Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

sitting loosely on his knees. He was wearing his knitted blue watch cap, a familiar
garment to Martin. As their eyes met, the cousin smiled, lifted a pistol from his lap, pointed it at the horse, then turned it to his right temple and pulled the trigger. He died without further
ado, leaving the family no explanation for his act, and was smiling still when Martin caught the reins of the startled horse and reached his cousin’s side.
    Nothing like that happened to Martin again until 1925, the year he published his collection of short stories. But he recognized the same irrational impulse when he was drawn, without reason, to
visit the lawyer handling his father’s libel suit against an Albany newspaper, which had resurrected the old man’s scandal with Melissa. Martin found the lawyer at home, in robust
health, and they talked of Martin’s father, who at that point was living in New York City. Two hours after their talk the lawyer died of a heart attack walking up Maiden Lane, and the task of
finding a new lawyer for his father fell to Martin.
    That same year Martin tuned in the radio at mid-morning, an uncharacteristic move, and heard of the sinking of the excursion steamer Sweethearts in the Hudson River below Kingston. He
later learned that a girl he once loved had gone down with the boat. He began after this to perceive also things not related to trouble. He foresaw by a week that a Times-Union photographer
would win six thousand dollars in the Albany baseball pool. He was off by only one day in his prediction of when his father would win the libel suit. He knew a love affair would develop between his
wife’s niece from Galway and an Albany bartender, two months before the niece arrived in Albany. He predicted that on the day of that love’s first bloom it would be raining, a
thunderstorm, and so it was.
    Martin’s insights took the shape of crude imagery, like photographs intuited from the radio. He came to consider himself a mystical naturalist, insisting to himself and to others that he
did not seriously believe in ghosts, miracles, resurrection, heaven, or hell. He seasoned any account of his beliefs and his bizarre intuition with a remark he credited to his mother: There’s
no Santa Claus and there’s no devil. Your father’s both. He dwelled on his visions and found them comforting, even when they were false and led him nowhere and revealed nothing. He felt
they put him in touch with life in a way he had never experienced it before, possessor of a power which not even his famous and notorious father, in whose humiliating shadow he had lived all his
years, understood. His father was possessed rather by concrete visions of the Irish in the New World, struggling to throw off the filth of poverty, oppression, and degradation, and rising to a
higher plane of life, where they would be the equals of all those arrived Americans who manipulated the nation’s power, wealth, and culture. Martin was bored with the yearnings of the
immigrant hordes and sought something more abstract: to love oneself and one’s opposite. He preferred personal insight to social justice, though he wrote of both frequently in his column,
which was a confusion of radicalism, spiritual exploration, and foolery. He was a comedian who sympathized with Heywood Broun, Tom Mooney, and all Wobblies, who drank champagne with John McCormack,
beer with Mencken, went to the track with Damon Runyon, wrote public love letters to Marlene Dietrich whenever her films played Albany, and who viewed America’s detachment from the Spanish
Civil War as an exercise in evil by omission.
    He also wrote endlessly on a novel, a work he hoped would convey his version of the meaning of his father’s scandalous life. He had written twelve hundred pages, aspiring to perhaps two
hundred or less, and could not finish it. At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the