The McCalls’ loss intensified Martin’s own. But where his was merely doleful, theirs was potentially tragic. Trouble. People he knew, sometimes his kin, deeply in trouble, was what had often generated his inexplicable visions. Ten years without this kind of divination, now suddenly back: the certainty Chick would call; the bizarre bedside visitor heralding the unknown; the death of Scotty followed by the kidnapping of Charlie. Coincidental trouble.
The inexplicable had first appeared a quarter century ago in late October, 1913, when, fresh from a six-month journalistic foray in England and Ireland, Martin found himself in Albany, walking purposefully but against logic north on North Pearl Street, when he should have been walking west on State Street toward the Capitol, where he had an appointment to interview the new governor, a namesake, Martin H. Glynn, an Albany editor, politician, and orator interested in Ireland’s troubles. But a counterimpulse was on him and he continued on Pearl Street to the Pruyn Library, where he saw his cousin, a fireman with steamer eight, sitting on the family wagon, the reins of the old horse sitting loosely on his knees. He was wearing his knitted blue watch cap, a familiar garment to Martin. As their eyes met, the cousin smiled, lifted a pistol from his lap, pointed it at the horse, then turned it to his right temple and pulled the trigger. He died without further ado, leaving the family no explanation for his act, and was smiling still when Martin caught the reins of the startled horse and reached his cousin’s side.
Nothing like that happened to Martin again until 1925, the year he published his collection of short stories. But he recognized the same irrational impulse when he was drawn, without reason, to visit the lawyer handling his father’s libel suit against an Albany newspaper, which had resurrected the old man’s scandal with Melissa. Martin found the lawyer at home, in robust health, and they talked of Martin’s father, who at that point was living in New York City. Two hours after their talk the lawyer died of a heart attack walking up Maiden Lane, and the task of finding a new lawyer for his father fell to Martin.
That same year Martin tuned in the radio at mid-morning, an uncharacteristic move, and heard of the sinking of the excursion steamer Sweethearts in the Hudson River below Kingston. He later learned that a girl he once loved had gone down with the boat. He began after this to perceive also things not related to trouble. He foresaw by a week that a Times-Union photographer would win six thousand dollars in the Albany baseball pool. He was off by only one day in his prediction of when his father would win the libel suit. He knew a love affair would develop between his wife’s niece from Galway and an Albany bartender, two months before the niece arrived in Albany. He predicted that on the day of that love’s first bloom it would be raining, a thunderstorm, and so it was.
Martin’s insights took the shape of crude imagery, like photographs intuited from the radio. He came to consider himself a mystical naturalist, insisting to himself and to others that he did not seriously believe in ghosts, miracles, resurrection, heaven, or hell. He seasoned any account of his beliefs and his bizarre intuition with a remark he credited to his mother: There’s no Santa Claus and there’s no devil. Your father’s both. He dwelled on his visions and found them comforting, even when they were false and led him nowhere and revealed nothing. He felt they put him in touch with life in a way he had never experienced it before, possessor of a power which not even his famous and notorious father, in whose humiliating shadow he had lived all his years, understood. His father was possessed rather by concrete visions of the Irish in the New World, struggling to throw off the filth of poverty, oppression, and degradation, and rising to a higher plane of life, where they would be the equals of all those arrived Americans who manipulated the nation’s power, wealth, and culture. Martin was bored with the yearnings of the immigrant hordes and sought something more abstract: to love oneself and one’s opposite. He preferred personal insight to social justice, though he wrote of both frequently in his column, which was a confusion of radicalism, spiritual exploration, and foolery. He was a comedian who sympathized with Heywood Broun, Tom Mooney, and all Wobblies, who drank champagne with John McCormack, beer with Mencken, went to the track with Damon Runyon, wrote public love letters to Marlene Dietrich whenever her films played Albany, and who viewed America’s detachment from the Spanish Civil War as an exercise in evil by omission.
He also wrote endlessly on a novel, a work he hoped would convey his version of the meaning of his father’s scandalous life. He had written twelve hundred pages, aspiring to perhaps two hundred or less, and could not finish it. At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He seriously valued almost nothing he wrote, except for the unfinished novel.
He was viewed by the readers of the Times-Union, which carried his column five days a week, as a mundane poet, a penny-whistle philosopher, a provocative half-radical man nobody had to take seriously, for he wasn’t quite serious about himself. He championed dowsing and ouija boards and sought to rehabilitate Henry James, Sr., the noted Albanian and Swedenborgian. He claimed that men of truest vision were, like James, always considered freaks, and he formed the International Brotherhood of Crackpots by way of giving them a bargaining agent, and attracted two thousand members.
His column was frequently reprinted nationally, but he chose not to syndicate it, fearing he would lose his strength, which was his Albany constituency, if his subject matter went national. He never wrote of his own gift of foresight.
The true scope of that gift was known to no one, and only his family and a few friends knew it existed at all. The source of it was wondered at suspiciously by his Irish-born wife, who had been taught in the rocky wastes of Connemara that druids roamed the land, even to this day.
The gift left Martin in 1928 after his fortieth birthday debauch with Melissa, the actress, his father’s erstwhile mistress, the woman who was the cause of the paternal scandal. Martin returned home from the debauch, stinking of simony, and severely ill with what the family doctor simplistically diagnosed as alcoholic soak. Within a week Martin accurately sensed that his mystical talent was gone. He recuperated from the ensuing depression after a week, but rid himself of the simoniacal stink only when he acceded to his wife’s suggestion, and, after a decade of considering himself not only not a Catholic but not even a Christian, he sought out the priest in the Lithuanian church who spoke and understood English only primitively, uttered a confession of absurd sins (I burned my wife’s toenail parings three times) and then made his Easter Duty at Sacred Heart Church, driving out the odor of simony with ritual sacrilege.
He shoved his arms into the fresh shirt Mary Daugherty had ironed. A fresh shirt every day, Mary insisted, or you’ll blow us all out the window with the B.O. Martin pushed into his black shoes, gone gray with months of scuffs and the denial of polish, threw a tie once around his neck in a loose knot, and thrust himself into his much abused suit coat. A sughan, Mary said. You’ve made a sughan of it. Ah well, all things come alike to all, the clean and the unclean, the pressed and the unimpressed.
In the bathroom he brushed away the taste of oatmeal, splashed his face with cold water, flattened his cowlick with the hairbrush, and then salt-stepped down the stairs, saying as he sped through the kitchen: “I’ve got a hell of a story, I think, Mary. I’ll call you.”