Light of the Diddicoy (17 page)

L
ATER, AS
P
ADDY
K
EENAN SATIATED THE
thirst of the longshoremen at the Dock Loaders' Club, I sat at the bar thinking. After Dinny paid out the dock bosses and walked downstairs, he tells Vincent Maher and The Swede to hold down the fort.

“Where ya goin'?” The Swede asks Dinny.

“Cohnheim's,” I say under my breath, wishing myself back with Sadie Meehan and her soups.

“Manhatt'n,” Dinny says. “Let's go kid. We gotta go talk to a guy on ol' Hudson Street.”

At the bottom of the stairwell Tommy Tuohey shakes Dinny's hand and offers me a “Good luck on ye, slacaire. Ye're a good lad.”

After that, the entire bar stands up and turns round, paying respects to the boss of the dockbosses, their king. The leader of the Whitehanders. They all wish me luck too. Even Paddy Keenan raises a glass to us as we walk by. The Swede walks ahead of us just to make sure no immigrant gets jumpy. The Lark and Big Dick tip their beat up wool caps from the mahogany trough. I even saw Richie Lonergan and a couple other punks sitting around a table with full drinks in front of them. Little Petey Behan sat across them, but doesn't pay me any attention. It is the first time I see him at the Dock Loaders' Club and I feel angered, maybe jealous about it and touch my new knife as I walk by him.

Cinders Connolly smiles and reaches with his lengthy arms all the way across a few men to shake with Dinny, while Philip Large just stares into the floor. Dance Gillen, Dago Tom, Chisel MaGuire, and many others stand behind the dockbosses and their right handers. Bill Lovett sits elbows-up at the crook of the bar with Mick Gilligan whispering into his ear, Non Connors and Frankie Byrne pulling from shot glasses on Lovett's right-hand side. Red Donnelly has a dirty bandage around his head and still looks a little disheveled after his ripe beating. Ragtime Howard looks into his drink quietly as we pass, and of course, Harry Reynolds had left as soon as he gathered his envelopes.

Vincent Maher walked with us in the spring air for a few blocks but eventually smiled and backed into the city dusk where he had his most fun, out with the young lasses of Vinegar Hill who think him a big catch. It was a Tuesday, and Dinny and I decide to take the jaunt over the Brooklyn Bridge by foot. As we start up the incline just over the abutment and toward the first tower, Dinny tells me about a time before the bridges were built when everyone had to take a ferry to Manhattan. He points down over the side of the bridge to a strange-looking gingerbread building that faces the water called the Fulton Ferry Terminal where the Fulton Avenue Elevated tracks end so people could take the ferry to Manhattan.

We couldn't quite see all of Manhattan just yet as the curvature of the bridge doesn't allow it, but the sky and the river separating the two boroughs from up high is a sight for certain.

Looking back at the sea of rooftops across old Brooklyn, I feel it more as an Irish city than any other. If Brooklyn were an ocean, it would be colored black and gray and faded brown as it appears below me now in my imagination. It is choppy, smoke slowly rises from random wounds in the cement sea as if the billows have a permanence to them. Unpainted, sooted wood-framed tenements creak in the breeze like an old coffin ship carrying dead famine families in its hulls. Sunken in time along with so many of their untold stories. Memories forgotten, remembered only in the blood like a feeling is remembered, but not articulated; memories known in the blood-feeling of so many Americans in the coming generations. Whisperings of great struggles, terrible sacrifices pitting family versus survival. Struggles and sacrifices that make life worth living for the happier children of much later days. Of all those Americans what proudly claim Irish blood.

I look down at one roof after another, then more and more until I can't distinguish where one roof ends and another starts. Layers of roofs mashed together three stories high, four stories high, five and six. Brick buildings butted against brick buildings with adjoining roofs, water towers and vents for miles and miles in every direction. Pier house roofs that line the waterfront, warehouse roofs just inland from pier houses, wooden tenement roofs just inland from the warehouses, stable house roofs in the alleys. And windows. Millions of windows. Large shuttered warehouse windows. Paint factory windows. Brownstone windows. Tobacco factory windows. Gothic windows. Arched windows. Boarded-up windows. Curtained windows. So many windows to peer into that it's a peeper's dream.

Some roofs have attics on one side of the roof with windows on them. Other roofs have laundry lines strung across them. Every here and there is a tall building such as a sooted white Robert Gair Company Paper Goods building where they make boxes to package everything made in the neighborhood to send from here to India or the war front in Europe. The same goes for the American Can Company building just down the block in the distance. At the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, I even see the roof of the stout Sands Street train station with multiple levels of elevated tracks that loop out over Fulton Street and disappear between buildings and into the neighborhood, snaking over the streets.

Smoke stacks. Flag poles. Cornices. Quoins. Fire escapes and the abutment of the Manhattan Bridge reaching into the neighborhood. The Williamsburg Bridge beyond. Flat roofs. Curved roofs. Slanted roofs with chimney pots sticking out from them. Thousands and thousands of brick chimneys and chimney pipes with smoke bubbling out from their openings. It makes me wonder why so many people would want to live this way? How is it that so many people could choose to live among so many others? Millions and millions of peoples stacked together, hemmed in by huge concrete sidewalks, muddied cobblestones, brick facings, dilapidated fencing?

I looked at Dinny with Brooklyn in the background and his eyes strong in their green stare, mouth grinning and gritting in the same motion. “A lot o' the people who live in Brooklyn grew up on farms just like you. Right outta the Middle Ages in places that haven't changed for centuries. My grandparents were tenant farmers, I heard. On both sides o' my family, but they said it was a sad place. Sad place is all. No end to the sadness, so they brought my father to the West Side o' Manhatt'n.”

“That's where you were born?”

He nodded, “Hudson Street, my father's brother ran a gang back then. He raised me mostly. Streetfighters over by the soap factory. His name was Red Shay and lemme tell ya, he didn't take skin from nobody. He was the law in that area. Cops didn' do nothin' back then. It was the local gang ya went to if ya needed anythin'. Someone died, ya went to a neighborhood guy. And if he was good, he'd make a respectable grave for 'em. No pauper's graves for Red Shay's neighborhood. It was big deal back then, getting' a respectable grave 'cause where they came from so many in their family were left in shallow pits an' ditches or were thrown into the Atlantic on the way here like they didn' mean nothin', ya know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“But as long as Red Shay was in charge, he paid for all expenses. It was all taken care of in the background. Kept it humble, ya know? Better to have a widow tell everyone ya paid for her husband's proper burial than to take credit for it yourself, ya know? In the background.” He looked at me. “Real humble. Need a job? Ya went to him. Dudes ran the streets. Not tunics with their copper badges. If someone wrong'd 'em? No one went to jail. They took care of 'em real swift like. Left 'em hangin' by a light post. They had to stick together to survive. Just like we do now. No one else did nothin' for the people in the neighborhood. They had to stick together. No government did nothin', no companies did nothin'. . . . Nobody cared about 'em. It was a matter o' survival, gangs were. Loyalty? They didn't create gangs 'cause they wanted to. They made their gangs 'cause they needed to. The conditions called for gangs. Need. Not want. Need. The Tammany? It helped us. Nowadays everyone hates Tammany. Says it's corrupt. That may be so. But so what? Who else was gonna get us in the lawmakin' gimmick? Who? If they don' offer it to ya, ya take it. That's what ya do. Someone had to take care o' the neighborhoods. They cared. People like Red Shay cared for people, brought people together. Sent a message, ya know. Those were the good ol' days. These can be too, ya know? Good days? They can be. We just gotta stick together.” Dinny stopped for a second, looked me in the face. “Like a fam'ly, a real fam'ly. And those who ain' gotta fam'ly? They got us.”

I looked to the ground. A trolley passed behind us and Dinny pushed himself away from the railing, then combed his hair away from his ear with his large hand. “Let's go kid, it's gettin' dark,” he turned around, I followed into the middle lane of traffic where walkers made their way over the bridge. Around us were trains and trolleys on outer tracks rushing by us while horse-pulled buggies and dray carts crept around the trolleys at the edge.

“You see that big buildin' standin' above all the rest?” Dinny said, pointing ahead. “That's the Woolworth Buildin', tallest buildin' in the world.”

I looked at him.

“We'll go right by it,” he says.

“In the world?”

He looked at me with a smile.

As the sun was going down and the wind got a little cooler off the water, you could see that the big city ahead was going to light the spring night. Street lights, office buildings, advertisements, and even the moving lights of automobiles illumined the darkness. A kid from the country walking over a great waterway on a mammoth bridge. Into the lighted future. That was me. My dirty, hand-me-down boots, torn-seamed jacket, my callused palms, scruffy hair . . . I was sure that I'd appear like a child from the feudal past to these educated city-goers. Grown out of the earth and working the soil like, then somehow transported into the most modernized place in the world where expensive cars pull up in front of high class restaurants and theaters or whatnot. I couldn't know what they did or how they made their riches.

As we come down the bridge and enter the Financial District, the excitement begins to show on me. There is urgency everywhere. The people walk with an importance and avoid eye contact at all costs. Choosing instead to stare in front of them only to look away at their watches or avoid a speeding automobile that overtakes a slower one. Ladies carry colorful scarves and wear narrow skirts that show their ankles and reveal the long heels on their shoes. They all seem to wear feathered hats or muffs even, but what strikes me most is some wear large, very low belts at their hips, which sway with their short strides and reveal the feminine in their very strong, forward stare. Tailored haircuts with spun curls and makeup that give their faces to look even more majestic and picturesque than they naturally are. The men have their two-piece suits so that their long jackets fit them in such a way as to accentuate their sleekness while their slacks are pleated and cuffed at the end. Older men wear single-breasted vests with a looping watch and a bow tie with an ornamental walking cane. The younger men wear striped neckties with a large collar.

I am relieved to find that no one notices me in my rags as they are all too concerned about their own destinations. The buildings are very well kept also and none of them are made of wood, only cement or brick and most with steel infrastructures. I want to sit on a bench and just watch the spectacle move around me for a while, just watch all the newness, but Dinny has other plans.

“Liam!” he yells while opening a car door. “Get in here.”

Trying not to show my surprise I lower my head and jog over to him. I feel so clumsy trying to move at the pace of the environment and almost trip getting into the car. I'll never forget it, a 1909 open-air Chalmers 40. That was the first car I ever rode in and the only reason I remember the name of the car was because the driver starts gabbing us as soon as we get in. First talking on the price of the ride, then going on how this is the same luxury car that is awarded to batting champions of professional baseballers and how lucky are we to be passengers in such a fine limousine and such, and so on. Dinny listens to him doubtfully, then directs him to drive by the Woolworth Building, then go up Lafayette and left on Broome.

“Yeah?” the driver asks. “Why? Well dat's gonna change ya fare fella, you know dis?”

Building after building up high above us and in front and behind us. They pass by us like a herd of giants. I can't imagine the sort of population those buildings can support. Then finally we come upon the Woolworth Building. The grandest thing I've yet seen in my fifteen years.

“Dat's the tallest buildin' in the woild, kid,” the driver yells out while pointing straight up in the air.

“I know,” I say defensively.

I lean my head back and watch it wave through the air as we pass. The very top of it looks like a church. After a few minutes, the big buildings start to disappear and some familiar tenements come in to view. Italians lounge in chairs along the sidewalks and gather on the stoops to enjoy the early evening breeze. The shorter buildings are stacked next to each other for blocks and blocks. Businesses are run out of apartments with signs on balconies advertising their wares. Laundry lines cross the street from window to window and the fruit and vegetable stands pulled by bored-looking, skinny horses are heading home for the day.

“Kid,” Dinny says, leaning closer to me so the driver can't hear him, then rubs his thumb across his nose. “Listen . . . there's good neighborhoods in Brooklyn that aren't close to the docks. Ya probably don't know much about 'em, but it's true. Good working-class neighborhoods where there's no gangs or nothing like that. Not bad gangs at least, just kids. Off the waterfront, ya know? They could live there. Ya mother. Ya sisters can go to school an' whatnot.”

“Church?”