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A TIME OF MORNING

by

by Tom Durkin

 

As he sat silently at the funeral home that first evening, Brian Dineen just stared at the body of Kitty Hanson lying in the dark mahogany coffin. She would have been 86 on her next birthday, Brian thought, but she never did have time to grow old. Kitty often said to Brian that she would like “to go quietly in her sleep when God was finished with her here on earth.” The remembrance of her saying that ran through his head as he fought the tears that were seeking expression. She never wanted her death to be a soppy, emotional event

“Save your emotions for things that are really important, Brian Og,” she often told him. “Your emotions are a gift for zesting life, for wringing from it every drop of vitality you can in the time you are allowed. They are far too precious and personal a treasure,” she insisted, “to be squandered mourning a death.” Brian’s tears came anyway.

As he stared at the lifeless remains of his great aunt, he couldn’t remember when he first became aware of Kitty Hanlon in his life. He also couldn’t remember a time in his life when she wasn’t there.

Her smile, a smile that would brighten any room for Brian when it floated through the door, was now reduced to a standard facial expression by someone at the mortuary who probably placed that same lifeless mask on hundreds of other faces in the past. The soft, baby blue eyes Brian had watched become rheumy over the years, which brought that smile to life, were closed now, their sparkle and warmth sealed forever, Brian wanted to believe, within a distant spirit, at peace and beyond time. The wispy straw blond hair, curled so carefully and patiently each evening before her bedtime, was now drawn back behind her ears;– ears, he fondly remembered, that were always there for him when someone to listen to him was his most pressing need. Her hands, folded restfully across her chest and intertwined with her dark rosewood rosary, now almost worn out from years of daily use, looked strange without the lighted Herbert Tareyton she wielded as deftly in conversation as Toscanini would the baton.

Brian’s father, Martin, his sisters and his aunt Nora left early to return to the Dineen apartment and to prepare for the mourners who would come back to the house after the wake. It was not unusual to have as many people call at the house as had come to the wake, and more often than not, it was the same people.

Brian and his mother, Grace, remained until the funeral parlor closed and then walked the four blocks down along Broadway and two blocks left on Academy Street to where they lived.

“I never know what to say at a time like this, to put into words what I really feel,” Brian said, as he and his mother walked.

“I miss Kitty something awful, but I can’t get it into my head yet that she’s gone.

“Worse, still,” he added as though his mother were listening to what he was saying, “it’s hard to believe that I’ll never see her again.”

Grace, caught in a distraction of her own, linked her son by the right arm and leaned on him gently as they walked.

“I know you’ll miss her, Brian,” Grace said, when she finally became aware that her son was speaking to her. There was a gentleness in her voice Brian remembered warmly from his childhood. “We’ll all miss her,” she added, “and we’ll never meet another like her.”

As they walked, Grace again began to retell Brian the story of how Kitty, her mother’s oldest sister, brought Grace and her three sisters to America in the early 1920′s.

“It was clear,” she said, “even then, in the new Irish Free State, there was little that a woman could aspire to beyond marrying–if she was fortunate enough–‘the farming son of a farming father,’ and raising a family of her own.”

Grace continued the story as though her son had never heard how Kitty provided safe haven for several young Irish refugees who participated in the Easter Week Rebellion in 1916, or later young men who were on the run after fighting the Black and Tans. And how, at a party for the four Keenan sisters at Kitty’s apartment on Riverside Drive, Grace Keenan met young Martin Dineen, a handsome young rebel who had a price on his head of 2500 British pounds–“a fortune at the time.”

Brian could recite this story by heart, but he would not interrupt his mother. He could listen to the story a hundred times and it would still move his soul. He thought it wonderfully romantic, the way his mother and father met and married, and how truly rich a heritage they both provided for him and his sisters.

And he knew enough not to remind his mother that the first time she told him the story, more than fifteen years before, the price on his father’s head was only 1500 pounds.

When they arrived home, Brian and Grace heard the noises coming from the third floor apartment as they entered the building. One sound blended with the next and became blurred as the commixture carried through the soft dampness of the warm July evening air. Yet, they could make out the tenor of Grace’s cousin, Michael Hayes, singing Percy French’s Come Back, Paddy Reilly, to Ballyjamesduff.

“I suppose I’ll be hearing about this tomorrow from Mrs. Eberhardt,” Brian heard his mother remark with a sigh as they entered the lobby and walked up the stairs. “She always sleeps with her windows open in the summer and I’m sure this will keep her awake.”

Martin poured drinks and served them to the thirty or so relatives and friends crowded into the dining room and living room. The older group seemed to favor the living room where they could sit and listen, or could join Michael Hayes as he sang. The younger group, mostly women, sat around the dining room table, smoking and sipping highballs or cups of tea, talking about matters of more current interest to them. Grace moved between the two rooms, speaking with her guests, and Brian joined his father in the kitchen to be of what help he could.

When most of the work was done, Brian joined the group in the living room where the singing became interwoven with story telling as the evening progressed. As Brian entered, Mattie Hyland was finishing another story Brian heard many times.

Mattie Hyland, who boarded with Kitty and her late husband Tom Hanlon, before she married and set up her own apartment, told about Kitty’s work in the political campaigns of the Governor Al Smith.

“She helped build support for Smith on New York’s West Side long before Governor Smith’s tried to become the country’s first Catholic president.

“She always had the ear of the Governor,” Mattie said, “and she was able to find work for her friends with a phone call to Albany or to the Governor’s New York City office even after he stepped down.”

Listening to this story inspired Marge Gilligan, whose mother, Maeve, now long gone, was a contemporary of Kitty’s, to tell of her mother’s and Kitty’s work with the Tammany Hall Democratic Club shortly after the turn of the century.

“The two of them would dress like men on election day and would go around to ten or fifteen polling places along the West Side and vote the Democratic slate at each stop,” Maeve reported, “to see how many times they could get away with it.

“And they got paid for every vote they cast. I remember my mother always saying Kitty was the first woman ever to vote in this country.”

The Kitty stories continued into the night with one person after the other attempting to come up with a tale the others may not have heard before. The stories were of a Kitty Brian knew only by reputation — the young immigrant looking for her first job, the days with Mayor Jimmy Walker, the Christmas eve Legs Diamond got killed and how Kitty’s friend Gene McHugh, then little more than a cub reporter, got out the story in the early edition of The New York Daily News almost single-handedly.

Brian listened to each story as if it was being told solely for his benefit and he regretted in a way he had no stories of his own to tell in return. But then, he thought, his relationship with Kitty was not the kind that gave rise to stories to be told for the entertainment of others. And that, he would never regret. The story telling was interrupted only long enough to refill a drink or a cup, or while some of the old songs were sung.

Shortly after one o’clock, the door bell rang, and Grace answered it. It was Mrs. Eberhardt.

 

Brian and his father ate supper Thursday night at O’Brien’s Steak House across Broadway from the funeral home with relatives from the Hamptons on Long Island, and a couple from Philadelphia who boarded with Kitty when they first arrived from Ireland in the late 1920′s. Grace told Martin and Brian she would stay at O’Connell’s to meet the callers who might come while he and the others were eating, and would have supper later with her daughters and Nora when the men returned.

O’Brien’s, was probably the best restaurant in the Inwood area for steaks and chops, and since it was directly across from O’Connell’s, it drew a steady trade of hungry and thirsty mourners from the funeral home

If it were not for the wakes and the weddings, Brian thought, he would seldom get to meet many members of his family and he would never know what they were doing. Occasionally, Brian met a relative he had not seen before, someone away at school, perhaps, or in the service at the time of an earlier get-together. Once, it was a cousin who spent the previous ten years in jail.

When they returned to O’Connell’s, Brian took a seat at the rear of the parlor while Martin stayed close to the prie dieu to meet the visitors. The friends and neighbors who stopped in on their way home from work while the men ate, had thinned out and the crowd wouldn’t start building up again until about eight o’clock, an hour or so before closing. From where he sat Brian could just about see his great aunt’s forehead protruding at a slight angle above the puffed white satin lining of the coffin.

When he was very young, Brian remembered, Kitty lived about two miles north of the Dineens at 135th Street and Riverside Drive, in what he always thought the most elegant apartment house imaginable. Brian and his sisters enjoyed their visits to Kitty’s house with their parents. In the spring and summer it meant a ride on the double-decker Fifth Avenue bus from Riverside Church, past Grant’s Tomb, the International House and the Claremont Inn, and then over the viaduct connecting Morningside Heights to Vinegar Hill. From the front seat on the upper deck, Brian could see north past the George Washington Bridge almost as far as the Yonkers Ferry on a clear day, and as far south as what his father said was Jersey City. Looking out over the Hudson River, he could watch the ferry boats, loaded with passengers and cars, plowing steadily across from the 125th Street landing to the ferry slip in Edgewater, New Jersey.

As the bus passed 133rd Street and he could smell the chlorine from Cascades Pool on the right, he knew it was time to rejoin his parents on the lower deck because the next stop would be Kitty’s house.

In the fall and winter, the Dineens walked to the subway station at 116th Street and Broadway rather than endure the icy winds that whipped around the bus stop on Riverside Drive. They took the Van Courtland Park train two stations north to 137th Street and then walked the three long city blocks south and west toward the river, usually against a cold, howling wind.

The entrance to the apartment building where Kitty lived was attended by a uniformed doorman, Patrick was his name, who smiled and tipped his hat to the Dineens when they arrived. Brian’s father always returned the courtesy tipping his hat and saying, “Mrs. Hanlon is expecting us.”

The spacious marble lobby of the building, with its high gilded ceiling and leaded windows draped in green velvet, was furnished with luxurious period couches and chairs, carefully placed on several oriental rugs. It was illuminated with floor standing electric lamps, casting a golden aura over the entirety. Large framed oil paintings of castles and sailing ships and someone who looked like Zachary Taylor commanded the walls. It was the most luxurious setting Brian could remember from his youth.

The family waited while Patrick signaled for the other uniformed man who operated the elevator cage to carry them aloft to the building’s sixth floor vestibule, which Kitty shared with two other tenants.

Brian enjoyed these visits to his great aunt’s apartment because she always made tea and served pie or cake to her guests. Brian smiled as he thought his early attraction to Kitty might have been because of the cake, a luxury his mother couldn’t bake and wouldn’t buy. His mind drifted to memories of the many subway trips he and his sisters made with Kitty and his mother after mass on Sundays to Calvary Cemetery in Queens, “to visit the graves”, as the trips were called. They would be treated to Sabrett hot dogs on rolls with mustard and sauerkraut from the pushcart at the main gate to the cemetery before they started the subway trip home. Brian found amusing the number of other things he could recall being trained to do without complaining as the result of similar rewards.

But even without the tea and cake, Brian knew, he would have been attracted to Kitty. The one time he ran away from home, the summer he turned eleven years old, he headed straight to her apartment. Brian remembered walking over the long viaduct for the first time by himself and camping out in Patrick’s package room off the lobby until Kitty came home from work. She listened to his complaints about having to stay in the house for a week because he skipped altarboy duty at the Monday afternoon novena to play stickball on 120th Street. Kitty cooked supper for both of them and assured him everything would be all right. When she deemed it time for Brian to return home, Kitty gave him two nickels. One for subway fare back to 116th Street, the other to give to his mother to call her when he got home.

Brian walked home that evening and spending his nickel for candy the next day. But he gave his mother the other nickel and Kitty’s message as soon as he walked in the door. Grace called her aunt from the pay phone at Bernstein’s Drug Store, and Brian’s restriction was lifted in exchange for his promise not skip his altarboy duties again.

That must have been ten or eleven years ago, he said to himself. Brian even remembered Kitty’s old telephone number, Edgecombe 4-6494. The telephone company changed the number at the end of the war when the demand for telephones overwhelmed the Edgecombe exchange, but the number, like his image of the woman it denoted, was burned deeply into Brian’s memory.

Brian’s reverie was interrupted when his sister, Marie and an attractive young woman walked to the rear of the parlor where he was sitting.

“Wake up Brian. There is someone I want you to meet.” Then turning to her companion she said “Caitlin, I’d like you to meet my brother, Brian,” as she introduced the young woman.

“Brian, this is Caitlin McLoughlin.

“Caitlin arrived from Ireland two weeks ago,” Marie said, “and will be starting college at Marymount in Tarrytown in the fall.

“She’s the granddaughter of Rita Scanlon, one of Kitty’s oldest friends in Ireland and came in from Long Island with her aunt today when she heard about Kitty.”

Caitlin was slightly taller than Marie, about five feet seven, though just as slender and shapely. Her rich, dark hair reached almost to her shoulders and then curled under, just above the collar of her light tan summer blazer, giving her hair a gentle fullness, like the hair of those models who swing their heads in slow motion on television commercials. Her dark, friendly eyes and delicate lips, which seemed to glow on their own with no need of makeup, made the soft, healthy whiteness of her skin appear more intense to Brian, even in the pallored lighting of the funeral home.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Caitlin,” Brian stammered, as he reached for the young lady’s hand. Before he could think of something more eloquent to add to his bumbling comment, Marie excused Caitlin and herself saying there were others in the family Caitlin wanted to meet before the funeral parlor closed.

Brian smiled and removed his hand from Caitlin’s. While the two young women worked their way toward the front of the funeral parlor, clever lines began to take form in Brian’s mind. “Too late now,” he thought, “too late.”

 

The solemn high funeral mass on Friday morning was well attended by friends and neighbors and the seemingly endless stream of relatives, several of whom arrived only hours before from Canada. As he walked to the front of the church to take a seat in the second pew with his sisters and cousins, Brian saw Caitlin sitting in the sixth pew. In the well-lighted church, Caitlin was even more lovely than she appeared the evening before at the funeral home, Brian thought. Their eyes made the briefest contact as Brian passed her pew but, he was sure, he could detect the start of an acknowledging smile. That thought proved a welcome and an enjoyable distraction for Brian for the remainder of the most solemn and somber Latin liturgy for his great aunt.

After the burial at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, Mr.O’Connell announced that the mourners were invited to return to the Dineen’s house. Grace and Nora prepared a lunch of tuna fish salad and cheese, since it was Friday and no meat could be taken, and some potato salad and coleslaw. Martin replenished the supply of beer and whisky, knowing friends would be dropping by to express their sympathies to the family whether invited back or not. O’Connell’s announcement simply made it official.

Brian had no idea how or when the tradition of returning to the home of the deceased’s family after the burial began, but among the Irish in New York it was the proper thing to do.

“At the funeral parlor, callers show their respect for the deceased,” Grace explained to Brian at an earlier funeral, “when they come to the house, they show their support of the family at the loss of a dear member.”

The returning signaled that the public aspect of mourning was over for most part, and the ordinary concerns of daily living were to be resumed. It was the final occasion at which the dark, usually black, clothing would be worn by all but the closest relatives of the deceased. That few, like Brian’s mother and Aunt Nora, would continue wearing the black dresses and stockings and the black hats with veils in public for at least another year until the first anniversary mass for the dead was celebrated. Widowers, fathers and grieving sons normally exchanged their dark colored suits after this phase of the mourning for a simple black armband worn on the left sleeve of the suit or sports jacket. But even that custom was being observed more rarely now as the immigrant community became more Americanized.

By mid-afternoon most of the friends and relatives paid their respects to the family and went on about their lives, but the Dineen home was still full of people. Brian and his father continued their duties slaking the thirsts of the guests, while Grace, Nora and Brian’s sisters shuttled platters of food to those in the living room and the dining room.

Caitlin came back to the house with Marie and was sitting with a group of younger women in the dining room, listening, but adding little to the conversation. To Brian she appeared shy and withdrawn among the other young women. Both times that afternoon when Brian offered Caitlin something to drink, she declined politely.

As the guests left and the reception was winding down, Marie called Brian aside. “I hate to ask a favor of you but would you mind driving Caitlin to her aunt’s home in Garden City?” she asked “Her aunt had to leave after mass this morning and Caitlin doesn’t know the subways and trains yet. There’s no one else is going out to Long Island this afternoon and besides, you’re the only one with a car.”

Brian told Marie he would be happy to drive Caitlin home.

“I really appreciate your doing it for me, Brian, it’ll be a big load off my mind. I was supposed to take Caitlin home myself but I don’t know when we’ll be finishing up here.” Marie said.

“Caitlin is expected for dinner at her aunt’s house, so you probably should leave right away, she added.”

Caitlin was quiet and seemed reluctant to speak as they drove down the Harlem River Drive and then across the Triborough Bridge. To get a conversation started, Brian pointed out several landmarks he thought might be of interest to her and after a while, Caitlin became more responsive to his prompts. By the time they were nearing Garden City both were engaged in full-blown conversation, finding out, in the process, that they shared several common interests and tastes.

When they arrived, Brian got out of the car and came around to the passenger’s side to open the door for Caitlin.

“Thank you for driving me home, Brian,” Caitlin said as she got out of the car and Brian and she walked to the front door of her aunt’s home. “I could never have found the way by myself on the trains, at least not yet, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness in taking the time to do this.”

“I was glad to drive you home,” Brian said, far more relaxed in speaking to Caitlin than he was the previous evening when they met.

“I was curious about where you lived and now that I know, can I ask if you would like to go out on a date with me next week?” he asked.

“I was hoping you would ask,” she said, “and I would really like to get to know you. Marie had nothing but good things to say about you and besides, I think you’re cute.

“One thing though, Brian,” she said as he was about to leave, “please call me Kate. It’s the name I grew up with and the name all my friends at home call me.

“Caitlin is my christening name, and the name my mother thought I should use coming to America, but I find it a bit stuffy and almost as uncomfortable as these high heel shoes I’ve been wearing all day.”

“Kate,” Brian said repeating the name. “Now there’s a name I’ll find easy to remember. Besides, I’ve always liked that name.”

 

THE END