“Yes…Mrs. Quinn, I picked Buddy…I mean Charles up at the request of the police from the Juvenile Detention Center in January and most recently we have been informed that his father had died from a drowning accident.”
“How is my darling boy?” she began to weep, and I handed her a Kleenex.
“There, there Mrs. Quinn…Buddy is just fine. He has adjusted quite well and seems to be a happy little boy.”
“I will be forever grateful for your kindness,” she sniffled.
“I have been ill…had surgery to remove part of the lung…I couldn’t take care of myself, much less Charles, so his dad came for him when I was in the hospital and my step-mother let him go…just for a few days don’t you know. Well I was too sick to think about Charles and when I got better…well they could not be found.”
“Are you ok now…may I get you something…coffee, tea, soda.”
“Yes, thank you a coffee with cream and sugar.”
I rang for the receptionist. “Rita are you free to get two coffees and some pastry. Mrs. Quinn will have cream and sugar and mine is black.”
I watched Katherine as I spoke to the receptionist…she dabbed at her nose. I noticed that she was stylishly dressed. Beautifully dressed in fact… young woman of nearly twenty-five, she wore high heel shoes, stockings on long legs…joining hips to make a beautiful figure. Something a young priest should not dwell upon since taking the vow of celibacy…but, fortunately Father did have the control to look and be grateful that God had placed such beautiful creatures on earth to be loved and enjoyed. Some would say even to feel, that young girl when he was fourteen…Katherine caused Father to remember the feeling oh so well, so well that it hurt.
There are some temptations that are so overwhelming that they don’t require deliberation. We know the outcome before we ever begin the debate. But still we go through the mental gymnastics because we know that we should-we must, to continue living with ourselves. In the days to come it would be these flimsy rationalizations that the young Louis Hermann would cling to, in his attempts to justify what he knew he was about to do. In point of fact, he thought in his young mind, it probably wasn’t even his fault. It was all the fault of the beautiful young classmate and her alluring fragrance. This moment was merely harvesting the fruit of a seed that would take time to grow…and in this time, destinies would be rerouted and journeys of the heart would lead in different directions.
Father Hermann and his young love were in the eighth grade and he had been sweet on her since the seventh grade. They were students at Christ the King and she lived near Hermann’s family at fortieth and Sylvan. She lived above her father’s grocery, and they walked together to the movies at the West End Theater. An old-time movie theater where all the neighborhood children gathered on Saturday to watch the silent movies…the westerns which required no sound to know that cattle were being rustled, guns were being fired and pretty girls in the balcony were being kissed. Yes, those were heady days and then, she went off to high school and Father Hermann and I went to the Sectarian Seminary and discovered that we had a vocation…though Father still remembered her beautiful green eyes, her smile and her breath, which always smelled of Bazooka bubblegum.
Hermann knew that carrying her through the four years of the seminary would be the test of his vocation to the priesthood, and though he has admitted to me that he has never forgotten her…the feeling he had for her waned early in his first year at the seminary and it got easier and easier for him to thank of her without causing him a great deal of pain in places where the pain is most acute. Boy troubles that are most often resolved by manhood when courting becomes a serious matter and sex resolves issues tantamount in a young man’s life, which blessedly do not exist for priest.
Rita brought the coffee and pastries and they sat at the table. Father placed a pastry on a plate and moved it in front of her with a napkin, fork and the coffee.
“Thank you father; I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Yes I thought you looked a bit on the pale side.”
“I would like to see my boy…but I do not know the bus system here.”
“Oh, there is no bus to St. Joseph I am afraid…but I would be happy to have you ride out with me this evening and you could spend the night with Buddy…err Charles and I could bring you back here in the morning.”
“You are just the kindest person I have ever known…but I don’t want to be a bother.”
“It will be a pleasure and to think of the joy it will bring to Charles.”
That night, I delivered Katherine Quinn to the orphanage. I had spoken with Sister Mary Como about our visitor and she was happy to accommodate her in the guest quarters on the third floor. It was a spacious place with a private bath, near the quarters of the nuns. Buddy had been given a bath and dressed in his Sunday best. Sister had even arranged to have dinner served to the two of them upon our arrival.
I watched from afar as they met for the first time in two years and was pleased to see that time may have impacted the short term memory of Buddy but had not impacted the imprint made for his mother at birth. They hugged for the longest time…she wept again and Buddy tried to soothe her pain. But hers was a pain that only time and the presence of her child on a routine basis could spare. I knew that we could not solve all the issues, but, at least, it was a start in the right direction.
Katherine Quinn could see that her son was being cared for by loving caregivers…he was safe and not being drug from bar-to-bar and flophouse-to-flophouse. She would always know where he was, and when she was better physically…had some kind of job that afforded the opportunity to care for the two of them…well Buddy would be free to go, and life could start anew.
But tonight she would hold her son until he slept and in the morning they would enjoy breakfast together and then there would be the teary good-bye…a moment so tragic, so emotionally difficult that it is not possible to imagine unless you have felt it.
Katherine knew that she must have her son with her and she promised Buddy that she would find a way back to see him each month.
“Charles, I want you to learn how to count to 30 and on that following Sunday, after you have gone to Mass…you can count on seeing me for the afternoon. That is until I can get my health back and then I will find a job and take you away with me.”
“Why can’t you stay here Mother?”
“This is an orphanage Charles, for boys.”
“But Mother there are women working here in the kitchen and they have children here.”
“I don’t know much about cooking for a large number of boys Charles.”
“What do you want to do Mother?”
“Well I know about laundry work.”
“We have a laundry here…my friend Joe Tough works there.”
“Well, I’ll ask the good priest on the way back to town Charles…maybe they need someone.
Historical Review
Europe is an invention, merely a small part of the great landmass that extends from the Atlantic to the China seas, arbitrarily defined and called a continent. Nevertheless, from classical times, its inhabitants believed themselves, like others elsewhere before and since, to be living at the world’s apex; the name Europe, given to the place by the Greeks, is generally supposed to have meant ‘mainland’, implying that everywhere else was, so to s Strange, offshore. There is certainly something absolute to the shape of Europe. In the west it dies romantically away, beyond the surf-fringed Atlantic countries, in those western isles so dear to mythologist down the Ages-Hebrides and Tenerife, Spitsbergen and volcanic Iceland, spouting fire and smoke halfway to Greenland. In the south it is bounded by the Mediterranean, which it also speckles with its own legendary Islands-Crete, Malta, Corsica and a hundred more. In the north it marches away heroically into the wastelands of the Artic. Only in the east are its limits less explicit and even there, apart from the protrusion that is Turkey-in-Europe, for the moment the continent may be said to end dramatically where the Soviet Union
begins. When an East wind blows over County Donegal, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, its bitter breath has come direct across plain, hill, and sea from the Ural Mountains on the far side of Moscow.
Europe is the second smallest of the continents-about one-eighth the size of Asia-but many kinds of terrain can be found within it. Much of it is gently rolling country, watered by easy rivers, blessed with temperate weather and generally free of natural dangers…except for the volcanic activity in Italy. There are, however, extremes and exceptions too. There are the marshes of the Danube and the lake-forests of Finland. There are the tremendous Hungarian plains. There are snow- peaks and tundra’s and patches of Mooreland wilderness. Bears, bison, water buffalo, wild cats, wolves, jackals, Artic foxes, elks, reindeer, chamois, wild pigs, even a few wild camels are all to be found in Europe somewhere, and its coastline range from the subtropics Mediterranean havens to the fierce and awful fiords of the frozen north.
More than any other of the earth’s continents, nevertheless, Europe has been man molded. Its civilization has been nurtured in towns and cities, and all along the river valleys of this continent, on estuaries and sheltered bays, wherever the soil was rich, the terrain safe and welcoming, humankind settled in urban patterns. Half the greatest cities on earth, if not in size at least in stature, are to be found in Europe, in some of the most congested of all habitations. It is as though the river of history, restlessly exploring these countryside’s, has left its fertilizing silt to generate streets, squares, and towers everywhere from Gdansk to Gibraltar.
It is almost impossible to imagine Europe uninhabited, and in fact an astonishing variety of the human race inhabits it. ‘Caucasian’ has lately replaced ‘European’ as an ethnic category on immigration forms; and just as well, for there are almost as many kinds of European humans as there are European landscapes, and they constitute about one-tenth of the earth’s total population. The hazy primitives who lived here before history began were overwhelmed millennia ago by successive streams of immigrants out of Asia, gradually resolving themselves into linguistic and racial groups we recognize Today-Tetons, Latins, Slavs, Celts, Greeks. These again presently evolved still further into Germans or Italians or Serbs or Norwegians, and threw off a myriad ethnic and linguistic splinters, like the slant-eyed Lapps or the enigmatic Basques, whose language remains to this day unintelligible to almost everybody but themselves.
The Europeans have never been homogenized into a distinctive type. There are Europeans pale-faced, olive-skinned, congenitally tall, and genetically squat. Europeans who look like Arabs or like Eskimos-Europeans habitually reserved, like Englishmen, or famously volatile, like Italians, or emotional, like Poles, or stubborn, like Turks. At least thirty-five languages are spoken in this continent, almost all with their own literature. Styles of architecture, cuisine, tastes, attitudes, all vary more widely and abruptly in this relatively small slab of country than anywhere else on earth. They drive on the left in Ireland. They are constitutionally neutral in Switzerland (but World War II proved that they were neither politically nor economically neutral). They eat boiled sheep’s’ offal for breakfast in Scotland. There are eight European hereditary monarchies, besides sundry princedoms and dukedoms, Francs, marks, pounds, dinars, drachmas, lire, leva, schillings, pesetas, crowns, florins, zlotys and escudos are all current somewhere in Europe…even as we face the conversion Euro as a common currency in the 21stcentury. At least a couple of dozen separate armies parade this continent, each with its own uniforms, its own battle honors and its ineffably martial generals.
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I wanted to give you a little break from the Dublin story, but there is such diversity, such uniqueness about the great city that I return you now for a few pages. We are now on Henrietta Street, which lies on the north side of the River Liffey, close to the City’s center. Its house built soon after 1720 are among the oldest in Dublin, and it is named after the wife of an 18thCentury English viceroy, the Duke of Grafton-a descendant, on the wrong side of the blanket, of England’s Charles II. The street has other connections with society’s upper orders. During the 18thCentury, four successes archbishops of the established Protestant Church of Ireland were residents, and in the last decade of that century four peers and four members of the Irish parliament lived in its short, exclusive span. Horse-drawn carriages pulled up constantly to unload beaux and dandies, belles and shrewish old dowagers; and its drawing rooms echoed to the kind of gilded bitchiness that the contemporary playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born only one street away, reproduced in his “School for Scandal”.
Things are different now. Three adjoining houses in the street are now reasonably maintained as a convent, but most of the others are in advanced state of decline. The efforts of conservationists have saved them from total decrepitude, but long ago their slender wooden staircases were replaced by unadorned concrete, their carved chimney-pieces sold at London auctions, and each of their floors adapted to accommodate three or four poor families. Windows are broken and patched, walls are whiskered with weeds; and gardens obliterated with tarmac. The homes of the aristocracy and gentry have become an unequivocal slum. Not wholly undesired by the Irish who annually seek to distance themselves from the English occupation of their country for 700 years?
There is a certain feeling from the new Irish prosperity that what will rise from these slums will be something truly Irish and the faint odor of the past pushed across the Liffey for parts unknown. In point of fact, Dublin’s development over the last three centuries has been rather like a fox-hunt (which has now been outlawed), with the aristocracy and gentry for once becoming the prey and constantly striving to keep a safe distance between themselves and the deprived majority.
The chase started out in the medieval city, on the high ground dominated by Christ Church Cathedral, where by the early 18thcentury, squalor and overcrowding head become acute. Developers with an eye to profit began to build smart terraces-rows of uniform and attached houses-on the other side of the Liffey in what is now the north-western section of the city, the area that includes Henrietta Street. The rich moved across the Liffey River, leaving the poor behind in the rat-infested lanes around the cathedral. More new terraces sprang up in the north-east, rising to the heights of Mountjoy Square, with its views across Dublin Bay and southward to the hills of Wicklow. Then, half-way through the 18thcentury, a fashionable new district developed in the south-east, around Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square. Aristocrats, gentry and newly rich merchants began to move back across the river, and the north side of Dublin began to decline, although until about 1800 it still had exclusive enclaves like Henrietta Street.
Today the rich, in the old sense, are gone, swept aside by a rush of events of which Irish independence has been only one. The government has broken up the huge old estates. Aristocrats have no official place in Irish precedence. Those who remain can use their titles to good effect in certain circles-horsey and some financial ones in particular-but they are not numerous enough to count for much, and are subdued and tactful in their brushes with the populace. It would be a fool who would use the kind of language spoken by a Provost of Trinity, John Penland Mahaffy, only 70 years ago. In disparaging one of Ireland’s greatest writers: “James Joyce is a living argument in favour of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of the island-for the corner-boys who spit into the Liffey.” (Joyce’s opinion of Trinity was not high either, “The gray block…set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone in a cumbrous ring.”
III
KATHERINE QUINN
Of course, Father Hermann told me he could have guessed what would happen after Buddy’s mother appeared. Buddy became a discipline problem whereas he had been pretty much the ideal child before her arrival. Father Hermann prepared the sisters and they did a great job of giving Buddy sufficient attention and understanding helping him to weather the problem. It took about three weeks and Buddy was back to his ol
d lovable self.
Father Hermann told me that Katherine Quinn had asked him for a job in the kitchen or the laundry but was disappointed that he had no job openings at the time to offer to her. She seemed so eager to please and wanted so very much to be near her son. Father promised to keep in touch by mail and to offer her the next position to become available in either the laundry or the kitchen. She seemed pleased that he was interested. Father took her to the Greyhound Bus Station the next morning…she thanked him many times for taking such good care of Buddy and promised to be a better mother.
He told me later that he had told her to take care of her health before she started worrying about getting a job. She told him she was living with her father and step-mom, had been especially good to her during the recuperation from the lung surgery. He asked her to write Buddy and the staff would be delighted to read the mail for him. She disappeared into the bus station and that was the last time he saw or heard from her. Two years would pass, Buddy had grown so much and was now in the first grade, doing extremely well…and was finally out of the nursery and into the big boys dormitory for first and second graders. Sister Louise Mathias was in charge of the dorm and she reported that Buddy was a good little boy…quite full of himself, but wasn’t a problem. He was quick to volunteer for extra duty and seemed to enjoy playing cards and board games with the other boys.
Sister had noticed that Buddy often stood looking out the big windows toward the circular drive, especially on Sunday after Mass. But he wasn’t unlike the other boys who watched and hoped for a visitor…most of the boys never had visitors and therefore did not anticipate anyone’s arrival at the orphanage to see them. But Buddy continued to hold hope and vigil each Sunday and then he would be extremely depressed for the rest of the evening. But the next day he had snapped out of the depression and was fine at school.
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