Page 97 of The High Tide Club
Brooke scooted her chair next to Gabe’s, peering over his shoulder. There were spaces on the page for the date, name, and address of parent or parents, child’s name and date of birth, weight, height, eye and hair color, and race. At the bottom, a space was reserved for comments.
According to the report, on May 5, 1942, a male child named Charles D. Anthony arrived at the orphanage. Weight was eleven pounds, six ounces. The child’s hair color was listed as brown. Eye color: blue. Race: W. In the spaces for the child’s mother and father, someone had typedUnknown. Also unknown were the child’s exact date of birth, although someone had typedApprox. six months of age.
The comments block had been filled out in Spenserian black script.
Father Ryan brought male child to home last Sunday, stated he was found asleep, under pew, in church today, after 8:00A.M.mass. No parishioners have any knowledge of child. Father stated hopes parent will return to claim child, but fears child has been abandoned. The boy is docile, in good health. Father Ryan believes that boy was born out of wedlock. Mother Superior advises we will accept child pending further investigation.
“Somebody left a child? A six-month-old baby in a church?” Brooke said, aghast.
“Yeah. That was me,” C. D. said. “Turns out since they didn’t know my real name, they named me after that priest. Charles David. For a last name, they gave me the name of one of the nun’s favorite saints, which was St. Anthony.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Me named after a saint?”
Brooke found herself speechless, pondering the reality of C. D.’s childhood. She’d always known who she was, who her people were, and whotheirpeople were. Family and a sense of family identity were ingrained in every Southerner she knew, especially Savannahians, who were obsessed with family connections. What would it be like to wonder your entire life who you really were?
“How did you find out about all of this?” Brooke asked. “Or did you always know about the orphanage?”
C. D. rubbed the gray stubble on his chin. “I always remembered bits and pieces from the time I was in the orphanage. Like how us little kids all slept in one big room, with rows and rows of these iron cribs that had high sides so you couldn’t climb out. Even when we got older and were big enough to sleep in a real bed, they kept us in those cribs, almost like a cage, you know?”
Brooke thought guiltily about the crib her own Henry had been sleeping in until recently. Would he too remember, someday, and wonder if he had been kept a prisoner there?
“How were you able to track down these records?” Gabe asked.
“That’s kind of a funny coincidence,” C. D. said. “After I came home from Vietnam, I’d been living in Savannah off and on for about twenty years. Retired there, after working as a longshoreman out at the Port Authority, and I knew a couple of guys, like me, who were Good Shepherd alumni. One of ’em told me about a reunion they were having a couple of years ago. It was the home’s275th anniversary. So I went along out there, ’cause I was curious to see how the place had changed.”
“I imagine there’s been quite a bit of change since you lived there,” Gabe offered.
“Yeah, the ‘cottage’ I lived in, it’s some kind of classroom now,” C. D. said. “The whole place is a boys’ prep school now, ’cause you really don’t have a lot of honest-to-God orphans these days.”
“My mom has a friend whose father and two brothers grew up at Good Shepherd, back in the Depression years,” Brooke said. “Their father had died, and their mother had to work and couldn’t care for three boys. So she kept his sisters and the boys were raised at the Children’s home.”
“That happened a lot,” C. D. said. “Anyway, at the reunion party, I ran into a guy who lived in my cottage. He was a couple of years older than me, but like me, he’d been at St. Joseph’s before Good Shepherd. And he was telling me that he’d been able to look up his records. In the church office. I forget what they call it.”
“The archdiocesan office,” Gabe said. “All the diocesan records were moved there after the girls’ orphanage was closed and remodeled.”
C. D. snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s what it’s called. Anyway, they won’t let you look at the records unless you can prove you were what they call a former ‘resident.’ I told the woman there, ‘Hell, I wasn’t a resident, I was an orphan.’” He rattled the papers on his lap. “That’s where I found all this stuff.” He smoothed the newspaper clipping. “They let me look in my file. How about that? I found this clipping. And when I saw the picture ofherholding me on her lap, something clicked. And I remembered her. How she come to see me, every year, at Christmas, and on my birthday, or what they told me was my birthday. I remembered she smelled like some kind of flowery perfume. And she had a pearl necklace, and I tried to play with it, but she’d slap my hand away.”
C. D. paused in his story. “Now you tell me, why would she come see some little kid in an orphanage, bring him presents and all like that, unless she had a connection to him?”
“Good question,” Gabe conceded.
“When you came to work here, did you tell Josephine you thought she was your mother?” Brooke asked.
He shook his head emphatically. “No. Because I wasn’t sure yet. I kinda wanted to get the lay of the land, check things out. I came over on the ferry, talked to Shug and asked about a job, and he’s the one brought me up to the house and told Josephine maybe I could run the boat and help with some other stuff around here.”
“And she never recognized you? Didn’t recognize your name?” Gabe sounded skeptical. “Come on, C. D. This is an entertaining story, but none of it proves that you are her son or her heir.”
“How about this?” C. D. asked. He handed over a faded color snapshot of a brick cottage surrounded by towering oaks similar to the ones on Talisa. Brooke squinted to read a plaque.
“That’s the Samuel Bettendorf Cottage at Good Shepherd,” C. D. said. “I looked it up in the records. Josephine donated the money for it to be built in 1946—the year I got put over there once they closed the orphanage.”
“And what do you think that signifies?” Gabe asked.
“It means she felt guilty about walking away and giving me up,” C. D. said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Hell, I can’t explain why she did the stuff she did. I just know I am her son, and after all these years, it’s about damn time she did right by me.”
He looked from Brooke to Gabe, then back at Brooke again, and then donned his sunglasses. “Kinda upsets your apple cart, don’t it? You and your mom and those women upstairs? Looks like none of y’all are gonna be heiresses after all.”
Brooke shrugged. She didn’t know what to say or how to feel. Just the night before, the mistress of Shellhaven had shocked them all by telling them about a murder that had happened nearly eighty years ago, right here on this island. This morning, Josephine was dead, her estate left in limbo. Horror, grief, shock, disbelief. And now this. She was numb.
She stood up and held out a hand to C. D. “Good luck to you, C. D. I hope you’re able to prove your claim. And I truly mean that. If Josephine really did walk away and leave you in an orphanage all those years ago, you deserve to inherit. But in the meantime, I need to get back to the mainland. To my own son.”
