Blood Ties
Authors: Ralph McInerny
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Contents
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For Tom and Bonnie Cavanaugh
Part One
1
“Talk to him, Henry. He'll know what to do.”
“Vivian, there isn't anything to do.”
“Oh, isn't there? Then why are you brooding about it?”
“I'm not brooding.”
Vivian was behind the wheel, so her remarks were addressed to the windshield, but they struck him like carom shots in billiards. Henry smiled, despite himself. Ever since a billiard table had been installed at the St. Hilary's senior center, he no longer considered their almost daily visits there just something he did for his wife. As often as not, she dragged him along to the pastor's noon Mass as well, ignoring his mild protests.
“I am not going to become a pious old man.”
“Bah.”
“Martin Sisk.”
“You are not likely to turn into a sanctimonious ass, Henry Dolan. Besides, at our age, well, why not?”
“Insurance?”
“Don't be cynical.”
She pulled into the parking lot behind the former parish school and parked. As she dropped the keys into her purse, she turned to him. “I mean it, Henry. Talk to Father Dowling.”
“We'll see.”
“And don't treat me like a child.”
She was out of the car and waiting for him before he came around to help her. Viv liked to be handed out of the car, even when she drove. Gallantry had become more than a habit over the course of the fifty years of their marriage, a habit born of love. Now it was such small things that best expressed his affection for her. In recent years, their marriage had entered a new phase. They did everything together. She put her arm through his, and they started for the door. Henry hummed the wedding march, and she looked up at him, radiant. Time had not dimmed the memory of the day they had pledged their love to one another. He glanced at the church.
“The scene of the crime,” he murmured.
She pressed his arm closer to her. “Think about it?”
“I'll think about it.”
Inside, Viv went off to play bridge, and Henry headed for the billiard table, where Martin Sisk was already chalking his cue in anticipation. Henry managed to smile. Not even Martin could spoil a game of billiards. Besides, Henry invariably beat the beaming little seventy-year-old altar boy. Martin still had the cherubic look with which he had pranced around the altar all those years ago, when they were students in St. Hilary's school, Martin the delight of the nuns. He had looked like a little priest as he scampered about the sanctuary, lighting the candles, rattling off the Latin prayers, lugging the huge missal from one side of the altar to the other. All these years later, he had offered to serve Father Dowling's Mass, but priests got along without such help nowadays. Martin had been crushed, pouting like a Fra Angelico seraph.
“You should have become a priest, Martin.”
“I know!”
“Why didn't you?”
“It is the regret of my life, Henry.” His voice dropped. “After Deirdre died, I talked with the bishop.”
“A retarded vocation?”
“It happens all the time now.” Martin carried around in his wallet a news clipping.
GRANDFATHER ORDAINED
. There was a photograph of the new old priest giving a first blessing to his children and grandchildren.
“What did the bishop say?”
“He laughed.” Henry said this in a shocked whisper. “Then I suggested maybe a permanent deacon.”
“And?”
“The man is preâVatican II. I should have gone to the cardinal. I think Bishop Gronski may have spoken to Father Dowling. That's why he refused me.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
“You always were charitable, Henry.”
Such praise from Martin was unsettling. The fact was that Henry, too, had been an altar boy, a reluctant one. In those days, when his turn came, it entailed getting up at the crack of dawn and hurrying to church, putting on a cassock and surplice and trying to keep awake during the 6:45 Mass. He had always made a point of not being teamed with Martin. He didn't want the nuns to think he might go to Quigley, the minor seminary of the archdiocese of Chicago.
“Father Dowling has an odd sense of humor,” Martin said, trying to be charitable, too. Father Dowling kept the enthusiastic Martin at arm's length.
Their daughter, Sheila, and her family were the great consolation of Henry and Vivian Dolans' life. Maurice, their son, had been a crushing disappointment until he relocated to California, where his immaturity was not a handicap. Father Dowling's handling of Martin Sisk almost seemed a reason for taking Vivian's advice and talking with the pastor about his granddaughter, Martha. His granddaughter. In his own mind, he put an asterisk before her name, as if to show that, like a recently broken record in baseball, it really didn't count. It was difficult to hope that Maurice would ever father a son to carry on the Dolan name.
Later, at the noon Mass, Henry found himself paying special attention to Father Dowling. The priest said Mass reverently but swiftly, and his five-minute homily was pithy and to the point. Witty, too, without making a show of it. Henry began to believe that he could talk to Father Dowling about his granddaughter, whose sudden interest in her birth parents threatened the tranquility of his daughter's marriage.
2
Whenever Martha Lynch thought of her twenty-two years of life, something she did more frequently nowadays, it seemed an even line that had seldom been disturbed by blips of insecurity. Was it always like that with only children? In childhood she seemed to bask in a sea of love, her mother, Sheila, almost a big sister to her, her father, less demonstrative, an inarticulate rock of stability. Yet she did not think she had been spoiled. There was discipline and order in their suburban home, and when she went off to school it was brought home to her that she must do well. Sheila had a master's in education and had taught until Martha came, but then she had decided to devote herself to a class of one. George Lynch was the premier pathologist of Fox River, Illinois.
“Most of my patients are already dead.”
It was his only joke, but every time he told it he seemed to surprise himself by his levity. He left the talking to his wife. It wasn't that Sheila dominated her husband. That would have been impossible, or so it seemed. She was two heads shorter than George, and he folded her into his arms as if she were a child. Sometimes Martha thought that she had grown up like that, herself gathered into one of her father's arms, her mother in the other, the three of them against the world. Not that the world seemed a menacing place. She might have been wholly unaware of the world outside the suburbs if her parents hadn't been given to unobtrusive good works. They volunteered at the center for the homeless on weekends and took their daughter with them on Saturday mornings, when George would heap the plates high at the hot table while Sheila devoted herself to the wary children. Only later, when Martha grew critical, did she think of those Saturdays at the homeless center as visits to the zoo. The unstated lesson was plain: They had been fortunate, and they had an obligation to those life had treated differently. The great earthquake of Martha's life came when she was nine and learned that she had been adopted.
When she tried to remember it, she could never recall exactly what her parents had said, the event was so submerged in her own reaction to it. Already she had learned the reticence of her father and her mother's habit of concern for others. It seemed important that she not let them know how the revelation had affected her. Once, in the car, her father and grandfather in the front seat, Martha sleepy between her mother and grandmother in back, she became drowsily aware of the adult conversation going on over her head, coded, oblique. But she knew what they were talking about. Her grandmother had asked if Martha had ever been told.
“Of course.”
“And.”
“It ran off her like water.”
It sounded like a baptism that hadn't taken. Martha had sensed the concern in the two women, and she felt good about the fact that she had protected her mother from anxiety. Her own anxiety remained silent.
What had been her parents' secret became her own. Several times, in later years, her mother tried to talk of it, but Martha headed her off. Perhaps she was still trying to believe that she had imagined it. After all, it was incredible. How could her mother not be her real mother and her father her real father? It was like being told that the axioms in geometry might be false, parallels meet, two things equal to a third turn out unequal. Her protection was to transform her life into a story she told only to herself.
Other kids dreamed they weren't the children of their parentsâit was a clichéâbut now Martha, knowing she wasn't, was free to imagine where she had come from, how her parents had acquired her, all the things she might have been if they had not adopted her. But she could not imagine a life better than the one she had. The story became one of being rescued from some terrible fate, a fate she really didn't want to know about. She might have been one of those sad little children at the homeless center who stared at her as if she were from some other planet.
Only her uncle Maurice spoke of her adopted status without embarrassment. “We're really not related, my dear. Be careful.” And he had kissed her cheek again. Of course, Maurice was the black sheep who had never grown up. How could she talk about herself seriously with an older man who seemed younger than she was?
In time, Martha graduated from Barat with a degree in history and then enrolled in a course for paralegals at Roosevelt University. She had lived in an apartment near the university, feeling that she was once more visiting the world of the homeless. Like those visits, though, that time was soon over, and she was hired by Foley, Farnum, and Casey in the Loop. That was where she met Bernard Casey, the son of a senior partner. He was very bright and witty and the most attractive man she had ever seen, so attractive she could not imagine why every other woman in the firm was not in love with him. Even more surprising was his immediate and unmistakable interest in her.