William Kennedy: Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

Months ago, when he was shaping his decision, the boy sat at this same kitchen table poking at his own raisins, extolling the goodness of priests. Do you know any good men who aren’t priests? Martin asked him.

You, said the boy.

How did I make it without the priesthood?

I don’t know, but maybe sometimes you aren’t good. Are you always good?

By no means.

Then did you ever know any men good enough to talk to the birds?

Plenty. Neil O’Connor talked to his ducks all day long. After four pints Marty Sheehan’d have long talks with Lackey Quinlan’s goose.

But did the birds talk back?

You couldn’t shut them up once they got going, said Martin.

Balance: that was what he wanted to induce in Peter. Be reverent also in the presence of the absence of God.

“I just don’t want them to drown him in their holy water,” Martin said to Mary Daugherty. “And I don’t want him to be afraid to tell them to shove their incense up their chalices if he feels like coming home. There’ll be none of that failed priest business in this house the way it was with Chickie Phelan.” (And Martin then sensed, unreasonably, that Chick would call him on the telephone, soon; perhaps this morning.) “His mother and sisters wanted Chick to bring a little bit of heaven into the back parlor, and when he couldn’t do it, they never forgave him. And another thing. I always wanted Peter to grow up here, grow up and beget. I don’t want to see the end of the Daughertys after the trouble of centuries took us this far.”

“You want another Daugherty? Another son? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

“It’s that I hate to see the end of a line. Any line. Think of all the Daughertys back beyond Patrick. Pirates stole him you know, made him a slave. That’s how he got into the saint business.”

“Ah,” said Mary, “you’re a talky man.”

“I am.”

“Are you through now?”

“I am.”

“Why don’t you be talky like that with the boy?”

“I was.”

“You told him all that?”

“I did.”

“Well, then?” said the wife and mother of the family. “Well?”

“Just about right,” said Martin.

The talk had calmed him, and real and present things took his attention: his wife and her behind, jiggling while she stirred the eggs. Those splendid puffs of Irish history, those sweet curves of the Western world, sloping imagistically toward him: roundaceous beneath the black and yellow kimono he’d given her for the New York vacation. The memory of coupling in their stateroom on the night boat, the memory of their most recent coupling — was it three, four days ago? — suggested to Martin that screwing your wife is like striking out the pitcher. Martin’s attitude, however, was that there was little point in screwing anyone else. Was this a moralistic judgment because of his trauma with Melissa Spencer, or merely an apology for apathetic constancy? Melissa in his mind again. She would be in town now with the pseudoscandalous show. She would not call him. He would not call her. Yet he felt they would very probably meet.

The phone rang and Miss Irish Ass of 1919 callipygiated across the room and answered it. “Oh yes, yes, Chick, he’s here, yes. Imagine that, and he was just talking about you.”

“Well, Chickie,” said Martin, “are you ready for the big move today? Is your pencil sharpened?”

“Something big, Martin, really big.”

“Big enough,” said Martin; for Chick had been the first to reveal to him the plan concocted by Patsy McCall, leader of the Albany Democratic Party, to take control of the American Labor Party’s local wing on this, the final day of voter registration. Loyal Democrats, of which Chick was one, would register A.L.P, infiltrate the ranks, and push out the vile Bolsheviks and godless socialists who stank up the city with their radical ways. Patsy McCall and his Democrats would save the city from the red stink.

“No, Martin, it’s not that,” Chick said. “It’s Charlie Boy. The police are next door, and Maloney too. Him and half the damn McCall family’s been coming and going over here all night long. He’s gone, Martin. Charlie’s gone. I think they grabbed him.”

“Grabbed him?”

“Kidnapped. They’ve been using the phone here since four-thirty this morning. A regular parade. They’ll be back, I know it, but you’re the one should know about this. I owe you that.”

“Are you sure of this, Chickie?”

“They’re on the way back now. I see Maloney coming down their stoop. Martin, they took Charlie out of his car about four o’clock this morning. His mother got up in the night and saw the car door wide open and nobody inside. A bunch of cigarettes on the running board. And he’s gone. I heard them say that. Now, you don’t know nothing from here, don’t you know, and say a prayer for the boy, Martin, say a prayer. Oh Jesus, the things that go on.”

And Chick hung up.

Martin looked at the kitchen wall, dirty tan, needing paint. Shabby wall. Shabby story. Charlie Boy taken. The loss, the theft of children. Charlie was hardly a child, yet his father, Bindy McCall, would still think of him as one.

“What was that?” Mary asked.

“Just some talk about a story.”

“Who or what was grabbed? I heard you say grabbed.”

“You’re fond of that word, are you?”

“It’s got a bit of a ring to it.”

“You don’t have to wait for a ring to get grabbed.”

“I knew that good and early, thanks be to God.”

And then, Martin grabbed the queenly rump he had lived with for sixteen years, massaged it through the kimono, and walked quickly out of the kitchen to his study. He sat in the reading rocker alongside a stack of Albany newspapers taller than a small boy, and reached for the phone. Already he could see the front pages, the splash, boom, bang, the sad, sad whoopee of the headlines. The extras. The photos. These are the McCall brothers. Here a recap of their extraordinary control of Albany for seventeen years. Here their simple homes. And now this. Here Charlie Boy’s car. Here the spot where. Here the running board where the cigarettes fell. Here some famous kidnappings. Wheeeeee.

Martin dialed.

“Yeah,” said Patsy McCall’s unmistakable sandpaper voice box after the phone rang once.

“Martin Daugherty, Patsy.”

“Yeah.”

“I hear there’s been some trouble.”

Silence.

“Is that right or wrong?”

“No trouble here.”

“I hear there’s a lot of activity over at your place and that maybe something bad happened.”

Silence.

“Is that right or wrong, Patsy?”

“No trouble here.”

“Are you going to be there a while? All right if I come down?”

“Come down if you like, Martin. Bulldogs wouldn’t keep the likes of you off the stoop.”

“That’s right, Patsy. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Ten.”

“There’s nothing going on here.”

“Right, Patsy, see you in a little while.”

“Don’t bring nobody.”

In his bedroom, moving at full speed, Martin took off his blue flannel bathrobe, spotted with egg drippings and coffee dribbles, pulled on his pants over the underwear he’d slept in and decided not to tell his wife the news. She was a remote cousin to Charlie’s mother and would want to lend whatever strength she had to the troubled family, a surge of good will that would now be intrusive.

The McCalls’ loss intensified Martin’s own. But where his was merely doleful, theirs was potentially tragic. Trouble. People he knew, sometimes his kin, deeply in trouble, was what had often generated his inexplicable visions. Ten years without this kind of divination, now suddenly back: the certainty Chick would call; the bizarre bedside visitor heralding the unknown; the death of Scotty followed by the kidnapping of Charlie. Coincidental trouble.