23

New York, 1947

He would only ask later if it wasn’t what he deserved. Finding himself at the end of an evening, seated in a rich man’s apartment. Dressed in his best dinner clothes, with a good cigar in one hand and a glass of hundred-year-old brandy in the other, when in walked the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen, and he thought, Why not? Widowed now. Powerful and respected, the mayor of the City. Surrounded by other powerful men, hovering about to pay court to him. He saw her face and thought, Why not?

“My, it looks like a speakeasy in here,” he heard her say, taking in all the silly, baronial frippery as she stood there in her designer gown. The voice rich, amused, sardonic.

Knowing what she’d look like before he even turned around, which one she had to be. A face and a form like some classic Greek huntress. Like a fable embroidered on a tapestry, Diana with her hounds. But it was the voice that made him turn. Husky and self-assured, the confidence alone enough to send chills up his neck. It was the voice of country clubs, and summer houses, and the knowledge of horses and sailboats. Or at least what he wanted them to sound like.

He was already on his way to her by then. Walking across the Persian carpet of the dead railroad mogul, in his fabulous lair hidden away in the upper reaches of Grand Central station. The thick beams supposed to look like a medieval lord’s hall. Arched fireplace big enough to roast a boar on at one end of the room, a very modern bar along the side, under the stained glass windows. Literal crests, bought up and carted off from all over Europe, displayed along the oaken paneling, broadswords and maces and morning stars piled up in umbrella stands on either side of the fireplace.

The silliest robber-baron imitation of old wealth imaginable. Empowering him to go up to her and show her that he knew it. That he knew his way around now, Charlie O’Kane from Lismirrane. Saying to her as he came up behind her, so that all she knew of him first was his own rich voice, pitched deep and low to the setting: “Young lady, you are too young, and too well bred, to know anything of speakeasies.”

Then watching to see how she turned, her green eyes flickering as she looked upon him. Thinking when he saw that face close up, Why not? Why not, why not, why not?

Up in the rail baron’s apartment, the green-eyed goddess of America winked at him.

 

After he was sworn in, he had a small elevator put in at the mayor’s mansion to accommodate Claire. But she called the place “the Museum,” and stayed there as infrequently as she could get away with. Complaining about how the old wooden house creaked at night, and how much noise the ships’ horns and the bells on the buoys made out in the river. Most of all, she didn’t like how the police guards and the pedestrians on East End Avenue would stare at her, when Neddy Moran was helping her from her wheelchair into the car for a drive.

She preferred to spend the last summer of her life at her sister Anne’s house out in Rockaway, warm-weather capital of the Condon Colony of Dreamers. They both knew she was dying by then, and she tried to make a joke of it, even though she could barely speak, or even move her face. Forming a rictus grin that he could barely stand to look at but forced himself to for her sake—knowing that she was trying to get across her little jest.

“See how it’ll extend your political honeymoon, a dying wife,” she rasped raggedly at him, her breath warm and rancid on his cheek as he leaned in to hear what she was saying, forcing himself to keep smiling. “See how good it is for you, what sympathy you’ll get!”

“Ah, God, Clairey—”

“No, no, I’m serious. A little,” she told him. “You weren’t made to live alone, Charlie. See you get yourself somebody when I’m gone.”

“What makes you think I’ll outlive you? Sez who?”

“Get yourself—” She made a rattling sound, deep in her throat, one that made the hairs on the back of his head go up. “Get yourself . . . one who . . . will . . . hold . . . you on the ground. You can get into an awful lot of trouble, Charlie, when you get above yourself.”

“Enough of this morbid talk now, Clairey,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Let me tell you what they tried to put over on me today . . . ”

She died at last in October, when the weather was just beginning to turn into another glorious New York fall. She passed at the old Holy Family Hospital, on Dean Street in Brooklyn, and after it was over, Tom could remember only the harsh smell of antiseptic everywhere, and the pale green linoleum out in the hallways. Natie Cohen raised a fund among Charlie’s many friends, and the next spring they donated a sparkling new ambulance to the hospital in her name.

“How can I tell you in a few words . . . it is sweet of you to remember Mrs. O’Kane” was all Charlie was able to get through at the dedication ceremony before his voice broke, burying his face in his handkerchief while Natie led him off.

 

Tom worried about him after Claire’s death, though he tried to keep his distance. Hearing he was putting in twelve-hour days at City Hall, shuttling between his office and Gracie Mansion. Whenever they did meet, though, they argued about housing, and taxes, and the poor, all the everyday horrors of the world, and he wanted desperately not to be a burden to his brother.

Thus he was pleasantly surprised and intrigued when he got the call from Charlie to meet him up at the Powerhouse, which was what they called the cardinal’s residence behind Saint Patrick’s. It was coming on another summer, and Charlie was still basking in his greatest triumphs—the settling of the tugboat strike and the removal of a late snowfall from the streets.

“The quotidian tasks of government,” he liked to say, “but it’s what people see, and hear, and feel every day.”

Things were running well then, the City humming along. Growing steadily fatter, richer, higher, than he had ever seen it. Tom had noticed that most of the hard-eyed men back from the war were gone—including himself. They fit more easily in their suits now, or even bulged out. Their eyes no longer looked so ravenous, their service buttons tucked away at home, forgotten in the bureau of the new bedroom set.

It was about this time that the Time magazine article came out, Charlie on the cover. Painting him as the unflappable tribune of the people, the poor boy made good. Spouting what had fast become all the usual, fantastic statistics and claims about the City since the war. Tom wary of the whole triumphalist tone, but secretly swept along by it, too—thrilled to think his brother could be running such a place:

“It is the biggest, richest city the world has ever seen—its wealth greater than all of Europe’s combined! . . . the greatest port, the greatest tourist destination, the greatest manufacturing center, the greatest marketplace! . . . along Manhattan’s great avenues the women shop like stalking tigresses, they dress like foreign spies, and they strut like courtesans . . . here half-a-million Irishmen like Mr. Mayor mix every day in more-or-less perfect harmony with 2 million Jews, more than a million Italians, another half-million Negroes, a quarter-million Puerto Ricans . . .

“The city that every day takes in and spits out a billion gallons of water, 23,500 tons of food, a billion gallons of sewage, 8,000 tons of garbage. One that requires 20 million gallons of fuel in the winter, subways and elevated railroads that glide 6 million people a day to work; where a train arrives from out of town every 50 seconds, morning, noon, and night. A city with 150,000 municipal workers. And at the head of this great army, one man: an immigrant success story as great as any in America today. The blue-eyed boy from Bohola, the former cop on the beat, Charles C. O’Kane.

“The city is a great organism, an organism without a memory, but OK Charlie refuses to believe it. “The Big City is the work of man,” he says, and like all of man’s creations, he believes, it can be controlled, and made an instrument of good . . .”

“Of course, sillier words were never wrote,” Charlie told him, grinning modestly when Tom congratulated him on the article. “And everybody knows, the City is all memory. It may sleep for a spell, but it all comes out, sooner or later. You can count on it.”

His brother looked tired, but Tom was very pleased to see there was some color in his face, even a little spring in his step. He was wearing the best suit Tom had ever seen on him, cleaned and starched to a knife edge. When he came up to him, on the corner just below the Powerhouse, at the back of Saint Pat’s, he seemed to be studying closely the shut-up buildings across Madison Avenue.

“What’s it about?” Tom asked him, but Charlie just shook him off, smiling mischievously.

“Oh, you’ll see soon enough. I have a couple surprises for you today, me boy!”

“Is that so? And how is it with you, Charlie? How are ye gettin’ on?” he asked, the concern obvious in his voice, and Charlie smiled again and ran a hand over his hair.

“Oh, it’s all right. There are moments when it scares me to death. Suddenly I’ll think, ‘My God, I’m mayor of the City of New York,’” he admitted. He shook his head, but to Tom’s relief gave a little chuckle. “Ah, but I have missed ya, lad. It’s been too long, Tommy.”

“I know it, Charlie.”

“That’s why I thought I’d treat ya to this piece of business with our old friend the cardinal. Make you believe I’m still fighting on the side of the angels. I have been summoned by my spiritual prince, you see.”

“Is this about his fight with the gravediggers?”

“In part. Did you see him in the papers today?”

“No, what now?”

The archdiocese’s gravediggers had gone on strike the month before, and the cardinal was having none of it. Already, he had denounced them as communists—to their wives.

“He brought a busload of seminary students out to dig the graves.”

“Ah, Jesus!”

“Yep. The press had a field day: ‘Turning Priests into Scabs!’ All those soft-handed little seminarians in their street shoes and brand-new overalls, laborin’ mightily to dig a hole in the ground. The dear cardinal took his own turn with the shovel, and every paper got a picture. I showed it to Red Mike Quill when he came by with his latest demands, an’ I asked him, ‘Whattaya think?’”

“What’d Quill say?”

“He said, ‘I think that poor bastard is not going down very far!’ And now he’s got himself in a big row with Mrs. Roosevelt!” Charlie added, when they had both stopped laughing.

“Oh, yes, I did see that! That open letter he put in the Mirror: ‘I shall not again publicly acknowledge you’—”

“Mm, called her anti-Catholic for saying the public shouldn’t have to pay for religious schools—”

“Goin’ on about the rights of the innocent little children, an’ Cardinal Mindszenty being tortured by the Hungarians. All it lacked was the poor missionaries being boiled an’ roasted by cannibals.”

“Frankie Spellman’s not one to leave out the kitchen sink if he can get somebody to lift it for ’im,” Charlie said, ruminating. “Course, she gave it back to him as good as she got. She’s quite the street fighter at heart, is our Eleanor. Now I’ve got to rescue the poor man, before she eats him like those missionaries.”

He picked up the hefty brass knocker at the back door of Saint Patrick’s and let fly—Tom feeling as though they were asking permission to enter a castle keep, or maybe the Vatican itself. A very pretty young Irishwoman with black hair and blue eyes let them in, blushing a little to see the mayor. Inside, more young women bustled about, cleaning and dusting, setting the dining table and hauling bags of food into the kitchen. All of them just as pretty, and young, and Irish.

“If I didn’t know his predilections, I’d say the cardinal was running a seraglio,” Tom whispered to Charlie while they waited, hats in hand.

“It’s precisely because of that he hires these sweet young things,” Charlie whispered back with a wink. “He must be the only prelate in the world lookin’ to start a rumor.”

The cardinal kept them waiting for a solid ten minutes, then emerged beaming like a big, jubilant baby—his face more cherubic than ever, a last wisp of gray hair settled along his head like a perfect halo. To Tom’s surprise, he was wearing not the red robes of his office but an old black cassock, gone rusty with age around the edges and tied with a simple rope.

“Mr. Mayor! And Thomas, too! Well, this is an occasion,” he said, his eyes twinkling benignly behind his Santa Claus spectacles.

“Excuse me, Your Excellency, if we’ve interrupted you at your ablutions,” Charlie said with a perfectly straight face.

“What, you mean this old thing?” the cardinal said, gesturing expansively at his robe. “It’s what I feel most comfortable in. You know, I’m really just an old parish priest at heart.”

“Yes, I’ve read that many times,” Charlie remarked.

“I tell you, it’s just such a relief to get back here, and relax a little among my flock after all the traveling I’m required to do these days,” Spellman said, chatting on as if he hadn’t heard him. “I have to go back to Italy again next month, and then there are some speaking engagements on the West Coast, and there’s another interdenominational conference up in Albany. It seems I’m constantly in demand these days!”

As if to underscore the constant bustle of his life, he led them through one magnificently appointed room after another, as he spoke. There was a parlor with red velvet chairs, and a Persian rug, and paintings of all the previous archbishops, and gold curtains draped from ceiling to floor. The “throne room,” for formal church ceremonies, with the simple country priest’s chair deliberately mounted above everyone else’s. A study full of more well-stuffed chairs and a fireplace bigger than the one Tom remembered back in the Sforza villa in Italy. The dining room full of impossibly heavy, dark wooden furniture—its table set with fine china and crystal for a meal to which they were pointedly not invited.

At last they entered the heart of the Powerhouse, an enormous, well-appointed space that, despite its twenty-foot-high ceiling and its carved walnut panels depicting scenes from the lives of the apostles, was still unmistakably a boardroom, dominated by a long conference table polished to a dazzling shine. Spellman gestured them coolly into a couple of plush, cushioned chairs, then sat across the table with all the benevolence vanished from his cherub’s face, his hands folded and lips pressed tightly together.

“Thank you, Your Eminence,” Charlie said, pulling the handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and pretending to mop his brow. “I thought we might be goin’ around by way of the Panama Canal.”

“Charlie, I won’t beat around the bush,” Spellman said, using the mayor’s first name as condescendingly as possible. “I called you here to talk about the descending moral tone of this city, and how our Mother Church is under attack.”

“How is that, Your Eminence? Is there another salacious film that’s opened?” Charlie asked piously.

“Have you seen this magazine? It’s outrageous!” Spellman cried, producing a copy of The New Yorker from the sleeve of his simple country priest’s cassock and smacking it down on the conference table.

“Your Grace, I think you are best off ignoring the yellow press—” Charlie tried, but the cardinal had worked himself up to a storm now. Standing up out of his plush chair, banging the magazine repeatedly on the table.

“Did you see the doggerel in here?! The effrontery! It’s time you took a moral stand, Charlie, instead of trying to straddle the middle between the church and its enemies!”

“I take it you mean the MacLeish poem—”

“‘I Shall Not Again Publicly Acknowledge You.’ Outright mockery of the church, and people of faith!”

“With all due respect, Your Grace, he was flingin’ your own words back at you—”

“‘Consider, Prince, your place and nation—’ What is that, some sort of threat? How he can be allowed to write such things in a public magazine—”

“Look, Francis, that’s what happens when you call the First Lady unworthy to be an American mother,” Charlie snapped at last. “You’re out there every week pickin’ a new fight an’ cryin’ anti-Catholic bigotry when somebody punches back. Last month it was Planned Parenthood. Now you picked yourself a beauty.”

“I’m right and you know it!” Spellman insisted, though his voice sounded shrill and more than a little desperate. “The public should pay something toward our schools. We lift a considerable burden off the taxpayer—”

“You’ll never convince anybody of that by goin’ after Eleanor Roosevelt. You’re punchin’ above yer weight with this one, Frank, an’ we both know it. The public’s on her side, an’ we can’t have all this disturbance with a tough election comin’ up. It doesn’t matter who stands with you, if we all go down to defeat.”

The cardinal resided into his chair, arms crossed against his chest. Tom amazed at how genuinely angry he seemed. His face still red, his voice snippy, he asked Charlie: “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Apologize?”

“That’s exactly what you’ll do. Ed Flynn’s arranged for you to stop by Hyde Park on the way to that interdenominational conference of yours. You’ll take tea with Mrs. Roosevelt, an’ tell the gentlemen of the press it’s all been a misunderstanding,” Charlie dictated in rapid-fire order. “You’ll find she’s quite gracious, though I’d eat a good lunch before you go, if I was you. And you might say something nice about Mr. Truman while you’re there.”

“I will not!” the cardinal still protested, looking shocked.

“You will, or that commercial rent control bill is goin’ to pass the city council next week, an’ I just might forget to veto it. Let’s see how your Mr. Reynolds will like that.”

Tom knew that John J. Reynolds, another one of the businessmen Spellman courted so assiduously, was said to have made the archdiocese at least a hundred million dollars, just since the war. A heavy-drinking rail fly most of his life, he had discovered in himself a capacity for investing in oil wells, and making real estate deals, which he brought the church in on. The money that was coursing through the City now, Tom thought, marveling to himself.

“You can’t do that!” Spellman ranted, freshly outraged.

“Can’t I? Reynolds is gouging half the shopkeepers in this town till the blood comes out their ears. But you’ve got him living up there on a church estate in Riverdale, complete with a tennis court an’ a swimming pool for that new chorus-girl wife a his—”

“It’s all perfectly legitimate!”

“Sure, what’s not legitimate in a sacred cause? Whatch ya do, give him another of your papal knighthoods? Or was it fixin’ him up with Joe Kennedy? Yes, I know about that, too. Kennedy gets the whole Chicago Merchandise Mart for a song—and you get all those buildings just over t’other side of Madison Avenue. How d’ya think that deal will look in the papers?”

“Are you through?” Spellman said icily, but Tom could see, to his amazement, that he was stymied, at least for the moment.

“Not quite,” his brother continued. “There’s the matter of the United Cemetery Workers—”

“That’s strictly diocesan business!” Spellman exclaimed. “Those men put their union above their church!”

“From what I heard, they were just quotin’ the pope’s encyclical. About a family of four deservin’ sixty-eight dollars a week to live on—”

“That’s those Passionists! They shouldn’t listen to that bunch of bandits—”

“So instead, you pay them fifty-nine dollars to work six days a week, eight hours a day. And then you call their wives communists.”

“I told them, I felt as badly for them as if they were my own mother in the same circumstances,” Spellman objected. “In the end, though, they had nothing to offer me, and I had nothing to offer them.”

“Well, I’m sure that you’ll find something to offer them, Your Grace. Maybe Johnny Reynolds’s tennis court.”

Spellman stood up indignantly, and they slowly stood with him.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay here and listen to any more of these indignities. I’m entertaining Lester Cuddihy and some of our other, faithful associates for lunch.”

“Then I shall not again detain you, Your Eminence,” Charlie told him with a slight bow and a grin. “I’m sure we can find our own way back out. Tom here left some bread crumbs.”

Without another word, Francis Cardinal Spellman turned on his heel and strode out of the Powerhouse boardroom. Leaving the chancery, Tom and Charlie passed his lunch party of contractors and self-made businessmen coming in, each of them ripe with toilet water and eau de cologne, making an unconscious genuflection and bow as they acknowledged him.

“It’s all right, boys. I’m just the mayor, not the prince of the church,” Charlie cracked as they passed, but this only drew wary frowns.

“Jesus, there they go. Frankie Spellman’s very own Knights of the Golden Fleece, or whatever he calls ’em,” Charlie remarked when they had passed. “Did you catch all of ’em?”

“Sure. There was Murray McDonnell, an’ Joe an’ Tom Murray. And Cuddihy, of course—”

“Did you notice the fine white choppers Lester has now?”

“How could you not? I thought I’d been blinded like Paul on the road to Damascus.”

“Did ya hear that Spellman pointed them out, over at the Hoguets?” Charlie said, grinning like a mischievous child himself. “When Cuddihy goes up to kiss the ring on the reception line, he says, ‘Ah, Lester, I see you have some new teeth!’ And Lester says, ‘I’ll teach you to call attention to my new teeth!’ Instead of kissin’ the ring, he bit Spellman right on his finger, so hard it drew blood!”

“That’s not bad. An’ you, Charlie—boxing the cardinal’s ears right in the Powerhouse! You were magnificent!” Tom said, exultant.

His brother grinned at him, and maybe it was Tom’s imagination, but he almost seemed to kick up his heels.

“Sometimes, I dunno, you just have to have a bit a the devil in ye to do this job! Ah, he’ll never forgive me, but I was just savin’ the poor man from himself.”

They were back outside and striding down Madison by now, toward Grand Central. Charlie checking his watch, evidently headed somewhere with a purpose.

“By God, Charlie, it’s good to see you lookin’ so strong—so full of purpose,” Tom told him.

“Well, there’s a reason for that, too, maybe. I want you to meet it today.”

“What’s that?”

They were in the Oyster Bar by then, the waiter ushering them over to the corner table. Faces on all the diners lighting up to see him go by, grinning as if they were in on some great joke together.

She was already at the table. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen close up, and dressed like no one he had ever known dressed. Sitting right there in the Oyster Bar, wearing a rose suit with matching hat, stole, and bag. Looking as though she’d be every bit as comfortable waiting for them there as at the Automat, or the palace of Versailles. She turned a warm smile on them, and he was lost in it right away. Charlie talking for no apparent reason, apologizing for them being late, telling him: “—but you must have seen her in the paper! Slim, I’d like you to meet my lout of a younger brother, Tom O’Kane. Tom, this is Slim Sadler, who I’m sure you’ve read all about—”

Reaching out a rose-gloved hand, which he took as Charlie beamed at them both, and held on to for dear life.

“Oh, you’re sure to get on. You’re two of a kind!”