34

New York, 1949

Whenever he could stand it, he went to see Charlie in the hospital, sure that she would be there. But they seemed to have a negative attraction now, a sixth sense for avoiding each other that was at least as strong as the pull between them had been. Meanwhile, Charlie transferred himself up to Saint Luke’s as the weather improved, where he could sit out on the screened porches, and look down into Morningside Park, and the lovely green canopy of trees above it.

He was clearly improving, the color coming back to his face. Already, though, Tom could see the job encroaching again. The messengers from City Hall walking the hospital corridors. Councilmen and deputy mayors and district leaders cooling their heels with the magazines in the waiting room—rumpled, bright-eyed men in cheap gray suits, who looked like waiting was what they did for a living, and something they could go on doing until the end of time.

He noticed Robert Moses there, too, the way he might notice a battleship among a fleet of paddle wheelers from Prospect Park. Not waiting for anyone, but always in motion, striding out of his brother’s room with a briefcase, or a sheaf of signed papers. Walking pitched forward, his disdainful stone face leading him onward like the bow of a ship—two or three assistants, as energetic and contemptuous as he was, scrambling to heel. Acknowledging him as perfunctorily as possible, if he did at all: a quick, sharp nod or a purse of his lips, as if Tom, too, were some lingering municipal blight he would have to take care of sometime in the near future.

“You know he’s quitting,” he couldn’t resist saying early one Saturday evening when Moses hurtled past him, alone for a change. “It’s been in the papers an’ everything. And I suspect Mr. Hogan won’t be needin’ your services.”

Moses stopped and addressed him, much to his surprise. “Don’t be silly, I’m not going anywhere.” He stood rigidly across Tom’s path, fists perched confidently on his hips. “You think it matters who the mayor is?” he scoffed. “Nobody could fire me if they wanted to—and believe me, they don’t want to! I could tie this city’s nuts in a bow. But that’s not why I’ll stick around.”

“Why, then?”

He took a step forward, a bigger, taller man than Tom had quite realized before, his face as scornful as ever.

“Because I bring them solutions, that’s why. All you and your liberal friends bring them is problems. Your coloreds and spics agitating to get into public housing. Your pinko priests on the waterfront—in twenty years there won’t even be a waterfront! Soon as they put the jet engine in commercial production, it’ll all move by air. Planes and cars, that’s the future.”

He bent in over Tom, his face still leering but imbued with real devotion. “Don’t you see it? There’s money again. Down in Washington, here in the City. With urban renewal, we can finally start to build again. We don’t have to negotiate for every damned lot, we can just take it—”

“You mean throwing people out of their homes.”

“Screw people! You can’t let people get in the way, or you won’t ever accomplish a thing!” he exclaimed, balling his hand up in a fist and making a pounding motion. “We can build six new expressways, now! Hook up the whole road system, keep the City from strangling itself with traffic. Put up enough public housing in the bargain to make all you little reform nellies happy.”

“That all sounds very democratic,” Tom said in a huff.

“Grow up!” Moses told him. “Democracy doesn’t enter into it. Things are going to be changing fast now—too fast for a lot of people to keep up. This is the first chance we’ve ever had to do things right, develop the City on a logical basis. It may be the last one we ever have.”

He strode across the room, pausing at the door to deliver one last sneer.

“And I wouldn’t be surprised if the General decides to stick around after all,” he said. “Trust me, son. Power is no easy thing to give up.”

 

He stood out in the drizzle early the next morning, watching Father Corridan conduct Mass on a West Village pier. The tall, balding cleric looking incongruous in his priestly robes instead of the wrinkled black suit they were all so used to, bareheaded under the light rain without the black slouch hat that he wore like another appendage.

It was that time of day Tom had always liked best on the waterfront, when the harbor was still coming awake all around him. The North River dock as crowded with men as he had ever seen it for a morning shape-up. Pier 59, King Joe Ryan’s home turf, right in the heart of the pistol locals. But this time, each and every one of the men in their worn work clothes stepped forward patiently, hat in hand, to take the body and the blood of Christ in his mouth and move back down the long concrete wharf, blessed and forgiven, his soul bleached pure as the lamb again.

When they were done, Father Pete finished off the sacred wine, then made the sign of the cross over all of them. He raised his arms to pray, and the men all dropped together, reminding Tom of how his whole platoon had gone to its knees when the chaplain blessed them back in Italy, right before they tried to take another goddamned hill. He found himself kneeling with them now, praying for the first time since the war.

“God grant that our just demands will be met, and that we may work in dignity, and honor,” Corridan was intoning solemnly, his voice as deep and rough as the weather filtering in off the river. “May God protect each and every one of us this day.”

He held out his hands, and the men rose again as one. Smiling and laughing now, swaggering off the dock. Behind them the black-hulled ships waited forlorn and abandoned, their cargoes untouched. Father Corridan and the men from the labor school at Saint Xavier’s handed them mimeographed leaflets, headlined The Longshoremen’s Case, as they left. The priest swearing genially as he pulled off his white and purple robes, crumpling them into a heap and molting back into his comfortable black clothes and hat.

“For Pete’s sake, if we’re going to keep going out this early, I’m going to have to stick to straight goddamned whiskey at night,” he muttered to Tom, his eyes bloodshot but still merry. “No more chasing it with beer. Jesus, it was only the promise of that wine at the end that got me through.”

“Are they going out?” Tom asked.

“See for yourself.” Corridan pointed proudly at the men moving away from the docks, piling into the nearest diners and bars, or starting the long blocks east to the BMT. “It’s the same all over the harbor. Men are walking off the job on every pier from here to Red Hook, and over to Hoboken. War—it’s wonderful!”

Tom could see, too, the shlammers skulking back by the pier sheds. Dressed in their fine suits and coats, hands thrust deep in their pockets. Faces bristling with menace. But the men ignored them as they streamed back past them, or jeered or gave them the bird—a few even jostling them as they went by, looking back as if spoiling for a fight.

Tom followed them, walking away from the river to an overgrown, aged office building at Nineteenth and Eighth, the fake-marble exterior encrusted in grime. Inside there was a wide, utilitarian metal elevator that seemed to be in working order, with a few more well-dressed thugs lingering around it, trying out their scowls on one another. Tom dodged into the stairwell by the door, preferring to go up unannounced. There was a cry behind him as he did, but the heavy door with its wire-glass window slammed shut behind him, and he took the stairs two at a time. He heard the door below open briefly, but there was no sound of any pursuing footsteps as he climbed up and up the metal-tipped stairs. Only a sour reek of food scraps, and cigarette butts, and insecticide, plus here and there rust-colored splashes on the walls and the railings, and a few abandoned workmen’s caps and hats.

“The Joe Ryan Memorial Stairs,” he said to himself, panting, on his way up.

When he got to the top, he pushed his way back through the heavy fire door again and made straight for the office suite ahead of him, the only one on the floor. There was another shlammer in a good coat standing out by the elevators on this floor, too, but he never saw Tom until he was past him. The double suite doors were stained so as to look like something of heft and quality, like oak or mahogany, with the grand designation INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMEN’S ASSOCIATION, JOSEPH P. RYAN, PRESIDENT-FOR-LIFE stenciled across them in beautiful gold letters. But in fact they felt almost as light as plywood, and opened easily to a quick pull.

Tom found himself in a spacious reception area, facing a high desk and a secretaries’ anteroom, behind a low railing. There was a further façade of legitimacy here—a deep carpet on the floor, and a couple of couches, and framed photographs on the walls, most of them featuring King Joe Ryan shaking hands with politicians and bishops who looked faintly embarrassed. But the upholstery was fraying, and the carpeting held the damp waterfront smell of fabric that never quite dried, like someone’s perpetually leaking basement.

This early, there was no receptionist behind the imposing front desk, no secretaries at work yet. He vaulted the low railing and headed straight for the office beyond, twisting open this unlocked door, as well. Across the room were two familiar figures, leaning against a windowsill and staring out in the direction of the piers, their heads swiveling around instantly at his unannounced intrusion.

“Gentlemen!”

King Joe Ryan’s face looked as comically surprised as it always did, in all its ridiculous, oversized features—the large, heavily veined nose, ears as cauliflowered as an aging club pug’s. His mouth hung open slackly, then seemed to slowly masticate whatever it was he wanted to say. Next to him stood Bill McCormack, his head tilted up like an alert schnauzer’s, his twinkly eyes now two dark buttons glaring in Tom’s direction.

“Don’t worry, I took the stairs. The same ones you threw those Negro longshoremen down, when they got sick of picking the tarantulas out of the banana cargoes you gave ’em. Another great moment in the history of the International Longshoremen’s Association.”

“You promised to do a thing for me,” McCormack said without any of his usual preliminaries, his voice jagged and hard as a saw. “That’s the only excuse I see for why we shouldn’t show you the same way out.”

“You wanted me to deliver a message to the fathers down at Saint Xavier’s,” Tom said. “It’s done.”

“Is it? And what answer did they give you?”

“I told them,” Tom said slowly, “that you wanted to know what it might take to settle things between you—”

McCormack looked mollified. “That’s all I asked.”

“I also told them that they’d be mad to strike any kind of a deal with a man like you. I told them that the only reason you’d want me to be your messenger was to imply that the mayor was behind your offer, and would serve as guarantor. I told them that wasn’t true, that it never would be true—that my brother would never sell the workingmen of this city.”

McCormack’s eyes were narrowed to razor-thin slits.

“Is that so? I wouldn’t be so sure of that, if I were you—”

“I didn’t stop by to hear any slanders of my brother,” Tom said, cutting him off. “Just to let you know that I kept my word.”

“You little punk,” McCormack said, putting out a hand to grasp King Joe Ryan’s desk, as if to keep himself in check. “Funny, I heard you weren’t such a jaunty lad before your brother was the mayor. I heard when you went up to Emil Camarda’s office you were white as a sheet, and about ready to piss yourself.”

“Is that a fact?” Tom said, trying to sound as offhanded as possible—wondering how much McCormack had heard about that day, and from whom. “You may be right. But fortunately, I was with Peter Panto that day. He was brave enough for the both of us, in the face of your killers.”

“Such insolence. If my Harry were alive, he’d slit you chin to navel. Hell, I got half a notion to do it myself—”

“That doesn’t sound much like subsidiarity to me,” Tom said. “Take a close look out there, the two a ya. Your waterfront is slipping away from you.”

“We’ll see about that. Tougher men than your priests have tried an’ failed,” McCormack told him.

“Have they? And how d’ya think it’s gonna go for you with Hogan himself in City Hall? I hear even now he’s up in Sing Sing, hearing Cockeye Johnny Dunn’s last will an’ testament about just who he’s been breakin’ heads and slittin’ throats for all these years.”

“Cockeye Dunn! The man’s a criminal, runs a couple piers down here, an’ starts puttin’ on airs. He’d never rat, and even if he does, no one will believe him,” McCormack scoffed, but Tom was sure he detected a note of uncertainty, maybe even surprise, under the man’s usual bravado. King Joe Ryan was still trying desperately to work his tongue and teeth around a word.

“Don’t be so sure. Governor Dewey’s stayed his execution, just to see if he’ll gab. I suspect that being on Death Row has a way of concentrating a man’s mind—and loosening his tongue.”

“You think I made my way on the docks for forty years to be brought down by the testimony of some small-time hood like that?” McCormack answered, smiling at him malevolently. “As I recall, you tried that once before.”

“It’s a new day. Get used to it, Mr. Big,” Tom told him, and turned to push past the shlammer out by the elevators, another short, broad man with a chest like a bull’s, who reached into his coat for something.

“No!” McCormack said quickly, causing the man to hesitate. But Tom was already bringing his fist up, driving it into the shlammer’s chin, knocking him back into a display case of civic and church medals awarded to Joseph P. Ryan. The man rolled off to the floor, momentarily stunned, the blackjack he’d been pulling out flopping out onto the carpet like a hooked fish.

“One more cheap shot!” McCormack snarled.

“Subsidiarity forever!” Tom grinned back at him, trying to ignore the sharp ache in his hand.

“You . . . you . . .” King Joe Ryan sputtered apoplectically, the eyes of everyone else in the room, even the dropped goon, turning to him, waiting to see what he might possibly have to say.

“You tell that Dorothy Day that she’s no lady!” he got out at last.

Tom laughed all the way back down the stairs.

 

“You gave it all away.”

He stood on the screened porch at the hospital, next to his brother, staring at the document there with the heart falling out of him. All but unable to believe that what he was looking at was real, even with all of the official seals and watermarks of the City of New York attached to it. Worst of all was the name stenciled in so beautifully at the top: Robert Moses.

Tom picked up the sheaf of paper and read from it again, shaking his head. “‘City construction coordinator.’ Jesus, Charlie, you know what this means? The power you gave him?”

“Sure—”

“Do you, Charlie? It means he can condemn any building, anywhere, and have it ripped down. He doesn’t even have to have a real reason.”

“You know I had to give him the tools—”

“He has the tools. A bulldozer and a sledgehammer—that’s all he uses anymore. Now you’ve added an atom bomb.”

“Tommy—” his brother said wearily.

“It was bad enough you went an’ put Bill McCormack in charge of that committee on the future of the harbor. Now you want to give the rest of the City away to Bob Moses. You really signed this?” he asked again, as if trying to convince himself.

“I had to, Tommy. Somebody has to run things.”

“Why?”

“Whattaya mean, ‘why’?” Charlie said, irritated.

“I mean why does somebody have to run things the way you’re talkin’ about? Why does there have to be one more boss, lording it over all the rest of us? And not even one we elected.”

“Don’t be naïve, Tommy.”

His brother looked away, over the fine park below. He was sitting in a rattan-backed wooden wheelchair, wearing a robe and pajamas. It was late spring by now, and the damp, stifling heat of the City had already come on, but Charlie had a blanket draped over his legs like an old man.

“Somebody’s got to be in charge, and who knows this city better than Robert Moses?” he asked plaintively. “He knows how to build.”

“Maybe once. Now I think he just likes to tear down. Look at what he’s doing out at Coney Island. Wiping out a whole neighborhood, and half the boardwalk with it. And the Bronx—”

“He’s a modern man, Tommy. He has a vision; he can see what the City’s becoming, and what it has to become. We’ve got to move forward, keep up with the new age.”

“He’s mad as a hatter, if you ask me.”

“Do you see that park below?” his brother asked, gesturing at the lovely green sweep of the treetops. From somewhere below they could hear the screams and laughter of children playing, though most of them were blocked from view. There was the hiss of pool sprinklers, and every now and then the thunk of a bat against a ball. Mothers and nannies pushed baby carriages along the promenade, and old women sat on the park benches, clutching their pocketbooks with both hands.

“Nobody even thinks about it much, but it’s a work of genius. A jewel. A park carved out of a cliff, both beautiful and eminently useful at the same time. Can you imagine anyone buildin’ something like that today?”

“Yes, I can. Just not Robert Moses—”

“And just up the street is Columbia University, and a block over in the other direction is the Episcopalians’ big bloody cathedral. The whole city on a hill, right here! We need people who can build like that now, Tommy.”

“Wielding the pickaxe to tear into that cliff was likely an Italian or a Negro, an’ no doubt there was a Paddy on the wheelbarrow, to cart it all away,” Tom said fiercely, crouching down by his brother. “We all built this city, Charlie. You know that as well as I do. These men you think we can’t live without, they need you to believe that. Can’t you see?”

Charlie sighed but kept refusing to look at him, staring down into the lush green trees like he was a hundred years old.

“It’s the things you do that you can never break free of,” he said in a dry, ruminative voice. “That’s what you don’t realize when you’re young. It’s a chain you start, an’ you think you can break it anytime. But you can’t.”

“What’re you talkin’ about, Charlie? What the hell’re you talkin’ about? Because by Christ I can’t figure a thing you’re on about anymore.”

“I remember when I first began to glimpse this city, from the top of the Woolworth Building. The real City, in all its limitless strength and power. Its heights and its depths, and all the light an’ shadows in between. How it worked and how it disported itself, in all its awful glory. And here we are.”

“Charlie, are ya all right?” Tom asked sincerely, afraid that his brother was having a stroke. But Charlie simply shook his head and turned to look at him at last.

“Elections are all well an’ good, Tommy. But I knew it a long time ago, ever since I climbed up that building with a load a bricks on my back: within the city that you see all around you—the one that lives by explicit laws and observances—there exists another city, just as real. One that lives by its own, unwritten rules and commandments—but ones that are no less binding, just the same.”

“You’re leaving, but you’re putting a permanent government in place before you go,” Tom said bitterly, standing up again and looking away from his brother. “McCormack with his harbor, Moses with his highways. Who else are you leaving in charge, in your marvelous invisible city?”

“A city like New York, Tom, it’s got to have great men—not good men—to run it.”

“Run it for what, exactly, Charlie? Run it for whom? That time is gone, Charlie. You said so yourself. For better or worse, the people run it now.”

“People today have no more moral sense than a pig, or a dog,” Charlie snapped. “They think a park like that is just given to them by God, because they’re good Americans. These are the days of the split atom, Tommy. We’re held together against the chaos by the grip of a few strong men, that’s all.”

Tom started to open his mouth to reply, but then he realized that for once, he had nothing left to say to his brother, nothing at all.

“Goodbye, Charlie.”

“Goodbye, Tom.”

They shook hands, and Tom walked in off the breezy screen porch, sure that he was headed somewhere, but with no real idea where, or what for.