Laughing from the Wings

...Sissy, knowing this all too well, is determined that her daughter (who shows disturbing signs of embracing the neighborhood ethos) will go to college, and Columbia no less...

...He was a natural leader and battened too much on his reputation to go on as an outsider...

...Inherent in passionate love are the conditions of its own entropic decay, even if the particulars will vary in every case...

...We try to make believe we don't notice...

...When Eddie first joined the police force he was a hardhead...

...Anyone whose appetite has been whetted by the quoted observations will be served more than enough to sustain him...

...By a sort of psychological and political jujitsu, her husband, who died under less than heroic circumstances, will be posthumously promoted to lieutenant, which should take care of the financial problem with Columbia nicely...

...14.95 Reviewed by Nick Browne When Theresa (Sissy) Sullivan was a little girl she walked her pet duck on a green leash around her Brooklyn neighborhood, very much like a bohemian poetess strolling a lobster up the Champs Elysees...

...She concentrated and made Eddie the center of her life...

...Eddie Sullivan was that, certified by the Marine Corps and acclaimed by the neighborhood...

...Sooner or later that dichotomy will force a rent between the most mutually adoring of couples...

...In Flaherty's case there is no danger of such disservice...

...That would have pleased the ass off him, she thought...

...Mickey McKenna was still getting laughs from the wings...

...So we say scum is scum...

...She is preparing, along with what is left of the family, to attend a City Hall ceremony honoring police officers fallen in the line of duty, of which her husband is ostensibly one...

...But first there is the family and the day to get through...

...Sissy's mother-in-law, "alone thought Lee Harvey Oswald had climbed the stairs of the Texas School Book Depository solely to break Rose Kennedy's heart...

...During an adult lifetime as the wife of a hero cop, she had acquired a loathing, as well as a reluctant understanding, of the mental survival techniques, attitudes and behavior patterns that she believes inform the lives of most, if not all, New York City cops...

...How Sissy ultimately fares you will want to discover for yourself...

...The watershed in their marriage was the death of their Marine son in Vietnam, but Sissy knew the marriage had been gone long before that...

...No less venturesome and imaginative than his heroine, Flaherty has set a romantic novel in a working class section of Brooklyn...

...To bring that off she dreams up a chancy scheme...

...His moral platform was what he conceived to be a sort of pragmatic fairness, and hers was pretty standard liberal...

...For once their stingy assessment was correct...

...he was no longer the core of her existence...

...About herself Sissy comments: "It's hard to think of oneself as merry and charming when the most frequent compliment bestowed is 'God bless her, she can work like a horse.' " It is sometimes unfair to both author and potential reader to select a number of fortunate phrases from a book to brighten up a review, for in turning to the work the reader finds that he has already had the dessert...

...He relaxed you...

...His attitude toward her became suspicious and tyrannous, and his drinking nasty...

...It must be remembered, though, that a romantic novel is not a romance, as Anna Karenina or Dick Diver would readily testify...

...It is not comic, just as The Charterhouse of Parma isn't comic yet has amused people through the ages...

...Sissy did give herself airs, and in this she was abetted, if not tutored, by her charming rapscallion of a father...

...As Tin Wife opens, most of the important men in Sissy's life—her father, her son, her husband—have died within a few years of each other, although they remain large in the narrative...

...Although some might consider Joe Flaherty's humor mordant, I do not...

...Indeed, so great was his idealism and vigilant honesty that his well placed uncle at Police Headquarters was unable to gain him, despite Eddie's personal popularity, the preferment that everybody had thought to be naturally his...

...If such conformity offers comfort to those who find it a refuge, it is, literally, maddening to those who must pretend to believe in its vanities and hypocrisies because they are essential to the ones they love...

...Sissy has a plan...

...But Flaherty's ironic detachment, while equally controlled, is considerably less distant from its subjects than the icy Stendhal's...

...And she had learned one big lesson about men from her charming dad...

...Like looking at a fish tank in a doctor's office...

...It is to Flaherty's credit that Eddie Sullivan is not a straw man to his wife's argument, and much of his street wisdom is appealing...

...Once she began to lead boys home rather than migratory water fowl, he changed...

...She remained pristine during his years in Korea, and after he returned he never stood a chance, nor wished to...

...To emphasize the humor in Tin Wife, however, is misleading...

...Official praise and a patrolman's pension, however, do not a satisfying widow's mite make, especially if you are determined to send your daughter to Columbia University in the teeth of family opposition...

...As Sissy gets ready to pull the trigger on her enterprise the book moves with the pace and tension of a first-rate thriller, without the mayhem and gore...

...Eddie was neighborhood...

...Eddie did not remain that way too long...

...In fact, it is a great virtue of this novel that it so clearly illustrates what we should know—that in those gray boroughs of New York a wealth of intelligence, aspiration and original thought lies waiting only to be found and properly invested...

...This painful experience proved useful when, as the biddies say, she set her cap to catch a hero...

...This obviously is hardly standard NYPD procedure...

...did you ever think how a black or PR cop feels when 80 per cent of the arrests, we, meaning them, too, make are of their own people...

...Eddie had it all—looks, strength, intelligence, plus a gentleness and fairness uncommon among the local bravos...

...Sissy had more than a touch of Manhattan in her...

...The child's venturesomeness and imagination were seen by her neighbors as giving herself airs...

...But in closing Tin Wife ont cannot help thinking of the author who died at the age of 47 last October and a line Sissy applies to her own departed father: "Despite all he had done, she could still laugh—even now, years after his death...

...The duck notwithstanding, Sissy was no Bushwick Avenue Baudelaire, or Bensonhurst Bovary either...

...Joe Flaherty, I think, too...

...It's alot easier...

...She intends to use her insider's knowledge, the clannishness of the department and the paranoia of the government bureaucracy to do much, much better for herself and her family than honeyed words over a fallen hero...

...Eddie addressed himself to the individual in question and Sissy to the principle...

...It was those airs again that did in Sissy's love, and besides she and Eddie were losing their concentration...

...It is always trenchant and infused with generosity and sympathy...

...It is even more to Flaherty's credit that he avoids both the sort of literary Socialist Realism that dogs so many serious novels about working-class life and the "forgive them, for they know not what they do" attitude we are asked to take when watching Archie Bunker...

...Sissy's mother, summing up the entire lifetime accomplishment of her husband, declares: "It was nice having him around...

...It was he who supplied the duck, larked off with her to the race track at Saratoga, and conspired with her to keep his infrequent winnings—and just about everything else—secret from her mother...

...The heart of this work is the burden of its characters: the arrested emotional and intellectual development that make life bearable for the people in any insular community who perceive their safety and well-being to be based upon unswerving observance of local custom and myth...

...In this vein we meet the family...

...For her part, Sissy never questioned too closely, or at all, the "tip on the horse" that resulted in the color Sony, the new bar in the den...

...Sissy was beautiful, but knew you did not land a hero with a reputation for dalliance by the lake in Prospect Park...