Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (36 page)

He thought of his own mother and how it must have hurt her when Rosanna died in 1915. Then the horror of being taken out of her own house and moving to a strange orphanage. O'Rourke was a menopause baby, and as a child, he worried about what would happen to him if his older parents died. The bond with his mother was extraordinary. Would he ever have a child? If he did, would the bond be as powerful? He couldn't believe his predicament. He was now nearly fifty-fouryears-old and about to become a father. Or would he? He wondered about Sam and his daughter. A daughter according to a dream. He didn't know what to do. In front of the
Mater Dolorosa
he knelt and said a prayer for Sam and the baby girl. Then he said a prayer for his newfound family, the Kavanaghs, late of Camden Row, Dublin City.

H
is dreams had changed. The Virgin was gone, replaced by the toddler. A little girl with wonderful golden, curly hair. She was so young she couldn't possibly talk yet, yet O'Rourke instantly knew her name. It was baby Rosanna, his aunt, the sister his mother had never known about. She reached her arms out to him, but they would never touch. For O'Rourke knew this was another Dublin ghost.

“Hello, Tone,” she said. She was too young to talk, but she was talking as if she was maybe six or seven. O'Rourke didn't know what to say. “Don't you want to know my name?” she asked?

“I think I know it,” said O'Rourke. “It's Rosanna, isn't it?”

“Yes,” she responded. “Joe was named after da and I was named after mammy. I, too, was born at 40 Camden Row. After Joe and before Charlie. They said 1903.” Then her voice turned sad. “But I had to die.”

“I'm sorry,” said O'Rourke.

“That's all right,” she replied evenly. “But remember I existed as sure as your mammy did.”

“I knew you were missing,” he said, “from the records in Lombard Street.”

“But you didn't search for me.”

“I will. Today. I promise.”

“They never talked about me, you know.”

“Who?”

“Mammy and da. I think when I died they felt so sad. Only my brother Joe knew. I think Charlie was too young.”

“I will find you today.”

“Don't forget me, please. I'm a Kavanagh too, just like the rest of them. Just like you. Think about me so your mammy, my sister Mary, will know I existed. Please.”

O'Rourke awoke and bolted upright in his bed at the Shelbourne. The summer dawn was upon Dublin City and he could hear the birds nosily awaken in St. Stephen's Green below him. He got out of the bed naked and fell to his knees to say a prayer for little Rosanna Kavanagh who left this world almost a century ago. He could feel her loneliness and her need to feel loved and wanted, just like everyone else in this terrible world.

The Virgin was changing tactics, thought O'Rourke. O'Rourke admired her for the effective politician she was, moving O'Rourke closer to another lonely little girl who resided in Sam McGuire's womb halfway around the world.

N
ow he was taking orders from a ghost. Did he really dream about a child named Rosanna? Or was it some figment of his imagination buried down deep that had come to the surface of his conscience because of the guilt over McGuire and the baby? Still, he had promised the child he would look for her, so he dressed and once again headed over to Lombard Street to search for this little girl, who may never have really existed.

He came out of the Shelbourne Hotel on a warm, sunny late July morning and started to head to his left when he stopped in his tracks. No, he decided, he was going the wrong way. He crossed over to St. Stephen's Green, said hello to the statue of his namesake Wolfe Tone, before heading toward Grafton Street and the Traitors Gate at the entrance to the Green. Around Stephen's Green West he went by the College of Surgeons and made a left into York Street on his way to Aungier Street. From there he made his way to Bishop Street where the massive façade of the Dublin Institute of Technology stood before him. It was the location of the old Jacob's Biscuit Factory, where Thomas MacDonough and Sean MacBride would earn their 1916 death sentences. The school's curved front, like Jacob's before it, always reminded him of the rotunda of Ebbets Field, of all things.

Down Bishop Street, to the left of the college, O'Rourke went until he came to the National Archives of Ireland at #8. He was photographed and issued an ID card then went upstairs to look at the 1911 Census. It was on microfiche and first he worked all of the Piles Buildings on Golden Lane, but could find nothing about the Kavanaghs. If anything, O'Rourke had surmised about his grandparents, they were creatures of habit. They had spent most of their lives surrounded by the same streets and buildings. Rosanna must have grown up in Temple Lane and her husband lived only five blocks away on Camden Row. He bet they must have met at church, at Michael's and John's.This was their neighborhood, the Strumpet City of James Plunkett, ripe with poverty and unrest, but they would never leave it. They were real Dubs. They had left Camden Row in 1910 and they had not arrived in the Piles Buildings until at least 1914. He just knew they lived around here someplace. He pulled out his map of Dublin and ran his finger down Camden Row to the west and the next street, an extension of Camden Row, was Long Lane. He went back to the desk and got the census for Long Lane.

One by one he went through them until he came to #36 Long Lane. A chill ran down O'Rourke's spine, for there they were, all seven of the Kavanaghs, including his mother. And for the first time he saw the signature of his grandfather, Joseph Kavanagh. It was strong and clear and it never wavered below the line that said, “Signature of the Head of family.” The census had been filled out all over Ireland on Sunday, April 2, 1911. After all these years and all his mother's stories, it was there for all to see, not on a sad gravestone, but on an official British government document, proof that the Kavanagh family existed in the eyes of the government. The grandfather was older than O'Rourke had thought, it seemed, because the census said he was forty, which would have put his birth year at 1870 or 1871. He was six years older than Rosanna. Joseph, Rosanna, Joe Jr., and Charlie could all “read & write.”The other children, Francis, Mary, his mother, and Richard, “cannot read & write.”The three older boys were “scholars,” and O'Rourke's mother and his Uncle Dick obviously didn't go to school yet, but stayed home with Rosanna, who still was not assigned a profession by the government.

There was no sign of another child, perhaps a daughter named Rosanna, but then he saw it. “Total children born alive: 6; children still living: 5.” There was a missing child and O'Rourke's heart began to race. He printed out a copy of the document and ran out the door into Bishop Street.

He hailed the first taxi he saw—that was one of the great things about the new Dublin, you could actually find a cab when you needed one—and minutes later was at Joyce House on Lombard Street. Up to the second floor he went and pulled the birth indexes for 1902 and 1903.

He started looking for a female child born in South Dublin. He looked for a Rosanna, but she was not to be found. He then searched for familiar names. He knew his mother had a sister named Nellie, which in Ireland at that time was short for Ellen. He found an Ellen and his heart raced. When they called his name out with the information slip, he thought he had solved the mystery.

“I'm sorry,” informed the woman clerk, “there seems to be a mistake in the book. I checked twice and this Ellen does not exist.”

O'Rourke went back to the books and searched again. He tried to limit his search from late 1902 until early spring 1903. Those were the parameters, because young Joe was born in October 1901 and Charlie was born in January 1904. He tried Mary Anne, which he thought might be his grandmother's name. No luck. He tried Eileen. Nothing. He tried Annie, Kathleen, and Frances and all the other girls names in South Dublin within his parameters and got nothing.

Maybe he was wrong in what he was looking for. Maybe it was a boy. Maybe Baby Rosanna was a ghostly curveball. First he tried John because that was his grandfather's brother's name. Nothing again. Then he tried James and James Leo and James Patrick and there was a John Joseph and Patrick and he came up totally empty. This child—he was positive she was a girl—was beginning to depress him.

He abandoned the birth books and worked the death books for 1903 and 1904. The age was listed for every entry. He choose zero to one and searched for South Dublin deaths. There was a “Nellie,” the same name as Grandmother Rosanna's sister. He handed in the paper and awaited the verdict. Little Nellie Kavanagh, spinster, read the document, was a child of a servant, and had lived nine hours in 1903. The only trouble was, she was not Rosanna's and Joseph's daughter. It was the wrong child.

O'Rourke explained his situation to the clerk who said that not all births and deaths had been religiously registered. Perhaps, if the child died in the first few days after birth no one had bothered to register it.

In his mind's eye O'Rourke could see Baby Rosanna and he knew she was beseeching him to keep searching for her. He kept checking randomly, anything close to what “qualifications” Baby Rosanna presented to him. He kept coming up with babies who had died at six months of bronchitis, pneumonia, and other diseases that today antibiotics would wipe out in days.

“You look depressed,” the clerk said to O'Rourke.

“I am,” he replied. “I can't find this child who I know existed from the census of 1911.”

“Sounds like a Holy Angels Plot baby to me,” said the clerk. She went on to explain that the Holy Angels Plot was up in Glasnevin and that babies that died in infancy were buried there.

Poor Baby Rosanna. Forgotten and abandoned. All O'Rourke knew was that she was not in the family grave in Glasnevin, he couldn't find her in the birth/death records, and maybe she was in Holy Angels with all the other little dead Dublin babies. No wonder she felt abandoned. When he went to visit his mother up in Glasnevin, O'Rourke was always moved by the graves of infants and young children. There was sometimes a picture of a beautiful child and on the stone would be written: “Love you always from your heart broken Mammy and Daddy.” He knew this baby had broken his grandparents hearts. He also guessed that she died before his mother was born because his mother never mentioned she had a sister. The pain of a century passed was drilling O'Rourke in his chest.

O'Rourke sat alone looking out the window onto Lombard Street. O'Rourke thought of this young child who was not even remembered on the family gravestone and to his utter surprise, began to cry, tears silently running down his cheeks and onto the 1911 census certificate before him. Baby Rosanna had been found, but not found. O'Rourke wanted to comfort this little ghost that so much wanted to get back into the dead Kavanagh family. O'Rourke knew he had failed Baby Rosanna, but he had done his best. He could see her in his mind's eye awaiting the verdict. Right now there was nothing he could do. Soon, he promised, he would make it right.

“I won't forget you, Rosanna,” he whispered. “I promise I won't forget you.”