Grace knew Tom had spent countless afternoons at the store as a little boy. Early in their courtship, he’d confided in her how his earliest memories were of sitting quietly next to his father and being surrounded by the unique rhythms there—the sound of a second handmoving with each tick, the chime of bells on the hour, or the soothing pulse of a pendulum swaying in its window box. When he was ten years old, his father gave him the task of winding each clock with its own special turnkey. Harry imparted to his young son that turning the clocks was one of the most important rituals of the day, for it kept them powered up, pushing each minute, then hour, ahead.
Now, as her husband approached forty, Tom had become even more self-reflective and soulful. Sometimes he would tell her that he felt he was still sharing the space with his dad, despite the fact that Harry had recently passed away in a nursing home for veterans fifteen miles away.
Grace would always be grateful that her late father-in-law changed the course of her husband’s life for the better. The man helped get Tom back on track just before they began dating, offering him a job at the family store, not because he thought Tom had an eye for clocks or a talent for repairs, but because he saw that his son had lost his way.
While Tom had been a good student and even an Eagle Scout, by the time he was eighteen, he hit a rebellious streak. His family’s tight-knit values felt provincial and insular. And while it had faintly amused him as a kid to introduce his predominantly Irish-Catholic friends to the tradition of Sunday bagels or matzo ball soup, as a teenager he just wanted to be like everyone else. He grew his hair longer and combed it back with Brylcreem. He played loud music his parents hated, like Elvis and Little Stevie Wonder. He concentrated less on his senior-year studies, finding more interest in extracurricular activities like smoking cigarettes behind the A&P and riding the secondhand Triumph Tiger motorcycle he had bought to impress girls. Even the toughest punks who had called him “Jew boy” when he was in grade school were impressed with his transformation.
After taking four years to graduate from a two-year community college, Tom contemplated joining the army. He was confident his father, who had been a World War II veteran, would be pleased that he’d decided to serve his country and finally shape up after spending years drifting away from his full potential.
But the conversation ended up quite differently from what Tom could have ever anticipated. On a warm Saturday evening in the spring of 1963, he and one of his buddies, Bobby O’Rourke, went down to the Ace Hardware Shopping Center to join a group of friends to race their motorcycles.
After he and Bobby struck their engines and barreled toward the finish line, Tom lost control and found himself wiping out on a turn. Thrown to the pavement, his leg was crushed beneath the Triumph’s heavy metal frame.
Tom shattered his fibula in eight places, causing him to have a permanent limp and pain whenever it rained.
His parents had met the ambulance at the hospital. The doctor read the X-ray with a grave look on his face and informed them that Tom would need to stay in traction at the hospital for the next two months, and even if the bone did fully heal, he would probably always walk with a limp.
When he awoke from surgery, Tom was dreading how his father was sure to react. But Harry very much surprised his son. “This dumb accident just might have saved your life,” he told Tom.
With the thunderclouds brewing in Vietnam, Harry had been nursing a concern that America might end up in a war there, like it had in Europe in the 1940s and Korea a few years later. Having himself experienced the horrors of war, the terror still sometimes returning to him at night when he found himself reliving the scene of him witnessing his best friend Jimmy getting blown up when he stepped on a land mine only a few yards away, Harry now felt more relief than angerover Tom’s accident. Now his son would be medically exempt from any future fighting.
Tom’s friend Bobby O’Rourke, who had bragged about his victory in the race that night as Tom was being lifted into the ambulance, would enlist a few years later.
Bobby passed his medical exam with flying colors, only to die a year later in a jungle outside Nha Trang.
CHAPTER 9
NO ONE INBELLEGROVE EVER FORGOT THE AFTERNOONBOBBY’Sparents received the news. They all heard about it, even before his name was read aloud on the radio a few days later. The neighbors had all held their breath on that rainy day in March, when the military vehicle pulled up to the O’Rourkes’ home and two soldiers dressed in uniforms solemnly walked toward the front door.
The ghost of Bobby O’Rourke still lingered in the small town’s air. Adele, his older sister, lived two streets away and had named her son after him.
Grace knew her husband thought about his dead buddy often, for it was because of Bobby he had learned how life was shaped by random accidents. That one incident could alter the lives of several people forever. He confided in her that there were times, when he drove past that Ace parking lot, he contemplated how different things might have been had it been Bobby who had skidded out and busted his leg and not him.
“We wouldn’t have met had you not gotten hurt,” she reminded him. It was true. If he hadn’t had been left with a limp that made him too self-conscious to dance at that mixer in Queens, she might not have sat down next to him that night.
Grace had left Ireland with a suitcase containing two good dresses, one skirt, three blouses, two pairs of nylons, one pair of black pumps, and a navy mohair coat. A family in Queens had sponsored her as a nanny to help with their three children, all of whom were under theage of five. She was terribly homesick when she arrived in the States. Not because she missed her family back home, as she had already been away from them at the Catholic school she’d boarded at since she was thirteen, but for Ireland itself. The lush green grass and meadows full of delicate red poppies and wild heather. The stretches of blue sky, the sunlight that peeked through the daily showers of rain. Her foreignness was only intensified by the unfamiliarity of the cement and asphalt of Sunnyside, Queens. The endless rows of apartment buildings. The parks that had playgrounds for children but no lawn in sight. Still, she found joy on the days she traveled into glamorous Manhattan, where she could lose herself in the museums she loved. The enormous Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side was her favorite refuge. There, the collection of butterflies with their fragile wings and brightly colored markings reminded her that beauty could be both delicate and strong.
Her friend Fiona, another transplant from Ireland, told her about a social sponsored by the Irish Club of New York. Grace initially hadn’t wanted to go, as she had no desire to stand around drinking warm punch while the men offered whiskey from metal flasks in their breast pockets.
But Grace loved to dance. So when Fiona mentioned they’d have a live band and the lead singer was from Galway, no less, she couldn’t refuse.
She danced for hours. Her face flushed, her blue cotton dress clinging to her skin. While one of the boys went to get her a drink, she sat down to catch her breath and she found herself next to Tom. He hadn’t gotten up once all night to dance, even though she had caught him staring at her on more than one occasion.
“Not much of a dancer, are you?” Grace asked, her voice sounding more confident than normal, as the exhilaration of the music seemedto give her more courage. She was drawn to his dark brown curls and hazel eyes. There was also something genuine about him. His sports jacket was rumpled, his shirt untucked, but when he lifted his head to smile at her, she felt her heart leap inside her chest.
“Can’t dance. Busted leg,” he said, pointing toward his left shoe. “My friend Lewis dragged me here. He’s a senior at Fordham. It gave him a kick to bring his only Jewish friend to an Irish dance.”
Grace smiled. She had never met anyone Jewish before she moved to New York, and she loved the exotic fabric of so many different ethnicities outside her doorstep in Queens. As Grace looked over at Tom, she thought he seemed sweet and handsome. Lewis, on the other hand, was sweating profusely over the punch bowl. “Looks like Lewis is finding the cooling system here more challenging than college.”
Tom laughed. His friend might be smarter than he was, but at least Tom’s shirt was dry.
“Does it hurt?” Grace eyed the khaki pant leg of his trousers.
“Not anymore, just makes me look clumsy. Doesn’t quite work like it should.”
Whenever people asked them how they met, it was one of the only things in their marriage that they remembered exactly the same way. She had taken his hand later that evening and gently led him to the dance floor. Grace didn’t twirl or kick up her legs as she had earlier with the faster dances. Instead, as the band played a slow ballad, she guided Tom’s hands around her waist and let him pull her close. And as he steadied himself to her rhythm, his self-consciousness fell away.
Weeks later, when he mentioned to his parents that he was dating Grace, their first instinct was that their son was rebelling, yet again, by bringing home a blond, blue-eyed Catholic girlfriend, straight from Ireland, no less.
