A Long Line of Dead Men

I might have been at Cunningham's. Not in one of the private dining rooms with the old man and his thirty new brothers, but standing at the bar or seated in the main dining room, or at a table in the smaller grill room that Vince Mahaffey liked. I'd have been twenty-two, with less than two weeks until my twenty-third birthday. Six months had passed since I cast my first vote. (They hadn't yet lowered the voting age to eighteen.) I voted for Kennedy. So, apparently, did a great many tombstones and empty lots in Cook County, Illinois, and he won by a nose.

I was still single, although I had already met the girl I would soon marry, and eventually divorce. I wasn't long out of thePoliceAcademy, and they'd assigned me to aBrooklyn precinct and teamed me up with Mahaffey, figuring I'd learn something from him. He taught me plenty, some of it stuff they didn't much want me to know.

Cunningham's was Mahaffey's kind of place, with a lot of dark hand-rubbed wood and red leather and polished brass, tobacco smoke hanging in the air and hard booze in most of the glasses. There was a decent variety of beef and seafood dishes on the menu, but I think I must have had the same meal every time I went there- a shrimp cocktail, a thick sirloin, a baked potato with sour cream. Pie for dessert, pecan or apple, and a cup of coffee strong enough to skate on. And booze, of course. A martini to start, ice-cold and bone-dry and straight up with a twist, and a brandy after to settle the stomach. And then a little whiskey to clear the head.

Mahaffey taught me how to eat well on a patrolman's salary. "When a dollar bill floats down from the skies and happens to land in your outstretched hand," he said, "close your fingers around it, and praise the Lord." A fair amount of dollars rained down on us, and we had a lot of good meals together. More of them would have been at Cunningham's but for its location. It was inChelsea, at the corner ofSeventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and we were across the river inBrooklyn, just five minutes away from Peter Luger's. You could have the same meal there, in pretty much the same atmosphere.

You still can, but Cunningham's is gone. Back in the early seventies they served their last steak. Somebody bought the building and knocked it down to put up a twenty-two-story apartment house. For a few years after I made detective I was stationed at the Sixth Precinct inGreenwich Village, about a mile from Cunningham's. I guess I got there once or twice a month during those years. But by the time they closed the place I had turned in my gold shield and moved to a small hotel room onWest Fifty-seventh Street. I spent most of my time at Jimmy Armstrong's saloon around the corner. I had my meals there, met my friends there, transacted business at my regular table at the back, and did my share of serious drinking. So I never even noticed when Cunningham's Steak House, est. 1918, closed the doors and turned off the lights. Sometime after the fact I guess somebody must have told me, and I suppose the news called for a drink. Almost everything did, those days.

But let's get back to Cunningham's, and back to the first Thursday in May of 1961. The old man- but why keep calling him that? His name was Homer Champney, and he was telling them about beginnings.

"We are a club of thirty-one," he said. "I've told you that my membership dates back to the last year of the last century, and that the man who spoke at my first meeting was born eight years after the War of 1812. And who spoke at his first meeting? And when did the first group of thirty-one assemble and vow to convene annually until only one of their number was left alive?

"I don't know. No one knows. There are vague references to clubs of thirty-one in various arcane histories down through the centuries. My own research suggests that the first club of thirty-one was an offshoot of Freemasonry over four hundred years ago, but it is arguable on the basis of a section in the Code of Hammurabi that a club of thirty-one had been established in ancient Babylonia, and that another, or perhaps a branch of the same one, existed among the Essene Jews at the time of Christ. One source indicates that Mozart was a member of such a club, and similar rumors have surfaced involving Benjamin Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, and Dr. Samuel Johnson. There's no way of knowing how many clubs have sprung up over the years, and how many chains have maintained their continuity across the generations.

"The structure is simple enough. Thirty-one men of honorable character pledge themselves to assemble annually on the first Thursday in May. They take food and drink, they report on the changes the year has brought to their lives, and they note with reverence the passing of those members claimed by death. Each year we read the names of the dead.