“You look after yourself.”
Dunellen turned his chair away. In his cockeyed state, Eddie failed at first to perceive that he was being dismissed without the promised pay—punished for Dunellen’s show of weakness. On the beach, it had been the same: Eddie yanked Dunellen by the hair onto the sand, where he lay keening and puking seawater for quite a while before he dried his tears and sauntered away. It was the other boy, Bart Sheehan, who had lifted Eddie into the air and kissed both his cheeks. But Eddie wasn’t fooled by Dunellen then or now; he knew the bully would protect him after that. And so it had been: the stronger the bond, the more flagrant Dunellen’s disregard. He loved Eddie deeply.
Dunellen pointedly turned his attention to several bookmakers who’d come to kiss his ring, now and then peeling bills from a roll and pushing them, with practiced intimacy, into fists, waving away murmured thanks. Eddie remained stubbornly seated. He waited even knowing he would go home empty-handed. In the byzantine calculus of their relations, waiting longer and receiving nothing would likely mean something extra from Dunellen down the line.
When he noticed Eddie still there, Dunellen scowled. Then his displeasure relented, and he asked softly during a lull, “How is the little one?”
“The same. As she always will be.”
“I pray for her every day.”
Eddie knew that he did. Dunellen was deeply devout, attending six-thirty morning Mass at Guardian Angel Church, sometimes without having slept, and returning for a second Mass at five. He carried a rosary in each pocket.
“I should pray for her more myself,” Eddie said.
“Sometimes it’s harder to ask God for your own.”
Eddie was touched by this truth. He felt his intimacy with Dunellen, deep and primitive, as if their blood ran through each other’s veins. “There’s a chair I need to buy for her,” he said. “It costs three hundred eighty dollars.”
Dunellen looked flabbergasted. “Are they loony?”
“They have the chair,” Eddie said, “and she needs it.”
He hadn’t intended to ask his friend for the money, but now he felt a sudden rise of hope that Dunellen might offer it. He had it, God knew. Might easily have the sum on him now, in his mammoth roll—warmed, like the rosaries, by his fierce body heat.
“Nat could help you with that,” Dunellen said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I’d have a word, buy you as much time as you need. Take it right off your pay if that would help any.”
It took Eddie a moment, in his half-stupor, to absorb Dunellen’s meaning. He was sending Eddie to the loan shark. And judging by the soft look in his eyes, Dunellen regarded the steer as an act of charity.
Eddie took great care not to react. “I’ll think about it,” he said mildly. If he remained at Sonny’s another minute, Dunellen would read his displeasure and punish him for it. “?’Night, Dunny,” he said, sliding the Duesenberg’s key across the table. “Thanks.”
They shook, and Eddie left the bar and stood outside for several minutes, waiting for the icy wind off the Hudson River to slap him sober. But he found himself staggering toward the IRT, drunker than he’d realized, and had to lean against Sonny’s cold brick exterior. The groan and creak of ropes from the docks reached him like a grinding of teeth. He smelled rusty chains, planks sodden with fish oil: the very stench of corruption, it seemed to him now. Dunellen was beloved among the rank and file for handing bills around, but Eddie knew he controlled the shylocks, Nat included, taking his cut from the interest they collected, setting his loogans on debtors who failed to pay. A word from Dunellen and the hiring boss would choose a debtor for a day’s work, so payments to the shylock could be deducted from his wages. The deeper you sank, the more fully theirs you became, the harder they worked to preserve you.
Ours, Dunellen had said. Our piers.
Eddie lurched to the curb and retched copiously onto the street. Then he wiped his mouth and looked around, relieved to find the block empty.
He was aware of having reached an end. He shut his eyes and remembered today: the beach, the cold, the excellent lunch. A white tablecloth. Brandy. He thought of the chair. But it wasn’t just the chair that had driven him to Dexter Styles: it was a restless, desperate wish for something to change. Anything. Even if the change brought a certain danger. He’d take danger over sorrow every time.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
Two evenings each week, a charitable lady came to the New York Catholic Protectory and read aloud after supper from Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and other tales of exotic adventure. As she looked out from the lectern at the swath of boys, Eddie tried to picture what she saw: row upon row of folded hands (as required when they’d finished eating), scores of faces interchangeable as pennies. The biggest, the ugliest, the sweetest might stand out (DeSoto; O’Brien; Macklemore, with his tiny angel’s face), but not Eddie Kerrigan. His only noteworthy traits were an ability to slip through doors locked only with a chain and shimmy up streetlamp poles like a monkey. He could do accents but was too shy to show them off. He’d once stayed underwater longer than two minutes in Eastchester Bay.
His father had brought him here at age four, after his mother died of typhus. At that time, the protectory was still in the town of Van Nest, Westchester, but by the time Eddie was old enough to care, Van Nest had been absorbed by the East Bronx. A separate set of girls’ buildings lay across Unionport Road, complete with an identical pond—but whether the girls were as adept at scooping wary, sulking carp into their hands, Eddie never knew. Brianne had gone to her mother’s people in New Jersey, her own mother having died back in Ireland. His father would visit early on, bringing Eddie with him to the races, then a saloon. Eddie remembered little of these outings beyond clinging to his father’s hand and trying, in short pants, to match his furious pace as he wove among horse carts and trolleys.