Sometime in the late 1960s, after my great grandmother Julia had moved in permanently with my grandparents (for years she traveled from one child's home to another until they kept her even though she was no easy person to live with), she dropped a bombshell on my grandmother. As I was told years later, they were watching television together, some innocuous program my grandmother could not even remember and Julia let out with the startling admission that she had come home one day and caught her husband in bed - in their bed - with another woman. She was furious at him, angry still beyond reason even though Tom had been dead and buried more than thirty years at that point. She gave this deep dark secret up and then sat back in the chair and my poor grandmother, who had a decent relationship with her mother but by no means one that involved personal revelations of any kind, did not know how to respond. Based on the woman he was found with though (and I won't share that here), my grandmother was finally able to understand a serious rift with this person that had occurred in her childhood. And she also knew what else had happened at very nearly the same time: Julia had met the woman who helped women lose their babies.

Finally, we understood why.

Unfortunately, my grandmother was so shell shocked by what her mother told her that day that she didn't follow up on it, ever. This kills me and my mother, (seriously - we have talked about it for years), but my grandmother said it was such an ugly admission - Julia was still so very upset that she didn't feel right poking and prying. Everyone else involved was dead anyway, so there seemed little point. She let it go and only told my mother and then years after that, told me. I don't even know if anyone else in the family is even aware that Tom cheated, or who he was found with.

What I have started to wonder in the past few years though is if this was the first time. Also, Tom was known to come home and pass out drunk. (My great aunt Agnes told a very sad story of coming home from school one day and happily seeing her father waiting for her near their building; when she got closer she realized he had passed out leaning up against it.) It is entirely possible that he was so out of it that he didn't even know who he was with that day, although I think that if this was the case Julia might have forgiven him for it. Or if it was the first time she might have been more understanding. What is clear though is that it was the end of Tom and Julia and all they could have been. Her anger at him was so great, her pain so complete, that she could not bear to carry his child. Can you wrap your head around what it must have been like for he to come to that conclusion? It's staggering. We know they did get together again at some point later because my great uncle Eddie was born in 1931, after that long gap. He was the last though because Tom drank himself to death and died at 44 years old in 1933. (The doctor told him if he did not stop he would be dead before his next birthday and he was.)

"Nana" died when I was four so I have only the barest of memories of her (we sat out a tornado together - not the sort of thing you forget). My mother knew her quite well and she was regarded as a stern no-nonsense woman by her and her cousins. She did love babies though and always remembered them; I still have some of the birthday cards she sent me. I can't imagine who she would have been without Tom Lennon - if she had met a man who loved her enough to put down the beer and pursue a life together, or at least attempted to do so. Like every other Irishman in my family though (and they were Irish on both sides of my mother's ancestry), Tom drank until the end. He drank so much that as the father of seven children, in the middle of the day, he took another woman into his wife's bed. It's almost like he didn't care - like nothing about Julia or his children mattered enough anymore.

But that's not fair. I know he was dearly loved by all of his older children (who remembered him well) but also a subject of pity. They might have been afraid of their mother at one time or another, but they knew she would keep them alive. In Tom, history had taught them to have little faith. After he died Julia fed and housed her children which is amazing when you think about it. Not one of them ever spent a night in an orphanage or was farmed off to relatives. Julia might not have been able to control her husband but she was damned if she was going to lose one of his kids. That sort of strength is beyond admirable - it is the backbone of our family.

But still. Knowing that even decades later she still harbored such sorrow for what he did makes me immeasurably sad. I wanted a happily ever after story for them - so young and so beautiful and so happy for so long. And more than anything, I wanted him to be a man who was worthy of her. I wanted to change history a bit, I guess, which is the genealogist's curse. A happier story next time, promise.

[Post pics:Julia, circa 1910 (after her marriage); Tom with son Thomas Jr, 1916; Tom & Julia, circa 1921]