Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy Page A

very worst things a
man can do to himself. It takes you over when you don’t expect it. Very sudden and we don’t anticipate a thing. It’s a terrible thing to do to yourself, getting too overly worked
up, Billy. I wouldn’t do it again for any man.”
    “I’ll catch you later, Pop. Thanks.”
    “Billy, I’m very glad you called me.”
    Billy hung up and scraped the horseshit out of his ear.
    The first of Billy’s family came home at three-forty Daniel Quinn, age ten, resident little kid returning from fourth grade at Public School Twenty across the street,
found his uncle on the couch with True Detective open on his chest, the lights out, shades drawn more than usual, the Telegraph , the Armstrong , the New York News and Daily Mirror on the floor beside the card table.
    “That you, kid?”
    “It’s me, Unk. Aren’t you working?”
    “Get lost. I’m half asleep. Catch you later.”
    And the boy went upstairs. But Billy’s eyes were open again, his gaze again on the shirty print of Mo the Kid, more properly titled “The Young Mozart,” hanging in an enormous
gold frame above the couch. There sat the precocious composer, exceptionally upright, playing, no doubt, a tune of his own making, on a spinet in a drawing room baroquely furnished with gilded
mirrors, heavy drapes, fringed oriental rug. The room was busy with footstools, ornamental screens, and music sheets strewn across the floor. The ladies in long, flowered gowns and chokers,
clutching single sheets of music, and an older gentleman in a wig, breeches, and buckled shoes like the composer, all sat listening as the young Mo sent out his life-giving music. The three gave
off non-human smiles, looking glazed and droopy, as if they’d all been at the laudanum.
    The print would not have been on the wall, or in the house, if Billy had had his way. It was a gift to his sister, Peg, from their Aunt Mary, a reclusive old dame who lived in the old family
home on Colonie Street, raised canaries, and had a secret hoard of twenty-dollar gold pieces she parceled out on birthdays. The picture always reminded Billy of his ill treatment by the people in
that house after his father ran away and left him and his sister and their mother; ran away and stayed away eighteen years, and neither Billy, Peg, nor their mother ever heard from him again. In
1934 he came back, not to his own home but to that goddamn house of his sisters and brothers, his visit culminating in inadequately explained rejection and flight, and further silence. And so Billy
hated the house for that reason, and also for the uncountable other reasons he had accumulated during his years as a never-quite-welcome nephew (nasty son of nasty Francis). The house was as
worthless as the stupid picture in which Kid Mo offered up his stupid, invisible music to a roomful of dope fiends.
    The picture would not leave his mind, even after he’d closed his eyes, and so Billy picked up the magazine and looked again at the about-to-be-raped model, fake-raped, with slip on the
rise revealing thigh, garter, seamed stockings. In high heels, with her rouged lips, artful hair, artificial fear on her face, she cowered on the bed away from the hovering shadow of the artificial
rapist. The change of vision from Mo to rape worked, and Billy slept the fearful sleep of an anxious loser.
    Peg’s keys, clinking at the keyhole, woke him.
    Plump but fetching, graying but evergreen, Margaret Elizabeth Quinn was returning from her desk in the North End Tool Company, where she was private secretary to the owner.
    “It’s dark in here,” she said. “What happened to the lights?”
    “Nothing,” Billy said as she switched on the bridge lamp.
    “Is Danny home?”
    “Upstairs.”
    “What’s new? You have a decent day?”
    “Great day.”
    “That’s nice.”
    “No it’s not.”
    “Did Mama call?”
    “No.”
    “The receiver’s off the hook.”
    “I know it.”
    “How could she call if the receiver’s off the