Mary Sullivan's career as a New York City police detective in the late 1920's and 1930's carries the measured tone of a schoolteacher who is patiently waiting to be disobeyed. Evidently her frustration with "the men" who run the department caused her to put aside her nun's clapper and write this memoir. She wants to enforce laws in a world of negro fortune tellers, degenerates, dope fiends, gesticulating Italians, homosexuals, light-fingered customers, matrimonial bureaus, and lobster palaces. Certain ethnic groups need close watching: "There was a public hall in the neighborhood where the poorer Polish residents held their weddings, and invariably, as the feast went on, the guests would begin throwing glasses at one another. In the end, the wedding party would be brought into the police station, suffering from lacerated scalps and shouting wildly in Polish." Mysteriously, "These episodes didn't seem to have any permanent effect on the friendly relations of the parties concerned" (p. 21).
Mary Sullivan's name honors the nun who had been her mother's best friend in Killarney, from whence both her parents emigrated to New York toward the end of the 19th century. Mary was born in what she assures us was a stable Irish section of Greenwich Village, 1885. Three of Mary's six brothers were New York City policemen. She never mentions the local ward boss, the famous "Big Tim" Sullivan. Likewise descriptions of father Sullivan are remarkable for their absence. But her mother was "a gentle person with beautiful light brown hair, deep-set gray eyes and a quiet, low voice. She was the harmonizing influence in a household which, considering the size and differences in personality, might otherwise have been turbulent." Perhaps the last sentence explains the men.
Mary Sullivan's description of adolescence is not a titillating read. Greenwich Village social life among the Irish was strictly supervised; "The gay nineties were not especially gay for a girl in Greenwich Village." But the girls could always look forward to cookies and Ladies Day on New Years, when they kept open house and begged for the privilege of serving a little port wine to the young men who arrived in droves. Otherwise they travelled in packs, as on the previous evening when they would walk to Trinity Church to hear the chimes and later walk home again, "perhaps bringing the evening to a climax by stopping for a cup of chocolate." We can be assured that it was the only climax they would know until the appropriate family formalities were complete.
Political corruption is outside Mary's scope, but she has plenty of vices to keep her busy. Among Mary's indicated satisfactions in life are the new laws that controlled fortune telling, a dangerous business. Anyone who succumbs to its lure is going to be a "weaker character as a result, and he is going to make some very bad mistakes." As for the fortune tellers, the good news is that "Today they can be put in jail for terms up to six months." According to Mary's catechism, systematic repression and punishment is the cure for fortune telling; "We've done pretty well, though we've no hope of actually stamping out fortune-telling until that distant day when all human beings acquire common sense." In 1905 when Mary was 19, her father brought home a young man, Timothy Sullivan. "Before long he and I were in love. We were married in 1905, when I was nineteen years old." Two years later Timothy died suddenly, cause unexplained. Mary went to work selling ribbon trimmed corset covers. She was inspired by the work of the department store detective. "the occupational tradition of the Sullivans rose in my blood."
Mary Sullivan is a good example of that Irish tendency to enjoy enforcing moral codes preferably under penalty of prison. Mary's own Catholic belief that a wafer of bread is actually the body of Jesus Christ, that eating meat on Friday will cause one to roast in hell for eternity, are in her mind simply right. This in contrast to dangerous and "false" superstitions held by other groups such as negroes. This insistence on the absolute correctness what in a world view must be considered rather local beliefs, remains a remarkably persistent characteristic of some Irish today.
The years when Marry Sullivan was head of the Policemen's Bureau, my mother was in her early 20's. "It wasn't anything like today" my mother says of her teens and early twenties. We used to do everything in groups. We'd go up to West Point (1935) and the boys would buy us drinks which we would pour into the potted plants; we knew what they were after."