Mile High Page 5

  His father’s public essence was strong and whole, but the boy could not match its splendid shape with the grotesque private form his father assumed inside the house, and thus was never able to see his father whole. Outside, the father was a giant figure, all-powerful, feared/loved. People came to him to try to realize their fortunes through him; the singers sang sweetly and the magicians their wonders did perform. But inside the house this majesty shrank into gabbling garrulousness that pleaded as it followed the icy, foul-tongued mother up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, apologizing for something that the son could not understand. “Maria! Wait! Listen to me! I have two tickets for a center box at the opera wit’ all that beautiful dancin’.”

  She would halt and turn on the stairs, look far down at her husband and say in Sicilian, “Why don’t you cover those tickets with dog shit and eat them for breakfast?” Only the boy understood what she had said. One dark winter afternoon (she would not use electric light because it was “not Sicilian”), while she was making pasta and talking to the boy, they heard the father move behind the kitchen door in the stair hall, secretively, trying to learn something desperately important to him. His mother began to talk more and more torrentially in Sicilian, flinging the dough, slamming it into the marble tabletop. After a while the father’s steps moved away and after a while his mother’s voice became calm and distant again.

  That night the father came into the boy’s dark room and sat on the edge of the bed and asked what the mother had been shouting so passionately that afternoon. Eddie told him she had been describing the grace of the great Sicilian dancer Evalina Perseguitare, the first dancer to remove heels from her slippers to assist her batterie, one of the most brilliant inventions of the ballet. She was also the woman who was credited with having perfected the entrechat six and who, in order for her feet to be seen as her Achilles tendon sent her into flight, shortened her skirts to mid-leg; but it took one hundred years more for them to go still higher, to the knee. The ballet is life in the air, Mama said. The ground is there only as a point of departure. Humans stay imbedded in the ground, Mama said; Gods and dancers defy the flypaper and soar, free of all restraint.

  “Does she always talk like that?”

  “Sure. She wants me to know all about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to be a dancer.”

  “Eddie!”

  The boy thought his father was electrified with elation. “It’s a wonderful life,” he said dreamily. “The world is at your feet. You travel and you see all the beautiful things of Rome, London and Berlin. I start my lessons in two weeks, then after a while Mama and I are going to Paris.”

  Paddy was sick with horror. He groped his way out of the house. When he returned the next morning he gave Eddie ten cents to buy himself some of that special cake at Boehm’s, six blocks away, then he went into his wife’s room, talked to her briefly about her plans to turn the boy into a ballet dancer, then beat her unconscious and left her bleeding, stuffed far under the bed like a chamber pot. He stopped talking to her forever on that day. That afternoon he took Eddie with him on his rounds, and from then on, in the weekends and during winter, summer and autumn holidays he took him to baseball games, horse races and boxing matches without much letup and began his basic education in the uses of power and money. Eddie forgot about dancing. His father told him to put it out of his head, that it was work for women and that men had a damned sight more of better things to do in their lives than balance on their toes and jump in the air in tights.

  The people around the courts—the cops, the gamblers, the businessmen and the madams—got used to seeing Eddie at his father’s side. Every leader of Tammany Hall from 1900 forward knew the boy as though he were a favorite nephew; so did the gang leaders. Paddy West got a big kick out of having Eddie talk Sicilian with the Italian mobs and some of the most famous killers of their time. Ignazio Saieta made Eddie an honorary member of the Unione Siciliane, which Eddie made stick when he got older and decided he needed it. The Irish gangs took for granted he was Irish. So did the Jews. The Italian gangs knew he was a Sicilian and that nobody and nothing could change that. His father, whose ponderous wisdom no one ever doubted, was careful to keep the balance correctly weighted. He taught Eddie the value of concealing from the Jews and the Irish (and everyone but Sicilians) that he could speak the Sicilian language. “They’re a canny, clannish people, Eddie,” he said, “and they’ll like it best if you show the Sicilian to them alone. When in doubt, think like Aaron Burr, Ed. Ice in the veins is money in the bank, and always take the long view.”

  On the day Eddie became fourteen his father chose Lorette des Anges, the leading soubrette of the day, eight times the cover girl on the Police Gazette, to “break Eddie in.” He took the boy to her beautiful flat in Murray Hill on a clear, sunny Sunday morning and had a glass of champagne with them before he left Eddie there. Eddie was pleasured so much he thought his hair would leap off his head in one piece. All in all, in a choice between his mother and father, there was never any real contest for Eddie’s soul—not apparently, anyhow.

  The day after the first time he was ever laid Paddy told him he was going to be a lawyer and that he would be going away to school in New England to prepare for college and be ready to handle the kind of boys he would meet there. Eddie was a bright boy. Paddy could line up the best sponsors. Eddie qualified for the junior form at the Gelbart Academy, where the boys were taught odd speech, something not too unlike the speech at Cambridge University in England—although no one ever identified it for Paddy West or the boy would not have been allowed to stay. Eddie entered Yale at sixteen, Harvard Law School at eighteen. He was admitted to the New York bar when he was twenty, a prodigy, on July 4, 1908.

  Each summer, from the time he was fourteen, his father rented a large cottage at Canoe Place, Long Island, and conducted his business from there while Eddie entertained friends from school, all of them talking high in their noses, swallowing vowels and vocally punching at odd syllables. The speech stayed with Eddie for all of his life. He was an aristocrat, so, it followed, he spoke like an aristocrat.

  Paddy worked out a clear policy for the selection of his son’s roommates. Eddie was always younger than the other boys, although usually taller and always more worldly. Therefore part of his standard equipment when he went off to Gelbart was autographed pictures—James Jeffries, Lorette des Anges (in spangled tights and inscribed “Stay warm for Lorette, baby doll”) and a signed cabinet photograph of William McKinley (Republican), twenty-ninth President of the United States (“For Edward C. West, a grand young American, The White House, January 27, 1904”).

  To develop his roommate system Paddy procured a list of the forty-one members of Eddie’s class at Gelbart and had his bank run down the credit ratings of their families. Together he and Eddie selected the six top ratings, and on arrival at school, Eddie set out to cultivate those six whether they had shale acne, congenital idiocy, or were immediately nicknamed “Shitty” by the other boys. “It’s the long view that sees you through, Eddie,” his father taught. “Don’t forget, Burr married an old whore for comfort in his old days. You got to go to the money, Ed—money don’t go to you.” Working his points with Tammany sureness, Eddie always managed to be assigned to a room with the bestconnected boy in his class (next to Eddie), but an important part of the system was to move on to a new roommate every year so that the greatest amount of future ground could be mapped. This required a strategy that would not hurt, offend or alienate the current roommate. “I’ve talked it over wit’ t’ree of the biggest men in Wall Street, Eddie,” Paddy said. “All independent of the other. Everyone of them said the same. The only good anybody gets outta schools is meetin’ the right people. The rest is all a lotta Latin an’ chowder.”

  Twice a year, at Christmas and at spring holidays, Eddie would take his current roommate and the next year’s roommate with him to New York. Paddy would put the boys up in a big suite at the Astor. These sessions always
clinched next year’s roommate and held the current one as a friend forever. In the years to come Eddie was able to move at the inner core of the great newspaper and magazine publishers, the bankers, lawyers and industrialists, all because of Paddy’s (and Aaron Burr’s) superior planning. When Eddie got the two young men to the Astor Paddy really laid it on with a trowel. He moved his “afternoon office” uptown to the boys’ living room, and in and out of the doors of the hotel suite would walk such figures as George M. Cohan, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, Al Smith, Isadora Duncan, Georgie Mountin, the jockey who won the Preakness, and Winston S. Churchill, who was in New York on a lecture tour. On the last night of the heavenly visit, after a quick tour of all the principal museums and lunch at Jack’s, when they were all dressed for dinner and he was opening a magnum of champagne (which he did not drink), Eddie would announce the surprise. There would be a discreet knock on the door and into the room would come three beautiful women (one of them always the glamorous, famous Lorette des Anges, who was always assigned to the current roommate) and really wonderful fun would begin. The roommates never got over that part of the program. For some of them it was the only thing they remembered about their youth. All of it gave Eddie a sound appreciation of power.

  It wasn’t only an education in material things. “Use their religions, Eddie,” his father taught. “Sometimes that’s a good handle on a man. But remember Burr. The old, long, ice-cold view of everything. Religion is only the politics of the centuries.” That was the only lesson from Paddy he never learned. His mother had been a savage, primeval Catholic. His wife was to be a rote devout. These two women had such formidable influence on his emotions that he was herniated by religion, which was for him an emotion never to be examined, only felt.

  As soon as he was admitted to the bar his father explained that he was now qualified to run the family’s little bank. It was a miniature bank run in a street-level store on West 14th Street, having four big safes in the cellar that could have been opened with the stick of a taffy apple but were safe safes because they were Paddy’s safes and the criminal element needed Paddy. The bank had been established in ’81 with a capital of ninety thousand dollars for the workingmen in the neighborhood. The saloon chain, the whorehouses, the gambling joints were throwing off good money. Because he never failed to deliver less than 98 percent of the vote, and on one occasion had delivered 107 percent, he was always so well regarded by the leader that Tammany saw to it that certain city funds, and later on, state and federal funds, were deposited in the West National Bank; and the gamblers and West Side gangs always used it as their bank.

  “Banks are the great power stations,” Paddy taught. “It’s as clear as day. The more money they put in your bank the more power you got, but the beauty part is the more power we get the more money they put in.” Both of them were dead certain about Eddie’s place in politics. “Yes and forever,” Paddy taught. “Look what Aaron Burr did with politics for a power base. He damned near owned Mexico. Now, mind you, to get it started I had to do it out in front where they could all see me workin’. But not you. There’s warmth in the shadows you never dreamed of, Ed. There’s much beauty behind a mask. Run the people who you put there to run politics and let them run everything but the bank. The bank is the only place the world sees you out in front. Give them the glory and a ham sandwich. You take the rest.”

  Edward Courance West at twenty-one became the youngest bank president in the history of the state. The bank was three blocks west of Tammany Hall, which had moved uptown from Franklin and Nassau in ’68. To install his son, Paddy had torn down the building the street-level store was in and built a four-story edifice, with a vault for the sweet little bank whose capital was now eight million, two hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars and eleven cents (as of the 1909 year-end audit).

  When Paddy died suddenly after a lifetime without a sick day, Eddie was twenty-three years old: March 24, 1911. Leaving the Franklin Street saloon with Willie Tobin, Paddy passed a horse that had just been frightened by a noisy automobile and had reared high, startling Paddy, who had grabbed the reins to pull the horse down to his level so he could slam it a good punch in the mouth. He knocked the horse to its knees, then picked it up again to send it spinning over on its side in the shafts. Then Paddy made a rattling sound in his throat, grabbed at his chest with his huge right hand and fell down on the pavement. Willie ran into the saloon to get a bottle of whiskey and to call Doc Solomon, the coroner, who was at the bar talking to a police captain. By the time they got back to Paddy he was dead.

  He was seventy-nine years old and might have lived to be ninety had he remembered Aaron Burr and not lost his temper just for the sake of slugging a horse. Just as Burr might have been President had he not lost his temper and shot Alexander Hamilton. Eddie made careful note of both errors and withdrew a few steps backward into greater coldness. But error to one side, Paddy West had died as active, powerful, teetotal and unsmiling as always. His life had been a chapter in the ever-unfolding American dream, inspiring and evocative. A principal thoroughfare of the City of New York was named for him, West Street—as had been Sullivan County, Foley Square and Plattsburg, New York, for other great men who had striven to widen the base of democracy.

  The day after Paddy West’s magnificent funeral, as he scraped red rubble off his cheeks, Edward Courance West, aged twenty-three, encountered the merest ghost of the idea that was to make him one of the great kings of the world but that was to finish the expansion and terminate the glory of the American dream by several centuries. Everything that followed the execution of his idea in American history was to be looted and sacked by him, drained and left hollow, and he was to be only most obscurely (by not more than three people) identified with it. From the moment the perfume of that idea lingered over him Eddie West thought about very little else. He began forthwith to organize all the affairs and details of his inheritance so that they might be administered at once by his appointees.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first step was to talk things over with the Leader, himself a saloon keeper who had been a horsecar driver on the 14th Street crosstown line, a job obtainable only through political wirepulling because it was a cash business and unreported fares were considered to be a fringe benefit. The Leader had worked hard and had spent very little and by the time he was twenty-four he had enough to lease his own saloon—soup and beer for a nickel with all the free crackers, cheese and bologna you could eat. Beyond members of his family (of which he considered little Eddie one) he was not a communicative man. Politics had been his only interest for all his life, and from the day of the opening of his first saloon and the establishment of his famous Fanwood Club he worked day and night, summer and winter, to deliver the vote when it was needed, so that in proper time he was made docks commissioner and was able to put four or five hundred thousand dollars aside and expand his chain of saloons. He was a political genius. He was what Paddy West believed Aaron Burr was and which Aaron Burr had not been.

  He lunched every day on the second floor of Delmonico’s at Union Square, right by the Hall, at a table that rested on four tiger’s paws, the room being known to the press as “The Scarlet Room of Mystery,” its door guarded by lads from the gas house district. Eddie got there early to be sure of a seat next to the leader, who was so glad to see him that he nodded at him. They ate caviar, tortue verte au sherry, filets de sole à la Nantua, suprême de volaille aux truffes fraîches, haricots verts à la crème, pommes de terre à la parisienne, parfait de fois gras à la gelée de porto, asperges vertes, bombe Montmorency and friandises. The Leader and Eddie shared a bottle of seltzer. The others at the table drank beer. The Leader did not countenance talking during meals—he rarely did what might be called chatting at any time—and would glare at anyone who talked while dining, or have him removed from the room. When the cigars came out the Leader rose and walked gingerly to the small table at the far corner of the room that had only two chairs. Eddie followed him. They sat down. The wa
iter served coffee, then went away. The Leader puffed on his cigar, then raised his eyebrows, signifying that Eddie could speak.

  “About the leadership of the First,” Eddie said. The Leader pursed his lips. “I want John Kullers,” Eddie told him.

  “John Kullers?

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t run yourself?”

  “No.”

  “You’d run it like Paddy ran it, Eddie. That’s what we have to have.”

  “John Kullers will run it that way because I’ll be telling him how.”

  “Have you thought about the Eyetalians?”

  “What about them?”

  “Paul Kelly was in to see me this morning. He wants Jimmy Lehner for leader in the First.”

  “In my district?”

  The Leader shrugged as though he were shifting a grand piano across his shoulders. “That’s politics for you.”