August Gale (10 page)

So it comes as no surprise on this rainy May evening that the mention of Ambrose stirs a flurry of deep and raw emotions in each of my sisters.

“I don't care about him,” Jackie says, her eyes focused on the napkin she folds into small squares. “I never knew him. I don't have any emotion toward him. I don't want to care about him. He didn't care about Dad, Nana, or Uncle Bill.”

The resentment in my sister's voice surprises me. A middle sister, Jackie is often the first to defuse anger, to forgive. It is rare for her to speak ill of anyone; she is the peacemaker, quick to encourage her sisters to “be nice,” to brush off ill-tempered or unintentional slights. Yet, she is not willing to do this for our grandfather.

After listening to my father recount what happened in San Francisco, I have my own strong feelings about Ambrose. I want to ask my grandfather, “Why? How could you leave your family, abandon them twice? How could you live with yourself?” My grandfather has been dead now for thirteen years, succumbing to colon cancer in June of 1990. In the years before his death, his daughters Donnie and Kathy grew closer to him. They came to understand and appreciate their dad despite his flaws. I consider Donnie's words in her first e-mail to my father, her conflicted feelings about Ambrose: “I know when Dad died he had a lot of regrets, and that's something he had to work out with himself. Dad was not perfect in any way, a bit spoiled, no, he was downright spoiled. We butted heads a lot as I got older; but I could always call him and he would be there for me; that is what I will remember about him, of the good he did and not what he did in the past.”

Ambrose's daughters loved their dad unconditionally, like my sisters and I love our father. Throughout their childhood and adult lives, Donnie and Kathy witnessed their father's loyalty. They had no fear that Ambrose would repeat his past, leaving them as he did his first two sons. There had to have been good in him, I tell myself. He embodied more than his worst mistakes. But his mistakes, his abandonment of his children—my father—were so wrong I cannot see past them. I know my emotions taint my grandfather's image; I can only see the dark side of his character. Yet, I know there is more to him.

“No one person, no story is ever black and white,” a veteran newspaper editor once told me. “There are always many shades of gray.” It was a lesson I heeded over my thirty years as a reporter. My editor's words echo in my ears on this cold spring night as I halfheartedly pitch Ambrose's positive attributes to my sisters, characteristics that I know will not be well received.

“Some people believe Ambrose was a good man,” I offer. “A lot of people, his ship-rigging employees liked and respected him.”

My sisters cut me off before I can continue. A few of them shake their heads in disgust.

“So what if he did some good things, think of what he did to Dad,” Janice says, her voice rising with disbelief and rage. “How could he be so heartless?”

“But he's our
grandfather
,” Janice's twin, Joanie, argues. “He's our blood, our stock; he is what we're made of. Dad isn't just all Nana. Ambrose is a part of who we are. We're all intuitive, good with people. Dad had the knack to motivate people who worked for him, and that's from Ambrose.”

Emotions and words arc back and forth between the twins. Tapping her chest, Joanie argues that Ambrose is in each of us, in our “genes.” Janice shakes her head refusing to consider Ambrose's blood, his DNA that tethers us to him. Like my father, she is repelled by his decisions, his betrayals.

The twins' voices rise as they argue, their passion drawing raised eyebrows from Laura, who sits between them. Four years older than Janice and Joan, Laura is hesitant to voice her thoughts on Ambrose. Like Jackie, the other “middle sister” Laura is not likely to jump into a conflict or argument, preferring instead to shrug her shoulders and utter “whatever.” On this evening, she sits quietly as her green eyes follow the conversation that escalates around her.

“He was so selfish,” Janice says.

“We don't know what was in his mind,” Joanie admonishes. “You can't judge him.”

“After what he did, why the hell shouldn't we be able to judge him?” Janice hollers back.

Knowing that if the twins continue to argue, they may leap across the table and throttle each other, Dede, the eldest, intercedes. “Joanie's right,” she agrees, her voice low and calm. “Like it or not, Ambrose is part of our family, our history.”

“He may be our family,” Janice says, “but we don't have to forgive what he did.”

After so many years of not knowing, of not thinking of our grandfather, it is odd to hear my sisters debate his morals, his decisions, with such fervor. Derived from the Greek
Ambrosios
, Ambrose's name means “immortal, undying,” Strangely, though we have never met our grandfather, his deeds and his decisions live on in each of us.

Regardless of their feelings, my sisters are thrilled with the news that my father has decided to travel to Newfoundland. The conversation shifts toward this less contentious topic and the unlikely trip that he will make in June.

“I can't believe he is going,” Joanie says.

It was Joanie who had called our parents' home several weeks ago and told our father, “I want to go to Newfoundland.”

My father did not hesitate in his reply: “Have a nice trip.” He had no desire to visit Marystown, to see Ambrose's birthplace, or to acquaint himself with relatives he had never met. What was the point? Ambrose had died more than a decade ago.

But Joanie persisted. “I want to know more about where we're from.”

Knowing Joanie was not going to relent, I agreed to go with her, but I did not care to learn more about Ambrose. I wanted to discover more about my Great-Uncle Paddy Walsh and the August Gale. Chasing a killer storm was easier than trying to figure out my grandfather and his heartless choices. When my father learned we both planned to journey to Marystown, he reluctantly agreed to come along. “Alright,” he sighed. “I'll go with you.”

As the church bell rings tolling midnight, my sisters and I begin to clear the empty glasses and cocktail napkins from the table. “It's good he's going to Newfoundland,” Dede says, before retiring to bed. “It's good you're getting him to talk about all this.”

I nod, but I am unsure of whether it's good or not. Since I have begun asking my father about Ambrose, both of us have lost sleep. My father has lain awake thinking of his childhood, his anger, the hurt his mother endured. I lose sleep wondering:
Why am I stirring up bad memories?
This is not a newspaper story that I can distance myself from. This is my father's story, and I am not sure where it will take us. I only know that I do not want to harm my father, to cause him more pain.

That night, I lie awake in one of my sister Janice's spare bedrooms, eyeing the sliver of street light that falls on the comforter. From across the nearby parking lot, the Immaculate Conception Church bell tolls once, and I know that I will hear it several more times as it rings at 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 in the morning. Across the bed, Dede punches her pillow, unable to fall asleep herself.

“Nana used to tell me stories about Ambrose sometimes,” she tells me.

“What stories?” I want to know.

“She used to talk about how he had another family in California,” she says. “She'd bring him up sometimes when I'd drive her home to Watertown.”

The Boston suburb of Watertown had offered Nana a new start when she returned from San Francisco heartbroken, shamed, and penniless in 1949. Unable to pay rent or buy food, Nana relied on the generosity of her sisters and brothers.

“She was very quiet when she came back,” Nana's sister Eleanor remembered. “She just felt bad. It was a miserable time for her, and a miserable time for the kids.”

Bounced from one house to the next, my father felt like a gypsy, a beggar. It was then, at the age of fourteen, that his bitterness against Ambrose took seed. “I'm through with him,” he told himself. “I don't ever want to hear his name mentioned.”

The new kid at Watertown High, Ambrose's son had two strikes against him. He was from a broken home in 1949—a time when few families dared to even talk about divorce—and he was also poor, living in an affluent town. Angry, he used his fists to quiet anyone who dared tease him.

Without money to buy winter coats, his mother stayed up till dawn knitting her sons sweaters so they would have something warm to wear to school in the morning. She also took the only job she could get, washing dishes in a small restaurant. Her boys ate dinner at the counter for free as they watched their mother in the back kitchen, bent over a sink scrubbing pots and pans. “I hate this,” her eldest son thought as he reluctantly ate his food. “Poor Ma.”

My father's memories create pictures in my mind as I struggle to sleep in my sister's Newburyport home. The image of my Nana's face, her soft white curls, the scent of her perfumed Cote face powder stir fond remembrances. She was my hero, the grandmother who taught me pig Latin and to play penny poker. A storyteller, she told me and my sisters scary tales as we took walks over dark bridges or along dirt roads. Mounds of dirt became castles, tree branches transformed into the fingers of unseen ghosts. When we visited her Watertown home, she tickled us until we cried, fed us as much candy as we liked, and when it came time to leave, she could never bid us good-bye. “See you in the funny sheets,” she'd tell us. Saying good-bye brought back the memory of her mother's death. She was four as she stood by her mother Bridget's bed, silent and scared. “Goodbye,” her mother said with her last breath.

After her mother passed, Patricia's father married a feisty Irish woman from County Galway, a woman who was not afraid of standing up to her husband. The last of seven children born to Tom O'Connell's first wife, Patricia often retreated to the porch steps as her stepmother and father bickered and hollered.

“She got nervous when they shouted,” Patricia's sister Eleanor recalled. “She was a soft, soft individual. If you'd ask her for something a second time, she'd give it. If anything went wrong, you could always go to her.”

It also was not Patricia's nature to complain, and despite the sorrow Ambrose inflicted upon her, she never spoke a bad word about him. Yet a few months after she returned from San Francisco, she confided to Eleanor: “If there is such a place as hell, I hope he ends up there.”

“He'd probably talk his way out of it,” Eleanor quipped.

The two sisters shared a laugh over Ambrose's ability to talk at length about any given subject.

More than fifty years later, laughter is not on my mind as I think of my grandfather and the pain he wrought on a woman who spent her life caring for others. My older sister's words spoken hours earlier on this night return to me in the dark.

He was a bastard.

L
izzie Drake started at the slam of the kitchen door.

The young woman kept her eyes focused on the potatoes in the sink as Father McGettigan pushed a chair from his path.
Aye, he's in a fine mood this evening
, Lizzie muttered to herself. As the August days waned, she had noticed the priest's demeanor growing increasingly sour. Just the other night, he'd kicked her bucket of suds over upon his return from counseling a family, parents who had lost their beloved baby to pneumonia. Lizzie had been kneeling there on the kitchen floor, scrubbing his own holy footprints, when he stormed in and upturned the water in front of her. Not a word he said to her then, nor now. Not that twenty-year-old Lizzie wanted the reverend to speak to her; she had little to say to the gruff priest.
'Tis better off there be few words among us
, she thought. And with these desperate times, she knew she was lucky enough to have a bed in the parsonage attic and a bit of beef on her plate. The four dollars a month wage she received for her housekeeping and cooking duties was a bonus that she was grateful for.

Still, the priest's presence kept the maid jittery as a boiling teakettle. She wondered if the absence of McGettigan's dog, Jocko, had anything to do with the reverend's foul moods. If he regretted the dog's passing, he was likely the only one in Marystown to harbor remorse. The creature, big and black, taller than Lizzie herself when it stood on its hind paws, was worse than the devil himself, terrifying everyone that walked past the parsonage. He had attacked the poor and rich alike; tearing the coat off a well-to-do missus from the north side—a coat that the priest later paid a pretty penny to repair. And then there was the unfortunate soul, the fisherman passing by the priest's home on his horse and cart. Jocko charged the horse, so frightening the large animal that it tumbled in the dirt, tipping the cart and tossing his master to the ground. The fisherman never recovered from his head injuries, his sufferings severe enough to render him a cripple, no longer fit to earn his living by the sea. And the worst incident of all, to be sure, involved poor Tommy Flanagan. Cornered by Jocko as he ambled past the priest's home, the simpleminded lad grabbed a broken piece of picket fence to defend himself. His teeth bared, Jocko leaped toward Tommy's face. Terrified, the boy struck the dog with the sharp end of the picket, unintentionally poking the animal's eye out.

The sight of his bleeding and injured pet had outraged McGettigan, who demanded swift retribution from the local constable. “Give the boy whatever punishment the law can!” he ordered. A few days later, Lizzie and the local women watched from their kitchen windows as the sixteen-year-old youth huddled in the back of the constable's horse cart, destined, the poor lad, for the nearby jail in Burin town. Lizzie whispered prayers as Tommy shivered in his oilskins, his only shield from the winter wind. Confused and cold, the boy would serve his two-month sentence without a clue of what prompted his confinement.