The first I remember of my father was when he took me down to North Avenue one day and held my hand while we walked along, and I chirped it was easy to tell how tall I was, as I was exactly half as tall as he was. He said it was easy now, but the question was: Would I stay that way? I think it was my first encounter with the idea I was growing and next year might not be the same size as I was then. We were on our way to his garage. He hadn’t started out to be a garage man but became one by accident. Around 1908 he bought a car. He was driving it along, and pulled out for a traction engine and wound up in the ditch. He swore, though he’s never convinced me, that the steering gear was defective, and sued. So the company made propositions, but as they didn’t have much, he settled for an agency, selling the car. Later, he said he wanted something on paper, a commitment he could put a price on when they’d be in shape to buy him out, and never expected to peddle the things because it was a cross between enlarging pictures and insurance. But when I came along in 1910 he was making more money from cars then five lawyers were making from clients, because the car became a very celebrated one, even though it was cheap, that you’d know if I chose to name it.
So a lawyer that was doing fair turned into a mechanic that was doing terrific. If you asked me, it made his life bitter. To an American, a business is a life. To an Irishman, especially one with a university education, it’s not, because there’s no such intellectual snob. I’ve heard him prove it a thousand times, that the automobile has done more for man than anything since Moses. Law, he said, makes property, steam makes power, but petroleum makes light, and the great light lit up when they put the stuff on wheels, so the lowliest “wight” could drive out of his village and see what the wide world looked like. I’ve seen him take a ball bearing from his pocket and orate on its being the finest jewel ever made. And yet, in their shelves around his study, I think those books, row on row of them in leather bindings, looked down to mock him. When he closed them something went out of his life, and money didn’t take its place. And there may have been a family angle too. His mother, as I piece it together, never liked that title, “stationary engineer,” that was worn by my grandfather. The automobile agency was not quite the same as superintendent of a powerhouse, but it was like it, and I imagine he wondered what she would have thought of it.
My mother I saw once, to know it. She was born in Baltimore, but she and my father didn’t meet for some years after he got here. Then at a Christmas party, when she was home from school, they danced together, and before New Year’s got married, in Elkton, after running away. She was sixteen, he twenty-eight. You’d think they were the right age to be happy, and that they’d got started the right way. But his hair had started to gray, and from things I’ve heard from Nancy and Sheila and others, he got the idea the difference in their ages was an Irish Sea between them. And then he began figuring she moved in a world of kids that thought he was funny. Three years after I was born in 1910, a rich boy came down from Philly. It was over him they had the bust-up, and it was on account of him, or what the Old Man got in his head about him, that it was put in the settlement he should keep me. But I’ll go to my grave believing it was all his imagination, and I’ve got my reasons for thinking he went to his grave believing so too. The bust-up knocked him galley-west, and he never remarried. He and she had set up shop in Roland Park, with Nancy and Sheila staying in the Walbrook house. But after she left he sold both houses, and he and his sisters moved to the house on Mt. Royal Terrace, and they even started going to a different church, which I’ll call St. Anne’s. So far as they were concerned there had never been a Louise Thorne, and I was a boy that had really been brought by a stork, and had a father and aunts but no mother.
All that, though, was before I was four years old, and I had no memory of what she looked like, and no pictures of her were around. All I knew about her was from a little trunk I found in the attic, that I doubt if the Old Man or my aunts even knew about. It had in it some of her clothes, especially a dark-blue velvet dress I loved to touch, and a black leather case with a nail file in it, a buffer, an orange stick, a powder box, a fluffy puff, and a little bottle of perfume with a glass stopper. By the time I was ten I must have smelled that perfume a thousand times, and when something had gone wrong, I’d go up there in the attic, open the trunk, touch the velvet dress, and smell the perfume. Well, came the time when I was the wonder child of Baltimore, the sweet singer of Mt. Royal Terrace, the minstrel boy of Maryland, with the church full whenever I sang, pieces about me in the papers all the time, and money rolling in, specially those twenties for Abide with Me at funerals, very joyous occasions in the life of a cute boy singer. And one morning we hadn’t even finished the first hymn, when I noticed this number on the aisle in the second pew, that was alone, and seemed most interested in me. By that time, though I was only thirteen, I’d had plenty of admiration from the female sex, partly from how I sounded, but partly from how I looked, with my big blue eyes and bright gold hair, in my little white surplice. But if you think I had got bored with it in any way, you’ve formed a false impression of my character. And if she looked older than I was, I had already found out even if they were older, the pretty ones could be awful sweet. She was plenty pretty. Her hair was gold, but the light from the Resurrection, streaming in through the stained glass window behind her, turned it red. Her eyes, though, were blue, and they stared straight at me.
So when we got to the offertory and I started the Schubert Ave Maria, I gave out with plenty, and beamed it right at her. After about three bars of it she looked away quick, and then back at me again, and I knew she’d got it, I was singing to her. When I finished and sat down, our eyes crossed and she nodded and this beautiful smile crept over her face, and for the first time I began to wonder if there was something about her that was more than a pretty girl that had liked how I sang. I was still crossed up when we started out, and she put out her hand as I went by, and gave me a little pat. We robed in the basement, not because there wasn’t plenty of room in the vestry, but so we could file out through the church, singing a recessional a cappella, and our voices would die away in the distance as we went down the stairs.
I had already passed her when it hit me, the perfume she had on, and I knew who she was. I wanted to turn around and speak to her, but I was afraid. I was afraid I’d cry. So I kept on, one step at a time, just like the rest, and hoped nobody would notice that I wasn’t singing any more. We got back to the basement at last, and I tore off the robes and ran back upstairs. People were all over the place, in the vestibule and outside, just leaving, some of them talking with Dr. Grant, the rector. She wasn’t there. It was part of the deal, I know now, that she would never visit me, and the way I dope it out, somebody had tipped her that my aunts and the Old Man were on one of their trips to New York, with me left behind with some friends, so she could see me without anybody knowing who she was, and hear me. But I hadn’t doped out anything then. All I knew was she was beautiful, and my mother, and I wanted to touch her, the way she had touched me. And when I couldn’t find her I went down to the basement again and cracked up, but good. The organist was a young guy named Anderson, that could play all right but thought he was a wonderful cut-up. He winked at the other boys, and began to whistle A Furtive Tear, from The Elixir of Love, or Una Furtiva Lagrima, as I sang it, in Italian. I almost killed that organist. I beat him up so bad even the boys got scared, and the men, the basses and tenors, called a cop. But when he got there I was gone.