Louisa’s daughter, Maria, married Thomas O’Brien on March 17, 1900—St. Patrick’s Day—in Boston, where he was a waiter and she was, apparently, more than a few weeks pregnant. Whatever his war experience had been, apparently it was over. The 1900 census found him employed as a coachman—a new job already—and living on St. Germain Street with his new wife, his mother-in-law, and a lodger. Louisa and Joseph Botana had separated.
The newlyweds’ daughter—my grandmother—was born six months into their union and christened Louise Marie, Americanizing the two first names passed down by her mother and grandmother. The 1910 census showed Thomas and Maria living with Louisa—a widow since 1907—and three children, Louise, Thomas, and John. But by then Papa was no longer a steady presence in their home.
Maria and Papa may have had all kinds of problems, but the only one we know about is sufficient to explain any amount of heartache: the drink. Thomas was the kind of drunk who alternated long stretches of arid control with sodden benders. Early in their marriage he had worked waiting tables, cutting meat, selling groceries … and had lost jobs by disappearing for days on end.
When he was at home, Papa delighted the children with jokes and stories. He could cook, specializing in omelettes and delicious soups improvised from whatever was in the refrigerator. He was irreverent, rascally, and Maria adored him, but he couldn’t be counted on to bring home the bacon. She put herself through school to get a teacher’s certificate, which kept the kids from going hungry.
Despite the drinking, Papa was able to use his grocery experience as a bridge into the restaurant business. In the 1930s he worked for hot spots such as the Music Box, and became the floor manager at Boston’s racy cabaret nightclub Lou Walters’ Latin Quarter.
The Latin Quarter made burlesque respectable by linking it to bohemian Paris, which somehow squared the seminude cancan dancers with Boston’s prudish blue laws. Walters mixed the more or less naked girls with top “legitimate” acts, and the formula was such a hit that he soon opened more famous Latin Quarters in Manhattan and Palm Beach. Lou’s daughter Barbara Walters once told my mother that she remembered Thomas O’Brien, her father’s floor manager, as an Irish raconteur with “a huge personality.”
It was somewhere in this nightclub period that Papa made his bargain with God. He managed more than one club, driving from one to the next—trips that were sometimes the start of benders, leading to days of anxiety for Maria Louisa. By the 1930s she was Mother Mamie, several times a grandmother; when Papa disappeared, she’d call her grown children, who’d help call the hospitals and police stations while Mamie worked her rosary.
One rainy night, as Papa was driving home from a club, he struck a woman who darted into the road, rushing to mail a letter. Waiting at the hospital, praying for the woman’s life, Papa made his promise of absolute abstinence. She lived; he never drank again.
Deals like that seemed to run in the family. Mamie made many such bargains. She was devoted to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and had a relic of the saint that she lost just at the time her daughter Louise was about to give birth. Mamie promised to show her gratitude if the relic was returned by making sure the baby’s middle name would be Therese. The relic came back to her; my mother was named Eleanor Therese. When illness caused Eleanor to miss much of third grade, Mother Mamie—grown stout in her fifties—promised not to eat candy for a year if only her granddaughter could be made well.
The other side of bargaining is holding a grudge, and the family seemed to do a lot of that, too. Although Papa’s sons were devastated by his callousness toward their mother, John and Thomas tried to accept the father they’d been given. Louise loved her father but couldn’t forgive him for breaking Mother Mamie’s heart. Louise expected Papa to die first, which would free Mamie from waiting at home, saying rosaries for him; then Louise could take Mamie to her house and treat her right. But Mamie died in 1941, at sixty-four. By then Papa was already keeping company with stylish Leone Rydalth, a strait-laced but sophisticated lady who fit in with his nightclub connections. Louise’s grudge deepened, and was still unreconciled when she died, suddenly and much too young, in 1952.
As Walters sold the Latin Quarter and Boston’s nightlife faded, Papa and Leone began a new life as a husband-and-wife traveling sales team. An elegant, petite old lady with gently mischievous blue eyes, Leone was the ideal representative for a line of knockoff perfumes. The O’Briens would make a deal with a department store, and Papa, a charming old man in a sharp suit, would take a station at the front door. Select customers would be greeted with blarney and a free coupon entitling them to exclusive samples at the perfume counter. There, Mrs. O’Brien would let them sniff smell-alikes of the most pricey popular scents. If Tresor was chic, she had Treasure; if the customer yearned for Magie, she had Magic. Between the blarney and the bargain prices, who could refuse?
It was a gypsy life, and they loved it. Leone kept the restless man close by keeping him on the road. They were good companions, creating domesticity in motel rooms by hard-boiling eggs in their electric coffee percolator.
Their circuit swung them down to winter in Florida, where they could visit with Leone’s daughter, a cabaret dancer who had married a horse-racing journalist. Another family story says that once, when they were out on the race tout’s yacht, they hailed and exchanged greetings with Franklin Delano Roosevelt—perhaps aboard the presidential yacht Potomac. The punch line is that Papa had been cooking clam chowder, and thought enough of it to send a bowl across to FDR.
This is the man who resolved the crisis of Leone’s coma—and the dilemma of her Christian Scientist faith—without a second thought, authorizing surgery despite Mary Baker Eddy’s belief in prayer and divine intervention.
That cocksure, flamboyant fellow is the Papa I remember. He wasn’t a big man, but his personality was outsized, and when he told the story of how he stormed San Juan Hill, his outstretched arms and quick features could conjure the heights, the armies, the bugler, the flag-tipped charge.
But he shrank his past to nothing. What kind of man never tells his grandchildren and great-grandchildren where he came from, what became of his people? He said he was an orphan, said there was no one living who knew him before he’d met Mamie. It seemed an unbelievably thorough extinction for a man who seemed to accept his burgeoning tribe of grandchildren as if he’d been born into a typically large Irish family, a man who made friends everywhere.
Though he said next to nothing about his past, Papa didn’t want to withhold vital health information from his children and grandchildren, so he told them that he was a twin, and twins ran in the family. His twin brother had died, he said … but family memory preserves a couple of instances of a man calling the house saying he was Tom’s twin brother. One time, the caller asked for money. But Papa neither accepted nor even acknowledged the calls. He answered no further questions.
His grandchildren refused to settle for silence and, starting with the baptismal certificate, began to unearth Papa’s past.
The first discovery, in the parish records of St. Thomas Aquinas in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was that Thomas O’Brien wasn’t the only son born to Thomas O’Brien and Mary Hanley—but the other brother was no twin. Papa had had an older brother, Christopher, born in 1877. The census of 1900 revealed the family Papa fled, living on Spring Street in Watertown, where twenty-three-year-old Christopher was employed as a driver. Christopher died of epilepsy in 1906, at age twenty-nine.
Christopher wasn’t the only sibling to turn up in census records. Going back to the 1880 count, Thomas, a forty-three-year-old laborer, and Mary, thirty-two years old, both born in Ireland, had a nine-year-old, Maggie, in school. Little Christopher was three, and Thomas just six months. By the 1900 census, Maggie was out of the house, and Thomas, too. But parents Thomas and Mary had Christopher still at home, as well as real twins, Mary Ann and Catherine, born in 1883, and the baby of the family, Bridget, born in 1890.
Papa had five siblings. His children—Louis
e, John, and Thomas—never had a chance to know their uncle and aunts. Louise, born in 1900, might have been able to remember her grandparents, Thomas and Mary, if she’d been allowed to meet them.
What was so awful about these people? What was Papa running from when he enlisted on May 31, 1898?
The O’Briens seem never to have been far from poverty, if they escaped it at all. Thomas emigrated in 1849, a boy caught up in the mass exodus of the potato famine. Mary didn’t leave Ireland until 1860, but the country had hardly recovered from the trauma of watching a million starve and another million sail away: a quarter of its population lost to what many Irishmen considered English economic warfare.
In his life as a husband and father, which began in 1868, Thomas’s jobs included shoe finisher, laborer, building mover, and teamster. He never seems to have found a successful niche; his daughters took in laundry. His wife, Mary, died of complications from flu in 1904. She was fifty-six years old. Thomas died of lip cancer in 1906, at age sixty-nine.
Sometime after he joined Mary in St. Patrick’s cemetery in Waverly, Massachusetts, their headstones were cleared away to make the place tidier. Their graves are unmarked, but graveyard records reveal another of Papa’s secrets. Regardless of what he told Mamie and his children, he was still in some kind of contact with his family. When old Thomas died on May 1, 1906, the burial plot was still unpaid for; Papa paid the twenty-five-dollar fee on May 12.
Before he died, the elder Thomas finally received a Civil War disability pension. He’d been applying for it since the Pension Act of 1890 made financial help available to veterans who hadn’t been wounded or otherwise directly incapacitated by wartime service. His pension was only granted in 1902, when he was declared eligible because of his complete inability to earn a living by manual labor, owing to “rheumatism, blindness of right eye, and impaired vision left eye, disease of heart and kidneys, lameness of back and loins and malaria,” as well as “senile debility.”
Under the Pension Act of 1890, a Civil War veteran who couldn’t work and whose infirmities weren’t the result of “vicious habits” was eligible for a pension. Thomas’s examiners certified him free of vice and indisputably infirm. Thomas’s war-time service was exemplary: two years and eight months campaigning with the 16th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, from 1861 to 1864, and two years and four months’ service, extending into peacetime, with the 1st Regiment, 26th Company, U.S. Artillery.
The 16th Massachusetts had a hard war. It was in on every major battle fought by the Army of the Potomac between the Seven Days Battles before Richmond in 1862 and the commencement of the siege of Petersburg in 1864. It was a first-rate combat unit, and commanders put it to the test at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spottsylvania Court House. The regiment lost sixteen officers and 134 enlisted men to mortal wounds, and two officers and ninety-three enlisted men to disease, a total of 245 dead, or a quarter of a regiment’s full strength. Sick and wounded men took the casualty total above 50 percent. By July 1864 there wasn’t enough of the regiment left to rehabilitate; the Army broke the 16th up, transferring its veterans and recruits to the 11th Massachusetts.
Thomas was among the men mustered out. When he reenlisted in October, he pulled Washington garrison duty with a heavy artillery regiment that lost a total of twenty-five men to disease.
Papa’s father was discharged from the artillery in February 1867. By 1890 he claimed to be unable to work for the pains in his hands and kidneys. These don’t seem to have been sudden developments. Malaria never quits. How many reasonably good, healthy years did Thomas have after the war? Fifteen? Twenty? No more.
There’s something querulous about the elder Thomas’s pension applications. The first, filed promptly in 1890, is filled out by a medical examiner who can barely suppress his impatience with the old man. Yes, his kidneys hurt; he passes brown urine, and little of it. Yes, his hands hurt, apparently from rheumatism. Neither problem strikes the doctor as deserving of twelve dollars a month, or even a fraction thereof. Thomas is a complainer. This application is stamped DENIED.
By the second, filed in 1902, Thomas has declined so rapidly and deeply that a second doctor can’t write enough about his symptoms, listing them in two dense columns. Thomas is a complainer, but his complaints have made themselves too obvious to ignore.
These documents are all we have of this Thomas O’Brien, Papa’s father, my great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-great-grandfather to our family’s latest generation. It’s hardly fair to read too much into them … but it seems that any chance old Thomas had of coming out ahead was ruined by the war, which broke his health and doomed him to poverty.
What was young Thomas running from when he joined up for the Spanish-American War? Our only, best guess: the wreck the Civil War had made of his father.
Papa wanted more than escape from his father’s house. He wanted abnegation and erasure. Whatever his family had been, he would be nothing like: divorced, opposite, quits. The story of his life would be a story he’d tell as he pleased, alone and beyond contradiction.
It would have no beginning—not until May 31, 1898, the day of his enlistment. And so what if the only clue left in that new start—the Rutio and Werblasky portrait—made a lie of his story about charging up San Juan Hill? He was wearing the uniform of a private in the U.S. Marines. But the Marines never got anywhere near Santiago.
Papa joined the Marines ten days before the Corps fought its only severe action of the war: the taking of Guantánamo on June 10. By the time he got to Gitmo, in July, the fighting was over all over the island. His unit delivered supplies and turned back toward Boston. He served until June 22, 1899, and there’s reason to believe he spent much of his service time courting Mother Mamie, who may have been pregnant by November.
Mamie took him at face value, and with the creation of a new family Papa fulfilled an American dream more primal than home ownership or a chicken in every pot: the dream of a disposable past, of being only who we say we are.
So Papa was never in Santiago, never dodged bullets at Teddy’s stirrup. What’s important about the story is not that he lied to his great-grandchildren. How many men have embellished their war stories with motives much more sinister than making little kids laugh? No, what was important about Papa’s San Juan Hill story was that he never divulged anything about his life before 1898: not to the kids, not to the grown-ups, not to Leone, and not to Mamie. From the moment Papa went to war, no one in his life knew much about who he had been.
I wonder whether Papa’s prime mover was guilt. Paying for his parents’ burial plot; punishing himself with drinking bouts that left him sick and helpless: to an Irishman and an alcoholic, these read as familiar signs. And then there’s that great proof of guilt’s power over his supposedly self-powered life: the woman in the rain, the accident, the bargain. He got sober on guilt, remorse doing for him what he could not do for himself. That’s one reading of his inscrutable life, but my guesses are only signs and wonderings.
Papa died a mystery, an enigma his surviving grandchildren are still trying to pierce. As a great-grandfather, he taught me the costs of self-invention. What happens when we choose to forget our history? What kind of hurts do we inflict—on ourselves, on generations to come—when we insist that we aren’t who we are?
Chapter 13
GETTING GUANTÁNAMO
Everything felt wrong, but I went ahead anyway.
I had to. My time in Cuba was nearly up, and my journey still hadn’t reached its starting point.
To travel the route of the 1898 U.S. invasion—the campaign most of us norteamericanos think of as “the Spanish-American War”—I’d had to begin at the end, flying into the city of Santiago de Cuba. That’s the prize for which U.S. troops marched inland from the beaches of Daiquiri and Siboney to make their iconic assault on San Juan Hill. I’d traveled back and forth across Cuba to see what the war’s traces could tell me about America, then and now. But I hadn’t been able to get to the campaign’s
initial objective, the first piece of overseas real estate America ever grabbed and wouldn’t give back: Guantánamo.
Of course, in December 2005 there was no chance that my government would let me visit the formerly somnolent U.S. naval base, then four years into its reincarnation as a “detention facility” for alleged terrorists. Journalists for major news outlets were rarely allowed in, and I was an obscure freelancer. I probably wasn’t missing much: The official tour didn’t include meetings with prisoners, and big-time newsies weren’t being told anything they couldn’t have learned from the Pentagon press office. Still, I wanted to get as close as a civilian could to el Báse.
By e-mail and phone from my home in Vermont, and face-to-face in Santiago and Havana, I’d pleaded with Cuban officials for permission to approach their side of the wire. I’d imagined having leisure to study the base and its deepwater harbor. Maybe, with binoculars, I’d be able to see the mouth of the bay, where Stephen Crane witnessed the Marines’ blood purchase of a scrubby hill one night in April 1898: “The noise; the impenetrable darkness; the knowledge from the sound of the bullets that the enemy was on three sides of the camp; the infrequent bloody stumbling and death of some man with whom, perhaps, one had messed two hours previous … made it wonderful that at least some of the men did not come out of it with their nerves hopelessly in shreds.” Or perhaps I’d catch a glimpse of an orange-jumpsuited Camp Delta prisoner being moved from cage to cage.
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