Free William H. Hallahan - by The Monk

man by the name of
Hardy O'Grady and hardy he was. He had bushy black hair, great white
teeth, a loud voice and a booming laugh that carried for miles, they
said. He was impatient with small quantities of anything, especially
beer. Wherever he went, he waved away the usual bar glass of beer and
demanded pints, from which he would scoff off a half in one pull. He
was the awe of the patrons in countless bars in New York--a man
admirably suited to his occupation: beer salesman.
    Hardy O'Grady was a marvelous raconteur with an endless fund of
stories, a master of timing with a gift for outrageous exaggeration.
And he loved to hear a good story as much as tell one. He ate as he
drank--in excess, with gusto and joy. Aunt Maeve was the very apple
of his eye and they made an incongrous pair--he, enormous, as though
he'd swallowed a barrel; and she, though not small, seeming petite
beside his bulk. Imagine the great mirth in the Davitt family when
from that union Aunt Maeve gave birth to Terry. Terrence Davitt
O'Grady, at your service. In the crib he was long as a worm, his aunt
Maggie said, with a whiny little cry and an unhappy expression on his
face--born with it and never lost it. Terry never smiled except when
he got something and then only until he realized it wasn't enough. It
was never enough. He had no friends. He disapproved of everyone and
of everything. He was also a tattletale and was decidedly antisocial.
Imagine. With a father like that. Worst of all, from Hardy's
standpoint, the boy had no sense of humor at all. The rest of the
family often forgot to invite him to birthday parties. Behind his
back they called him Ratface.
    When Terry was in his teens, he manifested, to everyone's
amazement, a gift for trade. He had a passion--just one--for postage
stamps and bought and sold and traded them with a dedication that
made him known to all the stamp dealers up and down the east coast
from Washington to Boston. He had a real nose for the market, and by
the time he was eighteen he had established his own stamp dealership
in the basement of his home. He went through college at Columbia
University, majoring in business. When he came out, he was already so
well established as a stamp dealer, he never considered for a moment
doing anything else. He opened a suite of offices in the old
Marbridge Building near Penn Station on Thirty-fourth Street, which
was populated mainly with shoe wholesalers' showrooms. He was
well-to-do before he was twenty-five.
    While Aunt Maeve and Uncle Hardy were watching this humorless,
furtive, unhappy little old man grow affluent, he surprised them one
day by bringing a woman to dinner. She was eight years his senior and
had a figure as flat as an ironing board. She was one of those women
who always seem to have a cold sore at the corner of their mouths and
a dissatisfied set to their lips. She had the eyes of a bird that
never showed any expression. She rarely spoke. But she was an
excellent catalog editor, knew the stamp business from childhood (her
father was the proprietor of a small stamp shop on Staten Island),
and Terry had hired her to start a mail-order stamp catalog to be
sent all over the world. It was to prove enormously successful. She
made a perfect mate for Terry. The cash register was marrying the
printing press. Hardy would laugh often at the bride's name: Joy.
    The wedding was a hopelessly dull affair that didn't get
interesting until Terry and his bride left for their honeymoon--at
Niagara Falls--by Greyhound bus. Hardy spread the story that they had
actually hired two other people to go on their honeymoon for them
while they went back to the office, and secretly, passionately, with
the lights out, so no one might see, fingered the stamps.
    Two years later, Hardy died as he had lived, laughing. He was in
his own home, in his kitchen in shirt sleeves and braces, pouring
pints from a full keg of ale to the visiting Davitts, when he fell to
laughing so hard at a joke Malachi told, he