Legacy of Secrets by Elizabeth Adler

Author:Elizabeth Adler [Adler, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-57483-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1993-10-27T20:00:00+00:00

DAN’S EMPLOYER, MICK CORRIGAN, was a bachelor, but as he told Dan many a time when business was slow and he fell to reminiscing, that did not mean he had never had a sweetheart. “My mistake was to leave her behind in Cork and come out here by meself, to try to make a new life for us,” he said with a huge, sorrowful sigh. “Oh, she was young, Daniel, me boy—just eighteen and as beautiful as a sunset over Bantry Bay. Sure and didn’t I survive the voyage on one of the first coffin ships sailing to America, when all else was dyin’ from the typhoid? And wasn’t my love the unlucky one, to stay home and die of the very same disease?”

Mick was in his sixties. He had wispy gray hair and rheumy eyes and the faded pallor of forty years of tenement living. Dan thought he was an unlikely candidate for youthful passion, but Mick still lit a candle in memory of his lost love every day in St. Stephen’s. And he told his story endlessly to anyone who would listen.

Mick shook his head sadly, busily measuring flour into small brown paper sacks, twirling them between his gnarled fingers to seal them. “And the irony is that me, a starvin’ Irish fella, built up a good business selling food to more starvin’ Irishmen.” Tears misted his faded eyes. “Sometimes, Daniel, I ask meself, will it never end?

“And that’s why, when I saw your hungry face outside me store every day, there was something about you reminded me of myself. Sure and it brought it all back again,” he said mournfully. Placing his flat cap firmly on his head he grabbed his stick and hobbled to the door. “I’ll be back at two,” he called, heading as he did every morning at this hour for Hegarty’s Saloon on the corner of North Street, where he met his cronies and reminisced endlessly about “the old days” over a jar or two.

Dan picked up a cloth and began slowly to polish the battered pine countertop. He replenished the barrels of sugar and tea and potatoes; he stacked the harsh carbolic-smelling blocks of soap, counted the candles and rearranged the kindling wood. He tidied the meager display of cabbages and carrots and onions set out in boxes on the trestle outside, and in between times he served a few customers, marking their credit in Mick’s notorious ledger, because come Friday those who didn’t pay had their credit immediately cut off until the account was settled.

And all the time he was thinking he should be doing this for himself. Frustrated, he glared at the man walking into the store carrying a satchel on his back. “We don’t buy from travelers,” he said stonily as the man deposited his satchel on the floor and leaned wearily on the counter.

“It’s a glass of water I’m needin’,” he retorted. Taking out a red handkerchief he wiped his sweating forehead. “I’ve been walking all night, and I’m just about beat.

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