Exile on Bridge Street (34 page)

Philip moans in agreement as I look at him.

“Listen,” Cinders says again. “Until ya talk wit' ya mother about a bank account, I'll make sure anythin' happens to ya, she's taken care of, uhright?”

I look up at him from the seat, “Thanks.”

“Don' thank me, just return the favor.”

“All right, I'll do the same, if somethin' happens to you I will—”

“Good, good. I don' wanna hear any details o' that. We're on then, you'n I, right?”

“Right.”

By seven o'clock it's dark and Harry Reynolds, Burke, and I are struggling up flights of stairs at the Eighth Avenue building. Burke stops on the second floor and goes inside his home, and as Harry and I keep going up, all I am thinking about is my bed.

“There they are,” my mother says welcoming me and Harry with a smile.

“Anybody knock on the door today?” I ask.

“Not a soul,” says she. “Here's yer tae, William. And yers too, Harry.”

“It smells so good in here,” Harry says.

“Well that's because I found the grocer there round the block and I've put together a meat pie.”

“Did you . . .”

“O' course, Liam. I told him to grind the meat right in front o' me or I wouldn't be buying it, I did too,” she says, proud of herself.

“Well that's good, but I don't know if it's a good idea to go wandering around the neighborhood, Mam.”

“Well then, ye'll have to find somethin' to keep us busy then. There's nothin' round here to cut the boredom, William. Hour after hour. . . . And we don't even know a single person. Haven't even met the people downstairs yet, what did ye call 'em?”

“The Burkes?”

“Well I wouldn't know what their names are, would I?”

Sitting at the table, Harry and I are given plates of food, but before we can take the first bite, I hear footsteps coming to the third floor. Harry looks at me. There are two other tenants on our floor, but they don't go out at night. Then a knock comes that scares my mother.

“Jaysus on the cross,” Mam yelps.

“I'll get it,” I say, already at the door while Harry stands from the table.

I hear a whisper from Thomas Burke on the other side.

“Who is it?” Mam asks.

“The Burke man from downstairs. We'll be right back,” I say, knowing that it must be something important. Harry and I slip out the door before my mother can invite him in.

The three of us walk halfway down the stairwell when Burke says, “Sadie's downstairs.”

Harry stops in the stairwell. “I can't see her.”

“She's cryin',” Burke says. “Someone went to her home and she's askin' for help.”

“William, you're gonna have to help her,” Harry says. “I can't.”

“What?”

“Dinny doesn't want me around her, especially when he ain't here.”

“Why?”

“Get her outta here for a while. Outta Brooklyn,” Harry says turning around and going back upstairs. “I'll keep ya ma'n sisters busy.”

“Wait,” I say, but the door closes.

Burke leads me downstairs where Sadie is in tears at the bottom of the stairwell with a bag of clothes in one hand, L'il Dinny pulling at the other in his short pants and boots.

“William, we can't go to our 'ome,” she says desperately.

“Why?”

“It's terrible. They're everywhere and I'm alone, William.”

“What happened?”

“Anna Lonergan, that l'il spiteful thing and one of 'er bruvas, I fink 'is name's Willie. Well, they stood outside on Warren Street for like two 'ours and next fing I know, a rock comes through the window, glass everywhere. I have a child in the home, William.”

“I know, all right, all right . . .”

“And 'at's not the worst of it, William. I saw me cousin outside too.”

“Which one?”

“Darby. And 'e was yellin' fings up into the broken window. . . .”

“Just calm down, he just wants to get into your head. Don't let him do it, all right?”

“All right but . . .”

“Just don't let him get to you. Don't let him scare you. Do you have money?”

“A little.”

I turn to Burke, “Can you help us?”

“Sure.”

“My mam and sisters have only been here a few days, and I really don't want them to think things are uneasy here. Can you take Sadie to the Long Island Railroad for a place called Rockville Centre. In a hotel. A nice one,” I turn to Sadie. “It's a nice little town, I hear. Very quiet. Out in the country. You can take a taxi from there down to Long Beach, Sadie. It's really beautiful, and it has a boardwalk and no one will know you're there. As soon as you get there, write me a letter to this address, all right?”

“All right, William.”

“Take this.” I hand her my day's earnings as a dockboss.

“I can't, William. I 'ave me own money.”

“I would be very unhappy if you do not take this, Sadie. I'm going to send Happy Maloney down there to watch over you.”

“He's back?”

“Minus a leg but yes. I want you to be comfortable and to have food brought to your room and I want you to go shopping too.”

“Shopping for what?”

“Clothes or whatever you'd like. You're going on vacation, Sadie. . . . Until Dinny gets out.”

Sadie looks up into my eyes and smiles. She wipes a tear away and hugs me. Holds me. And so does L'il Dinny, hugging me by the leg. But Sadie holds me close, pulls my ear down to her and whispers, “I always knew yu'd be good. Yu're good, William. Now yu need to start makin' a plan for yu'self an' yu family to escape 'ere.”

“What do you mean?”

But she just smiles solemnly, leaves with Burke.

On the second floor I knock on the Burkes' room and gather them, including the eldest boy who can barely walk.

“I asked your husband for a favor, Mrs. Burke,” I explain. “I'm very sorry for not asking you about it first, but it was a bit of an emergency.”

“Oh . . .”

“Come with me though,” I say, and help her son up the stairs to the third floor, step by step. His arm over my shoulder, scared out of his wits of falling down the stairwell.

“Don't worry,” I tell him. “Not to worry, everything will be fine. I have you. What's your name, anyhow?”

“Joseph,” he mumbles, petrified.

“Is that right? I used to know someone named Joseph,” I smile. “I bet you're a lot nicer than he was though. Does your mam call you Joey or Joe?”

“Just Joseph.”

“Joseph it is then. Do you like meat pie, Joseph?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good. I bet you eat as much as a horse,” I say.

“He does,” his mother says.

And opening the door on the third floor I yell, “Mam, we have visitors.”

“We do?” she says, her face lighting up. Harry sits at the table with cards, entertaining Abby and Brigid, who stand from the table with bright eyes to greet the visitors in the gentle and humble manner in which the Irish welcome people to their home.

“Yay!” two of Mrs. Burke's toddlers run in, a fat-cheeked baby on her hip, smiling, that is immediately taken from her and showered with adulation and blessings as our tiny home is filled to overflowing with family and friends. And tea. And I know that this is the life for me. And, if only for a moment, I let the peace we feel among ourselves take me over.

“And after church tomorrow, we'll go and see a shanachie,” I say aloud.

“Here? In America?” Mam asks.

“Yay!”

“With Joseph?” Mrs. Burke asks desperately.

“We wouldn't go without him.”

And Joseph, with his contorted features and glazed eyes smiles a distant smile, but a smile all the same.

CHAPTER 28

Deliberation

“A
REN
'
T
WE
A
HANDSOME
BUNCH
ALL
dressed up in the veins o' nicety. Now that Father Larkin? Is he from Dublin?” Mam asks outside after a late Mass at St. Ann's.

“I believe he is.”

She harrumphs at the idea. “I knew it by his tongue. He's a bit of a swaddler, I'd say, goin' on and on about the baby Jaysus'n all. He is Catholic, is he not?”

“He appears to be,” I say, lifting Joseph Burke into the horse-pulled taxi next to his mother and siblings.

It is only a few blocks to the tavern, but for Joseph it's quite a distance. The most of us walk alongside the taxi and though I know my mother has many questions, she resolves to keep them to herself. For the time being. The scar over my left eye only mentioned in passing and the other day when she found plumbing pipe fitted into my coat, she simply handed it to me and turned round.

“Oh, what it must've cost, all of this,” she said one morning in our room. And knowing my mother as I do, I could see she was not only referring to money. “The price we'll have to pay, hmm.”

And although we talk and talk as we meander through the old neighborhood, there is a great and still silence between us. The longer she is here, the more she finds out, the louder the silence.

“These'll break yer ankles, won't they?” she says, speaking of the rough cobbles of the old town.

“Take my arm.”

We are greeted merrily in the tavern, women and children allowed in on storytelling nights. Hanging our coats by the door, we are met by soft-spoken old-timers along the stretch of the bar who hat-tip us and smile, grab our hands in salutation, and it seems once again we are back in the old country. The smell of pipe smoke, stale beer, turf, and whiskey. There are no windows and the darkness is only broken by amber light. In a back room there is a grand hearth-fire and candles on the floor and on the odd table. Mealymouthed children whisper to each other and know to tiptoe, as there are mothers and fathers here that waste no time in clouting them on the top of their heads for a lesson.

An old man sits by the fire smiling like a thin, close-shaven Santa rocking back and forth. He is the center of all attention here and all around him are chairs for people to sit and listen to him speak. His hair silver with experience, eyes drooping with knowledge. He seems well into his eighties but his mind is about him tightly, I can see. All call him The Bard, or The Gas Drip Bard, for he worked some fifty years or more as a gas works employee.

“Well,” he begins, and quickly everyone becomes silent for to hear his words. “I see we've a good wheen o' childers here, but the child what can't sit still won't get a candy.”

He starts off with two tales for the children, the first an old-country yarn from Killarney called “Peg the Damsel.” Then he crosses the Atlantic with us to Irishtown in Brooklyn with the comical, pre-Civil War story, “Buxom Biddy Hoolihan and the Drunkard Goat of Shinbone Alley.”

The room is quickly taken with his stories and not a child in the house is without full attention on him. His voice pitching high when he needs to make a point. Low with the slight sarcasm of the indigenous Irish. Some say his way of storytelling is like a magician's act. A true art form built through tradition predating Jesus Himself. Others describe it as catching words like birds in their flight from Irish to English. Yet the Irish ways still lived in the themes and plots that leave out the righteousness of the Anglo-Saxon's method. But in clear-spoken English, his stories are told.

Later I sit on an old chair by the fire with a Burke toddler asleep at my chest, cozy and warm. Mam and Abby and Brigid dozing. Only Beat McGarry, Thomas Burke, Cinders Connolly, and a few other men still awake, children sprawled across laps fast at their slumbering.

The Bard slowly sits back in his rocker. And so, a pillow behind him, warm tea, and his rubbing his workingman's hands together, pushes back his long white brows, tilts the candle to redden his cuddy and leans forward to a place where myths still carry.

“There was a murder in Brooklyn one time, where there often was before and I s'pose there will be again,” he began to my surprise. “Dinny Meehan and t'ree others shot an' killed the tout Christie Maroney to bring the men o' the Irish waterfront together as one band, for there was a time in Brooklyn when street kings were so plentiful ye could hardly t'row a stone without raising a lump on one o' their heads.”

I look over to Beat, who is smiling, which lets me know the old man is allowed to speak Dinny's name when so many others are not.

He nods toward myself. “I see the newcomer here has missed the last few stories leadin' up to where we are now, but we'll keep movin' forward. Son, ye can come back to me some day for the others, that all right?”

“That'll be fine,” I say.

“Well then, t'was 1913 and Dinny along with his childhood friend McGowan and a young Vincent Maher and Pickles Leighton had been detained by Patrolman Brosnan o' the Poplar Street Police Station, as it were. And doesn't it sound familiar to ye? Doesn't it? Dinny and his men detained? Well the timing couldn't be better, so off we go. Just like today, t'was the papers that had a great time of it with the sensation of the trial and in great big bold letters they wrote:

“Jury Ready in Gang Killing:

Great Gathering, Riot Expected after

Deliberation of Sensational Trial

Not Since 1873 During the Great Whiskey Wars of Irishtown have the Marines Last Been Summoned from the Navy Yard to Keep the Peace'

“Could ye believe it? The Marines again. For what the police were callin' ‘the most dangerous and eagerly awaited trial in Brooklyn since the turnin' o' the cent'ry.'

“‘All rise,' the bailiff announces. ‘For the Honorable Judge Francis Denzinger of the Kings County Court.'

A plume surrounds the Bard as he pulls the pipe from his face and continues, “Our men, youthful as they were in 1913, stand to pay the price for what is termed their ‘dark roguery.' Can ye see them now? Can ye? Dinny, McGowan, Vincent, and Pickles. Four gorsoons bitten at the wrist by manacles and for what? Takin' down Maroney that paid the police to let him alone to his druggin' and enslavin' o' the women o' our neighborhoods? Oh no. And don't ye know if Maroney didn't personally hand out invitations to the I-talian to come to Irishtown? He did too. And is it any wonder he was shot in the women's entrance—to his dismay no doubt—of a saloon, fer givin' information to the tunics at his own betterment? Is it? No, it isn't.

“Well, back to the great trial of 1913 then. . . . In the gallery of the court's front row, Harry Reynolds stands next to Sadie Leighton and her mother Rose. And a cousin too, Darby, right behind 'em as Dinny Meehan himself looks over blank-faced and cuffed. And full o' nerves Sadie smiles for 'em, her hands shakin', for although she is with Harry, it's Dinny Meehan that makes her feel the eternal tingles o' love and melancholy. Dinny then looks at Harry, who stares back, placin' his arm round the girl they both were courtin' after.

“‘Dinny!' Sadie sings out.

“‘Quiet,' the bailiff demands.

“And the courtroom is filled with gamely patrons. Disfigured rowdies from wild childhoods, young and old. Associates o' the murdered Maroney, oh yes, and o' course t'was them that'd like nothin' more than to give a high-hangin' to the four accused Whitehanders, and on a windy day too. But mostly the crowd was filled with devotees o' this band o' youngsters led by Dinny Meehan, that in the broth o' their generation long to take back the streets o' Brooklyn from the Maroney-led loogin pimps and gold-toothed larrikins that profit from the port city's great transience o' libidinous sailors and lascivious merchant marines and the deluge of bawdy immigrants. It was this new brood o' Irish American ruffian that sought to renounce the graft Maroney's ilk applied to the body o' our lasses. To clear the way o' touts and their tunic masters. And to wall off the world once again along the waterfront where strangers don't dare set foot beyond where the pier sheds and the docks begin. The White Boys, as their like was once called in the hills and stretches o' rock-strewn fences o' Ireland. Silence their biggest weapon. The silence. In their silence they are here to bring us together again. As we were when the casket schooners and the coffin ships fell into the port o' New Yark back famine-way when our like first came to New York. These young men of The White Hand sought to overthrow Maroney and bring us together again in our old customs kept dear and secure in auld Irishtown for so long. Against the invasion o' the I-talian Black Hand that Maroney courted into our neighborhoods, himself the most egregious breed o' stoolie and informant. In Brooklyn this new generation was created by one lad. Their leader a lone man, young as he was then. A chieftain among men. Aquirin' gangs like an entrepreneur does comp'nies. Piecin' 'em together like, from the smithy o' his soul. A creator o' pride and remembrance, yes. And a spirit, is he. More than anythin', he is a spirit. Who inherited a silent past. Whose history is obscured in lies by victors. And in the shame o' victims. Dinny Meehan was his name. The spirit of the auld ways, is he.”

And listening to the old man, I know that I will tell this story too. That I will not allow it to be gone like so many other things in New York. In Brooklyn. Gone and forgotten. That I'd save the words that this man caught like birds. And store them away to be used afterward when it came my turn to tell stories. Beat McGarry sees it on my face too, and it all comes together. But I'll not tell it the same way as The Bard, because for him the rising of The White Hand in Brooklyn is an age-old lore. For me it is a scar, having lived through my springtime years during its heyday under Dinny Meehan's reign.

But before I can consider retelling the stories, I must seek this old man for the stories I've missed. That lead up to the arrest of Dinny, McGowan, Vincent, and Pickles. The stories that reveal the deepest motivation of our leader and the egg of our ways. But for those stories we'll have to circle back another time.

I look to my sleeping sisters, Abby and Brigid. And my mother dozing, her folded hands resting in her lap. And I am pulled away from The Bard for a moment. My mind taken from the gangs toward my family. And I know that all I've done is for them. We'd all do the same, of course. Any of us. Because we are human. Because we love people. Especially our family. That we will do anything we can to help them. Everything we can. For their survival. For their happiness, and when they are suffering and in need, we are there for them. And we give a piece of ourselves for them. Give everything we have to make up for their suffering. Throw ourselves into the suffering in order to relieve theirs. And I love my mother. And I want to tell her, but can't. I want to her to know it, but can't say it. Instead, I show her. And so I've shown her that I am willing to do terrible things to relieve her suffering. But now I see her contented. A home, she has. Food, she has. A church, she has. Safety from war too, she now has. And with these come a time for reflection on where we are to go next, our family. And I must make time for my own deliberation on who I consider family. I look back at my sisters, Mrs. Burke and Joseph and, finally, to my mother again . . . and the words come rushing to my mind: the gentlelife.

And I notice that my mother is not asleep at all, in fact. She is feigning sleep. Listening to the Bard's story all along, and knowing.

The Bard continues, “Guardin' the doors and standin' round the rim o' the courtroom are men dressed in military uniforms armed with bayonet rifles and pistols and blackjacks. And outside the Adams Street Courthouse there are seven hundred residents awaitin' decision. And round them too are a core o' two hundred riot-ready marines. The stand has been made. The line drawn.

“Nicely situated above all else, Judge Denzinger sits back onto his throne and speaks, ‘Full house, we have. Let me remind all of you here today that regardless of the outcome, we are to remain respectful citizens to the flag of the Unites States of America and anyone seen to act in a less-than-dignified manner today will be hit with the full force of the law.'

“The crowd giggles among itself, grumbles too.

“‘Quiet,' the bailiff demands.

“‘Jury, are you ready?' Judge Denzinger requests.

“Timid nods respond from the jurybox.

“‘Dennis L. “Dinny” Meehan,' Judge Denzinger announces, then asks the bailiff. ‘Wait, which one is Meehan? He's the deaf and dumb one, right?'

“‘The state of New York has determined he is an idiot, your Honor.'

“‘Idiot. That's right,” Judge Denzinger remembers.

“‘He is unable to speak, is all,' Dead Reilly stands, insists.

More giggles from the court gallery.

“‘Well, get him to rise when I say his name,' Judge Denzinger admonishes.

“Dinny is looking elsewhere, off in his own world as if he weren't there at all. Playing along, Dead Reilly touches him on the shoulder and points for him to stand.

“‘Vincent J. Maher,' Judge Denzinger announces.

“‘Charles M. McGowan.'

“‘John F. “Pickles” Leighton,' Judge Denzinger finishes, then whispers to the bailiff, ‘The loudmouth.'

“‘The leader, your Honor,' the bailiff reminds.

More giggles are hushed by soldiers and patrolmen.

“The judge scans the rake o' mugs fillin' the courtroom wall to wall, raises his voice again, ‘These four men are charged with the murder of one Christopher Lawrence Maroney one year ago on the morning of March 13, 1912. Jury?'

“The jurybox looks over.

“‘Who will preside?'