My father has always bolstered my courage and understood my frailties. Now for the first time in my forty-five years, I see him as vulnerable, and it is odd and unnerving. He has always been the protector, the provider, but on this spring night as we sit alone, I find myself wanting to change roles with my father. But how does a daughter fix her father’s past, repair the hurt inflicted so many decades ago? As the refrigerator hums in the corner of the kitchen, I sit quietly at the table and I fall back on what I have done since I was a small girl: I listen and put my father’s words into stories.
I imagine Ambrose’s son, a dark-haired child on the playgrounds of Staten Island, following his father’s footsteps, eager to be in Ambrose’s presence. The boy is too young to understand why Ambrose draws the attention of both men and women alike. The Newfoundland immigrant charms women with his easy smile. Men admire Ambrose’s rough nature and enjoy his stories about his seafaring family’s Newfoundland home.
Though he has but a sixth-grade education, Ambrose is quick to learn on the jobs offered by his father-in-law, Thomas O’Connell. A builder with an Irish temper and an eye for perfection, O’Connell is not easy to please. But when Ambrose begins working for his father-in-law, painting houses, sanding and shellacking floors, O’Connell is surprised at Ambrose’s skill and work ethic. “He’s the hardest-working goddamn Newfoundlander I’ve ever seen,” he boasts to family.
Still, something about the dark-eyed immigrant makes O’Connell uneasy, but the builder knows there is little use in voicing his concerns. His daughter Patricia is crazy about Ambrose and refuses to acknowledge any harsh words about her husband. When the Second World War comes, it brings opportunities for Ambrose with his knowledge of ships and sails. The young man who grew up on fishing wharfs and in schooners earns a job at the Arthur Tickle Engineering Works, repairing the torpedoed Liberty and Victory ships. In charge of the rigging loft, Ambrose supervises eighty men from all walks of life: bookies, tailors, sail-makers, carpenters, and dozens of Newfoundland immigrants. He convinces each of them they have the skills to repair the massive cargo steamships battered by German U-boats. Ambrose’s crew learns how to sew rigging ropes and make canvas hatch covers; they master splicing cable two and three inches thick—sturdy wire rigging—that will keep the ships’ one-hundred-foot-tall masts and five-ton booms strong and steady.
At the height of the war in 1944 and early 1945, Ambrose and his employees work seven days a week, twelve-hour days, and sometimes around the clock, repairing and rebuilding rigging for the 455-foot-long Victory ships. Pushed to return the cargo workhorses to sea as quickly as possible, Ambrose has little use for laziness or incompetence. Men find themselves knocked to the floor when their boss discovers shoddy work or overhears an insolent remark. The rigging loft crew quickly learns: Ambrose has a sharp temper and powerful punches.
Despite the respect and admiration Ambrose earns at work, the long hours take a toll on his family, which has grown to include another boy, William Patrick, named after Ambrose’s brother, Paddy. While his mother tends to the new infant, Ambrose’s son, Ronnie, looks for company. Lonesome for his father, he sometimes visits Ambrose on Saturdays. Ten years old now, he grins with pride when his father places his arm around the boy’s shoulders and boasts to his crew, “This is my son Ronnie.”
Ambrose’s workers notice how the boy’s face brightens, how the child seems to grow taller in his father’s company. Left under the care of the men in the rigging loft, nearby sewing machines clatter as the child watches Ambrose disappear among coils of rope and sheets of canvas cloth.
Months later, when the war ends, Ambrose, like many of the workers at Arthur Tickle, is out of work. The money that once was plentiful is tough to come by. To pay the bills, Ambrose seeks odd painting jobs and is gone now for days and weeks at a time. In between working, he is also secretly meeting with a woman he met while his family vacationed at Long Island’s Mastic Beach. Eighteen years younger than Ambrose, Arlene has honey-colored hair and a slim waist. Ambrose spends more and more time with her, and these sudden absences confuse Ronnie. The eleven-year-old boy grows angry and refuses to come in from the playground one evening to say good-bye to his father.
“Your dad was mad that you didn’t come see him,” his mother tells him.
“So what?” Ronnie shrugs.
In the fall of 1946, Ronnie is a seventh-grader, and Ambrose’s second son, Billy, is nearly two years old. During the past year, as money has grown increasingly scarce, they have moved from a rooming house in Staten Island to a one-bedroom apartment in Stamford, Connecticut, to a small apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Their new neighborhood is largely Italian, and Ronnie is singled out for his ancestry, quickly earning the nickname “Irish.” With little money coming in, dinners are often onion sandwiches, day-old bread, and whatever the family can buy at the grocery with donations from the local Catholic charity. Patricia’s sister, Eleanor, and her husband Eddie live on the second floor of the Red Hook apartment building, and they offer what they can to help, but they have little to give.
While Patricia becomes concerned about Ambrose’s time away, it is not her nature to find fault in people; she wants to believe that Ambrose is looking for work when he disappears. But she also knows that her husband has a gambling problem and that whatever money he earns often ends up in the bookie’s hands or spent at the horse races. In between the worrying, she prays at the local Catholic church, The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where she sits alone, bathed in the soft light of the stained-glass windows. Beneath the cavernous wooden ceiling that resembles the hull of a boat, she holds her Rosary beads and prays to God, “Please help me take care of my boys.”
A month before Christmas, it is cold and dark when Ambrose closes the door of his family’s Red Hook apartment and slips into Eleanor and Eddie’s secondhand car. In his pocket, Ambrose has $800, an early payment Eddie received from a friend who hired him and Ambrose to paint his house. As his two sons and wife sleep, Ambrose drives to another part of the city and picks up Arlene. In her arms, she holds a baby girl. Ambrose wraps his new daughter in his coat and then drives toward the highway that will take them south. By morning, they will be several hours into their journey to Florida. There Ambrose has set himself up with a job working on a yacht that he will eventually help sail to San Francisco.
When her son wakes, Patricia tells her eleven-year-old boy, Ronnie, “Your father has gone away.”
Later that morning she will inform her sister Eleanor, “He’s not coming back.”
“What are you talking about?” Eleanor will ask. “He stole our damn car and the money for a paint job!”
Christmas comes and there is one present under the tree, a miniature plastic bowling ball set. The name tag says it is for Billy. Ronnie sets up the bowling game for his younger brother, trying to hide his disappointment from his mother. Later, when his friends boast about all the gifts they received, Ronnie brags, too, making up imaginary toys that he found under the tree.
Several months later, they are back in Staten Island in a one-room apartment. Patricia has managed to get a job as a bank file clerk, and with the money she is able to feed and clothe her sons. Ronnie is in the middle of eighth grade when Ambrose calls.
“I miss you all,” he says. “Please come to San Francisco. Bring the boys.”
“Don’t go,” Patricia’s sister, Eleanor, tells her. “Don’t be a damn fool.”
Patricia’s older sister, Ruth, and her father also urge her not to leave, but the young mother is still in love with the dark-eyed Newfoundland immigrant. She quits her bank job, packs clothing for her two sons, and her nephew, Thomas O’Connell, a boy she has cared for on and off since his birth. She buys tickets for the four of them, fares for the trains that will carry them across the country. Ronnie can tell his mother is happy about her decision and the call from Ambrose; he hasn’t seen her smile like this for a long time. He is happy, too.
“We’re all going to be together agai
n,” he thinks. “My dad wants us back.”
They board a train in New York’s Penn Station, where Ambrose first arrived from Newfoundland nearly fifteen years past. Pressing their faces close to the train windows, Patricia’s boys are eager to begin their journey that will take them more than three thousand miles, from New York to California, to see their father. Over the next day and a half, their train rumbles through the mountains of Pennsylvania and the flattened cornfields of Ohio. Soon they are crossing the Mississippi River, and when they wake up the next morning, the Colorado Rockies are rising straight up before them; forests, canyons, and roaring rivers pass before their eyes. They are far from Brooklyn’s busy city streets and the small apartment where their father disappeared on a cold November night.
After traveling three nights and four days, they cross San Francisco Bay, where the city’s skyline and the orange Golden Gate Bridge greet their tired eyes. Ambrose welcomes them at the train station, hugging each of them. With the warm February sun and the palm trees that wave in the soft breeze, everything seems perfect. The cold and hardship of their lives in the northeast are a distant memory. They settle into a one-bedroom apartment in the nearby city of Mill Valley, where Ronnie sleeps on a cot in the living room. The apartment is cramped, but no one seems to mind. Everyone is content to be together again. For a while there are no surprises, no sudden changes, until Ronnie comes home to find his mother caring for a baby girl.
“Whose baby is that?” he asks.
“She belongs to a friend of your father’s at work,” Patricia tells her son.
Ronnie shrugs and helps his mother change the infant’s diaper. He does not know that this is the baby his father had with Arlene, the woman who now lives in an apartment down the hill from their home, the woman who is too overwhelmed to care for her child now that Ambrose is living with his first family.
Each day while Ronnie is at school, Arlene walks up the hill that leads her to Patricia’s apartment. Patricia makes tea and the two women talk while Arlene holds her child. Arlene is surprised at Patricia’s kindness and her willingness to care for Arlene’s daughter. But Patricia has always loved children, particularly babies, and this infant reminds her of her first child, the daughter she birthed stillborn and blue. Patricia still mourns the loss, and she will not let Arlene’s infant suffer because of Ambrose’s reckless choices. She also knows how upset Arlene must feel to be pushed aside.
“I’m not with her anymore,” Ambrose has told Patricia, and she wants to believe him; she also understands she has little choice but to go along. She has moved her family across the country to be with their father again. She cannot afford to upset this reunion.
In the months ahead, Arlene takes her baby back to her own apartment, and Ambrose begins to spend more and more time at the horse races and the bookie joints. Unable to pay rent at their Mill Valley apartment, Ambrose moves his wife, Patricia, his two sons, and his nephew, Tommy, to another small rental in Union Square. Consumed with gambling, Ambrose rarely comes home anymore, and eventually he leaves for good. Ronnie does not understand his father’s disappearance, and when he asks his mother, she explains, “Your father is living with another woman in Mill Valley.”
Patricia does not share anything more or the fact that this other woman, Arlene, is pregnant again with Ambrose’s child. As money grows increasingly scarce, Patricia, her sons, and Tommy move to a cheaper place, this time to a run-down hotel in the Mission District, a working-class neighborhood on the east side of San Francisco. There is one bed in the hotel room where Patricia and her youngest son, Billy, sleep. Each night, Ronnie and Tommy make their beds on the floor with their coats. In the morning, Ronnie rises at 4 a.m. to sell newspapers on street corners, earning what he can to help his mother. As he walks alone in the neighborhood, he sometimes glimpses his father near the bookie shop that is located a few streets away from their hotel. On the last time that he sees his father, Ambrose calls Ronnie to his side. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a few coins. Tussling Ronnie’s dark hair, Ambrose tucks the silver into his boy’s hand. “See you later, son.”
Ronnie takes the change, the coins cool in his palm. He watches Ambrose’s broad back disappear into the darkened doorway. Inside the dimly lit room, there is smoke and shouting, men’s voices excited about the horses that could make or break their bets. Alone, Ronnie stands on the street corner and and thinks about his mother. He knows she would not want him to take a nickel from Ambrose’s hand. So he keeps the meeting and the money a secret, and for now on this San Francisco street, the thirteen-year-old boy still has hope that somehow his family is going to be okay.
His mother does not share her son’s optimism. She knows in her heart there is no hope left; that she cannot rely on Ambrose for the truth, or a few dollars. Desperate for money, she fills out papers so she can collect unemployment. In this city of hills and fog, Patricia is stricken with dread and regret. She spends much of the day in bed crying or sleeping. Her nephew, Tommy, who is now seventeen, is worried about his Aunt Patricia and her deepening depression. He works as a clerk at a local bank and offers her most of his paycheck, but it is not enough to cover the rent and the grocery bills. Patricia rarely leaves the hotel room, and when she does, it is to walk the two blocks to pray in the Mission Dolores Church. The oldest building in the city, the church is named for the presence of a nearby stream, Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, or Our Lady of Sorrows Creek. Here in the whitewashed adobe sanctuary, Patricia cries her own tears as she kneels and asks God again to help care for her boys. Though this time, she does not have enough strength to wait for an answer. She returns to her hotel room where she considers jumping from a window.
The priest from Mission Dolores knows Patricia from her frequent visits to Sunday Mass, and he is familiar with her son Ronnie, who serves as an altar boy and sells newspapers after church. The monsignor feels badly for the young woman from New York, and he has done what he can to give her money for food and rent during her time of need. But he also realizes that Patricia has had a nervous breakdown and her sons are in trouble. He pays a visit to her motel room and knocks lightly on the door. When she rises from her bed, her eyes are rimmed red with tears. The priest offers her a hello and asks in a voice soft and low, “How are you getting on, Mrs. Walsh?”
Patricia does not speak, and her sobs fill the small room. Placing a hand on her shoulder, the priest shares his words slowly, and he tells her as gently as he can, “You’ve got to get better, Mrs. Walsh, or the state is going to take your children.”
The priest’s admonishment stirs Patricia from her stupor. Misfortune has already claimed her firstborn, and she will not allow anyone to take another child from her. When money from her older brother is wired to San Francisco, she buys four tickets for the long train ride back to the northeast.
In my mind’s eye I envision this scene: my Nana crushed by Ambrose’s betrayal, his lies, his decision to call his family out to San Francisco only to abandon them again thousands of miles from their home and their relatives. I consider her pain, the unbearable hurt of being pushed aside again for Arlene. Her shock at learning Arlene was pregnant with Ambrose’s second child. Her anger and shame at being duped by Ambrose twice in two years. Her wishing she had listened to her father and her sisters, who warned her not to move her sons across country. How she must have felt later after it all unfolded: A complete fool to have trusted Ambrose. Yet, I know too how blinded she was, how deeply she loved Ambrose; he was her first and only love, and now he has shattered her heart.
She was so pure, so trusting, my Nana. I can understand her wanting to believe Ambrose’s words. Wanting to mend her broken family. Wanting a father for her sons.
Billy is four, too young to understand his father’s absences. But Ronnie, at thirteen, is just a few years shy of becoming a man himself, of figuring out the world and his place in it. I imagine my father’s fury that begins brewing in San Francisco, like a storm gathering strength from the wind and wa
ves. The resentment and pain welling up inside him, the questions that bubble up: Why did my father leave us? Why did he do this? The confounding and tormenting lessons that his role model, his hero, offered.
I cannot fathom the strength of my father’s emotions, the power of his feelings. I only understand the wrath I feel for a man I’ve never met—and those emotions offer me a modest appreciation of how deep my father’s feelings must run.
Lost in our own thoughts on this April evening, my father and I are silent, each reliving the past. The refrigerator hums once again, lulling us both in the still house. I glance at the clock that hangs on the wall behind me, surprised to see that it is a few minutes after 1:00 a.m. My movements pull my father back to the present, and he glances at the clock too. He sighs and pushes his chair from the table. “Guess we should go to bed, Barbsie,” he tells me, harkening back to my childhood nickname.
I nod and stand myself, reaching up to hug him goodnight. “I love you, Dad.”
August Gale Page 5