How exciting it had been to buy all the furniture new (nothing much from where they’d lived before had been worth hanging on to); solid mission oak with straight, unadorned lines — Mike did not care for the fancy new veneers — and her all-white sanitary kitchen, with wood-burning stove, was efficient and modern, a homemaker’s dream.
The house and their simple yet not inexpensive furnishings reflected those within. Her handsome dark-haired husband (Black Irish, he was) was, for the most part, a serious, dignified man, whose finer qualities emerged in the bedroom, by way of his tenderness, and here in the living room, by way of his love for their son.
Their living room — where she sat in a comfortable, commodious mohair upholstered armchair, suitable to her current size, swollen feet propped up on an ottoman — was as good an indication as any of the devotion Michael O’Sullivan, Sr., felt for Michael O’Sullivan, Jr. The braided carpet on their parquet floor harbored an elaborate electric train layout, the finest Lionel had to offer, from trains and track to signal towers, tunnels, depots, and ticket offices.
With his hat literally in his hand, her husband had begged his wife’s permission to turn their formal living room into a train yard, “for just a little while.” Young Michael was a precocious three, and though she suspected “a little while” might well prove to be months or even years, Annie had no objections to an activity that would keep their little man’s energetic hands, feet, and mind happily occupied.
Not that her son had ever been a problem. Michael, Jr., had an active mind, and loved to play outside with neighborhood boys and girls; he was in general obedient to both his parents — it was as if he’d been born respectful, or perhaps the example of his stoic but not unkind father had sunk in, early on.
About the only battles that ever occurred were at the kitchen table — her boy was a fussy eater. On the other hand, when meals were served in the dining room, the formality of the surroundings encouraged angelic behavior, even in the presence of brussel sprouts.
Right now Michael was having his afternoon nap. He didn’t fuss about it — though the boy did not yet read, he loved books, and would page through picture books (Peter Rabbit a particular favorite, and L. Frank Baum’s Mother Goose) until he fell asleep, whether for his nap or at night.
As for the trains, she took no greater pleasure than to sit nearby with a book or a magazine (neither crochet nor needle work interested her), classical music playing on their new console radio, while father and son crouched and scurried and tended around the edges of their railroad yard. The eyes of both her “boys” flashed with a childish glee that she saw often in her son but rarely in her husband.
She knew her husband, Mike, adored her; he placed her on a pedestal, though he was not shy about removing her from that perch, behind closed doors. A deep passion ran beneath the surface of this stoic man.
The former Annie O’Hanlon had known her husband for several years before they married. He had come to the Tri-Cities from New York, where his late father had been a railroad man; he’d heard that John Deere was hiring, and he landed a job as a shop sweeper. She’d met him through church activities at Sacred Heart, and for a time Mike had courted her best friend, Katie O’Meara.
Before long Annie and Mike had become a couple — Katie understood, she’d sensed the attraction between them — and they were talking of marriage when he got swept away into the war by the wave of patriotism encompassing the country. In fact, they’d been together, on the porch of her parents’ shanty, when the band had come marching by.
Literally.
The band was made up of college boys — twenty-one members of the Augustana marching band, and they’d enlisted as a unit in the 6th Illinois Regiment. They played a final concert, then paraded through town performing martial marches, from Rock Island to the train station, high-stepping right through Greenbush.
Mike enlisted the next day.
He had returned a hero with a glittering array of medals and a somber, more adult presence that both thrilled and intimidated Annie; he’d been a boy when he left, but things overseas had turned him into a man — things he made clear he would never discuss with her...
Shortly after Mike’s return, Mr. Looney had invited him up to his house on the hill, in the Longview Loop area — Rock Island’s Knob Hill, rife with doctors, lawyers, and old money. Mr. Looney lived on Twentieth Street in a brooding stone mansion in Highland Park, a far cry from Greenbush.
Annie did not know what Mr. Looney had said to Michael, other than a job had been offered. At first Michael called it a chauffeur position, later referring to it as a bodyguard; occasionally, in passing, he called himself Mr. Looney’s “lieutenant,” as if he were still a soldier.
Shortly after, Annie and Mike had married at Sacred Heart. Over the next several years, her husband’s responsibilities and his position grew in the Looney organization. They were invited to events at the Looney home (Mrs. Looney had died in the flu epidemic in 1914, and he lived alone with his son, Connor; two daughters were away at convent school).
And before long the money grew, as well — first the O’Sullivans had a car; then this lovely home of theirs. And along the way, they had their son, Michael, Jr.
Of course there were those who shunned the O’Sullivans for their affiliation with John Looney. Briefly the family attended St. Joseph’s, near the courthouse, but turned-up noses and whispered remarks among these good Christians put them off, and they returned to the simple church where they had ties.
Many in the Tri-Cities, and not just the Irish, considered the lanky, mustached, handsome John Looney to be a living folk hero, an Irish American rebel and entrepreneur, battling the powers that be. A self-schooled lawyer, Mr. Looney had run for the state legislature as a Democrat but was defeated through trickery by corrupt opponents; he had looked around at the way his people were treated in the Tri-Cities, it was said, and swore he’d provide his own government outside the system for these disenfranchised souls. He would see to it that “Micks” like Annie’s husband got jobs, if not in his own enterprises, then at the area factories, where he had influence.
Some had no real opinion about John Looney — he was just a colorful character who dressed in black like a riverboat gambler and had a flair for theatrics (performing as Irish Catholic martyr Robert Emmet in a one-man play). And of course, he was the man who helped the good citizens of the Tri-Cities skirt a bad law, the Eighteenth Amendment, seeing to it a fellow could have a beer... which many decent people considered a public service.
But still others saw Looney as, simply, a gangster.
Before they’d moved to this big house, Annie had once risked speaking to Michael about his working for Mr. Looney. She did not refer directly to the bootlegging, brothels, and gambling that were as much a part of John Looney’s empire as his newspaper, the Rock Island News. Nor did she speak of the pistol (brought home with him from the Great War) that Mike carried beneath his shoulder.
All she’d said, serving him coffee in the kitchen after supper, was, “You’re respected, Mike. You did your people right proud, over there. You could work for anybody.”
“I work for Mr. Looney,” he’d said. He lifted the filled coffee cup and said, “Thank you, dear.”
She sat. “Some say Mr. Looney makes his money in sinful ways.”
Mike had given her a hard look — almost cold. Certainly his words chilled her: “We don’t question how Mr. Looney makes his money. It’s not our place.”