Читать книгу Cry Heaven, Cry Hell - Howard Gordon - Страница 12

Chapter 6

The year 1930 marked Patrick’s emerging manhood, Craine’s questioning his involvement with the criminal elements in America and Ireland, emigration of the Mikawber/Doleman clan to Boston, then to Williamsburg, Virginia. It was also a time when Craine found the capacity to love a woman again. It was also a time when men, who could not reconcile the loss of this new God, money, and began to see what people had to do to survive in reality.

After Patrick’s Bar Mitzvah, the whole clan went for a trip to Williamsburg for a gift to the young man. They saw how colonists worked, lived, ate, and became motivated to love their country. While participating in a mock battle of the Revolutionary War, Moses got carried away to the streets of Warsaw and Belfast fighting anti-Semites and British landlords at the same time. He whooped and hollered to Mendel, Tyndall, and anyone in earshot that he shot a Brit Redcoat in the arse so many times, and he wouldn’t drop; he got sick of it and clobbered him with the rifle butt. You betcha the bastid fell that time. Tyndall had to tell him it was only a game and not a war. War, he did not need to fight anymore because he lived in a free country. Moses’ last words were, “By God, if it’s that free, I’ll move here, and the hell with Boston. I like fights, but I never saw a man that could take ten bullets in the arse and keep standing. “Apparently he never learned what the concept of a blank bullet meant. Since he was so dead set on moving there, Tyndall and the rest of the Mikawbers joined him.

Craine could see that Patrick was more interested in being with his friends than in family outings by the way he was eyeing some of the teenaged females involved in the mock battles, bread making, flag sewing, and cooking activities. He also was excited about engaging in a pickup baseball game with some of the young men of the community. He decided to pursue some of his own interests, as he watched a rather interesting lady bend over to wipe a smudge off of her shoe. He smirked at her and said it would be less interesting to him, but kinder to her if she let him wipe it off for her. She stood up all startled and blushing to tell him to mind his own business and to take his rude brogue back to Dublintown, or wherever he came from. He laughed and said Dublin wouldn’t exactly appreciate his presence; he further indicated he’d take her on in a game of darts at any pub in Belfast. At this, her anger subsided, and she laughed. She told him that she was looking for a job as a mock nurse in the mock battle. He hired her for the job. She was so excited that she didn’t ask if he worked there. She asked when she could start, and he said he didn’t know, but he’d ask the personnel manager if she gave him her name. Before she could get all angered again, he asked if she’d give him and his family a tour followed by the best Irish dinner she ever ate. Her name was Molly Karhill. The anger that started in her soul was changed to laughter by the antics of Tyndall, Moses, Mendel, the rest of the Mikawber/Doleman clan, and last, but not least, Craine. What he expected to be the worst smack in the kisser turned out to be the nicest kiss he ever got.

There were picnics in the park and swimming at the beaches in Virginia, New England, Coney Island, trips on the Freedom Trail, trips to presidents’ homes, to museums. Molly accompanied Patrick to Hebrew classes and learned to read Scholem Aleichem in Yiddish. She also learned to read the poetry of the old Gaelic writers from the Protestant minister and some of the priests. He even introduced her to Bugs Moran, who was struggling, in vain to keep his empire from crumbling to dust. She was aware of his notoriety, but she enjoyed him as a person from it. Craine felt the pangs of guilt about considering another woman to take the place of Malkia until he had a talk with Patrick about it. Pat said that his leaving home was but a few years off, and though he loved him and Grand Da and Da Moses, he’d be building his own life. He said he also found Molly fun and loveable.

The following weekend, Craine took Molly to a cave in the Berkshire Mountains. She thought the woods were romantic and groaned as they ascended the peaks to the cave. She was awed by the point where a stalactite merged with a stalagmite. A tear came to Craine’s eye as he described what the merger meant to him. It meant that the righteous anger of God was joined with the unrighteous greed and lust for power that Satan sought and that Mankind would be in an eternal conflict over which could be applied to do the most good. Molly startled him with a question that asked why doing good had to be attached to anger. Couldn’t loving one’s self and one’s fellow man be a guide for seeking the good in life?

Craine considered this proposition and tried to annex this thought to his belief that he had to fight for everything he got. Molly told him the story of the friendship that developed between a lion and a mouse when the mouse pulled the thorn from the lion’s foot, and how Joseph earned the reputation of being skilled at dream interpretation by interpreting a fellow prisoner’s dream and having this passed on to Pharaoh. That night they swam in the hotel pool, and she divested herself of her suit and swam into his arms and kissed him tenderly. He carried her to their room by using the elevator and laid her gently on the bed. They enjoyed the rest of the night making love.

As Craine had grown up in the violence of the “War to end all wars” and the violence all around him, Patrick had to grow up around men building themselves up at the expense of others to the extent of creating a disparity in the income available to owners and producers. Sympathy for the little guy with the guts to work his way to the top has been a cornerstone of American philosophy. When Clyde Barrow made the statement, “We rob banks,” it won him a name amongst many impoverished small time dust bowl farmers. When the monied classes found themselves reaching into empty pockets after the stock market crash, they began to jump out of windows. Those that survived did so because they found that two parties have to cling together to fight their way through a mechanical, impersonal world, composed of people who don’t care about others. “By the sweat of your brow, shall you earn your bread.” Men like Craine and Bugs Moran were, through the consequences they were suffering, being shown that there are alternatives to getting ahead by stepping over a corpse.

In addition to the philosophical contrasts stimulated by the meeting of the stalactite and stalagmite, Craine had an ulterior motive: He wanted to take Molly flying. He showed her the plane, explained the history of its building, and uses, and asked her if she wanted the freedom and beauty of the air God had made for them. He took her up in the sky, where the clouds were like vapors of smoke, and the land looked like little squares of green and bustling ants along the highways. She was utterly fascinated by the change in view she saw and was also just as intrigued by being able to get away from the smallness of life, as illustrated by the ease by which a living being could have the life snuffed out of him/her. Viewing the vastness of the sky/universe renewed her faith in the concept of a power beyond Man, whose plan we cannot fully comprehend.

The hopes of Patrick and Tyndall seemed to hinge together in the hope that Craine could see some good in life. He did not know his mother very well since most of her life was spent trying to remove herself from the earthly existence that bound her pain wracked life to her husband and children. Craine knew the tearful emptiness his father had felt and wondered how he had the strength to love him, as he did. Life was further complicated by the practice of fighting to preserve who you were. His concept was beginning to be shaped into what can we build ourselves to be by loving one another, despite the obstacles in our way.