William Kennedy - Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Billy saw the top half of his torso in the bathroom cabinet mirror. The vision always reduced him to a corpse, being washed and powdered in an undertaker’s basement, like Johnny Conroy He always turned the image quickly back to life, pulling chest hair to feel pain, pressing a finger against shoulder flesh to see it whiten, then return to rich redness, moving his mouth, showing his teeth, being alive in a way he wasn’t sure his father still was. Is death hereditary?

Johnny Conroy: the corpse in Cronin’s funeral parlor, 1932, raised with Billy on Colonie Street, wild kid. Used to run with Billy after the action, any action, run to the cliff at the tail end of Ten Broeck Street and leap, leap, faaaaaaaaalllll, and lose the pursuit, faaaaaaaaalllll into the great sandpile in Hogan’s brickyard, scramble off, free.

Johnny Conroy, free to die in the gutter over stolen booze, and they waked him at Cronin’s.

Billy and Tod were taking Hubie Maloy home that night from Becker’s, crazy Hubie who said, Let’s stop and see Johnny, my old pal. But they’re closed now, it’s two in the morning, said Billy. I wanna go in, said Hubert, the wild filbert. And so Tod stopped the car and Hubert got out and went around the back of Cronin’s and crawled in a window and in a few minutes had opened the side door for Tod and Billy, and in they went, half drunk or Billy wouldn’t have done it. A burglary rap for sure. And there was Johnny in the open coffin with one basket of flowers, only one, ready for planting in the ay-em.

He don’t look so bad, Tod said.

He don’t look so bad for a corpse, Billy said.

And that’s when Hubert undid Johnny’s tie. And Billy watched it happen because he didn’t understand Hubert’s plan. Then Hubert pulled Johnny up from the casket and for the first time Billy really understood the word “stiff.” Hubert took off Johnny’s coat and shirt, and by then Billy and Tod were out the door and back in Toddy’s car, parked safely up the street.

Hubert’s nuts, said Tod.

Playful, Billy said and couldn’t even now say why that word occurred to him. Maybe because he still, even now, liked Hubert, liked crazies.

Well, I don’t play with him no more, said Toddy. He’s got no respect.

And Billy said, You could say that. Because he had to admit it was true. Five minutes go by and Hubert puts out the light in Cronin’s and comes out with all Johnny’s burial clothes under his arm, suit, tie, even the shoes. He owed me, the bastard, Hubert says, and if I waited any longer I’d never even collect this much. And Hubert kept the shirt and tie for his own and sold the suit and shoes for twenty bucks the next afternoon at The Parody Club, to a grifter passing through with a carny. On Broadway they laughed for weeks over poor Johnny and, worse, poor old Cronin, who had an attack and damn near died when he walked in and saw the naked corpse, standing with his back against the coffin, all his bullet holes showing. For Hubert didn’t tell folks he also took Johnny’s underwear. Always said he wasn’t wearing any.

Billy shaved and wet his straight black hair, brushed it back with the little part at the left, and was padding barefoot toward his bedroom, wrapped in a towel, when the phone rang. He waited and listened while Peg got it again. Ma. Billy stayed at the top of the stairs.

“We’re fine, Mama, and how are things there? Good. Yes, everything is all right. Billy is getting dressed to go out, and George won’t be home for an hour. The office is quite busy, yes, which is a nice change. You what, made an apple pie? Oh, I wish I had some. But it burned? Oh that’s too bad. But it tastes good anyway. And now Minnie and Josie want to bake pies, too. Well, I hope I get a piece of somebody’s pie. I bet yours’ll be the best. Yes, Mama, Billy’s working. He’s going out tonight and pick up some money. Yes, it is nice. .”

In his room Billy took out the navy blue gabardine and the silk shirt and the newest blue bow tie with the white polka dots. He fished in the drawer for the pair of solid blue socks with the three blue dots on the sides and took his black shoes with the pointed toes out of the closet. Billy never went out without being really dressed. But really. George was the same, and Peg and Ma, too. But George was too flashy. Dress conservative and you’ll always be well dressed. George always imitated Jimmy Walker, ever since he worked for him up at the Capitol. He’d see Walker’s picture in the paper in a sport coat with patch pockets and he’d be downtown buying one the next day. I never imitated anybody, was Billy’s thought. I never even imitated my father. They couldn’t even tell me how he looked dressed up, except what Ma said, he was so handsome. George is all right. George is a father. A good one. Billy hoped George would get the new book from Muller, but he didn’t know who the hell Muller was.

Billy took his trig gray fedora out of the hatbox and thought: pies. And pictured Pete the Tramp stealing two steaming pies off a kitchen windowsill, then running off and eating them behind a fence.

Billy looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door. He looked good. Maybe handsome to some. Not like a man who owed seven eighty-eight to anybody. Whataya think, because Billy owes a few bucks he can’t look good?

“Aren’t you eating anything?” Peg said when he went downstairs.

“I’ll grab something downtown.”

She didn’t make him ask. She fished in the apron pocket and handed him the bill, folded in a square. A twenty. He kissed her quick and parted her corset.

“That’s all I can give you,” she said.

“I didn’t expect so much. You’re a classy dame.”

“Class runs in this family,” she said.

Billy got off the Albany-Troy bus at Broadway and Clinton Avenue and walked up Clinton, past Nick Levine’s haberdashery, where the card game would be. He walked toward the theaters, three of them on Clinton Square, and stopped at The Grand. Laughton in his greatest role. As Ginger Ted. Ragged son of trouble. A human derelict on the ebb tide of South Sea life. Surpassing such portrayals as Captain Bligh, Henry VIII, Ruggles of Red Gap. An experience definitely not to be missed. The Beachcomber. Billy made a note to avoid this shit. Fats Laughton in a straw hat on the beach. He walked around the box office to check the coming attractions in the foyer. A Warner Baxter thing. Costume job with that lacy-pants kid, Freddie Bartholomew. Billy had already avoided that one at the Palace, coming back for a second run now. The Grand, then, a wipeout for two weeks. Billy headed for the restaurant.

There were four restaurants within a block of each other on Clinton Square but Billy, as always, went to the Grand Lunch next door to The Grand, for it had the loyalty of the nighttime crowd, Billy’s crowd. Dan Shugrue, well liked, ran it, and Toddy Dunn worked the counter starting at six, an asset because he spoke the language of the crowd, which turned up even in daylight for the always-fresh coffee and the poppy-seed rolls, the joint’s trademark, and because since Prohibition the place never closed and nobody had to remember its hours. Also there was Slopie Dodds, the one-legged Negro cook, when he worked, for he was not only a cook but a piano player who’d played for Bessie in her early years, and he did both jobs, whatever the market dictated. Nobody believed he’d played for Bessie until it came out in a magazine, but Billy believed it because you don’t lie about that kind of thing unless you’re a bum, and Slopie was a straight arrow, and a good cook.

The place was brightly lighted, globes washed as usual, when Billy walked in. Toddy, behind the counter, gave him half a grin, and Slopie gave him a smile through the kitchen door. Billy didn’t expect the grin from Tod. Billy also saw his Uncle Chick sitting alone at one of the marble-topped booth tables, having coffee and doughnuts before going to work at the Times-Union composing room. It was the first time Billy had seen Chick in months, six, eight months, and even that was too soon.