The priest set the shoeshine box down at the foot of the casket, and the lid, with its carved initials, caught the light. He was a heavyset man of perhaps sixty, in a plain black cassock, with thick white eyebrows and a face lined by weather, and he stood facing the crowded room with the calm of a man who has addressed many silences. “My name is Father Tom Ferraro,” he said. “Forty eight years ago, I was a boy of twelve in a house on Parade Street with a father who drank and a mother who cleaned offices at night. I did not own a pair of shoes that fit.” He touched the lid of the box. “Frank Delaney gave me my first haircut.”
My brother in law, standing beside the guest book with his pen still in his hand, stared at the priest. “I walked into his shop,” said Father Ferraro, “because it was warm, and I was trying not to be seen. Frank said, young man, you look like you could use a trim. I said, I have no money. He said, nobody asked.” The old men in the front rows nodded slowly, as if recalling something of their own. “That was a Saturday. By the next Saturday he had found me a pair of shoes. By the following spring he had taught me how to shine them. He gave me this box when I was fourteen, so I could earn my own way.”
He knelt and lifted the lid. Inside, on a lining of faded green felt, lay a comb, a straight razor in a leather sheath, a pair of long barber shears, a worn brush, and a tin of polish, all arranged in order. Carved inside the lid, in careless boyish letters, were three initials: T.F. “He made me practice on the shoes of every old man at the VFW,” said the priest. “He said a man who can polish a shoe can polish a life.” His voice caught. “The box has been in my rectory for forty one years. Tonight I bring it back to him, because the tools are his. He gave me the shears and the razor when I was ordained.”
A carved shoeshine box set at the foot of a casket by a parish priest gave one daughter in law the morning to bring her brother in law back to his father.
I had known that Frank was a good barber. I had not known he was a kind of unofficial saint. I turned my head and saw my husband on the other side of the aisle with his face in his hands, his big shoulders shaking. Father Ferraro closed the lid and straightened. “I have one more thing to tell you, and then I will sit down.” He looked at the long line of men that stretched out the door and down 26th Street. “Who here received a free haircut from Frank Delaney on a Monday?”
A hundred hands went up. Then two hundred. Father Ferraro nodded. “Every Monday for thirty six years, Frank closed his shop to paying customers at noon. He cut hair for the homeless, the unemployed, the dying. He drove to the hospice with a bag of scissors. He never took a penny. He told no one.” The priest turned his face to the casket. “And he told me never to tell.”
He gave a small, rueful smile. “But a man is entitled to break a promise to the dead, once, if the dead are being slandered.” He looked directly at my brother in law, who had gone the color of ash. “I understand the family was considering a one hour service. And no luncheon. For the barber.” The silence in the room was like a held note. My brother in law opened his mouth, and for a moment I thought he would defend himself, the way he always did, with a joke. Instead he walked slowly up the aisle, past the priest, and stood before his father. He put his hand on the polished wood.
“Dad,” he said. He did not use the microphone. He did not need to. “I was ashamed of you. I told people you were a guy with scissors.” He was a big man, fifty three, with a good suit and a BMW outside, and his voice was a child voice now. “I told myself you did not do anything big. Do you know what I just learned? You cut the hair of dying men for nothing, for thirty six years, and you never told me, because I would not have listened.” He bent over the casket and rested his forehead on the lid. “I would have come with you. If you had asked me, Dad. I would have come.”
No one in the room could look. The priest closed his eyes. The old men in the first rows bowed their heads like men at the changing of a guard. And then, from the back of the hall, a single voice began to sing, an old Italian hymn that Frank used to hum while he cut, and another voice took it up, and another, until the whole room swelled with it, old men singing without any shame, in the voices of boys. My husband walked to the front and put his arm around his brother. They stood that way, their heads together, the two sons of a barber, through all three verses.
We held the luncheon that afternoon in the parish hall of St. Andrew, because the priest insisted, and it was free, and it lasted until the dark. Women of the parish brought pasta and meatballs and cannoli, and the men of the VFW sat at long tables telling stories of Frank that grew taller and funnier by the hour. My brother in law moved from table to table, listening. Once I saw him laugh so hard that he had to hold the edge of the table, and then wipe his eyes, and then laugh again, while a man told how Frank had once cut the hair of a bride, on the day of her wedding, in the back seat of a car.
In the spring, the barber shop on 26th Street reopened. Not as a business, but as a free shop on Mondays, run by volunteers, with a sign in the window that reads: Delaney Cuts. No charge. Everyone welcome. The first Monday, my brother in law stood behind the old barber chair in a white smock, holding the shears of his father. A frightened teenager sat down in the chair. My brother in law draped the cape around his shoulders with trembling hands. “Young man,” he said, in a voice I will never forget, “you look like you could use a trim.”