I remember my father as clever and levelheaded, a man who observed more than he talked. But I believe under that quiet, he was a bit of a rascal. I could tell when he was up to something. His blue eyes would twinkle, and I would see that wry half-smile.
On one occasion our family was spending a weekend in Manhattan.
My parents had honeymooned there. They loved the city. One afternoon we were walking down Broadway, and we saw a crowd gathered in front of the famous Jack Demsey’s Restaurant.
“What everyone looking at?” my dad asked.
“Cary Grant’s in there,” a man answered.
My father passed on the rumor to us, and we stretched our necks to see the celebrity.
When no movie star materialize, the people began to wander away. Even I as a nine year old, I could see the whole thing had been a hoax. As we turned to go, a passerby asked my father. “What’s going on in there?”
“I heard Cary Grant’s in there,” he answered.
“Cary Grant’s in there… Cary Grant’s in there,” passersby began to say.
As we stepped away, a new crowd began to gather. I looked up at my father and saw sheer mischief. There are no photos of him as a child, but that roguish look always conjured for me what he might have been like as a little boy.
One of five children, his father was a skilled blacksmith specializing in racehorses with hoof problems. My grandfather died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-nine. It was 1914. The oldest son Stephen was ten, Anna was eight, Edward five, Timothy, my dad, was four and Mary was two.
My widowed grandmother moved her family to another town to be with her only relative, her brother-in-law, Edward and his wife. My grandmother received a thousand dollars from a life insurance policy, and for two years supplemented her income with dressmaking. When she had to return to work, she placed Anna in charge. At age ten her job was to “keep an eye on the little ones and get food started for supper.”
In her nineties, Anna wrote her remembrances of those days. I was not surprised to find that the tales almost always included Timothy and his antics. Here’s my favorite in his sister’s words.
Tim was sent up the street to pick up Ma’s Sunday shoes at the cobbler’s. On his way home, unbeknownst to the driver, Tim decided to hitch a rid on a wagon going down the street. He threw the shoes up onto the wagon, and then he jumped on. At this point the driver spotted him, snapped the horsewhip at him, and Tim quickly jumped off the wagon, leaving the shoes behind.
When he got home, he made up a story telling Ma that a man with a horse and wagon stole the shoes from him. Uncle Ed got furious, jumped into his wagon and took off down the street looking for the “thief” who was now long gone. The next day, the morning paper had big headlines – “Man steals shoes from poor widow’s son and got away with them.”
If ever they got the man, he would have been in trouble, because everyone would have believed the innocent little boy.
It was years before Tim told anyone the truth.
If my father were here, he’d let me tell the story. When I finished, the corner of one side of his mouth would go up. His eyes would twinkle. He wouldn’t elaborate, not one bit.
Mary-Jo Murphy 4/17/14