followed, filled with cousins and flowers, and people crying because that generation, the generation of the great families, was passing from America.
Toby never forgot all those cousins, most of whom went on to great success without ever committing a crime or a sin. But by the age of nineteen, he was completely disengaged from them.
Yet the hit man now and then secretly investigated thriving marriages, and used his great computer skills to track this or that impressive career of the lawyers, judges, and priests who came from his related families. He'd played a lot with those cousins when he was a very little child, and he could not entirely forget the grandmothers who brought them together.
He'd been rocked by his grandmothers, now and then, in a big wooden chair that was sold long after their deaths to a junk dealer. He'd heard their old songs before they left the world. And now and then he sang to himself bits and pieces of them.See Saw, Marjory Daw, Catch Behind the Steam Car! or the soft tormenting melody ofGo tell Aunt Rhodie, Go tell Aunt Rho oh di, the old gray goose is dead, the one she was saving for Fatty's feather bed.
And then there were the black songs that the whites had always inherited.
Now, honey won't you play in your own backyard, don't mind what the white child say. For you've got a soul as white as snow, that's what the Lord done say.
These were songs of a spiritual garden extant before the grandmothers departed the earth, and by eighteen Toby had turned his back on everything about his past, except the songs, of course, and the music.
Ten years ago, or at age eighteen, he left that world forever.
He simply vanished from the midst of anybody who knew him, and though none of those boys and girls or aunts or uncles blamed him for going away, they were surprised and confused by it.
They imagined him, with reason, to be a lost soul somewhere. They even imagined him mad, a street bum, a gibbering imbecile begging for his supper. That he'd taken with him a suitcase of clothes and his precious lute gave them hope, but they never saw or heard of him again. Once or twice over the years, a search was made but, as they were searching for Toby O'Dare, a boy with a diploma from Jesuit High School and professional skill with the lute, they didn't have the slightest chance of finding him.
One of his cousins listened quite a lot to a tape he'd made once of Toby playing on a street corner. But Toby didn't know of this; he couldn't possibly have known. So this potential warmth never reached him.
One of his old teachers at Jesuit High School had even searched every musical conservatory in the United States for a Toby O'Dare, but Toby O'Dare had never enrolled in any such institution.
You might say some of this family suffered grief for the loss of the soft peculiar music of Toby O'Dare, and grief for the loss of the boy who so loved his Renaissance instrument that he would stop to explain, to anyone who asked, all about it, and why he preferred to play it on the street corner, rather than the guitar of rock star affection.
I think you see my point: his family was good stock, the O'Dares, the O'Briens, the McNamaras, the McGowens, and all those who had intermarried with them.
But in every family there are bad people, and weak people, and some people who can't or won't withstand the trials of life, and who fail spectacularly. Their guardian angels weep; demons beholding them dance for joy.
But only The Maker decides what ultimately happens to them.
So it was with the mother and father of Toby.
But both lines gave Toby tremendous advantages: talent for music as well as love for it was certainly the most impressive gift. But Toby inherited keen intelligence, as well, and an unusual and irrepressible sense of humor. He had a powerful imagination that enabled him to make plans, to have dreams. And a mystical bent sometimes caught hold of him. His strong desire to be a Dominican priest at the age of twelve did not pass so easily with the coming of worldly ambition, as it might have done with another teenager.
Toby never stopped going to church during the roughest high school years, and even if he'd been tempted to skip the Sunday Mass, he had his brother and sister to consider,