Read Online Habit of Fear by Dorothy Salisbury Davis - Free Book Online Page A

really have thought she would fall into his arms and cry, “Daddy, you’ve been on my mind!”
    The transcript came through. She did not open it until she walked out and into City Hall Park, where, in the warm noontime sun, she found a bench to herself. She felt taut as a bowstring, her heart thumping. A party of pigeons gathered around her when she sat down. “Sorry, kids,” she said, having no lunch to share with them. They waddled elsewhere, and she opened the transcript.
    Katherine Anne Richards, residing at 499 East 91st Street, New York City, born July 17, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, and Thomas Francis Mooney, residing at 584 East 54th Street, New York City, born October 10, 1934, in Wicklow, Ireland, were married on July 20, 1954, at Saint Giles’s Church Rectory in New York by the Reverend Stephen Flaherty. The witnesses were Margaret Fiore and Michael Desmond. There had been no previous marriage of either bride or groom.
    For a moment it seemed as though she had learned a great deal, and then it seemed very little. In the City Hall basement she found a public telephone and called Saint Giles’s Rectory. The church was not far from the United Nations and not far for East Fifty-fourth Street. But to her inquiry about Father Flaherty, the soft-voiced woman said, “Father Flaherty’s been in his grave for over twenty years.” Julie asked if there would be a parish record of the annulment of a marriage Father Flaherty had performed. “Those records are kept in the Chancery Office,” the woman said.
    Julie said, “I see,” and thanked her, but she felt little hope of access to the Chancery Office records.
    There were a number of Fiores in the Manhattan directory, but none named Margaret. Nor was there a Michael Desmond. Margaret Fiore had to be her mother’s friend, Maggie. She could not remember her very well—a plump, noisy woman. Her mother had talked a lot about her at some point, which suggested that she had either died or moved away. Julie was on her way uptown when it occurred to her that she probably knew where Maggie had moved to. She remembered a quarrel with her mother over the size of a telephone bill. She had fought back because the largest item by far on that particular phone bill was a call her mother had made to Los Angeles, and it was to her friend Maggie.
    Julie got off the bus at Forty-second Street and headed for the New York Public Library. There were numerous Fiores in the Los Angeles phone books, but again, none by the name of Margaret. She could have married, of course, or remarried. Inveterate housecleaner that Julie was, she had destroyed her mother’s address book long ago.
    Her disappointment was heavy. Then she chided herself: she could have had a rich, successful father, Morgan Reynolds, half a column in Who’s Who. And here she was, looking for a Heathcliff. Leaving the reference room, she passed the various indexes—the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, the Cumulative Book Index …
    What prompted her to stop and search she would never know—a hunch, a prayer, a jab of hope. Beginning with the year 1950, she looked up Thomas Francis Mooney in the Reader’s Guide. In 1955 someone of that name had published a poem in The New Yorker called “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More.”

ELEVEN
    J ULIE COULD NOT HOLD BACK the tears when she read the poem. Whether or not it was good, it was Irish, and she thought it beautiful. Pride, a sunburst, warmed her through. She would brook no doubts, not of the author’s relationship to her nor of the poem’s merit. If it was in The New Yorker, it had to be good. She copied the poem—of sonnet length—into her notebook and turned in the bound magazine. While she waited near the elevators for a public telephone to become available, she began to memorize it.
    She called Virginia Gibbons, whom she knew through Jeff. Ginny reviewed theater for The New Yorker.
    “Nineteen fifty-five. Even for the magazine that’s going back a long