Fingy Conners & The New Century Page 3

  Hannah was acquainted with other families who’d produced many children yet had not lost a single one, Tom Nunan and his Jennie for example. She thought about it constantly. Hannah concluded that she herself must somehow be to blame and pledged to never again lose another child.

  Hannah had taken to tying fresh cheesecloth weekly around all the faucet spouts to catch any errant dirt or rust that might come in through the pipes. Within the first week she was horrified to see the white cloth become almost blackened, berating herself for not taking up the precaution much earlier. She boiled water for drinking when they ran out of bottled Crystal Water. She bought a charcoal filter to improve the taste of water she used for cooking.

  The Alderman had mocked her for the extravagance of purchasing bottled water, despite her informed choice, which was supported by much recent published evidence. Annie soon insisted that they too have bottled water delivered as well. The infamous tightwad was forced to relent.

  Hannah compelled everyone in the house, even visitors, to wash their hands upon entering, and she used rubbing alcohol to daily wipe down all the doorknobs in the house, the ice box handle, the entire telephone box, the toilet seat and chain pull and all the cupboard pulls, in order to sanitize them. Within months of initiating this regimen she was rewarded by the family’s suffering from fewer colds and general ailments as a result of these novel practices. She insisted the rear windows be closed even in stifling heat to keep out the coal smoke of passing trains as they chugged by right behind the house. Lake Erie winds applied this locomotive soot directly to the exterior batten and in summer clogged the window screens so heavily as to block even the most insistent cooling lake breezes. Additionally, almost six years after Johnny’s drowning, the children were still strictly forbidden from walking anywhere close to the banks of the river or of any canal or slip or ditch, a difficult feat in a city cut with nearly as many waterways as Venice.

  “Is David okay then, Hannah? Is he sick?”

  “No, Jim, the baby’s fine. He’s playing with Junior and Nellie in the parlor as we speak, and he’s laughing. I’ll keep a close watch over him. Don’t worry. You take care of your brother. I know how to get ahold of you, so don’t fret. I promise to place a call if I need you.”

  “Okay. I’ll be home as early as I can tomorrow.”

  “Goodnight, husband,” said Hannah softly.

  “Goodnight, dear wife.”

  ...

  “Detective?” the nun’s voice softly woke him.

  “Why are you sleeping in a wooden chair? The beds are empty. Here, you can undress and sleep in a bed.”

  “Are you certain it’s all right, Sister?”

  “Of course it is.”

  The following morning Jim awoke to the rough noises of a different, older nun attending to JP, this one lacking every particle of the saintliness of the previous. She cradled a pile of clean folded sheets tightly in her arms against her breast as if expecting to ward off some imminent attack.

  “Who told you that you could sleep in a hospital bed?” Sister Mary Seraphim snapped accusingly in a nasty shout, her bitter personality undisguised.

  Jim sized her up instantly, having encountered her type all too often in the past. Jim may have been a product of the city’s public school system, but had been well versed in the reputation of some of these more monstrous nuns during the many times he had returned truants to their classes.

  “You do not speak to me in that tone, woman. Understand?” barked the policeman. “Take a civil tongue.”

  “There are rules in this hospital, sir,” she sneered, fuming officiously, “and these beds are for our patients, not for overnight guests! There is a hotel located right down the street! I’ve got better things to do than clean up after the likes of you!”

  Detective Sullivan gave her a damning look.

  “Sounds to me like you could use a good dose of what you so-called ‘Brides of Christ’ have been forbidden from ever gettin’,” sniggered the Detective, sizing her up and down for effect. “Deprivation has made you into quite a sour old crab apple, that’s evident enough. But you chose the life you did, so direct your frustrations elsewhere, lady.”

  “How dare you! I will have the director remove you from this hospital instantly!” the offended witch hollered.

  “Yes, I do well know your embittered sort. Just because you’ve attempted to disguise your true nature underneath that costume doesn’t mean the world doesn’t plainly recognize the evil beast that dwells within. You seem hardly less foul than Satan himself.”

  The nun, livid and unaccustomed to any challenge, much less open vilification, angrily shot out of the room in search of the hospital’s overseer.

  JP giggled. He may still have been in a stupor, but not so addled that he failed to recognize his brother’s ventilating the family’s shared repugnance regarding a peculiar type of nun.

  “That one’s hardly no Sister Patricia, now is she?” JP chuckled, citing a sainted nun universally revered in the First Ward.

  “Hardly. How are you doin’ there, JP? Feelin’ any better?”

  “I don’t know. Where am I, anyway?”

  “You’re still in the hospital in Hornellsville, remember? They got you on laudanum to keep the pain down, that’s why you’re so groggy.”

  “Take me home, will ya, Jimmy? I don’t like it here.”

  “We’ll just wait for the doctor, and see what he says. Okay?”

  JP didn’t respond. He’d drifted off to sleep again.

  Jim Sullivan rose and gathered his things for the long train journey back to Buffalo. He paused at the threshold to take in a departing look at his brother, making sure he was still breathing. Then he left for the depot.

  On and off thereafter JP half awoke numerous times, not at all sure of exactly where he was or why. He wasn’t positive, but he could have sworn he saw Sister Seraphim leaning over the bed that Jim had slept in, thoroughly sniffing the sheets.

  Belfast, New York

  The substances administered to deaden his pain and calm his fears had the disquieting effect upon the Alderman of producing imaginings so luminous that they seemed more authentic than real life itself. His vivid hallucinations were accompanied by a luxuriance of scents and sensations, exquisite in their nature, as well as a most welcome and miraculous disturbance—that of collecting together the beloved dead in reconciliation with the living.

  His mother Mary McGrady-Sullivan-Halloran lived and breathed once more, as if she had never departed her loving sons. She hummed her favorite ditties, tunes which by that time had almost all but faded from the Alderman’s memory while she fiddled about baking her ginger cakes and stirring her Irish stew, attending to baby Dennis. Half-brother Daniel Halloran once more smiled his famous grin, a mischievous smirk expressed as much in the asymmetric curl of his lips as in the sparkle of his crinkling eyes, a mannerism that had once lit up the First Ward like a pharos. JP witnessed Daniel rowing the perfect race in his scull, being awarded the winning trophy, then marching inland a few blocks to recite his wedding vows in a grand ceremony conducted at the foot of the altar at St. Brigid’s. There, Mary and John Sullivan looked on, beaming. The Union soldier nursed his musketball-wounded arm in a sling but otherwise appeared quite fit. The evil stepfather Peter Halloran, the dreaded ollphéist who had tortured the family for twenty years, was excised from the Alderman’s dream altogether as if he had never at all existed. Peter’s son Daniel had been reincarnated instead as a full-blooded Sullivan, the authentic progeny of the two who truly loved each other. The Alderman smiled, recalling the time when, so ashamed was Daniel, so degraded had he been by his father Peter Halloran, that for a time he listed himself in the Buffalo Directory, while still living at his father’s address, as Daniel Sullivan. Peter had become outraged over this slight, taking no responsibility for his son’s estrangement.

  ...

  Detective Jim Sullivan braced himself against the familiar jolt of suddenly walking outdoors into the cr
uel blast of sub-zero arctic winds and horizontally blowing snow. He quickly bounded away from the little hospital toward the train depot. He was worried about his brother being so far removed from the visits of family and from their encouragement, so vital for one’s speedy recovery. He looked up at the blackboard as he entered the small pot-belly stove-warmed waiting room. The train was on schedule. He checked to make sure he had his rail pass in his breast pocket. At the distant sound of the locomotive he exited, pacing anxiously to keep warm on the frigid platform as his convoy made its approach, eager now to get home and see Hannah and the kids. The temperature hovered at twenty degrees below zero. The hairs in Jim’s nose instantaneously froze solid and crackled with each draw of dry arctic air through his warm moist nostrils as he waited for the iron beast to halt.

  He climbed aboard his car and expelled a relieved sigh as the wheels began to grind laboriously forward, slipping at first on the icy rails as the engine struggled to gain traction. The ride back home was relaxing, the countryside lovely. The fierce wind had stopped and a light snow now drifted lazily toward earth. He napped on and off as the car gently rocked back and forth.

  The clouds parted. The morning sun shone brightly on the newly fallen bone-dry snow covering the landscape. Trains passing each other in opposite directions kicked up a wild sparkling blizzard of powder as they shot past each other, propelling millions of tiny glittering flakes gloriously up into the brilliant sunlight. Young boys lingered by the tracks here and there along the route among the pretty little towns as the train raced by so that they might exchange a mittened wave with a heroic engineer or some friendly traveler they might compel to engage in a greeting.

  ...

  Alderman Sullivan’s opium-infused delusion drifted in the direction of cousin John L.

  The Champ was entertaining his captivated admirers at the Mutual Rowing Club boathouse on South Street, smoking expensive cigars end to end, and downing whiskey in quantities that directly contradicted his professed training credo. It had been John L. Sullivan who, soon after the Mutuals’ first boathouse had been completed, suggested to the brothers that they broaden the scope of the rowing club to include boxing in order to fill the void of physical inactivity created by the long dark freezing winter months. It was a logical suggestion in a ward where pugilistic skills were a basic means of survival. It was John L. himself who had plotted the club’s ring with a stick of chalk, deciding its location and pacing it out by carefully placing one famous foot in front of the other.

  Whenever he came to visit, John L. coached the ward’s lads in the Mutuals’ boxing ring, then afterward boasted of his innumerable exploits both recent and ancient to an awed audience of star-struck boys and men who’d collected there like swarms of summer canal flies.

  Lately upon each occasion of an impending John L. arrival, JP and Jim didn’t even inform the family until the date was almost upon them. Previously, such news would spread like wildfire and bring forth a gaggle of hangers-on near the corner of Hamburg and South Streets in anticipation, the turnout interfering with the normal flow of riverside traffic for days.

  In his delirium the Alderman recalled that Michael Regan was at that time an upwardly ascending sergeant due to make captain at any time due to his alliance with Fingy Conners. The Mutual Rowing Club was in its early eighth year of incorporation. Growing up with the Sullivan brothers on Louisiana Street, Regan had forged with them a friendship so tight that even daylight couldn’t come between.

  Back when the name John L. Sullivan first began to appear reverentially in the newspapers and in the utterances of an admiring populace, Regan was dazzled to discover that the Sullivan brothers were family to the great bare-knuckle boxer. And so it was, before the wives were told of any of John L.’s visits, before the kids had any idea that John L. was on his way, Mike Regan was informed on the sly that John L. was on approach. He found himself as excited as he had been as a boy by the imminent promise of Christmas.

  By 1887 periodic indulgences in whiskey, tobacco and all too many willing women had worked lethal damage on John L. Sullivan’s marriage to Annie Bates. Too, these things had eaten away at the canon of strict discipline that had represented the foundation of the Champ’s tenet. His visits to family in Buffalo by this time were both shorter and fewer in number and smacked more of nostalgia and of a longing for the good old days than anything other.

  John L. had historically exhibited a poorly-disguised admiration for Hannah, something that did not go unnoticed by Jim Sullivan, a frustrated and disillusioned Buffalo Police Department patrolman at that particular stage. John L.’s flirtatious manner with Jim’s bride was neither subtle nor respectful. The men came to exchange brutal words one night after one too many drinks.

  Jim called the great John L. Sullivan a has-been.

  The Champ, infuriated by the deadly accurate insult, went packing that very evening. Jim was left deeply troubled, regretting the familial rift, but not the reason for it. Hannah was relieved of the discomfiture wrought by the Champ’s too-obvious attentions, despite her secretly being flattered by them. The week following their falling-out, Jim Sullivan received a most soul-searching letter in which the boxer poured out his heart and apologized profusely for his covetous manner. He promised nothing of the sort would ever happen again, and once again pledged to stop drinking.

  This family upset proved a watershed event, compelling John L. to reevaluate his ponderous overindulgences in drink, his adulterous relationship with longtime mistress Ann Livingston, and his partaking in far too much rich food and too many fine Cuban cigars. The Champ was obliged to take a long hard look at his now off-kilter life.

  He concluded that if he wanted to recapture the heady feeling of being John L. Sullivan and all that the name had once stood for, that he would have to get himself back in the ring and fight once again.

  ...

  JP’s dreams continued to waft and drift among and through mostly pleasant illusions, undiminished even by a crying patient in the next room. He relived the wonderful day when the brothers and Mike Regan journeyed together in the early summer of 1889 to cheer on John L. in Bill Muldoon’s barn out in Belfast N.Y.

  The Western New York hamlet was so tiny that the trio were the only ones who got off, or on, the train when it lingered its few minutes at the Belfast platform. They’d arrived late in the day when the sun was just dipping behind the hills. With cicadas loudly buzzing and irritating dragonflies flying much too close to sweaty faces for comfort, there was nary a breeze to cool the summer’s humid heat. They checked into the town’s little hotel, respecting John L.’s trainer Bill Muldoon’s strict early-to-bed, early-to-rise regimen. Muldoon was preparing the champ for the battle of his life against Jake Kilrain. It was to be the fight of the century, the very last world title contest fought under the London Prize Ring rules. The final bare-knuckle heavyweight title bout. John L.’s last hurrah.

  The innkeeper apologized to the three men in advance for the Muldoons’ parrot.

  “Why? Does it live here at the hotel?” asked JP.

  “No, thank God. It lives at Muldoon Farm. But you’ll be hearin’ that bastard bird just the same.”

  Just the previous year John L. had taken seriously ill. On his thirtieth birthday, October 15th, he arose from his certain death bed after nine weeks of terrible sickness and summoned a cab to take him to his father Michael’s house at 8 Parnell Street in Boston, where he intended to die.

  The Champ’s physician warned him he would never survive the ten mile carriage journey, but from the moment he arrived in the embrace of his father’s home, he began to recover. John L. had suffered from typhoid fever, gastric fever, inflammation of the bowels, heart trouble and liver complaints. A few weeks after arriving at 8 Parnell Street, feeling much improved but still on crutches, he felt well enough to again begin contemplating a future for himself.

  The woefully weak and physically disabled John L. was inconveniently called upon at this ill-timed juncture to answer the
challenge of Jake Kilrain that Sullivan either defend his world championship title or forfeit all claims to it.

  Though by the end of the year the most egregious signs of his illnesses had dissipated to a promising extent, the still-languishing John L. Sullivan nevertheless traveled to Toronto on January 7, 1889 to sign articles to meet Kilrain in or near New Orleans the following July 8th.

  This meant he had exactly six months to accomplish the impossible—to somehow restore his sick, tortured and defiled body to world-champion fighting condition.

  John L. was still weak enough that he had asked cousin Jim Sullivan to meet him in Toronto to lend support both physical and emotional. Jim took the train from Buffalo across the International Bridge.

  After an absence of several years, former manager Jimmy Wakely had again taken the helm as John L.’s steersman. Wakely engaged Charlie Johnston, an infamous Brooklyn gambler, to back the champ for expenses, for John L. in early 1889 was totally broke once again.

  Once the Toronto business was wrapped up and the papers signed, and despite his frightening appearance and obvious poor health, John L. insisted the two cousins ditch the other men and go out on the town by themselves to celebrate the signing.

  John L. commenced drinking more heavily than Jim had ever seen him, surpassing all previous benders. Many hours later they ended their marathon in the bar at the Queens Hotel on Front Street where John L. was staying. When John L. began vomiting blood there, Jim Sullivan engaged the assistance of two hotel employees to help carry the Champ up to his suite. Jim put his cousin to bed, then fell asleep on the divan, exhausted by drink and his day’s trials. The following morning Jim hoisted the barely-hung over John L. onto a train back to Boston, and then immediately afterward boarded the train home to Buffalo. Head pounding, he fitfully slept the entire two hours.