My father was seventy-eight when I found the shoebox under his bed. I had gone to his little house in Cabra to clear out a leak-stained wardrobe after a bad winter, and there it was, tied with a brown shoelace, hidden behind old ESB bills and a biscuit tin full of coins. Inside were twenty-three letters, a black-and-white photograph, and a pressed daisy so fragile it looked like it might turn to dust if I breathed too hard.
The girl in the photograph was not my mother. She was standing near St Stephen’s Green, laughing at something outside the frame, her hair blown across her face. On the back, in my father’s careful handwriting, it said: Maura, summer of ’63. My heart did something strange when I read it. My mother had been dead six years by then, and I had never imagined my father as a young man with secrets. To me he had always been Dad: quiet, reliable, fond of burnt toast, unable to say “I love you” without clearing his throat first.
That evening, after tea, I placed the shoebox on the kitchen table between us. He looked at it for a long time. Then he put his hand on the lid the way you might rest your hand on the shoulder of someone ill. “Where did you find that?” he asked. I said, “Under your bed.” He nodded, as if he had known this day would arrive eventually and had been both fearing and waiting for it.
Maura had been his first love. They met outside the old Carlton Cinema when he was nineteen and she was eighteen, both of them pretending they weren’t early for different dates. Their dates never showed, so they went for chips instead. For two years they walked the city together, from the Ha’penny Bridge to Sandymount Strand, sharing cigarettes they couldn’t afford and making plans too big for their pockets. He was an apprentice electrician. She wanted to become a nurse. “She had a way of looking at the world,” he told me, “as if it was something that could be fixed if only enough kindness was applied.”
Then her family moved to Galway after her father lost his job. They wrote for a while. He saved for train tickets. She came back twice. But life, as he put it, “has a talent for putting furniture in front of doors.” The letters slowed. One day a final one arrived, saying she was engaged to a man who could give her a steady home. My father joined a building crew, worked long days, and years later married my mother, who was warm and funny and deserved every bit of love she received.
“Did you love Mam?” I asked him, too quickly, because fear can make you cruel. His eyes filled at once. “Of course I did,” he said. “Your mother was my life. Maura was my first song. Those are different things.”
That sentence stayed with me for weeks.
A month later, he asked me to help him find her. Not to run away, not to make some grand old-age romance, but because he had begun to worry that dying without saying thank you was a kind of cowardice. I searched online, made phone calls, found old parish records, and eventually located a Maura Keane living in Rathmines. She was eighty, widowed, and, according to her niece, still sharp enough to correct the newsreader on pronunciation. When I explained who my father was, there was a silence on the line. Then the niece said, gently, “I think she’d like that.”
They met on a Tuesday afternoon in Bewley’s on Grafton Street. I went with him because his hands were shaking too much to manage the bus fare. He wore his good navy jumper and polished shoes that had not seen daylight since my daughter’s confirmation. Maura arrived with a walking stick and silver hair pinned neatly back. For a second they only stared. Then she smiled, and I saw my father become nineteen again. Not in his body, but somewhere behind his eyes.
I sat at another table and pretended to read a menu. They talked for two hours. Sometimes they laughed. Once, Maura reached across and touched the back of his hand. He did not move, as if afraid the moment might fly
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
