But there had been a deal. Harris had instructed Jack, my other barman, to write down all that he gave away, and at the end of the week he gave a check to Jack to give to me after he had left and that check covered all of what I had thought were free drinks. A generous man.
I continued my brooding through all of it, and couldn’t see any way out of the dilemma of making the living. Running a public house (from which the word pub arises) means you are open to the public, and have to be prepared to greet any and all who walk through the portals, be they drunks, arseholes, fools, convicts, prostitutes, Wall Streeters, laborers, cadgers, the sad, the bad, the glad, and, horror of horrors, the boring. One of these had gotten my ear one quiet night, and was describing his work as a salesman of steel products and proudly showed me his business card, which was made from rolled steel. That was it, too much for me, so I hied my way to the back room to get away from the rigor mortis of his talk.
I was alone in the back room a little while later, dozing at the table, when I heard a commotion and a voice shouting in the bar, followed by a gunshot. A small parade entered the back room, where I had placed myself under a light so as not to startle the gunman. The little procession consisted of Jack Sandon, barman Ally Cobert, a serious waiter, the hilarious Bob Boland, who was also a waiter, a customer lady, some unknown man, and a young scion named Thomas Fortune Ryan, all with arms and hands well up into the air. They were followed by two lads of African-American descent carrying guns, who made loud and frequent reference to the fact that all of those in the assembled group had had some kind of sexual relations with their mothers.
We were seated at the various tables and told to keep our hands in sight. One of the gunslingers sat guard whilst his pal went out front to get at the cash register. The conversation did not touch on anything of importance, no reference to current affairs, theatre, or literature. Indeed, it was more demanding. Orders, in fact, emanating from our hold-up man. To wit, “Empty your motherfucking pockets,” to the men, and “Gimme that purse, bitch,” to the only woman in the group.
The cash register ransacker came back swearing that he couldn’t open the motherfucking thing and some motherfucker better come and open it or some motherfucker was going to have his motherfucking head blown off. Jack offered to do the job for him and, while they were out of the room, Fortune Ryan asked our captor if it were permissible to smoke.
“Go ahead,” sez the gunman.
Fortune R. picked the cigs out of his shirt pocket and, being a well-bred lad, offered one to the armed friend, who seemed highly offended that anyone would think he was a smoker. Ryan apologized for his assumption and timidly asked if the man had a match. The lad raised the pistol and told Ryan to put the cigarette in his mouth and it would be lit with a bullet.
Jack returned, along with the other fellow, who complained about the paucity of money in the register, and then shouted at Bob Boland to stop looking at him, and fired a shot past his head into a mirror to emphasize his point. We all looked pointedly elsewhere. Then we gallant six were herded into the cellar as the duo announced they were going to work Jack over until he revealed where the rest of the money was concealed. I said there was no more money, and I should know, as I ran the joint. The cold rim of a gun was placed at the right side of my head an inch from my eye and it was pressed hard into the skin.
I couldn’t help but think that a simple pressure on the trigger was the next step, and that through that cool barrel would travel a sheathed bullet at a great blasting speed, entering my head, tearing and rending the flesh, the bone, and the brains, scattering them and splattering them on floor, walls, and ceiling.
Closing my eyes, I said good-bye to Diana and Siobhan, Nina, and Malachy, but my good-byes were interrupted by a snarling voice ordering me down the stairs, still alive, to my astonishment. I’d always wondered what I’d do when faced with the possibility of immediate death. Some people say you’d pray, beg for forgiveness, beg for your life, plead with God to save you, but I found myself strangely without fear, as if this were happening to someone else, a trifle curious to know what it is to be shot and to die.
In the end, the bandits didn’t beat Jack, as they finally got the idea that there was no more dough, and off they fled into the night. Ally Cobert promptly locked the front door after them, which led Jack to ask him if he’d ever worked in a stable. Then, when the police arrived and asked how much money had been stolen, Bob Boland told them not much, but I’d written them a check for the rest.
Despite the fist-sized cloud of Vietnam, hanging low and menacing on the horizon, the sixties had come up smiling, with JFK and the charming Jacqueline riding waves of adulation from cheering and cheery crowds everywhere. Yes, we’d had the Bay of Pigs, but that was wriggled out of and had been planned by the Eisenhower crowd, egged on by Nixon. There were some nasty confrontations in the segregated South, but President Kennedy kept the lid on that boiling pot, and on Khrushchev, and on anything else unpleasant brewing in the world or beyond, as the Mayoman said.
I was in my monastic bed in the apartment above Himself when the phone rang around noon on November 22, 1963. ’Twas the soft-spoken Diana asking if I’d heard any news on the radio about the president being shot. My tendency is always to move into comforting mode, so I said it was probably a mistake and that there would be clarification very soon.
It wasn’t a mistake, and the clarification came much too soon. The man had been shot and he was dead. Within me, I had held a pride that an Irishman had made it to the White House, and it told me that America was opening up to me, too. There was a wit about the man, and the way he would poke fun at himself and the brothers made me think he was like me, someone I could have a drink with. When he was shot, it felt as if it had been done also to me, as if they had told me that the dreams I had for the future and my life in America weren’t possible.
If you could collect a dollar for every time the words “I can’t believe it” were uttered in those gloomy days, you would be among the wealthiest of the world’s denizens. We, Diana and myself, spent all that weekend together cementing our love in the grief of the day. We walked, talked, played with Nina, turned the television on and off and on again. Listened to people raging on the radio as to whether ball games should be canceled, whether Broadway plays should stop, was it profoundly disrespectful to go to movies. I did manage to get to work, but Himself was empty, the gloomiest place to be. I went to P. J. Clarke’s at one point, to immerse myself in a crowd, but it was nearly empty, too. There was a lot of staring into glasses going on during that weekend. I’d look up, shake the head in disbelief, say something inane, and go back to staring. One fellow stood up in the back room at P. J. Clarke’s and announced that if anybody said anything against President Kennedy he would deal with them personally. Needless to say, there were no takers. Of course, there were mutterings all over town about conspiracies and dirty doings by Nixon, who had been in Dallas that morning, and about Johnson and the coincidence of the assassination taking place in Texas, his home state. Then came the arrest and killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, leading to a confusion that has never been dispelled.
But time passed, as it always will, and everything eventually went back to normal, or whatever passed for normal. Diana still smiled and remained silent when I’d bring up the subject of marriage. She was virtually a prisoner at home, having to take care of Nina, and was still trying to get a straight diagnosis on whether the child was retarded, brain-damaged, or autistic, and she was still not getting one.
Diana was, and remains, the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met. As a young girl, she had studied ballet with George Balanchine, at the School of American Ballet, and attended the Professional Children’s School in New York City, whose curriculum was designed for kids involved in show business. Her father and mother, John and Bernice Huchthausen, encouraged the odd schooling despite the long commute from Ossining, in Westchester County. Diana got a scholarship to Smith College, from which she eloped shortly before graduation. She went into the publishing business, as a foreign rights manager at Harper and Row, and started up a literary magazine with her husband. But then came Nina, and then divorce, and she was now limited to taking in typing, which was somewhat akin to taking in washing. She wasn’t even that good at it, and didn’t really care to be, but she did type Catch-22 for Joe Heller. He paid her as an act of charity, she sez, as her work was quite bad.
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