All She Ever Wanted

by Lynn Austin

  “How to tell me what?” Joelle said impatiently. “What’s the big mystery?”

  “My father is being paroled from prison up in Attica. That’s what this party is for. It’s to celebrate his parole.”

  She saw surprise and shock in Joelle’s eyes, and something else—pity. Kathleen hated pity most of all. It never failed to make her feel ashamed. And she dreaded the next question Joelle would ask even more.

  “What did he do? Rob a bank or something?”

  Kathleen tried to draw a deep breath and couldn’t. “No. He was convicted of… of murdering my mother thirty-five years ago.”

  “No…” she said in a tiny voice. “Oh, Mom!” Joelle’s eyes filled with tears, and she rushed into Kathleen’s arms for a rare hug. It wasn’t offered in pity, but in empathy and love. She was feeling all of the emotions that Kathleen felt and reaching out to her.

  “Mom… Mom… I’m so sorry.”

  Kathleen was crying, too. “Sorry for what, honey? It’s not your fault.”

  “For talking you into coming here, for making you dredge all this up.”

  She paused, and her arms tightened around Kathleen. “And for… for stealing the lipstick. I didn’t know, Mom. I didn’t know how awful that would be for you.”

  “I never wanted you to know how terrible my childhood was. I hid the truth from everyone. I was so afraid no one could love me or respect me if they knew. One of the worst moments in my life was when I decided to tell your father the truth before we were married.”

  “But he loved you anyway, Mom—and so do I.”

  Kathleen hugged Joelle again. Dr. Russo had been right; by holding back the truth from her daughter she had withheld part of herself, seeming cold and distant to Joelle. It was the same mistake her own mother had made, never sharing the truth about how difficult her life had been. Maybe it would have helped Kathleen understand her own mother better if she had known.

  Suddenly Joelle pulled free. “Wait a minute! Why is your sister throwing a party for him if he killed your mother? And why is Uncle Leonard going? Isn’t he her brother?”

  “You have to understand that my father always claimed he was innocent. Annie and Uncle Leonard and the boys always believed that Daddy was telling the truth, even after he was convicted and sentenced.”

  “But you think he did it? Is that why you never wanted to come back here?”

  Kathleen sank down on the bed, rubbing her eyes. “To tell you the truth, I walked away so I wouldn’t have to think about it. I felt so confused and betrayed. I never wanted to believe that my father had killed her, but I had no choice, especially after a jury found him guilty. I felt like I was being disloyal to my mother if I believed him. And I felt ashamed of myself because my last words to her had been angry ones. I never had a chance to tell her I was sorry. Or that I loved her. I always thought that there would be time to reconcile, and that she’d always be here. After she died I realized that I could never go back and make it right—and it was the most terrible feeling in the world. It seemed like I should hate my father for killing her and robbing me of that second chance. I had to blame someone.”

  Joelle sank down on the bed across from her. Kathleen could tell that she was still trying to absorb the shocking truth. “I’ve never met a real-live criminal before,” she murmured.

  “Well, he’s not a mobster like Lorenzo Messina,” Kathleen said, trying to lighten the tension. “But you can stay here at the hotel tomorrow, if you want. I’m only going to stay at the party for an hour or so. I’ll make my peace with him and all the others; then you and I can go home and get on with our lives.”

  “Are you scared—you know—to be with him? I mean, what if he really is a murderer?”

  The word “murderer” conjured up images in Kathleen’s mind of all the criminals she’d seen portrayed in movies: tough, bitter men with knives in their boots and tattoos on their arms, spewing curses, ready to slit someone’s throat. It shocked her to realize that her father had been a convicted murderer in Attica prison for thirty-five years. But then the images dissolved, and Kathleen thought of her father as she’d known him: laughing, happy-go-lucky, lifting her up in his freckled arms, playing with her and the boys. She couldn’t recall him losing his temper or spanking them— even when they deserved it, even when he’d been drinking. And he’d always treated Eleanor with tenderness and love.

  No, she couldn’t imagine Donald Gallagher as a cold-blooded killer. And that’s what had always made the murder too horrible to contemplate: to think she had known him, and to find out that she hadn’t.

  Joelle was waiting for an answer.

  “No. I’m not afraid of him,” Kathleen said.

  “Then I’m not, either. I’ll go with you, Mom. … But we’d better hide all the knives, just in case—right?”

  Kathleen laughed and cried at the same time. Joelle was trying so hard to make it easier for her, to let her know that they were in this together, and that touched Kathleen. She pulled Joelle into her arms.

  “Yeah. We’ll make sure Uncle Leonard cuts the cake.”

  Being the night owl that she was, Joelle seemed hours away from falling asleep. She flipped on the TV, then started sifting through the items in the cardboard box. For once Kathleen felt wide awake, as well, and she sat down in the hotel chair with Fiona’s album to take a closer look. She found several pictures of Arthur Bartlett, and it solved a life-long mystery for Kathleen as she stared at his wide, dark eyes. They were her own eyes, as warm as pools of melting chocolate, even in a black-and-white photograph. Her mother and Uncle Leonard had hazel eyes, her father, sparkling blue ones. She’d wondered as she’d studied genetics in college where her own dark brown ones had come from. Kathleen’s husband had often told her that he’d fallen in love with her because of her eyes—not just the color but the sad expression in them. And here they were on Arthur Bartlett, of all people.

  She couldn’t help holding him in contempt for seducing her eighteen-year-old grandmother, then lying to Fiona all those years with promises of marriage. He’d been a selfish man, wanting both Fiona and his highsociety life. And he’d been a coward, abandoning them all by committing suicide.

  Kathleen dug deeper into the carton and found a scrapbook filled with mementos from her mother’s high school years. There were pictures of Eleanor in a bathing suit, posing on the beach with her girlfriends, and a picture of Leonard in a graduation gown and several of him in his army uniform. And there were all the usual program bills from school plays and concerts and dances. Eleanor had lived an active social life in high school and had been both pretty and popular.

  Kathleen paged through the book, viewing Eleanor’s life as she would a stranger’s. Then, tucked in the back of the scrapbook, Kathleen found a collection of yellowed newspaper articles. She carefully unfolded and skimmed through them—advertisements and critical reviews for several Broadway shows in New York City. The reviews were from 1939 and 1940. At first Kathleen couldn’t understand why her grandmother had kept them. Then she read them more carefully and found one common element: the name Russell Bartlett. Arthur Bartlett’s legitimate son had once produced and directed Broadway shows and plays in New York City.

  “Mom, look!” Joelle said, interrupting Kathleen’s reading.

  “What did you find?”

  “This manila envelope is full of newspaper clippings about your father’s murder trial.”

  Kathleen grimaced. Part of her wanted to throw the entire contents into the trash. She knew none of the lurid details of her mother’s death, and she wanted to keep it that way. But if she was going to face her father tomorrow for the first time in thirty-five years, perhaps it was time that she learned the truth. Joelle seemed to notice her hesitation.

  “If you don’t want me to read them, I won’t,” she said, holding out the envelope to Kathleen. “But aren’t you curious, Mom?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. We’ll read them together.” She climbed onto the bed with Joelle and pulled ou
t the envelope’s contents. Connie had been very meticulous, numbering the articles chronologically from the time the murder was first reported until the judge handed down her father’s sentence. Read in order, they told Kathleen the entire story:

  Riverside’s town constable had responded to an anonymous phone call and found Eleanor Gallagher lying dead on her kitchen floor. Her husband, Donald, was found with her, holding her in his arms, weeping, covered with her blood. Someone had stabbed Eleanor in the heart with her own kitchen knife. It had happened less than a half hour before the constable’s arrival. The crime lab found Donald’s fingerprints on the murder weapon—put there, he claimed, when he’d instinctively yanked it from her body.

  State police searched the house and found a packet of love letters from another man in her purse, written during the war. With them was a marriage license issued in 1943 to Eleanor and the same man. Her purse also contained an envelope with three thousand dollars in cash, two unused train tickets to New York City, and two tickets to an off-Broadway play.

  The prosecuting attorney alleged that Donald Gallagher’s motive had been jealousy; that he’d been upset to learn about Eleanor’s first marriage. The cash and unused tickets pointed to the possibility that Eleanor either planned to leave her husband or was having an illicit love affair. Donald Gallagher had a prison record for theft and was a convicted con-artist. He had no alibi for the time of his wife’s death.

  Reading the facts, Kathleen understood how a jury would interpret the evidence and condemn her father. He had opportunity and seemed to have a motive. But it didn’t fit with what Kathleen knew about her father. He might have been a thief, but he wasn’t a murderer. He never even lost his temper.

  Nor could she picture her mother leaving him for another man.

  Eleanor didn’t have enough self-esteem—or energy—to have an affair. She couldn’t even care for her own children, much less run off with another man. Donald had been her life. That’s why she kept welcoming him back each time he got paroled.

  So why had she saved the letters from Rick all those years? And why would she take the train to New York to see a play when she barely had the strength to get dressed in the morning or leave the house? And most mysterious of all, where had the three thousand dollars come from?

  “Let’s go to bed,” she told Joelle. “I’m too tired to think. We can sort through all this another time.”

  But Kathleen didn’t sleep. She tossed in bed, watching the numerals on the digital clock change, thinking about her mother. She rose and opened the blinds a crack so she could see Joelle’s face better in the moonlight, and she thought about how much she resembled beautiful, tragic Fiona Quinn. Kathleen still couldn’t sleep. She finally went into the bathroom and turned on the light to reread all of the newspaper articles, trying to figure everything out. Nothing made sense.

  In the morning, her eyes felt swollen and bleary. She ordered breakfast from room service, even though a bagel, juice, and coffee cost nine dollars.

  Kathleen let Joelle sleep as long as she wanted, but she was awake well before they needed to leave for the party.

  Kathleen felt numb as they drove from Bensenville to Riverside. As soon as the car pulled to a halt in front of their old house, Annie hurried outside to greet her. “Kathy, Kathy!” she wept. “I’m so glad you decided to come! Oh, it’s so good to see you!” Kathleen looked at her sister’s tearstained face and smiled. At forty-six she was a pretty, plumpish woman with fair hair and a round, cheerful face.

  “You look the same as I remember, Annie—tears and all. You always were a crybaby.” They laughed and hugged again. Kathleen introduced her to Joelle, who had also climbed from the car.

  “Hi, Aunt Annie,” she said shyly. Annie hurried around the car to hug her, too.

  Kathleen recognized JT, who had ambled out to the front porch, as soon as she saw him. He was as thin and wiry as he’d always been, with the same mischievous grin and dark, spiky hair that never stayed in place. He and Poke had tormented her endlessly when they were growing up, but she felt an uncharacteristic burst of love for him as they hugged for the first time that she could ever recall.

  “How are you, JT? It’s been much too long!”

  “Good. I’m good. It has been a long time, hasn’t it?” He cleared his throat. “Who’d you bring with you?”

  “This is my daughter, Joelle.”

  “Well, come on in,” JT said, holding the door open, “and meet the rest of the gang.”

  Kathleen met Annie’s husband and Poke and JT’s wives and all of their children for the very first time. With all the excitement and laughter, she couldn’t even begin to remember everyone’s name. Joelle made fast friends with two of her cousins, and they quickly lured her away from the adults. Kathleen could only hope that they weren’t as mischievous as their fathers had been.

  “Stay away from trains,” she called as the screen door slammed behind them. JT laughed out loud. “Where’s Poke?” Kathleen asked, looking all around.

  “He drove up to Attica to get Dad,” JT said. “They should be here in a little while.”

  “And you’d better not call him Poke to his face unless you want a fat lip,” Annie added.

  Kathleen’s initial nervousness began to fade as they sat around visiting, catching up on each others’lives. She learned that Annie worked as a pediatric nurse in the Bensenville Community Hospital, and her husband sold cars. JT’s wife was a teacher at Riverside High School like JT, and Poke’s wife worked as the office manager and bookkeeper for his TV and appliance business. Poke’s oldest son, Ryan, was married and had a one-yearold daughter.

  “So you all ended up getting a higher education,” Kathleen said in amazement.

  “Don’t act so surprised.” JT’s wry grin reminded her painfully of their father’s. “Did you think we weren’t as smart as you are?”

  “You were busy being hoodlums when I left home,” she replied. “How on earth could you afford college?”

  “Poke got drafted and wound up in Vietnam—did you know that?”

  Kathleen shook her head. “Anyway, the GI Bill paid for his education after he came home. Uncle Leonard and Aunt Connie helped Annie and me.”

  JT glanced at their uncle, and Kathleen saw gratitude and love in his gaze.

  Eventually Annie, Connie, and the other women retreated to the kitchen to finish all the food preparations. “Can I help?” Kathleen asked.

  “No, you sit tight and visit, for goodness’sake,” Connie insisted. “But I could use JT’s help getting the barbecue grill going. I’ve got a beef brisket that’s going to take a while.” Annie’s husband wandered off with JT, and Kathleen sat down on the sofa to visit with Uncle Leonard. Joelle returned with a can of soda and sat down beside them.

  Kathleen struggled for words, wanting to tell her uncle how grateful she was for the way he’d raised Annie and the boys, taking on a daunting, thankless job—but she didn’t know what to say or how to begin. Besides, he would probably act gruff and try to shrug off her compliments if she did.

  “I’ve been thinking about Grandma Fiona all night,” she said instead.

  “Thank you for sharing her story. How… how did she die?” She was a little afraid to ask, knowing what she did about Fiona’s life and remembering how Arthur had died.

  “She had a coronary,” he replied. “I guess she’d been having angina pains for a few years before that, but she must have developed a blockage. She called the parish priest one morning and said, ‘You’d better come over. I don’t feel well.’By the time he arrived she was dead, still sitting on the sofa with the phone in her hand. The doctor said she’d had a massive heart attack and was probably gone in seconds.”

  “Did you say she called the priest?” Kathleen asked in surprise.

  “Yes. I was surprised, too. I’d never known Mother to go to Mass— even though she made sure we went when we were children. Father Joe was the one who called me, and when I went up to Deer Falls, he told me th
at she had returned to church within the last few months—almost as if she’d known that her time wasn’t long. He said she’d made her peace with God.”

  Kathleen covered her mouth to hold back her tears, but she couldn’t stop them.

  “What’s wrong?” Leonard asked.

  “Nothing… I’m just so glad she found forgiveness. I loved Grandma Fiona. I only met her once—but I loved her.”

  Leonard cleared his throat. He looked as if he might cry, too, and didn’t want to. “I have the star sapphire ring my father gave her, if you want it. It’s one of the only things of hers that I kept.”

  “I would love to have it,” she whispered.

  He cleared his throat again. “I’ll go ask Connie what she did with it.” Kathleen watched him struggle to his feet and maneuver his walker, but she didn’t try to help him. He needed an excuse to hide his own emotion, and she gave it to him.

  The ring was beautiful—set in a style from the 1920s with a perfect star sapphire stone. It was too small for Kathleen’s ring finger so she handed it to Joelle. It fit her finger perfectly. She held out her slender hand to admire it.

  “She should have it,” Uncle Leonard said hoarsely. “It suits her.”

  “Thank you,” Joelle murmured. “I’ll always treasure it.”

  He nodded, and his mournful face came very close to a smile as he dropped onto the sofa again with a sigh.

  “Uncle Leonard, tell me about my mother,” Kathleen said. “You finished Grandma Fiona’s story last night, but you never said why Mom left home and came here—and why she never went back to Deer Falls.”

  “I wasn’t home when Eleanor moved away from Deer Falls. I’d joined the army after high school in 1940. I only know the parts of the story that she told me in her letters—and the parts that she was willing to talk about when I came back. There are things about Eleanor that we may never know. …”

  Chapter

  32

  DEER FALLS, PENNSYLVANIA— 1936