O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [146]
Going their opposite ways except when they needed contact, they established separate lives and a kind of mutually agreed-on friendship.
By the time of Paddy’s retirement, with the vice-president in attendance, Zachary was in total comfort in the Marine atmosphere.
Paddy O’Hara’s return to Hell’s Kitchen with his son had obvious rewards. With few Irish heroes to celebrate, Paddy O’Hara’s Saloon became an instant shrine.
Paddy proved not much of a businessman but of enormous value to Tammany Hall and the rising Irish politicians. This was the ward central, where deals were cut and palms were greased.
Within the hallowed halls, Paddy’s Medal of Honor and ten other citations for bravery were encased in glass, along with his sword and pistol and a battle flag from Fort Fisher.
The man had pissed more beer in the ocean than most breweries could make in a week. He was a deserving icon and could spend out his days being the object of worship.
Paddy had a decent flat over the bar and grew friendlier to his son. He had free access to every vaudeville, play, and musical in the city.
Fact was, Paddy was growing dependent on Zachary. And that was fine. Zach carved himself a space in the storeroom adjoining the bar, a mat on the floor, reading lamp and a square of wood to write on. From this vantage he could keep an eye on his da, lend a hand at peak hours, help shut down, sweep the sawdust, and now and again get into the singing with those fine Irish voices.
Zach kept an eye on the register and moved into taking better care of the books. And better care of Paddy, who became more and more permanently engaged in greeting and missed the good solid meals, and often ended up in his bed snoring with one shoe off and one shoe on.
Zachary dearly missed the Corps, where footsteps clicked smartly and did not stumble, and all was bright and shined up and crisp, with no slobbery bragging of men who used the bar stool as their stage.
They’d never smell ale on a parade ground or know the exultation of exhaustion at the end of a three-day forced march.
It was a foul place, Hell’s Kitchen, and though he was becoming his father’s keeper . . .
Well, then, girls took his mind off the work and study load. Zach was fancy company, with vaudeville tickets and sweet talking learned from his books. But Zach was counting days after his sixteenth birthday. In just two years, he was going to be able to enlist in the Corps.
Oh, for the clean barrack floors and starched shirts and orderly manner of life, where men got along with one another and need not scratch eyes out or spit teeth from a split lip.
You see, he did not find it in the gangs. The young thugs were fiercely jealous of him and of his da’s fame. The older crowd in the saloon reminded Zach on a daily basis that he’d never measure up to his da as they patted him on the head.
He was a loner walking the streets of the strange neighborhoods but sure enough of himself to go where he wished, and soon knew how to draw smiles from the Greeks and the Poles.
He wandered into the upper reaches of the West Side, where those odd folk, the Jews, had set down. He could sense their old-country privations.
Story after story of massacres of Jews in the Pale gave a growing sense that there would be floods of Jewish immigrants in the next years.
The other face of Harlem, the black continent, was crowding up with former slaves or the children of former slaves fleeing the South.
The songs of the neighborhoods, the Irish and Italian tenors, and the longings sung from the rickety Negro churches to the strange wail of the Jews, had a harmonious meeting place in street after street. After all, they sang of the same thing.
This burgeoning place was a strange place of villages, toiling, sweating, aspiring side by side there to serve the comforts of an exploding middle class and upper middle class and upper class and upper upper class.
Zach pondered. Could such a place ever sort itself out? It was a tinderbox on the borders but never quite