I went for a joke, for a wall. “I thought you only liked me for sex.”
“I told you I was serious, buster. Meaning this dance of ours isn’t entirely about glands. Besides which, I’m sorry to tell you, you’d be awfully alone in the world thinking of yourself as a Great Irish Lover.”
I managed, “Remember—I’m not like most Irishmen, am I?”
My vanity was wounded, and Ruby knew it. And knew that I was off balance. So she asked again, “What was she like?”
“She had a great dimple.”
“You got married because of a dimple?”
“Would I be the first man who fell in love with a dimple and then made the mistake of marrying the whole girl?”
“That’s all you can say?”
“I can say that I’m worried how much I love the cleft in your chin.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“For now it’s a joke.”
“What about your father? Do you want to make a joke out of him, too?”
She had struck me in a hollow place. “I already told you everything I know,” I said. “Which is, I don’t know much.”
My unknown soldier father, of whom my mother, all her life, would only say, “Your papa went off in a mist, that’s all there is to it; it hurts too much to speak of him as if he was ever flesh and blood and bone to me.” Of whom his brother, Liam, on his many visits from Ireland after the war, would add nothing more illuminating than that.
Ruby had of course seen the photograph, maybe the only one there is of my mysterious father—the one that sits on the dresser in my bedroom. Private First Class Aidan Hockaday of the United States Army, in his stiff uniform, with the fear of God tailored into it; a handsome young Irishman who got himself missing in action somewhere in the war against Hitler and Tojo; the sound of him, and the feel of him, and the smell of him missing somewhere in me.
I have the photograph, and a deep sense of the man. I have heard his voice, in the form of his letters from the battlefronts of Europe. These my mother would share with the neighborhood ladies when women gathered in our parlor on Friday nights, to listen to Edward R. Murrow on the Atwater-Kent, to keep the homefront vigil. I was a boy in short pants eavesdropping from the other room as my mother read my father’s words; knowing, somehow, that I should commit these letters to fiercest memory, even though I did not understand half what I heard.
But I never dared to write down the words, and so I have lost most of them. The letters are gone; gone with my mother to her grave. Ruby considers this a theft, and so do I.
Now, to Ireland this Sunday night. There to visit my only living relation, my dying Uncle Liam. To have him meet Ruby before he, too, leaves me.
Ruby. There she sat, across from me, through the candlelight. But I was miles away. And yet, I heard her say to me, “Maybe you’ll begin to know, with this trip. Do you really want to know?”
How many times, as a boy and as a man, have I risen in the night, believing my father’s ghost was perched on the edge of my bed? How many times in my sleep have I reached out to touch this ghost, to hold something in my hand more than a single flash of Aidan Hockaday’s life captured in light and shadow on a piece of photographic paper?
“Maybe I need a drink,” I said. I flagged a waiter.
“For the record, I disapprove,” Ruby said.
Much later, into the half-light of an emerging Saturday morning, I awoke to the ghost on the edge of my bed.
I reached out, clutching the usual air. I strained to hear words I knew the ghost wanted to speak. But nothing. Only the familiar disappointment of wakefulness.
I rubbed sweat from my face and neck with a corner of the sheet. Then I slipped out of bed, leaving Ruby there making her soft sleeping sounds.
I picked up my father’s picture from the dresser, and took it with me out into the parlor. I set it on top of the things in my suitcase, which sat partly filled and open on the couch. Over in the kitchen alcove, there was yesterday’s coffee in a pot on the stove. I put a flame under it, then went into the bathroom to scrub my face with soap and cold water.
When I was through, I poured out a cup of bitter black coffee and sat down on the couch next to the photograph. Just the two of us, father and son. Do you really want to know? If I did, there was one last chance for answers to the questions of Aidan Hockaday; they waited for me, on the other side.
Maybe the photograph would help the cause. I asked it, “Would you like to come along with me to Ireland?”
I decided that the ghost answered, “Why yes, I’d love to go with you, boy.” And so I tried wedging the photograph between layers of clothing in the suitcase; then I got the bright idea that I might travel a bit lighter, and without breaking glass enroute, if I removed the photo from its frame.
The metal tabs in back of the frame were brittle, and snapped away entirely when I bent them back. Then I loosened the felt-covered pasteboard and slid out the picture. There was a musty smell, and a small puff of dust, nearly five decades of time and grit under glass.
I held my father’s picture for several minutes, staring at it for the first time in my life without the barrier of glass. I touched the features of Aidan Hockaday’s face; I touched a nose and lips and a chin that mirrored my own.
Then I placed the photograph facedown among my things in the suitcase. Which was when I noticed the writing.
In an elegant hand, in blue ink protected all these years from fading by the prison of a picture frame, someone had penned a poem:
“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman,
“They killed my goose and a cat.
“Drown, drown in the water butt,
“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman.
Chapter 2
He sat in his room, in a chair by the window that looked down on a pretty and peaceful street. The girls who lived in the house across the way played double-Dutch jump rope; a fat man smoking a cigar walked slowly along with his fat twin dog on a leash; boys were gathered around the stoop of a house on the corner, haggling over marbles. Saturday morning’s strong sunlight dappled through the new spring green of maples and London planes lining the block.
With a sigh of expectant regret that sounded a thousand years old, he turned toward a ringing telephone on the table next to him. He stared at the flashing light of an answering machine connected to the phone.
When the machine picked up on the sixth ring, there were his recorded words: “Father Timothy Kelly here … I’m not about just now … Kindly leave your name and telephone number and I’ll call you back as quick as I can … Have a blessed day.”
The machine clicked once to receive and record a message. There was the crackle of static. And with that sound, he knew, the taint of the past intruding on the present.
Over the past two days, ten such calls had come to him. Ten times he had not picked up the phone. Ten times, he knew who it was who refused to speak up. Yes, Lord, he knew.
But today, the caller spoke: “What is a true patriot?”
Father Timothy Kelly knew the voice. Yes, Lord. He placed a pale, spotted hand over his thumping chest.
The voice was full of the memories of another place: the dark slow waters of the River Liffey moving under O’Connell Street footbridges; February’s wind hissing through hedges along clay roads beyond the city; his Wellingtons, mud-spattered, plodding through the dunghill behind the byre, where he and his brothers picked black-gilled mushrooms when there was nothing else for the family dinner …
… and later, before he had to leave the land of his youth, cloth hoods masking the faces of righteous comrades.
Had he not remembered this voice, and these words, so many times over the years? Had he not dreamed of them only last night?
Again, the caller asked, “What is a true patriot?”
There was no sense anymore in ignoring this. He picked up the telephone receiver, and sighed another thousand-year-old sigh. The machine continued recording.
Father Kelly replied to his past, with the words he had long ago been instructed to say in response to the question posed: “True patriots have guns in their hands and poems in their heads. Nevermore!”
Chapter 3
Anybody who is a New York cop, and a shamrock Catholic besides, has good reason for winding up a cynic or a bit of a mystic. Or as in my case, both.
There are probably eight million stories about Irish cops in my naked city. Irish cops—what will they think of next? On this very popular subject, I never read a book nor watched a movie or television show that failed to tell me half the tale. This is because cynicism is easy to come by and easier told, and because writers are a particularly lazy race of man.
A New York cop becomes a cynic along about the tenth time he has to knock down some apartment door to rescue some screaming woman with puffy black eyes and blood gushing out her nose and she takes a snarling swing at him from behind when he tries to put the collar on her old man for what he did to her. A dark mood will protect a cop from heartbreak such as this, the way an asbestos suit protects a fireman from flames. Writers, of course, suck down cynicism with their mother’s milk.
But to believe in things mystical, this is the finer side of police work. I myself believe the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple; I believe in the secret work of uneventful days; I believe in questioning coincidence very closely; I believe devoutly in the saints and most other unseen and noiseless forces; I believe in the Holy Ghost, and ghosts who are something less than consecrated souls.
Once, I thought this was all very sound-minded of me to believe in what I do, maybe even intellectual. But thanks to my commanding officer, Inspector Tomasino Neglio, I know now it is only due to a certain imagination I own.
The inspector invited me out for steaks one night a few years back, in honor of my finally joining the detective ranks. After a number of drinks and his fine big show of presenting me with the gold shield, encased in genuine eelskin, I was naturally feeling pretty good and so was Neglio; naturally, we had a number of more drinks. After which, the inspector was moved to reveal to me the real basis of my promotion. “Hock,” he said, “you’ve got an imagination that’s very full and active, and just this side of being lunatic. It’s what I always look for in a detective.”
Often, though, I wonder, Is it entirely my imagination?
There was I, sitting with a ghost on a brightening Saturday morning, long before my customary rising hour, which is the crack of noon. With my eyes wide from strong black coffee and a stern face-washing, like a lunatic I believed I had just conversed with a photograph. To the mystic in me, it was all true enough.
I imagined the root questions of a cop’s career: questions of time and distance, the quick and the fallen, right versus wrong. And could it be me alone putting such questions in my head?
No, for there was now something more; more than just the picture of my father. For the first time, there were words, just now discovered, penned to the back of Aidan Hockaday’s photograph. Were they answering the questions of my life? Could they begin to help me know? Do you really want to know?
I know that most of us believe in at least some of the Ten Commandments. Or at least we preach them.
We say it is wrong to kill, among other things.
But we kill spiders and pigs and rain forests and burglars and people of unglamorous races, and time and innocence and enemies, and disagreeable ideas and initiative and joy. We kill everything we can get away with killing, except fear.
And so, a New York Irish-Catholic cop such as myself takes some comfort in realizing that God is not so good at being a cop Himself.
Chapter 4
The priest’s legs prickled with arthritis, and he wept, but not for any physical pain. Next to him, on the telephone table, the red answering machine light blinked off and on. One call, received and taped.
He could stand up and walk to the bureau on the opposite wall of the tiny friary chamber and pull open the drawer where he kept a bottle of Jameson’s, and that would settle the ache in his old legs. For the tears, he had no cure. He tried to enjoy the scenery below his window, but it was now all a bright and wavy blur; crying had turned his eyes into fuzzy prisms.
He propped silver wire-rimmed glasses up over his head and wiped his eyes with a neatly pressed handkerchief, embroidered in Papal gold thread with the words Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Cross, New York, N.Y., along with his years of active priesthood. His eyes filled again, he wiped them again.
He rose, and stepped over to the bureau to do something about his legs at least. He fumbled in the drawer for the whiskey.
There were footsteps in the hallway, then a hearty knock on the other side of his door. And then the voice of his neighbor. “Are we feeling ready for breakfast now?”
“Good morning, Owen,” Father Timothy Kelly said, pressing the bottle of Jameson’s to his lips, breathing the woody smell of its contents. “I’m poky today. Go on down yourself, I’ll be along soon enough.”
His neighbor grunted, and moved on. Father Kelly listened to the fading of steps. Then he took a long, shaky pull from the bottle. He had to use his embroidered handkerchief again, this time to wipe his chin of spilt whiskey. Which reminded him of the many drunkards he had counseled in his day. He found a jigger in another bureau drawer, filled it, and returned to his chair and window—to drink like a gentleman, despite it being a drunkard’s hour for drinking.
After a minute or two, his chest started banging again, and he wept again. He crossed himself. Had he not always known this sorrow would return? How many times had he counseled the troubled among his own parish, “A man’s youth never leaves him, it only returns at inconvenient times”? Was he not counseling himself as well?
He put back half the jigger of whiskey. Then the telephone rang again. He did not pick it up directly. As with all his calls over the last two days, he screened it.
“Father Timothy Kelly here … I’m not about just now … Kindly leave your name and number and I’ll call you back as quick as I can … Have a blessed day.”
But now there was no sound of static, and no sound of the River Liffey in this caller’s voice. The voice was Irish, but New York born. He was greatly relieved.
“It’s Saturday morning, Father, and this is—”
He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes, yes—who is it? I’m here.”
“It’s Neil Hockaday, Father …”
His chest ached, and he wheezed. He crossed himself.
“Father Tim, are you all right?”
The priest lied. “It’s only a spring cold.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t called before …”
Father Tim lied again, as lonely people do when asked forgiveness by those who make them so. “Well, I know how that can be.”
“I have to see you, Father.”
The priest’s hands trembled. He said, “It sounds as though you’re in a very big hurry, son.”
“I am. There’s not much time.”
“No,” the priest sighed, “there isn’t.”
“So, can I see you?”
“Of course, son … only not today.” Today, the priest decided, he would go to the movies. How he loved the movies! Never mind that he had spent so many years denouncing them from the pulpit as part of the Communist conspiracy. A priest has as much God-given right to inconsistency as the next man.
“Then, Sunday?”
“All right. Come see me tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.”
The priest thought for a moment, then said, “Not here. Meet me in the old neighborhood. I’ll be taking the late mass.”
“At Holy Cross you mean?”
“Yes. I’ll be happy to see you after the mass.”
Once this meeting had been set, once priest and caller had said their good-byes, Father Kelly decided on a third drink before joining the others downstairs. Whiskey would help him through the job of pretending this was just one more endl
ess weekend among the other tired old priests. Whiskey, and the movies.
Before leaving his chair, he lay down his tear-stained spectacles on the telephone table, along with his handkerchief. The red light on the answering machine flashed for the next thirty-six hours, until the cassette tapes were removed.
Chapter 5
I hung up. But my hand rested on the telephone for several seconds as I considered how clumsy I had been talking to Father Tim. But there it was; at last I had made the call, and tomorrow I would see him.
I took my hand away from the phone and touched Aidan Hockaday’s picture again, the photo lying frameless and flat in the suitcase. I turned it over and read the poem once more, then felt someone watching me. But not a ghost.
Ruby stood in the bedroom doorway, wearing an old chambray shirt of mine with one button fastened at her waist and the shirt-tails dipping down around her knees. “How long have you been up?” she asked.
“Not long.”
She eyed my half-empty coffee cup and asked, “Is that fresh?”
“Reheated from yesterday.”
She made a face and walked through the clutter toward the kitchen alcove, where she started heating water in a teakettle and grinding coffee beans and otherwise making a lot of noise. “I’ll say it again,” she said. “Bachelors live like bears with furniture.”
Ruby turned and faced me, probably expecting me to crack wise. But what could I say? I do live like a bear. Besides which, I was preoccupied with dialing the phone number of another long-neglected friend. As I heard ringing on the line, I asked Ruby, “What are your plans today?”
“Meaning what, I’m on my own?”
“I need to see somebody. It’s important.”
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