Obit

by Anne Emery

  “He doesn’t embarrass easily,” I said.

  “Don’t challenge a girl like that, Montgomery!” she warned with a tinkly laugh. “Anyway, what I was going to say was I developed a bit of a crush on Declan. An older man, handsome, with those penetrating bright blue eyes. I thought of him as very worldly. Older man! He must have been what? Thirty-five? How young that seems to me now! I’m fifty-nine, would you believe that?”

  “Never,” I assured her.

  “I was always trying to think of excuses to speak to Declan.”

  New York City, 1952

  Is that Mr. Burke coming in? Yes! Declan. He said I could call him that. Swell name. All the men his age back home are named George or Wilf. Should I ask him for requests again, or should I sing “Just One Of Those Things” and look at him when I’m singing?

  “Good evening, Declan!”

  “Ah. Hello there, Evie.”

  He looks like he’s got something on his mind. Oh, no, here’s that friend of his again. Every time this guy comes in he just drinks soda, and Declan barely touches his own whiskey, and that means he never loosens up. They huddle over a table together and talk all night. And Declan doesn’t even glance my way. This guy looks Irish too, with that wavy reddish hair. He’s cute. That’s not really the word for older men, though. He’s handsome but not as handsome as Declan. I’m beginning to think older men are my destiny! I’ll sing “Younger Than Springtime.” It’s about a man with a younger girl.

  Oh, wouldn’t you know? Here comes Ramon. I find him so immature now. I’ll have to break things off with him. And here he is in his role as bodyguard for Declan and his guest. “Burke don’t want no other company around his table tonight.” Poor Ramon. Everybody knows he’s from Puerto Rico, even though he tries to pass for an Italian. His English is terrible but he’s going to language school to learn Italian instead! He loves being around the big shots in this place, giving them special attention, shooing the other waiters from their tables. He just wants to hang around them himself, hoping to overhear some Mob talk. Well, the heck with Ramon or this other Irish guy. I’m going over there.

  “Any requests tonight, Declan?” He’s thinking about it. What? That’s a weird combination of songs. Well, if that’s what he wants. . . My “Danny Boy” will make his eyes well up with tears, and I’ll do such a sultry “Love For Sale” it just might make something else swell up! Oh, yeah, I’ve got their attention now. All eyes on stage!

  It’s been a long night. But maybe it’s not finished yet. Declan is calling me over to his table. “That was brilliant, darlin’. Meet my friend, Danny. This is Evie. We’re moving on to another bar, Evie. How’d you like to join us? Let someone else do all the singing, and you can sit and have a couple of glasses with us.”

  Do I want to go? Isn’t this just what I’ve been waiting for? But I’ll play it cool. “Sure, if you like.”

  . . . Where are we? Somewhere over on the West Side. Hell’s Kitchen. I don’t know how they’ve managed to fit a band into such a tiny bar, but they have. Irish music, the real kind. And I like this little room we have all to ourselves. It’s called a snug. This stuff, Paddy Whiskey, is really strong. I’d better take it easy. It doesn’t seem to bother Declan. I see Danny isn’t drinking much. This is the first time I’ve heard Declan so talkative! He’s telling us about the old country and how beautiful it is. And there are all these great Irish writers that are important to the literature of the whole world. Declan even used to drink with some of them in the pubs! Danny is just as spellbound as I am. Declan says Danny has a great love for Ireland, and he’s going to help Danny find an affordable way to get there. “Don’t forget about me, Declan, I want to go too!” It would be so romantic to go over there, just me and Declan, away from everyone in New York. I understand about Irish history now, how the English oppressed the Irish for hundreds of years, and they’re still there in the northern part of the country. Declan knew people who were murdered by the English. I can’t help crying. Danny is upset too but, well, you know men! He can hardly sit there sobbing the way I’ve been doing.

  Now Declan says he’s all talked out, so we’re getting a fresh round of drinks and listening to the band. He just gave Danny a big hint to ask me to dance. Why doesn’t Declan ask me to dance himself? I might get somewhere with him if he does; I know I look good tonight in this dress. White, tight and lots of me in sight!

  But no, I just danced with Danny. He told me his wife was always saying he had two left feet. I taught him a bit about dancing and it was fun. Declan just sat and smoked and watched us. Now Danny says he has to leave; his wife will be wondering where he is. There should be more husbands like that.

  It’s good Danny’s leaving, because now Declan will have to drive me home. Just the two of us. Declan and Danny are in a deep, serious conversation together. There. Danny’s gone.

  Alone at last! He’s not saying much but at least we’re together. Here we are at my apartment. It’s now or never. “When do I get my next instalment of Irish culture, Declan?”

  “We could install a bit of it right now, I’m thinking.” He’s never said anything risqué like that before! And the way he’s looking at me!

  I just spent two hours in my apartment with Declan. The most blissful two hours of my life. I’m in love. In a way I’ve never been in love before. No more twenty-year-old boys for me.

  “Declan, please don’t go!”

  But he’s gone. And he was pretty damn quiet on the way out.

  “For my remaining time at the club Declan was back to his old polite, distant self. I got a call from a hotel owner in Vegas, who said he had received a call from someone in New York, some Italian name I didn’t even know, and this Vegas hotel guy wanted to hire me to sing in his place, and that was it. I was gone.”

  Brennan seemed not to hear her; he was gazing out the window.

  “Do you have a last name for this Danny?” I asked her.

  “Boy,” Brennan muttered. “No, I don’t know who he was,” she replied. “When was this? When did this other man come into the picture?”

  “That’s an easy one. A few weeks before my big Vegas debut! I was off to the desert —”

  “So that was when exactly?” I persisted.

  “June of ’52.”

  We were quiet for a few moments. Then it occurred to me to ask: “Was your move to Vegas something that had been in the works for a while? Sending out résumés, or demo tapes?”

  She cast a quick glance at Brennan, who seemed to have lost interest. “No. The move came out of the blue. I always suspected Declan arranged it. I flew out to Vegas June the twenty-first. Morning flight, first day of summer, and it must have been a hundred degrees out there. I worked my last four shifts at the club. Normally, I would have had a night off. Not that week; I figured I’d need every cent I could get. I tried my best to avoid Ramon, and that was that. I was out of there.”

  “And things went well for you in Vegas? Your career took off after that?”

  “Yes. Things went well.” She put on a smile. “All that old stuff is just water under the bridge now.” She turned again to Brennan. “I’m sorry to hear about your father. I hope he has a quick recovery. I suspect he will.”

  Burke and I stood outside the building, irresolute. “So, Brennan, what do you think? Is Vi a factor in this plot we’re trying to uncover?”

  “She had only a bit part in the drama but, like good bit players everywhere, she’s made it possible for us to see the star, my father, in a whole new light. And she’s given us another name to track down. Or is he somebody we already know?”

  “The latter, I’d say. Unless we’re way off, Danny is Desmond. The alcoholic who was fired, for drinking or for some other reason, from his job as a watchman on the waterfront. He was the real target of your father’s efforts. Vi was just a honey trap, or a honey pot, whatever the expression is. And your father fell into the pot.”

  “Didn’t fall, just took a quick dip.”

  Chapte
r 6

  He had no veteran soldiers but volunteers raw

  Playing sweet Mauser music for Erin Go Bragh.

  — Peadar Kearney, “Erin Go Bragh”

  March 15, 1991

  Brennan’s sister finally had a breakthrough with the name Murphy. She kept at it for a week, returning to those Murphys who had not answered their phones on the first, second, or third calls. And she came up with N.M. (Neasa) Murphy, an elderly woman who was cagey at first but who in the end broke down and acknowledged that Cathal Murphy had died some months before.

  We stood crowding each other on the crumbling doorstep of a seedy house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon. The Ides of March. The house was one of a row of attached frame houses, each one in worse shape than the next. There was a full ashtray on the stoop and a pile of dusty, curled magazines held down by a heavy, chipped mug. A sign tacked on the door advertised the upper flat for rent. Nothing happened in answer to our knock for two or three minutes; then we heard an irregular thump and shuffle getting louder as it approached. The door opened slowly, and a pair of small brown eyes glittered up at us. A chain barred our entrance. Unless, of course, one of us decided to give the door a forceful kick. The tiny woman leaned on a walker and waited in silence for us to state our business.

  “Mrs. Murphy. I’m Brennan Burke and —” A truck barrelled down a nearby street and the noise blotted out his voice. He started again, then added: “And this is Montague Collins.” The woman’s expression did not change, and she spoke not a word. Burke went on: “I was wondering if we might have a word with you.”

  “A word about what?” It was the voice of a smoker, the accent unreconstructed Eire.

  “About your husband.”

  “Burke, you say?”

  “Declan’s son.”

  She gave no acknowledgement that the name meant anything to her but she closed the door, fussed with the chain, opened up again, and stood aside to let us in. She could not have been more than five feet tall; she may have weighed ninety-five pounds with a cast iron frying pan in her hand. Her hair was short and grey; it looked as if she had just run the fingers of both hands through it. Her skin was wizened, like that of a woman who had passed many a long day out on her stoop, soaking up the sun.

  The woman jerked her head towards a room beyond us, and shambled along ahead. Her pace seemed slower now than it had sounded while we waited on the doorstep. The floor of her living room was covered with a wall to wall green carpet that was too large and turned up at the baseboards. One theme dominated the room: horses. Every flat surface bore a statue or figurine of a horse; the walls were adorned with pictures of horses being groomed, ridden or raced. Above the archway leading to the dining room was a silhouette in unfaded tan paint, where a crucifix once had hung. The only personal photograph was a well-preserved black-and-white picture of two small children running through a field, the girl ahead of the boy, laughing and looking back at him.

  Mrs. Murphy sat in an armchair beside an old-fashioned floor model ashtray, from the era when smoking accessories were part of the decor. This one had a large marble tray for the ashes and butts; it was topped by a bronze model of a DC3 aircraft with windows and moving propellers. I coveted the old Dakota but was not crass enough to try to buy it off her. The old lady lit up a smoke from a pack on the arm of her chair, and nodded to us to be seated on a small brown sofa. I took my place on it, still casting an envious eye at the DC3.

  Brennan pulled a large chair over from the corner and made himself at home in it. He brought out a cigarette of his own, lit it and took a leisurely drag before speaking. He bypassed the usual formalities — and the usual priestly assurances — and got right to the point. “I was interested to read the obituary of one Cathal Murphy,” he told her, never taking his eyes off her face. This was not the way I would have approached the interview.

  “Interested in what way, Mr. Burke?”

  “It appeared to contain a great many references that must have seemed obscure to all but a few readers.”

  “And would you be one of the few yourself?”

  “Have you had many visitors show up on your doorstep asking about it, Mrs. Murphy?”

  “You’re the first to mention it, Mr. Burke. You’ll have to explain the purpose of your questions.” She inhaled a lungful of nicotine and emitted a harsh cough.

  “Bless you,” I said, since Father Burke didn’t. “Who wrote the obituary, Mrs. Murphy? Did you write it?”

  “Do you see anyone else here who might have written up the poor man’s death? A niece with a pot of tea and a tray of cakes? A nephew up on a ladder repairing that leak in the ceiling?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the man had no family, nobody, besides me. Just me and my wooden leg.” She rapped on the lower part of her left leg with her knuckles. “But I did my final duty. Hobbled in to the newspaper office and left the obituary and the money on the counter. What an exhausting day, me and my walker on the trains to Manhattan and back. Oh, well, all in a day’s service to the dead.”

  “Should I conclude that things were not going well between you and your husband at the time he died, Mrs. Murphy?”

  “I had no husband, Mr. Burke.” She smiled, gratified by our reactions. Then she leaned forward and peered intently at Brennan. “I can see your mother in you. Tall and dark. Tell me, do poor lovesick women look after you in the streets? Trail around behind you, in the hope of even the slightest glance from those black eyes of yours?”

  “Ah, no. I hardly think so, Mrs. Murphy. As a matter of fact, I —”

  “I wouldn’t want to get caught following you down a dark alley, for fear of what you’d do.”

  Burke and I exchanged a glance. What on earth was she talking about? Brennan said: “I don’t understand you. What’s all this about people being followed in the streets?”

  “He escaped your notice, then? He must have perfected the knack of slipping through this life unseen.”

  “Who?” we both asked her.

  “My poor pathetic article of a brother. Who else?”

  “Cathal was your brother?”

  “My twin. Charlie ‘Cathal’ Fagan and Neasa Fagan. They called me Nessie. My brother was Charlie Fagan over there, Cathal Murphy over here. I became a Murphy. I played along with the codology so long I tend to forget we ever had another name. That’s the way he wanted it. Quite insistent, he was, about that.”

  “What codology? Why the change of name?”

  “Undercover name, Mr. Burke. My brother had a mission.”

  “What mission would that have been?”

  “Does it matter? I can’t see how he ever got anything done. His devotions got in the way.”

  “His devotions?”

  “To the blessed lady.” She grinned, showing a mouth full of uneven yellow teeth.

  “The blessed lady being —” I prompted, and Brennan looked at me as if my brain had just been washed of forty years of Catholic memory.

  “The blessed, the beautiful, the divine Teresa Clare Montoya Brennan.” At that, the woman took up and played an imaginary violin.

  Brennan maintained a wary silence. Nessie Murphy was in no hurry to break the spell she thought she had woven for him. But I wanted to get on with it.

  “How did your brother come to know Mrs. Burke?”

  “From walking and skipping through the streets of Dublin, something he was able to do, but I was not. With my leg, you know.”

  “Dublin!” Brennan exclaimed.

  “A lifelong love affair. On the part of poor Cathal anyhow.”

  “He knew my mother in Dublin?”

  “Am I going to have to say everything twice for you, Mr. Burke? I thought it was just us oul ones who are hard of hearing. He moped around after her in Dublin and followed her over here. I don’t know whether she ever caught sight of him in the new world. She knew a Charlie Fagan but I suspect she forgot his existence as soon as she boarded the boat for New Yor
k. I had to come too. What choice did I have? I could hardly support myself, could I? And what man would have married me, a one-legged bride?”

  “My mother —”

  “What happened to your leg?” I interrupted.

  “It was when we were all killing each other. July of 1922.”

  “Yes?”

  “They shot it off.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact. Or perhaps she wanted to sound as if being matter-of-fact was an effort she could not quite sustain.

  “Who shot it off?”

  “The Irregulars.”

  Brennan rejoined the conversation. “Are you trying to tell me that the Irish Republican Army shot the leg off a little girl?”

  “I was — what do they call it these days? — collateral damage. My father fought on the treaty side in the Civil War, and he was battling it out with the Republicans. He lost.”

  “How did you come to be hit?”

  “We lived on a farm in County Meath, not far from Dublin. My mother had died giving birth to me and my twin. One day Cathal — Charlie — and my father were in the barn helping me with our pony, Finnegan. We had a new saddle and I was going out for a ride. I could ride at the age of five! We heard men coming. Da told us to hide, and he lay down on top of us. The men didn’t know we were there until Charlie let out a little whimper of fear. The men started shouting, my father up and ran to lead them away from us, I panicked and followed him. When they shot him, I was in the way. My father died, and I lost my leg. All because of Charlie!”

  “Your twin, a child of five,” Brennan said.

  “I managed to keep my wits about me! Charlie didn’t. Here’s the result.” She raised her leg and let it thud to the floor. “After that, we were sent to live with Aunt Norah in Dublin. She was kind to us, kept us fed and got us through school. Where Charlie excelled and Nessie did not. Hard to concentrate on your sums when you’re worried about who’s laughing at you behind your back. Anyway, the poor woman did what she could, bless her. A staunch Republican she was. Like so many families, ours was divided by the Civil War. Norah had played a part in the Easter Rising. She and Charlie talked about it for hours on end; she had a convert in him. But she was getting on, and it was clear we couldn’t stay there for all eternity. Charlie went out and got a high-paying job at Guinness, and we found a place of our own. I couldn’t work of course.”