Daddy's Gone a Hunting

56

On Tuesday evening, Father Dan Martin picked up his former pastor, eighty-seven-year-old Father Michael Ferris, at the Jesuit retirement home in Riverdale, the upper west section of the Bronx. He had offered Father Ferris his choice of places to dine, knowing full well that he would elect to go to Neary’s restaurant, the iconic Irish pub on East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan.

Opened on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, more than forty-five years ago, it had been Father Mike’s favorite dining place when he was pastor of St. Ignatius Loyola and he still loved to go there.

Father Dan had made an eight o’clock reservation and at eight ten they were settled at their table, enjoying a cocktail.

Father Mike was the first one to refer to what was happening to the Connellys. “I knew them all,” he said. “Old Dennis and his wife, Bridget. They were parishioners. Then Douglas and Susan were married at St. Ignatius and moved into an apartment just off Fifth Avenue. Doug still lives there.”

It was exactly the subject that Father Dan Martin wanted to discuss. He had deliberately not brought it up at first but now the subject was on the table. “If you remember, I was helping out at St. Ignatius at the time of the accident. I was on the altar at the funeral mass. I phoned Douglas the next day. I’d just been ordained. I wanted to help him if that was possible.”

“I don’t think any of us could have helped him much. He was crazy about Susan. I never saw a couple more in love. And I know he was crushed with guilt about losing not only her, but his brother and four close friends. He was at the helm of the boat but the investigation showed it just plain wasn’t his fault. There was no carelessness and certainly no drinking involved. When they would go on a tuna fishing expedition at night, they never had liquor on the boat.”

Liz, a waitress who had worked at Neary’s since the day it opened, was standing at the table. “Let me guess,” she said. “Father Mike, you’ll have the Irish salmon appetizer, and the corned beef and cabbage.”

“Right you are, Liz,” Father Mike confirmed.

“Father Dan, you’ll have the shrimp cocktail and salmon as a main course.”

“I didn’t know I was so predictable, but there you are.” Father Martin then smiled and resumed the conversation with his former pastor. “Mike, we’ve both seen a lot of heartbreak in our day but seeing Douglas Connelly at the funeral of his wife and brother and holding three-year-old Kate’s hand has never left me. When I visited him at home afterward, it was like talking to someone who was walking in his sleep.”

“I agree. He was riddled with guilt but, on the other hand, so is anyone who survives a tragedy that kills someone they love. In this case, it was two people he loved and four close friends. They had radar on the boat but that was nearly thirty years ago. You would think that leaving a Brooklyn pier at eleven at night, you would have the Atlantic Ocean to yourself, but there was plenty of traffic on it. As you know, they were planning to arrive at the tuna feeding grounds at daybreak, a distance of about seventy miles away.”

Father Ferris paused to butter a salted roll, took a bite, and shook his head. “Doug could see the tugboat and they had plenty of room between it and their boat. But what he didn’t see, and didn’t notice on the radar, was that it was towing a barge. The chains were so long and the night so dark that when Doug, at a safe distance, steered his boat behind the tugboat, the chain literally cut the bottom out of their boat. A life jacket and life raft were stored near the helm. He managed to throw the raft overboard and pull on the life jacket. The others were in the cabin and never had a chance because it sank so quickly.”

“No one on the tugboat realized what had happened,” Dan Martin remembered.

“No. Tugboats didn’t carry much of a crew and, at that hour, who knows who was awake? Of course the next day, after no one could get them on the ship’s radio, a search-and-rescue crew went out and found Doug, half dead, lying on the raft. He had been slammed by some of the debris and had deep cuts and bruises from his skull down to his feet. He was in the hospital for three weeks. The bodies of all the others were found, and they delayed the funeral of Susan and Connor until Doug could attend. It’s incredible that now his daughter is suffering from a brain injury because that’s what happened to him. He had memory lapses and times when he referred to Susan as though she were in the apartment. He was never the same after that-at least while I knew him.”

The old priest looked past his companion and sighed. “Old Dennis Francis Connelly used to come here regularly. What a character he was.”

“He was before my time at St. Ignatius.”

“Maybe you were lucky. He was the crabbiest, most superstitious, stiff-necked old Irishman I ever had the hard luck to meet. His background was interesting. He was a street kid from Dublin with a good brain. He was smart enough to know that he needed an education and managed to get a scholarship to Trinity College. As soon as he graduated, he sailed for the United States and got a job as a messenger at the stock exchange. At twenty-two years of age, he had already figured out that was the place to learn how to make money and he sure did.”

The appetizers arrived. Michael Ferris looked around the dining room as he picked up his fork. “I remember when Hugh Carey was governor. He was here a lot. He said that the good Lord had changed water into wine but that Jimmy Neary had reversed the process. Jimmy loved that line and always quotes it.”

“I never heard that one,” Dan Martin said. “But I like it, too.”

“So Dennis got rich but it was always under his skin that he didn’t come from the kind of family that lived in a castle and rode to hounds. His solution was to create his own background. He made a ton of money, sold his investment company, and opened the Connelly Fine Antique Reproductions firm. That museum was his castle and he loved to show people the antiques in it. He knew the history of every piece of furniture, and let me tell you, before you finished the tour, you knew it, too.”

“I read that he didn’t marry until he was in his fifties.”

“Fifty-five, I think. Bridget O’Connor was twenty years younger. Then the two boys were born.”

“They were a year apart, weren’t they?”

“Try four minutes apart. Douglas was born one minute before midnight, on December thirty-first, Connor three minutes after midnight on January first. They hadn’t expected twins and for Dennis it was a terrible worry. Two generations of twins in his family had died violently and he was sure that his own sons would be cursed. He always referred to them as brothers, even though as I understood it, they were identical. Bridget was forbidden to call them twins. Even as babies, they were always dressed in different clothing and had different kinds of haircuts. If Douglas had bangs, Connor had a crew cut. As they got older, Dennis would tell people who didn’t know the family well that his sons were a year apart. They attended different schools from kindergarten through college, but even with all that, they were very close.

Jimmy Neary stopped at the table. “How’s everything so far?” he asked.

“Great,” they said in unison. “Jimmy, I was just talking about Dennis Francis Connelly,” Father Mike said. “You knew him well.”

“Saints preserve us. He could always find something that wasn’t hot enough or cold enough, God rest him,” Jimmy said. “I’m glad that neither he nor Bridget lived to see one of their sons dead and now one of his granddaughters fighting for her life, and that business he was so proud of destroyed.”

“I agree,” Father Mike said.

Liz cleared their appetizer plates. Both priests decided on a glass of chardonnay.

Father Dan said, “Mike, I brought up the Connellys because, after I read about the accident, I decided to visit Kate Connelly in the hospital. I saw her there this morning and met Hannah. Kate had been running a fever. If it had been caused by a serious infection, the fever could have been fatal but, thank God, it had just broken. I told Hannah that, nearly thirty years ago, I had contacted her father after the boating accident. I thought at that time that maybe I could be of help to him.”

“I did, too, back then,” Father Mike replied. “But he made it clear that he didn’t need any help from me and he didn’t need any help from the God who took his wife, his brother, and his friends. When I saw him, it was just a week after the funeral. He had broken his hand and was in terrible pain. The doctor had insisted that he have a nurse with him. I think they were afraid that he was suicidal. He broke his hand by punching the mirror over Susan’s dressing table.”

Michael Ferris, S.J., observed, “I just hope that the curse his father worried about doesn’t land on him. Maybe we should be grateful that Kate and Hannah aren’t twins.”