City of Dreams (42 page)

People said there was a simple explanation. Eddie had grown up in a political hall where the glad-hand was one of the tools of the trade. Tim had come of age in the presence of brokers and bankers who measured their words as carefully as their inseams.

But there was more to understanding the Riley brothers than that.

It may have begun with their mentors, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and Daly of J. P. Morgan. But it ended with the women who had shaped them, the mother they would never see again, the wives they had married, and the song-girl who had kept their secret since that bloody night at McGillicuddy’s. . . .

ii.

Tim was the older brother, but Eddie found a wife first.

He met her at Tammany’s Fifteenth District Cotillion of 1901.

Tim looked across the hall that night and saw Eddie talking to a pudgy girl with an infectious laugh named Polly Sadowski. After a visit to the punch bowl, Tim looked again, and Eddie was still talking to her. Half an hour later . . . still talking.

That was when Plunkitt sidled up to Tim. “Your brother and a Litvak. Not many Lithuanians in the district, so it won’t help if he runs for office. But that’s the most I ever seen him talk to a girl. If he starts playin’ the harmonica for her, get to work on your wedding toast.”

And sure enough, as people emptied out of Washington Hall that cold February night, Tim heard the harmonica. The song was “McNally’s Row of Flats,” followed by the happy laughter of Polly Sadowski.

Her family had come from Lithuania in search of a better life in 1897. The father, a boot maker, had opened a storefront on Tenth Avenue. Two of the sons were also bootmakers. The third, named Theodore, was an anarchist. They did not speak so much of him.

When Mary Riley learned that her son was in love, she worried that the girl wasn’t Irish. She was also suspicious of the Lithuanian brand of Catholicism: “Do these Lith-who-neenians bless themselves top to bottom and left to right, or do they go with that Orthodox business of top to bottom, then
right
to
left
?”

“Ask Father Higgins, why don’t you?” said Tim. “The whole Sadowski family sits down front at the ten o’clock every Sunday.”

That softened Mary Riley some. Then one day, Polly herself came by and offered to help the missus with her sewing. When Polly proved that she could do a running stitch and take a Singer sewing machine apart and put it back together again blindfolded, Mary Riley made the girl her own.

Eddie and Polly were married at Sacred Heart that summer.

Then everyone processed to Washington Hall for the reception.

Tim gave what everyone said was a grand toast. Later he gave what everyone said was a grand warning, when the anarchist brother drank too much and started grumbling about the oppressive institution of marriage. Tim told him, very quietly, to shut up or leave. “Or I will personally throw you out a window.”

T
WO YEARS LATER
, Tim met the dark-haired and slender Helen Murphy at a church social at Annunciation, on Broadway and 131st Street.

And he was captivated . . . by her wit, by her education (courtesy of the good sisters of the Sacred Heart), and by the blue eyes that watched him so seriously from beneath those dark brows.

Three nights a week, month after month, Tim took the El uptown to the neighborhood called Manhattanville, and he sat in the front room and listened while Helen’s Donegal mother played the piano. Tim had no musical talent, but he could have learned “Galway Bay,” “Greensleeves,” and “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” just from watching Mrs. Murphy’s fingers work the keyboard . . . again . . . and again . . . and again . . . because those were the only songs she knew.

Finally, the Murphys allowed Tim to take their daughter to the theater. It was the fall of 1904, and a new show was playing at the Broadway Liberty:
Little Johnny Jones
, by an up-and-comer named Cohan. Tim came out humming “Yankee Doodle Boy.” But Helen loved “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

Soon they were spending all their free time exploring New York, and for young people in love, it truly was the grand and imperial city that Plunkitt had promised.

They climbed the Statue of Liberty and looked out from the crown. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge just to feel the majesty of it. They strolled the Ladies’ Mile. They stood on Twenty-third Street and felt the wind currents that the new Flatiron Building created, and they laughed when the coppers shouted “Twenty-three skidoo” at the gawking johnny-boys waiting for a gust to blow a lady’s skirt up around her waist. They went to the nickelodeon to watch pictures that actually moved. They counted the number of stories on the
Times
building rising at Broadway and Forty-second Street, then they traced the northward progress of the subway trench slicing through Longacre Square. And for her birthday, Tim took Helen to Delmonico’s, where they had steaks and an amazing dessert called Baked Alaska, which was both cold and hot at the same time.

Tim was completely in love with Helen, but he scanned the vaudeville notices every week for a company that included Doreen Walsh, or as she was known when her name made it onto the bill, Doreen the Chorine.

Doreen never played New York, but if she was in town to visit her widowed mother, she and Tim would have lunch. She had followed her dream out to what the vaudevillians called the “medium time,” out to cities like Providence and Cincinnati, out where she played theaters that were clean but seldom crowded, where a good week ended with fifty dollars in the pay envelope and clean towels in the hotel.

Doreen always told Tim that someday, she would make it back. She had an idea for a show with beautiful girls, fresh songs, dancing, and funny skits about high mucky-mucks like J. P. Morgan, with herself as the headliner.

Tim always assured her that it would happen.

And the meal would end with Doreen saying how nice it would have been if she could have had her dream and
their
dream, too. “We would’ve made a good team.”

Tim would politely agree, but until he saw her again, he would not trouble himself over might-have-beens, because his life was advancing with purpose and promise, and he married Helen at Annunciation in June of 1905.

After Niagara Falls, the couple moved to Forty-seventh Street, to a row of town houses built by William Astor. A full brownstone should have been beyond the reach of a twenty-five-year-old loan officer. But by then, Tim Riley had become the prodigy of New York banking. It had happened the winter before . . .

C
HARLES
S
HAUGHNESSY, FIRST
president of Workingman’s, had died during a Christmas celebration at Keen’s Steakhouse. No one was certain if it was a heart attack that killed him or an exploded stomach, because he had just eaten not one but
two
of their twenty-six-ounce mutton chops. He sat back, patted his enormous belly, turned to say something to Tim, and pitched forward . . . right into the creamed spinach.

So, on the day after New Year’s, the directors of the Twelfth Ward Bank tendered an offer to West Side Workingman’s stockholders. They were following the simplest rule of business and life: when your competitor is weak, take advantage.

Workingman’s had been founded in 1899. The directors—including Daniel Daly, Harold “Squints” O’Day, and saloon-keeper Jimmy Deegan—believed that a man with a Hell’s Kitchen address ought to be able to get a loan in his own neighborhood. “A Local Bank for the Local Interest” was their slogan. And once the bank was capitalized, the customers lined up with coins and bills, with dreams and debts, and the little bank thrived. Even Mary Riley traded in her piggy bank for an account paying 3 percent.

But Twelfth Ward offered five dollars a share above the stated price of the preferred stock. And the board split on the question: capitulate or fight?

Daniel Daly requested a week to mount a defense. Then he proclaimed loan officer Tim Riley the smartest, most mathematically skilled young man he knew and asked him to lead the fight.

A lifelong bachelor, Daly had taken a fatherly interest in Tim on the day that the frightened boy first appeared at the offices of J. P. Morgan. He had made it his business to teach Tim about accounting and bookkeeping. But he had not taught Tim how to handle himself in a room full of gentlemen or how to do complex calculations in his head or how to pick the borrowers who would always repay their loans. Some skills, he said, were simply innate.

So Tim Riley set out to save Workingman’s.

For starters, he did what anyone in the Fifteenth District always did, if he knew what was good for him. He went to see Plunkitt.

As Tim came down the courthouse corridor, he heard Plunkitt delivering a disquisition to a young man with a notebook: “There’s only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’. And you can’t study it in books. Books is a hindrance and—why hello, Tim.”

Plunkitt introduced newspaperman Billy Riordan. “He’s been puttin’ everything I say in the papers. Now he’s makin’ a book of my wisdom.”

“All that free advice,” said Tim, “and folks’ll be payin’ for it?”

Plunkitt took out a cigar. “And ain’t that the grandest?”

Riordan begged a deadline and hurried off, so Tim climbed up next to Plunkitt, lit the sachem’s cigar, and presented the case for Workingman’s.

It did not take long.

“I’ve made myself a millionaire by not bein’ sentimental,” said Plunkitt, “unless sentiment had a purpose. When The McManus runs against me come fall, I’ll be able to tell voters that I helped saved the neighborhood bank. So you can have my proxy, and I’ll lend you fifteen thousand dollars, too.”

In the following week, Tim visited every major stockholder and every businessman who had ever benefited because of Workingman’s.

On the night before the proxy vote, he called a meeting of the board in the office of the late president. The kettle on top of the coal stove hissed steam that moistened the air but turned to frost on the windows. And he announced that they still needed twenty-five thousand dollars to hold off Twelfth Ward.

Daniel Daly, who had never expressed himself above a whisper in the back rooms of J. P. Morgan or the front rooms of Workingman’s, removed his pince-nez and said, “Then it’s finished. There’s no way we come up with twenty-five thousand to buy out the last stockholders by tomorrow afternoon.”

Tim Riley said, “What about J. P. Morgan?”

Daly’s face reddened, as if he had just taken a shot of Jameson’s, though he was that rarity among the Irish of New York: a teetotaler. “J. P. Morgan? You would ask
him
for money?”

“No,” said Tim. “
You
would.”

Daly shook his head. “I couldn’t. Morgan may have spoken to me a dozen times in all the years I worked for him, unless I made a mistake. Then he yelled at me.”

“He never spoke to me, either. But”—Tim tugged at his cuffs—“we’re fighting for our lives. And I’m not quitting. If you won’t speak to Morgan, I will.”

Squints O’Day grinned. “My God, boy, but you are your father’s son.”

Daly put his glasses on, let them drop again, and said, “I don’t know how you’ll even get close to Morgan. He sits in his glassed-in office at number twenty-three and lets everyone see him, but he’s as unapproachable as the Pope.”

“
More
,” said Tim. “More unapproachable.”

“Then how?” asked Squints.

“I have a plan.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Timothy Riley dressed in his best blue suit and red cravat, put on his wool chesterfield, his kid gloves, his derby. He left his flat on Fiftieth and stepped out into the January wind, hurried across Forty-second Street to Madison, then headed south along a street crowded with morning commuters and box cabs and those noisy new autocars.

He stopped across from number 219. Morgan’s brownstone faced Madison. Behind it rose his new library, a marble palace that housed the treasures he had been collecting through a lifetime. At eight thirty, the front door of the town house opened and out came an enormous Cuban cigar attached to the face of . . . himself.

J. Pierpont Morgan was sixty-eight, but he had aged little in the years since Tim Riley had first hopped his cab. It was as if Morgan had arrived at a certain place on a certain day when his hair had stopped graying and his body had grown into a force of gravity rather than simple weight, and there he had stayed. He still went alone, without secretary or factotum, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, out beyond the world of mere men, out where the money was, out in the future that was rushing toward every man every day . . . but few men could say with such certainty that they would be richer tomorrow then they were yesterday

The cabbie opened the door, the springs creaked, Morgan dropped onto the seat. And Tim Riley made his move. He dodged two horse carts and a pile of horse shit, opened the opposite door, and levered himself in.

Once more, J. P. Morgan filled the proscenium of Tim’s vision. Those small, dark eyes seemed even more ferocious when peering over a nose that now resembled an autumn gourd, all red and bulbous and covered with bumps.

“What’s the meaning of this?” boomed Morgan as he pounded his walking stick on the roof. “Smythe! Smythe!”

But this time, Tim was unruffled. He pulled off his gloves, took out an envelope, and put it into Morgan’s hands: “I’ve brought you another bond.”

“Bond?”

“Another 1780 bond. Number 2511.”

Morgan glanced at the envelope and said, “The office boy. The one who learned basic accounting in my back room. Riley, isn’t it?”

“And that is my calling card, sir.”

Morgan puffed two or three times on his cigar and told the cabbie to get on to Wall Street. Then he said to Tim, “You preferred to be a small fish in a tiny pool, when you could have been a tiny fish in a mighty school.”

“I’ve always been most appreciative of what I learned at the counting-house, sir. But Workingman’s was a good opportunity, and my father would have been disappointed if I hadn’t struck out on my own.”