Dwyer did his level best to make them look respectable. He even offered that filthy mick—his son-in-law, if you could believe it—a job in the Department of Public Works. And the little nobody turned him down cold. The runt said Thanks but no thanks on the job, as if it were beneath him. Men, real American men who were twice as good as him, were standing in the street begging for work, and little Martin Dempsey tells Dennis goddamn Dwyer that he’s going to keep blowing his horn till all hours with a bandstand full of Negroes beating out jungle music. That’s going to put food on his daughter’s table? And that’s going to raise his grandchildren?
More than once he had thought about closing his doors to them—closing his wallet, too—and telling Rosemary that she had brought enough shame on the family to last a lifetime. But blood ran thick. Blood bound you together with all of those who shared your name and it made the things you felt—love and anger and disappointment, mostly—stick to you like glue. There were claims of blood that even he was powerless to dissolve, but he knew that there was more to it. He knew that if he cut off Rosemary and her ill-conceived family, they were sure to fall, and fall far. And he knew what it would do to him to hear stories circulating about his daughter living in some cold-water tenement in Harlem, dumped by her deadbeat husband and shacked up with some other musician—only this time, a colored one. That was sure to put him in his grave. At the very least, it could cost him an election. He deserved better than that.
Peggy’s wedding was supposed to be different, a rare chance at a do-over that would erase, or at least outshine, the first Dwyer family wedding. The church and the banquet hall would be a one-two punch of flowers and ribbons, champagne and chandeliers, silk and chiffon, and a cake that was bigger than the tenement where Dennis Dwyer’s parents had raised their eight children. But more than all of that, there would be a guest list that would testify to the place of the Dwyers in the hierarchy of the unruly kingdom of the Bronx. He wanted La Guardia there, sure, but more than that he wanted Edward Flynn, who had been for twenty-five years the king of the Bronx power brokers. Flynn wasn’t even fifty yet, and already he had been the chairman of the county Democratic Party, the secretary of state for all of New York, a member of the Democratic National Committee, and a boon companion of FDR himself.
But they had all screwed Dwyer, and none worse than La Guardia—the same “Little Flower” who had practically begged Dennis Dwyer to throw his weight behind him in his first bid for mayor. Dwyer had taken a big risk: La Guardia was a Republican, for Christ’s sake, and the mayor knew he owed Dwyer, and a dance with the bride was one way he was supposed to make good on that debt. Not because Dwyer had any interest in seeing his little Irish rose in a clinch with that runty Italian, but because having the mayor make time for the wedding would show a banquet hall full of voters, officeholders, and party operatives—not to mention everyone who saw the photo that was sure to run in the society pages of the Bronx Home News—that Dwyer was a man with influence. A man who could not be ignored. But La Guardia backed out, and then to rub salt in Dwyer’s wounds he appointed Flynn the city’s ambassador to the World’s Fair, which would require Flynn to squire the royals around when he should be toasting Peggy’s future.
Dwyer briefly considered changing the date of the wedding—“Damn that La Guardia,” he had said. “Doesn’t he know the king and queen don’t vote!”—but he ran up against the limits of his own power: the church was triple-booked on every other Saturday in June, and the club didn’t have an opening until the end of September. Even Dennis Dwyer couldn’t push another bride and her family of registered voters out of their reserved and deposit-paid spot. Every other option smacked of the kind of pasted-together wedding that they had been forced to organize for Rosemary. No, Peggy’s wedding needed to be set in stone, proof that certain events could be planned, anticipated, and held in abeyance until the appointed hour. In a stab at finding a silver lining, he also convinced himself that there was political hay to be made here: for years to come, Dwyer would tell his constituents the story of how he was invited to meet the king and queen—which indeed he had been—But I said, No, thanks, Your Highnesses, that’s the day my princess is getting married.
Dwyer knew already how things would play out on his princess’s wedding day. Just as he was leading her down the aisle in front of a crowd of nobodies, some Young Turk at the World’s Fair with his eye on leapfrogging Dwyer would be pouring his smooth talk into Flynn’s ear. He’d wonder out loud, Where’s Dwyer? Didn’t he make the cut? And if somebody said it was his daughter’s wedding day—if they remembered that much—that would just start the talk all over again. Wedding, huh? You heard about his older girl, right?
FROM ABOVE, WITH its circles and spokes of names, the dining-room table looked like some kind of delicate machine. Each lacy white cog could be jammed by a stray touch or blown apart by the slightest breeze. Peggy had left for the fair, and her mother was supervising the cleanup of glassy-eyed dolls that Kate had dragged downstairs and scattered across the parlor. With the dining room quiet and his temper cooled, Rosemary’s father fixed his eyes on the jumble of seatless guests and half-filled tables.
“Maybe you had it right all along,” he said. “You saved us this headache, at least.”
Rosemary sighed, closed her eyes for a moment. “I think I’ve got this figured out. I’m going to move the Quinlans to table three. The across-the-street Kellys move to six. And Aunt Bridget moves to four, with the Beauchamps. That just leaves the Boston aunts.”
“The nuns?”
“They aren’t actually nuns.”
“Never been married, always in black—might as well be nuns.”
Rosemary smiled in spite of herself. She wanted her father to know that he had crossed the line, yelling and cursing. She didn’t want Kate to hear that kind of language from her grandfather. A smile was a reward he didn’t deserve.
“Ah, Rosie. This could have been yours.”
Her smile collapsed. “Not now, Dad.”
“I’m not just talking about the fancy wedding. You could take this Halloran kid and turn him into a congressman, maybe even governor.”
“What happened to mayor?”
He winced and stuck out his tongue. “He doesn’t have the balls to be mayor. Even you couldn’t do that for him.”
“I’m sure Peggy will get him where he needs to go.”
“Congressman,” he said. “That’s still on the board. Peggy knows enough to get him there. Still—it should have been you.”
“I don’t want to marry Timmy Halloran. I picked Martin—”
“You didn’t pick—”
“—because I love him. You need to know that. I married Martin because I love him.”
“Rosie, Rosie, Rosie.” His face broke into a toothy, yellowed smirk. “Don’t pull that crap on me. You’re better than that. At least, I thought you were.”