She sighed. “Well, all right. I'll have it at three.” She picked up her pen. “Now what's the name of the seminarian?”
“Brendan Connelly.”
“Nineteen thirty you say?”
“Yes.”
She wrote the information in a tight scrawl. “That should be helpful. Do you know where he was from originally?”
I shook my head. “No. But I think Baltimore.”
“You said you were related?”
“Yes. A very long story.”
“Because we can't pull records for justâ”
“He was my father.”
Her eyebrow raised. “Oh?”
Thank you, Lord! Here was the angle I needed!
I nodded and leaned forward, whispering dramatically, drawing her into my conspiracy. “And he still became a priest!”
“Oh!”
Standing up straight, I gathered my purse higher on my shoulder. “Is there a good place to eat around here?”
“Main Street Grill is pretty good.”
“That sounds like just the ticket.”
She rubbed her chin. “This is interesting. I don't get a request like this every day.”
I walked out of the room hoping that little bit of intrigue would send her down to the file room in time for me to grab the info and get back to the motel before rush hour. I decided to spend the night as I hate to drive in the dark.
The thrifty side of me won out and I ended up with a Big Mac on my plaid blanket by the playing field in front the seminary building. We don't have a McDonald's on Locust Island. I sipped on a Coke and read some Julian of Norwich. The sunshine heavied my eyelids, so I set my watch for 2:55, reclined back in the gilded light, and fell into a delicious sleep. I dreamed of Jesus. Only a dream, not a visit, and it was like one of those dreams after a loved one passes on in which you're sitting with them, eating a bowl of cereal, talking, or maybe watching some television, and suddenly you look at them and say, “Well, this is nice, but you're dead, aren't you?” And as the realization dawns, they fade away as if only allowed to be with you as long as you don't realize the real nature of the visit. I kept trying to bring him back as I dozed there, and sometimes he came and sometimes he didn't. But as I said, it was just a dream.
When my watch beeped, I gathered my bag and blanket and deposited them in the car.
Miss Porter was ready for me with a file and she was wearing her happy face! She was all chummy, her interest clearly piqued. “Well”âshe tapped the edge of the file on the palm of her handâ“we actually had a Brendan Connelly from back then, and, I have to say, Sister Mary-Margaret, you have his eyes and mouth.”
Those words scraped through me like barbed wire being pulled through the long channel of my spine. That I had a father had always been abstract. No talk of eyes and noses, or hair, or attributes of any kind.
“May I?” I reached out my hand.
“Here, take the file. I made copies for you. It's all there. You're going to be surprised.”
The manila paperboard felt smooth and cool, and the racing pulse in my red fingertips heated the surface right away. “Thank you, Miss Porter.”
She shook my hand, her bracelet sounding its music. “I hope you find what you're looking for. Most likely he's already passed away. I mean”âshe chuckled nervouslyâ“who lives to the age of ninety-five?”
I shrugged. “I'm actually counting on that, truth be known. I'm too old for that sort of upheaval.”
She sat back down in her desk chair. “Did he know about you?”
“I don't know. I have my doubts, though.”
“Wow. I've got to admit, I'm curious.”
“Me too. I thank you for your kind service, Miss Porter.”
“I hope it all works out.”
She truly did. I could see it in her eyes.
Back in the car I rifled through the pages. Brendan Connelly, born 1905 in Towson, Maryland. Parents: Etta and Niall. My grandparents.
And there was his picture. The raping seminarian.
He was thin-faced and handsome in a fragile way, his light eyes kind. His hair, most likely red and coarse like my own, waved back from his forehead in that Danny Kaye manner.
I ran my fingers down his face and tried to feel something akin to affection.
“Nothing,” I muttered.
I had a Father in heaven already, and despite the distance I felt between us, I felt I really didn't need one more.
My eyes skated over the papers, grades and suchâhe was intelligent judging by his marks, room assignments, mostly administrative details, until I came upon an interesting little scrapâa letter to a teacher who obviously felt it worthy of putting in his file. In June of 1940.
“You'll most likely be surprised
to learn I have become a Franciscan brother. I've taken on my confirmation name: Joseph.”
The
Franciscans
?! The raping seminarian? A
Franciscan
? Well, I supposed he must have felt bad about what he did, at least. And a brother too. So he didn't enter the priesthood after all. Or maybe he did eventually. Oh, all still such a mystery.
“I'm now at a mission in downtown Baltimore situated just off our red-light district known as The Block. We call it Heart of the City. The folks call me Brother Joe.”
Brother Joe? Brother
Joe
?
Oh, Jesus. I could hardly believe what I was reading.
You haven't met Brother Joe yet, sisters, but you will. And you'll be shocked I didn't actually faint when I realized he was my father. Some folks would call it a great coincidence. But I stopped believing in coincidences long ago.
He looked so different as a young man from when I met him in 1959. The kind redheaded man whom Jude adored. Jude knew this much, but he didn't tell me it in his papers, I was sure of it. But if he had been sitting there in the car with me, I wouldn't have had to look to see the expression on his face.
“See, Mary-Margaret?” Jude would have said. “You just can never tell. You needed to know. And now you know why. I think somebody was lying. Either your grandmother or your mom. Can you imagine Brother Joe raping anybody? But people go nuts sometimes, right? I'll give you that.”
I knew how people went nuts, that was for sure.
Brother Joe. I owed him more than I could say.
I'M SITTING IN THE KITCHEN NOW WHILE MY BREAD RISES. I missed the time to plant those bulbs and now I'm going to have to wait until spring. So I'll get back to what happened after receiving the file that day at the seminary.
I decided to head down to The Block, where Brother Joe worked at the mission. At first I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car; I just drove up and down the street, staring at the bouncers and the hookers and pictured Jude, overcoat wrapped around him on a cold night, collar upturned against the angle of his jaw, gold-brown curls brushing the wool. Most times I couldn't think about what he did all those years to earn money, so much potential so thoroughly wasted in backseats and fleabag motel rooms, or high-rise office suites. It didn't matter the location when it was someone you cared about. It wasn't like I thought,
Well, hopefully he's servicing someone well-mannered and with good
hygiene tonight.
The vice wasn't less if the venue and the players were disinfected.
I slowed to a stop by Blaze Starr's Two O'Clock Club and watched a variety of men trickle in and out. Men in respectable suits, young guys in jeans and polo shirts, the requisite hairy-chested, slick-shirted men who flaunted their sleezeball status unlike the respectable-looking people who fooled themselves. I wanted to pray for them, but all I could do was stare in wonderment at so many lives gone so sour and putrid they failed to smell their own stink any longer. At least Jude never fooled himself. I had to give that to him. He didn't make excuses, didn't act like sex-for-sale was okay if it was between consenting adults. “It's sickening, Mary-Margaret. It's nothing but people using each other, not one bit of romance. Don't you think I know that? Why you still want to be my friend is a mystery to me.”
But what Jude didn't know then was that in comparison to God's love and holiness, our own goodness is but a tiny shell in a sea. My shell in comparison wasn't much bigger than Jude's. I tried to explain it, and I think he got it eventually, but it was a long time coming, and a very long road to navigate.
I sat there in the little white car and wept. Then I drove around to Heart of the City Mission, parked, stepped inside, and had a cup of coffee. Mary-Francis, the secular Franciscan running the place, sat with me and told me about their ministry, going on for fifty-five years now.
“Did the famous Brother Joe start it?” I asked her.
She fiddled with a baby dreadlock. “No, but he gave the place its heart. What a saint. Lord have mercy, the stories he would tell. That man knew how to give life.”
You said it, I thought.
A woman, most likely a prostitute, most likely in last night's getup, stumbled through the door, a gash in her forehead bleeding down onto the hot pink sequins of her minidress. She tottered on a pair of silver stiletto, thigh-high boots.
“Gotta run.” Mary-Francis hurried toward the woman. “Lindelle! Did he hit you
again
?”
The woman nodded and broke down in tears. Mary-Francis put her arms are her. “Come back sometime and see us,” she said to me, her milky brown skin creasing around her light brown eyes. “We're always open!” she said. “Right, Lindelle?”
Lindelle nodded and looked up at me, blue eyes shattered into too many pieces for a human to count.
I couldn't pummel Mary-Francis with questions. They would have to wait.
Perhaps I would be back soon.
Perhaps? I knew I'd return as soon as I could get the time off. Fire spread beneath my scalp and I needed to leave. I hurried back to the car and sat for another hour, watching the foot traffic thicken as the night descended, the slack conditions of the buildings receded, and the carnival lights glowed to attract and feed the soul-starved denizens of Baltimore Street.
I drove right to the motherhouse and proceeded to Sister Thaddeus's room. She's in her eighties and is doing well. She dresses simply but somehow manages to look stylish. In other words, she hasn't lost it!
As always, she hugged me tightly and made me a cup of tea. She wears her hair bobbed and got her ears pierced ten years ago. The little gold balls look positively Parisian on her. I don't know what her secret is.
We sat on her sofa.
“You look wonderful, Mary. How's the artwork?”
“Fine.”
She nodded to a picture I painted years before, a wild dervish of color telling only the tale of my heart at the time. “Still holding up, don't you think, the old gal?”
“Yes. I'm happy you love it still.”
I told her what brought me to Baltimore and come to find out, she realized Brother Joe was my father too. “You two look a great deal alike. I wondered about it when I saw him, but figured you all had that certain redheaded way about you.”
“So, should I follow the trail?”
“Indeed, Mary-Margaret.”
Now you know where that “indeed” comes from.
She invited me to stay the night there instead of spending money on a motel and we stayed up until one a.m. remembering and chatting, me giving her news on the women who once went to school with me, relaying the jaunt to the lighthouse and . . .
“Oh, Mary-Margaret, you've always been quite the woman, haven't you?”
She waved me off in the parking lot the next day, then headed downtown to help out at the sour beef and dumpling dinner at her home parish. I prayed the silly prayer that she'd live for another fifty years or so.
WELL, THE BREAD IS NOW IN THE OVEN AND I'VE GOT THE gardens mulched for the coming winter. And as I finished up I became filled with the minute beauty of nature, thinking about those beautiful, tender little shoots that would come up in the spring, remembering my time in the woods all those years ago, having healed as much as I was going to initially, and ready, finally, to move forward into the order.
I was about to enter my tertianshipâa thirty-day period of intense reflection before saying my finals vows. Before it officially began at our retreat house in western Maryland, I decided a visit to Locust Island was crucial, to see the people I cared so much about: Gerald and Hattie, Sister Thaddeus, and the Brays.
And I hoped to
get a little time with Jesus. But of course, that was entirely up to him. Checking out one of the school's canoes, I paddled around the island, not venturing too far out from the grasses. I even spent some time on Glen's reading island, though Glen didn't live on Locust Island yet. He was still acting on Broadway during those days. Locust Island provided an escape for him back in 1995. He comes to Mass with me sometimes. I think he used to be Catholic. I think he lost his way and wonders if he'll ever find it again.
As I expected would happen, a few days into the stay in that sad 1959, I ended up paddling out to Bethlehem Point Light. Hattie saw me from far off, waved her arms in the pale spring sunlight there on the surrounding deck, and hollered, “I was wondering when you'd finally make it out!” She wore pink pedal pushers, a pink work shirt, and had tied her hair back in a pink scarf.
“And here I am,” I said as I pulled up to the dock ten minutes later. “It's only April, Hattie, I'm cold, and I'd sure appreciate a cup of your spearmint tea.”
“Sure thing, hon.”
We tied up the canoe and she thrust out one of her strong, square hands and almost hoisted me out of the boat by her own steam. We climbed the iron steps. “Let me put the kettle on. You just go ahead and make yourself comfortable in Gerald's chair.”
“Where is Gerald?”
“In town. I forgot the baking powder on my trip yesterday, and you know that man can't go a day without homemade biscuitsâ”
“Yours are the best.” I followed her into the kitchen where the radio burbled “High Hopes” sung by Frank Sinatra. I loved Frank. Hattie was partial to Bobby Darrin, but I always thought he attacked every single song.