Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

At the AA meetings, Kelly gradually displayed other changes. His hair was more carefully cut; he had two new suits, wonderfully tailored, and had replaced his old Thom McAn brogans with some wonderfully polished English shoes. He was a banker now; a watch fob appeared in his vest; a smile was permanently pasted to his face. Since he could help with loans, everybody was polite to him; some even fawned. The ability to grant a loan, or forgive a bounced check, was, of course, a form of power. Wonderful Kelly used that power judiciously, urging his supplicants to give up the sauce, to go back to church, to be kinder to their wives.

Then one Friday evening in the spring, Carol Kelly appeared in the door of Rattigan’s. The bar was almost empty. Dinny Collins was playing a game on the shuffleboard machine with JoJo Mullarkey, who used to get drunk and eat glasses before joining AA. Dinny looked at the woman, who had never been in Rattigan’s before, and nodded. Her hair was blowsy, her light spring coat open, her eyes scared.

“Uh, er, uh, excuse me, but, uh…have you seen my husband?” she said.

“You mean Wonderful Kelly?” Dinny Collins said. “No, ma’am, I can’t say as I have. He doesn’t come in that often, and when he does, it’s bad for business.”

“I see…”

“You try up the church?” JoJo Mullarkey said. “I mean, that’s where he is lots of the time.”

“Yes, I…well, thank you, gents.”

Dinny came closer. “Is there anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I er, uh—”

And she hurried into the night. An hour later, Father Donnelly came in, also looking for Wonderful Kelly. They learned that Wonderful had gone out for lunch that day and had never come back. By midnight, two detectives from the 72nd Precinct had been in, and there had been two more calls from Carol. But nobody had seen Wonderful Kelly.

They didn’t see him that weekend, and he didn’t come to work that Monday. And when the cops descended upon the bank, and the big shots came over from the main office in Manhattan, and the examiners were finally called in, they all knew why. There was $276,000 missing from the bank, along with Wonderful Kelly.

This news appeared on page 1 of the Brooklyn Eagle, and its first effect was to destroy the AA meeting that night. Many of the men felt they would rather be honest drunks than disciples of an embezzler. Others felt that Wonderful Kelly had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. Rattigan’s was packed that night, loud with the sounds of men falling off wagons. Dinny Collins sat in righteous splendor at the bar.

“Hitler didn’t drink,” he said. “Stalin didn’t drink. And neither did Wonderful Kelly. You don’t have to be a genius to see the moral of this story, do you?”

When the details emerged, so did the neighborhood’s anger. Kelly had worked out a system of faking the paperwork on loans. People from the neighborhood would sit at his desk and sign for a $3,000 loan, and when they were gone, Kelly would change the paperwork and make it $5,000. The bank said it would not hold the customers to the phony figures, of course; but many people felt that Wonderful Kelly had used them for his own gain. There was no pity for him, and very little for his wife and children. After a week, the wife stopped coming to church; the children were teased terribly in school, and there was talk that they were all going to move. And there wasn’t a word from Wonderful Kelly. He seemed to have vanished from the earth.

Then one snowy Saturday morning the following February, Dinny Collins walked into Rattigan’s with a Daily News . He held it up for all to see. “Will you look at this?” he said. And they all gazed at a picture of Wonderful Kelly on page 4, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy, handcuffed blonde beside him. The story was out of Tampa, Florida, under a headline that read: EXEC, STRIPPER NABBED IN BANK THEFT. The men standing grimly behind Kelly were FBI agents.

“He ran off with a stripper? ” JoJo Mullarkey said.

“He sure did,” Dinny Collins said. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing he ever did.”

MOST MEN IN THAT neighborhood thought Soldier Dunne had been born in a most fortunate year: 1937. This accident of birth made him too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, a stroke of luck that would have overjoyed the young men who had to fight those wars. But Dunne did not consider himself lucky; in fact, he was furious at his fate. More than any man in that neighborhood, he thought that a real man’s greatest glory was war. In 1955, when a perforated eardrum kept him out of the peacetime army, his anger soared into rage.

“This country is soft as mush!” he shouted one night at the bar in Rattigan’s. “We shoulda done what MacArthur wanted, just keep on goin’ into Red China! We should be fightin’ them right now!” He slammed the bar for emphasis. “Then they wouldn’t keep me out of it! Not for a damn pinhole in an eardrum!”

But the bureaucratic decision was final; Dunne was doomed to remain a civilian all his life. And so he tried to make up for his loss in other ways. He bought most of his clothes in army-navy stores, appearing in smartly cut khakis in the neighborhood bars, his jump boots gleaming, his posture erect, his hair chopped short in a crew cut. He read military history, lecturing late at night about great battles “we” fought, and — during Vietnam — how victory could be won. When he was in his mid-twenties, the men of that neighborhood began to call him Soldier, and, grim-faced, squinty-eyed, shoulders squared, Dunne wore the ironic title as a badge of honor.

Along the way, Soldier Dunne married a quiet, pretty neighborhood girl named Marge Rivington, went to work at the gas company, and fathered two daughters and a son, each of whom was required to call him sir. He ran his home with the discipline of a company commander. Food was “chow,” the kitchen was “the mess,” the bathroom “the latrine.” On the walls of the living room he hung framed photographs of Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, and Mark Clark; a huge American flag billowed on a pole outside his window every day of the week; he mourned the death of John Wayne, traveled once a year to Arlington to salute the fallen heroes of the republic, and when asked his favorite song would always reply: “You gotta stand when they play it.”

Naturally, his first daughter ran away and married an ironworker when she was seventeen. The second lasted until her eighteenth birthday; she took $216 she had saved, flew off to Orlando, became a tour guide at Disney World, and married an animal trainer. Soldier Dunne’s attention then fell most heavily upon his son, Jack. His attention, and his alarm. For Jack was not the son that Soldier had hoped for.

“He’s a nice kid,” he said a few times, when pressed by other members of the Saturday night infantry. “Takes after his mother, know what I mean? Reads a lot. Smart, that kid. Smart.”

But the truth was that at home they barely spoke. Jack had refused when he was thirteen to call his father sir, a small mutiny that Soldier punished by confining the boy to quarters. Confinement was ended through the tearful intercession of Soldier’s wife, Marge, whom Dunne started calling the judge advocate general. The boy said nothing. He never called his father sir again.

Worse, the young man resisted the military impulse. He thought parades were boring. He wouldn’t play with guns. He laughed at John Wayne movies. He read his books, listened to rock and roll, kept the door to his room closed. When Soldier offered to take the boy on his annual pilgrimage to Arlington, the boy turned him down; he was going with his friends to see the Rolling Stones. Then one evening, in the young man’s seventeenth year, Soldier Dunne came to his son’s room. He was carrying a thick manila envelope. Jack was listening to music on a Walkman. He looked up at his father, but he didn’t move.