by Jan Burke
It was hard to hear. It was also the beginning of a friendship.
Within two months of Maureen’s funeral, O’Connor’s father died of a stroke. One day not long after that, O’Connor’s mother invited him to come by the house that evening. He saw her as often as possible, worried that all the losses were becoming too much for her to bear. That night she sent Alma off to see a movie and had a quiet dinner with her son, talking to him of his job at the paper. After they had washed the dishes, she sat down next to him, took his hand, and said, “I’m selling the house, Conn, and going home. Alma’s said she’ll come, too.”
He knew that there was only one place she had ever considered to be home, but still, he was shocked by this announcement. “All the way to Ireland? But this is where—”
“This is where you’re at home. It’s a fine place for most, perhaps, but I’ve lost too much here. I don’t blame the whole country for what’s happened to us, but I won’t live with ghosts. I can’t walk past the corner without thinking of Maureen. God knows I can’t live in this house without thinking of your poor father and all he suffered.” She paused. “That’s why I packed up all your sister’s things, Connor. I think somehow I knew.”
He said nothing.
She sighed. “If you want Maureen’s things, lad, you may have them. I’ll not be taking them with me.”
“Yes, thank you.” He took his hand from hers and put his arm around her shoulders. “Lord, I’ll miss you so.”
She began to cry. “I know there’s no sense asking if you’ll come with me…”
He shook his head. “Not as long as her killer is free.”
She pulled a clean handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and wiped her eyes. “Well, you must come to see us, then. And… if they should learn anything… about Maureen…”
“I’ll tell you straight away.”
A month later he got a call at the paper from Vera. He nearly did not remember who she was, until she said, “We met in April.” She named the day of his sister’s funeral. “Remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” he said quietly.
There was a pause. “Look, I’m living in Las Vegas now. I’m just in Las Piernas for a few days. Let’s have lunch together.”
He hesitated. “It occurs to me that I don’t even know your last name.”
“Smith,” she said, and laughed. “True fact.”
“Look, Miss Smith—”
“It’s extremely important that you meet me for lunch, Mr. O’Connor,” she said firmly, all the laughter gone from her voice now.
“All right.”
They met at Big Sarah’s diner. It was a hell of a place, he thought later, to be told you were about to become a father.
“I won’t demand you marry me,” she said. “It’s just that I’d like some help.”
He thought of how he had felt on the morning after Maureen’s funeral, his feelings of having betrayed his sister’s memory by sleeping with this woman. But he also remembered that Vera had comforted him, and until now, she had asked for nothing. What should I do, Maureen? he asked silently.
A strange feeling came over him, a feeling he was too Irish to ignore. It was as if everything inside him that had been in turmoil for these past five years grew quiet and calm. At a moment when he had every excuse to feel confused and unsure and panicked, he found instead that he knew exactly what he must do.
He studied Vera for a moment, then said, “I’ll marry you.”
She looked taken aback. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I won’t have my son or daughter raised a bastard. If you don’t want to live with me, fine. If you think I’m going to ask you for… for anything else, I won’t.” He paused. “What kind of situation are you in that you can think of living openly as an unmarried woman with a child?”
“I can tell people I’m a widow. The Korean War, I’ll say. There aren’t so few widows around these days that one more will attract much attention. Besides, suppose you meet some woman you really want to marry, and you’re tied to me?”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
He was silent.
“I can see there’s no use trying to talk you out of that prediction. Okay — suppose I meet someone else?”
“Then we can divorce, but if the man you marry has any prejudice against the child, the child will come to live with me.”
“Divorce! I thought you were Catholic.”
“I am, and I wouldn’t like it, but I won’t father a child and not give it my name. That would be worse.”
They argued for a while. He was sober now and more than able to hold his own in a verbal battle. He found himself admiring her ability to do the same. In the end, after setting down several conditions of her own, she capitulated.
They would meet at city hall the next day, witnesses in tow.
When he got back to the paper, he tried to concentrate on the story he was writing and could barely do so. The newsroom was always a noisy place — a mixture of the clatter of keys being struck, the ching of typewriter bells ringing at the end of each line, the zip of carriage returns. The sounds of pages pulled free, the shuffling of thin layers of carbon paper between sheets of cheap copy paper. Voices calling “Copyboy!” The low chug-chug-chug of the wire service Teletypes. Phones rang on empty desks. Conversations went on everywhere. If not on the phone or writing, men were making wisecracks or arguing or horsing around.
Sound and smell. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air, along with the scent of the stale remains of takeout lunches. A good number of the room’s occupants reeked of booze, and more than a few would be half in the bag by four o’clock. Sometimes, O’Connor thought, the newsroom seemed like a bar with desks and typewriters. The paper did have a phone that, if one picked it up, rang in the Press Club, the bar across the street, to make it easier to summon staff back to the newsroom from their revered watering hole.
This afternoon, most of them were here, trying to finish stories before deadline. Summer and sweat and men under pressure. Men, and Helen Swan, who kept glancing his way. He could swear she could read his thoughts. He kept watching the door.
Corrigan had barely crossed the threshold of the newsroom when O’Connor stood up and hurried over to him. He asked him to step outside with him for a moment. Jack started to protest, but halted mid-sentence and said, “Sure. You look as if you’ve got something on your mind.”
O’Connor nodded and led the way back downstairs.
Outside in the summer heat, he told Jack about his wedding plans, and asked him to be his witness.
Jack called him every name for a fool he could think of. “Conn, how the hell do you even know it’s yours?”
“I don’t. It could be my child. It might not be.”
“If it’s not, why on earth—”
“I did something that could have resulted in a child being conceived. I have to own up to that, Jack.”
“The hell you do! Wait until it’s born and have blood tests. She’s just trying to take you for everything you’re worth.”
“I’m not worth much. Surely she could have done better than a reporter if she was looking to trap someone into keeping her in style.”
“Maybe not. You don’t know who she’s been with.”
“No, I don’t. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a trap. She didn’t even want to get married.”
“The oldest trick in the damned book. They all want to get married, believe me. Hell, it sounds to me as if this broad just wants your money, Conn.”
“If all she wanted was money, she would have asked for it from the first night I met her. Look, Jack, you aren’t going to talk me out of this one. I’ll go back inside and ask Geoff or Helen or one of the others to come with me tomorrow if you won’t. I’d like it to be you, though.”
“Conn, slow down. Think for a moment. What kind of life is that kid going to have?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
�
��What, keep it yourself?” Jack asked incredulously.
“No, she’s bound to give it a better life than I could.”
“Maybe not. If you find out it’s yours, then ask your mother—”
“My mother’s going back to Ireland, Jack,” he said, struggling to keep his temper. “I won’t add to her worries, and I won’t keep her here. You’re not to mention it to her.”
“Not to mention—!”
“No. Not yet. I’ll let her know when she’s in Ireland. I’ll tell her after the baby’s born.”
Jack shook his head. “You’re what now, twenty-two? Conn, you’re not thinking straight. A marriage is a legal contract. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You’re talking about throwing your life away on a whore who—” He broke off, quickly raising his hands to deflect a blow. “Damn it, Conn!”
“You’re not to talk of her that way, Jack. Never again.”
“All right, all right.”
O’Connor subsided.
“What is it?” Jack scoffed. “Love?”
“Not a bit of it.”
Jack sighed. “All your hard work, so this — this dame can have a chunk of your check?”
O’Connor said nothing.
“I wish I knew why the hell—”
“I’ve told you. It’s the child needs thinking of, Jack. Not me, not Vera. The child.”
Jack studied him. “Why do I feel as if this has something to do with Maureen?”
“Don’t,” O’Connor said, and averted his eyes.
“Conn,” Jack said sadly. “Jesus, Conn.”
O’Connor looked up again. “Will you do it or not? If the answer’s no, I’d best get busy looking for someone else.”
“I’ll be there — under protest.”
“You’ll not say a word to her that makes her unhappy,” O’Connor warned.
“Oh, not on her wedding day,” Jack said sarcastically, and turned and went back into the Wrigley Building.
When the baby was born, Vera sent word to him. A boy, named as they had compromised — Kenneth John O’Connor. He had wanted to call him Kieran, after his own father, in the Irish naming tradition used in his family, and after Jack, but she said the name Kieran was “too foreign” and so he had agreed on the name she had thought closest to it.
True to other agreements they had made, she did not live with him as his wife. He sent money. She occasionally sent a photo. More often, a change of address.
Jack was quick to point out that the boy looked nothing like him. O’Connor nearly knocked him down for that.
“Teaching you to fight was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Jack said when O’Connor had regained his temper, “because you don’t know your friends from your enemies.” But after that day, Jack never remarked on the child.
In no other matter, O’Connor realized, did he keep his thoughts so guarded from Jack. Whatever they might argue about was argued openly — except for this subject. He knew this was in some part due to the fact that he didn’t fully understand his own feelings about Vera and the boy. He only knew that when he thought of Vera, he thought of what had happened in her presence — of her comforting him as he wept, certainly, but even more often of that moment in Big Sarah’s, when he felt so calm — and how, for some reason, he never worried about Maureen’s ghost feeling disappointed in him after that. He decided that even if Vera had come to him that day to say that she needed help because another man had left her pregnant, his answer would have been the same.
Two years ago, in 1956, she had filed for divorce. He had been surprised to discover how depressed that had made him feel. There had been no request for child support.
Working on a newspaper had taught him all he needed to know about finding information on someone. He had called in a favor or two to learn the name of the man she was marrying and to look into his background. He could find nothing objectionable. Reports were that the man treated Kenneth as his own. O’Connor signed the papers. He hadn’t heard a word from Vera since then.
In that same year, Winston Wrigley II, the son of the founder of Wrigley Publications — who was now semiretired — faced up to what publishers all over the country were starting to realize: Americans who used to look forward to reading the evening paper after work now looked forward to watching the news on television. The news was being read aloud to them by men at desks. Newsmen before cameras instead of behind them — Huntley, Brinkley, Cronkite. Circulation for the Express was down and he saw no reason to expect it to pick up again.
The News and the Express would be combined into one morning paper: the Las Piernas News Express.
Winston Wrigley II was better liked than his father by the staffs of both papers. Although the family was wealthy, his father had insisted that he learn the business the hard way — moving from paperboy to copyboy to reporter to editor. He gained further respect from the staff by openly discussing the end of the evening edition, keeping as many people employed as possible, and doing all in his power to find jobs for the others. O’Connor remembered evening after evening of farewell parties at the Press Club, the bar across the street from the paper. Helen Swan said it was a wonder that such a sizable herd of drunks could make it back and forth across Broadway without at least a few stragglers being flattened.
O’Connor had been sure that he would lose his job. Winston Wrigley II kept him on. When one of the older reporters groused about this, Wrigley said, “O’Connor’s been on our payroll since 1936.”
“As a paperboy!” the reporter said, then blushed as he realized his mistake.
“You never know how high a paperboy might rise in the business,” Wrigley said calmly. Like his father, he seldom raised his voice.
O’Connor sat up with a start, and realized that despite his resolve, he had dozed off in Jack’s hospital room. He glanced at his watch — it was past eleven.
Jack stirred awake again, and this time O’Connor called the nurse, as promised. When she had left, Jack murmured something, and O’Connor came closer to hear him.
“Now that Miss Ass-Full-of-Sunlight has done her duty, tell me the truth.”
“Your speech is slurred, but I’m so used to listening to you when you’re under full sail, I can understand you.”
“Funny. Not that I would mind a drink.”
“None for a while, I’m afraid. The worst blows were to your head.”
“Thank God. What if they had injured something I use every day?”
“If you can crack jokes with a cracked skull, I suppose you’re going to be all right. Eventually, anyway. If I showed you a mirror, you’d scream like a little girl.”
“Given how I feel, I may just start screaming on principle.”
“Sorry, Jack,” O’Connor said, his voice no longer teasing. “It’s inhuman, but they can’t give you anything for the pain for a little while yet. Something to do with the head injuries.”
Jack was silent for a moment, then asked, “What about the eye?”
O’Connor hoped the truth wouldn’t lead to some sort of setback, because he had no practice at trying to lie to Jack. “Don’t know yet. Old Man Wrigley came by earlier, when you were still out cold. He told me he’s going to bring in a specialist for you.”
“Kind of him.”
“Don’t give up hope, Jack. They really don’t know.”
“Might as well tell me the rest.”
“Not sure I should…”
“Damn it, Conn! Have I ever, in the last twenty years—”
“All right, all right. Settle down. For God’s sake, don’t kill yourself just getting pissed off at me. You’ve three broken ribs, four broken fingers, and plenty of cuts and bruises. The cuts and scrapes wouldn’t be so much of a worry if you hadn’t decided to go for a swim in a swamp.”
“A swamp?” He looked puzzled.
“Okay, not exactly. You were found in one of the marshes by an egg farmer, and you were half-drowned and so cold he wasn’t sure you were alive. If you don’t become fe
verish from that, it will be a miracle.”
“I remember a farm… eucalyptus trees… feeling where my damned keys cut me when somebody kicked me.”
“Do you remember who did this to you?”
But Jack was caught up in other thoughts. “Listen — this sounds strange, but I swear it’s true — someone was burying a car on that farm. In the middle of the night, or sometime after midnight, anyway. Doesn’t that sound strange to you?”
“Yes,” O’Connor answered truthfully.
“But I’d swear I saw it, Conn. I woke up in a eucalyptus grove, a wind-break, probably. A dairy on the other side of the road. And I saw a farmer burying a car.”
“Well, I’ve always been a city boy, so I couldn’t tell you why farmers do what they do in the wee hours of the night or any other time. So let’s talk about before the farm.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you, Jack. I do.”
Jack fell silent.
“Who did this to you, Jack?”
He frowned, winced at the pull on his stitches, and said, “Big guy at a party. Never saw him before. Thought I was making time with his floozy and coldcocked me. One punch. Wasn’t expecting it.”
“How big a man?”
“Three inches shorter than the Titanic, if you stood them back to back.”
“Hair?”
“Blond. Crewcut. Blue eyes, I think. But that might have been the dame. I’m a little confused about him.” He put a hand to his head. “Someone else joined the fun, but I didn’t get a good look at him. He was behind me most of the time.”
He fell silent again.