late at Ed’s house. Cora had gone to sleep. They were sitting on the couch, which was worn along the seam by its skirt, some of the filling rupturing through. Eileen picked the picture of Hugh up off the end table.
“What was he like?”
“I suppose he was like a lot of fathers,” Ed said. “He went to work and stayed out late. He wasn’t around a lot.”
“What about as a man? All I see when I try to picture him is this coat and hat.”
A pair of end table lamps provided the only illumination in the room, which was like a parlor in a shabby club. Cora had installed cute statuettes in every corner, but personality only went so far in making an apartment feel like a home. Eileen had a new appreciation for how her mother had kept things neat and in working order, how her father had paid to replace the furniture whenever it got run down. Ed had grown up with less.
“He liked to laugh,” Ed said. “He told raunchy jokes. He always had a cigar dangling from his mouth. It made him look like a dog hanging its tongue out on a hot day. He was always hustling, working angles.”
“What else?” she asked, putting the photo down. She sensed he was on the verge of candor. “Tell me more.”
“He liked to drink,” Ed said. “It wasn’t pretty when he did.”
“I know a little about that,” she said, and they shared a moment of quiet understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better.”
She felt her emotions catching in her throat. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know how to say it if there were anything to say.”
“Just say what comes to mind.”
He was silent, and she worried she’d pushed him too hard. In her nervous state she had picked off the material that covered the sofa’s arm, and now she tried to fit it back into place with one hand while keeping her eyes on Ed. She should have left him alone, rather than risk angering him and making him shut down, but she didn’t want to revert to the surface-level interactions she’d had with other men. She had never wanted to talk to anyone more than she wanted to talk to Ed. She wanted to tell him things she’d never told anyone, and to learn more about him than she’d learned about anyone else. She used to think a bit of mystery was a prerequisite to her feeling attracted to a man. For the first time, her attraction didn’t diminish the more she knew, but actually grew.
“You remember Charlie McCarthy?” Ed said after a while. “Edgar Bergen’s dummy? My father used to say I looked like him.”
Eileen folded her hands in her lap and held her breath, trying not to look too eager to hear what he had to say.
“I figured out early on I could make him laugh if I did a Charlie McCarthy impression. So I practiced. I got to the point where I could do the voice pretty well. When my father got in from the bar, I’d hop up on the couch and twist up my mug for him.” Ed showed her, forming a rictus and opening his eyes wide, looking from side to side with an eerie, doll-like blankness. “Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he told me to cut it out and said I looked nothing like that doll. I never knew which it was going to be. I remember the last time I did it. He laughed and laughed. Then he smacked me in the mouth, whack!”—Ed brought his hand down on the coffee table—“and told me to stop embarrassing myself.”
Their hands migrated toward each other on the couch. After their fingers sat intertwined for a bit, she clasped his hand in both of hers, pulled it to her, and gave it a little kiss, then shifted closer to him.
Ed said he and his mother had never discussed his father’s drinking, but it was his understanding that his father hadn’t been a drinker before the war. “If the war had gone on forever, or if he’d been a park ranger or done something outdoors, maybe things would have been different.”
When peacetime returned, Hugh went back to Chubb and sat at a desk all day. He didn’t have any hobbies. “I think the only way he knew how to drive off the anxiety in him was to go to Molloy’s,” Ed said. “Everybody raised a glass when he walked in. They laughed at his jokes. They let him buy rounds.”
By the time Ed was nine, he said, his mother was sending him by train on pay Fridays to pick up his father’s check. If he didn’t get there in time, they were stuck for the week. If he did, his father wasn’t necessarily stuck. With his beautiful singing voice, he could make twenty-five dollars, or two-thirds of his weekly salary, as the cantor at a single funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea. Ed only knew his father did this because he served funerals during the school day as an altar boy.
“The first time he sang,” Ed said, “I walked out of the sacristy with the cross to start the funeral and there he was, standing off to the side with this sheepish grin on. When the time came, he walked up to the lectern. He gave me a nervous look, like I’d caught him in something. Maybe one of his friends knew what kind of voice he had and set him up with the gig. I remember knowing he’d been drinking beforehand. It’s just something you can tell.”
She nodded.
“Then the organ started up, and he started singing, and it was like he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Like he was hearing it for the first time. I couldn’t believe how good he was. He sang his heart out. There were tears on some faces in the pews.”
“My father can’t sing,” she said. “But he thinks he can.”
Ed gave her a warm smile. “He came to collect the cash afterward. I was in the rectory changing out of my alb. He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’” Ed’s face took on an intense expression. “I already knew enough not to say anything, you know?”
She nodded again. Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.
“He started showing up often. I don’t know how he did it without getting fired at Chubb. It was a pretty decent round-trip on the train. He must have been gone two, three hours at a time. He did it for years. I doubt a penny of that money made it home to my mother. To think that he was a block away from her all that time. She would have loved to have lunch with him.”
Once Ed started talking, the dam broke. They went out once a week to eat in Manhattan, and the conversation turned often to their early years. She found out that in grammar school Ed was a model student, but by the time he reached high school he’d turned his back on his studies. After he was kicked out of his second school, Cora used her influence in the parish to get him admitted on probation to Power Memorial in Manhattan. The long train rides settled him down enough to get him graduated. He took a job mixing paints and dyes at the Kohnstamm factory on Columbia Street, a short walk from home. He brought his paychecks home to his mother.
At Kohnstamm’s, Ed said, he found someone to look up to—the scientist who directed the mixers. The chemical processes awoke a scholarly impulse in him that had lain dormant. He got to know the chemicals so well that soon other men began coming to him instead of checking the manuals. He moved over to Domino for a better paycheck, turning slag into sugar, paying attention to the reactions, the reagents, the products. He began taking night classes at a community college, then quit Domino to enroll full-time at St. Francis College, where his younger brother Phil was a student. Cora paid both their tuitions with the money she’d saved from what Ed brought home.
Their flat had no hallway. To get from the
