8
Ed’s family had been in New York since just before the Civil War, but their sole claim to distinction was that his great-great-grandfather had had a hand in building the USS Monitor. Ed said his father liked to suggest by a looseness in his wording that his ancestor had been some sort of naval architect, but the truth was he’d punched the clock with the grunts at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, where they fashioned the hull.
Ed’s mother, Cora, had a soothing voice and a velvety laugh. Friday nights, Eileen sat with her and Ed, drinking tea and eating oatmeal cookies in the kitchen Ed grew up in, in a railroad flat on Luquer Street in Carroll Gardens, near the elevated F tracks. Cora kept the window open on even the coldest days, to drive off the steam heat. Eileen liked to watch the lacy curtains kick up in the breeze. Cats stalked the adjacent lot, curling into old tires. When they hopped onto the windowsill, Cora swished them away with a dish towel. Trains rumbled by at intervals, marking the passage of time. Whenever she rose to leave, Eileen found herself pulled into Cora’s bosom for a hug. She never got over her surprise at receiving maternal affection, and she returned the hugs awkwardly, with an abstracted curiosity, though she welcomed them all the same.
Ed’s father, Hugh, had been dead for a few years. Eileen knew little about him; Ed released that information in a trickle, and Cora never brought him up. The only evidence of him in the apartment was a framed picture, on one of the end tables, of him wearing a hat, an overcoat, and a slightly furtive half smile. Eileen knew he’d played the piano to accompany silent movies; that he’d sealed up paint cans in the Sapolin factory, once earning a small bonus when he suggested they paint a giant can on the water tank on the roof; that he’d worked as a liability evaluator at Chubb; and that World War II had given him his only real feeling of purpose.
Ed seemed to feel safest talking about his father’s experience during the war years, though he had no memory of that time. It was all just stories he’d heard.
“You could get him going for hours if you asked about the war,” Ed said.
The government had urged civilians to pursue activities essential to the war effort, and Hugh landed on the docks, in Todd Shipyard, sticking bolts in steel plates in the bulkheads and hulls of damaged ships. The work itself wasn’t stimulating, save for the mild danger of hanging out over the water, but he liked toiling under the sun alongside other men, breathing in the salt air and thinking of what his labor led to—never mind the irony that after three generations in America, the Leary line was still working on ships.
Ed said his father and the other men modified ships from regular freighters into tankers, adding a second layer to the hull. They converted luxury liners to barracks for troop transport. The peak of their activity, in terms of both industry and importance, was working on the Queen Mary. They stripped her of her furniture and wood paneling, replaced her bars and restaurants with hospitals, painted her a dull gray to confuse rising submarines, and gave her smoke suppression. She could go as fast as a destroyer, reaching speeds of thirty knots where an average submarine could only go ten. At the height of the conflict, in 1943, she carried sixteen thousand men from London to Sydney without a gunboat escort.
One night, Eileen stayed late at Ed’s house. Cora had gone to sleep. They were sitting on the couch, which was worn along the seam by its skirt, some of the filling rupturing through. Eileen picked the picture of Hugh up off the end table.
“What was he like?”
“I suppose he was like a lot of fathers,” Ed said. “He went to work and stayed out late. He wasn’t around a lot.”
“What about as a man? All I see when I try to picture him is this coat and hat.”
A pair of end table lamps provided the only illumination in the room, which was like a parlor in a shabby club. Cora had installed cute statuettes in every corner, but personality only went so far in making an apartment feel like a home. Eileen had a new appreciation for how her mother had kept things neat and in working order, how her father had paid to replace the furniture whenever it got run down. Ed had grown up with less.
“He liked to laugh,” Ed said. “He told raunchy jokes. He always had a cigar dangling from his mouth. It made him look like a dog hanging its tongue out on a hot day. He was always hustling, working angles.”
“What else?” she asked, putting the photo down. She sensed he was on the verge of candor. “Tell me more.”
“He liked to drink,” Ed said. “It wasn’t pretty when he did.”
“I know a little about that,” she said, and they shared a moment of quiet understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better.”
She felt her emotions catching in her throat. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know how to say it if there were anything to say.”
“Just say what comes to mind.”
He was silent, and she worried she’d pushed him too hard. In her nervous state she had picked off the material that covered the sofa’s arm, and now she tried to fit it back into place with one hand while keeping her eyes on Ed. She should have left him alone, rather than risk angering him and making him shut down, but she didn’t want to revert to the surface-level interactions she’d had with other men. She had never wanted to talk to anyone more than she wanted to talk to Ed. She wanted to tell him things she’d never told anyone, and to learn more about him than she’d learned about anyone else. She used to think a bit of mystery was a prerequisite to her feeling attracted to a man. For the first time, her attraction didn’t diminish the more she knew, but actually grew.
“You remember Charlie McCarthy?” Ed said after a while. “Edgar Bergen’s dummy? My father used to say I looked like him.”
Eileen folded her hands in her lap and held her breath, trying not to look too eager to hear what he had to say.
“I figured out early on I could make him laugh if I did a Charlie McCarthy impression. So I practiced. I got to the point where I could do the voice pretty well. When my father got in from the bar, I’d hop up on the couch and twist up my mug for him.” Ed showed her, forming a rictus and opening his eyes wide, looking from side to side with an eerie, doll-like blankness. “Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he told me to cut it out and said I looked nothing like that doll. I never knew which it was going to be. I remember the last time I did it. He laughed and laughed. Then he smacked me in the mouth, whack!”—Ed brought his hand down on the coffee table—“and told me to stop embarrassing myself.”
Their hands migrated toward each other on the couch. After their fingers sat intertwined for a bit, she clasped his hand in both of hers, pulled it to her, and gave it a little kiss, then shifted closer to him.
Ed said he and his mother had never discussed his father’s drinking, but it was his understanding that his father hadn’t been a drinker before the war. “If the war had gone on forever, or if he’d been a park ranger or done something outdoors, maybe things would have been different.”
When peacetime returned, Hugh went back to Chubb and sat at a desk all day. He didn’t have any hobbies. “I think the only way he knew how to drive off the anxiety in him was to go to Molloy’s,” Ed said. “Everybody raised a glass when he walked in. They laughed at his jokes. They let him buy rounds.”
By the time Ed was nine, he said, his mother was sending him by train on pay Fridays to pick up his father’s check. If he didn’t get there in time, they were stuck for the week. If he did, his father wasn’t necessarily stuck. With his beautiful singing voice, he could make twenty-five dollars, or two-thirds of his weekly salary, as the cantor at a single funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea. Ed only knew his father did this because he served funerals during the school day as an altar boy.
“The first time he sang,” Ed said, “I walked out of the sacristy with the cross to start the funeral and there he was, standing off to the side with this sheepish grin on. When the time came, he walked up to the lectern. He gave me a nervous look, like I’d caught him in something. Maybe one of his friends knew what kind of voice he had and set him up with the gig. I remember knowing he’d been drinking beforehand. It’s just something you can tell.”
She nodded.
“Then the organ started up, and he started singing, and it was like he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Like he was hearing it for the first time. I couldn’t believe how good he was. He sang his heart out. There were tears on some faces in the pews.”
“My father can’t sing,” she said. “But he thinks he can.”
Ed gave her a warm smile. “He came to collect the cash afterward. I was in the rectory changing out of my alb. He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’?” Ed’s face took on an intense expression. “I already knew enough not to say anything, you know?”
She nodded again. Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.
“He started showing up often. I don’t know how he did it without getting fired at Chubb. It was a pretty decent round-trip on the train. He must have been gone two, three hours at a time. He did it for years. I doubt a penny of that money made it home to my mother. To think that he was a block away from her all that time. She would have loved to have lunch with him.”