Habit of Fear (7 page)

Julie brushed aside the menu and shook her head at mention of the dessert cart.

“Later,” Reynolds said, and when the man had wheeled off, he asked, “is the idea so abhorrent to you that you can’t even speak?”

If she had answered, it would have been to say yes.

He knew it. “So you’d prefer I told you a romantic tale about Thomas Francis Mooney? Was that his name? I could do that for you, I suppose.”

“No.” Julie finally spoke. “Mother told me enough of them.”

“And nothing about Uncle Morgie.”

“Not much.”

“I thought she loved me. I thought we were very much in love,” he said as though reexamining that part of his life.

Julie looked at him. Squarely now. His expression was wistful, regretful. And he wasn’t a very good actor, she decided. She was sure it was an act, whatever his motive might be. But then, she wanted it to be an act.

“I was married to a woman totally dependent on me,” he went on. “There were two children. Katherine and I both understood, and there was never any question of my leaving Ellen. But when you were on the way, I agonized over it—”

“Why not an abortion?” Julie interrupted.

“I am a Roman Catholic. And at that point your mother had taken instruction, although I didn’t know it.”

“No kidding,” Julie said, again brittle.

Reynolds was offended. Or feigned it. “It would have been better if your mother had told you.”

“Oh, yes.” Then she forced herself onto a different tack. “I’m sorry, Morgan. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“I did propose an arrangement. It might not have worked and it would have taken time. But your mother arrived at an arrangement of her own—marriage to an Irishman considerably younger than herself. He was one of a small army of her admirers who headquartered at the bookstore—greedy as worms and just as impecunious. I have no compunction about saying what I thought was in the marriage for him: permanent resident status in this country.”

“And then an annulment?” Julie prompted.

“That did happen, I believe.”

“Wasn’t there a time discrepancy in there somewhere? Or was I supposed to be born prematurely?”

Reynolds seemed only then to become aware that she was angry.

“It really is distasteful to you to think I might be your father.”

“Well, yes,” Julie said, beyond further pretense. “I think my mother would have told me that—instead of making up the business of a ‘whereabouts unknown’ father.”

“Your mother was a magnificent fabricator. She ought to have been a writer herself.”

“Herself?”

“Aren’t you a writer?”

“Oh. I thought you meant him,” Julie said, disappointed.

“He might have been.
He
might have been almost anything. Katherine thought I was jealous of him. She couldn’t believe the only thing I envied him was his freedom.”

“And yet ten years later you were still around to enroll me in Miss Page’s School.”

“It wouldn’t occur to you that you might have been the reason I was still around.”

Julie said nothing.

Reynolds made a gesture of vast impatience. “Since you don’t want to accept my account of your origins, perhaps you’ll succeed in tracking down the Irish absentee and get his version.”

“I’d like to. I’d hoped today might be a beginning.”

“So had I.”

Julie was on her feet before he could scramble to his. She wanted to get away quickly. She laid her hand on his arm, a brief light touch. “Thank you very much, Morgan.”

His quick smile turned on and held until she was gone. The dimples would stay in her mind forever.

W
HY IN THE NAME
of God would the man claim to be her father if he wasn’t? And a marriage of convenience between her mother and a young man without ties made sense of the annulment as nothing else had to date. How long did it take to get an annulment? Something Father Doyle at Saint Malachy’s could answer. But before there was an annulment, there had to have been a marriage, and before that, a marriage license. She could, in her mind’s eye, retrace her and Jeff’s trip downtown to the Marriage License Bureau. First, the blood tests three days in advance, the physician’s signature and then the long wait in line at the Bureau for the application form. On which she had written the name Thomas Francis Mooney as her father, and his birthplace, Ireland. It now gave her the feeling of truth just to go over the scene in her mind. Very dangerous, the feeling of truth. It was a working rule of Jeff’s: that’s when you double-check your facts.

I
N THE MORNING
she took the subway downtown to Worth Street and inquired what she had to do to see her parents’ marriage license. She was given a form on which to request a search and transcript of marriage. The clerk was annoyed that she had no date for the ceremony. Since Julie herself had been born in April, she said the marriage had occurred within a period eight to twelve months earlier.

She wound up having to go directly to the County Clerk’s Office, and on her way she contrived a more aggressive stance: she offered her press card by way of identification, although no one asked for it, and stated as the purpose of the search her claim to an inheritance. Money, somehow, gave most things a quicker legitimacy.

“No attorney?” the assistant wanted to know.

“I thought I might pick up something for my column in the
New York Daily
if I came myself. What the City Keeps—you know, that sort of thing.”

“They’re state records, ma’am,” the man said laconically. But he authorized the search. Before lunchtime Julie knew that her mother had married Thomas Francis Mooney a good ten months before she was born. So, she reasoned, the so-called marriage of convenience had occurred before she had been an inconvenience to any of them. It made a liar out of Morgan Reynolds. A lot of men denied paternities. He’d have done it, too, back then—in his legitimate life—no matter how chivalrous his pose today.

“I’ve been given to understand the marriage was annulled,” Julie said to her informant. “Does that show on the record?”

“No. It would only show if the annulment dated back to the day of the ceremony.”

“In other words, if they hadn’t slept together,” Julie said.

“That’s what it comes to, yes, ma’am.”

She returned to the Marriage Bureau, paid her fee and waited for the other information to be taken from the microfilm, transcribed and certified, and passed along to the office where she waited. No question: Morgan Reynolds had lied; he had juggled the order of events to suit a purpose of his own. Again she questioned: a purpose or a whim? With genuine purpose, would he not have sought her out at her mother’s death? And he could have found her, knowing that she was married to Geoffrey Hayes. A sophisticated man, Morgan Reynolds ought to know that the true dates were ascertainable if she wanted badly enough to ascertain them.

A whim, she decided, contrived in the wake of her phone call. Champagne and roses, and the romance of her mother’s illicit love. Oh, wow! Could he really have thought she would fall into his arms and cry, “Daddy, you’ve been on my mind!”

The transcript came through. She did not open it until she walked out and into City Hall Park, where, in the warm noontime sun, she found a bench to herself. She felt taut as a bowstring, her heart thumping. A party of pigeons gathered around her when she sat down. “Sorry, kids,” she said, having no lunch to share with them. They waddled elsewhere, and she opened the transcript.

Katherine Anne Richards, residing at 499 East 91st Street, New York City, born July 17, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, and Thomas Francis Mooney, residing at 584 East 54th Street, New York City, born October 10, 1934, in Wicklow, Ireland, were married on July 20, 1954, at Saint Giles’s Church Rectory in New York by the Reverend Stephen Flaherty. The witnesses were Margaret Fiore and Michael Desmond. There had been no previous marriage of either bride or groom.

For a moment it seemed as though she had learned a great deal, and then it seemed very little. In the City Hall basement she found a public telephone and called Saint Giles’s Rectory. The church was not far from the United Nations and not far for East Fifty-fourth Street. But to her inquiry about Father Flaherty, the soft-voiced woman said, “Father Flaherty’s been in his grave for over twenty years.” Julie asked if there would be a parish record of the annulment of a marriage Father Flaherty had performed. “Those records are kept in the Chancery Office,” the woman said.

Julie said, “I see,” and thanked her, but she felt little hope of access to the Chancery Office records.

There were a number of Fiores in the Manhattan directory, but none named Margaret. Nor was there a Michael Desmond. Margaret Fiore had to be her mother’s friend, Maggie. She could not remember her very well—a plump, noisy woman. Her mother had talked a lot about her at some point, which suggested that she had either died or moved away. Julie was on her way uptown when it occurred to her that she probably knew where Maggie had moved to. She remembered a quarrel with her mother over the size of a telephone bill. She had fought back because the largest item by far on that particular phone bill was a call her mother had made to Los Angeles, and it was to her friend Maggie.

Julie got off the bus at Forty-second Street and headed for the New York Public Library. There were numerous Fiores in the Los Angeles phone books, but again, none by the name of Margaret. She could have married, of course, or remarried. Inveterate housecleaner that Julie was, she had destroyed her mother’s address book long ago.

Her disappointment was heavy. Then she chided herself: she could have had a rich, successful father, Morgan Reynolds, half a column in
Who’s Who.
And here she was, looking for a Heathcliff. Leaving the reference room, she passed the various indexes—the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,
the
Cumulative Book Index …

What prompted her to stop and search she would never know—a hunch, a prayer, a jab of hope. Beginning with the year 1950, she looked up Thomas Francis Mooney in the
Reader’s Guide.
In 1955 someone of that name had published a poem in
The New Yorker
called “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More.”

J
ULIE COULD NOT HOLD BACK
the tears when she read the poem. Whether or not it was good, it was Irish, and she thought it beautiful. Pride, a sunburst, warmed her through. She would brook no doubts, not of the author’s relationship to her nor of the poem’s merit. If it was in
The New Yorker,
it had to be good. She copied the poem—of sonnet length—into her notebook and turned in the bound magazine. While she waited near the elevators for a public telephone to become available, she began to memorize it.

She called Virginia Gibbons, whom she knew through Jeff. Ginny reviewed theater for
The New Yorker.

“Nineteen fifty-five. Even for the magazine that’s going back a long time,” Ginny Gibbons said. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything and everything about Thomas Francis Mooney, who wrote the poem. He might possibly be my father.”

“The title and the date it appeared?” Ginny wanted to know.

Julie told her. Then: “Want me to read it to you? It’s only fourteen lines.”

“Wait till I get a cigarette.”

“I like it,” Ginny said afterward. “I suppose you know about the Wild Geese? They were Irish mercenaries, I should think, though from what I know of the Irish, they’d have fought without being paid for it. In Napoleon’s army? For the French, in any case.”

“We’re onto something,” Julie said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Let me go down the hall and talk to some of the old-timers. What else has he written?”

“I’m going to go search now,” Julie said.

“I’ll see if there’s anything on him in our files while I’m at it,” Ginny said.

Julie searched back a few years from 1955 and forward to date. She found nothing. Bleary-eyed, her enthusiasm slightly blunted, she called Virginia Gibbons back.

“Sorry, Julie. Nobody around here knows the name, and there’s nothing in our files. It probably came in cold. If you want me to, I’ll try bookkeeping on it, but I’m not sure where those ledgers are stored, so it may take time. I have one other suggestion. It’s a long shot, but you might want to try it: in those days the Walsh and Kendall Agency represented most of the Irish writers. John Walsh’s father was an Irish playwright. I didn’t know him, but I knew John. We had some wonderful times trying to get his father’s plays produced in this country. ‘If it’s this hard to get Walsh produced,’ John would say, ‘what would it be like if his name was Yeats or O’Casey?’”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Walsh,” Julie said.

“That’s the point.”

“Oh.” She sometimes had trouble with the
New Yorker
ellipses. “I’ll try Kendall and Walsh. I’m not going to let go now that I’ve got this far.”

“Maybe he’s publishing under his name in Gaelic these days.” Whether or not she was serious Julie couldn’t tell. “Julie?”

“I’m still here.”

“Do you know the Irish playwright Seamus McNally?”

“No.”

“Well, you should. He’s giving a seminar at Yale this summer. Before he goes back, I’m having a gathering at my place. I’ll ask you and Jeff.”

“Jeff will be in Paris,” Julie said.

“Then you’ll come yourself, for God’s sake.”

Julie went from the library to a cocktail party at the Players’ Club given by the producers of a daytime television series, “Melissa’s Children,” to celebrate its twenty-fifth year on the air. She picked up a couple of items for the column, enough to keep her in business, and a pretty good meal of hors d’oeuvres. She fantasized a book to be called
The Well-Dressed Beggar’s Guide to Manhattan;
or
How to Live on Publication Parties, Opening Nights and Bar Mitzvahs.

She was back at the shop writing up her column material when she picked up on a call she first debated leaving for the answering service.

“Friend Julie? This is May Weems. I sure hopes you remember me.”

“I do.” It was the black street girl Detective Russo called Ring-Around.