Daddy's Gone a Hunting

88

Nick Greco did not realize when he began his research into the Connelly family on Thursday afternoon that he would find reams of material on Dennis Francis Connelly, the brilliant, powerful, and eccentric grandfather of Kate and Hannah Connelly.

Dozens of articles had been written about him. Many of them began by chronicling his humble beginnings in Dublin, where Dennis had been a street urchin who was arrested several times for stealing. Then, after finally staying in school long enough to finish the eighth grade at age sixteen, he completed high school in only two years, won a scholarship to Trinity College, and graduated summa cum laude in less than three years.

The pictures of him as a teenager and in his early twenties captured a thin, somewhat tall figure, unsmiling, and with eyes that seemed to look at the world with angry resentment.

And if he felt resentment, he had a right to feel it, Greco thought as he read that Connelly’s father and uncle, who were twins, had died when they were only twenty-six years old, burned to death when they were trapped in a raging fire that swept through the dismal factory where they both worked seven days a week.

The twenty-four-year-old mother of Dennis had been six months pregnant when his father died. Three months later she gave birth to twin boys, so small and already malnourished that they survived only a few days. Then, at age seven, Dennis had begun to try to support his fragile and heartbroken mother with a combination of begging and working odd jobs. And sometimes by stealing.

When he was ten, a kindly old woman, who could not live alone, had hired his mother as a housekeeper. Giving both of them a home, she soon recognized how smart he was and persuaded Dennis to go back to school.

He was an angry and proud man, Greco thought as he skimmed through the rest of the articles about the early life of the founder of the Connelly complex.

He quickly read through the accounts of Dennis sailing to the United States, getting a job on Wall Street, and beginning to amass his fortune.

At that point in his research, Nick turned off his computer and took his regular train home. On Friday morning he was back at his desk by eight o’clock and resumed his Internet research.

His interest deepened when he read that Connelly had finally married at age fifty-five because, as he had put it, “a man wants to know that his descendants will enjoy the fruits of his labor.”

Not the best or most romantic reason to marry, Greco thought as he studied the formal wedding picture of Dennis Connelly and his timid-looking, thirty-five-year-old bride, Bridget O’Connor.

According to the New York Times birth announcement, their son Douglas was born on December 31st of that year. A year later, their son Connor’s first birthday was celebrated in January at their Manhattan townhouse.

What’s that about? Nick asked himself. A year later Douglas would have had a first birthday, too. Was Connor adopted? The answer came when Nick read an article in a small religious magazine in which Dennis Connelly had bared his soul to a sympathetic priest. He had shared with him that his sons were really identical twins, one born on December 31, the other four minutes later, on January 1 of the following year.

He related that he had lived in constant fear of what he regarded to be the family curse, as he put it, that had begun when his father and his father’s twin had perished in a factory fire, and then his own twin brothers had died at birth. “My mother never had enough to eat when she was pregnant with them,” Dennis Connelly had told the priest.

Then he admitted that because his twin sons were actually born in two different years, he had hoped to avoid the curse that had befallen his father, his uncle, and his siblings. He explained that he never referred to them as twins, nor had he allowed anyone else to do so. “They never wore matching outfits. We never celebrated their birthdays together. And they always went to different schools.”

It was clear to Nick Greco from everything he had read about the life of Dennis Connelly that his early traumatic losses had profoundly affected the way he raised his sons. He wanted them to be competitive on every level. He wanted them to be strong. He wanted them to play football on varsity teams at separate colleges. If they were injured, they were expected to play through the pain and recover quickly. Even when they were small children, he had no sympathy if they complained of any ailment. If they fell off their bikes, he made them get right back on.

In an interview when Dennis’s son Douglas was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from Brown University with both academic and athletic honors, Douglas had been asked, “Do you feel that you have had a privileged life?”

“Yes and no,” he had answered. “I know that by almost any standard, I would be considered privileged. On the other hand, I remember reading that the son of President Calvin Coolidge had a miserable job one summer and his friend asked him why he would take it when his father was president of the United States. His answer was, ‘If your father was my father, you’d have taken that job, too. My father thinks the same way. He has never cut us any slack.’”

Greco leaned back in his chair for a long minute, struck with the realization that he had broken through. The background is the answer, he thought. The background has always been the answer.

To verify what he now believed he knew, Greco returned to his computer search to see if he could find any coverage of the funeral of Connor and Susan Connelly.