Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (26 page)

“It’s that, but it’s not that simple. And he’s quite senile but otherwise healthy. It’s my son going off to the priesthood, and it’s a friend just kidnapped
by hoodlums.”

“A kidnapping! How fascinating!”

“Oh, Christ, Melissa.”

“Well, isn’t it fascinating?”

“Everything isn’t fascinating. Some things are serious.”

“Oh, poo.”

“Tell me about you. I suspect you’re well. I read your notices.”

“It is rather a ducky time.”

“You look very fit. For anything.”

“Don’t be forward now, lovey. It’s much too early.”

“I’ve known you, my dear, to throw away the clock.”

“Me? Not me, Martin. You must be remembering one of your casual women.”

“I could’ve sworn it was you. That week the taboos came tumbling down. The Hampton, was it?”

“Don’t be awful now. Don’t. I get shivery about that. Tell me about the play. Did you like it?”

“You were quite splendid. But then you’re always quite splendid. And I did find that wig becoming.”

“Did I look like her to you? I did try.”

“At times. But she was never quite as sensually animated as you played her.”

“She must have had her moments.”

“I think,” said Martin, and he pictured his mother coming down the back stoop naked, walking past the small garbage pail, wearing only her sunbonnet hat and her white shoes and
carrying her calico handbag, “that all she ever had was her repressions.” Walking into the waiting arms of Francis Phelan? Did they ever make love after that intimacy?

“So sad,” said Melissa.

“Very sad. But that’s not one of your problems, I’ve noticed.”

“Avoiding things never made any sense to me, none whatever.”

“You’ve done it all.”

“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, lovey.”

“But it must be difficult to surprise you.” Martin resented her use of “lovey.” It sounded vaguely cockney, and insufficiently intimate for what they’d had
together.

“Surprises are always welcome,” said Melissa, “but they’re only the interest on the principal, and it’s the principal I’m most fond of.”

“I have a bit of a surprise for you,” Martin said.

“How delicious,” said Melissa. “When do I get it?”

“Don’t be forward now.”

When breakfast came she insisted he sit on the sofa as they had at the Hampton, and she dropped pieces of melon into his mouth, a scene, he presumed, she had copied from a Valentino or Gilbert
film. She lifted champagne to his lips, gave him wafer-thin slices of camembert and croissant, and more and more champagne. He thought he had eaten his fill at Keeler’s, but satiation too has
its limitations, and he accepted all that she offered.

He kissed her when both their mouths were full, shared his champagne with her. He kissed her again when their mouths were empty, stroking the breast of her robe lightly. And then he leaned
away.

“What is this gift you have for me?” he said.

“Can’t you guess?”

“I’ve imagined a thing or two.”

“I hope you didn’t see it,” she said, rising from the sofa and crossing the room. She held up the ledger, giving him a full view of the cover with another of his father’s
date markings: February 1908 to April 1909.

“I didn’t mean to leave it here in full view, but you caught me unawares, coming in like that. You didn’t see it before, did you?”

“No, no, I didn’t. You say you’re returning it?”

“It’s yours,” she said, coming toward him with it. “I took all I needed for my memoirs.”

“I thought you wanted it for the film.”

“It’s not necessary now. They have more than enough in the play, if they really want to do it. They don’t deserve any more than that. So it’s yours.”

“Then I must return your money.”

“Of course you must
not. Absolutely
you must not.”

He had charged her eight hundred dollars for the ledger, an arbitrary price from nowhere, for how could he possibly have set a true dollar value on one of his father’s notebooks?
He’d said eight hundred for reasons no more explicable than his dream of rhomboids. An odd figure, she said. Oddness, he told her, is my profession.

They had been talking then on the roof garden of the Hampton, where she had taken a suite while she found a way to take possession of the ledger, whose contents she had, at moments, watched
being written. The Albany sky was the darkest of blues, swept by millions of stars, the moon silvering the river and the rooftops of buildings on the Rensselaer side. From where Martin and Melissa
sat, the Yacht Club, the night boat landing, the Dunn bridge, and much of lower Broadway were blocked from view by a tall, ghostly structure with window openings but no windows, with an unfinished,
jagged, and roofless top. This was the “Spite Building,” built by a bitter cleric who felt the Hampton had wronged him. And when the hotel opened its roof garden to enormous crowds, the
cleric erected this uninhabitable tower of vengeance. It fronted on Beaver Street and nestled back to back with the hotel, and it rose, finally, above the glamorous rooftop cafe, blocking the view
and insulting the lofty crowds with its crude bricks and its grotesque eyeless sockets, where squads of verminous pigeons roosted.

Martin and Melissa dined and danced and drank together, abandoning the Hampton roof eventually for the privacy of Melissa’s suite. And when the morning came, Martin walked the few blocks
to the newspaper, took the ledger from the bottom drawer of his desk, where he’d put it the day before, and brought it back to Melissa. In return he accepted the mysterious eight hundred, and
also accepted two and a half more days of lascivious riches from this calculating, venal, and voluptuous incarnation of his psychic downfall.

Melissa now placed the ledger on his lap and sat beside him. He opened it to a page from 1908 and read the words written in his father’s upright script, which looked like a wheat field on
a windless day.

Martin turned the pages well forward, stopped, smiled, and read out loud: “ ‘Clarissa. Valley of veneration. Cave of nuances. Isosceles jungle. Lair of the snake. Grave of the
stalker.’ ” He paused to look at her.

“I know that page by heart,” she said.

“ ‘Grave of the stalker,’ ” Martin said. “He could be a silly man. I see an erected Hawkshaw. Tell me. Did you ever go round the clock with him for three days as
you did with me?”

“That’s a very impertinent question. Do you really think I’d tell you?”

“I thought one day you might compare notes on us. I fantasized your reply.”

“And naturally you win that contest.”

“I didn’t think of it as a contest. More a contrast of styles.”

“Let me say, and end it here, that exuberance runs in your family.”

“Up exuberance,” he said, and drank his champagne.

She refilled his glass and raised hers.

“And here,” she said, “a toast to my gifts.”

“And rare and splendid they are. Up your gifts.”

“I was speaking of my gifts to you.”

“Gifts, you say. Is there more than one?” And he touched the ledger.

“One more.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one and only,” she said, and stood up before him and opened her robe to reveal no negligee, only that indelibly remembered torso, with its somewhat graying isosceles jungle
trimmed and shaved with supreme care in the contour of a heart.

“It’s a bit late in the year,” she said, “but will you be my valentine?”

Martin opened his belt, the front burtons of his trousers, the three burtons of the shorts he’d put on clean this morning, and presented to her the second-generation stalker, full grown
now, oh yes, wrapped in white tissue paper, tied with green ribbon, and tagged with a small card bearing the greeting: Happy Anniversary.

As he made love to Melissa he studied that portion of her neck and breast where his mother had been scarred by the point of a flaming, flying stick in the fire that killed
fifteen people, most of them Irish servant girls. Melissa bore no such marks. Her mark was her face, and he kissed it lavishly, loathing both himself and her, loving her with passionate confusion,
pitying her the gift of such a face, for it had been her torment. What man could ever think he alone possessed a beauty so famed, so excessive? Who could own Botticelli’s Primavera?

His mother’s scar had been a white oval with a scalloped circumference where the stitching had drawn her wound together. He closed his eyes as he kissed Melissa, and behind him the white
scar grew by itself, a floating ovoid that became witness to his act. The scar swelled, and Martin thought of the flaming ball of tow that had marked the elder Henry James, playing in Albany
Academy park, the park on which Katrina’s Elk Street home fronted. The young James, then only thirteen, had been flying hot-air balloons, which rose skyward when the flaming tow balls were
placed beneath them. One James balloon ascended from the park and when the flaming tow ball fell to earth, someone kicked it and arced it into the hayloft of a livery stable across Washington
Avenue. The conscientious James ran to the stable to put out the fire, but his pants leg had been splashed by turpentine from soaking the tow, and it ignited like the tail of a comet. The burns led
to amputation, creating a mystic philosopher from an incipient outdoorsman, and changing the future of American culture. Serendipitous movement from Edward to Melissa to Henry to Martin. Bright
flaming people in a roundelay of accidental life that alters the world.

The scar grew behind Martin, its center becoming the most brilliant of all possible whites. Martin saw to it that the animal-child was seated on the chair beside the hotel bed in a typical
spectator’s position.

The animal-child watched the cleansing siege of the taboo, unaware the maternal flame was flirting blindly with his presence. The divine figure saw too late the advent of love’s flaming
embrace, and he ignited with a rasping, crackling brilliance. He tried to scream but the sound caught in his immaterial throat, and he was suddenly ashes, a spume of sooty flakes flying upward. To
heaven? To hell?

Martin ejaculated with an onrush of benediction.

Aware that Melissa had been shorted on the significance of the moment, Martin manipulated her vigorously into a writhing, low-level ecstasy. This, she sadly admitted, was the
only estate she could inhabit since her hysterectomy four years before. When her ovaries were taken from her, something else went with them. Oh, she could approach climax, almost peak. But there
was a point beyond which nothing would take her. She had tried. Oh, how she had tried. Poor little one. And now she gave what could be given, took what must be taken. Her explanation sounded
vaguely biblical to Martin, as if she read Saint Augustine hopefully every time the nuances flooded her cave.

Yet Martin could not escape the notion that his presence here at this altar of hand-me-down flesh was in some way therapistic, that he was expected to remantle the wings of Melissa’s
passion, that his time with her a decade ago had been as maleficent for her as it had for him, that she was searching in his flaming ashes for a new display of her own lost fireworks. They’re
not really
all
gone, are they, Daddy?

He rubbed, oh, how he rubbed. She tried, oh, how she tried.

But when she exploded it was only with exhaustion, to save her heart’s wearying ventricle.

They dressed and rested and poured new champagne, and Melissa ate a piece of melon standing up. Martin sat on the sofa trying to understand the meaning of what he had just gone
through. He was unable to grasp the significance of so many people suddenly webbed in the same small compass of events. He dismissed coincidence as a mindless explanation of anything. Was it his
mind discovering patterns that had always existed but that he, in his self-absorption, had never noticed? But how? He was a fairly perceptive man. More than that, he was foresightful. Even now he
had the impulse to call the newspaper, for what reason he did not know. Emory would not be in yet, and he had no reason to speak with anyone else.

He went to Melissa’s bedroom and sat on the rumpled bed, still damp with drops of love and loathing, and asked the hotel operator to ring the
Times-Union.
When Madge, the crone,
answered, all he could think to ask was whether anyone had left him a message. “Yes,” said Madge, “some bozo named Franny Phelan called. He’s in jail and wants you to bail
him out.”

Martin went back to the couch.

“Did you ever hear my father speak of having a gift of foresight, or anything comparable?” he asked Melissa.

“I remember he was superstitious,” she said. “He used to throw salt over his shoulder when it spilled and he had a lucky pair of pants. They were green with small checks. I can
still see them. He almost never wore them except when he needed money, and he swore that when he put them on, money started to trickle in. We were standing in the middle of Fourteenth Street one
afternoon and he was wearing a blue suit and he didn’t have enough money to buy our lunch at Luchow’s. ‘Nobody knows I need money,’ he said. ‘How could they? I
don’t have my green pants on.’ We went to his rooms and he put the pants on, and the next day he got a bank draft in the mail for eleven hundred dollars from a producer.”

Martin felt a lazy rapture come over him looking at Melissa, the golden bird of paradise. Yet, he resented the intimacy such a story reflected, and the pain it caused his mother in her grave. It
was the first time he’d ever heard of clairvoyance in anyone else in the family. But Martin quickly decided his father, through telepathy with the producer, learned of the money on the way
and put on the green pants as a way of turning the vision into something magical but not quite serious. It was not the same gift as his own. No.