13

THE DRUMS WERE BEATING. America each day across the big water coming closer. That home sweet home where all was well, which was God-blessed and thought-shining in its glory to the West. Where all the good things were against the bad. Where our lives were early lived with radiant promise ahead to be fulfilled. Where one might open one’s heart to what magic, what joy. Where doctors would do all to save a life by merely putting their stethoscopes over one’s wallet. Where fairness and humanity could be found in unexpected places. And there was endless room to move across the valleys, mountains, deserts and plains of this massively great victorious America in whose defense our fists flew to avenge on the spot any insult to its flag or people. And yet at this time came ominous messages that one saw in letters being sent out from that land. That something was amiss. That a secretly pernicious evil had already taken hold and was beginning to pervade from coast to coast. But in remembering America from an earlier time, one did not wholly take in this certain hint of warning.

My pictures, watercolors and oils had preceded me to the boat in a big black box, traveling down that lonely, boggy coastland past the little cottage and barn where they had been painted. From the Shelbourne we went by train to Cork, changing there to proceed the few miles farther out along to the harbor and weatherbeaten town of Cobh, where we stayed the night in one of your better hotels ready to board the America in the morning.

Dining that evening in the hotel, and served dinner by a waiter who ceremoniously swayed back and forth as he placed our plates, Valerie sitting across from me, having just left Philip in his carrycot asleep in the bedroom, suddenly had a premonition that something was wrong and jumped up and rushed off. To find that the maid, turning down the bed and drawing the curtains, had thrown a raincoat over the carrycot completely covering it and baby Philip, who would have in a few more minutes been smothered while he slept. It was Valerie’s last contact with Ireland, a place she never felt entirely at home in, and despite the general friendliness given her charm and beauty, she had to remain always conscious of the slight hostility to her Englishness. It was too to be our last association with Ireland, the Emerald Isle, as a family.

Some folk oblivious of the artistic problem of producing aesthetic balance regarded such a canine picture as obscene. Happily, not all were so dismayed, for such as my publisher Seymour Lawrence sported one of my priapic dogs on the wall of his publishing office in Boston.

By tender, we traveled out on a chill, breezy morning to the black steep sides of the America anchored in the bay of Cobh, the last port of call of the ill-fated Titanic before it sank out on the cold Atlantic. Indulging a slight inclination for privilege and at the same time exercising one’s conservative nature in practical matters, we traveled cabin-class. And I was to recall that in coming to Ireland initially, one would have done so first-class, due to that strange confine, the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, which was frequented by many a distinguished naval gentleman. For in hearing that I was off to Ireland, Commodore Harry Manning gave me a note to take down to Broadway when booking my ticket. As I did so, and never having been on a liner before, I asked the clerk what difference the commodore’s note made. The eager-to-please man seemed surprised that I was unaware that, as Commodore Manning was at the time the ship’s captain, I would be given the very best accommodation aboard. However, at the time there occurred a prolonged shipping strike and, following a series of false starts over a period of three days, I ended up flying to Ireland instead.

But now on my return after five years of not having paid dues to keep up my membership of the club, there was no Harry Manning to alert. And boarding this ship this windswept day, something alien and yet familiar was already dawning. In the bustle of the main deck, as passengers were directed toward their cabins, the efficient indifference of the American way of life was already evident where one’s vowels and demeanor were less an advantage than one’s money. One could not say this trip on the liner America was the most pleasant of all voyages, especially as I was now encountering the American ethic of making sure selfless service was only a thing encountered during the last hours of the voyage when attendance was danced upon one and an expectant hand would then come reaching out for a tip.

In the ensuing years I would make this ocean voyage many times, always it seemed while standing chill and windswept on the deck and always feeling the drama of seeing ahead that unforgettable sight on the last day, of those faint, thin stalks of buildings arise on the skyline, and glinting out of a gray wintry ocean. As the tugboats maneuvered the mass of this great liner into its Hudson River dock, I saw down on the quayside my mother looking up, Valerie remarking with surprise that she had no idea that my mother could appear so good-looking. Philip and Valerie were taken to my father’s car while I oversaw the first of one’s American problems, which could have, with just a nuance, turned into something violent and ominous. My father had sent an immensely big and strong friend from the fire department to get my luggage, and not being an accredited stevedore we came close to an altercation on the dock, especially as the man my father sent to help seemed to be the only one strong enough to shift my large crate of paintings. It was my first experience of my anglicized accent and the reasonableness one attempted to exude with such vowels, helping me to delicately navigate through the blunt rudeness of New York City. Which after Ireland and the Isle of Man suddenly seemed a place of violent chaotic mayhem, the desperate purpose of which was to make someone’s next dime or dollar. And to direct such attempt toward yours truly.

The house in Woodlawn where I lived from an early age. Behind the three front second-floor windows, I wrote many pages of the manuscript of THE GINGER MAN and where Crist would come with a dram of whiskey to hand to read my notes over my shoulder to him when I’d become mute.

At the side of the house in Woodlawn, my sister, Rita, employed at the time by the United States Steel Corporation. She was later to become a distinguished professor in the field of education.

My parents lived in a small, mostly white Protestant enclave called Woodlawn, described again in the New York City Guide of 1939 as “a middle class community on the far northern marches, where New York City cedes to Yonkers and Mount Vernon.” The area consisted of a triangular tract of hardly more than a couple of hundred acres cross-sectioned by nine streets north and south and seven streets east and west. Cut off from the rest of New York City by Van Cortlandt Park, a thousand acres to the west, which had been a former hunting ground of the Mohican Indians, Woodlawn possessed a degree of isolation, for, to the east flowed the Bronx River through its linear park, and to the south lay the sylvan acres of Woodlawn Cemetery dotted with its graves, exotic statuary, and grandiose mausoleums. This burial ground, already famed as the final resting place of some of America’s robber barons as well as their socially registered descendants, was not only a splendid sanctuary for them but also for many birds and small mammals.

With its main street of Katonah Avenue, its two schools and five churches, its four or five bars and two sweetshops, where the kids congregated for their pineapple sodas, the community of Woodlawn resembled a small midwestern town and certainly would join any list of favored places to spend a childhood on the continent of North America. And typical of such places, among the first things I learned taking up residence in this white house on top of the hill on East 238th Street and where I mostly grew up, was that my father thought that instead of exhibiting and selling paintings or writing a novel, I should take the city’s civil service exams and see if I could become a fireman. Later I also heard that he felt the Union Jack should be raised to fly above the house as not only my accent but my behavior was now distinctly British. But my intrepid mother was of a tolerantly different mind and had confidence in my intentions and let it be known that she would back whatever I wanted to do. With some surprise, I learned that she had kept up my membership to the New York Athletic Club all these years, just as she had my government life insurance, which one held in the navy. Her principle in all things seemed to be consistent persistence in whatever endeavor one undertook and never to waver or give up.

But I was soon to find that outside my mother and Valerie, there were to be few believers, supporters or benefactors. And as the cars endlessly traveled the highways, dawning was the quick realization that the odds were mountainously stacked against me and that my naivete had overwhelmed reality. I had already tasted fame and publication of a sort in the small art world of Dublin, but it was now eminently clear that nowhere or anywhere was there anyone waiting across this massive nation to put a laurel wreath on the head of any would-be genius full of heartfelt intentions to have his voice at least heard if not to be rich and famous. And failure could mean only two things, death or escape. For one thing was absolutely certain, that even in the unlikely event that I would be offered a job, I was not about to conform to the American mealymouthed ethic of corporate employment in any shape, manner or form. Or to tolerate, even for an instant, opposition to the work I wrote. And as I sat down now once more to again peck away at the pages, I felt that each snapping down of a typewriter key landed like a hammered nail, sealing a coffin in which was my past life of having been born and raised an American.

For having grown up in this country’s culture, success always seemed to be some sudden thing that happened and all one had to do was push a certain combination of buttons that set you on your way to permanent glory. And with the right smile, the right clothes, the right friends, you just waited. But it was understood that you never made any conscious effort to succeed. That one would finally be apprised of a door through which you stepped into that place of heaven, where, as your face was lit by flashbulbs, one-hundred-dollar bills endlessly floated down on your head to pile embarrassingly up around you. And that you had to kick your claustrophobic way out of the heap.

But as an old prep school friend, Tom Gill, with whom I frequented this room, would say to me when, during the enjoyment of some exotic New York City delight, and when he felt a sobering moment or two of profundity was called for, “Pat, we live under the rich man’s yoke.”

But I might have been suffering even more culture shock than Valerie who at least had had the previous confrontation of having been evacuated to Canada during the Second World War where she had tasted a near version of middle-class American life. I wrote back to Europe letters to such as Crist with reports he found frightening, which described what seemed then a changing society. The once thought humane fairness of American life was undergoing an insidious corruption. Leaving the intelligent and sensitive isolated and counted fewer and fewer in number. Random violence, of gang warfare and zip guns, which was once confined to known dangerous parts of the city, was spreading. My father, watching television evenings, spoke of killing time. My brother Thomas, whom we called T.J., and who had not yet come to Ireland, I now met after many years, seemed grossly unhappy. He had taken temporarily to being a salesman of cemetery plots under the guidance of a senior, but through his lack of conviction that a pre-need grave was a priority in life, he miserably failed to make a sale. And upon the one occasion that he might have done, he was ruthlessly usurped by his senior. A demonstration of our growing-up trusting backgrounds of fair play making us vulnerable to the unscrupulous. And meanwhile a man called Senator McCarthy, with accusations of communism, was seeking out and terrorizing liberals throughout the land.

In this old white house, I stationed myself upstairs in the shadowy middle bedroom, where I occupied a small desk. Following breakfast each morning I would start to write at around ten and continue until about one o’clock. Dressing then in one of my Manx tweed suits, I would take the bus, which ran along the main street of Katonah Avenue at the bottom of the hill. The bus then went past the high black railings of the Woodlawn Cemetery, a fence that took four years to paint, and when finished it was time to start again. Turning left, the bus continued along a road over which trolley tracks once ran. For nearly a mile or two in every direction with no habitation of any sort, this area was one of the loneliest and most bereft areas in the Bronx. It was along the cemetery railings that a meeting took place which involved the Lindbergh baby, one of America’s most famed kidnappings. And alighting at the main gates of the cemetery, across the street was the terminus of the Lexington Avenue elevated train. Which last stop was to provide its own historically sad setting for Gainor Stephen Crist.

With no one with a beard in the entire United States except the naval Captain Sheridan in the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, and perhaps an odd religious sect here and there, I was now constantly made aware by stares and looks of the hair on my face. My beard had become my blazing badge of defiance wherever I went, setting me immediately apart and alerting those on all sides that I was a highly suspicious character, and more than likely one of the insidious enemy spreading the creed of communism across the nation. And while this phobia besieged the United States, mercifully for my paranoia, I did deeply believe that, although at times critical, there was nothing I had ever done or would ever do that would make me disloyal to the nation.

One had already many times, on the occasion of being asked why I was growing that beard, answered that I was doing nothing but that everybody else was shaving his off. One day I even ventured forth down into the city in a red shirt and tie, albeit muted by a tweed waistcoat and jacket. Although it was wonderful for one’s privacy, nothing anywhere could have set me more apart than my whiskers and made most of whom I met or encountered eager to disappear as soon as they could from one’s presence. A chap even walking face-first into a closed glass door. And I suppose, all such folk in the final analysis, would be one’s potential enemy ready to betray one at the merest clank and tinkle of a hammer and sickle. However, I did not seem to give way to any delusions of persecution, and there did occur one single exception to all this surrounding hostility. At exactly five minutes to three, one breezy cool day, I was taking a left turn rounding the northeast corner of Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue. When, on this otherwise empty street and coming in the opposite direction around the same corner, I was confronted by a cheerful, smiling gentleman who dressed in a great bundle of tweed, uttering loud and clear these words, as if they were a cry of victory,

“Ah, magnifique barbu.”

To hear the words “bearded man” sung out with such joy by this obviously Gallic gentleman, and as if his soul had been saved, lifted my spirits no end. We both waved back at each other full of smiles. Brief as it was, it was a relief from having to employ an implacably fearless look backed by a pair of ready fists wherever I might go. Alas this was the only single time in my entire stay of twelve months in the United States when I was met with any sign of unrestrained heartfelt enthusiasm. But considerable exception to this air of hostility occurred in that aforementioned strange outpost, the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, a venue tucked away in a southwest corner of that twenty-story version of an Italian Renaissance palace overlooking Central Park. Founded over a hundred years ago and dedicated by its originators to the pursuit of manly sports, the club was a princely redoubt for those seeking comfortable escape from the spiritually corrosive shoving and pushing of America’s largest city and the hustle and bustle of its swarming masses seeking fortune, as I was, in this municipal bourse. Along with its country clubhouse, this urban, gray stone edifice housed all manner of equipment and chambers to accommodate not only an endless number of athletic activities from rowing, shooting and yachting, to squash, handball and fencing but also numerous means of restorative cures for body and mind. Based on the theory to treat the body well and the mind will take care of itself.

In the city clubhouse, one thing all sports and their venues had in common was that, except to be invited to matches or to the special cocktail lounge to drink or to the dining room to dine, women were banned. And the sweaty, noisy irreverent confines of the boxing room was the most banned place of all. Several sports were small clubs within themselves, and the boxing room was certainly one of the clubbiest, attracting as it did the more extreme of the dissident eccentric who comfortably circulated around New York on their private incomes. Among these were another assorted folk, maritime and naval types who commanded vessels at sea and who were the stalwart everyday regulars. But also could be found one or two like oneself, still looking for a private income. However, all had in common a readiness to pop a punch on anybody’s nose who gave them any unwanted lip of which there could be found plenty around every streetcorner in New York. And especially encountered by these eccentric, who by their nonconformist appearance, behavior and opinions and blatantly possessed of the self-esteem of the warrior, provoked it. Of course all this sportsmanly behavior in the use of fisticuffs was before drugs, handguns, and knives, when bullets and stab wounds came into vogue.

It was my fellow classmate Thomas M. Gill at Fordham Preparatory School who had first invited me to the New York Athletic Club because he said I seemed to manage well in the prep’s boxing ring and gave the impression of fearing no one. I certainly had my fears, but there was no doubt that along with a willingness to fight anyone, I also must have demonstrated rebel and dissident signs at the prep because I was finally expelled. In any event, Gill at least thought I would be an interesting specimen to see flailing about with other eccentrics in the athletic club’s boxing ring. In the school’s intramural contests, I had a first-round knockout or two and was now being pressed above my lightweight division by the coach to take on even bigger and better opponents. Gill, himself a light heavyweight, was no slouch in the ring, and of those he hadn’t pounded to the canvas in short order, he sent flying through the ropes. And it wasn’t long before the two of us were putting on boxing exhibitions of murderous intent, which had folk at the athletic club gathered to witness flying bicuspids as the blood and gore spattered the ring.

Gill and I, as well as slamming resounding punches into each other’s faces and ribs, also had our intellectual contests. These especially provoked by Gill’s blunt, matter-of-fact way of putting things, which were opposed to my usually erroneous romantic exaggerations, and some of our discussions were just as brutal as our battles conducted within the crimson ropes. But there were moderating arbiters in the persons of two gentlemen, both former boxing champions and highly respected referees, who, overseeing the boxing room, saw to fair play. Both were also advisers and scholars in the world of boxing. One Frank Fulham and the other Arthur Donovan, the latter being at the time world-famed as the doyen of referees and referee of the Joe Louis fights. And especially a most-famed fight of all, when Louis, previously knocked out by Schmeling, knocked out Schmeling in their return match. With the room’s two boxing rings, collection of punching bags, skipping ropes and weight-lifting apparatus and the mementoes of fighters and even framed letters from a president or two, there was no question that the boxing room was a revered sanctum dedicated to the manly art of self-defense, where those of gentler dispositions feared to tread. And where Arthur Donovan and Frank Fulham always attempted to keep the maim and gore to a minimum.

Ah, but there were exceptions to the gentlemanly peacekeeping, and no hindrance was put in the way of formulating any well-deserved war between members who detested the thought of each other. And such battles were viewed silently out of the corner of each eye. But mostly the boxing room was a center of information about the boxing world, the source of which was found historically represented around the walls and in the encyclopedic knowledge both Donovan and Fulham had of the fight game. Donovan once telling me about a boxer no one at the time had ever heard of but, according to Donovan and those who’d seen him fight, was one of the most devastating ever seen in the ring. Donovan, whose eyes would light up talking about this mystery pugilist who the public were only beginning to know of, said that because of the destructive force of this fighter’s victories, no manager with any kind of decent boxer with any prospects would give this man a fight because no fighter once battered to the canvas by him was ever the same afterward. And I asked the name of the fighter. Donovan answered with a whisper and chuckled as if I were being let into a well-kept conspiracy.

“His name, Pat, is Sugar Ray Robinson.”

Of course this prizefighter was well heard of years later as a world champion in more than one weight division and is thought of as one of the ring’s greatest ever middleweights. However, lucky for most inmates of the boxing room, the repartee and sardonic burlesque were as blisteringly wielded as were the flying fists, which latter mercifully were encased in sixteen-ounce sparring gloves. But when the likes of Frank Fulham was asked to spar a friendly round or two with a gent called Steve Brody, a socialite sportsman around town and of formidable heavyweight size and an equally brilliant boxer, some of the most devastating fights I’ve ever seen in the ring took place. Thunderous punches landing, with beads of sweat sprinkling the air and mouthpieces flying. Total awed silence would reign in the boxing room as the inmates waited for one or the other of these gentlemen to lay stretched unconscious on the canvas. Frank Fulham always ending up having landed the most lethal punches.

As no money was used in the club and members signed chits, I became somewhat of an imposition on Tom Gill’s generosity and it was decided that for the modest fee it entailed I should become a junior member. And except for an occasional guest that Tom might invite we seemed to be the only two young persons abroad in the vastness of this club amid these older clubmen. After a day’s workout, which now consisted of a round or two in the ring, a game of squash and sometimes even a wrestling match followed by our usual retirement to the palatial tiled baths to bake in the hot room, steam in the steam room, a pummel in the power shower, swim in the pool and an occasional massage, Tom and I would repair to the club’s taproom on the second floor. In this mock English setting of oak floors and beamed ceilings and a fox hunting scene rushing past across the back of the bar, there came at around five o’clock each day two white-coated and -hatted chefs who would assemble themselves at one end of the taproom, sharpening knives behind a long refectory table upon which sat a baron of roast beef and a massive ham. At one’s proffering a dish, great slabs were cut and deposited on the slices of rye, pumpernickel or other breads and then upon one’s desiring it, sauce or gravy would be added. This extravagant repast rendered with the compliments of the club. And often just Tom Gill and myself alone in enjoying it. There were as well selections of cheeses, crackers, butters and other hors d’oeuvres. With our appetites, Tom and I frequently came back for seconds and thirds with which to down beer from a club member’s brewery. This member was also a habitué of the boxing room, who by winter looked like some abominable snowman coming up Central Park South enveloped from ears to ankles in a voluminous raccoon skin coat. He must have known how much of his brewery’s beer we drank. For at the sight of Tom and I, he would stop in the middle of the Fifty-ninth Street pavement, do a little delighted jig and then demonstrate his power handshake, at which Tom and I would dutifully grimace in pain.

Having been expelled from Fordham Prep for being a bad influence upon the student body, myself now in the U.S. Navy, standing sockless in front of a college hall at Manhattan College. The preparatory school just behind to the left where I attended not unhappily for my last year of high school.

But my life was not free of traumas. Although possibly I exhibited other devious traits to the Jesuit tradition, the reason for my expulsion from Fordham Preparatory School was given as being a bad influence on the student body occasioned by my efforts to start my own personal fraternity of which I would be the supreme brother master. I also, of course, may have been absent without leave and sentenced to jug by the prefect of discipline, a Father Shea, a meticulously stern disciplinarian who remains unforgotten by anyone who ever attended this prep school during his reign. His clipped words ordering one to write ten thousand words on why my tie should not be loose at the neck. “Jug” was the word used to designate punishment and consisted of walking in a prescribed circle in the gym or out of doors on clement days until told to stop. But my infractions deserved the most serious punishment of all, expulsion. My father exploding his Irish brogue and angrily pounding the desk of the principal with his massive fist when it was suggested that my innocent younger brother be removed as well. A young Jesuit English instructor, however, for whom I had written a theme or two he had admired, stood up for me and was equally incensed and said to the principal that I would be one of the few pupils whose presence in the school would be of some significance one day. And there was also a Mr. Songster, another young Jesuit, who, from an aristocratic family in Germany, sported a silver-knobbed ebony walking stick, and who, although he did not back or defend me upon my expulsion, said he would very much miss the frequent nuisance I made of myself.

But one other to stick up for me was Tom Gill’s mother, who shoutingly called the principal a bastard over the phone. However, I did have my first European indoctrination at Fordham Prep. The son of the French consul in New York sat in front of me, and when I would incite him to respond to some of my more inflammatory observations concerning his existence on earth, he would turn and resoundingly declare in French that I should lick his ass. This change of usage from the American verb “to kiss” usually associated with this act, made one realize that Europe allowed a more exotic descriptive expression, if not behavior, in dealing with unwanted attention. Alas, my French was not good enough to follow his other lengthier ripostes in that language, but I would let him have blasts back in my most fluently abusive Italian, which seemed to enrage him more than my American English. But this young Frenchman was delighted to hear that I was being kicked out of this school. Nor was it lost upon me that the principal of this educational institution, as he summarily dismissed me, would take the trouble to greet on the front steps the arrival of a pupil, a young star on Broadway, who was chauffeured there in a limousine. But had it occurred to me at the time, which it didn’t, imbued as I must have been with the American ethic of equality, I could have assumed that my parents’ Irish birth and our family’s modest aspirations were such as to make me socially undesirable in the eyes of socially climbing folk. My father still possessed of innocence enough to intercede with an admirer of his, a Madam de Barbac, along with an old-time resident dowager of Woodlawn, to have my sister, a first-generation American, made a member of Daughters of the American Revolution.

This Dear Mr. letter was written as a punishment to a Mr. McKinney, a Jesuit novitiate instructor at Fordham Preparatory School. My tendency was to have a lot to say, if not to inspire rebellion then to incite minor disruptions and especially to protest oppression. Mr. McKinney was tolerant enough not to insist upon worse than the present letter as my chastisement. Indeed he even fought for my not being expelled, pleading to the principal at the time that my presence at the prep might be the only reason the school would ever have to boast of anyone in future years. As indeed one does now boast of Mr. McKinney.

Following my expulsion from Fordham Prep, I entered one’s idea of paradise, a coeducational high school north of New York City in Westchester County called Roosevelt. This modest mock Elizabethan red brick edifice, with its small campus, was then located in open countryside and seemed after an all-boys’ school, almost as if one were entering a true American life of sweaters, sweat socks and saddle shoes. And last but not least now provided a constant association with young ladies instead of the infrequent opportunity occasioned by the chaperoned tea dances at Fordham Prep. And it was here I met my first quasi-serious girlfriend one evening during a train ride south between the affluent communities of Scarsdale and Bronxville. A year older and her father dead and her mother working as a nurse, I encountered a less palmy side of American life, where they lived in a small apartment on the slightly wrong side of the tracks. However, her quiet elegance and considerable beauty and her awareness of how the world worked landed her with invitations from the Ivy League colleges and as far afield as Annapolis. I found myself mildly envying her too because she kept Coca-Cola in her refrigerator, a drink regarded as being without nourishment by my mother. During nights we spent clutched together on a couch in the small sitting room, she would say, “Don’t move, don’t speak,” as her senile grandfather, who had once prosperously built many of the houses in Bronxville, would wander in in his pajamas, and as he loomed over us in the moonlight, he would raise an arm and point a finger and intone, “I’m going right up over there now.”

Her life, once privileged and rich, was now one of parsimony, and I occasionally accompanied her to her babysitting jobs, where she would listen patiently and even appreciatively to my poems. But she once made an embittered outburst at my indifference and unawareness to the sorrow, impoverishment and tragedy of American life. And it was a pity I never realized what a gem this American girl was, who, with her lucid brown eyes, abundance of brown hair, her smooth skin, her soft lips and calm voice, was so far beyond me in sophistication. But my insensibility and ignorance of the grimmer aspects of American life was due to the small-town, pleasant community of Woodlawn, and in some part to the New York Athletic Club, from which I was not expelled, and which remained a part of one’s daily existence. Its great haunted rooms, always sparsely populated, and Tom and I, after trying to beat each other in chess or to a pulp in the ring, would each day following steam baths and ablutions come sit in the taproom overlooking the park and the bustle of theater customers collecting across the street at the Yiddish Arts Theater. Discussing the verities of life, we would watch the traffic lights change from red to green and green to red and people crossing Seventh Avenue as they made their way along Central Park South. Occasionally, a fire apparatus would speed out of Fifty-eighth Street, clanging and hooting around the corner. Women not being allowed in the taproom, upon more gala occasions Tom and I took ladies, one of whom was my Bronxville girlfriend, to the club to dine in what must have been and no doubt still is one of the most beautiful dining rooms with a cityscape view in America. The cheapest thing on the club menu was sautéed potatoes at fifteen cents a portion, often ordered by me in having to be conscious of a big club bill at the end of the month.

But much entertainment came free of charge through Tom Gill’s father, an influential lawyer who would frequently have an invitation or free tickets somewhere for Tom and myself to amuse ourselves. Separated from Tom’s mother, his father seemed to live a bachelor’s life out of a shadowy apartment just behind the club in an ornate building known as Alwyn Court, a city landmark whose facing was covered by an intricate terra-cotta French renaissance stone tapestry, and which was lonely viewed by me many times from the club’s library and boxing room windows. Although I never knew precisely what Tom’s father did, he seemed to manage one or two of New York’s notable nightclubs and ran some of America’s famed bands, which started out their careers from what was known as Glen Island Casino, a nightspot on the Westchester shore of Long Island Sound and just across a stretch of water from the club’s country clubhouse. However, he did every day seem to play cards or at least visit in the massive great darkness of the card room up on the ninth floor, where one imagined that under the inverted bowls of light beamed down on the tables, large sums of money were won and lost. And every once in a while, as the chimes of the grandfather clock sounded, one would see a player get up from his seat and, puffing his cigar, cross the soft deep carpets to the corner of the vast lounge overlooking Central Park, where a ticker tape machine spewed out its long strip of paper quoting the most recent price of stocks and shares on Wall Street. A scene which prompted a remark from Tom Gill one day.

“Pat, for some people it’s all play and no work.”

And my first confrontations with the deeper mysteries of New York came, when Tom’s father, as Tom was unavailable at the club one day, invited me to drive to Glen Island in a bulletproof limousine with a gentleman in a dark suit and a black Stetson hat, who was saluted by traffic policeman as we drove by. When we reached the casino, and as the band there rehearsed, a young lady singer came to sit on this gentleman’s knee, and he put a large sparkling diamond ring on her finger. Somehow, this simple act, although alien to me, seemed to demonstrate the power of power in America. And I was learning of the artless workings of money in this great unpredictable bourse of New York, as later that day we drove down to the Lower East Side of the city, where Tom’s father went on behalf of an elderly widowed client to collect rents in some tenement buildings for which he emerged with great stacks of bank notes. He once spoke of a man to whom he’d given valuable tax advice, which consisted merely of a change of accounting dates but which saved the man many hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, the man resented paying a considerably large fee of tens of thousands of dollars for such simple but valuable counsel. And one last impressionable ethic Tom’s father left upon me was he refused to do business with anyone drinking or who had been drinking.

But throughout my goings and comings downtown at the New York Athletic Club, there was another most unforgettable character who was the reason why so many frequented this curious precinct known as the boxing room. Sometime past three o’clock, the door was propped open each day, which allowed the faint smell of steam and newly pressed clothes to permeate, as the boxing room door was across the corridor from the club’s tailor and dry cleaning service. And pulling the door further open, one would see inside Frank Fulham, his feet in boxing shoes propped up on a desk, and wearing an old tattered robe. And it was Fulham these five years later following my departure to attend university in Europe who sat there just as I’d left him and who was now one of the few who instantly said friendly words to me in these United States.

“Jesus, if it ain’t Pat Donleavy. It is, isn’t it.”

“It is.”

“Where have you been all these recent years out of our lives. You know every once in a while people would come in here asking for you. Where’s that guy gone with the fastest fists in the business. All the admirals, captains and commodores, the undertakers, the judges, the politicians and congressmen. You and Tom Gill used to put on some of the toughest fights around here.”

Nothing perhaps in my stay now in America gave me greater encouragement than the cheerful welcome I received that day from Frank Fulham. Who when away from his duties as boxing instructor operated a “we knock ’em dead” exterminating service, which he was always quick to let us know dealt with bedbugs, rats and that indomitable ancient beast, the cockroach, and was not of the human kind. But such were the myriad connections effected through the boxing room that one was sure that somehow through its network that even the agency to get someone rubbed out could be found. For which, let me tell you, there was no shortage of suitable candidates.

Upon this exuberant day of seeing Frank Fulham, I went through my first workout since my years in Dublin, where all my punches thrown were in pubs and on the street. And here in the good old boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, such blows and swings were now exercised under the guise of the gentlemanly art of self-defense. But even so, within a few minutes, some collegiate boxing champ invited me into the ring for what was purported to be a friendly sparring match but was to clearly beat the absolute bloody bejesus out of me. And suddenly one felt highly inconsiderate blows raining upon one from all sides. Until I let loose a right under the man’s heart which landed like a ton of cement and quickly corrected his sporting manners. And bent double, the collegiate champ gasped, “Nice shot.”

Fulham enjoying the event, and it was obvious that habitués of this room still did not hesitate to knock the hell out of each other when they got into the ring. And I was now fully reminded that when any member casually invited one to spar a round or two, he was, you could be sure, planning to murder you. Meanwhile, Fulham was anxious to know what I was up to, having returned from Europe.

“Hey, Pat, tell me what are you doing.”

“I’ve been painting pictures.”

“You mean art. Like Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Yes.”

“Hey, that’s good. You try to sell them.”

“Yes.”

“Hey, that’s even better.”

A few days later, in returning to the boxing room, and as I would, visiting it early in the afternoon before the hard-hitting habitués arrived, Frank Fulham, as usual in his old boxing gear and with his feet propped up on his desk and in his old ragged dressing gown, called me over to where he always sat by the telephone. He took up three cards and handed them to me, each with a note written on the back.

“Here you are, Pat, these are three introductions. I’ve talked to each of these guys, and they’d like to meet you. I said Picasso and Matisse better watch out. You just go around the corner there to Fifty-seventh Street and introduce yourself.”

The three cards were to the three of the most prestigious modern art galleries on this famed boulevard. I was quite pleasantly astonished at Fulham’s unhesitating help he offered and at the same time wondered how I was to break the different news that I was now writing a novel and had to find a publisher. It became apparent in the goings and comings of the boxing room that Fulham, although always ready to be amused, was also a very practical gentleman, and in addition to his exterminating service he seemed to have access to many influential pies. But knocking insectile vermin dead was his first love, and business was brisk.

“Pat, I ain’t a professor of bugology for nothing. We got over fifty species of these cockroaches that will eat anything and survive our ruthless methods. The building owners, with a building so infested that nobody can live in it anymore, think they can get rid of them when they knock the place down and build a new building. But the cockroaches don’t die, they just go swarming into the next building or go across the street at night and wait. Then when the new building’s built and ready for occupation, and when everyone’s asleep, the king of cockroaches says let’s go, and they next morning are all there back again. The whole city is nothing but a breeding ground for the biggest, best-fed healthiest rats, termites, fleas, bedbugs and cockroaches in the world, plus other pests down the sewers they haven’t got names for yet. That’s why we got our new motto, ‘We knock ’em dead for longer than just a while.’”

Out of the increasing bleakness of my return to America, and as spring approached and the pavements of New York promised to soon fry eggs, I was finding my funds inexorably dwindling despite my family’s free accommodation, so I could not have been more delighted with Frank Fulham’s helpful gesture. And finally when I worked up the nerve to tell him that I was presently engaged in writing a novel instead of trying to paint and sell pictures, I also avowed that I would still most certainly go and make use of his calling cards.

“Is that right, a novel, Pat. Like a book that keeps you turning over the pages in deep suspense.”

“Yes, I hope so.”

Hardly more was said. But toward the end of the same week, I found myself confronted by a gentleman who’d been led down from the fencing room to the other end of the fourth-floor corridor, and who in his athletic gear was shown into the boxing room to meet me. His name was Charles Rolo, who was on the board as a judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the well-known bonanza for authors and publishers. One most politely bowed and shook hands with Mr. Rolo, who in turn let me know that he’d heard from Frank Fulham of the brilliant novel I’d written which Frank informed him would have people standing on their chairs cheering and be a certain bestseller, Frank Fulham of course not having read a single word of the book. However, the friendly Mr. Rolo did caution that it was a long way up to this position but he’d be more than glad on Frank’s recommendation to see the work and if promising recommend it to a publisher. It was such gesture as that made by Frank Fulham that gave me glimmers of hope against all the odds that I instinctively felt were accumulating and against which my own confidence was more and more desperately exerting itself. And I was even vaguely toying with taking up professional prizefighting, with Fulham as usual providing his ready course of action.

“No problem, Pat. Take your weight down to middleweight, that means no butter and no sugar. And we’ll get you just the right kind of warm-up fights to take you right up to the championship.”

There were others who took their steps to glory from the help that seemed available through the good offices of Frank Fulham and percolated through from many sources in the boxing room. Favors and influence could be traded amid the brewers of beer, makers of whiskey, owners of cotton and silk mills, male heads of modeling agencies and the odd tabloid newspaper publishers. There were also champions from nearly every sport, who also liked to be able to use their fists when necessary. One, such as Lawrence Tierney, a champion runner with an unpredictably serious temper which he indulged in the boxing ring and later in Hollywood when he authentically played the role on screen of the famed gangster John Dillinger. There was such as my own namesake, Brian Donlevy, the actor who portrayed many a tough-guy role in Hollywood. But if you weren’t planning to set out to the West Coast for movie fame and fortune, there was Commodore Bayliss, always available, who headed the coast guard and could cruise you around New York Harbor, and even a prominent undertaker or two if you needed such service. I even felt that had I mentioned to Frank Fulham that I was intending to qualify as a mortician that he would have had in short order an arrangement ready for me to apprentice at an embalming table in one of your better New York funeral parlors, one or two of the proprietors of which, under Fulham’s tutelage, liked to be handy with their fists. It not being totally unknown, according to one undertaker, for a corpse with rigor mortis settling in, to stiff-arm the embalmer one in the eye.

Although a club employee, Fulham, with his charm and influence, was more like this vast club’s honorary deputy president, and he could sometimes be found in the lobby making introductions. But of the many good fights that could be witnessed in the boxing room, nearly all the best involved Fulham. And were generally fought with those few he was not exactly enamored of and who in turn did not disguise the fact that they would dearly love to knock Fulham out if not exactly kill him. However, such folk ended up coming out between the ropes from their encounter, faces and ears well reddened. But not all such protagonists were Adonis-like ex-football stars and all-around skilled athletes and famed for swan-diving at least once a year from the highest point on the Brooklyn Bridge. There was another with whom Fulham engaged in loathing contention, but this was limited to nonviolent exchanges of sarcastic words. The battle would commence whenever the bow-tied Ivy Leaguer Horace Bigelow would appear at the boxing room door. Bigelow, club librarian and the official chess instructor, ran the chess room on the ninth floor and would, as a brilliant player, have simultaneous games with seven or eight club members and beat most in less than a dozen moves. But in exchanging unparliamentary language with Fulham, Bigelow, with all his erudition, was no match. One would listen avidly to the parry and thrust of the cant and argot, not to mention an occasional Fulham obscenity.

And there was

Never any question

That this was

An athletic club

Which included words

As well as muscles

For exercise