Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

you doin’ for yourself?”
    “I write for the morning paper, a daily column.”
    “A writer like your father.”
    “No, not like that. Not anything like that. Just a column.”
    “You were always a smart kid. You always wrote something. Your father still alive?”
    “Oh yes,” and ancient times rolled back, the years before and after the turn of the century when the Phelans and Daughertys were next-door neighbors and Martin’s mother was
alive in her eccentric isolation. Francis was the handyman who fixed whatever went wrong in the Daugherty home, Edward Daugherty cosmically beyond manual labor, Martin a boyish student of
Francis’s carpentry skills as he put on the new roof or enlarged the barn to house two carriages instead of one. He was installing a new railing on the back stoop the summer morning
Martin’s mother came down that same stoop naked, bound for the carriage barn with her shopping bag. Francis wrapped her in a piece of awning and walked her back into the house, the first
indication to anyone except Edward Daugherty that something was distracting her.
    Edward Daugherty used Francis as the prototype for the fugitive hero in his play about the trolley strike, The Car Barns , in which heroic Francis, the scab-killer, was immortalized.
Legends and destinies worked out over the back fence. Or over a beer and an orange soda.
    “He’s in a nursing home now,” Martin said of his father. “Pretty senile, but he has his moments when a good deal of it comes back. Those are the worst times.”
    “That’s how it goes,” Francis said.
    “For some people.”
    “Yeah. Some don’t get that far.”
    “I have the feeling I ought to do something for you, Fran,” Martin said. “Something besides a pack of cigarettes and a glass of soda. Why do I feel that?”
    “Damned if I know, Martin. Nothing I want out of you.”
    “Well, I’m around. I’m in the book, up on Main Street in the North End now. And you can always leave a message at the Times-Union .”
    “Okay, Martin, and thanks for that,” and Francis extended his right hand, which was missing two joints on the index finger. He will throw no more baseballs. Martin shook the hand and
its stumpy digit.
    “Don’t blow any whistles on me, Martin. I don’t need that kind of scene.”
    “It’s your life,” Martin said, but even as he said it he was adding silently: but not entirely yours. Life hardly goes by ones.
    Martin bought an Armstrong at Jerry’s newsroom, just up from the paper, and then an egg sandwich and coffee to go at Farrell’s lunchroom, three doors down,
and with breakfast and horses in hand he crossed Beaver Street, climbed the paintless, gray, footworn, and crooked staircase to the Times-Union city room, and settled in at his desk, a
bruised oak antique at which the Albany contemporaries of Mark Twain might have worked. Across the room Joe Leahy, the only other citizen on duty and a squeaker of a kid, was opening mail at the
city desk and tending the early phone. The only other life sign was the clacking of the Associated Press and International News Service teletypes, plus the Hearst wire, which carried the words of
The Chief: editorials, advisories, exclusive stories on Marion Davies.
    Martin never looked at the machine without remembering the night Willie Powers, the night slot man, went to lunch and came back pickled, then failed to notice an advisory that The Chief was
changing his front-page editorial on Roosevelt, changing it drastically from soft- to hard-line antipathy, for the following day. Willie failed to notice not only the advisory but also the
editorial which followed it, and so the Times-Union the next morning carried The Chief’s qualified praise of F.D.R., while the rest of the Hearst press across the nation carried The
Chief’s virulent attack on the president, his ancestors, his wife, his children, his dog.
    There is no record of Hearst’s ever having visited the Times-Union city room, but a