City of Dreams (43 page)

Morgan grunted. He was not known for the display of any emotion except anger. He held the bond up to the window and studied the watermark. “How much?”

“It’s a gift.”

“Gift?” Morgan looked Tim Riley in the eye. “What do you want?”

“Want?”

“A man always has two reasons for doing a thing,” said Morgan, “a good reason and the real reason.”

“But—”

“Every man wants something. Find out what it is and you may do business with him. I want items like this bond, for what they say about where we’ve been and where we’re going. So . . . what do
you
want?”

Tim almost laughed. Powerful men thought alike, whether they were pontificating from shoeshine thrones or riding cabs to Wall Street. But Tim did not laugh. He pulled at his cuffs and made his case. By the time that they arrived at number twenty-three, Tim had the loan that would save West Side Workingman’s.

A week later, in a move that the banking community both hailed and condemned, the directors made twenty-five-year-old Tim Riley the president of their bank.

And come June, Tim bought Helen that town house, two rooms deep, four floors high, an easy walk to the main branch of the bank.

B
UT NEW YORK
was still a dangerous place. There were a thousand perils to kill a person in an instant, a thousand more to wear him down over a decade.

On a bright afternoon in March of 1906, Helen Riley stepped into Eighth Avenue just as a horse team was startled by the sound of a horn blasting on one of those newfangled autocars. City horses were supposed to be used to everything from trolley bells to gunshots, but these two bolted.

Helen was seven months’ pregnant and just a step too slow . . .

If any pain could have been worse than that of a boy listening as his father was beaten to death, it was the pain that Tim Riley felt for months. Losing a parent seemed somehow in the natural order of things, no matter how violently it happened. Losing a pregnant wife after nine months of marriage was all but unbearable.

So Tim resumed his habit of walking.

When his banking day was done, he would go back to his empty town house and change into work clothes. He would put a blackjack into his pocket because it was still Hell’s Kitchen, and everyone knew Tim Riley on the good streets and the bad corners, in the parish halls and the clip joints. And any thug would love to see what a young bank president carried in his pockets after dark. But Tim only met with trouble once. He met it with the blackjack on two thick skulls and kept walking.

His evening routine grew as regular as his banking day. He walked down to Deegan’s Saloon, where he drank two beers. Then he walked past Sadowski’s Boot Shop and waved to the men of the family, who always worked late, except for the anarchist. Then he walked on toward the water, always toward the water. He was still walking in October, when the nights grew cool and the shadows came early. He feared the approach of winter, because he knew that it would be harder to face his despair in the dark.

One evening, he sat on a piling on the Thirty-fifth Street Pier and stared across the river. The sky over New Jersey was layering into colors sliding down the scale from gold to red to purple. Morgan’s new yacht, the
Corsair III
, rode at the old anchorage.

Seeing it reminded Tim of two promises he had made to himself so long ago: that he would kill the McGillicuddys and make himself rich. The McGillicuddys were gone, and he was riding the rails from salaried to well paid to wealthy. And . . . what did it matter?

He looked into the oily water lapping against the pier and heard a voice, like an echo across the years: “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

He turned. “Doreen?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to sing your wife to her rest.”

“I didn’t know you were in town.”

“I’m comin’ home.” She was wearing a blue skirt and matching jacket. Her hat was black. She could have been a schoolmistress.

“Coming home?” he said. “Quitting the circuit?”

“Comin’ home to do that play. One way or the other.”

He said, “I’ll be first in line to see it.”

“I’ll give you tickets. No standin’ in line for Tim Riley.”

And a thought echoed back from his boyhood: she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And the thought robbed him for a moment of speech.

Then she smiled. “Say, are you hungry? I’ve been back to New York half a dozen times since they opened that new Flatiron Building, and I never ate yet in their café.”

“The one on the roof ?”

“Whaddya say?” Her eyes brightened.

“I . . . I don’t know.” Tim’s mother had said that a man should be in mourning for a year after his wife died. “I haven’t had much appetite for a while.”

“You have to eat,” said Doreen. “We could walk it in twenty minutes. Get there in time to watch the electric lights go on. German food . . . wiener schnitzel . . . bratwurst . . .”

He protested that he wasn’t dressed for it.

She slipped her arm into his and said that a café should serve men in work clothes and business suits, too. “Besides, you’re with me. And you might be the handsomest bank president in New York, but no one’ll be lookin’ at you if
I’m
on your arm.”

That made him laugh. She was brash and confident and as in love with herself as she ever could be with anyone else. She announced herself. She barged ahead. And while she might not be the most ladylike lady he had ever met, she was the most fun.

So they ate dinner on the top of the Flatiron Building. Then they rode the horse car back up Broadway, then walked across Forty-eighth to her mother’s place.

On the stoop, she kissed his cheek and said she had one more tour, then she would be back for good. “And we’ll look to raise money for the show. We’re callin’ it
The Big Cavalcade of 1907
.” Then she kissed him again, a little sisterly peck on the lips.

He stepped back and instinctively looked up at the windows of his mother’s flat.

She said, “So . . . you want to come up?”

“Come up?”

“You can come up. We’re old friends.”

“But I—”

“It’s all right.” She gave him another peck on the cheek. “Maybe another time.”

TWO NIGHTS LATER
, just as Tim slipped the blackjack into his pocket to head out for his walk, Doreen came to the front door with a covered pot.

“I brought you a nice roast chicken with gravy.”

He stood there, looking at her in her prim shawl and blouse and skirt, and thought it again: the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“So you gonna ask me in,” she said, “or do I take this bird down to the old actor’s home and feed it to all the second bananas still dreamin’ of top billin’?”

They ate in the dining room, at the mahogany table that Tim had ordered the week before the accident. He opened a bottle of white French wine that someone had given him. She lit the candles she had brought and put the pot on a trivet.

“I’m not much for cookin’,” she admitted.

He said it looked better than anything cooked in that house in a long time.

As they ate, Doreen told stories of her life in vaudeville, and she made Tim laugh, which he admitted was something he had done very little of late.

“So,
you
got any funny stories?” she said. “If I make you laugh, you gotta make me laugh. It’s an old vaudeville law.”

“I’m a banker.” He pretended to scowl. “We’re never funny.”

And they both laughed.

Then there was silence between them.

Then she slid her hand across the table, touched his, and said, “Sugar and salt.”

“Sugar and salt?”

“That’s what you sprinkle on two peas in a pod. Sugar and salt.” She leaned closer. “I’m sugar, and you’re salt.” And she kissed him, but not like a sister.

Tim’s whole being rose in an instant, rose out of the darkness of grief, out of the pain of walking alone.

Then she was standing beside him and he was undoing her blouse and pushing up her chemise and pressing his face to her breasts. They tasted of salt, not sugar, and they rose to the touch of his lips just as he rose to her.

And then the two of them were twined on the carpet beside the table and his trousers were at his ankles and her bloomers were on the floor and . . .

They were done quickly. But they weren’t done . . .

They went upstairs to the guest bedroom and left their clothes on the floor and slipped between sheets that had not been mussed in months.

And soon they were done . . . again.

And they lay on their backs and stared up at the ceiling.

He licked his lips and tasted salt, tasted her.

She said, “Do you remember that night at McGillicuddy’s?”

“Like it was last night.”

“I remember thinkin’—when the pistol fell and the ladder come crashin’ after it—everything the Riley boys ever hoped for, everything they ever dreamed, was all crashin’, too.”

Tim did not say that one of their dreams had been fulfilled a few moments later, when they saw the McGillicuddys dead on the floor.

She said, “I’ve kept you boys’ secret all these years since.”

“We know.”

“So you got to live your New York dreams.” Then she rolled away from him and lay on her stomach. “And that’s all I ever hoped for.”

He slid his hand down the smooth white skin of her back and along the sweet ridge of her bottom. “Are your New York dreams different?”

“No.” She turned toward him. “They just cost more.”

He knew where this was headed. But he could not invest in a play. A play had no collateral. It was all future value, all pie in the sky. That’s what he told her.

“But a
theater
is real property,” she said. “And a theater company can raise the money for costumes and props and talent, so long as the house ain’t takin’ too much off the top.”

“So, the bank invests in the theater, not the show, and the theater gives a sweetheart deal to a new company?”

“Somethin’ like that.” She propped herself on her elbows. “My friend, Charley Gibbs, he’s an old-time vaudevillian from old-time money. Family disowned him when he went on the circuit. Wanted him to go to Harvard or something. But an uncle left him a chunk of land up at Coogan’s Bluff. He’d put it up as collateral. He’d buy the theater. We’d produce. You’d lend. Whaddya say?”

Tim knew it was a bad idea. But everyone deserved a chance at their New York dream. So he said, “Let me think about it.”

“Think hard.” And she lifted her bottom against his hand.

And the sight of it lifted him. And he lifted her hips off the bed and got onto his knees behind her. He had never done it like this with Helen. He plunged deep. Doreen let out a long, low moan. . . .

iii.

So a year later, the Riley brothers stood in that flat, with their mother dead, and the banks in panic, and a flop called
The Big Cavalcade of 1907
hidden on the books of West Side Workingman’s.

Tim said, “Pa would tell us that keepin’ our dignity matters most when things are falling apart. If you can keep your dignity, you can keep a cool head, and then you can put things back together.”

“Maybe that’s why J. P. Morgan’s so dignified,” said Eddie.

The papers were full of the stories: For almost two weeks, Morgan had been plugging gaps. If there was a run on an important bank, Morgan saw that it received the funds to stay open. If the stock market threatened to close early because the banks couldn’t provide call money, Morgan got them the cash to keep trading. And when men were seen carrying boxes of money from bank to bank, Morgan was sending them.

“He even saved the city from bankruptcy,” said Tim, “with an issue of short-term bonds, covered by the Clearinghouse.”

“Savin’ big cities, savin’ big banks. I hear he saved a small bank in Harlem, too.”

“The big and the small,” said Tim. “Scrambling at the top and the bottom.”

“But the ones at the top of the pyramid scramble to keep things smooth. Down at the bottom, folks scramble to keep alive. At least the ones at the top know that keepin’ things smooth at the bottom keeps ’em smooth at the top, too.”

“You need to go into banking with a philosophy like that.”

“Either banking or anarchy.” Eddie grinned. “Bring the whole thing down. Let new forms rise. Human forms. That’s what Teddy says.”

“Teddy? Teddy Sadowski, the anarchist brother-in-law?”

Eddie pulled a paper from his pocket and gave it to Tim. “He has an article in
Mother Earth
, Emma Goldman’s paper.”

Tim flipped through the pages. “Have you lost your mind, readin’ this stuff?”

“No. Just my job.” Eddie laughed and gave his brother a gentle punch on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Readin’ this tells me how the enemy thinks.”

Tim pulled out his watch and checked the time. “Want to go to the theater?”

“No, thanks.” Eddie turned for the door. “That’s where you go when you’re thinkin’ with your other head.”

Tim said nothing. Only his brother could talk to him like that.

“You know,” Eddie added, “Ma would say that receivin’ Communion after spendin’ time with a chorus girl is a mortal sin. You been to confession lately?”

Tim gave his brother a long look. “She’s not a chorus girl. She’s a headliner.”

T
HE
B
IG
C
AVALCADE
of 1907
. . . there was something sad, almost naked, thought Tim, about a theater marquee in the midday sun. Marquees were meant to be seen at night. But a poster slapped across a marquee—closes wednesday—was more than sad. It was a punch in the face, especially for the headliner.

No sparkling reviews festooned the message boards. No one would post a notice like this: “Last night on Fourteenth Street, a show opened that may be the most witless, tuneless, worthless piece of foolishness spilled onto the New York stage this season. . . . As for Doreen Walsh, she has the voice of one of the lesser angels, which is a small blessing, but many of the lesser angels chose to sing in Hades, which is where you’ll think you’ve been after a visit to the old Variety Theater.”