By Janet Clark
Chapter One 1964-1970
Jack looked hungrily at the bowl of sweet creamy oatmeal his grandmother, Lucinda, had placed in front of him, but even at six years old, he knew enough not to take a bite just yet, and not only because the cereal was still steaming. He watched his grandmother as she swiftly moved around the tidy little kitchen, pouring orange juice and coffee and bringing a plate of cinnamon toast to the table before she finally sat down with Jack and his older brother David.
“Ready, boys?” she said. Jack and David bowed their heads, folded their hands, and joined their grandmother in saying grace, an unbroken ritual in the O'Donnell house.
“Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen,” they chanted together.
Lucinda allowed herself a rare moment of reflection as she drank her first sip of coffee and looked proudly across the table at her two grandsons. With his light brown hair, broad face and cleft chin, David strongly resembled his father Mike, who had left for work at the cold storage facility hours earlier, while the rest of the family was still sleeping. Jack, however, looked so much like his mother that it sometimes broke Lucinda's heart. The gap-toothed smile, the even features, the eyes that couldn't lie, all reminded Lucinda of her only child, Rita, who had died just a few months after Jack's birth.
“Do you want Alan and me to take Jack to school with us, Grandma?” David asked as he reached for another piece of toast. "We can help him find his room and everything."
“No, thanks, honey,” Lucinda said. “I'll walk with Jack today. Maybe next week he can start going with you boys.” I'm not ready to let go yet, she added silently.
Lucinda's mind flashed back to the morning Rita had died. Only three things had kept Lucinda going the day she'd lost her only child. First was the relief she'd felt to know her daughter's pain had finally ended: Lucinda had watched helplessly as brain cancer had zapped Rita's strength and crippled her with crushing headaches that visited with ever-increasing ruthlessness during the last weeks of her life. If there was anything more torturous than losing a child to death, it had to be standing by and watching her suffer, unable to alleviate the pain.
The second thing that kept her going was her promise to Rita, that she would help Mike raise the two boys. When Lucinda and Mike had come home from the hospital after Rita had died, Lucinda had walked in the door and found their neighbor Rose Castani rocking Jack, who was contentedly drinking from his bottle. Lucinda had held out her arms and Rose, immediately understanding her need, had stood up and handed the baby to his grandmother. She settled into the rocking chair with Jack, who nursed on, barely missing a beat. As his little body nestled into her own, Lucinda's pain had lifted just enough to let her know that she would somehow make it through this ordeal.
It didn't seem possible that almost six years had passed since Rita's death, and that Jack, whom she had raised from infancy, was actually old enough to start school. But here it was, Jack's first day of kindergarten, and David was starting sixth grade. Rita, baby, you'd be proud, Lucinda thought, wiping a tear from her eye before the children could notice.
“Go upstairs and brush your teeth, boys,” she said. “It's almost time to go.”
Last but certainly not least, what had enabled Lucinda to survive the loss of her daughter was her deep Catholic faith. For Lucinda, the Church was her lifeline. The Church was where she had taken comfort when her own mother had died when Lucinda was a young woman, just newly married. Her faith was what had strengthened her when her husband had left her and their daughter to start a new family with another woman. And her faith was what gave her the courage to go on after she'd had to bury Rita, her little girl, and the strength to raise Rita's boys.
A soft rap on the door jarred Lucinda from her reveries. She got up to open it. Alan Castani, his stubborn hair smoothed down and lying flat, at least temporarily, smiled shyly and shifted from one foot to the other. Alan and David had been best friends since before kindergarten, but the boy was still a little bashful, even more so as he approached adolescence.
“Hi, Mrs. Walters,” he said. “Is David ready?”
“I'm coming,” David called from the stairwell. He grabbed his jacket and hurried out the door. "Bye, Grandma, see you after school. Bye, Jack, have fun," he said to his brother, who had followed him down the stairs. Lucinda got the coats out of the closet in the hallway, then quickly cleared the breakfast dishes off the table before heading out the door with her youngest grandson.
Jack, like David and Alan, was dressed in neat navy blue pants and a tucked-in white shirt. He carried a sack with a box of crayons, a package of tissues, a pair of stubby scissors, a mat for naptime, and one of Mike's old shirts to use as a paint shirt. (Actually, Jack carried the sack for the first two blocks and then, finding it was a lot heavier than it had looked, he turned it over to his grandmother, who carried it the rest of the way.) As they approached the school, Lucinda felt a rush of apprehension, though Jack seemed to be taking it all in his stride. She walked him through the double doors, down the hallway crowded with lively children and anxious parents, to the door of the kindergarten room, and bent down to give Jack a kiss.
“Be a good boy, Jack, and remember, Grandma will meet you here after school to walk you home,” she said.
“I will, Grandma,” Jack said nonchalantly, then squared his shoulders and walked into the classroom, a sunny room with big windows and bright posters displayed on the pale yellow walls. Jack's teacher, a fresh-faced young nun named Sister Marie Therese, greeted him warmly and seated him at a table with three other children, who were busy coloring.
Lucinda watched for just a moment, and then slipped out the door. It was a bittersweet moment. She had enjoyed having Jack all to herself for these past six years, but she also knew it was time for her to start letting go. A public elementary school was just four blocks from their home, half the distance as St. Maria Goretti’s, but Lucinda trusted that the education and the surroundings would be superior at St. Maria’s. Most importantly, she knew Jack would be safe here.
Established near the turn of the century, St. Maria Goretti’s School was an attractive tan brick one-story building on the same site as St. Maria Goretti Church. The founders of the church had been eager to establish a place where their children would learn their Catholic faith right along with reading, writing and arithmetic. St. Maria Goretti School educated students from kindergarten to eighth grade, with two sections in most of the grades, drawing children from throughout the working-class neighborhoods that surrounded the school. The students’ parents were shopkeepers, factory workers, railroad employees. Some families were a little wealthier, some a little less, but there were no great extremes at either end of the spectrum. The lack of economic disparity and the families’ shared faith made for a solid, somewhat insular community at St. Maria’s. Diversity meant some folks were Irish Catholic and some were Italian Catholic, with a few families of German extraction thrown in to the mix.
Students at St. Maria’s followed a very structured routine. The subjects were standard: reading, handwriting, geography, history, language, math, religion, art, music and gym. Some of the teachers were nuns and some were lay teachers. Each Friday morning all the students gathered at the church for Mass. The carefully controlled atmosphere of the school provided a comforting rhythm to most of the students; though future educators would pronounce learning by rote and repetition to be stifling, the students at Maria Goretti’s knew no other way and most of them were happy there.
Lucinda walked back to the school at noon, having spent a busy but strangely quiet morning cleaning the house. She joined the group of young mothers waiting in the hallway. Soon Sister Marie Therese opened the door, and the children rushed out excitedly.
“Grandma, look at my picture! We got to paint, and we played on the monkey bars at recess, and had treats, and I didn’t spill my milk, Grandma,” Jack assured her.
“Well, good job, Jack,” Lucinda said, admiring the reds and purples and yellows splashed somewhat randomly over the page. The anxiety she had felt earlier was alleviated when she saw how well Jack was adapting to his environment. “Let’s go home and we’ll have some grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said, folding his small hand in her own.
Later that evening David shared the news from his first day of school. He would begin serving as an altar boy this year, and practice started the following Thursday after school. Father Delanoit had chosen David to be in the first group of boys to serve, which Lucinda suspected was due to David’s reputation for being responsible and trustworthy. She was very proud, and even Mike looked pleased when he heard the news.
“That’s great, son. I used to be an altar boy myself, about a million years ago,” Mike said. Mike was not an especially religious man himself, but he knew the Church had been important to Rita, as it was to Lucinda, and couldn’t imagine bringing up the boys any other way.
That first month of school passed quickly. Jack flourished in the warm learning environment in Sister Marie Therese’s classroom. He practically exploded with excitement the week it was his turn to take care of the classroom pet, a guinea pig named Betty. Lucinda chuckled to see his exuberance until she found out the student who cared for the guinea pig all week had to bring it home for the weekend. Lucinda, who took to heart the axiom that cleanliness was next to godliness, was not a fan of allowing animals in the house.
“Jack, you’ll have to keep that creature in your room,” she said. David had helped him lug the cage and sack of food home on Friday afternoon.
“I will, Grandma. Only she’s not a creature. She’s Betty, and she’s a very good girl, aren’t you, girl?” he said, carefully carrying her up the stairs.
When Jack still hadn’t come back downstairs an hour later, Lucinda began to get worried, picturing the rodent roaming around the bedrooms, leaving a trail of droppings behind her. So she went up to check the situation out and found Jack sitting next to Betty’s cage, clasping a well-worn copy of Mailman Mike and reading to the guinea pig, stopping after each page to hold the book in front of her cage to show her the pictures.
“And that’s the story of Mailman Mike,” he concluded. “Do you want to hear another story, Betty?” he asked, and then noticed his grandmother in the doorway, smiling at the sweet scene. “I don’t want Betty to be scared, being in a new place, so I’m reading her some stories,” Jack explained.
Lucinda gave him a squeeze and a quick kiss on his still babysoft hair, and then went downstairs to fix supper. That boy never failed to lift her heart. Rita, she knew, was looking down from heaven at him, beaming proudly.
“You’ve got yourself two good boys, sweetie,” Lucinda whispered. She wiped away a tear, picked up the potato peeler and got to work.
By the first Sunday in October, David was ready to serve at Mass, along with Alan Castani. Mike, Lucinda and Jack took their usual pew, right across from Rose Castani and her crew. Rose’s husband had died in an accident at the John Deere plant two years before, leaving her with six children to raise on her own. Alan, the second oldest, sometimes seemed to get lost in the shuffle, Lucinda had noticed. That morning Alan was slouching, his eyes glued to the floor, as they waited for Mass to begin.
But David stood tall, a slight smile playing at his lips. He felt honored to be playing this role in the celebration of the Mass. As the time approached for David’s confirmation, he was beginning to take more interest in the Church, in God. He felt a warm glow of peace every time he received communion, a sense of drawing near to the God who brought his grandmother so much comfort. He began to wonder if maybe God was calling him to the priesthood.
After church, Mike took the family to the House of Pancakes for breakfast to celebrate. The perky red-haired hostess escorted them to a booth, where Mike and David sat on one side and Lucinda and Jack on the other.
The waitress brought menus and coffee for the adults. After she took their orders, Lucinda said to David, “Honey, you really did a good job today. I was so proud of you!”
“That you did, my boy,” Mike said. “You almost looked like you belonged up there,” he added, then looked a little surprised, wondering to himself where that came from.
“Thanks,” David said.
“Alan seemed awfully nervous or something,” Lucinda said. “Is there a problem, do you know?”
“I don’t know. He did seem weird today,” David said. “Before Mass when we were putting on our robes and Father Delanoit came in the sacristy, Alan just about jumped out of his skin: he even dropped the chalice! I thought Father Delanoit was gonna be really mad, but he wasn’t at all. He even gave Alan a hug and told him not to worry about it.”
“That was kind of him,” Lucinda said. Father Delanoit always seems to pay a little more attention to the kids like Alan, who need it, she thought. Boys who don’t have a father of their own.
“I want to be an altar boy, too,” Jack said. It must be a good gig, because David was getting a lot of attention.
“You will,” David assured him. “All the boys get to be altar boys in the sixth grade.”
“Geeze!” Jack sighed. Six years was a lifetime to him. “Were you ever an altar girl, Grandma?”
“No, Jack, there aren’t any altar girls,” Lucinda said. “Only boys get to serve that way.”
“Why?” Jack asked, his dark blue eyes perplexed. “I don’t think that’s fair!” he protested, but the theological discussion ended when the waitress arrived with their breakfasts. Lucinda ate her pancakes slowly, savoring every bite. Food always tasted better when she wasn’t the one to cook it, and that didn’t happen very often. She sometimes wondered if Mike would ever remarry, and if he did, what her place in the family would be. There was no sign that was going to happen any time soon, though.
It had been over five years since Rita’s death, but Mike didn’t really date. At least not that Lucinda was aware of. He did spend a couple of nights a week at Dooley’s or one of the other watering holes, and there had been a few occasions where he’d drunk enough alcohol that he could justify going home with a woman he’d met there, but no one could compare with Rita in Mike’s eyes. Rita! He remembered the day he’d met her like it was yesterday.
Mike O’Donnell was a big, swaggering Irish-American, the first generation in his family to be born in this country. Like most men with a swagger, Mike’s covered up a host of insecurities. When Mike was a little boy growing up in Cleveland, he had struggled in school. At that time, children weren’t diagnosed as learning disabled or dyslexic, which Mike was; they were written off as stupid or shamed for not trying hard enough. After ten years of being labeled, Mike had had it with formal education. He dropped out of high school and, at his uncle’s urging, moved to Hook’s Point, Iowa. His uncle worked at the cold storage warehouse there and encouraged Mike to apply for a job when a position opened up. So he did.
He started working at the plant, making good money and enjoying the respect of his peers. Life was good-Mike got by just fine without the reading skills which had proven illusive for him. He worked hard, dated some girls and spent some time in the bars, though he vowed not to become the drunkard that his father was. After a few years of the single life, Mike grew tired of it: the loneliness and a gnawing empty feeling in his gut that only alcohol could alleviate. Until he met Rita.
One summer afternoon Mike received a message from his foreman to report to the office. When he got there, one of the secretaries, a forty-something woman whose mouth was set in perpetual scowl, handed him a paper.
“You didn’t fill out your income tax form completely,” she said accusingly, as if Mike had the power to single-handedly take down the entire United States fiscal system with his error. She thrust the paper at him and waited impatiently for him to complete it.
Immediately, Mike was back in fourth grade. He was standing at the blackboard, forehead puckered as he labored to diagram a complex sentence, his bitchy teacher ready to pounce at the first error. He blinked, willed himself into the present moment, and looked at the form.
Shouldn’t be too hard, he told himself. He’d memorized a few tricks that generally concealed how inept he felt when confronted with the written word-Mike was an intelligent man, but his impaired reading ability made him feel ashamed, and the shame made him confused, which made it harder still to read. He took a deep breath to avoid getting stuck in that old cycle.
“I don’t have all day, just because you want to waste time to get out of work. Would you mind hurrying up and finishing that form,” crowed the harpy.
Mike’s hands shook as anger battled with shame. He struggled to keep his temper: this job was too damn good to lose on account of that old bitch.
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
“Just finish the form! Damn immigrants, come over and take up all the jobs and they can’t even fill out a simple piece of paperwork,” she growled.
And then, when he was on the brink of walking out the door of Jefferson Cold Storage for good, an angel appeared. Only this one was a fiery little Italian angel.
“Cut it out, Dianne. Some of those tax forms, you have to practically be a Ph.D. to fill them out," said the dark-haired girl whose desk sat kitty-corner across from Attila the Hun, also apparently known as Dianne. The girl’s angry expression changed to a smile as she looked up at Mike.
“Hey, it’s okay. I work with these things and I can barely figure them out,” the girl said, and suddenly his anger and shame were dissolving. She had moved out from behind her desk and stood next to Mike. “All we really need is your John Henry right here,” she said.
Mike inhaled, breathing in deep the delightful springtime scent of the girl. As he lowered his six-foot two frame into a chair, he brushed against her. Their eyes met and he felt his heart filling up, not just with desire-although he definitely felt that-but something else, something even stronger. Mike smiled at the girl, his confidence restored, and whispered, “What’s with the cob up her ass?”
Rita snorted, smothering a laugh, as Dianne managed to give them both a withering look while she answered the phone. “She’s just getting warmed up. That woman’s something else, I’ll tell you.”
“Hey, you saved my life there. Let me buy you dinner tonight at Moby’s,” Mike said. Moby’s served steaks as well as seafood and had just the right ambiance for a first date; quiet enough to talk, but with enough action that there wouldn’t be a big awkward silence to contend with if the date went sour. Although that didn’t seem likely to happen.
Rita surprised him by blushing slightly before she said, “Sure. I get off work at five.”
“I get off at three. That gives me time to run home and catch a shower, and then I’ll swing back and pick you up,” Mike said.
“How about I meet you there,” Rita said, her feistiness returning. Later in their relationship Mike had learned that Rita’s father had deserted the family when Rita was a little girl, forcing her mother to take work cleaning houses in order to provide a living for them. After watching her mother struggle all those years, Rita had vowed that she was going to be careful in love not to fall in love too quickly. But she and Mike had only dated a few months before they both knew it was the real thing. Mike had loved Rita with all his heart; he’d been a faithful husband throughout their too-short marriage and still missed her every day. The brief encounters with other women left him feeling even more lonely, feeling ashamed, feeling as if he had betrayed his wife.
Mike’s real betrayal was deeper. Increasingly, whiskey was becoming his mistress. Not only did Mike drink in the bar every Wednesday and Friday, he was drinking at home now, also. He’d have a nip before bed to help him sleep and a few shots while he worked on his car in the garage. He was able to rationalize it by telling himself he never drank in front of the boys, like his old man had, and he wasn’t getting shit-faced. And he wasn’t. Mike was a quiet drunk, not an obnoxious one like his father. So it was easy for Lucinda to overlook the undeniable fact that Mike was an alcoholic.
And her denial was understandable, for there were moments where Mike did seem to be totally present with his sons, like later that afternoon when they watched the football game on television, David sitting on one side of Mike and Jack on the other, all three of them cheering whenever their team scored a touchdown. Then they drifted outside and had their own game. What Lucinda didn’t see, nor did the boys, were Mike’s occasional trips to the garage, where he’d have just a nip, then pop a breath mint to hide the smell.
And so far, nobody was the wiser. Nobody was hurt if he sipped a little whiskey now and then, Mike rationalized. He wasn’t like his father, an out-of-control, raging bull, who had kept his family on a constant state of high alert. Mike was a good dad. Nobody could say that Mike O’Donnell’s boys lacked for anything they needed, and he rarely laid a hand on them. Lucinda was more apt to deliver a swat to their butts than Mike was, for he feared turning into his old man. His boys would never know the pain and fear that he’d grown up with. Mike had promised Rita that he’d take good care of their sons, and he fully intended to keep that promise. His boys would come to no harm under his watch, that was for sure.
That year flew by in a blur, Lucinda thought. It seemed as if one day Jack was bringing home finger paintings and a permission slip to visit the fire station and the next day, she was enrolling him in the first grade. Now he was gone for a full day, and, while sometimes Lucinda got lonely, she did take the opportunity to stretch out for a nap in the afternoon on occasion.
Lucinda was now sixty-one years old. Most of her hair had turned white, the lines in her face were a little deeper every year, and, let’s face it, she told herself ruefully, the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. She considered herself fortunate to have the good health to look after a house and raise two boys, but a lifetime of hard work had taken its toll. Hopefully, her health would last at least until both boys graduated from high school.
Lucinda had also begun taking one night a week off to go out for pie and coffee with a couple of other women from the church. While her life wasn’t easy, it was peaceful. Mike took good care of the family financially, both of the boys were good-natured and obedient, and life rolled along fairly smoothly, one year evaporating into the next. Pappa, Lucinda’s father, visited about once a month, and sometimes Lucinda tried to convince him to move to Hook’s Point so she could keep an eye on him, in case his health began to fail, but he said no, he was perfectly happy in Chicago and she had enough to worry about without having an old man like him adding to her troubles. Lucinda had to admit, he really didn’t need her help; although he was now in his eighties, Pappa still cooked all his own meals, kept his apartment scrupulously clean, and socially, the man got around a lot more than she did.
Tony Gargano, like so many others, had come to America in search of a better life for himself and his family. He and Lucinda’s mother Gina emigrated from Italy in the early 1900s and joined Tony’s brother in Chicago, where Tony worked as a tailor and Gina took in laundry while taking care of Lucinda. Lucinda remembered Pappa whistling as he walked up the stairs to their flat after work, sometimes surprising her mother with a bouquet of flowers or Lucinda with a carefully stitched addition to her doll’s extensive wardrobe. Other nights he’d stroll in the door and, sweeping Gina into his arms, dance her around the little kitchen, twirling her around until she’d squeal, “Enough, Tony, you’re making me dizzy!”, and then he’d release her, turn to Lucinda and twirl her around, until both she and her mother dissolved in a fit of giggles.
Tony never made the fortune he’d dreamed about, but his little family lacked for nothing, especially love. When Lucinda married, she’d expected her life to be a replay of her parents’, and it came as a shock to find out not all men were cut from the same cloth as Pappa. She still felt a wonderful sense of security whenever he was around.
And the boys were growing up. In 1970, David was a senior in high school and Jack was in the sixth grade. David and Jack, with six years between them, weren’t exactly close, for they each had separate interests and friends, but Jack did look up to David as his big brother, and David stood ready to defend Jack if any neighborhood bullies tried harassing him.
David would much prefer talking it out to fighting it out, however. His boyhood faith had ripened into something deeper, and he was beginning to believe that he did indeed have a call to the priesthood. Whatever it was, David knew he felt a tug in his spirit away from the drinking and brawling and necking with girls that most of the boys at school were obsessed with, towards a higher purpose. Sometimes his buddies gave him a bad time because he didn’t join in their crude talk and lusty appraisals of the girls in their class, but David considered their teasing to be pretty minor when he compared it with the torments which the great saints he’d studied about in religion class had to put up with. Getting boiled in oil, thrown into the lions’ den, crucified upside down, now that was persecution.
Jack was looking forward to sixth grade, for this was the year he would get to serve as a patrol boy, helping the little kids cross the street before and after school, and as an altar boy. When he was in the lower grades, the sixth graders seemed like super-heroes: big, strong kids who could do just about anything an adult could, but not as dull and boring as grown-ups tended to get. Finally, his day in the sun had arrived. And, he lucked out-he got Mrs. Gardner for a teacher. Young, pretty, and upbeat, she was the teacher everybody hoped for. The other class got stuck with Sister Veronica, a stern-faced nun whose temper was legendary. But Jack had gotten lucky, it seemed. Sixth grade was shaping up to be a good year.