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.
“You’re going now, aren’t you?” Melissa said.
“I had a call at the paper. An old neighbor of mine’s in jail and wants my help.”
“I could tell by your face you were going to leave me.”
“What is it? Do you want to talk? I don’t have to go right this minute.”
“I don’t see you in ten years and you pop in and use me like a Klondike whore.”
“Use you? Klondike?” Martin’s fingers still ached from the reciprocal friction.
“You drink my champagne and eat my food and exploit my body and leave me alone with my energy. You use me.” She hurled a croissant at him. It missed him and bounced off a lampshade.
“You crazy bitch,” he said. “You’re as crazy as my mother.”
He pulled her robe off her shoulders, pinning her arms to her side. Then he dragged her to the floor and undid his trousers.
How do I use thee? Let me count the ways. As a sacred vessel to be violated. As a thief of Holy Writ. As the transcendent trinity: Melissa-Katrina-Marina, which my father discovered and loved; which I now love. As my father immortalized them all, like the figures on the Grecian urn, so do I now perceive them in all their lambent lunacy. Seeing with my father’s eyes and knowing how he was victimized by glory and self-absorption, I now forgive the man his exorbitant expectations, his indifference, his absence. Once forgiven, it is a short walk to forgive myself for failing to penetrate such passionate complexity as his. Forgiving myself, I can again begin to love myself. All this, thanks to the use of the fair Melissa.
As he pronged the dying fire, Martin sensed the presence of his parents in the room, not as flaming balls of tow this time, but as a happy couple, holding hands and watching him do diddle with Melissa for them, just as he had once done proud piddle for them in his personal pot. Clearly, they saw him as the redeemer of all their misalliances, the conqueror of incoherence, the spirit of synthesis in an anarchic family. Martin, in the consanguineous saddle, was their link with love past and future, a figure of generational communion, the father of a son en route to the priesthood, the functioning father of the senile Edward. More than that he had, here, obviously become his own father. He was Edward, son of Emmett Daugherty, father of Martin Daugherty, grandfather of Peter Daugherty, and progenitor of the unchartable Daugherty line to come. Lost son of a lost father, he was now fatherhood incarnate.
Perceiving this, he spent himself in Melissa’s ravine of purification.
“You are my yum-yum,” she said to him, wholly flattened, the corners of her mouth yanked downward by unseen powers at the center of the earth. She stroked the fluids at the center of herself and sucked the mixture off her middle finger, evoking in Martin a ten-year-old memory of the same act performed at the Hampton. Moved profoundly both by the act and the memory, he loathed himself for his own psychic mendacity, for trying to persuade himself he had other than venereal reasons for jingling everybody’s favorite triangle.
Hypocrite!
Lecher!
My boy!
Fifteen
Billy found Martin in the news coop of police headquarters playing knock rummy with Ned Curtin, the Times-Union’s police reporter. Martin saw Billy and nodded. Then he drew a card and knocked. Ned Curtin slid a dime to him across the desk.
“How come he called you?” Billy said when Martin came out to meet him. They walked together up the stairs, Billy still smelling the pine disinfectant he always associated with this building. Billy had been here only once, five years ago, for dealing cards on Orange Street. He’d been hired by a punk who said he had Bindy’s okay to run the game, but didn’t, so they pulled everybody in and held them an hour here and then let the players go. But they kept the punk, who had to pay up and do a night in jail.
“I saw him Thursday down in Spanish George’s,” Martin said, “and I told him to call me if he needed anything.”
“You didn’t tell me you saw him.”
“He didn’t want me to. When you see him, you’ll know why.”
“Why’d you call me now?”
“It’ll be in the paper tonight, or maybe even this afternoon, who he is and used to be. You had to know before that.”
They sat down on a long, wooden bench in the empty courtroom. A white-haired man in shirtsleeves came in from the room behind the judge’s bench and sniffed at them, then went out again.
“Did you ever know why he left home?” Billy asked.
“I know the gossip. He drank, then the baby died. The one fed the other.”
“I was nine.”
“Do you remember him well? You could at nine.”
“I don’t know if I remember his face from seeing it, or from the picture. There’s one home in a box of snapshots, about nineteen fifteen, the year before he left. He’s standing on our old stoop on Colonie Street.”
“He was all done with baseball then. I can remember how he looked. He doesn’t look like that anymore.”
With a magnifying glass, Billy had studied how his father wore his sweater, the same one he wore in the rowboat, and maybe the same cap. He studied the cut of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, and his smile, the lips open and twisted a little to the left. It was a good smile, a strong smile. But Billy’s mother said it was a weak thing to leave us and drink so much. A man shouldn’t be weak like that, she said. But, oh my, how he cried, she said. How we all cried.
“Here,” said Martin, nudging Billy Through an open door they saw men entering the hallway behind the courtroom. One guard in blue shirt and policeman’s cap walked ahead of the prisoner, and one behind him. Billy was not prepared for this sight. It was Pete the Tramp without a hat, without the spiky mustache, without the comedy. When tramps came to the house and asked for a meal, Billy’s mother always fed them, and gave them coffee with milk. Now he knew why. Billy and Martin followed the procession. The tramp dragged his feet, slouched, shuffled on fallen arches, or maybe on stumps with toes frozen and gone. Billy kept his father’s dirty gray hair in sight. He did not remember hair on his father, he remembered a cap.
The white-haired man who had sniffed at them turned from the large ledger in which he was writing. Billy remembered seeing the man only last month at Foley’s pit in Troy, handling fighting cocks for Patsy McCall. His name was Kelly and he was a hell of a handler.