Authors: Lynn Austin
I gazed at him hopefully, waiting for him to take me in his arms again and let me call him Daddy for the first time. Instead he dropped my hands.
“I can’t let you do that, Grace. I’m so sorry. . . .” His eyes shone with tears, and I saw the muscles of his face working as he tried to hold them back.
“But it could be a secret and . . .”
“It wouldn’t be right. I made a vow to God that I would never have a wife or children. That I would serve Him and be a father to all the people He places under my care, not just one. I can’t break my promise, Grace.”
“Not even one time?” I pleaded. “Can’t I call you Daddy, just this once?”
“No,” he whispered. He lost the battle with his tears, and they slowly rolled down his face. “No, I’m sorry.”
I turned to run up the aisle again, and this time he didn’t stop me. When I reached the door I looked back. The sanctuary was still, the sounds from the street outside muffled by its thick stone walls and dark, polished wood. Father O’Duggan knelt at the rail with his face in his hands.
TWENTY-ONE
Father O’Duggan had refused to let me call him Daddy, but he became even more of a father to me after that day. He always walked his daily visitation rounds on foot, and they ended right outside my school, just as classes were dismissed. I met him there nearly every day, and he escorted me through the gauntlet of girls, eliminating their taunts and nosy questions. The Catholic girls were in awe of him, just like the rowdy drunks were in awe of Black Jack. I think it was because Father O’Duggan knew all their sins and could assign their penances. I was in awe of him too, but in a different way—mine was more an amazed sense of wonder that a man as important as Father O’Duggan would take time to be with me. He was my best friend.
He had a slight limp, and I could always see him approaching by the way he walked. I loved the softness of his uneven gait and the vulnerability it revealed in a man who was otherwise so solid and strong and commanding. We talked all the way home from school.
“Did you have a good day?” he asked as we walked to my apartment building around the corner from the rectory. “How was your geography test?”
“Easy. Thank you for loaning me your globe. It helped me study.”
He kept close track of the subjects I took and the grades I received, encouraging me when a subject seemed difficult, praising me when I did well. Best of all, he nurtured in me a great love for books.
“What did you think of
Treasure Island
, Gracie?”
“Oh, Father O’Duggan, it was so exciting! I had to stay up late reading it so I could find out what happened!”
“I knew you’d like it. It’s one of my favorites too. Remind me to find
Robinson Crusoe
for you next.”
I spent most of the book money he paid me on the movies, my second great love. I laughed with the Marx Brothers in
Duck Soup
, gave myself nightmares with Boris Karloff in
The Mummy, envied
Jean Harlow in
Dinner at Eight
, and fell in love with Clark Gable in
It Happened One Night
,
“I hope you won’t squander all your time at the movies,” he warned. “Books are still a better way to travel and see the world because they make you use your imagination.”
“But movies are educational too,” I said. “The theaters show newsreels about world events before the feature presentation.” He laid his hand on my head like a blessing and laughed his warm, rolling laugh.
“Aye, so they do . . . so they do.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. “Do me a favor, Gracie, and buy me some jujubes next time you go, okay?” He patted his middle, then added, “I’m only allowed to have two or three, though, so you go ahead and eat the rest while you’re watching the show.”
When Prohibition ended in 1933, all the fun went out of my nights down at O’Brien’s speakeasy. We no longer needed to have “fire drills” now that the bar was legal—though I still got an adrenaline rush whenever Mother played “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The Regency Room closed for a week for renovations, and when we returned I hardly recognized the place. The owner of the hotel had knocked out the back wall of the restaurant, making one huge room, and he installed a dance floor where the speakeasy had been. Mick’s bar got a new coat of shellac and brand-new barstools.
“I’ll be serving real hootch from now on,” Mick told me proudly. “No more rot-gut.”
He and Mother adapted well to the changes. She put together a dance band with trumpets and saxophones and trombones and drums, and she even started singing while she played the piano. But O’Brien grew more and more restless and unhappy. He snapped at all the waiters, and his freckled face seemed to take on a permanent frown.
The storm cloud I had seen brewing came to a head one night when Mother and I arrived for work and found O’Brien in his office, cleaning out his desk. “What are you doing?” Mother asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He pulled out the bottle of bootleg gin he kept in his bottom drawer and set it in front of Mother. “Here. A little present to remember me by.”
Mother was supposed to be tuning up the band, but she sank down on the tattered sofa as if she’d already played three sets without a break. “You’ve got to give yourself more time, O’Brien. You can’t expect to adjust to earning a respectable living overnight.”
“I gotta make more money than this, Emma. Me and Black Jack gotta live in style.”
“But . . . but this is the same job you always had, isn’t it? Running this place?”
O’Brien scooped up a pile of papers from his desk and shoved them into a cardboard box. “The money was in the booze, Emma, not in managing the club.”
Mother sprang to her feet, her hands on her hips. “Is it the money you’re addicted to, O’Brien, or the danger? The excitement of breaking the law? Outscoring the cops?”
He looked down at his desk top, clean for the first time that I ever recalled. “Maybe you’ve got something there. . . .” he mumbled. “But I still can’t help it. This isn’t the life for me and Black Jack—”
“Go ahead then, open your stupid gambling den!” Mother shouted. She pulled me close as if to protect me from him. “But don’t come around me or Gracie anymore if you do! I don’t want anything to do with criminals!” She was crying hard—and Mother seldom wept.
“Aw, now, Emma . . . don’t cut us off from Gracie. You know how much we love that kid. Black Jack will die of a broken heart.”
“Do you love her enough to go straight?”
The answer must have been no because Black Jack and O’Brien kissed me good-bye that night as if their hearts would break, then they both disappeared from my life. Not only had my real father abandoned me, but now these two fathers had left me as well. The loss overwhelmed me.
I poured out my sorrow to Father O’Duggan. When I was little, Mother had soothed away my tears with Great-grandma’s crying cup. Now he was my crying cup, able to comfort me in my grief.
“I’m sure they never wanted to hurt you, Gracie,” he said as we talked on the crumbling cement steps of my apartment building. “But grown-ups are complex creatures, and the choices they make are seldom black-and-white. Just because they are forced to choose between two things doesn’t mean they love one less and the other more.”
“But I miss them so much!”
“Aye, poor lass. It’s like a death, isn’t it? The sad truth is that people are sure to come and go from our life as we grow older—some die, some move away, and some leave us because they change so much that we hardly know them anymore.” He handed me his handkerchief to dry my eyes. “You won’t
always feel this sad, Gracie. The Bible says, ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’”
“Mother says,‘Joy and sorrow come and go like the ebb and flow.’”
“Aye, she’s right, you know.”
“Are you going to move away too, Father O’Duggan?”
“No . . .” he said softly. “No, I think the good Lord wants me here in St. Michael’s parish for a while longer.”
About a year later, Mick got homesick for Ireland and decided to return. “Please don’t go!” I begged when he told Mother and me the news. “Who will sing lullabies to me, Mick? And you promised to teach me the meaning of life someday—remember?”
“Aw, Gracie . . . don’t make me feel any worse than I already do.” His mournful face was filled with sorrow as he hugged me hard. “You’ll meet a handsome laddie someday who’ll sing sweeter songs to your heart than I ever could. And as for the meaning of life . . . well, that’s something we all have to figure out for ourselves.”
“I’ll never forget you, Mick.”
Mother cried even harder than she had when O’Brien and Black Jack left. Mick surprised me when he took her into his arms. O’Brien had hugged her often, but I’d never seen Mick hold her before.
“Come with me to Ireland, Emma . . . you and Gracie both. We’ll start all over again.”
“You know we don’t belong there, Mick. We’d never be happy away from our home.”
“Aye. That’s why I can never be happy in America, you see. It’s not my home.”
Mother and I went to the train station to see him off to New York, hoping he’d change his mind. He didn’t. We never heard from him again. Not even a postcard.
Now I had only two fathers, Booty and Father O’Duggan. Booty kept us supplied with food during those hard depression years when Mother and I had so little. He always had a smile and a pat on the head for me—provided Mrs. Booty wasn’t around. I couldn’t understand how he could be so loving at times and so distant at others. I also couldn’t understand why his wife didn’t like me. As far as I could recall, I had never done anything to cause it.
“‘Tisn’tjust you, lass . . .’tis all children,” he explained one afternoon.
“Is that why you and Mrs. Higgins never had any children of your own?”
I asked. But Booty was busy lighting another one of the cigarettes he chainsmoked and didn’t answer.
I loved going into the store to visit with Booty and looked for an excuse to go every day after school. If I came in with a little money to buy groceries, he would swear that those exact items just happened to be on sale that day. But there were no special sales when Mrs. Booty sat at the register. I loved the creak and slap of the rusty screen door; the cozy, crowded aisles jumbled with dusty cans; the dark, smoky haze that hung over the entire store. I often stole a peek into the mysterious apartment behind the curtain where the Higginses lived, but I never once went inside.
“Say, lass . . . how would you like to earn two bits?” Booty asked me one day when I was twelve years old. “I could use some extra help today.”
“Sure! I’d love to! What do you need me to do?” He gave me an ancient feather duster and put me to work cleaning the shelves. In truth, I probably stirred up more dust than I eliminated.
After that I worked in the store nearly every day, stocking shelves for him or making a small delivery if it was close by. In return, he would give me a couple of potatoes or a stick of oleo, saying, “I’ve got to get rid of this anyway, before it goes bad,” and he would make it seem as though I were doing him a big favor.
The day I turned thirteen, I went to the store after school to take Booty a piece of my birthday cake. Mrs. Higgins stood behind the register. I looked all around but there was no sign of Booty. I returned every day that week until the cake was too stale to eat, but he still hadn’t returned.
“What? You again?” Mrs. Higgins said when she saw me on the fifth straight day. “What do you want, coming in here all the time?”
“Where is Mr. Higgins?” I asked.
“He’s . . . he’s sick.” Her voice sounded different. When I looked at her closely, I saw that she didn’t look angry, she looked worried.
“Tell him I hope he’s better soon,” I said. To my utter amazement, Mrs. Higgins covered her face and wept. Mrs. Murphy, who had been examining eggs one by one, set her shopping basket down and hurried over to console her. I quietly left, careful not to bang the screen door on the way out. Mrs. Higgins hated that most of all.
The following day, Father O’Duggan wasn’t there to meet me after school. I ran all the way home in a panic. As soon as I walked through our door, I knew by Mother’s face that something was wrong. She wasn’t smiling. Her eyes were red from weeping.
“Gracie, honey . . . something terrible happened. Booty . . . Booty’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where? Did he go away like O’Brien and—?”
“No, sweetheart. Booty died this morning.”
“No! I don’t believe you! It’s not true!”
Mother held me close, pouring out the story in a rush of words. “He accidently stabbed himself on a huge nail from a packing crate, and he didn’t see a doctor or even tell anyone he was hurt until he had a high fever and greenish-white streaks down his side. By then it was too late. He died of blood poisoning.”
I twisted out of her arms and ran into our bedroom, flinging myself onto my bed. My grief was inconsolable.
Mother took me to Booty’s funeral at St. Michael’s. It was the first time that I’d ever seen Mother step inside a church. Everyone in the neighborhood came because everyone loved Booty. Father O’Duggan conducted the funeral, wearing a long black robe and one of the vestments Mam had made him. He wept along with all of us.
I had lost all of my “fathers” but one, and I was terrified that Father O’Duggan would leave me too. Then I remembered that I had a real father somewhere. I began to hound my mother for information about him, and when she gave me her usual, maddeningly evasive answers, I decided to go to Bremenville and find him myself. I got the idea from the movie
Dick Tracy Returns.
He solved mysteries and tracked down missing people all the time.
I didn’t tell anyone about my plans, not even Father O’Duggan. For the next few weeks I read twice as many books as usual and skipped the Saturday matinees until I had saved enough for a bus ticket. But of course I never made it out of the bus station. Mother hauled me home again and told me the painful truth—my real father didn’t want me. He had tried to kill me before I was born. She had run away from him to protect me. Piled on top of all my other losses, the truth devastated me.