Thunder City (2 page)

“Which Crownover, Abner the Third or Edward?”

“Neither. It was Harlan.”

“Harlan?”
He set down his cup with a click. “Whatever can he want to see me about? He’s feeble-brained.”

“He is not. He is shy. You would be as well if your father were Abner Junior. The man is a tyrant.”

“The tax base could use a dozen more tyrants like him. He saved his father’s business from bankruptcy after the old boy threw in with John Brown. Any self-respecting horse in the country would be proud to step into the traces of a Crownover coach. Our phaeton is a Crownover. You’ve never been ashamed to be seen riding in it up Piety Hill.”

“The coach is not the man. Anyway, I hope you won’t be after keeping Harlan waiting. He had to plead for the hour off and if I know Abner Junior, he’ll dock the poor boy another hour if he’s one minute late getting back.”

Dolan consulted his pocket winder and made rumbling comments about having to cut short his afternoon to meet with the idiot son of a man who forbade politicking on company property, but they both knew the argument was over the moment Charlotte had introduced her view. He resigned himself to spending a bleak hour with a young man whose own father trusted him with duties no more pressing than those of foreman of the loading dock.

He finished his coffee, kissed his wife, and trundled out into the front hallway, where Noche waited with his hat, a soft dove gray one to match his spats with the brim turned up jauntily on the right side, and his stick, black walnut with a gold knob. It was a fine spring day, unseasonably warm for Michigan, and Dolan left his overcoat in the closet as he began his stroll. There were those who said he should move out of the narrow brick saltbox and into one of the more spacious homes on Jefferson Avenue facing the river. He was not among them. His father had laid each brick of the house in Corktown, he had grown up there, and it was over that high threshold he had carried his bride when he was a twenty-two-year-old switchman with the Michigan Central Railroad. In the small lumber room that became his study he had pored over borrowed books in preparation for the bar. In the parlor on the ground floor he had rehearsed the opening arguments of his first case, with Charlotte as his audience, practicing the gestures and finding the breath control that would win him his first elected office. Both his children had been born there, and he had fed William Jennings Bryan, George M. Cohan, and the great John L. in the dining salon and shared his golden Irish whiskey and General Thompson cigars with them afterward in the study. He intended that his wake should be held in the parlor; when he vacated the house for good he would do so on his back in a coffin made of sturdy white pine from the Upper Peninsula.

His daily rounds took him first to the Erin Bar in the next block, where he climbed a rubber-runnered staircase between horsehair plaster walls to the Shamrock Club on the second floor. He never drank alcohol before noon, and breakfast was too recent for him to partake of corned beef and cabbage, the chefs specialty, but he accepted yet another cup of coffee—in summer it would be a glass of lemonade—in the private curtained room where he conducted business, selected his first cigar of the day from a humidor proffered by Fritz, the club’s German headwaiter, clipped off the end with the miniature guillotine attached to his watch chain, and lit it carefully with a long wooden match. The club’s mahogany panels were hung with pictures in plaster frames of prizefighters and the ornate back bar was stocked with more mature whiskey than its somewhat larger counterpart downstairs.

For the next three hours he greeted his appointed visitors with courtesy, offering them cigars and the hospitality of his bill, and sat down with them at his table to hear their requests and complaints. A contractor wanted to arrange a permit to build a hotel on Woodward Avenue. A streetcar conductor named Hanrahan had fallen from the platform at the end of his shift, breaking his wrist, and wanted the city to pay his doctor’s bills. A maker of moving pictures had a contract with the owner of the Temple Theater on Monroe Avenue, but had been denied permission to show his feature because it included a scene of two women undressing to their chemises and bloomers. Dolan vetoed the contractor’s petition on the grounds that his hotel might cause hardship for Jim Hayes, a friend and party supporter who owned the Wayne Hotel in that block. He shook a stern finger at Hanrahan, whose accident was well known to have been the result of having made his last stop at Dolph’s Saloon; but Dolan produced a roll of greenbacks from a pocket of his morning coat and peeled off enough of them to satisfy the man’s doctor. (Hanrahan worked as an unpaid volunteer during elections, conveying Democratic voters to the polls without charge and tearing down Republican posters on his Sundays off.) There was nothing to be done for the moving-picture man, as the Temple was a private enterprise and not beholden to the city. Dolan softened this blow by giving the fellow the name of the manager of a burlesque house in Toledo that might have room on the bill for his ecdysiastic display. Judge Collier stopped by to pay his respects and accept the offer of a glass of beer, which he sipped through a straw to avoid staining his immaculate white beard. Brennan, the assistant party chairman, spent ten minutes discussing the November ballot, during which he drank three whiskeys, then shook half a dozen pieces of Sen-Sen into his mouth straight from the box and left, as steady on his feet as he had been arriving. His bantam body, tightly vested and topped with a shiny brown bowler, burned off everything he put into it within minutes. The man’s nervous animation exhausted Big Jim, who valued the man’s energy but preferred something more stationary in a companion.

At twenty minutes to twelve, Jimmy Dolan retrieved his hat and stick and boarded a streetcar to downtown, ostentatiously slotting a nickel into the fare box, which as street railway commissioner he was not required to do. He disembarked on Woodward Avenue with time to exchange small talk with familiars he encountered on the street. He inquired after the health of Johnny Dwyer’s saintly mother, remarked upon the comeliness of Jerome and Cathleen Whelan’s infant daughter Josie, elicited a promise from Casey Riordan to send him an invitation to his sister Mary’s wedding. It was a matter of some speculation in Corktown whether the Honorable James A. Dolan left off campaigning when he slept.

At his customary table in Diedrich Frank’s saloon, in a booth upholstered in tufted leather beneath a poster showing Eva Tanguay, the Queen of Perpetual Motion, in tights and an hourglass corset, he shoveled in a platter of sauerkraut, three kinds of sausage, and a wheel of Pinconning cheese, chasing each course with a glass of lager. When the boy arrived with the first of the afternoon papers, he tipped him a nickel, lit a cigar, and read with keen interest the details of yesterday’s National League baseball match between the Tigers and the Orioles at Bennett Park. He scowled upon learning that a routine ground ball hit by Uncle Robbie Robinson to Pop Dillon at first base had turned into a game-winning RBI for Baltimore when the horsehide bounded off an exposed cobblestone and past Dillon’s ear. For years Dolan had been after Georgie Stallings to dig up all the stones and prevent such “cobbies” in future, but the general manager, bound by club owner Sam Angus’s Scotch purse strings, could offer nothing more permanent than an occasional application of fresh loam. Big Jim was fond of repeating that he’d lost fifty cents in a friendly wager on the old Detroits in 1895 and had spent five thousand dollars trying to win it back. Betting on baseball was the most scrupulously managed of his vices. Jakob Wiess, proprietor of the Star of Israel chain of cleaning stores in Cleveland, boasted that he owned the most modern steam pressers in the Middle West and magnanimously declared that he owed this distinction to the Indians and James Aloysius Dolan of Detroit. Dolan acknowledged this with an outward show of bluff good humor and an inward loathing for Wiess, whom he considered an unscrupulous businessman and a Christ-killer into the bargain.

Next he reported to Falco’s Barbershop (haircut, fifteen cents; shave, ten cents), where amidst the sparkling white tile and endless mirror images he sank back into a leather armchair and pretended to amuse himself with
Harper’s
and the
Police Gazette
while eavesdropping upon the conversation between the barbers and the customers seated in the five Union Metallic chairs. He found these exchanges more enlightening than the newspapers, and considered his decision to eschew the status of an in-home tonsorial visit a signal advantage over his equals. Moreover, the man on the street pointed to his presence in such establishments as evidence of Big Jim’s accessibility and democratic nature.

When Sebastian, his favorite barber, was free, Dolan sat for a trim, then, pink-necked and freshened with witch hazel, gave him a quarter. He snapped open the face of his watch, sighed, and took a streetcar back to Corktown, where Abner Crownover II’s backward son awaited him in his study.

Jimmy Dolan loved this room. Small compared to those of many men less important than he, it was packed with mustard-colored law books in a walnut case that filled the wall to the right of the desk, a massive slab of carved and inlaid hickory supporting a stained blotter, a heavy brass inkwell and pen stand, and a bust of Socrates done in green marble with a chip out of one eyebrow that made the old pedant look as if he were winking slyly. A full-length oil portrait of Himself with his thumbs in his vest pockets hung behind the desk, still smelling faintly of turpentine; it had been finished just last week. Over everything, Turkish rug and leather humidor, Regulator clock and elephant-leg wastebasket, hung a pungent and masculine odor of bootblack and tobacco and decaying paper and dust; no feminine invasion with feathers and lemon oil was tolerated. The English sparrow that had built its nest on the sill outside the leaded window seemed unaware that it had settled so near the center of the great machine that drove the city of Detroit, and by extension the state of Michigan and a large part of the Midwestern bloc in Congress. The bird alone accepted such crumbs as were sprinkled before it with no thought of returning the boon.

Not so Harlan Crownover, who sprang up from the leather armchair in front of the desk when Dolan entered. He was a rather stocky twenty, darker than his father, but he possessed the long Gallic upper lip that to some degree bore out the family’s claims to descendancy from the French who had settled the region two hundred years before. This distinction was in no small part responsible for the gulf that separated the Crownovers from the Dolans in the New World; in a hundred years of continuous residency, Big Jim’s great-grandchildren would still smell like peat to the Abners and Harlans of the next century. The Irish Pope noted with distaste his visitor’s costume of faded flannel shirt, stained dungarees, and thick-soled work boots; he hadn’t even bothered to go home and change on his way there from work. Well, Charlotte had said he only had an hour. Still, he might have put on a necktie. If Noche had answered the door, he would have told the son of one of the city’s richest men to go around back.

No trace of Dolan’s displeasure showed as he wrapped his big soft hand around Harlan’s small calloused one. “Merciful Mary, can this be Abner Junior’s middle boy? I’m after remembering a skinny lad in knickers with a swollen nose. You slid down the Washington Street hill into the wheel of a milk wagon.”

“That was Edward,” Harlan said. “I think it was a coal wagon.”

Dolan grunted and indicated the armchair. He was vain about his memory for personal details and didn’t care to be caught in error. Seating himself between the wings of his great horsehair swivel, he asked after the health of Harlan’s parents.

“Mother’s very busy with the Orphans’ Asylum. I’m afraid Father’s working himself to death, but he won’t be dissuaded.”

This literal answer displeased Dolan, who preferred to reserve such straight talk for matters of greater gravity. It was no secret that Abner III, Abner Junior’s eldest son, had been promoted to an executive position of no real authority when his incompetence in the office of president had driven the company to the brink of bankruptcy, and that Abner Junior had been forced out of semiretirement to assist young Edward with his new presidential duties. Edward was his father’s rubber stamp, an adequate functionary but incapable of arriving at a decision that differed with Abner Junior’s nineteenth-century fundamentalism. Harlan, the dimmest star in the family constellation, had been passed over entirely. A long tradition of genius had ended with old Abner.

“Will you have a brandy?” Dolan asked.

“Thank you, sir, no. I reserve my drinking for the Pontchartrain bar.”

So far nothing the young man had said had elevated his station. Less than six months old, the Pontchartrain Hotel had replaced the fine old Russell House, which for half a century had sheltered such world luminaries as the former Prince of Wales. No one of a certain vintage had been encouraged when it was demolished to make room for a pretentious palace for transients whose bar catered to a particularly disagreeable clientele: motormen who tracked grease and oil across the Oriental rug in the lobby and hoisted their pistons and things onto the mahogany bar for the admiration of their cronies.

“Are you a frequent customer?” Dolan asked.

In his eagerness to curry favor, Harlan misunderstood the motive behind the question. “I’m a two-drink man, sir. Never more nor less. I don’t mind saying most of those fellows enjoy tipping the tankard and distrust those who limit themselves to one glass. Henry Ford is the exception. He’s a total abstainer, but he is a genius.”

“A genius, is it?” Dolan was amused. “You’re a fortunate young man. In forty years I’ve never met one.”

“You would if you visited the Pontchartrain.”

He shifted in the swivel; the sauerkraut had begun to work. For a young man without much time the fellow was taking the long way around the barn.

Harlan sensed his discomfort. He leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees as if in prayer. “I intend to invest in Mr. Ford’s automobile company. If you’ll agree to lend me the money. I intend to repay it with interest within a year.”