HIS MOM PULLED ANOTHER TRAY of Tollhouse cookies from the oven when Patrick eased open the front door of their three-story Victorian home. He winced as the door squeaked, and then tiptoed past hallway photos of relatives watching him—his aunt who was a nun, and his Mom’s dead dad with the purgatory card on his picture frame.
“That you, Patrick?” his mom called from the kitchen.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m gonna change,” he yelled as he sprinted upstairs before she could come out and catch him.
She flipped the perfect cookies with a spatula onto the cooling rack and wondered why Patrick came in the front door and not the back. And why didn’t he come straight to the kitchen with the smell of warm cookies in the air? With three boys, she could never be too suspicious. But she let it go and hummed along with the big band song playing on the radio. It was Tex Beneke and the Modernaires with the Glenn Miller orchestra.
She smiled as the music carried her back to 1947 when she was the prettiest girl at Ursuline Academy. Counter stools swiveled when she walked into the Parkmoor sandwich shop after a movie with one of her dates. She could feel the eyes—both admiring and jealous—as she crossed the room with her shoulder-length red hair bouncing, her slim figure, and a face like a girl on a Coca-Cola tray. Her dating years were just beginning, and before they would end, she would have gone out with 108 young men. Other girls fretted they might never hear the words from their favorite love songs, but she heard so many lyrics, and so soon, that she started rehearsing new ways to say no. Boys who dreamed of being doctors, lawyers and downtown men sat across candle-lit tables and offered her velvet-covered boxes holding sparkling promises of everlasting love and solid financial futures. They all wanted to be with her, but she kept her distance, and more, by giving innocent Doris Day smiles and by letting the phone ring the next day until her father answered it to say she’s not home and where do you go to church.
True love—her widowed, Irish father Patrick O’Hanlon had told her after waiting up for her one night—was a gift. That night she found him sitting at the piano, hat slanted over his careworn forehead, playing a five-cent song from his own sweetheart days, “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.” As he played, he looked at his wedding photo hanging on the wall. It had been taken in 1919, and he was wearing his World War I uniform. His eyes were beaming in the photo, but as he sat at the piano that needed tuning, he was old, and his eyes were sad and tired, like a doughboy whose leave was almost over and the Argonne Forest was waiting.
She listened to her father play as she sat in her party dress, straightened her pleats, and relived the date that had just ended. His hands moved across the keys in the dim lamplight and then the song faded away, and he turned toward her. God, he said, reaching for a glass of O.F.C. Whiskey, was going to lead her to fall in love with a man who would really love her. And that man would be Catholic, and together they would raise a fine Catholic family.
“Patrick, what are you doing up there?” she yelled up the laundry chute.
“Just changing.”
“What’s the water running for?”
“Trying to get clean.”
Something was up. But she didn’t feel like climbing the steps to find out. The back door swung open and Patrick’s older brother, John, walked in. John was one of the coolest kids at Mary Queen of Our Hearts School. For a second-grader, John was smart, good looking and advanced. He already knew what he wanted in life. It was 1966 and John wanted to become a Beatle. Specifically, he wanted to become John Lennon. Since realizing his purpose, he walked more confidently, like a boy with an atomic secret. His only problem, which he kept to himself, was that he did not own, or know anything about, a guitar.
“Hi, John,” Mom said.
“’Ello, Mum.”
“I made cookies.”
“Fab,” he said, checking the mirror by the refrigerator. The back door opened again, and Teddy came in carrying sheets of construction paper with crayon and milk stains from the afternoon pre-school. Teddy ran right to Mom, and she leaned down to his level to kiss him. Teddy was the skinny, quiet boy who almost died of spinal meningitis a year ago. Now he was four-and-a-half and showing an interest in sports. But he was still too weak to really punch around.
“Oh, Teddy, you’re the last one home, and the first one to kiss me.” She looked toward the back porch. “You hear that, John?”
John was in front of the mirror, analyzing a bang that had potential, all the while lightly singing a few lines from the Beatles’ tune, “Boys.”
“John! Quit looking at yourself and come over here,” Mom said.
John went over and hugged his Mom, and she sneaked a kiss on his cheek. In her presence—her warm apron and the cookie fumes—he left Liverpool briefly and spoke to her in his own voice. “Hi, Mom.”
“That’s better. Here, you boys have some cookies while I get some more out of the oven. And drink some milk.”
“Can we have soda?” Teddy asked.
“No, remember we gave up soda for Lent,” Mom said. “I wonder what that Patrick is up to.”
Upstairs, Patrick was in his underwear sprinkling Lysol Tub and Tile Cleaner on his pants and shirt. On the sink before him was an array of products—Barbasol Shaving Cream, Tucks Pads and Preparation H. But nothing was working. Frustrated, he finally ditched his dirty clothes under his bed and pulled on his straight-legged blue jeans with cuffs, a green plaid shirt, and white Keds. Walking downstairs, he passed the front hallway photos of his aunt who was the nun and the dead grandfather he was named after. Their eyes followed him around the corner to where Mom was waiting in the kitchen.
“Patrick, are you in trouble?”
“No.”
She looked into his eyes. His eyes were hard to understand. Once he had dropped lit matches down the clothes chute and set Dad’s executive underwear on fire. But when she asked him about that one, he admitted it. He had not yet fallen into the sin of lying.
“What happened today?”
The speeding freight train shot through his mind. “Nothing.”
She looked at him.
He knew he’d better say something. “We had a slide show.” She slapped the gooey batter on the tin tray with a wooden spoon to the beat of Big Band Radio. The music oozed through the kitchen like strands of chocolate from a pulled-apart cookie. Nearby, in the breakfast room, a competing song blared from the black and white TV.
The cartoon Speed Racer was on. Patrick saw John and Teddy enjoying the show with cookies and milk and wanted to join them. He wanted to escape his Mom’s questions before he confessed everything.
“Patrick, I know something.”
He saw himself diving in front of the train. “Is it something good?”
“Somebody called you, right before you came home.”
He thought of the engineer with his head out the window. Maybe there was a phone on the train like on boats. “Who was it?”
“Patrick, my number-two son, my son named after my dear Daddy, to think seven years ago you weren’t even alive.”
“Yeah.” He looked at the cookies and fought the urge to run.
“It’s quite a thing to be alive. It’s an un-asked for thing. It’s … you ever stop to think you might not have been born? Your father could have married somebody else. Or I could have married somebody else.” He felt like running from the house, running around the block, peeing on a bush, but she had him in an eye lock. “Yes … I married your father, and you came from us, and at just the only possible time for you to be, you were. And now here you are in the first grade at Mary Queen of Our Hearts, studying catechism and getting a call from … a girl!”
Ebby! Ebby had called his house. She must have told his Mom everything, and he would probably be grounded forever. He looked at Mom to see what his punishment would be. But her eyes were not punishing. They were believing—the way they believed when Dad remembered their wedding anniversary with a last-minute trip to the Rexall Drugstore greeting card section.
She straightened his hair. He kept looking at the cookies.
“Well, what’s she like?”
He thought of Ebby’s shiny hair blowing in the train wind, and her fingers trying to keep it off her face. “I don’t know.”
“You must know something about her.”
He remembered her smart, brown eyes, the way they lit up when she was writing in cursive. “She can write her name in handwriting.”
“Is she pretty?”
He looked to the side, embarrassed. “Yes.”
“What do you think she wants? I mean, calling you, a girl calling a boy.”
“I don’t know. Her mom is having a baby today.”
“Today?”
“Yeah.”
She hugged him. “Today, of all days. Life is like a song.”