“What’s this, Patrick . . . coal?”
He shook his head. “It’s a diamond-in-the-making. God will use pressure and stress to turn it into something beautiful, something precious. He’ll do that in your life too, if you’ll let Him, Emma. He’s in the business of redemption. We sinned, but He gave us Grace. We—”
He stopped when Grace skipped back into the room. “Mr. Clancy said thank you very much and welcome home,” she said.
Patrick quickly shoved his arms into his overcoat, then bent to caress Grace’s head. “Take good care of your mother, all right? And thanks for the tea.”
I said good-bye and watched Patrick walk away, as I had so many times before.
* * *
That was the last time we spoke until Patrick showed up at the Regency Room one night, four years later, wearing a suit and tie. I nearly fell off the piano stool when I saw him from across the room. My love, my longing for him, hadn’t diminished in the least. He asked O’Brien for a table near my piano, then sent a message that he wanted to talk to me when the set was over. My fingers could barely find the right keys.
“Emma, why are you still hanging around with that gangster?” Patrick asked as soon as I was seated across the table from him.
“Is that what you came here to talk to me about?”
“No. . . .”
“Then drop it, all right?”
He stared down at the table, toying with a book of matches. I remembered the warmth of his hands, the touch of his strong, gentle fingers. I wanted to lift his palm to my cheek and feel his warmth again, then kiss the knuckles of his hand. But Patrick didn’t belong to me.
“Emma, the other girls are making fun of Grace,” he said eventually.
“They’re taunting her, badgering her. When I bumped into her today after school she was crying. It seems there is a great deal of speculation and gossip among my parishioners about her father. . . .”
My hands flew to my face. “Grace and I should move away! You can’t be seen with her! They’ll know!”
“Emma, they don’t suspect me, they . . . they think she’s a bastard. That’s what Bridget Murphy called her, but she’s only repeating what she’s heard at home.”
I saw him struggling for words, a rare thing for Patrick, and I sat back to let him empty his heart without interruption.
“The word shocked me, but only because I realized that she had spoken the truth. And for the first time, I really saw what my sin has done to my daughter.”
He dropped the matchbook and leaned back in his chair, his hands dropping into his lap. We both waited until he could go on. “I lectured all the girls about kindness and Christian compassion—not that it’ll do any good with that heartless lot—but I didn’t know what else to do. I felt so helpless, so . . . so angry, mostly with myself. Those schoolgirls hadn’t caused Gracie’s tears—I had. How had I ever imagined that by spending ten minutes with her every week, tossing her a smile and a couple of nickels, I could somehow fill the role of a father in her life?”
He stopped again, this time biting his lip so hard I feared it would bleed. I started to speak but he held up his hand. “No, let me finish. I went inside St. Michael’s to pray. The first thing I saw was the crucifix above the altar and Christ hanging there in silent torment. How had Father God ever endured it? To watch His beloved Son suffer unjustly? To see Him scorned and mocked? I had just a taste of what He endured when I saw my own child mocked, and I wanted to murder every last one of those girls. I can’t understand how God could ever forgive me. I don’t understand why He hasn’t turned His face away from me, why He hasn’t destroyed me for what I’ve done to His Son—and to you and Gracie.”
Patrick rested his elbow on the table and propped his forehead on his hand. I didn’t want to think about his words and the long-suffering of God. I couldn’t. I deserved His wrath too. I stared at Patrick’s thick golden hair instead, remembering the texture of it beneath my fingers. Finally he looked up.
“Gracie interrupted my prayer, Emma. She followed me into St. Michael’s to ask . . . to ask if I knew where her real father was and why he didn’t live with her. I didn’t know what to say. I told her she had to talk to you about him. Then . . .” Patrick swallowed hard. “Then she asked if I would be her father. She begged me to let her call me Daddy . . . just once . . . in secret.”
“You didn’t let her!” I was horrified.
“No.” Patrick’s jaw trembled. “But I longed to hear her call me Daddy every bit as much as she longed to say it. It nearly broke my heart to tell her no. I’m a priest—it’s my job to comfort and console people who are in pain. But I couldn’t give my own daughter what she needed the most in all the world—someone to call Daddy.”
Patrick closed his eyes and lowered his head. “Forgive me, Father,” he whispered, “for I have sinned.” When he lifted his head again, his eyes pierced mine. “This is why God hates sin, Emma. Why He forbids adultery . . . because He loves us. Sin hurts us. But it hurts the innocent people we love the most.”
I didn’t know what to say. The image of Gracie being taunted and crying for her daddy made me see my sin afresh as well. It was as though Patrick and I had tossed a pebble down a slope eight years ago, and now we watched in helpless horror as it turned into an avalanche. Our daughter stood in that avalanche’s path.
“I think Gracie and I had better move away,” I said again. “I knew this wouldn’t work—living so close to you.”
“You’re missing the point, Emma! She needs a father! She longs for one, like all the other girls have. She doesn’t understand why her father abandoned her, why he doesn’t love her. And he’s me! I’m the one who abandoned her, not Karl Bauer! Moving someplace else isn’t going to change how Gracie feels or make her stop wanting her father. And if you do move, I’ll find you. I won’t let you take my daughter away from me. I came here tonight to tell you that I’m going to do much more than throw her a couple of nickels from now on. I’m going to walk her home from school every day, protect her from the other girls, listen to her fears and her dreams. I’m going to be a father to her!”
“You can’t! People will see the resemblance!”
“Emma, I don’t care!”
“Please! For Gracie’s sake . . .”
“They’re calling her names now. How can it get any worse? At least this way she’ll have a father—not a priest, a father. Someone who loves her and cares for her. Someone she can run to and confide in when she’s upset.”
“You promised you would never tell her!”
“I’ll keep my promise. I won’t tell her the truth.”
“I can’t let you do this, Patrick!” I was desperate to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen to me.
“I didn’t come for your permission, Emma. I came to tell you the way it’s going to be. I told the bishop the same thing this afternoon. I’m Grace’s father. And I will be a father to her, no matter what it costs me.”
“But anyone with eyes to see will know! Your hair . . .”
Patrick shoved his chair back and stood. “I’ll keep my hat on.”
* * *
Over the next few years, I watched from a distance as Patrick became Grace’s confidante, her ally, her friend. He’s the reason she started going to church every week. He even let her borrow his pajamas. When she left home for nursing school, he maneuvered a way to take her there himself, all the way to Philadelphia.
I thought he might move on to another parish once she was away in school, but he didn’t. I met him on the sidewalk in front of Booty’s store one day as I was going in and he was coming out. His right eye was blackened with an enormous shiner.
“Hello, Emma.”
“Patrick! What on earth happened to your eye? Did you run into a door?”
“Just a bit of a scrap with Denny O’Hara. He’d had too much to drink, you see.”
“So he attacked a priest?”
“Nay, Emma,” he said quietly. “He attacked his wife and little one
s.” His words chilled me when I remembered Patrick’s own past.
“The O’Haras are lucky to have you nearby. And they’re lucky their priest isn’t afraid of a brawl . . . though perhaps he should be, at his age.”
He smiled, but when the corners of his eyes wrinkled he winced. “Ouch! It hurts when I laugh,” he said, tenderly touching his face.
“Why do you stay here, Patrick . . . struggling with these people? Now that Gracie’s on her own, couldn’t you move up the ranks, go to a bigger church, become a cardinal or something?”
“The bishop asked me the same thing just a few days ago. But I can’t leave. These people are my children, my family. Thanks to Gracie, I’m finally learning what it means to be a father to them. Will the next priest be willing to brawl with a drunken fool like Denny O’Hara? I can’t be sitting in comfort in a bishop’s residence somewhere, wondering if the little O’Hara boy will be getting his leg broken in three places like I did.”
“You can’t save the whole world, Patrick.”
“No, but I can save one child.” He gazed into the distance, his eyes shining as blue as the sky. “If I can ever pry some money from the church after the war, I’d like to convert all those grand rooms that are going to waste in the rectory into a place where women and children can go to be safe. I remember how desperate you were when you came here, running from Karl Bauer, expecting a baby. You had no one to turn to, no place to go. Lord knows I don’t need all those rooms.”
Tears came to my eyes. I loved him more with the passing of time, not less. “God answered your prayer, Patrick.”
He looked back at me again. “Which prayer is that?”
“You’re a wonderful priest.”
* * *
About a year after Grace and Stephen were married, I heard the news about Patrick—from Sheila Higgins, of all people. I said hello to her in the bank, and her eyes filled with tears.
“’Tisn’t it awful about poor Father O’Duggan? Such a young man, barely past fifty . . .”
A huge fist squeezed my heart. “What happened to him?”
“You haven’t heard? The whole parish is reeling. He’s in Sisters of Mercy Hospital and not expected to live the week.”
“How . . . what-?”
“Acute leukemia. It was very sudden. And the doctors say it’s very deadly. There’s nothing they can do.”
I ran straight out of the bank and hailed a taxi. Patrick couldn’t be dying. He had always been so strong, so capable. Grace and I and everyone else in his parish knew we could run to him whenever we needed him. If I could have prayed, this is the one time in my life when I would have. But I had no right to ask God for anything, especially where Patrick was concerned.
I rushed into the hospital like a crazy woman. The head nursing sister wouldn’t let me past the front desk. “You aren’t the only person in the parish who loves Father O’Duggan, God bless him. There’s been a line of people a mile long asking about him, wanting to see him. Why, there wouldn’t be room to let them all into the lobby, let alone his room! But the doctors are only allowing his immediate family and fellow priests to see him. I’m very sorry.”
“No, listen. You have to let me in. I . . . I am family.”
The nun frowned. “Oh? And how might you be related to Father O’Duggan?”
“Tell him it’s Emma . . . Mrs. Emma Bauer. Please! Ask him! You have to ask him if he’ll see me!”
“Just a minute.” She looked annoyed as she dialed a number on her telephone. “Hello, Sister Angelica? There’s a woman down here asking to see Father O’Duggan and claiming to be a relation. Yes, her name is Mrs. Emma Bauer.” She nodded knowingly as the nun on the other end talked. “Yes, that’s what I thought. All his relations have already been heard from. . . .”
“Tell Father O’Duggan my name!” I shouted desperately. “Let him decide if he’ll see me!”
She frowned again, then spoke into the phone. “She wants you to give Father O’Duggan her name and let him decide.”
I nearly wept. “Thank you!”
“It will take a few minutes for Sister Angelica to check with him, Mrs. Bauer. If you’d like to have a seat . . .” She propped the phone receiver against her shoulder and spoke to three other people while I paced the lobby floor, waiting.
When she finally received the answer, her frown softened. “He wants to see you. He’s on the third floor, Mrs. Bauer, room 315.”
Sister Angelica was waiting for me when I stepped off the elevator. “Please remember that Father O’Duggan tires very easily.”
“Is he really going to die?” I asked, still struggling to absorb Sheila’s words.
“I’m afraid so,” the nun said. Her eyes filled with tears, but she said in a brisk voice, “Visits are limited to five minutes.”
I walked down the hall in a daze of shock and grief. How could I say everything I wanted to say in five minutes?
Tears sprang to my eyes when I first walked into his room and saw him lying against the cold white sheets. His skin was gray, his golden hair as dim as tarnished bronze. Then he looked up at me and smiled—his glorious, radiant smile—and he was Patrick again. I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand in mine.
“Your hands were always so cold, Emma. They still are.” “And yours are still warm.” We gazed at each other without speaking. We didn’t need to.
“I’m so glad you came,” he finally said. “The doctors say my life is just about over.”
“Is that all right with you?”
“Aye, it’s all right with me. My life belongs to God. Let Him do what He wants with it.” He smiled, and the skin at the corners of his warm blue eyes crinkled. I wanted to lay my face beside his and weep. “No, don’t cry for me, Emma. I’m ready.”
“I know you are.”
“What about you? Are you still angry with God?” When I didn’t answer, he said softly, “You haven’t found God’s forgiveness, have you?”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“None of us do. But when the Pharisees brought a woman to Jesus who’d been caught in the act of adultery, He said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ That’s grace. It’s our daughter’s name. What we did years ago was a sin, but God will forgive us if we ask.”
“That’s what Papa said too.”
“Then why won’t you ask, Emma?” I looked away. Patrick had his prayer book in the bed beside him. He pressed it into my hands. “Take this with you. Read the passage where the marker is. It’s my favorite one. David and Bathsheba committed the same sin we did. But God can redeem sin and turn it into a blessing. The son of David and Bathsheba became the ancestor of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accept His forgiveness, Emma. He wants to give it. It cost Him His Son.”
I couldn’t speak. I knew that our five minutes were nearly over. The nurse would be back any moment. I longed to hold him one last time. As if he’d read my mind, Patrick said, “I’m reminded of the last stanza of Yeats’ poem, Politics:
“. . . And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But Ο that I were young again
And held her in my arms!’”
I bent down and gathered him in my embrace. His arms came around me, but with only a shadow of their former strength. I pressed my cheek to his. Patrick’s skin smelled the same as I remembered, and I inhaled him for the last time. Our tears joined and flowed, a single stream.
“If you ever tell Gracie the truth,” he whispered, “make sure you tell her how very much I loved her.”
“I will. I love you, Patrick.”
“I know. And I . . . ‘love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life! And, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.’”
* * *
1980
“I never stopped loving Patrick,” Emma said. “Not when I married Karl, not when he became a priest, not even when he died. That’s why I didn’t remarry after my divorce. I lived in an era where marriage was a lifelong commitm
ent, like the one Louise and Friedrich had made—till death us do part. I broke those vows with Karl. I never should have vowed to love him in the first place because I couldn’t keep it. My heart was wedded to Patrick. So after the divorce I took a lifelong vow of celibacy, as Patrick had.”
Emma finished her story as Suzanne pulled the car into the parking lot at Birch Grove. She was home again. She felt an enormous sense of relief to have finally told the truth about Patrick, as if a heavy burden had been lifted from her, but she coudn’t help wondering about the consequences.
Suzanne sat behind the wheel of the parked car, her eyes brimming with emotion. Emma rested her hand on her granddaughter’s shoulder. “You know, when you chose your major in college, I thought of Patrick. I could never tell you this before, but you inherited your love of literature, your love of words, from your grandfather.”
“I’m part Irish . . . “she murmured. “Jeff always insisted that I was.”
“Yes, you are. I only wish you could have known him. He was an extraordinary man.” Had she done the right thing, telling Grace and Suzanne the truth after all these years? But she could hardly have denied it. Somehow they had unearthed the truth by themselves and had merely asked her to confirm it. Maybe it would help Suzanne and Jeff. Maybe it wasn’t too late for their marriage. But Grace . . . what would happen to Grace? All the way home she had sat in a daze. So silent. So stricken.
Emma opened the car door and climbed out. She longed to hold her daughter, to ask for forgiveness, but she didn’t dare. Grace wouldn’t even look at her.
“Thanks again for the ride,” Emma said and hurried away into the building.
Once she was in her suite, the tears came. What if Grace never forgave her? That would be the worst punishment she could possibly suffer for her sin. She had already lost her parents and her home, and she’d forfeited a lifetime with Patrick to pay for what she’d done, but she couldn’t lose Gracie too. How could she live without her daughter?