Pete Hamill - Forever

When Tweed took power as head of Tammany Hall, he presented plans for water, for housing, for schools, for decent wages, for the right to form unions among tradesmen and mechanics; in some way, those ambitions were shared by all of the Tammany professionals, so much so that the principles were seldom mentioned. To talk too much about them would be bullshit. Cormac sometimes drew up the plans, making them at once precise and vague, and gave them to Bill Tweed and stood in the shadows as Tweed tried to make at least parts of them real. Tweed’s friends and associates listened, calculated, made swollen budgets and phony invoices to include their personal shares, and then sighed. They would need money to pay off the upstate Republicans. They would need money to pay off those who lived in the way of the street that must be widened. And of course they needed money for themselves and their boys. To Cormac, the Tammany sachems were like worldly archbishops who no longer believed in God.

In private, or over oysters, Cormac argued the issues of slavery with Tweed but was greeted with a shrug. “It’s an injustice, the whole goddamned thing,” Tweed said. “No doubt about it. But there’s nothing to be done. It’s the way things are.” They would walk along South Street at lunch hour, and Tweed would point at the endless rows of masts and the small armies of stevedores and say: “All from the South, brother. Cotton, sugar, all of it… If we lose that trade, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Cormac said, “If you keep it, we’ll be a cemetery.” And Tweed said nothing, as they walked among the Irish and the Africans on a day when Cormac did not hear a single word in Irish or Yoruba, in the city whose past was swiftly sliding away.

All of that seemed long ago, in this room in the Ludlow Street Jail. The table was set for five, and when Luke Grant went to pick up the food, the fifth man arrived: Charlie Butts, former head-breaker from the Cherry Street days of Tweed’s youth, now the owner of a livery business with 109 carriages. Butts had a thick neck, broad shoulders, fierce mustaches dyed black, hard gray eyes, and short legs. He was carrying a cardboard box, which held the birthday cake.

“Charlie, you know everybody here?”

“I do.”

“Could you do us a favor and fix some drinks for them that’s drinking? Luke’s gone for the chops.”

Butts lifted a bottle of Rhinelander wine from the glass ice bucket (no silver allowed in Ludlow Street) and gave Cormac a squinty look. They’d been seeing each other for twenty years in the company of Bill Tweed.

“You still a newspaperman, Cormac?”

“No, not for a long time.”

“Good. What’s said here is between us.”

Tweed said: “He doesn’t have to be reminded of the rules, Charlie. We’ve been friends longer than I’ve known you.”

“He looks too young for that.”

“He’s a freak of nature,” Tweed said, sipping his water.

Cahill, the doctor, leaned forward, trying to lighten the moment.

“He’s not a freak of nature,” he said. “He’s Irish. When they don’t drink, they look good forever. In Mayo, there’s a guy a hundred and nine years old, and not a white hair on his head.”

“Is he still fucking?” said Billy Edelstein.

“Only nuns,” Cahill said, and Tweed laughed and wheezed and grabbed at his chest until the doctor’s face went pale. He held Tweed’s wrist, he patted his back.

“For Chrissakes, Bill, we don’t want you dying over a hundred-and-nine-year-old Mick fucking nuns.”

That set Tweed going again, his eyes dancing with laughter, but the huge body wracked and hurting. He coughed a wad of phlegm into a handkerchief. Cormac saw a few spots of blood.

“Will somebody please talk about the fucking water problem?” Butts said.

“Or that rat Dick Connolly?” said Edelstein. “Blabbing away and living free in Paris.”

“Not till after dinner, for Jaysus’ sake,” Butts said.

The mention of Connolly calmed them all down. They knew that everyone else in the Ring was free, and only Tweed was in jail. Connolly was indeed in Paris, carrying with him six million dollars. Elegant Oakey Hall, the former mayor, supreme horse-shit artist (as the Boss called him), was off in London, charming the British. Brains Sweeny had paid a fat fine and was dozing in the country. Tweed was the only one of them in jail. And the attorney general, Charles S. Fairchild, had double-crossed the Boss, promising him freedom in exchange for some sort of confession. Tweed had confessed, and stayed in jail. There was a minute of somber silence as the faces of their old friends passed among them.

Then Luke returned with the food.

“Salvation, gentlemen,” Tweed said.

Luke laid out the veal chops, corn, asparagus, and roasted potatoes. He put a basket of bread on the small table, and a small tub of butter and slabs of cheese. Everybody got up, except Tweed. He tried, but fell back, and Cormac took one elbow, and Butts the other and they lifted him out of the Windsor chair. He shuffled to the head of the table. Cormac noticed that he gave off a moldy odor, as if something had exuded through his pores and dried on his skin.

“Jesus Christ,” he said in a feeble way. “Jesus Christ…”

They all carved away at the chops, remarking on their tenderness, while Tweed grunted and chewed. Cahill tried to guide the talk away from anything upsetting. They chatted about this fellow Edison who had invented a sealed light bulb, with some kind of filament inside that made fire impossible. “He’ll get rich on that one,” Edelstein said, “as long as he got it copyrighted.” Butts said they’d never get enough electric lights in New York to light a single avenue, and Tweed whispered, “You’re wrong, Charlie, you’re wrong. They’re gonna light up the whole city. There’ll be no such thing as night.”

“There’ll be subways too, Charlie,” Cahill said. “You’ll be out of business with the carriages if you don’t get a piece of them.”

“People won’t ride under the fucking ground.”

“They’re doing it in England.”

“New Yorkers will never do it. It’s like being in a tomb.”

“Or the Tombs,” Tweed said, and smiled.

“What do you hear from the wife, Bill?” Cahill said.

“She’s fine, she’s fine. You know, I just wanted her to be away from all the flying shit here if, if… She’s taken care of no matter what happens.”

He paused, the knife and fork in his hands.

“But listen to this,” he said. “She’s in Paris, right, with the young children? And she goes to the opera with some friend of hers. And who’s sitting in the twelfth row? Connolly. Slippery Dick himself.”

“Jaysus.”

“So at the interval, she goes right to him. He looks shocked to see her, but she says to him, ‘You, sir, are a cur.’ And walks out.”

“Good woman.”

“Bravo.”

A pause.

“I hope to join her there soon,” Tweed said. “If I get sprung.” “We’re working on it,” said Edelstein. “And we’ve got some chance. The public is outraged over Fairchild’s double-cross. They want the state to spring you.”

“I should have built this goddamned jail on Spring Street,” Tweed said, and they all laughed.

“Let’s talk about something else, Bill,” Cahill said. “I don’t want your blood pressure to go through the roof.”

“I wish I could go through the roof!”

Then he led them again into the food, like a commander set against a foe, eating with a kind of frenzy. Once Cahill placed a hand on his wrist, as if to slow him down, and he waited, inhaled, sipped some water, gave Cahill a filthy look, and went on. Edelstein said the corn was delicious. Tweed said, “I don’t have the teeth for it anymore.” He cleaned his plate with buttered bread. Then turned to Cormac.