Pete Hamill - Forever

“Where is that ice cream store, anyway?”

“Two blocks from here, Delancey and Essex.”

“Luke!”

They cleaned their own plates in the sink while Luke went for the ice cream. Then they helped Tweed back to his Windsor chair and sat facing him. He looked at Butts, and then at Cahill and Edelstein, and turned his face toward the barred window with the flowered cretonne curtains moving languidly in a breeze. Cormac noted their grave faces. Finally Tweed whispered, “I’m never getting out of here alive, am I?”

Ah, Bill, Cormac thought. Ah, you goddamned fool. God damn it all to Hell.

Tweed had helped him more than once, had helped them all, the way he’d helped thousands of people in the bad parts of town. He had paid for medical school for Cahill and law school for Edelstein. He’d arranged a place for Cahill on the staff of St. Luke’s and got Edelstein into a good law firm. Neither man was part of the Ring. They didn’t vote early and often. They didn’t line up with the shoulder hitters to intimidate voters on election days. They gave Tweed something in return that he needed more than cash or votes. They gave him unconditional loyalty, which was another way of saying that they loved him. In a way, that was all he truly wanted.

“I’d take a bullet for the man,” Cahill said one night after Tweed had been through a day of agony in a courtroom. “I mean it. I’d take the bullet.”

“He’s the only true Christian I’ve ever met,” Edelstein said on another night, silent with snow. “Jews don’t meet many of them.”

They knew, and Cormac knew, that Tweed was presiding over the most corrupt system in New York history. He didn’t tell them this, never brought them into the system. But they all read the newspapers, and particularly the New York Times, which had all the documents, and saw the Startling Revelations after 1871 about how Tweed took 25 percent of all city contracts, which were inflated by the contractors to cover the bribes (while Slippery Dick Connolly, as controller, took down his own 10 percent). Money was flowing everywhere in New York after the Civil War, and the Ring took its piece. The newspapers seldom mentioned that the system was invented in the 1840s by Fernando Wood, who was thinner than Tweed and slicker and knew as much about loyalty as an oyster. Tweed was in the business of politics and he would end up convicted of standard business practices. The newspapers didn’t mention that most of the swag, about twenty million dollars of it, went to the Republicans in Albany, because Tweed could get nothing done without their approval. New York was the only city in the state that could not levy taxes without the permission of Albany, and the upstaters would never give up such a cash cow. If Tweed wanted money for New York City schools, he had to bribe the Republicans. If he wanted Croton water to flow into the streets where the poor lived, he had to pay off Republicans. One night before it all went bad, Tweed paused over a meal at the Astor House and said, “It’s cheaper to buy the legislature than to elect it.” And laughed and laughed.

A lot of the money stuck to him, of course, and Cormac knew it. So did Cahill and Edelstein. Tweed owned the building on Duane Street where he ran his office on the third floor and accepted the bundles of cash. He owned property on both sides of the new Central Park. He moved from one large Uptown house to another as his family grew bigger, and each house was grander than the last, with three carriages always waiting at the curb. He had a seven-room suite at the Delevan Hotel in Albany and a more luxurious one at the Broadway Central, a hotel he loved because it had a back door. The Americus Club on the Connecticut shore had started as a fishing club where his friends could smoke cigars and drink brandy. But it became grander too, with formal clothes on Saturday night and testimonial dinners instead of clambakes. The old modest skiffs were replaced by yachts, and a separate cottage was built out in the woods for his mistress of the moment. Tweed hid almost nothing, which was why the voters loved him. He bought that diamond stickpin, which Cormac urged him to hide at once in a coal bin. It was the size of a nose and glittered in every room he entered. Tweed laughed and laughed, and flaunted the stickpin on every possible occasion. This added still another symbol to the sunken eyes, the swollen belly, the polished shoes, and the Tammany Tiger that flowed from the pen and brush of Thomas Nast.

They knew all that. They didn’t care. They lived in the real world, where bullshit warred with horseshit and sin was part of the deal. And besides, they were his friends.

Luke brought the ice cream, and Edelstein asked the Boss to tell Cahill about the great fights between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B’hoys in the 1840s, and Tweed smiled and wolfed down ice cream and started telling the old stories. Cormac had heard them all before, and surely so had Cahill, and even Charlie Butts. But they made Tweed happy in the telling, and in the remembering. Cahill and Edelstein lit up cigars. Luke brought brandy and took away the ice cream dishes.

“The thing you learn in a street fight,” Tweed said, “is that it’s not how big you are, but how smart you are. So…”

As Luke laid slices of birthday cake before them, Tweed talked about those days when he was a big lean street fighter, one of the Cherry Hillers, long before he joined the Big Six fire company on Gouverneur Street. They first fought two dozen Dead Rabbits on Bayard Street, and beat them badly, and then joined forces with the Bowery B’hoys to beat them again, and then the Rabbits came with guns and they dropped bricks on them from the Bayard Street rooftops and the police came and they shoved a chimney down on one of them too. And then…

“It was a rough old school,” Tweed said.

“I’m sorry I missed it,” Cahill said.

“Don’t be,” Tweed said. “Many’s the lad didn’t escape it.” He glanced away. “Or was broken by it.”

He looked tired again, staring at his hands. Then something in memory turned him to Cormac.

“Play the piano, Cormac,” he said. “Play that thing that the little blond girl loved.”

Cormac flexed his fingers, remembering the little blond girl named Rachel who had intoxicated Tweed for one long winter in the Broadway Central. There was a nocturne that she loved hearing.

“I hope I can remember it,” Cormac said.

“Give it a try.”

He went to the piano, gazed at the keys, saw—as he did each time he sat on a bench like this—the face of the Countess de Chardon, and began to play. The music of a nocturne filled the room in the Ludlow Street Jail. Full of night, with clouds scudding across the moon and a distant sound of the sea pulling on the shore. Cormac’s technique had been acquired the hard way, at the keyboards of tuneless pianos jammed against walls in saloons, in the studios of teachers, and, after moving to Leonard Street, at the piano he bought with the money from his first cheap novel. He played to the end, and then the four men clapped.

“Just beautiful,” Tweed said, his voice lower. “Just beautiful.”

Cormac started to get up.

“No. Nononono, Cormac. You know what you’ve got to play now. All of us need it. Me most of all.”

Cormac smiled. He’d learned the song in Tweed’s company, at clambakes and Fourth of July celebrations, at rowdy election night parties at Tammany, in oyster bars and a hundred saloons. Tweed called it the Fight Song.

Cormac started to play, plunking the keys as if the piano were a percussion instrument, the song a march of some kind, an American tune. He began singing in a light voice. Cahill and Edelstein knew the words too, and the three of them were singing together, with Butts finally joining too, and the music pounding, and then, without help, Tweed got up. He just stood there, the backs of his knees jammed against the seat of the chair. Then his arms were moving, his face was grinning, his eyes were sparkling, and he swung his arms like a bandmaster and joined in the final words: Then pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!Bayard is a hard street to travel.Pull off the old coat!And roll up the sleeve!The Bloody Sixth is a hard ward to travel…I BELIEVE!