Exile on Bridge Street (27 page)

Dinny had asked Mrs. Lonergan not to speak with the newspapermen that showed up on Johnson Street, but she couldn't resist the attention. Even if the papers mocked her accent, made fun of her ignorance. But in any case, the brilliance of the orchestrated move simply added to Dinny Meehan's legend, even though he didn't really exist in the first place, as far as anyone would admit. And Mrs. Lonergan's publicly shaming the highly profitable factory succeeded in stifling any notion of its demanding the stolen property back. The death of a shoeless child in the neighborhood where they manufacture shoes effectively suffocating any legal action against the thousands of dollars' worth of their stolen product covering the feet of tenement children.

And for myself, I was finally able to retire McGowan's boots. There was a certain connection I had with those boots, however. I had gone to McGowan's wake and watched as the dead man's boots were taken off him within his pine coffin in Mrs. McGowan's tenement room. My first day out of Sadie's nest and into the world of the Brooklyn docks, Dinny gave me those boots and I'd been wearing them ever since. Wearing them proudly, as Dinny and McGowan had been such close friends for so many years before I'd arrived.

“Looky 'ere,” Sadie says laughing, pulling up her dress enough to show me the boots on her while L'il Dinny falls on the rug trying to carry a pair.

But from the great beyond comes another demand on us. It is not of Wolcott's doing, but it seems as though from up high, well past our ability to control and fight against is yet more bidding for our loyalty. The Great War is everywhere in Brooklyn now, and the weapons needed are soldered and welded in Irishtown factories. Iron forged in Navy Yard foundries for ships and vehicles. Bombs and torpedoes manufactured by the E. W. Bliss Company under the Manhattan Bridge between John and Plymouth Streets and soldiers plucked from our many households and sent right along with the war goods to the French trenches and an assured death. Men must either accept their drafting or be deemed seditious. There really aren't many other options, and so they go, and both Simpson brothers taken from us and never again to be heard from—dead and gone the both of them. Happy Maloney too is drafted. And Johnny Mullen, as well as Fred Honeybeck and Gimpy Kafferty and Lovett's drinking buddy from Manhattan, Joseph Flynn. And just as we are getting to know him, Thos Carmody is taken from the ILA and sent to Europe. And only a week after he'd been officially named King Joe's treasurer of New York City, a promotion earned for his work bringing us into the ILA fold. I remember Vincent Maher shaking the man's hand, for the two of them had killed together already. A mighty thing that brings upon fellows a great and lasting bond.

“We'll work together again some day,” Vincent says to a parting Carmody, though he doesn't believe it. “At least Tanner Smith can't get ya way over there.”

And many others are drafted or recruited or swayed into volunteering by the bands and the propaganda—many of whom I simply don't have the memory to name. Our ranks diminishing again.

But others step up, like Mickey Kane, who has grown right in front of us and is named the new dockboss in Red Hook, with Dance Gillen at his side. He'd been groomed all along without our realizing it, and even though he is Dinny's cousin, Kane had done well for him by sticking next to Lovett and reporting everything from within. Taking a ripe beating in the process. He'd earned the promotion, though, and his reputation as a brawler is known throughout, as any time his name is ever mentioned it's immediately followed with “ready scrapper, brisk fighter.”

It must have been Dinny's plan from the start, making Mickey Kane the dockboss of Red Hook. Mickey is Dinny's last surviving family member loyal to him. Tall and powerfully built in the shoulders and upper body with a big head of blond hair, Mickey follows Dinny's orders closely and has no issue with the Italian ILA men taking over the south terminal in Red Hook. I can see by the way Dinny speaks to his cousin how proud he is. Like a son he sees him, even. The two had grown up in Greenwich Village but were separated when Dinny's side of the family was decimated around the turning of the century. With his dying father, Dinny left for Brooklyn until he took control of the longshoreman gangs and summoned his younger cousin to his side. And Mickey Kane did not let him down. He worked hard. Went undercover and paid his dues, earned his scars and made Dinny proud. I admit to feeling a bit jealous of Mickey Kane because the attention Dinny gives him is unlike what he gives the rest of us. Mickey Kane is blood. He is from his mother's blood, and many of us feel as though one day he will replace The Swede at his right side. His most-trusted. Dinny had raised many of us—Vincent Maher, myself, and he took in Harry Reynolds too, along with everyone else. But Mickey Kane was different. Mickey Kane would one day inherit Dinny's waterfront.

With Kane in charge, I am welcome to run messages in Red Hook again, and for that I am happy. Even if just south the Italians, of whom I was once so afraid, now are able to work there. It's a fair shake they got and relations between us and the Italian are at an all-time high.

As I turn the corner on Imlay Street one summer afternoon in 1917, I see Darby Leighton running past me at a terrible and desperate pace.

“Why didn't you trip 'em?” Kane asks as he runs by me, The Swede holding his shoulder as he runs by with Dance ahead of him.

“Sorry,” I yell after them and join the chase.

All the others are banished too. “Eighty-sixt,” as they say. Joey Behan and his best friend James Quilty, older brothers of the Lonergan crew, volunteered for some Army infantry division, we heard. Having been a part of the gang for quite a few years, Frankie Byrne and his followers were sent away too and certainly they'd never get hired on the Italian docks. Where they went, we couldn't know. Maybe to the war, maybe to the Jersey shore. As long as they don't show their faces in our territories, they won't get demolished. We never told them that, but they knew it still.

Eventually Richie Lonergan and his boys are released after spending a few weeks' time at Elmira's Reformatory after their ginzo-hunting affair. Dinny helps get them released early by hiring Dead Reilly to represent them, even though no one died.

Thankful to Dinny for his reaching out to her eldest son and his followers, Mrs. Lonergan shows her appreciation by bowing to him like a peasant anytime she sees him.

“Oh, to the Lord above do I t'ank ye, Mr. Meehan,” she supplicates herself in front of him.

“Stop it, Ma!” Anna scolds her mother.

Mrs. Lonergan also thinks Dead Reilly, our attorney, is the second coming, for the man always has shiny shoes and shiny hair and pinstriped suits with a pinstripe mustache while speaking words she thinks both elegant and mysterious, though is simple legalese. Eventually though, she has her way with Richie.

“There's no future wit' Lovett, as much as I love the man,” she tells him. “Why not help the man's helped us so? Ye can't go on cutpursin' at the Sands Street Station now that yer out. Too big fer it'n Dinny won't allow it. All o' yez're grown childers now. Time to be smart and take what's offered ye.”

“Ma,” Anna says, arms crossed. “Ya got no loyalty.”

“And ye'll do the same when ye've got little ones, Anna, so shut yer gob. Every mont' the man pays our rent at the bikecycle shop. What's Bill Lovett doin' fer us now? What?”

Richie eventually decides to help disperse the boots throughout the neighborhoods with us and I find myself handing them out right next to Petey Behan himself.

“I've got three girls,” a woman says to Petey and I. “I'm s'posed to put boots on 'em?”

“Free gifts and this one's complainin',” Petey says to me as I smile back.

At the Dock Loaders' Club, I've become quite the bother with my hat in front of men at the end of each workday.

“Why not give a few coins' worth, boyos?” I say to the dockbosses at the mahogany trough.

“Here ye are, Poe,” Paddy Keenan offers me a small wad. “Tell 'em this comes from Kilkenny by way o' New Yark.”

Ragtime pulls out some coins too, nods as he drops them in the hat. Cinders Connolly and Red Donnelly, they give their bits as well. The Lark happily offers a few of his own and Big Dick and Chisel and Dance and Needles Ferry with a coin or two and Eddie and Freddie and Quiet Higgins and Dago Tom and many immigrants who feel the pressure in it, give what they can so as to warm themselves up to Dinny and his boys. Upstairs I run and Vincent and The Swede and Mickey Kane and even Lumpy Gilchrist, who has no connection to Ireland at all, give their own too.

“A small fortune we have here, Dinny,” I say, planting the overflowing hat on his desk.

It is during that summer the sun shines more than it ever has in Brooklyn and everything seems to slow down. Every Sunday Harry and I borrow Hart's truck with plumbing pipes, a new bear-claw bathtub that weighs near two hundred pounds, or a load of ceiling studs to replace the old rotted ones. Hours are spent, the two of us, and I am amazed at how gentle Harry is with his hands.

“Never much of a need to twist it hard, Liam,” he says to me while lining up the long pipes with the fittings. “As long as they're lined up, a simple turn will do. Musclin' it don' help. You'll strip the threads that way.”

And that seems to apply to everything he does. I learn from Harry things that young men need to learn. The lessons all fathers are wont to teach their sons, that patience and taking the time to prepare and plan ahead of time is much more important than anything else. I learn that I have to take my time and make sure the work is done right. That getting it done well is the most important aspect of a man's job and that completing it quickly but without accuracy is the worst thing a man can do.

It takes the two of us to carry the kitchen sink up three flights of stairs. Having to stop halfway up to rest my back and my hands and fingers which were stuck in place, I mention that I had no idea how heavy a sink was.

“When ya ready,” Harry simply says, and we push our way up, sweating and straining all the way, step by step, higher and higher. When we get it inside, we heave it up under the window where the new cabinetry is that we'd only just completed. There is a large hole in it for the sink to be dropped in, but when we do so, we notice something.

“It doesn't fit,” Harry says.

I look at it, “Pretty close.”

“Half-inch off.”

“Well, let's cut out a larger hole.”

“With what?”

“Handsaw?”

Harry looks in the hole where the sink is stuck in the air, “We're gonna have to get the other size that we passed up on.”

“What? I'm not taking this back. . . . Carry this all the way down, then carry another one all the way up?”

“Doesn't fit.”

“We can make it fit.”

Harry looks up at me, “Won't ever be right and I don't want my name on it. We made a mistake and . . .”

“Half inch,” I plead, wiping sweat from my forehead.

“We won't be as careless next time. Let's take it down.”

“Jaysus,” I complain, rolling my eyes. “Isn't there another way?”

And Harry simply turns away, as he is done with the conversation, and back to the store we go. I am truly put out by it, and when we stop for a rest halfway down the stairwell, I throw my hat to the ground floor. And when we get back in the truck, I slam the passenger door. But in the end I have no choice but to admit being wrong. The sink we eventually install fits perfectly and although I take it upon myself to show humility and say openly that I was wrong, Harry only looks at me and says, “Don' embarrass ya'self. Just do it right.”

And I feel like it's fine that Harry says it like that, because some men might say worse. Or use it as a way to show they are always right about things. In fact, since he doesn't really say much, it allows me to fill in the blanks. Allows me to recognize on my own that a man is measured by his work: a lesson not enough sixteen-year-olds are taught, or willing to see.

Yet we have more holes to fill; the one in the kitchen flooring is still there. Looking down it, I see one of the children in the second-floor room sitting at the table in an oddly slumped manner. He is an older child, maybe eight, but he does not seem to move much, and when he does move, it seems shaky and awkward. I see a belt wrapped around his chest that is secured to the chair, the chair secured to the wall. His wrists are bent and contorted, fingers knotted up, and his feet are splayed, and when he looks to the side I can see that his bottom lip sticks out and there is a distance in his eyes.

“Let's go,” Harry says. “We'll start on the floor next week.”

“Sadie would take interest in the family below,” I say to Harry as we climb down the steps in the darkness.

“She'd what?”

“The Burkes below us, she'd likely take an interest in them.”

He doesn't answer.

“Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“Sadie wanted me to ask you if it would be all right if she helps decorate the place. She wanted me to ask you.”

We keep at our pace down the stairwell. Further and further we go and still no answer from him. At the bottom he turns half round and speaks without looking directly at me, “When I'm not here.”

CHAPTER 23

Long Shadows

S
EPTEMBER
, 1917

S
OME
THINGS
ARE
TOO
SHARP
TO
speak of. So is the case with Harry and Sadie, I find.

“Don' ask me about that,” Beat McGarry says. “Leave me out of it entirely, ya fookin' hear me?”

“I do.”

“Good then.”

Harry's room is a mean dwelling where only a bachelor can be comfortable. A one-window room, with one chair, one plate, one set of utensils, and no running water. On one side there is a small bed for him and a cot for me on the other, and between us is an automobile engine on the floor that he takes apart, then puts back together again for the exercise in it. There is also an entire block of tree trunk on the floor with the shape of a horse's head carefully sculpted and sanded out of it, though it is yet undone and lays there like some wooden statue frozen in time.

“Who is that for? Is that going to be a hobbyhorse?” I ask, though I get no answer.

As I read from Mr. Whitman's poetry, Harry pulls a candle from a table and holds it over the mechanical heart in the middle of the room and reaches into it with one hand like a surgeon, wiping its black blood on a soiled towel, eyes fixed on some wonder within. Outside, a train slowly passes like a big rusty wobbling and moaning iron dragon every eighteen minutes or so during the day, every thirty minutes at night and weekends. In some parts of the wall you can see straight through to the studs and when a pink-nosed creature appears sniffing round in its own minor business, Harry is quick to his shiv and sticks it in the neck where it lets loose of its own life, gently relaxing without time for a single squeak even and me there holding my pencil with mouth agape at his speed.

I don't complain about the room though, even as we live right above the Long Island Railroad Depot and where the Fifth Avenue and Fulton Street elevated lines cross as well as a couple Atlantic Avenue trolley lines.

One morning I leave Harry's place and as I walk out of the building I sense a change in the weather. The air has become crisp and the shadows seem longer, or at least at a different angle or shape. Breathing in through my nose, I can feel the change. Sense it. The excitement in the onset of autumn brings out a feeling that the constant movement of life is, well, constantly moving. The air beautifully unsettled by the current-like winds, I fasten a coat button and dig my hands into my trousers, which are getting tighter as I keep growing with a thickening in my thighs and in my chest and shoulders too.

And I think, if everything is changing and growing all the time, then where I'm headed seems a good place, because everywhere I look there are people that care about me, which is important because without people who care for you in a place like Brooklyn then surely you'll have difficulties. Even if I am with men like Dinny and Harry, who love nothing more than to live on the edge of life and brawl their way through it as opposed to giving into what the city throws at them. Like their demand upon life, their love is stronger than most and with it, I am able to save more money than I could by living a more docile, pliant existence. I learn to fend for myself with them, and so I have come to walk with a more self-assured gait on these streets. But reading Mr. Whitman, I believe, helps me to better understand the love men can issue, for it seems he loves a man's heart through to its soul.

I climb the stairwell outside at the Fifth Avenue Elevated and take it north toward the Bridge District, our home front. Reading my book about Brooklyn before it was so industrialized, I smile when it talks about “the hues” of autumn. And with the pencil I stole, I underline passages such as,
I walk with delinquents with passionate love, I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts. . . . And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

On the train I look below at the passing school amidst the brick factories and storehouses and the huge, round fuel cauldrons across the street and turn back to my book ever more determined to study and educate myself. Taught by Mr. Whitman, though he gives lessons not on arithmetic or economics or English history, but on empathy and compassion, which I know deep inside of me to be good and to be right.

At the three-level Sands Street Station I come down the long stairwell with my hands still dug into my pockets, book under my arm and smiling inside. Going east on Sands underneath the gigantic pillars of the Manhattan Bridge between Jay and Bridge Streets that support the anchorages of the suspension superstructure, I go left toward the north. I sneak unseen past the Lonergan bicycle shop where this early in the morning Anna and Mary and a few of the children are quietly behind the glass, waiting for buyers. Coming closer to the water, on the left is the huge Hanon & Sons brick building and I smile and look down to my feet that are happy inside my boots, bright and new against the drab gray of my attire.

The weather on my skin amidst the great mammoth feet of bridge stanchions and pylons and buttresses and trains going in all directions with the wind on my face and life pulsing and screaming out every iron-shuttered window, poetry in my mind . . . I know I'm alive. Know now that Brooklyn is my home. Accept it entirely. That Ireland is my heart, but I am now and will for the rest of my life be anchored in Brooklyn.

At the Dock Loaders' Club, Paddy Keenan is cleaning up from the night before and when he sees me he says, “Word from Ireland,” and passes me a letter. “Dinny gave it over to me s'marnin' fer ye to have.”

Again the letter has been opened then shoddily taped back together. Mam writes that there is still no sign of my father's whereabouts, but a family friend saw his name on a prison ship's manifest. He'd spent many months in a place called Frongoch. Since then, though, he's been released but they haven't heard from him at all. Mam says she only hears from the locals to stay strong, hold out. She says there's almost no hope securing passage as long as the war is on and that she prays it'll be done with soon. In the letter she asks if they are drafting eighteen-year-olds in America.

“No, only twenty-one-year-olds for now,” I say aloud.

“What's that?” Paddy asks.

“Sorry, I was just talking aloud.”

The next sentences in the letter are confusing to me, but I realize that because her letters are read by British authorities, she must use coded language and not tell the truth of things altogether. She explains that Timothy has taken over the farm and has proven himself worthy as a farmer, but that British soldiers often “visit” the farm and surrounding areas. This makes me nervous, for we all know they have an appetite for younger girls and Abby and Brigid are now entering their fifteenth and fourteenth years, respectively. Her last reference in the letter is to Timothy and the failed request of Irish nationalists to drop requirement of Ireland's boys into conscription for British services.

“That would mean the girls will be left alone,” I say.

“Get ye a drop, Poe?” Paddy asks with a bit of an echo as it's only the two of us in the place. “I heared their convention might result in another half-arsed Home Rule with the payback of Irish conscription in the war. How old is yer brother?”

“Fighting age.”

“Hmm, well anyway, ye can only do what ye can when faced with t'ings that're much bigger than ye.”

And that's Paddy for you, always summing things up in a sentence. “Things that're much bigger than ye,” he says. That's what I seem fixated on. That the world is against me maybe. Against us as a whole, whether it be in Brooklyn or Ireland.

Just as Paddy says this, Dinny comes down, and I can see on his face that he is wearing down. Tired even, though he fights through it. Ever since he was so quiet about Lovett killing Tuohey and breaking off, The Swede trying to kill himself, and Tanner Smith backstabbing him, he's not had the sharpness in his eyes that I knew him for having.

Behind him is the manager of the Kirkman Soap Factory, Frank, the eldest Leighton brother, and I can see on his face that Dinny gave him the big “so long.” A few mumbles from Leighton and down the hatch goes a whiskey. Shaking hands with Dinny and Paddy and myself, he says his goodbyes and puts on his hat as he slouches toward the door, shuffling outward.

“Can't ask a man to choose family over job,” Dinny says.

I look at him, then at Paddy.

“Paddy don' talk,” Dinny assures me. “But he knows everything. And tells me more than I tell him even.”

“Well he's the Minister of Education,” I say without a smile.

“Just too harried now,” Dinny says, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb toward the man that just left. “Them Leighton boys're just too wild and even though Pickles is in Sing Sing, Darby eighty-sixt, never know what could happen. . . . Darby'd been seen at the soap factory, but it wasn't Frank that told me. He apologized, but that's the end o' him at Kirkman's.”

“Why'd you marry into that family if they're so wild?”

Dinny looks at me, then looks away, unhappy of my asking such a question, “There once was a day when marryin' into a family brought factions together.”

I nod, thinking of his ideas on me and Anna Lonergan.

“Them days gone,” Paddy mumbles.

Mickey Kane then comes up behind Dinny, tall and blond-haired and handsome. In the face he is very young looking, but in the chest and shoulders he is thick, and with big hands, it seems he still has more growing to do. Looking behind, Dinny smiles at him and they shake hands with a woody sandpaper and cupping sound. Kane is probably the most handsome man I've ever seen and Dinny is more than proud of rearing him. His jaw alone is thick and wide and his blue eyes set apart broad, hair flayed back and shorn over the ears. And although he is bigger than most men, he is also faster and more athletic too.

“Goin' back down to Red Hook,” he tells Dinny, who nods.

The two of them are like statues in my mind. Men more able-bodied than any I'd ever know. Mickey had become the last connection to Dinny's mother's side, I could see. The last connection to anyone that had his blood, really. And that connection is a powerful one. Still, though, there is a pit in my stomach about Harry Reynolds. And the way Beat McGarry shut the conversation down so quickly, I know there is something deadly about Harry and Sadie and Dinny. What, I do not know. Somehow, though, I will find out. Some day.

But although Mickey Kane is given special favor and run to the top of us quicker than the rest, he takes what Dinny teaches him with a great humility, and with Dinny in Irishtown and Kane in Red Hook, there is a feeling at the Dock Loaders' Club that all is well. All is right, even now that The Swede is not what he once was. Even as Wolcott slowly assembles against us, for the time being, at least, we are good for the fight. Right and able.

Dinny looks out the window as Kane walks across it, then back at me, “Let's go to Manhattan for a meet. Ya got the hat money?”

“I do.”

Paddy smiles at me because he knows like I do that we'll go and see Mr. Lynch, which means I can send some letters back to my mother and sisters through the people he knows in Clare back home.

“Give it to Eddie,” Dinny says looking toward the stairwell where we can hear Vincent's voice coming down as The Swede and Lumpy are doing all they can to ignore him. Through the front door comes Big Dick, Philip Large, Dance Gillen, Henry Browne, Eddie Hughes, Freddie Cuneen, Dago Tom, Chisel MaGuire, and many more to support us, leaving the dockbosses on their own at the terminals.

We come to a neighborhood north of Greenwich Village on the West Side called Chelsea and walking down Fourteenth Street in our large numbers, Vincent whispers to me smiling, “See that?” he says looking ahead of us at three girls in heels and hats and curvy dresses. “Ya fookin' kiddin' me? Some people say the cradle o' civilization is Africa. I say, nah, it's the hips of a woman's the cradle o' civilization, true thing! Nothin' more beautyful than it. Watch it move, kid. Amazin', ain' it? At the Adonis they got girls just like that except they'll love ya an' treat ya kinglike. Guys like you'n me got the dime that makes 'em happy too. Ya come wit' me sometime, yeah? I'll meet ya up wit' the owners today.”

“They're Italian?”

“Sure they are, so what?”

We go into a clubhouse where the lobby is filled with cigar-toting men. Democrats of many stripes and ethnicities. Most connected to Tammany Hall. Even I know that. Union fellows too. And Italians. I meet many of them who are mostly known by monikers like my own, “Poe.”

“Poe,” Dinny says. “This is Silent Charlie'n Red Mike.”

“Poe,” says Vincent proudly. “This is the Prince o' Pals. And this here's Jack and his son Sixto, say hello, kid. Guys from the Adonis like I told ya about.”

“Hello,” I say and can't help but notice the one named Sixto, the son of the owner. He is probably twenty-three years old. And with a big smile across his moon-shaped face, he plays like he is the most mannerly and polite man the world has ever held. Graciously nodding when he meets me and others, he puts our nicknames to memory and true enough, he doesn't forget a single one of us.

“Poe,” Dinny again says, introducing me to a big dog-faced man with black hair. “This is King Joe.”

“Poe,” Vincent says again. “This is Paul Vaccarelli.”

The Italians call themselves businessmen, though they have a strange sense of wealth and are gaudily adorned in summery suits, tight and beige. With pinky rings, pink kerchiefs, and curly coiffed hair, they look nothing like ourselves. One man is wearing a tiny bowler cap tilted to one side gallantly and with glinting, pointy slippers on him. He is the Vaccarelli fellow, the crudest, scariest-looking man I've yet come across in all of New York, for although he is dressed as the gentlest of gentlemen—overdressed, in my estimation—he has the scars of a pugilist and a cruel set of black eyes. Of all the shadows leaning over Brooklyn, Manhattan's men who've turned from streetwise murderers and pimps to supposedly legitimate businessmen bring the coolest shade over our lifestyle back in Irishtown. The message, though, from the Italians to Dinny and The Swede is that ethnicity is becoming less important.