn day while tooling over from Peekskill toward a holy-name college in western New York. She admired the sunbathed valley, nibbled on an overpriced shrimp-salad sandwich, and studied a textbook on Greek mythology.

Mike, the maitre d’, hastened not only to seat her but also to serve her. To his surprise, he found himself a shy, awkward host. Smitten, he ignored the lowland wonders entirely and focused on the topography of Kathleen Fergus. She was as lovely as Maureen O’Hara in The Black Swan. No, lovelier. And early autumn or no, his sap rose.

He managed to talk her into a date, despite his tangle-tongued manner, and then into an embrace, and then into bed. He persuaded her to tarry for a while at the top of the world, where they dallied, kissed, and parried. At last, long before the first snows of winter, his reason gave way to his passion, and he asked her to marry him.

Kathleen, nineteen, accepted and thus tied her destiny to this man who owned Olympus, or at least that part of it that Mike billed as “the dining room with the best view in America.”

He was never shy or backward after that, not with his advertising claims, not with his wife. Mrs. O’Shea bore nine children in the next ten years, barely managing to get in a few games of tennis, a couple of movies, and a rubber or two of bridge between babies.

Mike, caught up in the day-to-day struggle of running a restaurant — it was as hard as his mother had said it would be — stayed apart from the nursery and never really got to know his children. Worse, he adopted a hazardous practice from the old Charlie Chan movies. Charlie Chan, you may remember, called his boys “Number One Son” and “Number Two Son” in a B-movie affectation that seemed to wow the audiences in those days.

With only two kids and a shrewd private eye like Chan for a father, that worked out all right in the movies. But in real life, with nine kids and a vague, romantic restauranteur calling the numbers, forget it. When Mike began addressing his children as “Number Three Daughter,” “Number Five Son,” and so on, he mixed those children up. He muddled everything.

“Number Four Daughter,” he would say imperiously to an already rebellious teenager.

“I’m Deirdre,” would come back the frosty reply.

That sort of snafu became more and more common as the years sped by. Then, too, the children’s answers were often ambiguous, and a less trusting father might have suspected sarcasm. After all, what did Deirdre, that green-eyed little vixen, really mean when she said, “I’m Deirdre”? Was she his Number Four Daughter with a perverse desire to be called Deirdre? Or was Deirdre not his Number Four Daughter? Indeed (and Mike sometimes forgot) was there a Number Four Daughter? Yes, there had to be, didn’t there? By the end of the Vietnam War, his numerical system, like the war itself, had turned into a hopeless quagmire. But Mike refused to abandon it.

“Number Two Son,” he said one evening during the brief and troubled reign of Jimmy Carter. “I hear—”

“I’m Ted, Pop. Kev’s Number Two. The body-and-fender king of Elm City. The one who restores old Chevys. I’m Number Three. I’ll be a senior at Cornell this fall.”

Mike went on carefully. “Sorry, Ted. But listen to me. I’ve just heard that Clyde Wrighthouse has inherited the Ayrshire Dairy Farm.”