On the Waterfront (42 page)

“I only hope I have a chance to follow through on it,” Father Barry said.

“So do I,” Father Donoghue said. “I like your ideas for a control commission to screen out the criminal types, and for supervised, honest elections and regular, open meetings for the union locals, a rotation plan for the hiring, to get rid of the shape-up, a credit-union system to run off the loan sharks, and protection for the older workers, seniority, I think you call it, and a welfare fund. You see, Pete, I have read it pretty closely. I thought it was really excellent and I’m convinced our Catholic longshoremen should be encouraged to work along these lines. But Pete, again, the way you went about it was too far and too fast.”

“But Father, I had to move fast. The clock was running out.”

“Pete, if you had only cleared your plan with me I might have been able to buck it up to the Bishop and I think I could have talked it through. Instead he was hit cold with all those headlines about the ‘waterfront priest.’ Don’t you see what you did by rushing ahead?”

“I guess I did set myself up for a sucker punch,” Father Barry said. “Well, it was a gamble, and in a way I lost. But, Father, if anything ever does come out of this waterfront mess, at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing the stuff we believe in is getting across to some of our boys here in the harbor.”

“Son, you’re going to have lots of satisfaction. And lots of heartache. You’ve got a strong sense of justice and a strong conscience. That’s good, as long as you don’t defy authority. Some of the best men we had in all twenty centuries were in a lot of hot water trying to adjust conscience to authority. Yet we need both, a hunger for justice and acceptance of obedience.”

“It’s the acceptance of some of those other things that I find it tough to go along with,” Father Barry said.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Father Donoghue said, “I happen to know the Bishop is planning to have a long talk with the Monsignor. He thinks O’Hare has overstepped his bounds the other way in condoning waterfront evils. So don’t think too harshly of our Bishop. He may think you’re a little too chesty and want to cool you off a little bit. But he’s very much interested in the idea that we may be allowing our waterfront communicants to stray from the Church because we’re not taking a firm enough moral position in defense of their God-given rights. Believe me, Pete, you’ve stirred up some embers here that we’re going to keep burning. I want you to fan those embers, if at the same time you learn how to control the fire all round you—and in you.”

Rising, the Pastor put his arms out to Father Barry and embraced him. “I see it’s time for me to work on my sermon for High Mass on Sunday. God be with you, Pete.”

“God bless you, Father.”

Back in his room, Father Barry fingered the rosary given to him by the girl he used to go steady with in high school, and about whom he wondered now and then. She reminded him just a little bit of Katie Doyle. Katie had been in to see him before she left for Marygrove. She had changed; she was older; there was less of the onward-Christian-soldier, I-want-it-to-be-just-as-it-is-in-the-Missal. She had embarrassed him by apologizing for expecting him to solve everything overnight. Now she had had a taste of the complexities, a bitter taste. Now she knew that the sins of avarice and theft and murder in Bohegan were not to be shucked off like a snake’s skin, but had infected the body, deeply.

“Katie, I hope you never lower the fine flame of your indignation,” he had told her. “Even when you learn as you have learned that it’s going to burn you a little bit too.”

They had looked at each other a moment, and he had known that both of them were thinking of Terry and the way evil often intertwined itself with good, and the way life had of rubbing some of the quality of one onto the other.

It still hurt him to realize that Runty Nolan and Terry Malloy actually had been torn from this world and hurled into the next. Day after day he had tortured himself with the question of their sacrifice. Had human life been given in vain, and had he been worthy to ask this terrible price of them before weighing more carefully the value of their offerings? I took their lives in my hands, he prayed. I stumbled upon these two most unlikely of martyrs, an old, tough-flint of a bar-fly and a fringe hoodlum. I took these two, and, right or wrong, I made them dare as St. Ignatius dared when he chose the Coliseum, saying: “I am God’s wheat: I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts that I may end as the pure bread of Christ.”

From his desk Father Barry picked up the preliminary report just issued by the Crime Commission and flipped a page: “Criminals whose records belie any suggestion that they can be reformed have monopolized controlling positions in the longshoremen’s union; under their regime narcotics traffic, loansharking, short-ganging, payroll phantoms, shake-down and extortion in all forms—and the brutal ultimate of murder—now flourish and continue unchecked.”

Continue unchecked.
In Father Barry’s mind those words ticked on:
Continue unchecked.
Tom McGovern was untouched. Everybody knew his word still thundered on the docks. Oh, yes, he had been passed over for the Order of Saint Gregory, and Father Barry took some slight satisfaction from that, but he was still a Catholic paying his own men less than the going rate and hiring gunmen to keep them in line. Still a Catholic…

Had the mountain strained to bring forth a mouse? And was the mouse poor Weeping Willie Givens? Yes, it’s true, Willie was under indictment for misappropriation of union funds. He had resigned, tearfully, avowing his concern for his beloved longshoremen to the end. Willie had been retired on half his salary, and the new president was Matt Bailey. He was fifteen years younger than Willie and not quite as paunchy. For years he had been president of the checkers’ union that worked jowl by jowl with Willie. And, of course, for Tom McGovern. That reform was the laugh of the waterfront, especially since the new Fat Cat was known as Smiling Matt Bailey. Father Barry could almost hear Runty laughing, “So now we got a smiler for a cry-baby an’ it’s the same difference.”

In Bohegan, it was true, the hearings had shaken up City Hall, and Mayor Burke had just announced that he would not stand for re-election. That meant the end of Donnelly too. There was talk of a new reform ticket. Interstate had been fined five thousand dollars for commercial bribery and had lost its license to operate on the docks. But it had quickly rebounded as the National Stevedore Company. An Interstate vice-president had resigned and a pier superintendent had been given a six months’ sentence, suspended.

But to Father Barry the most mystifying fact of all was that Johnny Friendly had been tried merely for perjury and given a year in the State Prison. He’d be back in seven or eight months, Moose and Pop had told the priest. Meanwhile everybody in Bohegan was in on the secret that he’d go right on running his docks from inside the pen.

The national labor federation had expelled the longshoremen’s union as “hopelessly gangridden,” but the Johnny Friendlys and the Jerry Benasios, with the tacit support of Tom McGovern and the shipping association, hung on to those docks. Longshoremen like Moose and Pop and Jimmy and Luke, in nearly every part of the harbor, were trying to buck them. But they were still on the outside looking in.

Just the same, Father Barry’s handful had grown to a hundred. And for each one who showed up at the meetings there could easily be ten more ready to follow, when they thought they had a chance. I call that progress, the Pastor had said. Maybe so. Maybe progress was to be measured not in hundred-yard dashes, as Pete had tried to do, but in mere centimeters, painfully crawling forward.

Restlessly, Father Barry went down into the church to meditate, to examine his own conscience, since he was finding so much fault with others’, and to ask for guidance. The small church was empty, but in the flickering, shadowed light of the altar and the shrine candles it seemed very large, and Pete Barry, on his knees in front of his favorite Saint Xavier, seemed very small. If there was any figure in the whole great gallery who would understand and intercede, it was the hollow-cheeked Basque who administered to the souls of the 7,000 Paravas pearl divers with a loving heart while venting his rage on the baptized Portuguese who swindled them out of the harvest of pearls for which they had risked their lives and health in the depths of the oyster beds.

That’s the kind of saint Pete Barry wished and prayed he had the courage to be, the spiritual courage to be, a man who didn’t merely intone “and the last shall be first,” but lived it, dangerously, every day.

He knelt for an hour, and his mind wandered, but the intensity of his feeling remained concentrated. He prayed for his friends, and he prayed for his enemies, and he prayed for the dead, and he prayed for surcease from the stalking evil of Bohegan. And finally he prayed for forgiveness for hating Tom McGovern and Willie Givens and Johnny Friendly. At the same time he was sure his Xavier would like to see Johnny Friendly get more than eight or nine easy months. And greedy merchant princes and worldly princes of the Church could—and did—make even a saint lose his temper. O Xavier, worn out with too much living and loving at an age when lesser men are coming into their prime, make me see so that I may make others see that our Church is not for the O’Hares and McGoverns taking the easy way, but a Church that suffers as Christ suffers when they crucify Him on a tenement roof or in the hold or on the stringpiece or in the stinking Jersey marshes.

It was midnight. Father Barry listened to the familiar tone of the chimes. He wondered if he was going to be able to function within the Pastor’s benevolent but somewhat limiting restraints. For a moment he felt a twinge of self-pity. Then he caught hold of himself. Hang on, Pete. What have you got to beef about? What was the name of that old Cardinal who said, “If you say nothing and do nothing, you will escape criticism”?

Hell, he hadn’t been accused of heresy as Saint Basil was before Pope Damascus. He wasn’t condemned as a heretic and then deposed as Saint Cyril was by a council of forty bishops. He wasn’t accused of witchcraft like Saint Athanasius. Or burned like Saint Joan. And he hadn’t been charged with vile immorality like Saint John Chrysostom. No, and he hadn’t been reviled and rejected by the Holy See like Saint Joseph Calasanctius who died in disgrace in Rome at the age of ninety-two. And he wasn’t thrown into a windowless prison, persecuted by Pope Clement and deprived of the consolation of saying Mass, like the great Father Ricci Xavier’s noble successor. Somehow those bearers of the cross survived all that, or their memories did, and waited for the Church to catch up with them. And the Church had been richer for their daring.

Solaced, he made the sign of the Cross, rose and genuflected. Then he walked out of the church and crossed the street into Pulaski Park. Now the early winter sleet had given way to snow and there was a white hush over the park. It seemed for a moment as if all the turmoil of Bohegan had finally come to rest. The snow was falling softly, a pure white cloak under which the ugliness of Bohegan might hide—for a little while.

Peering through the grille work at the far end of the park, Father Barry looked out across the majestic waterway of the Hudson to the most powerful harbor city in the history of the world. From the darkened faces of the buildings on the opposite shore, ten thousand yellow eyes twinkled and stared back at him. Having eyes, they see not, he thought to himself. Hang on, Pete, inch along.

Down river a ship sounded its whistle in a melancholy, echoing farewell as it eased down the Narrows. Slowly, Father Barry turned away from the old North River—Johnny Friendly’s silent partner still—and walked back to answer some of those letters in the rectory.

New Hope, Pennsylvania, July, 1954

Princeton, New Jersey, April, 1955

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a celebrated screenwriter, novelist, playwright, and journalist best remembered for his classic novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
(1941) and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for
On the Waterfront
. Schulberg was the first major American novelist to grow up in Hollywood, a town with which he had a complex and sometimes contentious relationship.

Born Seymour Wilson Schulberg on March 27, 1914, in New York City, Schulberg and his family relocated to Los Angeles a few years later. His father, Ben “B. P.” Schulberg, became one of the most prominent movie producers in the 1920s and ’30s, so Schulberg grew up among movie stars and powerful studio executives. His mother, Adeline Jaffe, was a talent agent who later became one of the first female literary agents. Both of Schulberg’s parents valued authors and literature, and cultivated Schulberg’s literary ambitions throughout his childhood. More than acting, though, Schulberg revered boxing; his father introduced him to the sport and to some of the era’s champions. His fascination with boxing would influence much of his writing career, including his 1947 novel
The Harder They Fall.

Schulberg attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1936. He then worked in Hollywood as a writer (collaborating with F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others) while working on his first novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?
Once it was published, the book set off shockwaves with its frank exposure of the dark side of Hollywood’s golden era. The novel angered real-life industry heads and damaged his own father’s career. Schulberg was fired from his scriptwriting job with Samuel Goldwyn and nearly blacklisted in the filmmaking business.

During World War II, Schulberg worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. In 1945, director John Ford tasked him to help assemble film evidence of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to be used during the Nuremberg trials. This was the first time that film evidence was used in a trial to convict. He compiled footage shot by German filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, who was arrested by Schulberg himself and brought to Nuremberg to help aid the prosecution.

In 1951, Schulberg was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his former involvement with the Communist Party. Though he had been a member of the party for six years, he had quit after a bitter disagreement with party members who wanted to vet his script for
What Makes Sammy Run?
. During his testimony, he identified several fellow Hollywood figures as Communists. The HUAC trials caused another rift between Schulberg and the film industry, with many feeling that his testimony betrayed friends and colleagues.