Read Online A Shared Confidence by William Topek - Free Book Online

simple ceremony in his cabin, the bride attended by her sisters and the groom stood up for by the first passenger willing to shave and put on a necktie in exchange for a one-dollar gold piece.
    And so Mr. and Mrs. William Caine – traveling with the bride’s sisters – arrived in New York Harbor in May of 1891. My mother, of course, would never have married for any reason other than true love, but she allowed as how it did make the immigration procedure easier. In those days, arriving as the wife of a respectable (and eminently employable) Englishman was significantly preferable to showing up on the pier as one of three unmarried Irishwomen.
    â€œThey’d have kept me in the dock for weeks, boy-oh,” she’d tell me. “Months. Years even. And what would have become of your poor father? He’d have wandered the streets and alleys like a ghost, wasting away to nothing, his fine suit in rags and holding out his begging bowl – pitifully asking passersby for toad-in-the-hole or some other revolting English muck – until a roving band of brigands cut his throat for the boots on his feet. Oh, I saved him, sure enough. I’m not ashamed to admit it and I have no regrets.”
    It was at this point that Dad would look up from his newspaper, nod toward Mom, and comment dryly: “Imagine if you can, lads, trying to get that through Customs.”
    The happy couple stayed in New York only a short while before moving to Boston. Dad managed to ply and hone his trade, drafting technical drawings for various manufacturers before landing a steady job with an architect. Mom took in sewing and tutored the neighbor children to help make ends meet. When Nathan came along two years into their marriage, Mom decided that a big city wasn’t the proper place to raise a child. Dad agreed, probably ready to see more of America himself by then. The family made their way to the more open areas of the Midwest, settling for awhile in the small town in southern Illinois where I was born.
    I remember a photograph in one of Mom’s albums, Nathan holding me on his lap, both of us dressed up in knickerbockers and bow ties in the middle of a small, very crowded living room. It’s nighttime and all the lamps are turned on. My brother and I are surrounded by a mismatched array of humanity. Family, friends, neighbors – many of them also immigrants – all in their finery and holding glasses of punch or wine or whiskey, toasting the camera (photography was one of Dad’s many intermittent hobbies). And beneath the photo, in Mom’s neat cursive script: “New Year’s Eve 1899 – Welcoming a new century!” Apparently, at one point during the evening Dad pointed out that, strictly speaking, the new century didn’t actually begin until 1901. Mom informed him that their guests had come to stand a glass, not sit a lecture, and my father was free to take his whiskey out to the backyard if he couldn’t remember that.
    To me, that photograph encapsulated growing up in my family. My parents moved around a lot and liked to travel when they could, but wherever we ended up, we were never short of friends. Mom’s warm Irish charm and Dad’s English, “old man” hospitality drew companions easily, and neither of my parents were hampered by any stuffy notions about the “right kind of people.” Their circle included a parade of lawyers and seamstresses, doctors and dock workers, bartenders, painters and poets, salesmen, ward heelers, amateur magicians and professional nightclub singers, staunch Catholics and stauncher atheists, the unemployed and the unemployable, and – what would have been the last straw for many people – even a few government workers. Friends for years or friends for moments, it was the quality of the company and not the duration. The Caines had that rare gift of being able to look upon people as individuals. They had no use for the