I looked on in amusement. Everybody’s hair was brushed, Harry’s and Brainard’s whiskers were oiled, Gould’s mustache waxed. Collars were buttoned. Ornamental dickeys, each with scripted C, were on straight. George and Brainard sported cravats. George and Waterman wore their silver medallions awarded by the New York Clipper for leading their respective positions in hitting the previous season. They were posed in two rows, Harry sitting in the center foreground. Next to him Brainard held a ball, while Sweasy and Gould, on the ends, rested bats against their knees.
“You’re all so beautiful,” I said, mugging behind the photographer during his final countdown. When he turned around to hiss, Brainard brazenly flipped me off. We studied the matter later with a magnifying glass. Unfortunately the surreptitious finger did not record beyond the merest hint of a blur. History’s loss.
The tiny thatch-roofed frame house in which Andy had grown up sat on a dirt street lined with box elders. A pig wheezed in the shade of the porch. Several bony cows grazed in a side lot. Andy ushered me through the front door. The atmosphere inside was close and hot, with a stale cabbagelike odor.
It was obvious that I was a guest of honor and that such occasions were rare. Behind a table covered with patched linen and set with crockery and pewter, the Leonards waited in line to meet me.
Andy’s mother was tiny and birdlike, probably only in her fifties but ancient, her every movement tentative, as if she might take flight. Her rheumy eyes held mine with a quality of vague questioning as she repeated my name wonderingly and touched my hand.
Next was her brother Gavan, Andy’s uncle, stout and red-faced and bald as a bulb. He pumped my hand and greeted me in dense brogue, something that sounded like “G’aarf bray!” I managed to understand, with Andy’s help, that he’d taken off work early to see the celebrated nine engage in the glorious American game.
Andy’s sister Brighid was only in her midthirties. She was a hair taller than her mother and had Andy’s coloring, but gray already streaked her hair and crows’-feet bordered her light green eyes; she seemed weary, very weary. When I took her hand she blushed—and astonished me by dipping into a curtsy. I attempted to bow in response—my first ever—and it felt ridiculous. She explained apologetically that her husband couldn’t leave the factory where he worked, but the children were home. And so they were: four of them staring as if a fairy-tale giant had stomped into their home. I suppose I was a giant. Nobody there even matched Andy’s towering five six.
While he passed out gifts—the prodigal son come home—I looked idly at a bric-a-brac stand. A small wreath-shaped polychrome print caught my eye. On it were pictured eight men’s faces. They bore the names O’Brien, Grattan, Fitzgerald, and others. At the top was “Erin Go Bragh” and at the bottom, “Justice to Ireland.” In the center, on a field of green, appeared Erin herself—she resembled Columbia in militant feminism, but was probably plumper—garbed in flowing shamrock-bordered skirt and chain-mail doublet and trampling a prostrate English king. One shapely arm held a flag bearing the Irish harp; the other brandished a sword. She was nobody you’d want to mess with.
Beside the wreath was a framed twenty-dollar bond dated January 1866 and issued by an Irish “government in exile”; it bore portraits of Emmet and Tone flanking a bare-armed Hibernia exhorting what appeared to be a Union army soldier to take up the sword in Ireland’s cause.
Behind it was a small green flag with a sunburst in one corner. Gold letters spelled, “Newark 1st Regt. Irish Army of Liberation. Ridgeway & Fort Erie, June 2, 1866. Presented by the Fenian Sisterhood of New Jersey.”
I pondered all of that, recalling that I’d heard the term Fenian several times. Then my attention was caught by a group of miniatures; daguerreotypes, I thought. They included a steely-gazed, teenage Andy in a baseball jersey with PIONEERS across his chest; a younger Gavan grinning beneath a jaunty derby; an even younger Mrs. Leonard—God, she’d once been a dark-haired beauty!—on the arm of a smooth-shaven, smiling-eyed man I assumed to be Andy’s father. A studio logo told me the portrait had been made in Ballyjamesduff, wherever that was. I said the name silently as I stared at their faces, trying to imagine what their lives had been in that other land, that other time. My grandparents had kept only one picture of my father. It was a wedding picture. I had stared at it the same way. Who were you?
Then the last picture caught my eyes. Caught and impaled them. I tried later to sort out elements of the moment; I think my first discrete awareness was of the other eyes looking back: pale of iris, dark-lashed, metallic-seeming, gazing out at me.
Is it unusual to have an overwhelming sense of fatedness about an encounter? To feel from the very first instant that in some unfathomable way your existence is linked with another’s? What I’d felt before with Andy and Twain now seemed almost minor beside this new sensation.
In her features were traces of Andy and Brighid and Mrs. Leonard. She was young, probably in her teens, at the time of the portrait. And a beauty, no doubt about it, with dark hair piled high, a straight nose, lovely cheekbones, lips in a trace of a smile. There was a haughty quality to that smile, a hint of stubbornness in the tilted chin, a willfulness in the eyes, a sense that she knew well who she was and would not be undervalued. Not quite arrogance, but on the road to
