A God in Ruins Read online

  A God In Ruins

  A God In Ruins

  A God In Ruins

  TROUBLESOME MESA, COLORADO

  AUTUMN, 2008

  A Catholic orphan of sixty years is not apt to forget the day he first learned that he was born Jewish. It would not have been that bombastic an event, except that I am running for the presidency of the United States. The 2008 election is less than a week away.

  Earlier in the day, my in-close staff looked at one another around the conference table. We digested the numbers. Not only were we going to win, there was no way we were going to lose. Thank God, none of the staff prematurely uttered the words “Mr. President.”

  This morning was ten thousand years ago.

  I’m Quinn Patrick O’Connell, governor of Colorado and the Democratic candidate for president. The voters know I was adopted through the Catholic bureaucracy by the ranchers Dan and Siobhan O’Connell.

  My dad and I were Irish enough, at each other’s throats. Thanks to my mom, we all had peace and a large measure of love before he was set down in his grave.

  All things being equal, it appeared that I would be the second Roman Catholic president in American history. Unknown to me until earlier this day, I would be the first Jewish president as well.

  Nothing compares to the constant melancholy thirst of the orphan to find his birth parents. It is the apparatus that forms us and rules us.

  Aye, there was always someone out there, a faceless king and queen in a chilled haze, taunting.

  Ben Horowitz, my half brother, had been searching for me, haunted, for over a half century. Today he found me.

  Tomorrow at one o’clock Rocky Mountain time I must share my fate with the American people. You haven’t heard of Rocky time? Some of the networks haven’t, either. Lot of space but small market.

  The second half of the last century held the years that the Jews became one of the prime forces in American life. Politically, there had been a mess of Jewish congressmen, senators, mayors, and governors of enormous popularity and power. None had won the big enchilada. I suppose the buck stops here.

  Had I been elected governor as Alexander Horowitz, I’d have been just as good for my state. However, the discovery of my birth parents a week before the presidential election could well set off a series of tragic events from the darkness where those who will hate me lay in wait.

  How do I bring this to you, folks? In the last few hours I have written, “my fellow Americans” twenty-six times, “a funny thing happened to me on the way to Washington” twenty-one times, and “the American people have the right to know” three dozen times. My wastebasket overfloweth.

  Don’t cry, little Susie, there will be a Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

  No, the White House kitchen will not be kosher. My love of Carnegie tongue and pastrami is not of a religious nature.

  By presidential decree, the wearing of a yarmulke is optional.

  Israel will not become our fifty-first state.

  To tell the truth, my countrymen, I simply do not know what this means in my future. O’Connell was a hell of a good governor, but we are in uncharted waters.

  I’m getting a little fuzzy. I can see into the bedroom, where Rita is sprawled in the deep part of a power nap. Rita and our bedroom and her attire are all blended with Colorado hush tones, so soft and light in texture. At the ranch Rita liked to wear those full and colorful skirts like a Mexican woman at fiesta. As she lays there a bit rumpled, I can see up her thighs. I’d give my horse and saddle to be able to crawl alongside her. But then, I’d never finish my Washington’s farewell to the troops speech.

  On the other hand, Rita and I have made the wildest gung ho love when we were under the deepest stress.

  Write your speech, son, you’ve got to “face the nation” tomorrow, Rocky Mountain time.

  Straight narrative, no intertwining B.S. or politicizing. Explain the O’Connell ne Horowitz phenomenon. Truth, baby, truth. At least truth will not come back to haunt you.

  Strange, I should be thinking of Greer at this moment. Rita is the most sensual soul mate one could pray for. We have loved one another without compromise for nearly thirty years. Yet, is it possible that Greer is really the love of my life?

  I’d have never come this far in the campaign without Greer Little’s genius. I would have been tossed into the boneyard of candidates never heard from again. She organized, she raised money, she knew the political operatives, and she masterminded my “miracle” campaign.

  I was struck by the realization that Greer would leave soon, and I felt the same kind of agony as when we broke up years before. I had needed to see Greer on some business, and knocked and entered her room. She had been on the bed with Rita, passed-out drunk. Rita had held her and soothed her as though she were a little girl, and Rita had put her finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet.

  Well, there was life without Greer, but there could be no life without Rita. Yet it still hurts.

  I watch the hours flow in the passageway behind me like the tick of a suppressed bomb about to be released. I am through with a draft. I write another.

  As the hours to dawn tick off, it all seems to come down to the same basic questions. Am I telling the truth? Do the American people have the civility and the decency to take the truth and rise with it?

  Why me, Lord? Haven’t I had enough of your pranks? Isn’t slamming the White House door in my face just a little much, even for Your Holiness? I’m at the landing over the reception foyer of the White House. The Marine band drums up “Hail to the Chief” and the major of the guard proclaims, “The president of the United States and Mrs. Horowitz.” Oh, come on now, Lord. Aren’t you carrying this a little too far?

  Well, all the stories of the good Irish lives are best passed on around the old campfire from schanachie to schanachie, and I’ll not spare you mine.

  In actual fact, my own beginnings began at the end of World War II, when my future adopted father, Daniel Timothy O’Connell, returned from the Pacific with a couple of rows of ribbons and a decided limp.

  BROOKLYN, AUTUMN 1945

  The war to end all wars had ended. The Military Air Transport DC-3 groaned as the cables stretched in a turn, and a piece of the plane’s skin flapped against the pilot’s window. The tail swung. A queasy contingent of soldiers, sailors, and a few Marines were losing the battle with their equilibrium.

  Staff Sergeant Daniel Timothy O’Connell tried to suck oxygen from the

  wilted air as beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. The sergeant

  mumbled into his beard that he had come all the way from San Diego without puking and damned if he was going to puke in front of a planeload of swab jockeys and dog faces.

  In the cockpit a pair of MATS women flew the craft, adding to his discomfort. “Guadalcanal,” he continued mumbling, “Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa, only to crash ten miles from home!”

  Crossing the United States was no simple matter. There was no commercial air service to and from San Diego. MATS, which took as many discharged veterans as it could, had hundreds on their waiting list.

  O’Connell had caught a train from San Diego to L.A. From there, two different airlines making nine stops over a twelve hour period landed him at Wright-Patterson Field outside Dayton.

  There was a delay of several hours before another MATS plane could get him to the East Coast. He checked in and segued into a bar just outside the gates and sashayed in with a sailor he had teamed up with named Gross. Marines seldom used first names, so Gross was Gross.

  They entered the Blue Lady lounge to see a half dozen women lined up at one end of the bar.

  “Could be a B-joint,” O’Connell said. “Got your dough safe?”

  “Money belt.”

  “You see,�
�� O’Connell went on, “they know a lot of GIs are coming through Wright-Patterson Field loaded with back pay and that we have to be out of town soon.”

  “I know you’ll protect me,” Gross said.

  “Jim Beam with a Jim Beam backup.” “A couple of ladies would like to

  treat you boys.” “I’ll bet they would.” “Hey, take off your pack and

  stand at ease,” the bartender said. “I’m Army, myself. These are a lonely wives club. Some of them have been without for two years. Just women without men. They work at Wright Patterson

  “You know,” Gross said, “I might settle in here for a few days.”

  “Yeah, only after we find a Western Union and you wire home the money you’re carrying.”

  “You going to stay?” Gross asked.

  “No,” O’Connell answered.

  “I mean, look at them, their eager little bodies twitching.”

  “It’s a duty thing,” the Marine snapped.

  “With me, too,” Gross said. “God would never forgive me if I just upped and ignored His perfect works of beauty.”

  “I haven’t seen my sweetheart in over three years,” Dan said, becoming serious. “So pick a filly and let’s get your money home.”

  With Gross on the way to wonderland on the arm of a happy sad lady with two kids, Dan O’Connell returned to MATS at Wright-Patterson Field. He had been bumped by an officer.

  In a race down the train platform he got aboard a train to Pittsburgh with no time to spare for the overnight ride to New York. Dan was up before daylight, a hundred dreams all fusing. How does one play out his homecoming scene?

  Siobhan Logan rushed into Dan’s arms while her brother, Father Sean Logan, remained a step behind. Scan smiled widely as they embraced. He had seen them as teenagers, young adults, same pose, only this time she screamed for joy.

  Dan’s testy hip and knee made itself felt when he dropped his sea bag to en curl her and spin her about.

  “Oh, Dan, your leg, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m still big enough to hold up a drunk in either hand. Siobhan!

  Siobhan! Oh, you are so beautiful.”

  Dan spotted Father Sean advancing timidly. He wore a Roman collar.

  Ordained and everything.

  “Father Scan.”

  “Just Scan.”

  The two men were the closest of pals, and they went their separate ways—Sean to the seminary and Dan to the Brooklyn Police Academy. Both had prayed that Dan would get home. Dan didn’t embrace men. A tough handshake, a couple of slaps on the shoulder.

  “I’ll take that sea bag,” Father Sean said.

  “I can deal with the weight.”

  “Oh, it’s not the weight, it’s your general awkwardness. See now, with your limp we’d have to attach the bag to your waist and have you drag it, or you could put it back on your shoulder and when you fall down I can pray over you and Siobhan will pass the plate.”

  “All right, all right—if you’ve no respect for a wounded veteran!

  Anyhow, I sent the big trunk home by Railway Express.”

  “I hope it finds its way to you someday,” Father Sean said.

  The Promenade along Brooklyn Heights rarely had enough benches and parking spaces these days. Dan was not the only lad from Brooklyn coming home.

  “They’re talking about putting a bridge over the Narrows,” Siobhan said quickly and shakily, “to Staten Island.”

  “They’ll never get a bridge over there.”

  This kiss was fiercely mellow or, as Dan would say in the Marines, “The price of poker has just gone up.”

  Siobhan straightened up and gulped a monster sigh. “We’re all but married in name.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you are behaving stupidly.”

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s not what you did. It’s what you dol If we are virtually married, I want to do what married people do, now, today,” she said.

  “I’ve thought about it so much,” Dan said, “that I want it to be utterly perfect, utterly. I want us to be joined by God first.” “That will take God two weeks. God may be patient, but I can’t wait that long. I’ve got a key to a girlfriend’s flat. Either we go there now, or I’m going to undress right here, right now.”

  Home! The grand illusion.

  Everything you remembered had to be perfect to balance the imperfections. A cop from Flatbush. Now, that was a big man in Marine eyes. The only man who really came from a perfect place was his closest and eternal buddy, Justin Quinn.

  Home! Dan had forgot that his mother’s voice ranged between a squeal and shrill. Gooseflesh popped out on his skin when she argued, like someone had run chalk over a “singing” blackboard.

  Home! Dan remembered those midnight-to-eight walking beats. It could be noon before he could get to the paperwork. The nights brought gunplay and gore. One of his backup partners had been massively wounded. A tot murdered in its crib, the mother’s throat slashed, and a deranged boyfriend opting to shoot it out. (“That was a bad one. Take a couple days off, Dan .”)

  Home! Until he saw her again, he had clear forgotten about the wart on the end of his aunt’s chin.

  Or how small and crushing the streets were.

  Or how tiny his room was.

  The closeness of space and people led to a repetition of life.

  Now, Justin Quinn had a real home! Justin Quinn had never returned. He had been killed in Saipan, but even the night before his death he had spoken of the beauty of his father’s ranch in Colorado. It was the perfection sought by all but experienced by few.

  A Marine’s life can be boring, but there is always a jazzy sparkle when he is polishing up for shore leave. He and Justin blew through the camp gates. Justin would go to waiting arms.

  Dan played it straight with Siobhan for the entire time. But he was a singer and dancer and great teller of jokes. Well now, he did get into an awkward situation or two with the ladies in New Zealand, but nothing he couldn’t tell Siobhan of, at a later time.

  Home. Relatives and friends who spent most of their lives stirring the pot in each other’s kitchens and salty old yarn spinners bragging about WWI, the “big” war in France and their blowout in Paree.

  No Sunday came and went without a wedding or a christening. Hardly a week passed without a wake. “How many Japs did you kill, Dan?” “San Diego! That’s the end of the earth now!” “Go over your medals one more time, Dan. Which one was for getting wounded?”

  “Is it true what they say about them Asian women?”

  WELCOME HOME, CLAN read the banner over the entrance of the precinct station. It was a happy event, indeed. The precinct had lost five men to the war.

  A big cake had been baked and several cases of Coke hustled. (Can you believe it, Dan? Coke is up to a dime a bottle.)

  Dan’s new uniform came compliments of a grateful mayor. He was issued a revolver, a sweet .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special.

  “You know, you can wear your military ribbons on your police uniform.

  Now, what’s that one?”

  “It’s called a ‘ruptured duck,” to signify you are a veteran.”

  The powers that be knew Dan would not be able to take up a walking beat again. He could handle it somewhat, but he’d lose too many suspects and arrests if he had to give chase. Well, no matter, Dan O’Connell was a war hero, and they’d talk about a desk job or perhaps a patrol car and, just maybe, becoming a detective.

  A rookie named Kofski was on Dan’s old beat. He put on his new uniform and bolstered his new pistol for “the walk.” Kofski was all thumbs. Dan preferred Irish cops to polacks.

  “The walk” would be a sort of victory lap to reclaim the homage of his protectorate. It started as all walks started, with Dan taking an apple from the Italian vendor.

  Farther along, they rushed up to a third floor to break up a marital. In the old days, Dan had been an arbitrator, along with the parish priest. Consultation fees, a cup of tea and
a slice of pie. Jesus, Kofski, don’t just burst in with your baton swinging!

  A final cuff was made when they nailed a kid heisting hubcaps. Kofski shook the kid real hard and wanted to take him back to the station. Dan had to read quickly whether this boy was too far into the street scene or could still be salvaged. He opted to take the boy to his mother and dad.

  This chase incident made Dan aware of his limited mobility. Kofski had to run the kid down, and it wasn’t easy.

  In the Corps, he’d been thrown in with all kinds of guys, Texans, farmers, and those wild lads from L.A. He’d only heard of such people and never believed he would live to see them. Won’t the nation change at the end of the war? As they left “the walk,” Dan wondered if his beat wasn’t really the perimeter of a walled graveyard.

  He sank into a mood of Irish maudlin. The pending mayhem of a large Irish wedding shaped up. A yard filled with clucking hens writing invitations, pinning up, pinning down. A band and step dancers and a tenor and a poet were hired, and even the mayor might make it.

  As the kitchen calendar was X’d, Dan entombed himself in his tiny room, awaiting his only respite, the daily visit from Father Scan Logan, his forthcoming brother-in-law.

  “Looks like you’ve had enough of the women, Dan.”

  tet t Egh.

  “Well, marriage is the one moment in life that a girl can make a kill. It’s bound to test your patience. But some fine news! Permission to use the big cathedral came from the cardinal of Brooklyn himself. I’ve waited for near on three years and have never performed a marriage ceremony. I wanted you and my beloved sister Siobhan to be my first.”

  Dan said it must have cost him a fortune in fees.

  “Never to mind. You don’t wear this collar to make money. You appear to be having normal prenuptial jitters.”

  “No doubts, Scan. I love Siobhan fiercely.”

  “Almost as much as you love the Marine Corps,” the priest retorted.

  “It’s so damned hard to let go!” Dan cried.

  “I’m counseling veterans a good part of the day. Lots of lads are stumbling around. It was for most of you the first taste of life beyond Brooklyn, and no matter what happens, the war will always remain the big event of your life.”