August Gale by Barbara Walsh Read Free Book Online Page B

memories, as if he himself needed to hear these words aloud. It is the San Francisco trip that prompts my father’s voice to rise in anger; what happened there he cannot forgive or forget.
    â€œAfter he left us in Red Hook, it was bad, but I cannot understand why he called us out to California. How the hell did he think that was going to work? I can never forgive him for that. Jesus,” he says, his head shaking with the memory. “What my mother went through.”
    What about what you went through? I want to ask, but I do not.
    A journalist for twenty-five years, I had written many stories about tragedies. I had talked to families who had lost children or loved ones to murders, suicides, and car accidents. I was adept at absorbing their sorrow, their emotions, and conveying them through the written word. Now I was gathering details about my own father’s childhood pain, and the thought of asking my dad about Ambrose left me queasy, anxious. There is no distance here; there are no strangers in this story. The interviewing skills that I have honed over the last few decades do not work on this night. Here in my parents’ kitchen, I am not a journalist; I am a daughter, overwhelmed by my father’s memories, struck silent with my own sadness over his past.
    These feelings of grief and concern for my father are new to me. When I think of him, I conjure images of him happy, spontaneously singing Frank Sinatra songs, crooning lines from one his favorite lyrics, “I’ve got you under my skin . . . New York, New York, these little town blues . . .” In my mind, he is steady, strong, the source of support and encouragement for my five sisters and mother. Years ago, after I graduated with a degree in photojournalism, I announced that I was traveling alone to Ireland to find work. My father did not question why; perhaps he knew I was running from failed confidence and my professor’s belief that I would be better off pursuing photography instead of writing. Rather than find a reporting job in Ireland, I worked as a photographer for a weekly paper on the west coast in Galway. I photographed Gaelic football, fishermen sitting on ancient stone quays, tinkers begging for money, small Irish girls dressed like child brides on their First Communions. Taking pictures was easier than writing. There were no deadlines to miss. I was gone a year before returning home and falling into a comfortable job: working for a small weekly paper in the town where I had grown up. I wrote stories and took pictures. It was a role I felt secure in; there were no daily deadlines. When an editor from a nearby city newspaper called wanting to hire me, my gut told me to say no. There would be more pressure, more chances to fail. My father understood my fears. “You can do it,” he told me. “Take the job.”
    My father has always bolstered my courage and understood my frailties. Now for the first time in my forty-five years, I see him as vulnerable, and it is odd and unnerving. He has always been the protector, the provider, but on this spring night as we sit alone, I find myself wanting to change roles with my father. But how does a daughter fix her father’s past, repair the hurt inflicted so many decades ago? As the refrigerator hums in the corner of the kitchen, I sit quietly at the table and I fall back on what I have done since I was a small girl: I listen and put my father’s words into stories.
    I imagine Ambrose’s son, a dark-haired child on the playgrounds of Staten Island, following his father’s footsteps, eager to be in Ambrose’s presence. The boy is too young to understand why Ambrose draws the attention of both men and women alike. The Newfoundland immigrant charms women with his easy smile. Men admire Ambrose’s rough nature and enjoy his stories about his seafaring family’s Newfoundland home.
    Though he has but a sixth-grade education, Ambrose is quick to learn on