Grace pursed her lips in thought. “He was just O’Brien. I can’t recall ever hearing him called by a first name. I think that was how he wanted it. I’m sorry.”
“You said that the first time Grandma went to ask O’Brien for a job, he and Black Jack seemed to know her . . . they greeted her like long-lost friends.”
“That’s true. I remember a lot of hugs and tears. And they made a huge fuss over me.”
“What about Slick Mick? You said he was sentimental, that he sang ballads. Can you picture him reading poetry?”
“Well, yes. He’s the most likely candidate in that respect.”
“And Mick said he had a daughter your age. Was Mick his real name or did they call him that because he was Irish—you know, the way they call all Irishmen ‘Mick’?”
“Sue, I’m sorry, but I just don’t know the answers to your questions.”
“What about Black Jack? He was a fighter, like Patrick.”
“Those were the only names I ever heard any of them called.”
“If we went downtown to the Regency Room, do you think someone might remember O’Brien?”
“The hotel is long gone. There’s a parking garage there now.”
“Well, that leaves Father O’Duggan. He played the biggest role in your life.”
“Yes, but his name was Thomas. I know that for a fact. Besides, he was a father to everyone in his parish, not just to me. He was a very godly, caring man—and not at all the type to engage in affairs with married women!”
As they neared the front gates, Grace saw a hearse slowly enter the cemetery, followed by a line of cars. It was probably the funeral Emma was attending. Good. They would be going home soon and the probing would stop. It would be better for everyone if the past remained buried.
When the last car had passed, Suzanne said, “I’m convinced that one of the men in your life was Patrick, and that Patrick is your real father. Why else would Grandma live here in Little Ireland?”
“I admit it would make a great story, Suzanne, but it would have to be fiction. In spite of all your brilliant speculation, we may never know the truth.” They had reached the car once again. Grace looked at her wristwatch. “We still have forty-five minutes. What do you want to do now? Since we’re meeting Mother here at the church, I hate to give up my parking space, but I’m not sure it’s safe to wander too far.”
“There has to be a way to find out what O’Brien’s first name was!”
Grace threw up her arms in a gesture of defeat. “Give it up, Suzanne. We’re never going to know.”
“I can’t! It’s driving me crazy!”
As Grace stared at the facade of St. Michael’s, she suddenly thought of a way she could distract Suzanne from her obsession. She glanced at the meter and saw that they still had time remaining on it. “You know what? While we’re waiting for Mother, I’d like to see Father O’Duggan’s grave. He must be buried in this cemetery somewhere; since he worked here all his life. Do you think we could find out where?”
“Sure, we can easily get that information in the cemetery office. Come on.”
“You go ahead. I want to buy some flowers from that vendor down the street. Find out where his grave is, and I’ll meet you outside the office.”
While Suzanne went to consult the register, Grace bought a huge bouquet of daffodils and tulips. She met Suzanne coming out of the office a few minutes later.
“That was easy,” Sue said, waving a piece of paper. “The section for all the priests and nuns is along one side. I wrote down directions.”
They walked through the peaceful grounds again. Unlike the frantic pace in the city streets outside the gate, the cemetery was quiet and serene. Restful. Grace glimpsed the line of dark cars parked near the back of the graveyard. Sue led the way as they strolled up and down the rows.
The clergy graves were very plain, marked with small identical markers that lay flat on the grass. Grace silently read the names of long-forgotten priests and nuns: Sister Angelica . . . Sister Benedict . . . Father Hogan . . . Father O’Sullivan.
Suzanne counted out loud, searching for the right row. “It’s the fourth one in from the road—one, two, three . . . here it is, Mom. ‘Father Thomas—’” She inhaled sharply.
Grace looked down at the grave and the bouquet of flowers she carried slipped from her grasp. The tombstone read, Father Thomas Patrick O’Duggan.
Two bright orange bird-of-paradise flowers, just like the ones Emma had brought from home, lay on his grave.
“No . . .” Grace whispered. “Oh, please . . . no!”
Somehow, Grace made it back to the car on wobbly knees. Too shaken to drive, she let Suzanne get behind the steering wheel.
“It could simply be a coincidence, you know,” she told Suzanne. “Patrick is probably the most popular name there is for Irish boys. He’s the patron saint of Ireland, for goodness’ sake. We could probably find a hundred markers in that cemetery that say Patrick.”
“Are the flowers a coincidence too? It has to be him, Mom. Grandma said she met Patrick during World War I right? Why didn’t he serve in the armed forces if he was twenty years old? Father O’Duggan wouldn’t have been able to serve because he limped. And another thing, why did Grandma have his prayer book?”
Grace felt sick all over again. “I don’t know.”
“Father O’Duggan must be Patrick. It all fits together. He was probably so in love with Grandma that he became a priest after they broke up.”
“Look, even if all this is true, even if he is the mysterious Patrick, it still doesn’t mean he’s my father. Their relationship ended in the fall of 1918. I was born almost seven years later. Father O’Duggan worked at St. Michael’s all his life. He would have no reason to return to Bremenville. Maybe Mother did go to him for help after she left Karl, but that doesn’t make him my father.”
Suzanne reached over the seat and retrieved the photograph album from the back. “I want to look at his picture again.”
Grace gazed across the street at the unchanged facade of St. Michael’s church. Once again, she was transported into the past. She saw Father O’Duggan striding toward her after school with his gentle, rolling gait. She pictured his smile and the way his face lit with joy when he saw her. As she did, it was as if Grace’s eyes were opened and she saw what she had never seen before—his face. His familiar face. In an instant, Grace’s life exploded with the force of a bombshell. All the lies she had once believed rained down painfully like shrapnel.
“No, Suzanne!” she moaned. “Don’t look! Please don’t look!”
It was too late. She had already found his picture.
“Mom, look at the man! The answer has been staring us in the face!”
Grace closed her eyes. “I don’t need to look.” Grace knew what she would see, even in a black-and-white photo—the same oval-shaped face as hers, the same bright blue eyes, the same pale brows. His hair was the identical shade of blond as hers, and would have been just as unruly if Father O’Duggan hadn’t slicked it down with hair tonic every morning.
“Let’s go home, Suzanne,” she begged. “Please . . . let’s go home.”
“We have to wait for Grandma. And you have to confront her.” “No, I can’t. It’s too awful . . . I don’t want to believe that this is true. Father O’Duggan wouldn’t . . . I can’t believe it. Not him. And I don’t want to upset Mother by accusing her. . . .” She felt as though she was babbling.
“Upset her? Mom, you’re the one who’s upset. She owes you an explanation. Besides, maybe she’ll be glad to get it off her chest after all these years.”
“No, she’s near the end of her life now. It’s much too late to start unearthing all her secrets. She must have kept them buried for a reason.”
“Listen, Mom. When Grandma comes back, I think we should show her what we found, show her his tombstone. We’ll just ask her if Father O’Duggan was Patrick. That’s all we’ll ask, I promise. If she doesn’t want to tell us more, we’ll leav
e it at that.”
It can’t be true . . . it simply can’t be true, Grace told herself over and over as they waited in front of the church for her mother. Not Father O’Duggan. Twenty minutes later, Emma strode through the cemetery gate, smiling in spite of the somber occasion. She hugged all her old friends good-bye, then crossed the street and got into the car. She seemed like a stranger to Grace as she sank into the backseat with a weary sigh.
“Oh, that was dreadful!” Emma said. “Poor Katie, stuck with such a tiresome priest for her funeral. I think he was in league with the undertaker, and they were both trying to drum up more business by boring us all to death. Grace, promise me you’ll shoot off fireworks or bottle rockets or something when I die. Anything to liven things up! . . . Where are you going, Suzanne?”
Without a word of explanation, Suzanne had driven across the street and through the cemetery gates. She parked the car near Father O’Duggan’s grave.
“Where on earth are you taking me?”
“Can we show you something, Grandma?” Suzanne helped Emma from the car. Grace trembled from head to toe as she stood between her mother and her daughter, gazing down at Thomas Patrick O’Duggan’s grave. The bouquet of flowers that Grace had dropped lay strewn beside Emma’s birds-of-paradise.
“Oh my,” Emma breathed.
“Father O’Duggan was Patrick, wasn’t he, Grandma,” Suzanne said.
Emma was silent for a long moment before answering. When she spoke, her voice sounded very old. “I guess . . . I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it? With the flowers . . .” She exhaled wearily. “He was named Thomas, after his father, and he didn’t want to be. His father was not a very nice man. So Patrick was always known by his middle name—at least when I knew him.”
“Was Father O’Duggan a priest when you met him?” Suzanne asked.
“No, but he had attended seminary for a year before the war. He came to Bremenville to help out in the church in 1918. He was having doubts, and it was supposed to be a time of reflection for him, to decide if God had really called him to become a priest or not. We fell in love, as I’ve told you. He wanted to marry me.”
Grace waited in anguished suspense for her mother to reveal more, but Emma grew silent. Grace wanted to know the truth, yet she didn’t want to know. Suzanne kept her promise not to ask.
It can’t be true. It can’t be, Grace repeated to herself. Yet in her heart, she knew that it was.
“Mother, I need to know the truth,” she finally said in a shaking voice. “He was my real father, not Karl Bauer, wasn’t he?”
Emma stared at Grace, open-mouthed, her face a mixture of surprise and alarm. Then she quickly turned away to stare down at the grave again. Grace longed for her mother to deny it. She wanted to continue believing what she always had—that Karl Bauer was her father, that Father O’Duggan was a devout man of God.
Emma finally looked up. Their eyes met. “Yes, Gracie. Patrick O’Duggan was your father.”
Grace felt the bomb explode a second time, more painfully than the first. She covered her face. “No! Mother, no . . . how could you? How could he?”
“It wasn’t something we planned, Gracie. Neither one of us ever meant for it to happen.”
“But how could you lie to me all these years!” Grace wept.
“I’m sorry. . . . I hope that you’ll forgive me, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I never forgave myself.”
Suzanne pulled Grace into her arms and held her tightly. Grace knew that if her daughter let go, she would shatter into a thousand pieces. She wanted to run, wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere, to weep and mourn. She didn’t want to face the awful truth that she was illegitimate, that her parents had committed adultery. When her tears were under control again, she pulled away from Suzanne.
“Did Father O’Duggan know I was his daughter?”
Emma stared at the ground. She hadn’t moved, as if frozen in place. “You were the image of him, Gracie. The first time he saw you at the Mulligans’ when you were about four years old, you gave him a shock. He saw the same eyes looking back at him that greeted him in the mirror each morning, and he knew without asking that you were his daughter. In fact, you noticed the resemblance yourself. His mother had to hide his childhood picture because you thought it was yourself.”
Grace remembered the night Father O’Duggan took her to Mam’s house—how he had thrown down his hat and scooped her up into his arms, their faces side by side. “Will you look at the child, for the love of God?”
“Mam knew I was her granddaughter!”
“She refused to believe Patrick at first when he told her I was pregnant with his child. She said I was trying to ruin him and make him quit the priesthood. But when she saw you . . . well, there was no longer any doubt in her mind. To her credit, she loved you as one of her own.”
Grace recalled the comfort of Mam’s arms, the lilt of her Irish brogue, the security and love Mam had lavished on her during those months. Then she had vanished from Grace’s life once again.
“Why did you lie to me all these years?” she asked again.
“I had to lie. I had to protect the two people I loved—you and your father.”
Her father. The shadowy image of Karl Bauer had been violently ripped away like a page torn from a book, replaced by a tall golden man in a clerical collar, a man she had once revered and admired. As Grace’s shock began to subside, a stronger emotion replaced it—anger.
“My father! He was my father! Why didn’t he tell me? He knew how much I wanted a father. I begged him to let me call him Daddy, just once. He refused me!”
Emma gripped Grace’s arms as if to steady her. “That was my fault, not his. I made him swear that he’d never tell you the truth or I would disappear and he’d never see you again. He kept that promise, even though it broke his heart to do it. He had to, don’t you see? We both had to lie to protect you from scandal. I had to make you and everyone else believe that you were Karl’s daughter. I dragged out the divorce proceedings for as long as I could so that I would be legally married when you were born. I didn’t care if the stigma of divorce fell on me. But the stigma of illegitimacy, to be branded the child of an adulterous Catholic priest—that shame would have fallen on you and on Patrick. I couldn’t allow that to happen. You were the two people I loved most in all the world. Patrick said he didn’t care about his reputation, but he agreed to keep the secret for your sake. He loved you, Gracie. Your father loved you more than life itself.”
TWENTT-NINE
* * *
“I want to serve God,” Patrick told me as we sat on the beach on Squaw Island, “but I can’t accept His terms. God is asking too much of me. He’s demanding that I give up . . . life! Living! Going places and seeing things!”
“I feel exactly the same way!” I said.
“The dean of the seminary says that I haven’t surrendered all of myself to Him. That I won’t make a good priest until I do. He suggested that I take a year off from school and work here.”
My father had recognized God’s call on Patrick’s life the day they had talked in his study after Papa’s beating. In spite of his disagreement with many of the tenets of the Catholic faith, he said that Patrick was “God’s workman in another vineyard.” He warned me not to oppose God’s will. I wouldn’t listen.
When Patrick decided we would elope and be married by a justice of the peace, he was not only abandoning his church, but his calling to the priesthood. The pressure on his side of the family was even worse than on mine. They were so proud to have a future priest in the family, someone who could redeem the name of Thomas O’Duggan. But that would all be lost if he gave up his calling, especially to marry a Protestant girl. But God had the final say over all our plans. God wielded a weapon more powerful than love—He held the power of life and death. Eva died. Our disobedience killed her. Patrick belonged to God, and He wanted him back.
We held each other that night after Eva’s funeral, standing beside the desolat
e road, our eyes finally opened to our sin.
“When Jonah ran from God, he plunged everyone on board the ship into the hurricane,” Patrick said. “Now I’ve done the same thing. I’ve brought all this misery on you and your family by my disobedience. I don’t know how you can ever forgive me, Emma. I won’t even ask you to. But I know I will never stop loving you. When I take the vow of celibacy, it will be because I can never marry you.”
I lost my two best friends, Eva and Patrick. When I started dating Karl Bauer in the spring of 1919, 1 still hadn’t touched the bottom of my grief. It was so fathomless that I accepted Karl as part of my punishment. I would serve out my life sentence with him in Bremenville.
Karl knew all about Patrick and me. The entire town knew. In his jealousy, he never quite believed that we had been chaste. “Is that the way you greeted your Catholic lover?” Karl said when I didn’t rush to the door to meet him every day. “Would your holy man have bought you all these nice things?” he said as he fastened a diamond necklace around my throat. For five years Karl poked at the wound, keeping it bloody and raw, never allowing me to forget Patrick.
Then in August of 1924, Karl went away for three days. The morning he left was a beautiful sunny day, and since Karl had taken the car, I decided to walk across the river to the parsonage to visit my mother and my sister Vera. But when I got to the church I kept walking, for some reason. I found the Metzgers’ boat tied where it had always been and got in and rowed across the river to Squaw Island.
The river, like my soul, was at the lowest ebb of my lifetime. There had been no rain all that summer and the woods were so dry there were warnings about the danger of forest fires. I remember thinking how appropriate it was to return to the place where Patrick and I had fallen in love and find it as dry and desolate as my soul.
My boat ran aground on the beach a long way from the dock. I hauled it out of the water and set out to explore the now-alien landscape. The marshlands, once teeming with wildlife, lay barren and exposed. Rotting fish and dead reeds littered the cracked, sun-baked clay. I looked for our white birds but found only their abandoned nest. The island, like my life, had changed. Nothing looked the same. I sat on the rock where Patrick had once read poetry to me and recited our favorite verse aloud.