And then there was his father. Da was dead. Martin stared at the train window now, mirrorlike in the darkness of the subway tunnel. All around him mothers fussed with children, and men and women talked and laughed or carried on whispered arguments, but Martin tried to quiet his mind and let silence lead him toward an answer to the question that had tugged at him all morning long: How do I feel about this? He certainly didn’t take any delight in his father’s death—he wasn’t a monster—but was he saddened by the news? He felt a weight in his stomach and a light and empty space in his head. It wasn’t sadness so much as a gnawing uncertainty, or the awareness of a distance between how this news should make him feel and how he actually felt. Martin had known the moment he left Ireland that he would never see his father again. Shortly after he had landed in New York, he wrote to say that he had arrived safely, to convey an address where he could be reached, and to explain as best he could his reasons for leaving. Looking back, he would guess that the letter was probably too grandiose—more manifesto than Remember me, dear Papa—but he was nineteen and drunk on America. His father sent a terse reply, which brought to an end the correspondence between father and son.
This didn’t seem a fitting memorial. Quarreling with a ghost about who was to blame for the failure of their correspondence and, to be honest, for so much else. They were headstrong, the both of them, and Martin had been so preoccupied with his plans for America, and then by the place itself, that he was quick to consign his father to the ash heap of things he had left behind when he sailed from Ireland. His father was an item on a long list of failings and untenable situations, or, to give him his due, he was a force that had kept Martin mired in a life he did not want, and which he believed he could escape only through careful planning and great effort. Any contact with his father threatened to pull him back to the old country, the old life. Or so he had told himself. Why, he reasoned, should I carry with me into a new country, a new life, this anger and guilt—the guilt itself engendered by the anger he directed at the old man? Better to forget it all, or treat it as some fever dream that had plagued him for a time, but would recede from memory as the sun rose and a new day began.
The train rocked on its rails, slowing into one station before speeding toward the next. What would his father make of this—dead more than two weeks and Martin still arguing his case? It wasn’t as if he knew nothing of his father since his departure. Traces of life in Ballyrath had made it into Michael’s letters: his father had taken ill two winters ago but had regained his health; Mrs. Greavey, the woman who took care of his cooking and washing, had procured a nanny goat, believing as she did that goat’s milk was the key to a long life, but his father could not develop a taste for it; the O’Brien boy had demonstrated great potential with his Greek, almost as much as Martin had once shown. This news was accompanied by a heartfelt wish—Michael’s, he assumed, and not his father’s—that Martin had continued his study of Greek, as the consequences of wasting such a gift were well illustrated in the parable of the talents.
Maybe this was a fitting memorial: Da knew better than anyone else how hard it was to break off a conversation simply because death had intervened. Hadn’t their mother remained a constant presence in his life? Hadn’t his efforts to escape from his own sorrow and guilt and anger—at the world for taking her, at God for letting her go, at Bernadette herself for leaving him—driven him to move to the farthest point on the island from the car wreck that had killed her? That was the shocking part about the cause of his father’s death: his heart. Martin had long believed that his heart had already been blown to bits the day their mother died. If he had managed to preserve some piece of it for himself, he had never let his sons see it.
He had hoped the train would give him a few quiet moments to think through the events of the day, and look where it had gotten him: worked up into a lather about a life he had left behind. His father was dead, and Martin could think of no way to mourn him.
IN CHURCH
IN THE PARISH CHURCH in Woodlawn where she had made her First Communion, knelt through confession and Stations of the Cross, and lit countless votives before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, Rosemary had always had her favorite saints. Agnes with her lamb, Stephen and his pile of stones, Lucy with her eyes on a plate. She had no interest in the pious men in their broad red hats and their dusty books; even stained glass couldn’t brighten their sour faces. The popes’ crowns all looked like hard-boiled eggs and the nunnish wimples were proof that these moldy old men had never gotten outside to mix it up with the crowd. Rosemary preferred the virgin martyrs to the doctors of the church any day. Hadn’t Saint Catherine of Alexandria argued with the king’s philosophers until they chopped off her head with a sword? That was going to be Rosemary when she grew up, or so her younger self had thought. She wanted the forthrightness and the refusal to give an inch, but now, kneeling in prayer in this foreigners’ church in Fordham Heights, she wondered if she had taken on the suffering but forgotten to ask for the glory, the grace, or the clarity of purpose.
But who was she to be picky? Any saint here would have to do today, because Rosemary had plenty to pray for. She wanted patience for the next round of wedding planning, but then what was the point of praying about the wedding, or her sister, or her parents, now that Martin had come shambling back into the apartment looking punch-drunk and poorly shaved, telling her that his father was dead and his brothers were in town and the youngest was in some kind of state and the two of them were holed up at the Plaza—the Plaza, could you imagine the cost?—and right at the end, almost like an afterthought, mentioning that he had quit Chester’s band? And over what? The songs didn’t swing?
Perhaps she could look to Saint Monica, patron saint of wives, but prayers to her tended to be pleas for forbearance, and Rosemary wanted more than forbearance. And there was always Saint Jude, who handled lost causes. But it hadn’t gotten that bad. Not yet.