The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising (36 page)

94

E
OIN’S
D
IARY

I
let meself into Róisín’s flat in Walworth Road and sat down at the tiny kitchen table. Out of me pocket, I retrieved both of Sebastian Blood’s notebooks, collected by the Squad at the Volta Cinema and meself the day of his execution. Blood was not a great note-taker. Mostly there were scribbles about the Kavanagh family and the notation, “Eoin/missing son.” That, for some reason, made me smile. I keep going through these books because I think I’m missing something. The notes are so rudimental that I’m wondering what kind of detective Blood really was. He was either fookin’ brilliant, or he was a dunce. My gut tells me that Blood could not have cut the Colman’s at Crow Street. There’s nothing in them, except for one quizzical notation: “williewick.”

What the fook is a williewick?

Also on the same page was the entry “vchrist.”

Williewick and vchrist.

Something to do with candles and church?

I was just sitting there looking at the books when Róisín let herself in, just off work. “Jaysus!” she exclaimed. “You gave me an awful fright!” She punched me playfully in the shoulder and added, “Don’t scare me like that! What are you doing?” I don’t stay with Róisín that often. I find it safer to keep moving. Last night I slept at Dr. Gogarty’s over in Ely Place; tomorrow it will probably be the Bartleys up in Phibsborough. And there’s always the couch over in Bachelors Walk.

I told her I was trying to figure out what a “williewick” was. She blurted out, “Isn’t that the thing between your legs?”

I looked up and shook my head. “You have a durty mind,” I said to her. “Do you know what a ‘vchrist’ is?”

“Maybe a victory for Christ?” Róisín suggested. “Maybe playing with your williewick is somehow a victory for Christ.”

“You’re a big help,” I told her.

“Williewick,” she whispered in my left ear, then did the same into my right ear, adding a diabolical laugh.

Now my willie was getting hard. “Róisín,” says I. “Do you know what you’re doing to me?”

“I do, indeed!”

“You’re a terrible tease,” I acccused, as I stood up from the table and pushed her against the sink. I ground my hips into hers, and she could feel my banger. “I’m hungry,” I said.

“A fry-up?”

“How about bangers and mash?”

She laughed and pushed me away. “You know the rules.”

“No tomfoolery.”

“No tomfoolery,” she confirmed. “Not yet, anyway.”

She guided me back to the table and Blood’s two notebooks. I looked down at the pages. “Williewick” still didn’t mean anything to me. Róisín threw her black frying pan on the stove and pulled some sausages from a cooler box on the windowsill. “Eoin,” says she. I turned and saw she was holding a banger by its tip, letting it hang out for me to see all its glory.

“That’s about the size of it,” says I.

“You wish!” Róisín said, laughing. She took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom, where I knew my frustration would continue to grow—Blood’s “williewick” now driving me mad at both ends.

95

E
oin’s diaries were having an effect on Diane and Johnny’s relationship. The more brutal 1920 became, the less they spoke to each other. Their long marriage was often like that—
quiet
. While Johnny was writing, he was often uncommunicative, stuck in his book for long periods of time. Diane had come to accept the behavior of her husband, which she noticed he had inherited from his grandmother, Róisín. Diane knew Roisin during only the last decade of her life, but she was writing and publishing books—and causing controversy—until the day she passed.

“Is there any good news coming out of those diaries?” asked Diane, as the two of them sat in their Dalkey living room watching the RTE news.

“Good news!” said Johnny. “Mayor Walker has returned to America, and, thanks to Grandpa, he has a job.”

Diane brightened. “Now that’s what I want to hear! I do like Mayor Walker.”

“So did Grandma,” said Johnny. “I think Grandpa could have stayed away from Jimmy Walker, but Róisín insisted he get him a job.”

“How did it happen?”

“Well, they were living at 45 Christopher Street, and, according to the diary, one Sunday night, Grandpa went out to get the
Daily News
at eight o’clock in the evening and bumped into Jimmy as he was hailing a cab to take him home.”

Walker was returning from the Tamawa Democratic Club that Carmine De Sapio had just opened on Seventh Avenue South. “Mr. Mayor!” said a surprised Eoin.

“Congressman Kavanagh!” returned Walker, genuinely happy to see the person who had issued him his walking papers.

“What are you doing down here in sinful Greenwich Village? I heard you were strictly an uptown man since your return from Europe.”

“Sinister Carmine,” laughed Jimmy, “wanted me to launch his new club with a speech to inspire.”

“Thinking of making a comeback?” nudged Eoin.

“You never can tell!”

Eoin grabbed Walker by the elbow and walked him across Grove Street to Jack Delaney’s saloon, a former speakeasy. “I’m calling Róisín,” Eoin declared, and, five minutes later, the three of them were bellying up to the bar.

“Mr. Mayor!” said Róisín, as she kissed Walker on his cheek.

“My lovely Róisín,” charmed the Mayor, “you get more beautiful by the year!” Walker took her hand and kissed it, and Róisín blushed in his admiration.

“Funny,” intoned Eoin, “when I say that kind of stuff to her, she wants to know what I did wrong!”

Walker laughed. “Well, Eoin,
everyone
knows the sins of Jimmy Walker!” Walker, of course, was right. He had returned to New York in 1935, when the Justice Department decided they had nothing on him. He and his new wife, Betty, had tried many business schemes and had come up short. “For a guy who was supposed to have stolen City Hall,” said Walker, “I’m flat broke.”

“Have you heard from the president?” asked Eoin.

“Not a whisper.”

“Well,” Eoin said, “he told me he was delighted by your defense of him against grumpy Al Smith during last year’s election.”

“The president could have called Jimmy,” insisted Róisín.

“Busy man, the president,” added Walker. The Mayor finished his drink and put on his hat. “I have to get going.”

“It was great seeing you again, Jimmy,” said Eoin.

“Pass my regards on to the president,” Walker replied.

“Will you and Betty come down to dinner at our home?” asked Róisín.

“I will, indeed,” Walker agreed. “If your cooking can match your beauty, it will be a gourmet feast!”

“Where’d you find that shovel, Mr. Mayor?” Eoin teased, and the three of them roared.

Walker made his way to the door, glad-handing patrons on his way out. “He’s one of a kind,” Eoin remarked.

“Why don’t you ask FDR if he has a job for Jimmy?” pushed Róisín.

“You never give up, do you?” responded Eoin.

But knowing that the motto, “Happy Wife, Happy Life,” was true, he did ask FDR the first chance he got. “I’ll see what I can do,” said the president. “Maybe Fiorello has something for him.”

“Why would Mayor LaGuardia want to help Jimmy Walker?” asked Eoin of the president.

“Because, Congressman, he’s Jimmy Walker!”

Eoin arranged for Walker to meet the president and then brokered a meeting with LaGuardia. As Walker emerged from his meeting with the Little Flower, reporters asked what they had talked about. “We were trying to find out if Diogenes was on the level!” replied Beau James.

And it wasn’t long until LaGuardia came up with a job: “Czar” of Industrial and Labor Relations in the Women’s Coat-and-Suit Industry, one of New York’s signature commerces. FDR signed off, and Walker found himself making a cool $25,000 a year. Not bad in 1938. Asked exactly what he did in his new job, Jimmy quipped, “They are always buttonholing me!”

“That’s a wonderful story,” Diane marveled.

“Jimmy Walker must have been quite a guy,” Johnny agreed. “Even his enemies loved him. They figured he did his penance, so why not reward him?”

“Róisín could be quite feisty, I see,” said Diane.

“Eoin and Róisín were separate moons, rotating around the same planet,” said Johnny.

“In what way?”

“Well,” Johnny explained, “even as a kid, when I moved in with them, they led separate lives. Grandpa would be in Washington, and Grandma would be writing books in New York and running salons for all her crazy women friends.”

“Watch your step, Mr. Kavanagh!” warned Diane.

“Well,” said Johnny, “they were all crazy. It was a
Who’s Who
of the feminist movement running through that apartment. Half of them thought I had no right to live there!”

“Oh, you poor thing,” said Diane, gently touching Johnny on his chin. “You seemed to survive.”

“As did their marriage,” said Johnny. “Even after Eoin retired from Congress in 1964 and went to Dublin to serve in the
Dáil
, they remained close. Grandpa wore out Aer Lingus flying back and forth between Dublin and New York.”

“Why didn’t Róisín go to Dublin and live with him?”

“Well,” said Johnny, “to be honest with you, Róisín wanted nothing to do with Dublin—or Ireland, for that matter. She felt it was a century behind the times, and she thought there was something special happening in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s. She was also pissed that they banned all her books!”

“She held a grudge!”

“Of course, she did. She was Irish, wasn’t she? That’s why Grandpa and I were always running around Dublin alone together when I was a teenager. He taught me so much.”

“I wish he were here again,” Diane remarked wistfully. “There is so much I want to ask him now. You only think about stuff after people die.”

“What did you want to ask him?”

“Oh,” said Diane, “why he quit Congress and left America. It seems to me that that was a very outrageous thing to do for a man in his mid-sixties.”

“As outrageous as joining a revolution on the spur of the moment?”

“
Almost
as outrageous,” laughed Diane.

“I actually know the answer to that,” said Johnny. “You know Grandpa was mentor to a generation of Democratic politicians in the House for nearly thirty years. Guys like JFK and LBJ. He liked all of them, especially JFK. And when Kennedy got shot, it took something out of Grandpa.”

“It might have also reminded him of his job in the Squad—and of Collins,” said Diane.

“Absolutely,” Johnny agreed. “Then the civil rights movement came along under LBJ, and Bobby Kennedy was still Attorney General. Grandpa had to marshal those votes in the House because he was a whip. He saw how divisive the whole thing was and, of course, there was the Vietnam War coming down the chute. Grandpa had a great sense of history, and he knew it was time to get out, to go back to Ireland and maybe finish Collins’s work in some way.”

“He was a truly amazing man,” Dianed said. “But this shooting stuff really gets to me. I can’t believe Grandpa could do something like that.” Diane paused and then quietly asked, “Did he shoot anyone else in 1920?”

“No comment!” laughed Johnny. “Let’s just say, for now, he helped send several on their way!”

“It’s not funny.” Diane took Johnny’s hand. “Now don’t lie to me. Did you have any clue that Grandpa was a gunman?”

“In all my years with Grandpa and his cronies,” said Johnny, “I only heard one story, and that was from Speaker O’Neill, another of the old man’s protégés.”

“What happened?”

Johnny began the tale of Big Haley Bourbon, the Democratic congressman from Biloxi, Mississippi. Haley was six-feet-four and 325 pounds. He always wore white linen suits that looked like they had been purchased from Sidney Greenstreet’s estate. Bourbon had rotted Bourbon’s insides—he even got red in the face peeing. The odds of him bursting his guts were running three-to-two against his guts. He was great pals with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and Alabama Governor George Wallace. He was staunchly against the civil rights movement, saying, “The negras of Mississippi never had it so good!”

“Well,” said Big Haley—a liquid lunch making him feel invincible—as he spied the diminutive congressman from Greenwich Village, “if it isn’t the nigger-loving, homo-loving Democratic whip from Nude Yawk Shitty!”

It had been a hard week for Eoin Kavanagh, counting LBJ’s votes and trying to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the House. He had had enough.

The color drained out of Eoin Kavanagh’s face. He walked up to the southern congressman, who towered over him. He grabbed Haley by his necktie, and as he jerked it, he kicked the congressman’s leg from under him. The thud of the congressman hitting the marble floor could be heard throughout the Cannon House Office Building. Eoin was still holding Haley’s tie as he bent over him and whispered in his ear, “You’ve heard that stuff about me being a gunman in the IRA? I was. Don’t fuck with me. One more at my age won’t make any fucking difference. You understand me, shithead?” With that, he let the Mississippi congressman slump to the floor and walked away, Tip O’Neill in tow.

“That’s unbelievable,” said Diane.

“Not really,” said Johnny. “Grandpa was such an even-tempered man that people are always shocked at the idea that he could be tough or even violent. He had his boiling point—and God help the individual who brought him to that boiling point.”