Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Read Online Free PDF

Irish troubles, plus the
short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He
seriously valued almost nothing he wrote, except for the unfinished novel.
    He was viewed by the readers of the Times-Union , which carried his column five days a week, as a mundane poet, a penny-whistle philosopher, a provocative half-radical man nobody had to
take seriously, for he wasn’t quite serious about himself. He championed dowsing and ouija boards and sought to rehabilitate Henry James, Sr., the noted Albanian and Swedenborgian. He claimed
that men of truest vision were, like James, always considered freaks, and he formed the International Brotherhood of Crackpots by way of giving them a bargaining agent, and attracted two thousand
members.
    His column was frequently reprinted nationally, but he chose not to syndicate it, fearing he would lose his strength, which was his Albany constituency, if his subject matter went national. He
never wrote of his own gift of foresight.
    The true scope of that gift was known to no one, and only his family and a few friends knew it existed at all. The source of it was wondered at suspiciously by his Irish-born wife, who had been
taught in the rocky wastes of Connemara that druids roamed the land, even to this day.
    The gift left Martin in 1928 after his fortieth birthday debauch with Melissa, the actress, his father’s erstwhile mistress, the woman who was the cause of the paternal scandal. Martin
returned home from the debauch, stinking of simony, and severely ill with what the family doctor simplistically diagnosed as alcoholic soak. Within a week Martin accurately sensed that his mystical
talent was gone. He recuperated from the ensuing depression after a week, but rid himself of the simoniacal stink only when he acceded to his wife’s suggestion, and, after a decade of
considering himself not only not a Catholic but not even a Christian, he sought out the priest in the Lithuanian church who spoke and understood English only primitively, uttered a confession of
absurd sins (I burned my wife’s toenail parings three times) and then made his Easter Duty at Sacred Heart Church, driving out the odor of simony with ritual sacrilege.
    He shoved his arms into the fresh shirt Mary Daugherty had ironed. A fresh shirt every day, Mary insisted, or you’ll blow us all out the window with the B.O. Martin pushed into his black
shoes, gone gray with months of scuffs and the denial of polish, threw a tie once around his neck in a loose knot, and thrust himself into his much abused suit coat. A sughan , Mary said.
You’ve made a sughan of it. Ah well, all things come alike to all, the clean and the unclean, the pressed and the unimpressed.
    In the bathroom he brushed away the taste of oatmeal, splashed his face with cold water, flattened his cowlick with the hairbrush, and then salt-stepped down the stairs, saying as he sped
through the kitchen: “I’ve got a hell of a story, I think, Mary. I’ll call you.”
    “What about your coffee? What about your eggs?”
    But he was already gone, this aging firefly who never seemed to his wife to have grown up quite like other men, gone on another story.
    Martin Daugherty had once lived in Arbor Hill, where the McCalls and the Phelans lived, but fire destroyed the house of his childhood and adolescence, and the smoke poisoned
Katrina Daugherty, his mother, who escaped the flames only to die on the sidewalk of Colonie Street in her husband’s arms, quoting Verlaine to him: “. . . you loved me so!”
“Quite likely—I forget.” The fire began in the Christian Brothers School next door, old Brother William turned to a kneeling cinder by the hellish flames. The fire leaped across
the alley and consumed the Daugherty house, claiming not only its second victim in Martin’s mother, but also his father’s accumulation