Chapter 2€¦ · Web view“So, you’ll be looking in on her tomorrow, then?” Edward nodded. “And you picked up your new trousers today? You’ll want to look your best Monday

LOUSTAU/The Complicity of Edward Dooley Ch. 2 - page 1

Chapter 2: A Homecoming

“What in God’s name were you thinking, Edward?” Honora said, taking her seat in the

front parlor of the Dooley’s flat at half past eleven.

Walter set down a tea service on the sideboard and looked uneasily to his brother. He’d

arrived home just as Edward and his parents were returning from the Victory Ball, and noting the

tension in the air, he’d offered to make up a late-night refresher while Edward telephoned

Morgan to ask after Constance. Now as he poured the tea, Walter found no one was particularly

interested in hearing about the picture he’d seen that Saturday evening. Drawn drapes, the dim

light from table lamps, and the cloying smell of carnations on the mantel only added to the

oppressive atmosphere, and he handed cups of hot tea to Edward in silence.

“As I’ve explained, Mother,” Edward said wearily as he delivered a cup and saucer to

her, “Morgan and I never intended to put her in an uncomfortable situation. We’d just gone over

to say hello to Jimmy Fitzsimmons, that’s all.” He dropped onto the sofa, upsetting the lace

doilies, and added with a sigh, “She went looking for us and – Oh, God – what a mess...”

Honora hastily took a sip of tea. “Well I think it’s simply outrageous – having invalids at

a ball! What a ghastly idea! It’s little wonder others weren’t traumatized as well…” After

another sip, “At a celebration, no less – what foolishness!”


Edward closed his eyes, exhausted. “They deserved to be there as much as anybody,

Mother – probably most of all, as a matter of fact.” He opened his eyes and saw her scowl but

went on, “They weren’t bothering anybody – they were as far out of the way as possible.”

“They weren’t even ambulatory, so what’s the point of their being at a ball?”

“The point is that they served honorably and we should be in their debt...I daresay not

many of us would trade places with them.”

“Well said, boyo,” James Dooley offered, raising his teacup to Edward and ignoring his

wife’s grumbling. “But don’t knock yourself – you’ll always be able to say you did your part in

the Great War…”

Walter frowned, relieved to be done with his military service. Though two years older

than Edward, he’d been sickly as a child, and after barely passing the army physical, he’d been

stationed at the Presidio for the duration of the war. Colm, the eldest of the three boys, had been

drafted as well, but owing to disciplinary problems he’d never shipped overseas. As with so

many things, it had been left to Edward to do the family proud.

“They were rubbing our noses in it,” Honora observed haughtily. “Someone in charge

insisted that those boys be put there on display tonight, and it was tasteless and mean-spirited.”

“What’s mean-spirited is keeping them out of sight, Mother,” Edward said with a

defiance that startled him. “Better than some circus impresario charging two-bits to see them.”

Walter and his father looked at each other uncomfortably.


“Don’t be flippant, Edward,” Honora said, her lips tightening, “No one’s calling them

freaks. There are modern prosthetic devices those men can use so they can fit in and not draw

attention to themselves.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Edward muttered.

“I didn’t say that!”

“Well, in any event, son,” James interjected, “your Constance suffered a shock tonight.

What did Morgan say when you called?”

Edward shook his head dejectedly. Turning to his father, he repeated Morgan’s one-word

summary, “’Overwrought.’”

James nodded. “War’s a brutal thing – it’s best that women are well away from it…”

“That’s true, Father,” Walter said, as if considering this for the first time.

“Not all of them,” Edward noted. “I can’t imagine how the nurses cope with the things

they see.”

“That’s enough now,” Honora said preemptively. Never one for idle hands, she took out

her crocheting from the basket beside her chair. “So, you’ll be looking in on her tomorrow,

then?”

Edward nodded.

“And you picked up your new trousers today? You’ll want to look your best Monday...”


“Yes, Mother.”

“I’m lending Edward my Homburg,” Walter put in, “and the tie that I bought for—” He

stopped short, choked by his words, at the thought of his cousin gone forever.

“Say it, boy,” Honora insisted, “’for Patrick’s memorial service.’” She looked first to her

husband, then to Edward, before addressing him again. “He was killed in the war, Walter. He’s

dead. That’s a plain fact and there’s no use dancing ‘round it. Death is death – it’s too bad, but

there it is.”

James shook his head. “You can be a hard woman, Honora.”

“And you’re a soft man, James Dooley,” she retorted, adjusting her spectacles. “Bad

things happen in life, that’s the way it is…Why my poor friend Brigid and her little Maeve had

to be taken by the Spanish Flu is a mystery only God can fathom. A tragedy, yes, but no use

dwelling on it because it won’t bring ‘em back.”

“But there’s the grievin’, woman.”

Honora pursed her lips. “You’re a professional griever, you are, a first-rate wallower just

like your sister, Mildred – the two of you always livin’ in a dream world, never facing facts…”

“And you, Mother?” Edward cut in. “How’d you manage, not knowing what had become

of me?

“I’ve had my share of loss, boy, God knows.” Concentrating on her needlework, she

continued, “I know what an ordeal it is – I was with Mrs. Haggerty when she learned about her


Darragh, and then the Newmans, and the Rileys, of course. I dreaded the Western Union man, I

can tell you…Thankfully Colm and Walter were out of harm’s way, but as for you, Edward, I

prayed, I prayed mightily. That’s what gave me strength.”

She worked in silence a few minutes and her husband looked over the newspaper. Walter

began describing the picture he’d seen, but Edward only feigned interest as he regarded his

parents, wondering what the future held. So little had changed in the two years he’d been gone.

Colm and Walter had joined their father’s sheet metal business in the years following the

great earthquake and fire, but despite all the new skyscrapers going up they never capitalized on

the boom. Colm was an affable fellow, but he’d gained an unfortunate reputation for

fecklessness that cost the company some long-standing customers; it remained to be seen

whether he could keep the business afloat in the precarious post-war economy. Walter had

always been good with numbers and continued to keep the books, though he’d recently enrolled

in night school at Armstrong Business College by way of hedging his bets.

Edward’s two sisters were opposites as well. Early on, Honora had drafted her eldest

daughter, Katherine, into the role of auxiliary caregiver – first helping with Walter as an infant,

then later with Baby Deirdre, after she’d sustained a head injury in the earthquake. Lately

Katherine and Deirdre had been assigned to care for Aunt Mildred, James’s eldest sister, who’d

come to live with the family as of Christmas 1917, when the bedroom Colm and Edward shared

became available. Now in her late twenties, Katherine had the imperious air of her mother,

which had put off a handful of would-be suitors. By contrast, Deirdre, now nineteen, seemed to

Edward to be developing into a winsome young woman.


“We’ll be going to the nine o’clock mass,” Honora announced as she bundled up her

knitting, “then Katherine’s to get Mildred’s liniment while we look in on Old Man McCormick.”

She glanced at her husband who closed the paper and rose stiffly from his chair. Walter

gathered up the tea service and headed down the hall while Edward pulled apart the pocket doors

that divided the front parlor from the sitting room, his quarters since returning home.

“’Got everything you need, boyo?” James asked.

“I do, Father, thanks.” Retrieving his toiletry kit from a hook on the door connecting the

sitting room to the hall, he followed in his parents’ wake.

“You’ll want to slide the doors tight tonight, Edward,” his mother said ahead of him,

“’There’s no tellin’ when Colm will be gettin’ in…”

Edward stopped outside the water closet. “Night,” he said, as he watched them

disappeared into the gloom of the hallway.

The Dooleys had relocated to this warhorse of a Victorian after the ’06 earthquake,

known as a railroad flat because the rooms were laid out along a narrow hallway like a railcar.

Edward’s parents occupied what originally had been the dining room, the swinging door to the

kitchen blocked off by a wardrobe left behind by the previous tenants. There were three

bedrooms upstairs, one for his sisters, one for his brothers, and the one for Aunt Mildred

overlooking the rear yard. Edward’s least favorite part of the house was the cellar beneath the

kitchen where as a boy he would hide when his parents started bickering.


In an Irish-Catholic household where respectability was prized above all else, Honora’s

dissatisfaction with the circumstances was a constant refrain. By 1913, with the family business

still sagging, she decided their last hope lay with Edward, and late one afternoon, with the girls

gone to the butcher’s, and thinking that the boys were out with their pals, she confronted her

husband with an ultimatum. From the cellar, Edward overheard his father floating the idea of the

family moving into quarters above his sheet metal shop downtown until things picked up, when

the sound of a skillet slamming against the stove nearly caused Edward to cry out.

“Oi! James Dooley, you’re impossible!” his mother roared above him. “You and your

stupid ideas! I’ll not have this family living in squalor South of Market with those bogtrotters

fresh from Cork…I won’t have it!”

“Aw, now look, Honora, it’ll just be temp—”

“Now you listen to me,” she cut in fiercely, “I’m through with yer excuses! There’s

plenty of construction work around but all you ever manage to get is dribs and drabs. We’re so

deep in debt on account a you that you leave us no choice – it’ll have to be up to Edward now.

He’ll quit the Christian Brothers and go find a proper job…”

“But Colm and Walter are still learnin’ the trade…”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen. Colm’s shiftless, a wash-out just like you, always involved in some

scam or other. And as for Walter, he’s too scrawny to be crawlin’ on roofs – the boy might have

a head for figures but what good’s that when yer business is a bust!”

Edward heard his father mumble something about his health.


“Aw, now don’t let’s start with that again,” Honora snapped. “It’s useless dependin’ on

you, what with yer affinity for the bottle…Always a rung above destitution…It’s a disgrace is

what it is. A disgrace!”

After washing up, Edward returned to the sitting room, closed the door to the hallway,

and drew the pocket doors to the front parlor shut. From the closet he pulled out his pajamas, a

sheet, and a pillow and proceeded to make up his bed on the narrow bench seat across from the

old maple secretary. He’d slept on far worse the previous year and now stretched out beneath a

single sheet – after so many bitter cold nights in France and Belgium, he’d been sleeping hot

lately. Cradling the back of his head in his hands, he contemplated the curious array of shadows

on the ceiling, the play of moonlight reflected off the shiplap siding of the light well.

The nightmares had been less frequent since his return, but had not gone away entirely.

They were always distressingly vivid: he could feel the violent impact of the troop train

accident, could see the gruesome battlefields strewn with human flesh, choke on the memory of

the acrid smoke, gag at the thought of the fetid trenches. To defend against these anxieties, he

walked miles every day, hoping that by exhausting himself he could sleep soundly at night.

Only now, as the events of evening ran through his mind his pulse quickened, and

throwing off the sheet, he returned to the bathroom for a drink of water. He looked at himself in

the mirror, wearing the pajamas he’d worn as a teenager, and returned to bed resolved to get his

own place as soon as possible. He forced himself to not think about the ball as he tried to fall


asleep, and his thoughts returned to a recent conversation concerning his parents that he’d had

with his Aunt Hildie.

Her brother, James, had been sponsored from Cincinnati to San Francisco by a man

named McCormick with the promise of construction work; after apprenticing with a Welsh

tinsmith for several years, the man abruptly decided to return to Cardiff, and sold James the

business on favorable terms. By the time he was thirty, his fortunes rising, James sent for his

two sisters, Mildred and Hildie.

Aunt Hildie was no fan of her sister-in-law. The story went that Honora had escaped the

tenements of Boston and come out to San Francisco in ’87 to serve as governess for an up-and-

coming Irish family. James first noticed her at church one Sunday, her faint brogue eliciting a

pang of nostalgia in him even though his own father had thoroughly renounced Ireland. Hildie

once confided to Edward that her brother had been quite a catch – a gifted tenor with a fondness

for romantic poetry – but it wasn’t so much his charm that swept Honora off her feet as the fact

that he was moving up in the world.

Edward had always assumed that Honora’s incessant criticism had driven his father to

drink. Not until he came to know grief of his own in the war was Edward able to conceive how

the bottom might have dropped out for his father well before she started nagging him. It seemed

obvious in retrospect. Over the years, Edward had heard talk in hushed tones about a baby sister,

Mary, who’d come between Walter and him. Only a week ago, however, paying a visit to Aunt

Hildie who was down from the country, did he come to understand the full truth.


He’d always considered his aunt an intelligent, sensible person, but when he joined her in

the sunny drawing room of Old Man McCormick’s sprawling Victorian mansion he was

circumspect. Her hair was more grey than he remembered, and she looked tired.

“Now Edward,” she said, after one of McCormick’s domestic apprentices had delivered

tea, “I’ll not have you walking on eggshells. What happened to poor Patrick has devastated us,

true enough, but this visit is about you, dear boy. I can only imagine what you’ve been through

and I thank the Good Lord that you’ve been safely returned to us.”

Taken aback by her generous spirit, Edward’s eyes welled up immediately. This was the

only time during his homecoming he would be so vulnerable, and he gasped to catch his breath

while she looked at him solicitously. At length, straining to maintain his composure, he could

barely manage a whisper. “It was horrible, Aunt Hildie…just horrible…”

Hildie moved to the edge of her chair and placed her hand on his shoulder. With that he

broke down and sobbed pitiably, his head in his hands. “I know, son…I know,” she said.

When he’d composed himself, he told her how sorry he was for her loss, and seeing this

in his eyes, she lovingly caressed the side of his face before sitting back in her chair.

“It’s your Uncle Aiden I’m worried about, Edward,” she said, taking up her tea and

balancing a shortbread cookie on the edge of the saucer. “He’s been locked a terrible

melancholy these past six months – he and Pat were so much alike, you know…He’s proud of

your cousin Michael, in seminary now and all – and of our Cora and Maggie, too, of course – but

he and Patrick were cut from the same cloth. Patrick loved the land as much as his father.”


She was lost in thought a moment, then said, “They’re that kind, the kind who see life’s

meaning in what they can accomplish with their hands – it’s all about leaving one’s mark, you

see. Your Uncle Aiden has poured his heart and soul into that farm, so now it grieves him to

think that there won’t be another O’Shea to tend it when he’s gone.”

The knot in Edward’s throat had relented and he sipped his tea. “But what about you,

Aunt Hildie? It must be hard on you, too…”

“’Tis,” she allowed, “but I’ll manage.” She raised her index finger to head off any more

consoling. “Now listen, Edward, because there’s something I need to say to you. You’re not

likely to hear it elsewhere and we don’t get to see each other that often.” He suddenly looked

afraid and she laughed. “Don’t worry! I’m not gonna have you blubbering all afternoon,” she

said with a smile, reaching for another cookie. “You were always such a serious one, Edward!”

He smiled with relief but looked puzzled.

“It’s just this, dear boy – God be praised that you’ve come back to us because you’re the

reason your father managed to hold on all those years ago.” Placing a pillow under her arm, she

gazed out to the magnolia in the garden as she spoke. “He was never the same man after Little

Mary passed, bless her soul. There was a rumor at the time – more fiction than fact, I’d say –

that he’d brought a cold into the house and therefore was the one responsible.” She glanced at

Edward. “Mind you, I know the ordeal was terrible for your mother, especially with three little

ones to look after, but then,” returning her attention to the tree, “she was never one to dwell on

emotions, and she never did much to lay that nasty rumor to rest.”


Aunt Hildie went on to explain that Honora’s announcement six months after the tragedy

that she was pregnant again – this time with Edward – did little to console James. By this point

he’d lost two key business accounts to apathy, and within a year the family was forced to

downsize from a rambling Victorian on Harrison Street to a modest York Street rental.

“When you first arrived, Edward, before the move, he was still in a fog, barely putting

one foot in front of the other.” She raised her eyebrows, and said with a sigh, “But then God

never gives us more than we can handle…” After recounting the familiar story about how

strangely self-sufficient Edward seemed from the moment he came into the world, she said,

“Your father told me years later it was only after taking over your nighttime feedings that he

managed to turn the corner. He told me,” Aunt Hildie looked Edward straight in the eye, “that

holding you for hours caused his sadness to lift, so consoled was he by your contentment.”

“Consoled by your contentment.” The words echoed in Edward’s head as he lay there,

disoriented, not sure if he’d been in bed ten minutes or an hour. Anxious at the prospect of

another fitful night’s sleep, questions began nagging him:

How can I ever get a place of my own when I’ve got to support the family?

Why can’t Constance see that rushing into marriage would be a disaster?

Will I ever be able put the war behind me when there are men like Fitz around?

Scratching sounds at the front door startled him and he propped himself up on his elbows.

Tilting his head, he tried to make sense of the noise, and when he recognized it as Colm’s clumsy


attempts to enter the flat, he exhaled in exasperation. He listened as his brother finally got in and

pushed the heavy door closed, knocking into the side table in the process.

“Easy there, big fella!” Colm said in full voice. Having evidently caught the porcelain

lamp in time, he snickered with relief.

Edward followed the sound of his brother shuffling to the staircase, but when he stopped

short and seemed to turn, Edward winced and fell back on the cushions of the bench seat. He

shut his eyes tight, desperately hoping Colm wouldn’t barge into the sitting room looking to chat.

He just wanted to be left alone, and when after what seemed like an eternity he heard the sound

of Colm climbing the stairs, he opened his eyes again, surprised to find them wet with tears.

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Chapter 2€¦ · Web view“So, you’ll be looking in on her tomorrow, then?” Edward nodded. “And you picked up your new trousers today? You’ll want to look your best Monday