August Gale (28 page)

T
he young man knocked on the door.

Ambrose did not recognize the surprise visitor—his second-born son, William Patrick Walsh, the child he had named after his beloved brother Paddy.

Bill Walsh eyed the man he believed to be his father. He had seen pictures of him, but still, he was not sure.

“Are you Ambrose Walsh?” he asked.

Ambrose nodded.

“I'm your son, Billy.”

It was 1972, and my uncle had just completed his master's degree in social work. A few years earlier, Ambrose had surprised him with a phone call, wanting to talk. My uncle was excited about this unexpected connection with his dad.
Maybe he wants to reconcile with Ma, with us
. Unlike my father, my uncle had no memories of Ambrose. He was a year and a half old when Ambrose had slipped out the door in Brooklyn, and just a few years older when his dad abandoned his family again in San Francisco. My father was not excited about hearing from Ambrose after three decades of silence, but my uncle thought,
I just want to see him. I want to see my dad's face
.

When he arrived at Ambrose's California home without warning, my uncle did not consider the repercussions of his visit. Unflustered by his son's sudden appearance, Ambrose invited my uncle into the living room. As the two of them talked, Ambrose's daughters returned home. Twelve at the time, Donnie asked her mother, “Who is that man?”

“He's your brother,” Arlene said, pulling Donnie into the kitchen.

“My
brother?
” Donnie asked. She had four older brothers, but no one had ever told her about this mysterious sibling. “What are you talking about?”

Ambrose's eldest daughter, Kathy glimpsed the man talking to her father.
He has to be related to us. He looks just like my brother, Jim
. For years, Kathy had wondered about Ambrose's other family after discovering two paintings in her father's closet. The watercolors depicted young boys, with curly light brown hair. “Who are they?” she had asked her dad. Ambrose shook his head, refusing to answer. “Who
are
they?” she persisted.

“They're my sons from my first family,” Ambrose said quietly, refusing to say anything more.

Now, a decade later, Kathy stared at the stranger in her father's home.
That's got to be my brother
. For most of her childhood, Kathy had dreamed about her mysterious brothers.
I wonder what their lives are like
. After my uncle's impromptu visit, Donnie also began to consider her secret siblings and her connection to them.
Someday, I want to meet them. I want to know them. They're my family
.

The August sky is dark and storm clouds threaten as the plane touches down at the New Hampshire airport. After the sudden connection through our August Gale research and multiple phone and e-mail conversations with my father, Kathy and Donnie fly three thousand miles east to meet the brothers they have long wondered about. They have no trouble recognizing my father at the airport terminal; he walks and carries himself like their brother Jim. Kathy's eyes tear up.
After so many years, I can't believe we're finally meeting our brother
. As my father helps them carry their suitcases, Kathy and Donnie stare at his hands. They are identical to Ambrose's. Over the next few days, they will watch my father wave his palms in the air as he talks, place his fingers to his forehead as he thinks.

“He's so much like dad. His mannerisms are identical,” Donnie whispers to her sister.

“How,” Kathy and Donnie will later ask themselves, “can he mirror Dad's characteristics so much when he was only with him for a short time?” Oddly, none of their other four brothers share Ambrose's traits.

As I drive south from Maine to my New Hampshire childhood home, I imagine my dad and his half sisters together, getting to know each other after decades of separation. I consider my Nana, how she would have told my father,
It's the right thing to do. Invite them to your home. You're the oldest. It's your responsibility
. For most of my Nana's life, she bridged her two families—the first six siblings born to her mother—and the other seven children born to her stepmother. My grandmother quelled the feuds, mended the hard feelings, and was forever trying to link her brothers and sisters together. And now my father tries to do the same. “I don't hold anything against them,” he says of Kathy and Donnie. “Why would I?”

Though my father has no qualms about meeting Ambrose's daughters, my mother, five sisters, and I still find this gettogether surreal and strange. For most of their marriage, my mother had never asked about Ambrose. She knew my father did not want to talk about him, to resurrect the painful memories of his past. Protective of my father, my sisters and I are unsure of how we will feel in Kathy and Donnie's presence. They represent the family Ambrose chose over our dad; they symbolize the grandfather several of my sisters still resent. Still, we are curious. Will they look like us? Act like us? Will we like them?

Hours after Kathy and Donnie arrive, I pull into my parents' driveway. Overhead, storm clouds loom, growing larger, closer. They are black and thick and will soon thunder and spark lightning that will crackle in the afternoon air. I muse about Paddy and Ambrose, their spirits conspiring to create an August storm as a backdrop to this unexpected family gathering. Donnie and Kathy's visit comes so soon, six weeks after our trip to Marystown, and I wonder if their stay, their memories will flesh out the grandfather I am beginning to know. What stories will they tell, what details will they choose to share about their lives and Ambrose?

My parents' house is quiet, the kitchen, sunporch, and pool area empty. An uneasy feeling lurches in my stomach.
Where are they?
The living room is vacant, too. I head down the hall and open the den door. The air conditioner whirs on high, and my parents, Kathy, and Donnie are laughing at the black-and-white images that flicker on the television. They are watching videos of my sisters and me as young children. Our chubby legs pump backyard swings and attempt to climb a metal slide. My older sister, Diane swings, vigorously, upside down on the monkey bar. Kathy and Donnie laugh as if they have seen this video before, as if they are part of our family. I am struck by how comfortable they are, how at ease my parents are in their company.

I hug each of them, taking in their auburn hair, the color of their eyes. Kathy's are soft, hazel, and a bit guarded, watchful like my own. Donnie's brown eyes sparkle with light, reminding me of my sister Laura's luminescent gaze.

Not long after I arrive, my Uncle Bill and his wife Pam pull up to my parents' home. Despite having moved to Michigan in 1970, my uncle has often driven to New Hampshire for his six nieces' weddings, for momentous birthday and anniversary celebrations. And he was not going to miss this gathering, the chance to meet his half sisters.

As with my father, Donnie and Kathy tear up when they see my uncle. Later they will tell each other:
He's got the same facial features and build as our brothers Michael and Jim
. Kathy also appreciates my uncle's soft-spoken nature. She watches him listen intently to conversations.
He's like me
, she thinks.
A listener, a bit shy
.

That evening, after the dinner dishes have been cleared, Ambrose's children sit at the kitchen table sharing stories, piecing together the secrets of their father's life.

“My dad always told me that I was six weeks old when he bundled me in his coat and drove me and my mother from Brooklyn to Florida,” Kathy explains. “A few months later, my mother and I took a bus across the country to San Francisco.”

Ambrose, Kathy explains, arrived before them, on a yacht he was paid to sail to the fog-shrouded city. My father is stunned; he had not realized Kathy is the baby who suddenly appeared in their Mill Valley home.

“My mother took care of you,” he tells her. “For a few months, you lived with us.”

Kathy cannot understand or fathom why my Nana would care for her, knowing that she was the child of Ambrose's mistress. Though her mother Arlene will later refuse to talk about why my Nana temporarily cared for Kathy, she does tell her daughter, “She was good to you. I walked up to see you every day and had tea with her. She was really nice to me.”

Kathy and Donnie wince as my father continues the story, explaining how Ambrose gambled away most of their money and eventually deserted them again.

“It was tough, really tough on my mother,” he says. “She had a nervous breakdown.”

Shaking their heads, Donnie and Kathy offer their apologies. They loved their father and never worried that he would leave them, but they understood how their dad's bad choices could cause chaos and pain. While raising his six children in California, Ambrose worked a variety of jobs—selling cars, painting commercial buildings, driving buses, but he often gambled away his paycheck, and sometimes he got fired for taking too much time off to bet on the horses.

“You probably were better off without him,” Donnie says, sharing a sentiment that her four other brothers have voiced about Ambrose's first two sons.

My uncle and father fall silent.

Eager to console, Kathy offers some of the good memories, stories of the years before Ambrose left his sons.

“Before he died, my father opened up more about you,” she tells my dad. “He talked about how close he was to you, how he bought you your first bike and taught you how to ride. He said the two of you used to go everywhere together. You used to stand on the car seat next to him as he drove, with your hand around his shoulders.”

My uncle listens quietly to these stories; it is painful to realize there are few memories for him. Still, he knows Ambrose saved his life. My uncle was only a few days old when he came home from the hospital and caught the whooping cough. Ambrose and his wife, Patricia, feared their second-born son would die. They watched as the infant closed his fists and flailed his arms, coughing and struggling to breathe. Determined not to lose another infant like their daughter, who was stillborn, Ambrose swaddled his brother Paddy's namesake and took William Patrick to five doctors. “There's nothing we can do,” they told him.

Ambrose refused to take their word. He sought out a chiropractor, who massaged the phlegm from his baby's lungs and told him to take the infant to the sea to breathe the cold, salty air. With several treatments, Ambrose's son overcame the cough and survived.

Still, for much of his life, my uncle lived with a void, an emptiness, no recollection of his father. Though the stories Kathy and Donnie tell are difficult to hear, my uncle understands that his half sisters are doing what they can to absolve Ambrose's wrongs.
They want to know that we're happy, that we're okay, and even though Ambrose left us, he still thought about and loved his first two sons
.

Before they leave to return home to California, Kathy and Donnie witness a raucous birthday celebration in which all of our family—my parents, five sisters and me, my uncle, his wife, eight grandchildren, four brothers-in-law, and even my Aunt Eleanor—all gather poolside for a barbecue. It is my father's sixty-eighth birthday that day, August 12; the following day is my forty-fifth birthday. Kathy and Donnie laugh at the insanity that unfolds around them. Kids jumping in and out of the pool, sisters brewing batches of margaritas, a Wiffle-ball game in the backyard. Growing up, they did not have these types of celebrations, and they are happy to take part, to be welcomed, to be considered family.

Before the birthday candles are lit, my uncle has a surprise gift for Kathy, Donnie, and my father: navy T-shirts with white bold block letters that read:
WALSH
. Pulling the shirts over their heads, they pose for pictures. They line up, Kathy and Donnie on either side of my uncle and father. They smile and instinctively place their arms around one another. As I focus my camera on them, tears well up in my eyes. Never did I think the August Gale, the desire to tell the story of my seafaring ancestors, would lead to this: to Ambrose's children hugging, sharing the apologies their father could not voice.

During the last few days of their stay, Donnie, the more loquacious of the two sisters, shares a wish with me. “I've always felt sad about your father,” she says. “Out of all the brothers, he was the closest to my dad. And then his father leaves. You never get over it. That wound stays with you all your life.

“I thought maybe by visiting him, we could resolve some of his heartache. I know he cannot quite forgive, but to let go of that anger would be the best thing.”

I nod, knowing my father has unburdened some of his bitterness, some of the anger. He has talked about Ambrose more in the last few months than he has over the past five decades. I think about the conversation my dad shared with me on a winter's night about the August Gale—how a storm that wrought so much grief and loss could result in calming another tempest, the squalls and sorrow my grandfather stirred.