Light of the Diddicoy (12 page)

“What's the Black Hand and what does Frankie Yale have to do with black hands and Il Maschio?” I ask Cinders Connolly, but he won't say.

“What does Il Maschio mean in Italian?” No one's sure, but Dago Tom tells me it means “the mail.”

“Like sending letters, like?” I ask. “The postal service?”

“No, like man. Or boy. Male, ya know?
Male?
”

“Oh, that kind of male.”

Somewhere I learn that Il Maschio is Frankie Yale's wing of Italian thugs, or thug, who work on the docks and believe in something called “the Sicilian code” and that if they can't reach your mother, they'll kidnap your child for ransom. And if you talk to the police or anyone else, the child will end up in a barrel at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal. And I learn too that Il Maschio only appears when the Irish fight amongst themselves, which happens often or when the dockboss is sent to Sing Sing or the workhouse, which also happens often. And since I can't get straight answers about Italians, and I'm filled with strange stories I sense that there is mystery around their ways, even if they are Catholics like us. They are a mysterious people and since they show up only when we are fighting among ourselves, I sense that they must be in cahoots with the pookas from the stories of my childhood. But then, I am starting to get to the age where the validity of the old stories become questionable and that only confuses me more.

I think of my father and his quips, and though he was speaking of the British being preoccupied with the German, he used to say, “With your enemy's turmoil come opportunities,” and so it is in Brooklyn with the Italians. Before being sent up to Sing Sing, McGowen had long been charged with controlling Red Hook for Dinny. But a couple months after McGowen was sent up, Dinny came under great pressure to take the area by force as it had been coming under the influence of Il Maschio in McGowen's absence, since that's when the Whitehanders are most vulnerable.

Wolcott of the Dock Company also was to use the turmoil like a stoic card player and was not so reluctant to refuse Yale's offerings as a way of improving his hand with Dinny and the Irishers. But I don't blink when I hear Wolcott takes advantage of other people's disadvantage because he's a capitalist and that's what that means; to capitalize.

But that's where Bill Lovett comes in. Only twenty-one years of age, the leader of the Jay Street Gang was brought under the umbrella of Dinny's White Hand and immediately sent into the border at the Red Hook. It was a legendary combination because previously the two gangs were enemies. Even though Lovett's young crew was smaller and less experienced, they were seen as the future. But it was a bloodless coup. Dinny was accommodating and courting and respectful, and offered Bill both security and a stable income, not to mention the two fierce gangs wouldn't have to go to war, which Dinny reminded Lovett could only end in the Jay Street Gang's demise since the Whitehanders had so many more men. The other factors in Lovett's gang joining Dinny's were twofold: the notion of honor and Bill's hatred of the Italian.

“Them ginzos,” Dinny said to Bill. “Let'em have the prostitution and gamblin', no honor in that. You know that Bill. You know that like I do. Not in our neighborhoods they don't.”

Bill Lovett was a lot of things, but a pimp and a numbers guy he was not. Dinny was at his best in persuading and as a way of reminding Bill of his honor, he asked this question out from the blue, “Ya parents, ain't they from County Kerry?”

And of course Bill Lovett could never face his mother again, if and when it ever got back to her that he was making money off the beauty and purity and sanctity of a woman's body that was formed from the innocence of Eve and embodied by the Virgin Mary, holy mother of Jesus himself. Since it was his mother that tried to steer the young William Lovett into the lay, until she found out he was more influenced by the Peck's Bad Boys of Catherine Street than by the homilies at Mass.

But in those days, living from the streets was not seen as so terrible a thing since there weren't enough jobs for as many people needed them in New York. If you did get a job, it didn't pay enough. It was in the blood of the Irish American, working on the docks. The famine families that came over and certainly any Irish American back then could see that dock tribute was not as bad as enslaving the female body for sinful pleasure and gain, surely.

So the deal was done then, Dinny Meehan's White Hand enveloped Bill Lovett's Jay Street Gang and everyone in the waterfront neighborhoods sighed a big relief for there would be no war between the gangs that dominated the Bridge District from the two main arteries, Jay and Bridge Streets. Lovett and Non Connors, Darby Leighton and Frankie Byrne's boys were all in now and decided to make a legitimate go of it and work the Irish-Italian border at the Red Hook and as far as Lovett and his men were concerned, if killing Italians came with the job, the job wasn't so bad for them.

Tommy Tuohey told me, over by the stairwell at the Dock Loaders' Club, that although Bill was the smallest in his gang, he was always the leader. When drunk he was as ruthless a murderer as Brooklyn has ever seen, but when sober he had an intelligence about him, and in joining the White Hand, “Well, he-has-his-own-motives-o'-course, giverteek, moraless,” Tommy said.

Anyhow, Lovett and his boys drove out Il Maschio from the Red Hook in a matter of weeks, but it was his force of will and cold ferocity that came back to bite Dinny when McGowen was murdered in his cell up in Sing Sing. “Rumors-a-flyin',” Tommy explained, that when McGowen was to return, Bill and his boys would be “off-the-trolley.” With Pickles Leighton (Darby's brother), already serving a sentence, and with Bill Lovett as the beneficiary, Dinny and the Whitehanders knew from where the order came.

Up in the Navy Yard, Red Donnelly muttered to me under his breath that “Instead o' hitting Lovett back tit-for-tat, Dinny expelled Darby Leighton from the gang altogedder as a way o' showin' his power.” Which the rest of the gang approved of.

“Most at least,” Dance Gillen told me. “The Swede wanted blood and war of course.”

But Dinny was not one to go to war with his own kind. And as far as the Red Hook goes now, it's a war front of a different stripe. The Black Hand is still rising, the International Longshoreman's Union still demands worker rights and Wolcott's duplicity is just as snide as always, but Lovett had done well to clear the way for the old Irish method of running things, gaining complete and despotic control over Red Hook in just weeks.

“Can't argue wit' facts,” Harry Reynolds said. “Lovett's a man and he's to be honored. Killin' Lovett?” Shaking his head. “Can't kill a man wit' honor. Not right.”

So to the Red Hook I was not sent, and for the better.

O
NE EARLY
A
PRIL EVENING AFTER A
day's running, I walk in the door at the Dock Loaders' Club as all the other Brooklyn workingmen do this time of day, and like one of them I feel. So many of the familiar faces are there and look up from the thundering of the giant Manhattan Bridge behind me and above the saloon. It brings me back to the place and to the time. And just thinking of it brings the nostalgia of the good old years as men's personalities were wholly shaped by the circumstance for which they were thrown. They didn't know how much things would change in just twenty, thirty years. They lived in their time. Lived for the moment and to survive in their day.

Along the mahogany stretch are the dockbosses with monikers that either the police give them or they somehow earn: Gibney the Lark, Big Dick Morissey, Cute Charlie Red Donnelly, Harry the Shiv, and Wild Bill Lovett by the crook in the bar with Non Connors and Frankie Byrne behind him and quickly sitting among them is Cinders Connolly, named Cinders because that's what he turns a ship into if a captain refuses White Hand authority. Behind them are the men I get to know so much better during my time. Men who don't lead, or can't. Men who are loyal to the gang for the most part, or at least are strong workers or have specific talents. So many names I scarcely believe I remember them, but they exist. Oh yes, they are the children and grandchildren of our people that survived the Great Hunger and evictions before and after the Land Acts or the general lack of any hope at all in the place where all our hearts still hang, Ireland. Men of America now, like the half-black, half-Irish Dance Gillen, King of the Pan Dance as he is known for stomping another's face with his boots.

There are loads of kings in Kings County, as I've mentioned. Proud ones too like long-nosed Chisel MaGuire, the Craps King of Ballyhoo for his talent of introducing pugilists at prize fights and fanning the odds too. I never knew his first name, but all call him Chisel since he's always at work on some sort of scam or skim or dealing craps or faro, looking for an angle to put the screws on someone, smiling sly when he gets in trouble. But I'm ignorant to usurers and schemers and such. I only see the dated vest and dusty tails on his coat that he wears like royalty as being odd. And the beat top hat too, as if he were some sort of London theater-goer from a hundred years previous, patchy beard and all. He seems to find happiness in his own wit and gives a stately bow when a dockboss loses patience with his badgering them. Everyone knows he longs to be a shylock or a craps dealer or a policy wheeler, but the Whitehanders don't deal in numbers, as mentioned. Though he's not to have much luck talking Dinny into his double-deals, there are no other groups for a chiseler to hang on to as he's a low-goer, even though he acts like he's among the high-regals and the old Dutch aristocrats of the county of Kings.

Some of the men shake my hand out of interest as Dinny's new mascot, while others avoid me coldly like Garry Barry and his crony from the old Red Onion Gang, James Cleary. Others greet me kindly while they stand behind the dockbosses like flat-faced Philip Large and Dago Tom, the half-breed Italian Irish that grew up in the shadows of the Benjamin Moore Paint Factory and the spire of St. Ann's in the Water Street rowhouses of Vinegar Hill. Best friends Eddie and Freddie; Eddie Hughes and Freddie Cuneen are there too. And so too are the Simpson brothers Baron and Whitey, the dust sniffer Needles Ferry, the fair scrapper Mickey Kane, buddies Happy Maloney and Gimpy Kafferty, the old Frankie Byrne Gang members Jidge Seaman and Sean Healy, the desperate Mick Gilligan is there too and Ragtime Howard who sits in front of his enabler Paddy Keenan who keeps everyone at the bar happy, listening to the day's stories and replacing empty glasses with full ones.

Other than the old-timer Beat McGarry, Paddy Keenan, and a few immigrants, there is not a man beyond the age of twenty-six in the entire saloon, though most have many years, experience and have been working or in gangs since the age of ten, even younger. Lacking the self-importance of the better classes, the gangs in Brooklyn are always filled with the young who can't see much farther than the cheapness they hold for life itself, as does a soldier ready to die, and see honor and respectability in it and the songs they sing in the Dock Loaders' Club shows it to be true:

Oh, a soldier he leads a very fine life

And's always a-blessed with a charmin' young wife

Payin' all o' his debts without sorrow or strife

And always lives pleasant and charmin',

Yes a soldier he always is decent and clean

In the finest of clothin' he's constantly seen

While other poor fellers go dirty and mean

And sup on thin gruel in the mornin'. . . .

There are many others too, but not wanting to confuse, we'll leave them out for now. But it is in those names that this story owes much. Old clan names, most of them; evidence of the people driven down so low by the oppression and by the hunger and by the flight. On their leave to America in such a state their parents, maybe grandparents having no money or means to continue their journeys, settle in the neighborhoods that berth them: along the waterfront here in Brooklyn. And these young men in the Dock Loaders' Club are haunted by the reason for their arrivals here in America, though most don't even know they are haunted. But haunted they are. I can see it now all the more clearly, of course, as I have outlived the times. Found it in myself too, I did. Haunted by a great distrust passed down for many generations, these new Americans gave to what come of their lives. Lived in their time and from what they knew only, their wild eyes a window into their persecuted souls, yet hidden in the dress of the modern man in ties and jackets like savages dressed with zoo bars.

Among the crowd, Paddy Keenan reaches across the bar to give me a cherished beer.

“Enjoy, kiddo,” Cinders says as Beat McGarry smiles and pays for it with the click of a coin.

Tommy Tuohey walks over from the stairwell for a shake. “Dere he is, da yoke! Fine broth of a lad, is he. Young slacaire o' County Clare show'n up fer da divvy.”

Other than some candles on the bar, a few lanterns hanging from the ceiling beams and some wooden chairs and small tables, the saloon is not dressed with accessories or decorations of any sort, which I'm certain is the reason the lone framed picture on the wall by the front door grabs my attention. On the top of the frame is dust many ages old and at some point the glass that once covered the portrait had been broken, exposing the man in it who had a proud beard while his mustache was shaven away entirely. Below the man's face was an old yellowed newspaper clipping. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” I read aloud. “What's that mean?”

“Hellifino,” says Tommy.

“It sounds so beautiful,” says I.

“Beautyful, he says,” Cinders laughs. “It's beautyful, Beat.”

“Sure it is,” Beat McGarry smiles.

“I mean the way the words are put together, it's poetic. Isn't that what poetic means?”

“Is it a poet ye wish on bein'? A poet?” Paddy Keenan asks.

“Regula' Eddie Allen Poe,” Ragtime Howard mutters, the only words I ever heard from him.

“I don't know,” I say thinking on it. “Who's the man in the picture above the words?”

“That is Abraham Lincoln,” Beat McGarry claims proudly.

“What'd he do?”

“Freed the slaves.”

“Wow, what a feat. How did he accomplish it?”

“Well, he was president back den.”

“What party line was he?”

“Republican.”

“I want to be a Republican then, freeing slaves is honorable.”

“Jaysus,” says Paddy Keenan.

“
Phphphph
,” Ragtime chuckles under his breath.

“No ya don't,” Cinders interrupts kindly. “You're a Democrat. We all are here.”

“I'm a Republican in Ireland, why can't I be one here too?”

“
Phphphphph.
”

“What's Democrats got over freeing slaves?” I say.

“Well,” thinks Beat McGarry good and hard. “We got Tammany across the bridge, the Madison Club here in Brooklyn.”

“What's that? Tammany?”

“The old wigwam in Manhatt'n.”

“What's a wigwam?”

“Like a Indian hut.”

I look at him, confused.

“Tammany is the Democratic machine, named for the Lenape Indians.”

“Are there really Indians in Manhattan?”

“
Phphphph.
”

“Jaysus,” says Paddy Keenan. “He's got questions.”

“I want to see them, can I see them?”

“No kid, it's where all the New York Democrats call home now,” says Beat.

“Did they free the Indians?” I ask, still confused.

“Jaysus.”

“
Phphphph.
”

“No,” says Beat McGarry. “They represent the workin' man and the unions.”

“Oh, and we hate the unions right?”

“Sure we do.”

“And who do the Communists represent?”

“Unions.”

“They sure are well represented. I think I'd want to start my own independent party if I can't be a Republican and if I were a politician here in America.”

“They already have that party,” says Beat McGarry.

“What party?”

“Independent.”

“Who do they represent then?”

“No one.”

Scratching my head, “Maybe they should represent the Irish, we've got no one to represent us, so say my da.”

“
Phphphphph.
”

“True for you, child,” Paddy Keenan calls out. “Spoken well too.”

“Except for the Irish Parliamentary Party who are nothing but a bunch of jackeens, my da says.”

“He's right too,” Paddy Keenan agrees while Tommy Tuohey rolls his eyes since he couldn't give a care about one government over another.

“Ya're a good kid, Garrity,” Beat McGarry says to me while Paddy Keenan smiles from the other side of the mahogany.

I look back at the picture of the stately man, Lincoln. He's a gentleman, I can see. But my eyes are brought again down to the words that sound so light and airy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” And I care about the way the words sound together. Reminds me of the shanachies that used to wander the country lanes or tell stories by the fire in the inns of Ennis coaxed by the wondering eyes of the children listeners. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” It sounds so nice the way they work together, but since I'm uneducated I don't know what else to call it, but I think its poetry. And I wonder if it's better to be uneducated so that things remain mysterious because it's in mystery that I find beauty and, not to mention, all the men I am beginning to love are all uneducated too, even Sadie is. My da didn't allow his family to go to the schools in Clare that were dominated by the Catholic Church, which was bribed by British parliamentary funds and where each child was made to recite,

I thank the goodness and the grace,

That on my birth have smiled,

And made me in those Christian days,

A happy English child.

But I did go to a hedge school when I was back home and learned arithmetic and reading and writing and about pookas and Cuchulainn and the Irish language too, so maybe I could be as gentlemanly as Mr. Lincoln looking so proud and smart and caring in the picture. But then I look around, and at myself too wearing the floppy boots of a dead man and remember that I won't be much of anything since I'm not only Catholic, but I'm Irish and the son of an IRB man and an immigrant and anyway, maybe I'd just end up like Mr. Wolcott if I did go to get schooling, who I hate more than anyone else. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” but at least I know what sounds beautiful.

“Tommy!” A voice yells from upstairs, so he ambles over to hear. A few seconds later Tommy the tinker waves me over. “Dinny's h'opstairs dere, just knock ona daar two time and weet fer da bellow. Migh' t'ave to weet a minute er two fer an answer, giver teek, mora less,” and it seems the more I hear Tommy in his pavee speed, the better I understand him.

So up the stairs I go, two-by-two and knocking on the door. After a moment I hear a bellow and the door opens just a sliver to reveal the half face of Vincent Maher, who then closes the door to undo the chain, and then opens it wide.

“Kid!” Vincent smiles gallantly while holding a paper cigarette in the doorway like some would point a dart. “Come on in, yeah.”

Along the back wall are rows of dirty, curtainless windows that light the second floor. Eddie Gilchrist sits in a corner below them and is engrossed in his numbers, a squat pencil and a collection of envelopes scattered on his small table. The pencil looks snug in Gilchrist's hand. As snug as some men feel a gun in their grip or the handling of a spade in my father's hard hands under my window back home in Clare, or the bale hook of a longshoreman's grasp even. I want the pencil in Gilchrist's hand for myself. I want it in my own hand and I can feel it there, snug. But somehow I have already gathered that in the gang a pencil and paper is a most dangerous collection of weapons. There is more suspicion surrounding the pencil and the paper in fact, than there is in a gun or a bale hook.

Behind a large makeshift desk that looks as though it was left there some forty years previous, Dinny sits back with one leg crossed over the other while speaking with The Swede, who stands behind him to his right, leaning against the long window sill, arms crossed. Closing the door behind me I hear Vincent lock it and take a seat in a lone chair by the entrance.

Other than the few things that I've mentioned, Dinny's office is surprisingly barren. Emptiness seems to be the point of it. In front of his desk is another chair, which he motions for me to sit in. So I do while continuing to look around.