The Christmas Kid (14 page)

ALMOST EVERYBODY LOVED WONDERFUL
Kelly. He had a wonderful wife and three wonderful kids and lived in a wonderful house on Fuller Place, two blocks from Holy Infant Church. They thought he was wonderful at the church, too; he was an usher at two Masses every Sunday, he helped coach the eighth-grade softball team in the spring and the football team in the fall. In the summer, he always volunteered to take the poorest kids to Coney Island or the Sunset Pool. He had a good job in one of the neighborhood banks. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. Just a wonderful guy.

“You’re so lucky, Carol,” the women would say to Kelly’s pretty young wife. “You’ve got a wonderful guy. Not like some of the bums we married.”

Carol Kelly would smile in a shy way and keep walking up the avenue to the meat market or the hardware store, trailing her wonderful children. There were, of course, some neighborhood dissenters. Most of them could be found on a Saturday afternoon in winter, peering through the steam-fogged windows of Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, while Wonderful Kelly strode along the avenue. Dinny Collins, the bus driver, was one of them.

“Lookit this guy,” Dinny said one afternoon. “Walking along, bouncing on the balls of his feet, breathing in that clean winter air, his skin all pink and healthy. Lookit the hair. The guy’s forty but his hair’s black and he looks twenty-five. It makes you sick.”

“Come on, Dinny. Everybody says he’s a wonderful guy.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d he ever do for you that’s so wonderful? I’ll tell you. He did for you exactly what he did for me. Nothing. So how wonderful can Mr. Wonderful be? Could he make me fifteen years old again? Can he get me a raise? Can he pick me a winner at Belmont? What is this ‘wonderful’ crap, anyway?”

“The wives like him.”

“They would,” said Dinny Collins, who lived alone, a knockout victim in the marriage tournament. “They’ll like him even more when he goes to heaven.”

That summer, Wonderful Kelly extended his good works into the saloons. He said he was shocked by the high rate of neighborhood drunkenness, especially among married men. And he convinced the church to host a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in a large basement room on Tuesday nights. Then he started touring the bars, talking to each drunk in his quietly wonderful way about the evils of John Barleycorn, as he called it. Dinny Collins, of course, ignored him. What did Wonderful Kelly know about drinking? He’d never even been a drunk. But Wonderful did recruit some of the men, and when the existence of the AA meeting became known, a number of the wives issued ultimatums to their husbands: join AA or sleep in the subway.

After several weeks, a few former drunks could be seen nursing club sodas at the bars, even in Rattigan’s. They told stories about the meetings, how everybody got up to describe what alcohol had done to them, the wreckage it had caused, the chaos it had fueled. Coffee and tea and doughnuts were served, and priests were available for those who wanted to make general confessions, cleaning their slates of decades of mortal and venial sins. Kelly was, of course, delighted.

“I feel like a million bucks,” Charlie Deane said one night. “I’ll never touch this stuff again.” He was sitting on his usual stool at the bar. His pants were pressed, his hair neatly trimmed, his face closely shaved. “The wife even talks to me now. First time in three years.”

Dinny Collins scoffed. “Wait’ll you hear what she’s been saying. You’ll want to get stewed another three years.”

A few of the converts did fall off the wagon; but many stayed dry. Kelly’s stock in the neighborhood rose even higher. The monsignor of the church wrote a note to the archbishop, telling him how wonderful this fellow Kelly was; the archbishop wrote the bishop, and the bishop wrote to the president of Kelly’s bank. Within the month, Kelly had been named manager of the neighborhood branch. Everybody thought this was wonderful. Wives streamed into the branch to congratulate Kelly, and dozens moved their small accounts to Kelly’s bank. The first sign of Kelly’s wider prosperity was a new car. A small trophy, to be sure, but too much for Dinny Collins.

“Well, he got himself an early Christmas present,” Dinny said one Saturday afternoon that winter, watching Kelly drive by, his wife and kids in the car. “What’s next?”

At the AA meetings, Kelly gradually displayed other changes. His hair was more carefully cut; he had two new suits, wonderfully tailored, and had replaced his old Thom McAn brogans with some wonderfully polished English shoes. He was a banker now; a watch fob appeared in his vest; a smile was permanently pasted to his face. Since he could help with loans, everybody was polite to him; some even fawned. The ability to grant a loan, or forgive a bounced check, was, of course, a form of power. Wonderful Kelly used that power judiciously, urging his supplicants to give up the sauce, to go back to church, to be kinder to their wives.

Then one Friday evening in the spring, Carol Kelly appeared in the door of Rattigan’s. The bar was almost empty. Dinny Collins was playing a game on the shuffleboard machine with JoJo Mullarkey, who used to get drunk and eat glasses before joining AA. Dinny looked at the woman, who had never been in Rattigan’s before, and nodded. Her hair was blowsy, her light spring coat open, her eyes scared.

“Uh, er, uh, excuse me, but, uh…have you seen my husband?” she said.

“You mean Wonderful Kelly?” Dinny Collins said. “No, ma’am, I can’t say as I have. He doesn’t come in that often, and when he does, it’s bad for business.”

“I see…”

“You try up the church?” JoJo Mullarkey said. “I mean, that’s where he is lots of the time.”

“Yes, I…well, thank you, gents.”

Dinny came closer. “Is there anything wrong?”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong. I er, uh—”

And she hurried into the night. An hour later, Father Donnelly came in, also looking for Wonderful Kelly. They learned that Wonderful had gone out for lunch that day and had never come back. By midnight, two detectives from the 72nd Precinct had been in, and there had been two more calls from Carol. But nobody had seen Wonderful Kelly.

They didn’t see him that weekend, and he didn’t come to work that Monday. And when the cops descended upon the bank, and the big shots came over from the main office in Manhattan, and the examiners were finally called in, they all knew why. There was $276,000 missing from the bank, along with Wonderful Kelly.

This news appeared on page 1 of the
Brooklyn Eagle,
and its first effect was to destroy the AA meeting that night. Many of the men felt they would rather be honest drunks than disciples of an embezzler. Others felt that Wonderful Kelly had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. Rattigan’s was packed that night, loud with the sounds of men falling off wagons. Dinny Collins sat in righteous splendor at the bar.

“Hitler didn’t drink,” he said. “Stalin didn’t drink. And neither did Wonderful Kelly. You don’t have to be a genius to see the moral of this story, do you?”

When the details emerged, so did the neighborhood’s anger. Kelly had worked out a system of faking the paperwork on loans. People from the neighborhood would sit at his desk and sign for a $3,000 loan, and when they were gone, Kelly would change the paperwork and make it $5,000. The bank said it would not hold the customers to the phony figures, of course; but many people felt that Wonderful Kelly had used them for his own gain. There was no pity for him, and very little for his wife and children. After a week, the wife stopped coming to church; the children were teased terribly in school, and there was talk that they were all going to move. And there wasn’t a word from Wonderful Kelly. He seemed to have vanished from the earth.

Then one snowy Saturday morning the following February, Dinny Collins walked into Rattigan’s with a
Daily News
. He held it up for all to see. “Will you look at this?” he said. And they all gazed at a picture of Wonderful Kelly on page 4, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy, handcuffed blonde beside him. The story was out of Tampa, Florida, under a headline that read:
EXEC, STRIPPER NABBED IN BANK THEFT.
The men standing grimly behind Kelly were FBI agents.

“He ran off with a
stripper?
” JoJo Mullarkey said.

“He sure did,” Dinny Collins said. “I think it’s the most wonderful thing he ever did.”

MOST MEN IN THAT
neighborhood thought Soldier Dunne had been born in a most fortunate year: 1937. This accident of birth made him too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, a stroke of luck that would have overjoyed the young men who had to fight those wars. But Dunne did not consider himself lucky; in fact, he was furious at his fate. More than any man in that neighborhood, he thought that a real man’s greatest glory was war. In 1955, when a perforated eardrum kept him out of the peacetime army, his anger soared into rage.

“This country is soft as mush!” he shouted one night at the bar in Rattigan’s. “We shoulda done what MacArthur wanted, just keep on goin’ into Red China! We should be fightin’ them right now!” He slammed the bar for emphasis. “Then they wouldn’t keep me out of it! Not for a damn pinhole in an eardrum!”

But the bureaucratic decision was final; Dunne was doomed to remain a civilian all his life. And so he tried to make up for his loss in other ways. He bought most of his clothes in army-navy stores, appearing in smartly cut khakis in the neighborhood bars, his jump boots gleaming, his posture erect, his hair chopped short in a crew cut. He read military history, lecturing late at night about great battles “we” fought, and—during Vietnam—how victory could be won. When he was in his mid-twenties, the men of that neighborhood began to call him Soldier, and, grim-faced, squinty-eyed, shoulders squared, Dunne wore the ironic title as a badge of honor.

Along the way, Soldier Dunne married a quiet, pretty neighborhood girl named Marge Rivington, went to work at the gas company, and fathered two daughters and a son, each of whom was required to call him sir. He ran his home with the discipline of a company commander. Food was “chow,” the kitchen was “the mess,” the bathroom “the latrine.” On the walls of the living room he hung framed photographs of Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, and Mark Clark; a huge American flag billowed on a pole outside his window every day of the week; he mourned the death of John Wayne, traveled once a year to Arlington to salute the fallen heroes of the republic, and when asked his favorite song would always reply: “You gotta stand when they play it.”

Naturally, his first daughter ran away and married an ironworker when she was seventeen. The second lasted until her eighteenth birthday; she took $216 she had saved, flew off to Orlando, became a tour guide at Disney World, and married an animal trainer. Soldier Dunne’s attention then fell most heavily upon his son, Jack. His attention, and his alarm. For Jack was not the son that Soldier had hoped for.

“He’s a nice kid,” he said a few times, when pressed by other members of the Saturday night infantry. “Takes after his mother, know what I mean? Reads a lot. Smart, that kid. Smart.”

But the truth was that at home they barely spoke. Jack had refused when he was thirteen to call his father sir, a small mutiny that Soldier punished by confining the boy to quarters. Confinement was ended through the tearful intercession of Soldier’s wife, Marge, whom Dunne started calling the judge advocate general. The boy said nothing. He never called his father sir again.

Worse, the young man resisted the military impulse. He thought parades were boring. He wouldn’t play with guns. He laughed at John Wayne movies. He read his books, listened to rock and roll, kept the door to his room closed. When Soldier offered to take the boy on his annual pilgrimage to Arlington, the boy turned him down; he was going with his friends to see the Rolling Stones. Then one evening, in the young man’s seventeenth year, Soldier Dunne came to his son’s room. He was carrying a thick manila envelope. Jack was listening to music on a Walkman. He looked up at his father, but he didn’t move.

“Hey!” Soldier shouted. “You think I’m standing here for my health?”

Jack removed the headset and sat up. “What is it, Dad? The Russians invade or something?”

“Don’t be a wise guy,” the father said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Shoot.”

“Look,” the father said. “You’re almost eighteen. You gotta start thinking about the rest of your life.”

“Yeah.”

“And I think I know what you gotta do. Nex’ June, when you graduate, go right in the army. They’re giving great deals now to high school graduates. You can pick a career. Electronics. Computers. All kinds of things. The money’s great. It’ll be the bes’ thing ever happened to you, believe me.”

He opened the manila envelope and took out a batch of brochures; the army, navy, and marines were all represented.

“Where’s the air force?” the young man said, smiling.

“Ah, hell, that’s not for you,” he said. “That’s not like the real service. But if you want, why don’t you…”

“Forget it, Dad,” Jack said. “I’m not going in the service.”

The father stood very erect. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re a man, ain’t you?” the father said, his voice rising. “A real man serves his country if he has the chance. I didn’t have the chance. They turned me down. But you got nothin’ wrong with you. They won’t turn you down. They…”

“I’m going to college, Dad.”

“College?”

The word fell between them like a sword. Soldier Dunne turned abruptly on his heel and walked out of the room and out of the house. At the bar across the street, he drank a beer in silence. College. Not even West Point, or Annapolis. Just college. It wasn’t as if he had already served his country and was going on the GI Bill. He was just going to college. That’s why the country was going to seed; these kids were soft; they had no discipline; they didn’t know what it was like to fight, to bleed, to die for your country. No wonder the Russians were pushing us around everywhere. They had infantry, planes, bombs, tanks, trained killers, spies; we had college boys!

“You all right, Soldier?” said Loftus, the bartender. “You look like yer gonna cry.”

“It’s a sad day for this country,” Soldier said.

“What happened?” Loftus said. “I miss the news?”

“My kid’s going to college.”

Loftus laughed out loud. “That’s great. Soldier. Why’re you sayin’ it’s sad?”

Soldier snapped to attention and said: “You’d never understand.”

He walked out of the bar and marched through the dark streets of the neighborhood for hours, until his legs grew heavy and his hands cold and he headed home. As he crossed the avenue, he saw a figure standing in the vestibule of his building. He tensed, ready for combat. But when he came closer, he saw that the shadowy figure was only his wife. Good old Marge. Waiting up for me. He smiled and opened the outer door.

She stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” she said.

Soldier stepped back, a hand to his stinging face, and said: “What is this? What’s going on? What’s this about?”

“Your son’s upstairs bawling his eyes out,” she said. “That’s what this is about!” Then, her face furious, she slapped him again. “I took your crap for a long time, Mr. Dunne. All this soldier-boy gobbledygook, all this yes-sir-no-sir baloney. Well, you drove the girls out with it. But you’re not gonna do it to Jack. I’m not gonna let you, Mr. Dunne.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want you out of the house,” she said in a cold voice. “Tonight. Pack your bags and go. Get a room at the Y. Sleep on the subway. I don’t care. But get the hell out.”

Soldier backed up against the wall, stunned, riddled with words that came at him like bullets. He tried to speak, but nothing came out of his mouth. His legs were gone, his head ringing. He slid down the wall to a squatting position. His post had been overrun.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. She looked down at him, as if prepared to shoot the wounded.

“Save it for the boy,” she said, doing an about-face and hurrying up the stairs. Soldier squatted there for a long time, listening to the wind blow down the avenue. After a while, he thought: Maybe he’ll at least join the ROTC. And then slowly, he rose to his feet and started up the stairs, hoping the enemy would accept his unconditional surrender.