All She Ever Wanted (46 page)

“Stay away from trains,” she called as the screen door slammed behind them. JT laughed out loud. “Where’s Poke?” Kathleen asked, looking all around.

“He drove up to Attica to get Dad,” JT said. “They should be here in a little while.”

“And you’d better not call him Poke to his face unless you want a fat lip,” Annie added.

Kathleen’s initial nervousness began to fade as they sat around visiting, catching up on each others’lives. She learned that Annie worked as a pediatric nurse in the Bensenville Community Hospital, and her husband sold cars. JT’s wife was a teacher at Riverside High School like JT, and Poke’s wife worked as the office manager and bookkeeper for his TV and appliance business. Poke’s oldest son, Ryan, was married and had a one-yearold daughter.

“So you all ended up getting a higher education,” Kathleen said in amazement.

“Don’t act so surprised.” JT’s wry grin reminded her painfully of their father’s. “Did you think we weren’t as smart as you are?”

“You were busy being hoodlums when I left home,” she replied. “How on earth could you afford college?”

“Poke got drafted and wound up in Vietnam—did you know that?”

Kathleen shook her head. “Anyway, the GI Bill paid for his education after he came home. Uncle Leonard and Aunt Connie helped Annie and me.”

JT glanced at their uncle, and Kathleen saw gratitude and love in his gaze.

Eventually Annie, Connie, and the other women retreated to the kitchen to finish all the food preparations. “Can I help?” Kathleen asked.

“No, you sit tight and visit, for goodness’sake,” Connie insisted. “But I could use JT’s help getting the barbecue grill going. I’ve got a beef brisket that’s going to take a while.” Annie’s husband wandered off with JT, and Kathleen sat down on the sofa to visit with Uncle Leonard. Joelle returned with a can of soda and sat down beside them.

Kathleen struggled for words, wanting to tell her uncle how grateful she was for the way he’d raised Annie and the boys, taking on a daunting, thankless job—but she didn’t know what to say or how to begin. Besides, he would probably act gruff and try to shrug off her compliments if she did.

“I’ve been thinking about Grandma Fiona all night,” she said instead.

“Thank you for sharing her story. How… how did she die?” She was a little afraid to ask, knowing what she did about Fiona’s life and remembering how Arthur had died.

“She had a coronary,” he replied. “I guess she’d been having angina pains for a few years before that, but she must have developed a blockage. She called the parish priest one morning and said, ‘You’d better come over. I don’t feel well.’By the time he arrived she was dead, still sitting on the sofa with the phone in her hand. The doctor said she’d had a massive heart attack and was probably gone in seconds.”

“Did you say she called the
priest
?” Kathleen asked in surprise.

“Yes. I was surprised, too. I’d never known Mother to go to Mass— even though she made sure we went when we were children. Father Joe was the one who called me, and when I went up to Deer Falls, he told me that she had returned to church within the last few months—almost as if she’d known that her time wasn’t long. He said she’d made her peace with God.”

Kathleen covered her mouth to hold back her tears, but she couldn’t stop them.

“What’s wrong?” Leonard asked.

“Nothing… I’m just so glad she found forgiveness. I loved Grandma Fiona. I only met her once—but I loved her.”

Leonard cleared his throat. He looked as if he might cry, too, and didn’t want to. “I have the star sapphire ring my father gave her, if you want it. It’s one of the only things of hers that I kept.”

“I would love to have it,” she whispered.

He cleared his throat again. “I’ll go ask Connie what she did with it.” Kathleen watched him struggle to his feet and maneuver his walker, but she didn’t try to help him. He needed an excuse to hide his own emotion, and she gave it to him.

The ring was beautiful—set in a style from the 1920s with a perfect star sapphire stone. It was too small for Kathleen’s ring finger so she handed it to Joelle. It fit her finger perfectly. She held out her slender hand to admire it.

“She should have it,” Uncle Leonard said hoarsely. “It suits her.”

“Thank you,” Joelle murmured. “I’ll always treasure it.”

He nodded, and his mournful face came very close to a smile as he dropped onto the sofa again with a sigh.

“Uncle Leonard, tell me about my mother,” Kathleen said. “You finished Grandma Fiona’s story last night, but you never said why Mom left home and came here—and why she never went back to Deer Falls.”

“I wasn’t home when Eleanor moved away from Deer Falls. I’d joined the army after high school in 1940. I only know the parts of the story that she told me in her letters—and the parts that she was willing to talk about when I came back. There are things about Eleanor that we may never know. …”

Chapter
32

D
EER
F
ALLS
, P
ENNSYLVANIA—
1936

L
eonard grimaced as he tried to squeeze one last drop of glue from the bottle. It was no use. The glue was finished and his eighth-grade history project wasn’t. It was due tomorrow, and the stores were all closed on Sunday.

“Drat!” he said, tossing down the empty bottle. It was as close as he dared come to saying a bad word. If his mother heard him swear, she would wash out his mouth with soap and make him go to confession.

“There must be more glue around here someplace,” he mumbled as he rummaged through their apartment. His mother had gone to pick up Eleanor from a friend’s house and would be back soon, but Leonard didn’t want to wait. He wanted to finish his project. Maybe his mother kept some glue downstairs in her hat shop.

Leonard thundered down the stairs with the grace of a newborn calf. His awkward legs seemed to be growing faster than he could adjust to them. He opened one drawer after another in her work desk, trying not to mess up the contents too much, but he didn’t find any glue. He yanked open the last drawer, lifting out a wad of fabric scraps—then he froze. On the bottom of the drawer was a folded, yellowing newspaper with a photograph of a man he recognized—his father. Leonard sank onto a chair and unfolded the newspaper to read it.

The story stunned him. He’d known that his father had died seven years ago, but not that he had committed suicide. And not that he’d been a wealthy investment banker who’d lost everything in the stock market crash. Leonard read the article all the way through. There were things in it that didn’t make any sense at all, but the man in the picture was definitely his father. Leonard recognized him, even though his father had never really lived in the apartment with them—not the way other fathers lived with their families. He seemed to visit for only a few hours during the week, and once in a while he’d stay overnight on a weekend.

Leonard forgot all about the glue as he read the article through a second time. Then he read all of the other articles on the front page. He never heard his mother and sister arrive home, and was oblivious to any sounds from upstairs until his mother called down to him.

“Leonard? Are you down there? You need to come up and clear your schoolwork off the table so we can eat supper.” He didn’t reply. He couldn’t make sense of what he’d just read, let alone mesh it with what he’d thought had been true these past seven years.

“Leonard?” she called again. “What are you doing down there?”

“Reading!” he yelled angrily. “Reading a bunch of lies about my—” A sob choked off his words. He couldn’t finish. He felt the shame of what his father had done as if it were his own action. He heard his mother’s soft steps descending the stairs, and when he looked up at her, he felt inexplicably angry with her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked when she saw him. He held up the newspaper, unable to speak. His mother crossed to the desk and yanked it from his hand. “You had no right! What did you think you were doing, snooping through my things?”

“Is it true? Did my father really put a gun to his head and kill himself?”

Fiona exhaled. She closed her eyes and nodded.

“What about all the other things the newspaper said? Why is every-thing all wrong? It says that his wife’s name is Evelyn. And that my name is Russell and Eleanor’s name is… I don’t remember, but it was wrong. And it said that we lived in Westchester, but we didn’t. Is this really my father or isn’t it?”

Fiona took a step backward and leaned against the cutting table, her eyes still closed, her head lowered. Leonard saw that she was crying and then realized that he was, too.

“Arthur Bartlett was really your father,” she said after a long moment. “He committed suicide seven years ago. That’s why we moved up here to Deer Falls. I wanted to give you and Eleanor a fresh start in a place where nobody knew us.”

“And those other things… those wrong names… did the newspaper make a mistake?” He wished his mother would laugh and say yes, of course they’d gotten it all wrong. Learning that his father had killed himself had been horrifying enough.

But somehow Leonard knew that she wasn’t going to say that. His father had never lived with them; he’d never acted like a real father in any sense. “Please don’t lie to me,” he begged when she didn’t reply.

Fiona looked up at him, meeting his gaze. “I wasn’t his wife,” she said through her tears. “I was his mistress. I should have known better than to let him do that to me, but I didn’t. I was eighteen years old, dirt poor, living in a stinking tenement, and working in a sweatshop. I wanted all of the fine things he offered me. Your father promised to marry me, and I was fool enough to believe him. I loved him. God help me, I still do.”

“Mommy?” Eleanor called down the stairs. “Are we ever going to eat?”

“I never wanted you children to know about this,” Fiona said, wiping her tears with her apron. “Please don’t tell your sister.” She handed the newspaper back to Leonard and left him sitting alone in the now darkened store, devastated.

After that terrible day, Leonard became aware of other things he’d never noticed before. It was as if his mother had finished reading a book of fairy tales to him and had closed the cover, dissolving the fantasy and plunging him into the real world where there were no happy endings. He noticed how differently the coal miners lived compared to the mine bosses.

He saw the shantytowns along the railroad tracks housing destitute men, women, and children, while the summer cottages that belonged to wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers stood vacant most of the year. He became aware of how differently his teachers treated students from impoverished families. It shouldn’t be that way! It wasn’t fair!

The knowledge that a man like Arthur Bartlett was able to take advantage of a girl like Fiona Quinn, simply because he was wealthy and she was a poor immigrant, fueled in Leonard a deep hatred toward the rich and powerful, and a new empathy for the workingman and his struggles. His mother’s story exemplified the way all rich men abused and misused the poor—and there was nothing the poor could do about it. They had no way to break free.

Reading the daily newspapers inflamed Leonard’s sense of injury and his passion for justice. He started buying as many as three papers a day, spreading them out on the dining room table at night, growing angrier and angrier as he sat hunched over them, reading. In the early months of 1937, when the new United Auto Workers’Union staged a sit-down strike, closing a General Motors plant in Michigan, Leonard cheered.

When the strike escalated into a riot, he wanted to hitchhike to Michigan and join in the struggle. He followed the news religiously for the next month as the strike spread to GM plants in other states and production stopped. In the end, management caved in to the workingmen’s demands. Labor unions gained new power to represent the weak against the strong, and Leonard felt as though he had personally triumphed over men like his father. Three months later, ten people died at a Republic Steel rally in Chicago, and as the union movement gained momentum and strength, Leonard knew he had found his life’s purpose. He could fight against injustice; he could help right society’s wrongs.

He became interested in socialism, then in Communism and its promise to eliminate the class system and give power to society’s poorest members. When he was a senior in high school he started reading Karl Marx. That was the year that Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began. And it was also the year he found his half-brother, Russell Bartlett.

It happened by accident. Leonard had been pouring through a stack of newspapers, reading everything he could about Joseph Stalin’s Red Army marching into eastern Poland, when he stumbled upon the New York society pages. The name Bartlett at the top of a wedding announcement leapt out at him. He paused to read it more carefully and discovered that his father’s wife, Evelyn, had remarried. That news didn’t interest him much, but the announcement also mentioned her son, Russell Bartlett, who was a Broadway actor and director.