Golden Years Read online

  She sat down at the table and opened her Diet Pepsi.

  “How did you explain the accident?”

  “For the moment Mary Margaret fell and hit her head on a lamp—minor change in the order of things … Erin is putting her to bed.”

  She removed the cover from her plate of linguini à la Genovese.

  “Yum … Where were we? Oh, yes. Why you, Chucky Ducky? Why does this Bride Raftery person, living or dead, real or only in poor Joe’s mind want to bring you into the act? You’re not an internationally known detective. Nor are you reputed to be a psychic. You are a picture taker with the heart of an accountant—which is nonsense of course—and an unemployed ambassador whom the State Department keeps on their list because they might want you to do something sometime … Why are you selected to play the role of a medium in this business?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  Heavens, she was beautiful when she put on her thinking cap.

  “It must have something to do with your picture taking. She links you with your books of pictures, which she knocks off the shelves to remind Joe that’s what it’s about.”

  “Fair play to you, Rosemarie … What do you think?”

  “I think she and her daughter are probably dead, the victims of a cruel and vicious murder. I think that Joe’s troubled soul has conjured this whole story. I think Maggie Ward would suggest that it’s a wild-goose chase.”

  “I can’t disagree.”

  “But what if I’m wrong?”

  “I ask myself the same question.”

  We both remained silent.

  My wife lifted her lovely shoulders.

  “You will read the file and then give it to me.”

  “I don’t think there is a rush.”

  “Probably not, Chuck, but …”

  “But if Bride Mary O’Brien is still alive, there might be a rush.”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “I don’t like this sort of thing, Rosemarie. The uncanny makes me feel uncanny.”

  “We don’t have much choice. Joe Raftery is from the neighborhood.”

  At that moment, speaking of the neighborhood, Peg and Vince arrived. We wouldn’t tell them unless we needed their help, especially Vince’s, as our probing went on. Deep down in my brother-in-law’s Italianate soul there was not merely dislike of the uncanny, but fear of it.

  “We heard you ordered from Farnese when we went in there, so we brought along our own supper.”

  Vince had his usual spaghetti and meatballs and Peg, always the soul sister of my wife, brought linguini à la Genovese. They also provided a bottle of Chianti, substantially better than the Dago red of our youth.

  “How’s she doing?” Peg asked anxiously.

  “She ordered us out of her room, so she could sleep.”

  “Her mother’s daughter … No hairline fractures?”

  “None. They’re keeping her overnight for observation.”

  “Routine. But if it were Rita, I’d be a wreck.”

  Rita was their youngest—Marguerita, named after her mother, just as our daughter was named after her aunt.

  “And Mom?” Rosemarie asked.

  “Pretty shook up, as are Madge and Theresa. They cringe every time a car goes by. The Good April seems so vulnerable and fragile. She praises all of us for being so quick to respond and worries greatly about ‘poor little Moire Meg.’ Maybe when she gets out of the hospital tomorrow she should stop and say hello. Are you still going to visit Mr. Reagan?”

  “Only if Mary Margaret is well enough to come with us. Dr. Kennedy says she seems okay. But I’m not going there to ‘scope out’ the new president, unless she comes with us. And that’s final.”

  That settled that.

  “After all,” Vince chimed in, “he’s a Republican!”

  “I’m worried about April,” Peg went on, toying with her linguine. “She recites the same lines, still Dr. Panglossa with a bit of the old flapper thrown in. But she’s tired and fragile and lonely and sad. I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong with her heart, but it’s not as good as it used to be. This crazy business with Jane might be just too much for her.”

  “Are the cops still out there, Chuck?” Rosemarie asked.

  “They sure are, including that young woman who was so nice to Mary Margaret. Since Jane is not likely to reappear for a long time, they’re there for morale purposes. I suppose by tomorrow April will be inviting them in for cookies and tea. I told the chief to tell them that it was okay. And, Vince, what about Jane?”

  He spread his hands out in that marvelous Sicilian gesture which, I think, means what can I tell you, especially in this perverse and fatalistic world. I have tried to imitate it often with little success.

  “Poor Ted. He’s such a good guy. He still loves her or maybe loves what she used to be. We’re not going to file charges against her for the present, though we hold open the possibility of filing before the statute expires. I’ll need some evidence from Doc Kennedy about the injury done to Mary Margaret. We have the testimony of the cops, of Madge and Theresa, as well as yours, Chucky. We could nail her on felony charges, but I don’t think anyone wants to do that unless we have to.”

  “We might have to,” I insisted.

  “Certainly … I told Ted that and he understood. He wants time to get her back on her medications. Right now she’s on her way to a private sanitarium up near Deerfield. He won’t let her out of there until the doctors in charge are convinced that she will stay on her pills.”

  “How can they know that?” Rosemarie asked.

  “They can’t. Ted says he will have full-time nurses on her after she comes home. Moreover, he’ll bar any contact with Father Delahaye, some sort of weird religious order priest who told her that she was bound in conscience to free her mother from those who were keeping her prisoner.”

  “Can we do something about him?” I asked.

  “I can and will talk to his superior and tell him that we will depose Father Delahaye and the superior if it comes to a civil case. In the present climate of the Church, priests are scared stiff of suits.”

  “It will get worse,” I said, “when all the sexual abuse stuff comes into the open … Can we do anything with the rest of Jane’s children?”

  “Ted brought Chris along, an estate planner at a Loop law factory. Obnoxious punk, combination of patronizing smile and a bored yawn. He told Ted not to pay any attention to me, I was merely a Daley hack. His firm would teach me how hardball is played in the big leagues.”

  “Tell them what you said,” Peg urged.

  “I told him that if they really wanted to play hardball, we’d go for attempted murder. Your cousin, I said, is over at Oak Park Hospital with a possible skull fracture. Your mother hit her over the head with a lamp. It’s a miracle she didn’t kill her. They could plead insanity if they wanted. Otherwise, she’d do serious jail time. He tried to answer that, and Ted told him to shut up. So he yawned again.”

  “Mary Margaret says the kids are creeps,” I said.

  “Could we really do that?” Rosemarie asked with a contemplative frown.

  “We can and we will if they don’t keep her away from us.”

  “In other words,” Rosemary summed up, “we don’t want to play hardball just yet, but Ted knows we’re prepared to do so.”

  “Yes, the poor guy. He knows you have no choice.”

  “He never should have moved away from the neighborhood,” I said.

  “She probably wanted to move,” Peg added. “Get away from me and Rosie.”

  “I figured you’d want me to do it this way.” Vince looked uneasily around the table. He had never quite understood the dynamics of Irish family decision making.

  “Certainly,” Rosemarie said, feeling no need to ask my opinion.

  “They sedated her at the police station as you know, so she wouldn’t do any harm to herself. It would have broken your heart to see what a pathetic lump she was … I remember.” He trailed off.

&nbs
p; “So do we all,” I said.

  My wife and I returned to our daughter’s room.

  “Mary Margaret is restless,” the floor nurse told us. “She has a tiny fever, nothing serious. But she’s lonely and confused.”

  “Where have you two been?” Mary Margaret demanded when we entered the room, dark save for the monitor on the wall.

  “We were having supper downstairs with Aunt Peg and Uncle Vince,” Rosemarie replied.

  “You told us to get out and leave you alone,” I pointed out.

  “You should have known I didn’t mean it … I’m scared. Aunt Jane is chasing me with that lamp.”

  “Aunt Jane is locked up, hon. You’re dreaming.”

  “Regardless …”

  Our mature, self-possessed daughter was weeping. Damn Jane and her sick envy.

  “We’ll stay here all night, hon,” Rosemarie said soothingly.

  “You’d better … I want to go home.”

  “First thing tomorrow morning.”

  Rosemarie sat on the chair next to the bed and took our daughter’s hand in her own.

  “Chucky, will you close the door, please. Aunt Jane might not know it’s my room.”

  “Sure.”

  I closed the door.

  “Rosie …”

  “Yes, hon?”

  “Remember when I was a real little kid and I’d have a cold and you and Chuck would sing me to sleep?”

  “You want us to do it now?”

  “Kind of soft, so you won’t disturb others, huh?”

  So we sang our “intermediate” daughter to sleep and exorcised all visions of the Wicked Witch of the North Shore coming after her with a lamp.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chuck

  Bride Mary O’Brien was born in 1941 in a small hamlet in West Galway on the River Suck [sic!] above Ballinasloe on the Roscommon border. The circumstances of her birth were not promising. Ireland was in the Emergency, a period of economic stagnation as Mr. De Valera, the leader of the country, argued that every possible sacrifice was essential to keep Ireland neutral in England’s war with Hitler. So neutral was Ireland that, although many of its sons were fighting in the English armed forces, Mr. De Valera went to the German embassy to sign the sympathy book at the time of Hitler’s death.

  However, Emergency meant poverty, especially in the West of Ireland, and more especially for those who lived on poor land like her father’s. Bride Mary was the only child of James O’Brien and Brigid Mary Slaney, who married late in life as was still the custom in the West in those days. Her mother was 42 and her father 58 when she was born. The neighbors said she was a stubborn, headstrong little girl who fought with the other children in the hamlet, defied the older people, and charmed everyone with a mischievous, crooked smile. She was a troublemaker at the National School in Newtown, to which she walked every day because her parents were too poor to afford even a bicycle. She was by far the brightest child in the school but also the most troublesome. She made fun of the teachers, the principal, and even the parish priest. The last named, a stern, dour old canon, unaccountably was fond of her. He had a reputation for never laughing; but he did laugh at her jokes, her insults, her dirty face, and her threats. Astonished to discover she had an audience, she would often visit him in the parish house and request that he tell her stories. The canon, who seemed to have a collection of fairie stories from the old days, was delighted to do so. People said that she reminded him of his mother or of a sweetheart from long ago.

  Bride Mary’s parents, conscious of their position at the bottom of the social ladder, were not happy with this sign of favor. What will people say? Who do we think we are? None of this opposition had the slightest effect on Bride Mary or on the canon either. She continued to do well in her studies, but acquired no other marks of a civilized respectability. Moreover, while her parents were English-speaking, she caught on to the Irish language in class and loved it. She spent what little time she had between school and work on the farm with a gang of Irish-speaking kids who roamed the fields around Newtown and even invaded Ballinasloe on Saturdays to pick fights with the townies and yell insults at them in Irish.

  The Irish language lacks obscenities and scatology, so in the Ireland of that day, the Irish-speaking ruffians had to spice up their insults with English four-letter words. They were mostly children of men and women who,-like Bride Mary’s parents, had to marry late in life because of the poverty of the Great Depression and lacked the vigor to tame their bright and charming young hellions. When they were not in school and not working their family farms and not tormenting the respectable citizens of Ballinasloe, they played in the reeds and marshes along the Suck, chasing birds, scaring fishermen, begging money from the occasional tourist, and, if one were to believe the gossip, being free with their sexual favors to one another.

  The gossip was probably defamation. The prudery of Ireland at that time made sexual play among the young almost impossible—and it was a good thing too they themselves would later say when they began to worry about their own offspring. Yet perhaps Bride Mary’s group was an exception to the national norms. Perhaps their crimes did not go further than naked play and swimming in the Suck under the full moon. Perhaps.

  At twelve, Bride Mary and her class would leave the National School in Newtown either for the Secondary School in Ballinasloe or to return to their farms as full-time workers. Her teacher insisted that she was a young woman of enormous talent and should go on to Secondary School. Brigid Mary and James O’Brien worried that people would say that they were putting on airs if they sent their daughter into Ballinasloe for school. The next thing the priest and the teachers would be telling them that she should go to Galway for university.

  Galway might just as well be in Nigeria as far as the O’Briens were concerned. They had never visited the city and did not intend to do so. They had traveled a couple of times “down the line” to Athenry and returned disappointed with the venture. Travel cost money and it afforded little pleasure. Athenry, they told their neighbors was no different from Ballinasloe, though the people in the former town put on a lot more airs.

  Brash and irresponsible hellion that she was, Bride Mary had come to enjoy school. She loved to show off her intelligence, which, she realized dimly, was considerable. She also loved the praise of the teachers and the canon. She didn’t give a fig (she would have used a stronger word) for the envy of her classmates. Yet she was of two minds about more school. She loved her elderly (as she saw them) parents dearly. She knew they needed her help on the farm. Her Irish-speaking gang, especially Colm, with whom she thought she was in love, would not be going on to school. There was not that much point in more education. She would eventually marry someone from her part of Ireland and settle down to a life like that of her parents, though perhaps a little less difficult. She wanted a different life, the kind of life portrayed in the books she was reading; but there was nothing in the world around her to suggest that such a life might be possible.

  Then the canon changed everything. He came by their farm one Sunday afternoon in April and informed her parents that the nuns in Galway were offering Bride Mary a complete scholarship—board, room, tuition, everything for a secondary education. She would have to maintain a high average and her behavior would have to be exemplary (a stern look at Bride Mary). However, he had no doubt that she would live up to both requirements. The nuns were women who demanded prompt reaction to their generosity. He would phone the nuns tomorrow with their acceptance.

  The O’Briens were devastated. What will people say? Brigid Mary asked immediately. Why should a daughter of ours go off to the nuns in Galway? She’ll never come home again, her father protested. She’ll think she’s too good for the likes of us. Bride Mary was too frightened to speak. Galway was a chance for a different life, one of limitless possibilities or so it seemed. But it was also an unknown, so terrifying that it overwhelmed her. She wanted to stay where she belonged.

  What do you want to do, young wo
man? the canon asked imperiously. I don’t know, she stumbled. Do you realize what a great grace this is? She didn’t know what he meant, but she said yes, because that was what you said to the canon when he asked a question that way.

  Well then, that settles it. It’s off to Galway with you in September.

  After the canon left, all three O’Briens clung to each other and wept. Great was their grief all summer long and it was a wet and grim summer. The Emergency had ended almost a decade earlier, but Ireland was still a poor and stagnant country. Could her parents survive without her there to help them on the farm? But she had given her word to the canon, her father said, and she must keep it.

  Her friends ridiculed her good fortune. Who did she think she was? She wouldn’t last a week with the “swells” in Galway. She’d come home in disgrace. Or, alternatively, she would become a grand lady.

  It is possible that she lost her virginity to Colm that summer or maybe the next one. She never mentioned him in her later letters and apparently never wrote to him. Inquiries about him reveal only that he migrated to England and never returned to Ballinasloe.

  We do know that she wept all the way to Galway on the train trip from Ballinasloe. She was awed by the city when she arrived. Though in 1954, still the time of a stalled Irish economy, Galway was a drab, dour city even in the bright afternoon sunlight, her busy eyes drank in the people, the buildings, the cars, the Green in front of the station, the young people her age who were coming to town to begin their university education. This she thought to herself was even more terrifying than she had expected: it might also be something like paradise.

  Two nuns waited for her at the train station, tall, slender, stern-looking women. She had heard many stories about how ferocious nuns were. She realized with a sudden insight that she was a dirty farm child in old clothes and with manners these elegant women would detest. She felt naked and wanted to turn and run.