Pete Hamill - Forever

Cormac set down the pail of ice cream and crossed the room for a chair. There was a boxy grand piano against one wall, a table for meals, flowers everywhere. Cretonne curtains. Bands of thick rubber attached to a casement for exercise. Two of Cormac’s own paintings hung on the walls, one of the Great Fire, and a view of Cherry Street toward the river, along with pictures of yachts outside the Americus Club in Connecticut and a daguerreotype of Tweed’s wife and children. Cormac took a chair from the table, twirled it so that the back faced Tweed, and sat with his arms draped over the curve.

“I’m worn out,” Tweed said. “Luke has some woman mad for him, that right, Luke?”

“Yeah, she crazy for me.”

“And she writes him these letters, very fancy handwriting. Mister Luke Grant, Ludlow Street Prison, on the envelope. Like he was the prisoner, not me. And so I help him with the writing. I mean, I talk, and he writes. He likes those big words.”

“She do too, boss. She likes that ‘extraordinary.’ She likes that ‘mellifluous.’ She likes ‘magnificent.’ ”

“She’s after your magnificent fortune, Luke.”

Luke laughed, and Cormac lifted the pail toward him.

“We’d better eat this before it melts,” he said. “There’s enough for the three of us.”

“Yes, sir, Mist’ Cormac.”

“You know how to spoil a man,” Tweed said.

“It’s from Braren, the German.”

“To hell with what the doctor says.”

Luke came back with two dishes and spoons, and Tweed started to eat.

“I hope they’ve got ice cream in Hell,” he said.

“I’m sure they don’t, so you’d better have all you want while you’re here.”

“Luke,” Tweed said, “fill this again.”

He wasn’t really old, only fifty-five on this night, but Bill Tweed looked ancient now. His beard was white without seeming patriarchal, his hair thin on his skull, gray and lank. But it was the eyes that looked a thousand years old. They were looking at last like the black sunken eyes in the Nast cartoons, with small stars of yellow light reflected from the gas lamps. He had never been a drinker, and smoked only a rare cigar, but the face looked dissipated, and there was a wheezing sound from his lungs. The great body was shrinking too, the shoulders somehow narrower inside the blanket.

“There’s less of me every time you show up,” Tweed said.

“There was a lot less of you when we met,” Cormac said.

“Aye, wasn’t there…”

“You were tough as a mule that night.”

“What the hell year was that?”

“It was 1844….”

“Jesus Christ.”

A summer night. On Grand Street, on the Seventh Ward side of the Bowery. I was still living on Mott Street, Cormac remembered. Painting. Writing the first of the dime novels. Laying cobblestones for a living. In early July, American nativists rioted against Catholics, killing two, beating hundreds, most of them Irish who thought they’d left all that behind.

“That scoundrel Ned Buntline was stirring them up that summer,” Tweed said. “Another goddamned writer that liked trouble.”

“And Morse.”

“That bastard,” Tweed said, taking a fresh dish of ice cream from Luke. “Samuel F. B. Morse. Always insisting on the F. B.”

“Which the Irish said stood for Fucking Bigot.”

“Which he was,” Tweed wheezed. “Him and his goddamned telegraph. An invention he thought gave him the right to judge people. If there was any justice, he’d have ended his days here, instead of me.”

“He certainly helped put those Know-Nothing idiots on the street that night.”

“The poor bastards.”

On that summer night in ’44, Tweed was walking west on Grand Street, while Cormac walked toward him from the east. They were a block apart when Cormac noticed him. Nobody else was in the street. Tweed was then twenty-one years old, and in the obscure light of Grand Street he walked with a big man’s casual confidence. If he was Catholic, that rolling gait would have infuriated the men who came upon him from the safety of their carriage.

“They thought I was a Catholic,” Tweed said. “Me, who believed in nothing, even then. Me, the child of Presbyterians from the River Tweed in Scotland.”

He laughed.

“The theory was simple: if they didn’t know you, you were a Catholic.”

On that night in ’44, the three men in black followed that theory. They leaped from the carriage, hefting clubs that were two feet long. From a distance, Cormac saw them approach Tweed but couldn’t hear their words.

“They said, ‘Hey, papist!’ ” Tweed said, “and I said, ‘Fuckest thee off!’ Which they thought was Latin. They started swinging the cudgels.”

Cormac saw Tweed knock down one of them with a punch, but he couldn’t dodge the clubs of the other two.

“Then you got into it,” Tweed said. “What the hell for?”

“I was like them,” Cormac said. “I thought you were a Catholic and I didn’t want you killed over some horseshit from the seventeenth century.”

Cormac picked up the club of the fallen man and stepped in, swinging. He gripped the club horizontally, kicked one of the young men in the ass to get his attention, then slashed left-right, then right-left with the club, driving the man’s jaw off its hinges.

“I remember the scream from the fucker even now,” Tweed said, laying the ice cream dish on a table beside a Bible.

“I didn’t need to hit the third idiot,” Cormac said.

“That’s for true. I was givin’ him a good hammerin’.”

His head rose now, remembering that night, and there was more light in his eyes.

“A terrible hammering,” Cormac said, remembering Tweed smashing the man against a stoop, wrenching the club from the man’s hand and tossing it behind him into the street. The carriage suddenly galloped away toward the East River. The last man was spread on the stoop, unable to rise because of the angle, and every time he tried to get up, Tweed hit him. The man pleaded that he was done. “Well, I’m not,” said Tweed, and hammered him again. Without his cap, the man on the stoop looked to be sixteen or so, with a hairless face, blood gushing from his nose and leaking from a cut over his right eye.

“Who are you, you rotten little shit?” Tweed said.

“Johnson, sir, I’m sorry. Bill Johnson, sir, sorry, a mistake—” Tweed stepped back, paused, then hit the man again, driving his head to the side. Blood now covered his teeth.

“Easy now, mister,” Cormac said. “You don’t want to kill him.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, and chuckled, then went fierce again, grabbing the frightened boy by the neck. “Who sent you after me?”

“I don’t know, sir, I—”

Tweed was laughing now in his room in the Ludlow Street Jail.

“I did get the fucker to tell me who’d sent him out to beat up people, including me,” Tweed said. “I remember that.”

Cormac again saw young Bill Tweed driving a hand between the man’s legs, grabbing his testicles, and squeezing. The man’s eyes bulged and a gargling cry rose from his throat. Then the first man who’d been knocked down by Tweed rose on wobbly legs. His bleary eyes gazed around for his club. He patted his jacket as if looking for a pistol. Cormac walked to him, again gripping the club with two hands, and jerked it hard to the man’s chin. The young man fell in a shambling pile. Two of them were groaning on the street now, while Tweed squeezed the third man’s balls.

“A name,” he said.

“Martinson, sir. Yes, that’s it. Martinson. Frankie Martinson, sir…”

“Of course. Frankie Martinson. That hopeless Know-Nothing idiot.”

Tweed called to Luke for a glass of water.