During the war years, Rosemary wrote almost two dozen books for the New York City Board of Education, so many that Martin took to calling her Rosie the Writer-er. Her tales of polar bears, baseball players, Scottish terriers, and leepercons each imparted an important civic virtue: decency, loyalty, citizenship, hand-washing. She continued writing children’s books after the war, and in her correspondence with Lilly Bloch they often spoke of collaborating, though it never came to be. Schedules were difficult to manage, and truthfully Lilly’s photos never really lent themselves to stories for children. Rosemary once joked that it would be the saddest children’s book ever written, a guarantee of bad dreams or long, sleepless nights.
Michael lived with Rosemary and the girls throughout the war. He walked Kate home from school every day, and the two of them played cards and drew pictures while Rosemary tended to Evie or worked on her latest book. Michael had a special fondness for Peggy’s son, Jack, a redheaded bruiser born almost nine months to the day after her wedding. They all had their suspicions, but no one spoke them aloud, not with Peggy and Tim just starting out as husband and wife, and certainly not once Tim was deployed to Europe as an aide-de-camp to a brigadier general, and definitely not after Tim was killed in action in Italy. Jack would be Peggy’s only child, even after her second marriage, to a man whose family owned the biggest department store on the Grand Concourse. Jack would grow up surrounded by cousins—Martin and Rosemary’s girls, then the boy born to them after the war, and later Michael’s children—who regarded him as a brother, albeit one lucky enough to have his own bedroom and a houseful of his own toys.
It was during the war that Michael began frequenting the library at Fordham and then, later, at Columbia, where he was eventually offered a fellowship in the classics department. While receiving his doctorate for his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues, he taught himself Italian, and began work on the edition of the Divine Comedy that became a standard college text after its publication in 1964.
As for Francis, his path was never easy to trace. After he left New York, he posted letters from Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and points in between. He reported that he was engaged in the import-export business, which raised fears in his brothers that he would soon find himself behind bars again. He itched to return to Ireland, but both the government and the IRA had a claim on his body, and he didn’t want to end his days in a prison cell or earn himself a boggy grave. He had long fancied himself a man of the world, but often, as he felt the creeping suspicion that he needed to move on, he caught himself thinking of Anisette’s house by the sea and wondering if he could ever find for himself a place of such peace and security.
On a rain-spattered fall day in 1943, he made a brief, unexpected appearance in New York to have dinner with Michael and Rosemary. He had done well for himself and as the wine was poured, he announced that he was going all the way back home, to Cork, though under a new name: “Call me O’Donovan,” he said. “There’s loads of them in Cork, and even they can’t tell one from the other.” His plan was to patch things up with the IRA and then to buy one of the fine Georgian homes that overlooked the city. He would get himself an office on the South Mall, conduct business in the lounge of the Imperial Hotel, marry a feisty Cork girl, and raise a rowdy brood of his own.
This was his new plan, his FC Plan Mark 2, but he never had the chance to put it into action. Two days out of Boston, his neutral, Irish-flagged freighter was sent to the ocean floor by a German U-boat prowling the North Atlantic. When Rosemary wired Martin in San Diego, telling him that Francis was dead, he wanted to believe that it was another of his brother’s schemes: a death certificate would wipe clean his accounts. Francis would be free to resume his life as Angus MacFarquhar, find his heiress, and spend his days in luxury. But Martin knew the truth. He felt it like a lump in his chest, choking the breath out of him. After ten long years apart, that week in New York was all the time that he would ever have with his brother. Francis would never appear at his door, decked out in a costume and with a story to tell. He was gone.
MORE THAN FOUR decades later, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City collected Lilly’s photos of life in Vichy France. At the opening reception, Lilly and Rosemary were reunited for the first time since they’d said good-bye in 1939. Lilly had brought with her a packet of photos from her first visit to New York, the negatives of which had survived through the years at the home of a friend outside London. Martin had died two summers earlier, but in the pictures from the suite at the Plaza he and Francis were young and full of life. Kate and Evie, now in middle age, couldn’t get over how beautiful their mother looked and how dashing their father had been as they held hands beneath a glittering marquee. Their younger brother, Francis, named for the uncle he had never known, was keen to see a photo of his namesake raising a glass in a toast at the 21 Club. Michael’s wife signed to her husband that he was so small back then she could have knocked him over with a single breath, but Michael could only stare at the pictures of his lost brothers. His hands, which were always so lively on the subjects of love and loss and poetry, were stilled.
On that Saturday evening when Lilly took their picture, they could not have known that it would be the last night they would all spend together. Nor could they have known that the story of the months and years ahead would be broadcast in boldface headlines and urgent radio bulletins. It would be told in V-Mail and telegrams from the War Department and in prayers offered in church. More than they could know, it would be written in silences, absences, and empty spaces. But the story of those years would also be told in love letters saved and bundled in ribbon, and in songs dreamed up during nights in the barracks, and in the warmth of the spotlight before the first note was sung, and in sunlit hours when it was possible to believe that everyone you had lost was only late, and would be home soon enough.
ON THE NIGHT he left the Dempseys for good, Cronin was reaching the end of a long journey. The Bronx was now a hundred miles behind him. Even so, as city became town became country, he grew anxious. In the city, the Packard was practically invisible, a dime-a-dozen car that witnesses would have trouble identifying. But as he drove north, past the neatly organized towns of Westchester and out among the farms, the car made him feel conspicuous. Against the tasseled grass and the sprays of forsythia, it was a boxy black slab, a storm cloud on the move. He wanted to believe that the only men who knew where to find him were dead, but he would need to be vigilant. After all, the dead had their stories to tell, too. They could be restless in pursuit of the living.