The Thief of Lost Time

Chapter 6: The Ahernes

Mom was born into a well-to-do family; Dad was not. His parents were immigrants from Ireland, and they lived on the wrong side of the tracks running from Cambridge through Arlington. Dad was born in 1916 and named for his father, George Augustus. George Sr. was an engineer for the Boston to Worcester Limited. Leslie has a photograph of Granddad standing in his engineer overalls in front of his train. His occupation was the spark igniting Dad's life-long love of model railroads.

His family lived on the second floor of a three-decker. They attended the Catholic Church a block away. His parents had only high school educations. Money was a constant worry, aggravated by his father's fondness for alcohol and gambling on horses at Suffolk Downs. Dad never spoke about his father. In fact, he never told us any stories about his childhood.

His mother, Margaret, earned money from sewing, by hand. A sewing machine was too expensive. She also laundered women's dresses too delicate for a washing machine. She hung the clean dresses on racks in the kitchen; drying them outdoors risked soot stains from coal heating neighborhood buildings. When dry, she ironed each dress twice, hung them on wooden hangers, and covered them with brown paper. As the tallest member of the family, Dad's sister, Rose, returned the dresses, her arms raised above her head to prevent the hems from touching the ground. Only once did she forget to bring the wooden hangers home.

Dad's parents were always a mystery. Margaret died when I was four. I remember nothing about her except for a photograph from 1949. She sits in our living room reading to me. Her feet don't reach the floor. I stand beside her chair while she holds Leslie, still a baby, in her arms. I imagine Dad seeing us grabbed his camera. She's wearing a non-descript housedress with her white hair tied up in a bun. I have no sense of her as a real person, only as an image in a Brownie camera snapshot.

As teenagers, Dad and his friends joined the Scout troop at the town hall, a rite of passage for boys in the 1920s. He earned money for his uniform delivering papers. I have a photo of Dad in the Scouts, one of the few Leslie and I have of him as a young man. Looking closely, I recognize him: the jawline, the straight nose, the thick hair slicked back from his forehead. He's handsome, clean cut, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. 

The boys stand ramrod straight with chests puffed out, their feet shoulder-length apart. Dad is at the end holding the troop flag. They are dressed in baggy pants tucked into knee socks, a uniform with an unsettling resemblance to doughboys in WWI, the 'war to end all wars.' Waiting in their futures are the stock market crash, the Depression, and WWII.

As part of his Tenderfoot badge, Dad needed the signature of his parish priest to affirm his attendance at weekly religious services. "The housekeeper at the rectory told me to wait in the parlor while she went upstairs to tell the priest. When the priest didn't come down, I thought he'd forgotten, and prepared to leave. At that moment, he entered in his black cassock and asked what I wanted. I explained why I needed his signature."

The priest examined the front and back of the card. "What troop do you belong to?"

"Troop 2146, Father."

"Where's that? The Town Hall?"

"Yes, Father."

"Why aren't you in the troop here at your church?"

"I wanted to be with my friends."

"You have no friends at Saint Barbara's?"

"I mean my friends at school."

The priest slapped his hands on his knees and stood. "I'm sorry. I only sign for boys in the Saint Barbara troop." He returned the card and left the room.

Dad left the rectory, upset and embarrassed. When he told the Scout Master what had happened, the troop waived the requirement. After high school, he left the Catholic Church and, before marrying Mom, became a Protestant.