Father Kilbride reached into the pocket of his white vestment and brought out a small brown envelope, soft with age. I walked up the aisle of St. Brendan with every head following me. My knees felt like water, but I kept my back straight, the way I did on a pole in a Boston wind. “Neil,” the priest said, loud enough for the last pew, “eight days before she went home, your Peggy sat in the sacristy and told me three things. First, that her gown would come back to this church one day. Second, that you would be hiding when it did.”
A soft laugh went through the church, the warm kind. Father Kilbride opened the envelope. Inside were a folded note in the blue pen Peggy used for grocery lists, and a small savings passbook from the Dorchester credit union. “Third,” he said, “she told me to say this out loud, because she knew you would never read it in front of anybody.” He gave me the note. I put on my glasses. the writing of Peggy swam, then settled. “Neil. Sit up front. You earned the seat the first time you married a girl from Savin Hill with nothing but a truck.”
The passbook was in her handwriting too. At the top she had written, For the Next Baby in the Gown. The first deposit was in 1965, two dollars from the grocery money, and there was another every month for fifty six years. At the bottom was the balance, eleven thousand four hundred dollars, payable to whichever child wore the lace at baptism, when she turned eighteen, with me as trustee. “She wanted it to be a surprise for the baby of Caitlin,” Father Kilbride said gently. “And she wanted the family to see you receive it, not hear about it afterward.”
A faded envelope left with the parish priest by his late wife gave an eighty four year old Bostonian the front pew and a family that finally saw him.
Tyler stood in the aisle with his hands open, smiling the smile of a man who has just heard a joke he did not like. “Father, this is very sweet, but we are running behind on the photographer.” Father Kilbride looked at him over his glasses. “Peggy also told me you would say that, son. Years ago, at the Sunday dinner where she met you, she heard you ask Caitlin what the triple decker on Savin Hill Avenue was worth. She said, “That boy counts the house before he counts the people in it.” She asked me to bless you anyway. I have. But you will sit down.”
Tyler sat. I will say that for him, he sat. His mother, a tall woman named Eleanor with sunglasses on her head, had gone pink to the roots of her hair. His father, a silent man in a linen jacket, looked at the floor and then at me. Caitlin stood with Margaret Rose on her shoulder and tears running down her freckles. She walked straight through the front pew, past the knees of her husband, and put the baby in my arms. “Pop,” she said, “you finish the blessing with Father. And nobody takes a picture without you.”
Father Kilbride placed his hand over mine on the lace of the baby. The old words came out of his mouth like water, and I felt Peggy there, the way you feel a person standing behind you in a kitchen. Margaret Rose looked up at me with the gray eyes of Peggy and grabbed the Miraculous Medal that had slipped out from under my collar. She held it as if she knew whose it was. The photographer, a young man in black, had been told earlier to keep me out. He lifted his camera now with his own hands shaking. I did not mind how many times he clicked.
At the Irish Social Club afterward, Eleanor found me by the corned beef. She said she was ashamed, and that in her family nobody had ever been told where to sit in their own church. Then the father of Tyler walked to the bar and quietly paid the entire tab, to the last stout. Tyler apologized on the steps, awkwardly, with his hands in his pockets. I told him he could make it up to me by learning to carve a roast like an Irishman. He has been practicing every Sunday at my table since, with me watching and shaking my head.
That evening Caitlin sat with me at the kitchen table of the triple decker, with the passbook open between us. She asked whether I had known. I had not. I told her how Peggy used to stand at the register at the Stop and Shop counting out coins, saying the rest was for the gown account, and how I had thought she meant a savings club. Caitlin laughed until she hiccuped. Then she said, quietly, that Tyler would sign no paper about my house, now or ever, and that she would see to it herself. I believed her. She has the chin of Peggy.
Caitlin hung one photograph in the front hall of the triple decker. It is the six babies in the lace gown, from 1965 to now, all in a row, and in the new one I am holding the baby with the medal in her fist. Under it, in pencil, Caitlin wrote Pop and Margaret Rose and Nana. I stop and look at it each morning on the way to the kitchen with my coffee. The young families upstairs now ask me to tell the story, and I do, and each time Father Kilbride gets taller.
I still go to St. Brendan every Sunday. I sit in the front pew now, on the aisle, with Caitlin and the baby beside me. Sometimes I turn and look back at the pillar. It is only stone, and the people behind it are just people, some of them old, some of them shy, some of them waiting to be asked. So when I see one, I walk back and say, “Come sit up front. There is room.” They always say no first. Peggy taught me what to do about that. You take them by the arm and you do not let go.