The Leaving Of Liverpool

by Maureen Lee

  ‘I was thirteen.’ She could remember that now, but not how many years had passed in between.

  Elsewhere in the apartment the phone rang and Christina answered. Seconds later, she popped her head around the door. ‘It’s Bobby Gifford who came yesterday. He’s downstairs and wants to come up.’

  ‘Tell him to go away, I don’t want to see him.’ She didn’t want to see anybody. Right now, she could hardly remember who Bobby Gifford was.

  Christina frowned. ‘Are you sure about that, honey?’

  ‘I don’t want to see anybody, Christina.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have shouted at her,’ John said when the woman had gone and could be heard relaying Anne’s message to the desk.

  ‘I didn’t realize I’d shouted.’ Poor Christina had also had an upsetting day. ‘I’ll apologize later.’

  ‘Can I use the phone? I need to tell some people, the Iveses, that I’m OK or they’ll be worried.’

  ‘Of course, there are phones all over the place.’

  ‘When I come back, I’d like us to talk.’ He paused at the door and looked at her searchingly. ‘You’re more like my sister than my mother.’

  ‘But I am your sister, aren’t I? Your sister and your mother.’

  John told Mrs Ives that he was in Manhattan: ‘I’m staying with one of Pop’s friends, I hope you don’t mind.’ He got the impression that Mrs Ives could well have minded very much, had the circumstances been different. But he’d lost his folks and his rudeness was excused.

  When he got back to the bedroom, Anne was fast asleep. He looked at her compassionately. It sure was a weird story. She’d been through a lot but, from now on, he’d look after her. Having a husband in California wasn’t much use.

  He sat on the bed, watching her, but in a while his eyes began to blink and he lay down beside her and fell asleep.

  Christina came, wondering why everything had gone so quiet. She’d heard everything, but the only person she’d tell was Lizzie. She smiled with relief when she saw them asleep on the bed: mother and son; sister and brother. Softly, she closed the door and helped herself to a large glass of Mr Blinker’s best whiskey. The last few hours had possibly been the most traumatic of her life.

  Chapter 14

  Anne wanted John’s parentage kept secret. Because of Herbie, her name had already appeared in the scandal rags. ‘Can you imagine the headlines?’ she said, shivering. ‘“ANNE MURRAY, WIFE OF THE INFAMOUS HERBIE BLINKER, IS RE-UNITED WITH LONG-LOST SON.” There’d be reporters round and they’d insist on having all the horrid details.’ Only Lizzie and Christina were allowed to know, though Ollie and Herbie would have to be told eventually.

  Lizzie, who was very nice and very capable, returned with John to Brooklyn to take over the funeral arrangements from Dick Ives. ‘We can’t very well leave it in the hands of strangers,’ she said.

  His mom and pop were buried together in Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn, after a Requiem Mass in the old St Patrick’s Cathedral. Hundreds of people turned up: his mother’s friends from Brooklyn, John’s friends from school - school was still out - and his father’s friends from Manhattan. John hadn’t dreamed his pop had been such a popular man - Mom had always made out he was a bit of a failure - but there were other lawyers, the staff from his office, the manager of MacCready’s diner where Pop had always lunched, some of his old clients, people from show business. Lizzie’s husband, Ollie Blinker, came all the way from Los Angeles to say goodbye to his best pal, Levon Zarian.

  ‘There’ll never be another guy like Lev,’ he said tearfully, and everyone within earshot said, ‘Hear, hear.’

  When it was over, John and the Blinkers went back to the apartment on Fifth Avenue. John had been sleeping in Herbie’s room where the closet was full of clothes that he wouldn’t have been seen dead in; flashy suits, loads of white pants, and gaudy sweaters. Blown-up pictures of Anne and Herbie dancing had been stuck to the walls. In his opinion, Herbie looked a bit of a dork, and his hair was too long. Had he been given a say, he would have been against Anne marrying him.

  It had been established that he would live in the apartment from now on and that the house in Brooklyn would be sold. When Herbie came back - and he only came at Christmas - he could sleep in the room that used to be his sister’s. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he’ll just have to lump it,’ Lizzie said in the funny accent she’d managed to keep after spending over two-thirds of her life in New York. She’d asked Christina to empty the closet and give the clothes to a thrift shop. ‘They’re too old-fashioned for Herbie; he’ll never wear them again,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he left them behind in the first place. I suppose he thought he’d buy a whole new wardrobe in Los Angeles.’ In future, the closet would be used for John’s clothes, though he doubted if they’d fill a quarter of the space.

  He enjoyed being fussed over by Lizzie and Christina - his mom had been a very practical person and didn’t hold with fuss. Anne didn’t fuss, either, but John reckoned it was because she was too used to people fussing over her and wasn’t experienced at it. She just drifted around looking vague and beautiful with a slight smile or a wistful look on her face. She read the theatre section in the paper, but nothing else. Sometimes, she sat by the big white piano, playing with one finger while she sang in a deep breathy sort of voice that sent prickly sensations up and down his spine. ‘I sang that in a show once,’ she’d tell him, or: ‘This is from my new show. We haven’t started rehearsals yet. Oh, and what do you think of this one? “Oh, Danny boy,”’ she sang, ‘“the pipes, the pipes are calling, from glen to glen and down the mountain side . . . ” That’s my very favourite song. I used to sing it when I was a little girl.’

  So far, no one had mentioned school. When they did, he’d say he’d like to go back to his old one. Lots of people travelled from Brooklyn to Manhattan every day, so it wouldn’t hurt to go the opposite way. He would enjoy telling his pals that he was now living on Fifth Avenue with one of Pop’s old friends. And he was of Irish descent, not Armenian, though he couldn’t tell them that.

  The day after the funeral, Anne announced she was off to start rehearsing for a new show.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ John asked. He didn’t want to be parted from her for a single minute.

  ‘You’ll only be bored.’ She was packing shoes in a bag and wore a strange outfit comprising black tights, a short skirt, and a skimpy sweater. There was a red bandana on her black curls. She’d look silly dressed like that on public transport, but it turned out Eric was taking her in the car.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ he argued. He was convinced he would never be bored with her.

  ‘You can come if you want. If you are - bored, that is - you can always go out and take a stroll around Broadway.’

  The show was all about Prohibition, some stupid law that had been passed in the 1920s banning the population from drinking alcohol. When Franklin Roosevelt became President, he’d repealed the law and become the most popular guy in the whole of America. He probably still was, although not with the right-wingers, who didn’t believe in real democracy, as Pop had been fond of saying.

  John sat near the back of the theatre. In a row near the front there was a man who kept shouting instructions. A woman with a feather in her hair played a beat-up piano. From what John could understand, most of the male cast were gangsters, and the women, including Anne, were gangsters’ molls. On stage, she was a different person, lithe and sensuous, dancing with such passion and energy that it amazed him, as if this was the only place where she was truly alive. This incredible woman was his mother. She fascinated him. When they were together, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He’d hardly grieved for his mom and pop because he was so enamoured with Anne. He watched her twirl across the stage, as light as a feather, to be caught in the arms of a guy who held her aloft for a second, then threw her to the floor and began to kick her. John’s fists tightened and he was about to hurl himself down the aisle and break every bone in the guy’s body, when he
remembered it wasn’t real; he was in a theatre where nothing was real.

  On the way home in the car, she asked if he’d like to go to stage school. ‘You could go to the same one I went, Peggy Perlmann’s. Peggy was at the funeral yesterday. She was the tall, red-haired woman who cried the whole time.’

  John confessed he’d never nursed any ambition to go on the stage. ‘Pop wanted me to be a lawyer like him, and Mom wanted me to teach, but I don’t think I fancy either. I’m not sure what I want to do when I leave school, but I’d sure like to work in Manhattan, the same as Pop.’ Then he would never have to leave her. He could cut the grass in Central Park, drive a bus, work on the subway - and live in the apartment on Fifth Avenue for the rest of his life.

  Anne’s eyes snapped open. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. Its luminous hands showed that it was ten past four. Outside, it was still dark. She’d just remembered something. Her name was Annemarie Kenny and she was born in a village in Ireland called Duneathly. Oh, if only Lev were alive and she could ask him where the name Anne Murray had come from. There were still blank spaces in her mind. She remembered boarding a big white boat in a place called Liverpool and Mollie putting her to bed, but nothing more until she’d found herself in Lev’s cab and he’d called her Anne Murray. She’d accepted the name because she didn’t want to be Annemarie Kenny any more. She was a new person without a past, except she’d brought part of the past with her in the form of her father’s baby.

  It was such a relief that she could let herself think about it, talk about it with Lizzie. She’d blocked so many things out of her mind, even John, who wasn’t really part of the past. It was hard to believe that the tiny baby she’d turned her back on had grown into such a remarkable young man. She was so proud of him that she really wished she could tell everyone that she was his mother.

  Something else she’d remembered was that she had an aunt in New York, Aunt Maggie, whom she and Mollie had been going to stay with. Her other name was Connelly and she was a teacher, but Lizzie had hired a private detective who could find no trace of her. ‘Perhaps she’s gone back to Ireland, pet,’ she’d said.

  Anne had felt a tiny bit glad. Aunt Maggie was bound to write and tell the Doctor where she was, and just imagine if he wrote to her! Her flesh crawled at the idea. She’d love to contact Mollie and her brothers again, but she’d have to tell them about John and how could she put that in a letter? She wasn’t sure if she could ever bring herself to do it.

  It was a full two weeks later before she remembered Bobby Gifford, the way he’d kissed her and said, ‘Shall we leave it like that and see what happens next?’

  John had happened next. John had arrived and taken over her life, releasing so many memories, which kept seeping in a few at a time, that she couldn’t cope with anything else apart from rehearsals for the show; they came before everything. She had a feeling that he’d phoned when she’d been unable to speak to him and wondered why he hadn’t phoned again. Had he got the job he’d wanted on the New York Standard? In fact, she’d telephone the paper right now and find out. When she did, she discovered he was working for the paper, but was now thousands of miles away in another country altogether. The woman who answered the phone refused to give her his address, but Anne didn’t mind. They would meet again one day, she felt quite sure of it.

  Jeez! Being in London was like stepping back in time. Some of these buildings were hundreds of years old. Even the more recent ones looked as if they dated back to Victorian times. The cars and the big red buses were very much out of place in such ancient surroundings.

  Bobby Gifford turned away from the window of the hotel in Parliament Street, right opposite the Foreign Office. The windows, like every other one in London, were criss-crossed with tape, which was to prevent the glass from shattering in the event of a bomb dropping nearby. The United Kingdom was at war; he was actually in a war zone.

  His room was like something out of a museum: a thick carpet, a ponderous bed covered with a tasselled velvet quilt on which his suitcase waited to be unpacked, furniture that looked as if it would require a crane to lift. He wondered how many images and fashions the slightly spotted, gold-framed mirror over the marble fireplace had reflected over the years. At the desk, he’d been asked if he would like a fire in his room, but had refused.

  Tomorrow, he would start looking for an apartment, something small and comfortable in the centre of the city, for Bobby was now the European correspondent for the New York Standard, based in London, but shortly off to Paris. Having captured Norway and Denmark, German troops were now approaching the borders of Belgium, Holland, and France, and it was anticipated these countries would be invaded at any minute. As an American, Bobby assumed he would be safe to assess the situation on the ground and send reports back home.

  Two and a half weeks ago, Bobby had got the job of assistant editor on the paper. Outside, the interview over, he’d whooped with joy and caught a cab to Anne’s apartment. He could hardly wait to tell her. He was thirty-five, but hadn’t had a great deal of experience with women. His wife hadn’t exactly instilled him with confidence the way she’d abandoned him when he’d lost his job through no fault of his own, and there hadn’t been much time for socializing in Springfield. In fact, he’d deliberately buried himself in his work, not wanting to get involved. But he’d never forgotten Anne and her kindness. When they’d met again he’d realized this was it. She was the woman he’d been waiting for all his life. There was something otherworldly about her, an artlessness that must be unique in someone who’d made a career in show business, but this only strengthened the attraction she held for him; an attraction that he had believed he also held for her.

  But it turned out he was wrong. He’d asked the guy on the desk to announce he was downstairs, and had imagined the way her lovely eyes would light up when he told her he’d got the job he was after, that in another month he would be living in New York.

  Boy, had he been wrong. The guy on the desk reported that she didn’t want to see him. ‘But why?’ Bobby had asked, but the other man had merely shrugged.

  ‘I dunno, feller, do I?’

  ‘Is she sick?’

  ‘I dunno that, either. I sent another young feller up there a couple of hours ago, and he hasn’t come down again. Maybe she’s busy with him.’

  ‘Should I come tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s up to you, but if some dame told me to go away, I’d stay away.’

  Which is precisely what Bobby did. Feeling as if his heart had broken, and hurt more deeply than he’d ever been before, he’d gone back to the paper, asked to see the editor, and told him he didn’t want the job after all. All he wanted to do, though he didn’t say it, was return to Springfield, bury himself in the Courier, and forget about women for the rest of his life.

  The editor was remarkably sympathetic and intuitive. ‘Is it woman trouble?’ he’d asked.

  Bobby nodded. The man had a kindly face and was old enough to be his father. He had a job stopping himself from bursting into tears and telling him the whole story. Instead, he said, finding it hard to keep his voice steady, ‘Strange how quickly life can change: when I left your office, I felt as if I were on top of the world. Now, it’s as if the bottom’s dropped out of it.’

  ‘That can happen to anyone, son. Take Skip Hillier, f’rinstance, our European correspondent. He was driving down some little country lane in Suffolk, England, as right as rain, when he took a bend too fast, crashed into a wall, and ended up with two broken legs, three cracked ribs, a smashed collarbone, and a sprained wrist. He’ll be in traction forever and a day,’ he finished ruefully. ‘Now we’ve got another vacancy on the books. I can manage without an assistant, but not without a guy in Europe, not when there’s a war raging over there, the British Prime Minister’s in deep shit and the population want Winston Churchill to take over. That guy Hitler’s on the prowl and Christ knows what country he’ll take over next.’

  ‘Can I do it?’ Bobby asked impulsive
ly.

  The editor - his name was Bill Flanaghan and he still had a trace of an Irish accent - shook his head. ‘You haven’t had the experience, son. How much do you know about the war?’

  ‘Everything,’ Bobby said emphatically. ‘I read your papers from cover to cover every single day. I’ve read all Skip Hillier’s reports. I know what the situation is with the British government and that the Brits are having a hellish time, losing hundreds of their ships. It makes me mad when some folk over there refer to it as a “phoney” war; there’s nothing phoney about being torpedoed. The next country the Germans will invade will almost certainly be Norway. The main reason I wanted to leave Springfield is because it’s too parochial for me - I told you that before.’ Thinking about it now, he didn’t want to go back; he didn’t want to bury himself anywhere. Bill Flanaghan would consider him a no-brainer, turning down one job and demanding another, but the idea of living in London and reporting on the war was the best job on earth and, if anything would help him forget Anne, it would be that.

  The editor smiled. ‘I’m impressed with your enthusiasm - and your knowledge. Let me think about it and give us a call in the morning.’

  The next day Bobby had called and had been told he had the job. He’d gone rushing back to Springfield where he’d stayed a while to make sure the Courier was in good hands - there wasn’t time to work out a month’s notice - and now here he was in London. He hadn’t forgotten Anne and never would, but the excitement of his sudden move to another continent had certainly cushioned the blow of losing her.

  Having rented an apartment in Dover Street, off Piccadilly, Bobby went to see Skip Hillier, his predecessor, in a hospital in Suffolk at the request of Bill Flanaghan: ‘It’ll cheer the bastard up, let him know the paper’s thinking about him.’