He buried her on a starry Saturday night in Prospect Park. He found a thicket on the hill beside the Quaker cemetery, dug quickly and furtively with a soup spoon, and laid her gently in the dark, moist earth. He made a triad of smooth stones to mark the spot, and then said a short prayer. It was over. At the end, he looked up at the sky, at the infinity of stars, let out one aching cry of loneliness and loss, and then walked in silence down the hill and back into the safe routine of his life.
ALMOST EVERYBODY LOVED WONDERFUL Kelly. He had a wonderful wife and three wonderful kids and lived in a wonderful house on Fuller Place, two blocks from Holy Infant Church. They thought he was wonderful at the church, too; he was an usher at two Masses every Sunday, he helped coach the eighth-grade softball team in the spring and the football team in the fall. In the summer, he always volunteered to take the poorest kids to Coney Island or the Sunset Pool. He had a good job in one of the neighborhood banks. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. Just a wonderful guy.
“You’re so lucky, Carol,” the women would say to Kelly’s pretty young wife. “You’ve got a wonderful guy. Not like some of the bums we married.”
Carol Kelly would smile in a shy way and keep walking up the avenue to the meat market or the hardware store, trailing her wonderful children. There were, of course, some neighborhood dissenters. Most of them could be found on a Saturday afternoon in winter, peering through the steam-fogged windows of Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, while Wonderful Kelly strode along the avenue. Dinny Collins, the bus driver, was one of them.
“Lookit this guy,” Dinny said one afternoon. “Walking along, bouncing on the balls of his feet, breathing in that clean winter air, his skin all pink and healthy. Lookit the hair. The guy’s forty but his hair’s black and he looks twenty-five. It makes you sick.”
“Come on, Dinny. Everybody says he’s a wonderful guy.”
“Oh, yeah? What’d he ever do for you that’s so wonderful? I’ll tell you. He did for you exactly what he did for me. Nothing. So how wonderful can Mr. Wonderful be? Could he make me fifteen years old again? Can he get me a raise? Can he pick me a winner at Belmont? What is this ‘wonderful’ crap, anyway?”
“The wives like him.”
“They would,” said Dinny Collins, who lived alone, a knockout victim in the marriage tournament. “They’ll like him even more when he goes to heaven.”
That summer, Wonderful Kelly extended his good works into the saloons. He said he was shocked by the high rate of neighborhood drunkenness, especially among married men. And he convinced the church to host a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in a large basement room on Tuesday nights. Then he started touring the bars, talking to each drunk in his quietly wonderful way about the evils of John Barleycorn, as he called it. Dinny Collins, of course, ignored him. What did Wonderful Kelly know about drinking? He’d never even been a drunk. But Wonderful did recruit some of the men, and when the existence of the AA meeting became known, a number of the wives issued ultimatums to their husbands: join AA or sleep in the subway.
After several weeks, a few former drunks could be seen nursing club sodas at the bars, even in Rattigan’s. They told stories about the meetings, how everybody got up to describe what alcohol had done to them, the wreckage it had caused, the chaos it had fueled. Coffee and tea and doughnuts were served, and priests were available for those who wanted to make general confessions, cleaning their slates of decades of mortal and venial sins. Kelly was, of course, delighted.
“I feel like a million bucks,” Charlie Deane said one night. “I’ll never touch this stuff again.” He was sitting on his usual stool at the bar. His pants were pressed, his hair neatly trimmed, his face closely shaved. “The wife even talks to me now. First time in three years.”
Dinny Collins scoffed. “Wait’ll you hear what she’s been saying. You’ll want to get stewed another three years.”
A few of the converts did fall off the wagon; but many stayed dry. Kelly’s stock in the neighborhood rose even higher. The monsignor of the church wrote a note to the archbishop, telling him how wonderful this fellow Kelly was; the archbishop wrote the bishop, and the bishop wrote to the president of Kelly’s bank. Within the month, Kelly had been named manager of the neighborhood branch. Everybody thought this was wonderful. Wives streamed into the branch to congratulate Kelly, and dozens moved their small accounts to Kelly’s bank. The first sign of Kelly’s wider prosperity was a new car. A small trophy, to be sure, but too much for Dinny Collins.
“Well, he got himself an early Christmas present,” Dinny said one Saturday afternoon that winter, watching Kelly drive by, his wife and kids in the car. “What’s next?”
