There was never a dull moment when my father was around; he couldn’t even die quietly. His body turned up in the Lincoln Hospital morgue three days after he closed the garden gate behind him yelling to my mom, “I’m taking a ride down to the old neighborhood, to St. Luke’s.” 

He must have boarded the Lexington Avenue local at Westchester Square and exited at Cypress Avenue and 138th Street. Sensing a tightness in his chest perhaps, he headed towards the 40th precinct, a hike of about five blocks, where he died on the steps. Because he had no identification on him, he was sent to the morgue, an ignominious end for a man who knew every cop in the neighborhood in the 1950s and raised five children there. The date was May 16th, 1969. He was sixty-six.

“I knew he was dead when he didn’t come home, Mom; he’d never miss the opportunity to come home and torture us,” sobbed my younger, twenty-five year old sister, Mary, after she hung up the phone on the call that told us my father’s body had been found. 

Pop was known as “Fisty” by those who knew him when he was young. Whenever I asked the origin of the name, my uncles laughed and told me nothing. By his coworkers on the New York-New Haven and Hartford Railroad he was known as “the Gob,” a moniker I completely understood, for it aptly described the torture to which my sister referred—he talked us to death. 

Pop would lounge in the overstuffed tan damask armchair in the living room and we would wait. When will he start? What will set him off today—a phone call from his sister or brother, a letter from Castlewellan, dirty dishes in the sink, my older sister Ann weaving pincurls into her long blond hair, so exactly that each curl marked a perfect “X” on her scalp.

Pop used to massage his scalp because it encouraged the growth of his silver locks. Sometimes, he would pose in front of the oak mirror in the foyer in his long johns and Henley shirt, admiring his gray pompadour, “Wouldya look at that mane of hair,” he’d say. Then he would glance sideways at his profile with his protruding belly, “What a man, what a fine figure of a man.”

“Yeah, Dad, Cary Grant himself,” I’d say. 

“And would you look at these elegant feet, no bigger than a size eight all me life.”

“Fred Astaire has nothing on you, Pop.”

It wasn’t until I read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth that I began to appreciate Pop’s cultural love of small feet. 

His tiny feet first touched earth in the rural farming community of Castlewellan, County Down, Northern Ireland. One of seven children, he was raised in poverty. Unlike my mother’s family, who owned land a few miles away in Kilcoo, his family did not own land, so I have no idea how they survived at the turn of the century.

Although my father and mother lived near each other in the old country, they did not meet until his brother’s wedding in New York City, where they both had immigrated and struggled to live during the Depression.

What my father was like before the loss of three infant girls and my five-year-old brother Butchie, I will never know, since I was not born yet. I remember that my father was unpredictable, irascible, dictatorial, garrulous and sometimes funny. I don’t believe he ever got over Butchie’s death, the only son of four surviving children at that time. Because she understood his sorrow, my mother had unending patience with him.

It took patience to endure his irrational behavior, especially on the day we made our “BIG” move from 615 to 537 on 138th Street, a busy thoroughfare dotted by commercial enterprises, one of which was the F.W. Woolworth, where I worked on Saturdays in high school. Instead of working that day, I transported end tables, chairs, mirrors, crucifixes, baskets, umbrellas, lamps, toasters and canisters up and down the block, back and forth, back and forth, passing Woolworth’s and my boss smirking through the mahogany-trimmed double glass doors.

Why did I become a beast of burden when the moving men who hailed from County Clare had a van large enough to house an elephant? Perhaps Pop wanted to impress them with his dictatorial control of his kids. Who knows? All I know is I could have crawled into a New York sewer and swam happily with the rats rather than suffer the embarrassment in front of my neighbors, coworkers, and the greatest shame of all, Billy Woods, whom I had been ardently pursuing for weeks and who lived in 535, next door to our new building.

I wanted to kill my brother Michael for not helping move the furniture. Michael had the unfortunate karma of being born two years after Butchie died and spent the rest of his life replacing the lost golden boy. Not one to give in to my father’s whims, Michael bolted down the back fire escape, not to be seen again until all the furniture was moved. 

“Go to the deli and buy a few cans of beer for the mighty Clare men, Elizabeth child. They’re killed with the thirst.”

“Gladly, father dear. Could I at least have the money to pay for the beer?”

“With all the confusion, I don’t know where I put my wallet. But I know you have plenty of money from that grand job you have at Woolworth’s.”

“Is there any other little thing I can do for the mighty Clare men, them exhausted from all their labor?” I’d say.

“You could stop at the luncheonette at your Woolworth’s store and buy a few sandwiches, daughter number three.”

“Not on your life, father number one.” What I wanted to tell him was, ”Go get the goddamned beer yourself, but I hadn’t the guts.” 

I flew down the stairs resentful that I had missed the day at work.

Living closer to Woolworth’s was convenient for me, but it was also convenient for Himself. I worked behind the food counter and thoroughly enjoyed it because the time flew and I did everything from washing dishes to frying hamburgers, and making scrumptious BLTs with one slice of bacon cut into four pieces and enhancing the flavor by soaking the toast in the bacon grease, according to F. W.’s regulations. I whipped up malteds with cream on top, chocolate egg creams and vanilla frappes smothered in cherry syrup. I loved serving the public. 

Pop would often meander up to the lunch counter when it was flush with hungry shoppers in the middle of a Saturday afternoon rush.

“I would like a lettuce and tomato sandwich, miss.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Arra, you forgot the mayonnaise, miss.”

“I’ll get it for you right away, sir.”

“You toasted the bread too much, miss.”

“Is there anything else wrong, sir?”

“The tea is not hot enough, miss. You Yankees don’t know how to make a hearty cup of tea, miss.”

Then Pop would devour a slice of lemon meringue pie, swivel out of the silver barred stool with the red leather seat, tip his tweed cap and say, “Thanks for the treat, miss, it was lovely altogether,” and exit without paying, knowing my portly, hawk-eyed boss was guarding the end of 
the red Formica counter. I wanted to strangle my father.

The Irish tweed cap that Pop tipped was one of his favorite possessions. Another favorite possession was his gold pocket watch, which, according to the Gob was thrown out by my mother when she shipped a few of his old suits to the St. Vincent de Paul society, which cared for New York City’s poor.

“Damnit, woman, is there nothin’ ya can do right? Is it everything I have to do myself? Start searchin’ the house and find that family heirloom.”

“Family heirloom, my Irish American ass,” I muttered to myself and my mother as we searched through closets, drawers, kitchen cabinets, overstuffed chairs, sugar bowls, flour canisters and book shelves.

“God knows where he put the watch, Mom, for fear the thieves would come  in the middle of the night to wrest it from him, since the blaggards know how rich we are.”

“Why don’t we just go to the jeweler and buy a gold pocket watch,” pleaded my sister Mary, who was aching to get the hell out of bedlam to hang with her pals on Cypress Avenue.

“It was an old watch,” I snarled, “he’d know. Maybe we could try a pawn shop.” Not that I knew a tinker’s dam about pawn shops, nor where the money would come from to pay for the watch.

The search was torture enough but we had to conduct it to the inexhaustible rhythm of my father’s drone about my mother’s deceased father. 

“Paddy the Blue, Paddy the Blue couldn’t do anything right either, him with the screwed up face.” 

I wondered. Had he ever even met my mother’s father? Paddy the Blue was a name given to my grandfather in Kilcoo, where he ran a flax mill that dyed the flax blue. I could have recorded the history of Northern Ireland that afternoon if I could have taken a reprieve from the search of the century to write down all the characters in his tirade: Paddy the Blue, wee Biddie, Johnny Mac, Mickey the tailor, Shorty’s Mary, Danny’s Mary, John and Mary, and Annie the Wack. I never knew the people about whom he was ranting and prayed that I would never have the Irish misfortune of finding out. And what the hell did all my ancestors, whom I had never met, I wanted to know, have to do with his prized possession, which we never found?

Another prized possession of my father’s was a black homburg that he received from Monsignor Mulcahey, the scholarly, elegant pastor of our parish. Monsignor Mulcahey’s long, black gabardine cassock, cinched by fifty cloth but-tons down the center, swayed as he distributed report cards to our fifth grade class. 

Shortly after I received my grades, my father sported a black homburg, “Take a look at this beauty, will ya?”

“Gee, Dad, it looks just like Monsignor’s,” I said.

“It is Monsignor’s.”

“Monsignor’s hat? How did you get it?”

“He gave it to me,” he said as he stood in front of the mirror adjusting it on his thick skull, tipping it first to the right, then settling for the middle. ”Which looks better?”

“He gave it to you? Why would Monsignor give you his hat?”

“He said that you were the finest student that ever went to Saint Luke’s and I deserved it for doin’ such a powerful job of raisin’ you.”

“Monsignor would never be that generous with his praise. Please give it back to him. What will you do with a black homburg?”

“Wear it, of course, and tell everyone, too, that the great Monsignor himself deigned to bestow his chapeau on Eddie Dougherty.”

And wear it he did, embarrassing us all by deliberately attending the overcrowded twelve-twenty mass on Sunday, even though he hadn’t darkened the doors of Saint Luke’s in a long while. Slapping old man Flaherty on the back, he said, “Now, Flaherty, me bucko, let me show you a gift from the monsignor.”

“A gift from the monsignor, is it—to you, Dougherty, a gift indeed to the holiest man in the parish, a paragon of virtue, a giant among the saints.”

“Here it is right on my head, Flaherty.” He tapped the top of the hat with his right hand.

“I was wonderin’ what ye were doin’ with a black homburg on that massive skull of yours, the monsignor, indeed!”

“May God strike me dead if I’m not tellin’ you the blessed truth, Flaherty; may He strike me dead right here in front of Saint Luke’s herself, may he strike me dead right in front of your huge feet.”

“Be jasus, Dougherty, I believe ya, I believe ya. Ya probably blathered the poor man to distraction and he gave ya the hat to get rid of ya. But I don’t wonder that the unworldly prelate will regret that move; for it’ll only give ya more fuel for the fire. He’ll be sick to the death with all the thank you’s and crack you’ll be gettin’ outta this one.” 

Flaherty pulled a pack of Chesterfield’s from his inside pocket.

“Arah, geez, you’re jealous, Flaherty, jealous. You were always a small-minded man; you’re jealous of my friendship with the leader of our faithful flock and him educated in the Holy See itself.”

“I’ve got a thirst on me that won’t be sated talking to an amathon such as yourself, Dougherty.” Flaherty bolted across the street to Loughery’s since he knew Dad was dry and would not follow him there.

Pop straightened his homburg and strutted down the street, stopping to talk to all he knew—and he knew them all. He would not slight anyone by not giving them a few words—what cost was it, after all? 

And at home, we were relishing our few moments of peace and deploring the things about him that we scorned. But Dad always had the last word. His children inherited not my mother’s gentle resilient spirit, but the Gob’s restless irreverent struggle with the world. His irreverence was transmitted whole to my sister Mary who shed new light on moving day. 

“That was the day Dad received the telegram from County Down telling him his father died.”

“Noooo, not possible, Mary.”

“How could you forget? He fell apart.”

“I remember the telegram, but it didn’t arrive on the day of the move.”

“Oh, yes, it did; ask Mom.”

I do remember the arrival of that black missive. My father cradled his head in his arms on the red and white enamel kitchen table and sobbed, shaking like a little boy, a little boy who had crossed the ocean and had not seen his father for thirty years. All of his bluster and braggadocio disappeared and I wondered what was his connection to that man, Mickey Dougherty, of Castlewellan?

And what was my connection to my father, the storyteller who gave me both the love of the art and scorn for the artist? How shallow was my connection to him when my adolescent angst blocked my memory of one of the saddest days in his life? 

In truth my connection was not shallow but twisted; the wires were crossed because my father’s messages were always inconsistent, frustrating and marred by a deluge of words. I loved the old rascal even though his endless chatter made me want to cut his tongue and heart out.

Heart attack was the cause of death written on the certificate on May 16, 1969; maybe it should have been “heart broken.” I wish I had his gold railroad watch so that I could turn back the hands of time and know my father before he lost four children. I wish I had the black homburg, which, I am sure, Monsignor gave Pop because he tolerated and ached for the grieving father whose children he had buried. I would place that watch with its gold chain in Pop’s blue serge vest pocket and plant the hat on his head.

For years after his death, I sensed him tapping on my shoulder. Startled, I would spin around, almost bumping into him and hear his dulcet tones, “Those clutie feet of yours were always in your way.”

“Geez, Pop," I’d say, “would you give it a rest; you’re breaking my heart.”

Author's Biography

I am a wife, mother, grandmother, retired English teacher. I am most proud of the alternative school I ran in the Bronx.

I have five grandchildren who live on the next block. One, David, has Down's Syndrome and came to us when my family was grieving the loss of three family members in four months -- one, an infant born dead. Now I know David came to help us heal.

Publications:
Poems, memoir and short stories published in Dreamstreets, Rattle, The Writer's Publishing [Canada], Literary Mama, Canadian Woman Studies, finalist in Literary Mama’s mother’s day issue, Lullaby Hearse, Slowtrains

Public readings of poetry and short stories at Books and Coffee, Dewey Beach, and Borders, Wilmington. Celebration of 2004 DDOA grant reading; Poetry Reading at SDAL, Lewes, March 25, 2004; Poetry Reading with the DE poet laureate, April 30, 2004.

Grants:
2002: DDOA-DE Poet Laureate Weekend, presented at Dover Days (12 poets chosen)
2003: DDOA opportunity grant to mentor with author Julianna Baggott
2004: DDOA emerging professional grant-mentor with Baggott and Quinn Dalton

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