On the Waterfront (21 page)

Entering the basement chapel, Father Barry felt as keyed up as a boxer going down the aisle to his first main event. Father Vincent, a portly man of thirty-five, followed him in. Harry Vincent admired Father Barry, but he thought he was inviting ruin to a promising career by offending the Catholic lay powers in Bohegan and around the harbor.

“Pete, you’ve got a lot on the ball,” Father Vincent said, trying to be helpful when he heard about the meeting. “Why throw your chances away on a wild-goose chase? Social justice is fine, but if I were you I’d wait until I had a little more rank. Pete, you’re looking for trouble.”

Pete Barry’s answer had been quick and impatient. “That’s right. And it’s about time.”

Harry Vincent was a good priest and a good fellow, Father Barry thought, but he had carried into the priesthood some of his father’s conception of material success-if-you-play-your-cards-right. Vincent senior had been a nominal Catholic who had been rather shocked at his son’s decision to attach himself to the hierarchy of Rome rather than to that of H. J. Vincent & Sons, chain grocery-store merchants. Harry, Jr., was determined to prove to his father the Tightness of his choice by eventually becoming a bishop. That was something H. J., Sr. could understand. Young Vincent had recognized that his colleague Pete Barry had the brains and the drive to wind up at the top, perhaps at the Chancellery—familiarly known to the younger priests as “the powerhouse”—and it disturbed him to see his associate throw away his chance on an unprecedented longshoremen’s meeting in the church. So it was with quizzical aloofness that he followed Father Barry into the sparsely attended meeting.

When Father Barry faced these men in their windbreakers and coarse wool shirts, some of them with their faces still grimy from moving cargo, he realized there was no sense of welcome, of gratitude for his effort, or even trust. Instead, he felt them looking at him through a silent, invisible wall of suspicion. He stood in front of the simple altar and looked out into the long, bare basement room which had only the most basic adornments of a place of worship. The walls were of plaster, and the lighting was dim, as though the meeting did not want to call undue attention to itself.

He began in his rapid-fire, slightly nasal, East Bohegan way: “Well, uh, I thought there’d be more of you here, but we, uh, the Romans found out what a handful could do—if it’s the right handful.”

He paused for some response, for some sign that he was on the target, but the men just looked up at him and waited. Go on, Father, play your hand, the poker faces seemed to be saying. Father Barry looked across them to Katie, in one of the rear pews. Even she seemed to be waiting, as if no longer sure what she had gotten him into.

So he plunged: “Uh, I’m just a potato eater, but isn’t it simple as one-two-three? One—the working conditions are bad. You got 40,000 men competing for less than 20,000 jobs. You’ve got a union that works against you instead of for you. Two—conditions are bad because the union is run by a mob—am I right?—and the mob does the hiring. Two-thirds of your hiring bosses have got criminal records. And three—the only way you can break the mob is to stop letting them get away with murder. When they knock off one of you they keep the rest of you in line. You’ve been letting them get away with murder.”

He looked at each one of them and saw in their faces only sullen resentment. They had come for help and his neck was way out to help them, but the waterfront silence was fathomless. Even a product of Bohegan who seemed to talk their language began to feel lost in the depths of their reticence.

“Now listen, boys,” the priest sounded angry, “if one of you will just answer one question we’d have a start. And, uh, that question is: Who killed Joey Doyle?”

He tried to catch the eyes of his listeners again, but not one of them would be trapped. Moose was staring into his big lap and Runty leaned back and pulled his chin down as if sleeping off a drunk. Luke half turned in his seat to study the bare wall and Jimmy ran one hand over the knuckles of the other in front of his face. Who killed who was a taboo question on the waterfront. Father Barry should have known that.

In the silence Father Barry had cracked a match alive to light a cigarette. He looked over his little audience angrily. By God, if he was going to get into hot water with that Monsignor O’Hare and maybe even the Bishop, he’d like a little cooperation. Father Barry thought of Sergeant Doyle’s words, “Those dock workers are funny fellows …” and threw his hook again:

“Not one of you has a line on who killed Joey Doyle?”

The silence became oppressive. The wooden pews creaked as men shifted weight self-consciously.

“I’ve got a hunch every one of you could tell us something about it,” Father Barry said.

The men pressed their lips together and their eyes avoided his face.

“All right, then answer me this,” Father Barry tried again. “How can we call ourselves Christians and protect these murderers with our silence?”

Silence seemed not only to hang in the room but to swell as if it were feeding on itself, wave on wave of silence.

“Can’t you see?” Father Barry was shouting now. “On this waterfront, in a supposedly Catholic neighborhood, murder has become a commonplace. There’s something lousy rotten on this waterfront. And the entire parish—all of you—are conspiring in it.”

His loud, harsh voice, not so different in timbre from Johnny Friendly’s, trailed away. In the silence the creaking of a door in the rear of the room was very loud. It was Terry Malloy, entering with an exaggerated rolling of his shoulders. He slumped down into the back pew just as Katie was turning to confront Jimmy.

“Jimmy Sharkey, you were Joey’s best friend. How can you just sit there and not be saying anything?”

Jimmy started confidently. “Sure, and I’ll always think of him as my best friend. But … but …” He lowered his head again and was silent, withdrawing into the group apathy again.

Katie pushed the palms of her hands against her face and shook her head slightly. Jimmy saw the gesture of futility and felt miserable, helpless, ashamed. But what could he do?

Terry Malloy was slouched in his seat, leaning back with his hands clasped behind his neck. He could not have found a more appropriate posture for the scorn, superiority and boredom he was feeling at having to oversee these proceedings. A screwball priest and a bunch of meatballs. Lousing themselves up on the waterfront so that even a crummy loan shark wouldn’t look at them. Charley would want to know their names. Hell, he didn’t like stooling for anybody, even Charley, but if these clowns were stupid enough to throw themselves into the pot, maybe they had it coming to them. Just the same, Terry wished he wasn’t here. He dreamily saw himself lying under a palm tree with a bottle of rum and a Latin broad ready to love him up like the one in the magazine. That priest should know what I’m thinkin’, he thought to himself with an inward, satisfied smile.

Runty Nolan glared across the empty rows at Terry and then muttered audibly to Moose, “Who invited him t’ this party?” Moose looked around and expressed his feelings with a big-shouldered shrug.

Terry leaned back, looking smug. He felt out of place.

“Anybody in the harbor is welcome here,” Father Barry said, rebuking Runty. Then he spoke directly to Terry.

“I’m trying to find out just what happened to Joey Doyle. Maybe you can help.”

Terry kept his hands behind his neck and shook his head slightly, still wearing the mask of scorn and boredom.

“The brother of Charley the Gent,” Runty stage-whispered to Moose. “They’ll help us get to the bottom of the river.”

Terry had been instructed not to open his mouth. But he had a strong feeling about anyone’s mentioning his brother. It was a mixture of pride and shame. So now he could not resist saying, “You better keep Charley outa this.”

Runty never could keep his trap shut. It was an irrepressible, old-country trait, like never backing away from anyone, regardless of size. “You don’t think he’d be helpful?” he turned and asked the kid.

Terry hesitated a moment and smiled at what he felt was a smart answer. “Ask him yourself, why don’t you?”

“Maybe I will,” Runty said. “One of these days.”

Terry snickered, and leaned back like a winner. “One of these days.”

Katie, half-turned in her seat, had been watching the late-comer curiously. She recognized him as the boy who had given her the work-tab after roughly blocking Pop out to grab it away from him. And now, studying his face, she remembered him from earlier days, at parochial school on Pulaski Street before she went away to Marygrove. She remembered the Sisters shaking their heads at him, forever calling him a “bad boy.” Then he had been sent away some place—a Catholic corrective school, she vaguely remembered. She had been going on thirteen then, and his swarthy, handsome, dirty, evil presence wasn’t easy to define in the haze of early adolescence. He had been a dark spot to be avoided; that was almost all Katie could remember of him.

“Now
listen!
” Father Barry snapped them back to attention. “Don’t kid me. I’ve been talkin’ to people about this thing all day. You know who the pistols are. Are you goin’ to keep still until they cut you down one by one. Are you? Are you?”

Because Nolan had spoken up, and had a reputation for guts, Father Barry took a step toward him. “Hey, Nolan, Nolan, how about you?”

“One thing you’ve got to understand, Father,” Runty said. “On the docks we’ve always been D ’n D.”

“D ’n D?” Father Barry hadn’t heard that one.

Runty nodded. “Deef ’n dumb. No matter how much we hate the torpedoes, we don’t rat.”

All the men nodded their heads or muttered an almost in- audible “Tha’s right, Father.”

Here was the nub of it, here was the code. Father Barry felt like a man trying to tear down a cemented stone barricade with his bare hands.

“Boys get smart,” he shouted. “I know you’re getting pushed around, but there’s one thing we’ve got in this country and that’s ways of fighting back. If you’ll use ’em. Like this investigation they’re trying to get going. Sure you don’t like the State butting in, I know all about that. But think of it this way, the State—which is after all only you and you and everybody else—is giving you a chance to get something out into the open that’s been festering in the dark for years and years. You stand up and testify for what you know is right and decent and democratic and Christian against what you know is wrong and evil and stinks like dead fish floating at the edge of the river. You do that and you start to make a new climate, a new soil where honest-to-God trade-unionism can start to take root for a change. Boys, break the Joey Doyle case and you begin to break the power of the mob. Break the power of the mob and you begin to see a little daylight on the kind of job security set-up you deserve down here. You say ratting. What’s ratting to them is telling the truth for you. Now can’t you see that? Can’t you see that?”

Again the same crestfallen, self-ashamed silence hung over the room. Father Barry lowered his hands, defeated. He started to raise his hands and then dropped them again in a gesture of despair. He looked over the heads of the silent men to Katie, as if to ask: Where do we go from here? She tightened the scarf around her neck and stared back at him.

Terry was leaning back with his hands still clasped behind his neck, enjoying the priest’s discomfort. He could have told this round-collar joker how the men would clam up. It made him smile to think of this bunch of losers making trouble for real men like Johnny Friendly and his brother Charley.

There was a prolonged, awkward pause after Father Barry stopped talking. Father Vincent, who had shaken his head several times with impatience, seized this moment to take over the meeting. Smiling at Father Barry, and with a benign voice, he said, “This seems to be just about all we can do at this time. I think you will agree with that, Father. And so may we close with a few words from St. Matthew, ‘Come unto me, all ye who are heavily burdened and I …’ ”

Father Vincent’s benediction was never completed. At this moment he was drowned out by an explosive wooden thunder outside on the sidewalk above the basement window level.

“Baseball bats,” Runty said. “That must be our friends.”

Everybody was on his feet. Joey Doyle was forgotten now.

“There’s a back way out through the inner courtyard,” Father Barry shouted. “You better go home in pairs. Two’s is two, you know.”

A number of men hurried to the side door to the inner courtyard.

“If they lay a hand on any of you I’ll see they go to jail, I swear it,” Father Barry shouted.

“Fat chance,” somebody grunted.

“I’m walkin’ out the front way,” Runty boasted. “Let ’em have me. I don’t hide from them bums.”

“I got a wife and kids,” Moose shouted. “If I’m laid up they don’t eat. I’m duckin’ out the back.”

“And then you better run like hell,” Jimmy Sharkey said.

Outside the pounding of baseball bats on the sidewalk rose to a frightful crescendo—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. Inside people were shouting against the din. “This way, Tim. Hey! C’mon, hurry …”

Father Barry was trying to restore order, but the group was out of his control now. Truck Amon and his goons had taken the play away from him.

“What did I tell you—sticking your neck out?” Father Vincent shouted at Father Barry. “This is a police problem. Let them try to handle it.”

“These fellers need help, Harry,” Father Barry insisted.

“Okay, okay,” Father Vincent yelled back. “I hope you’re ready for the consequences.”

Father Barry laughed. “I’m gonna go out and get those baseball bats.” But when he stepped outside, the Friendly muscle seemed to have vanished into the shadowy dampness of the night. He peered into the darkness, puzzled and disconcerted. Down the street from the park the blur of red neon lights beckoned men to drink, and to forget, to drink and to dummy up.

W
HEN FATHER BARRY RETURNED
, the basement chapel was empty. During the moment he had stepped outside, there had been a brief, charged, almost wordless meeting between Katie and Terry Malloy that had brought them together and hurried them out into the night before she could focus her mind on what was happening. Watching her, Terry had been quick to notice how she stood uncertainly at the side door, too frightened at the pounding of the bats to be able to follow Moose and Jimmy out when they had called her. In that instant of hesitation, Terry had grabbed her arm. “Not that way. C’mon, I’ll get ya out.” Obeying the rough grasp of his hand on her arm she had almost automatically started running along with him, out the back door and up the stairway to the main level, then through an emergency exit and down a fire escape that led into an alley.