Word: fathering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Final Payments, the best first novel in many months, begins at old Joe Moore's funeral. At the graveside are weeping priests. Mary Gordon knows the Irish Catholic enclaves of New York lethally well. The priests had been her father's companions, drinking for hours in his house and arguing about baptism of desire. Moore himself was a militant soldier of Christ and a right-wing fanatic: "His sympathies were with the South in the Civil War and the Spanish Fascists." But if his opinions were unfashionable and possibly barbaric, he knew something about the nature...
...will be another job and another man for her, but before that she must go back to Margaret Casey. It was not the old woman's spiteful tongue, her sloth, her mawkish novenas or her copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger that Isabel hated. It was that her father loved Margaret, with an engaged love for the wretched of God's earth, those who spend their lives trying to keep a little space at the edge of the table. From the opening rites of burial, laced with fine Irish malice, the reader relaxes, secure in the hands...
...earlier biographers, often hagiolatrous in their enthusiasm for Hamilton, have known that he was born illegitimate in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies, his father the disinherited fourth son of an aristocratic Scots family. That part of the Hamilton story, briefly told, has suggested a certain domestic warmth surrounding the child, and even a hint of affluence. Flexner's research, he says, "turns the accepted story completely upside down. I found not affluence but relative squalor; not warmth but betrayal. Hamilton's home was a shambles." Being illegitimate, Alexander was officially designated an "obscene child." His mother...
...actually a heavily Catholic section of Valley Stream, L.I. Her mother, "a nice Catholic girl" and now a legal secretary, has lived in the same house for 58 years. Mary, who is 29, sometimes feels, like Isabel, that the most interesting part of her life is her past. Her father's family were the only Jews in Lorain, Ohio. They managed to send their son to Harvard, but he dropped out and knocked around Europe for a few years. Says Mary: "He once started a girlie magazine called Hot Dog. When I was a teen-ager I found...
Flexner, author of a magisterial four-volume life of George Washington, believes that this chaotic childhood left Hamilton, for all his brilliance, a strange and scarred man, "by far the most psychologically troubled of the founding fathers." He finds in Hamilton two very different, constantly warring creatures. One is the paragon of eighth-grade history: logical, visionary, very nearly alabaster; the other, "the semimadman who sought from the world an ever-denied release from inner wounds ... The accomplished, smooth and brilliant man of the world could at any moment change hysterically, invisibly, for the time being decisively, into an imperiled...