On the Waterfront (14 page)

Terry shifted his position, finding the thought uncomfortable. Why couldn’t he just squat here and enjoy the big circle his flock was making over the river and the rooftops instead of thinking … Jeez, with a head on him like a five-day-old watermelon, this was no day for thinking. Just lean back into the tar paper and look up into the cold sky, think of the races he’d win and the easy-come goof-job he’d have in the loft. Think of Melva, the neighborhood’s favorite teen-age cooze, a jazzed-up kitten still fleshy with baby fat yet to be rubbed off, blue-jeaned Melva with “Danger—T.N.T.” proudly crayoned on her sweatshirt over her fat young teats, a funned-up member of the young ladies auxiliary of the Golden Warriors, with her gold-and-purple Golden Warriorette blazer.

Yea, man, that’s better, forget last night and think of all the good, young loose stuff around, and of those beauteeful homing bastards, and eight hours of two-thirty-four per for goofing on the coffee bags. Think of the things you can look to steal, Spanish brandy and French perfume and high-grade steaks from ships’ stores, Fundador and Chanel and tender filets, and tender Melva and twenty bucks a day for studying the endlessly fascinating female form in the art magazines like
Girlie
and
Scanties,
that was the life, the old sporting life. “Sha-boom, sha-boom, tatata-tatata-tatata-tatata-tatata …” Terry hummed a not-bad imitation of the Crew Cuts.

“Get him. Eddie Fisher without talent,” came a fresh voice from around a corner of the coop. It was young Billy Conley, the ace man of the Golden Warriors and, in the informal but intricate feudalism of the Bohegan dock country, Terry’s vassal.

“Whasamatter, you don’ like the Crew Cuts?” Terry demanded.

“Sure I like the Crew Cuts”—it came back like a ball off the stoop—“but I aint heard ’em lately.”

“Ha ha,” Terry said derisively.

“ ’Samatter, you roll outa the wrong side of the bed this mornin’?”

“I didn’ roll outa no bed this mornin’, tha’s the matter,” Terry explained.

“Man, ya look like an unmade bed yaself,” Billy said. “What ya doin’ up so early anyway?” He used the
oi
sound that was known as River Street brogue.

Terry regarded the question sourly. “None o’ ya goddamn business.”

Billy was offended. “Well, gee whiz, ya don’ hafta blow ya stack about it!”

“I come up here early becuz I wanted t’ come up here early and nothin’ else,” Terry insisted.

“Jeez, whatta ya wanna do, make a Federal case?” Billy was indignant. His lord and master turning on him. “Fa nuttin’,” he’d be telling his Golden Warrior buddies in a little while, “he toined on me fa nuttin’.”

Billy reached under the raised coop to pull out the tin of scratch feed. It was his job to pour the scratch grain into the feeder every morning. Terry paid him a quarter for this chore, which kept this fourteen-year-old retainer in cigarettes.

“ ’S all done,” Terry called. “I took care of ’em myself already.”

“Jeez, you was really on the ball this mornin’. A reg’lar early bird.” In Boheganese it was “oily boid.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Terry wanted to cut the kid off. “I figgered I was up anyway, so what the hell.”

Billy looked at him wonderingly. Terry Malloy, whose proud picture in fighting togs had a place of honor in the Golden Warrior’s rooftop headquarters, was acting kind of funny. The boy nodded toward the edge of the next roof. “Jeez, I wouldna wanted t’ be that Doyle bum last night makin’ the high dive inta no water.” He shook his head with a nasty little laugh. “Would you, Terry?”

“Christ, what a gum-beater,” Terry said irritably. “Yatata-yatata.”

“Jo-Jo’s lucky,” Billy went on. “He saw it land. It busted Mrs. McLaverty’s clothesline. He swears it bounced once, this high, like a ball. How about that? I think he’s a goddamn liar.”

“Will ya fer chrizzake knock it off?” Terry raised his voice.

“Jeez, what is this, Russia? I can’t say nuttin’ around here no more,” Billy protested.

The flock followed Swifty in a sharply banked turn that carried them within twenty feet of the roof, then up again in a graceful, sweeping circle. Terry’s preoccupied frown changed to a grin of admiration as his head panned with them.

“Those bastards really got it made,” he said wistfully, mostly to himself. “Eat all they want, fly around like crazy, sleep together every night ’n raise gobs of squabs.”

“You aint got it so bad yourself,” Billy said. “A big in with Johnny Friendly and a free ticket when you take in the fights down in Newark. An’ all the broads in the neighborhood puttin’ out for ya becuz ya name was up in lights in the Garden …”

“Once,” Terry reminded him.

“What’s the diff?” Billy continued. “The broads all a time wantin’ t’ feel ya muscle.” He made a suggestive, grabbing gesture for Terry’s crotch and laughed evilly. “You aint got it so bad.”

“Jesus, get the talking machine,” Terry said, vaguely troubled. He hitched up his dark corduroys and cuffed Billy playfully, but hard enough to make the kid’s eyes tear a little. On the river an early-morning ferry hooted at a slow-moving train of coal barges. Terry turned his thoughts to the river and the morning shape. “I’m gonna go down t’ the coffeepot n’ grab me some sinkers ’n coffee. You c’n clean out the water pans.”

Terry winked and jabbed the air twice, sharply, in a breezy gesture of farewell. He half-turned as he entered the sheltered stairway leading down into the building.

“An’ don’ be spillin’ no water on the floor now. I don’ wan’ them birds t’ catch cold.”

For a moment Terry’s glance was drawn to the adjoining roof where Joey’s birds were hopping around and making anxious sounds for their breakfast. “Hey, ya might as well toss some scratch over there in that other coop too,” Terry called casually.

“Hey, that’s an idea,” Billy responded. “You c’n prob’bly add ’em to yours.”

“Just do like I told ya,” Terry commanded. Then he squared his shoulders and started down the steps in a rapid, rope-skipping rhythm.

On the second flight down Terry was moving so fast that he almost collided with Father Barry who was hurrying up the stairs.

“Look where ya goin’,” Terry grumbled and hurried on.

The priest hardly noticed him. His eyes were red-rimmed from his sleepless night. It had been a night of pacing and reading, of meditation and prayer. He had thumbed the works of the Church scholars from the dark-skinned Augustine through Aquinas to the social thinking of Pius XI and Maritain. He had thought hard about the martyrs, Paul, the first Ignatius, Stephen, St. John of the Cross and Thomas More, fierce, unbending men. And the saints of mercy and service, Francis Xavier, an old favorite, and the other self-denying Francis, barefoot from Assisi, walking the hard road. St. Jude crossed his mind, and Vincent de Paul.

He had heard the chimes in the town hall strike three and as the final tone burrowed back into the silence of the night he had thrown himself into bed in his shorts because he had a six-o’clock Mass to say. But in the darkness he heard again the Doyle girl’s clean, angry, slightly childish voice:
Was there ever a saint who hid in the church?
Was there, indeed? He thought again of his slight, shabby-looking, large-minded Francis plunged into Goa in the pagan East, who had first to brave his way through the graft and intrigue and moral chaos not of the Asiatics, but of the European Christians greedy for temporal riches, mocking Christ in every covetous breath. No saint hiding in the church was that boy. Pete Barry, at Fordham, had written his master’s thesis on the good-looking selfless little Basque aristocrat who had no patience with the Portuguese Catholic profiteers and their worldly priests, but who had the patience of Job and Jesus when it came to the beggars and slaves, whores and landless fanners, the city poor and foul-mouthed sailors with whom occasionally he sat down to a game of cards on the docks.

Father Barry sat up and groped for the light and lit a cigarette to help himself think more clearly. Then he got out of bed and reached into his few shelves of books for his worn copies of the letters of Francis Xavier, with bits of yellowing paper calling attention to pages he had underlined and mulled over as a seminarian. The parishioners of St. Timothy’s hardly knew this side of him. They saw a young, gruff, ruddy-faced Irishman who sometimes ran through his mass too quickly and who didn’t seem to have in him any of the spirituality that made the Pastor, Father Donoghue, an impressively religious figure in the parish. “That Father Barry is about as holy as a sack of flour,” had been Runty Nolan’s first impression, and when it got back to Pete he chuckled to his fellow curate, Father Harry Vincent, “I’m glad he said flour. It could’ve been worse.”

But what Father Barry had in him, held in check since he came to St. Tim’s, was a live memory for what it meant to be poor, the humiliations his mother had endured when the social-service workers came poking around, the way the crushing poverty of the less fortunate, less well-connected on the waterfront could depersonalize and degrade. He had vowed in his last year of theology never to let himself forget this, and to work as He had labored among the lowest of the low.

Well, had he welched on himself? Not exactly. He was here at St. Timothy’s on Pulaski Street because the Bishop had granted him his preference for a slum section of Bohegan. But in his second year a certain complacency, some of Father Vincent’s prudence, had rubbed off on him. Damned if Bohegan wasn’t in the same hypocritical, inhuman, therefore unCatholic, slough as Goa when the young Xavier disembarked there four centuries ago. Only the difference is you haven’t got the guts, the Xaverian guts, to speak up about it. Okay, Pete, you hear that,
Father
Barry, and if so what’re you gonna do about it?

In the book he was holding he paused over one of the letters he had marked a few years earlier. He got back into bed to read it, for the Pastor was stingy (or, as he and Father Vincent jokingly said, pious) with the coal. The rectory was always ten degrees colder than comfort. But the bed was warm and the pillow, which his mother had made specially for him, softly cradled his head. The words floated before his eyes. Too much reading of that small print in the breviary. What was he doing all this for anyway? This wasn’t the seminary; there was no longer any need to grind away like a schoolboy. His alarm was set for five-thirty, allowing just enough time for a wash, a quick shave and a morning prayer before the six-o’clock Mass. One of these days he’d be a pastor and make his curates say that pesky six o’clock! Then guilt grabbed hold of him and pulled him out of bed. He had chosen the toughest and easiest job in the world. Not so different from the Army, really, with its infantry platoon leaders, its front-trench fighters, its high-level strategists and its headquarters politicians.

Pete Barry had thrown off the comforting blankets and lowered himself to his knees on the cold floor beside his bed. Using the bed for a desk, he studied the words of the penetrating Xavier, woven into a letter addressed to a young priest about to take up his apostolic life in India four hundred years ago. The words had not only been underlined but annotated: even so they came back to Pete Barry now as something fresh and new:

When in the sacred tribunal of penance you have heard all that your penitents have prepared to confess their sins, do not at once think that all is done, and that you have no further duty to discharge. You must go on further to inquire, and by means of questions to rake out the faults which ought to be known and to be rendered, but which escape the penitents themselves on account of their ignorance.

Ask them what profits they make. How and whence? What is the system that they follow in barter and loans, and in the whole matter of security for contracts?

You will generally find that everything is defiled with usurious contracts; those very persons have got together the greater part of their money by sheer rapine, who nevertheless assert themselves so confidently to be pure from all contagion of unjust gain; having, as they said, the true testimony of a conscience that reprehends them in nothing. Indeed, some persons’ consciences have become so hardened that they have either no sense at all or very little sense of the presence of vast heaps of robberies which they have gathered into their bosoms.

“Vast heaps of robberies …” Father Barry read on with a mounting sense of awe and excitement. Here was a priest who had gone from Spain to Paris, from Paris to Portugal, from Portugal to India, from India to Japan and the coast of China, a priest whose church was the wide, wide world, a priest who didn’t take every kneeling Catholic for a Christian and who set out to reconvert by word and deed the paganized, oppressive, lip-serving Christians-in-name, a priest who lived and suffered the knowledge that Jesus had many lovers of the kingdom of heaven but precious few bearers of his cross. Father Barry read on:

… Interrogate all these people by what means they grow rich on the discharge and income of their office. If they are shy of telling you, search and scent out in every way and the most mildly that you can. You will not have been long on the hunt before you come on sure tracks which will lead you to the very dens and lairs of their frauds and monopolies, through which an unconsiderable number of men divert to their own private hoard emoluments belonging to the public …

“Search and scent out in every way …” What a hep kid that little Xavier was! Get the way he knows all the tricks of the trade, the whole stinkin’ set-up, never letting himself get boxed into the argument that talk of profiteering or racketeering has no place in the pulpit or the confession booth. This is no accident, no sportive growth, Father Barry was thinking; it’s one of the pillars of our Faith, as our Holy Father was saying just the other day, and not the least of them either. If Man is the only creature on earth created in God’s image, then by God you’re thumbing your nose at Him every time you stomp on the dignity of that creation.

Still in his shorts, with his knees and arms reddening from the cold, but with excitement as always able to anesthetize discomfort, Father Barry wondered if the girl was saying more than she knew.
Hiding in the church.
It had hit him like a slingload of steel ingots. In a couple of head-spinning hours he had ranged nearly two thousand years, from the Savior to the social genius of Pius XII and back to his catholic Catholic Francis X: