The High Tide Club

“Can I see that?”

C. D. passed the clipping to Gabe Wynant, who examined it closely and then handed it to Brooke.

The newspaper photo was date-stamped SAVANNAH MORNING NEWS, June 18, 1945. The woman in the photo was dressed in a dark dress, with a frivolous feathered hat perched on her dark hair. She held the child stiffly at arm’s length from her chest.

LOCAL BENEFACTRESS VISITS CHILDREN’S HOME, the caption read. Underneath, the copy said:

Miss Josephine Bettendorf distributed smiles and Christmas gifts to orphaned boys this week at the St. Joseph’s Foundling Home. Three-year-old Charles Anthony delighted in receiving a new toy truck.

Brooke studied C. D.’s face.

“Charles Anthony is me,” he said. “And I still got that truck.”

“That’s an amazing coincidence,” Gabe said. “But Josephine was probably just doing what wealthy socialites did back then. It was a charity visit, not a mother-son reunion.”

“No way,” C. D. said. “She came to that home every year while I was there, at Christmas. She handed out candy and toothbrushes and pajamas to them other kids. But I was the only one who got a real toy.” He leaned forward, showing off a narrow white scar that ran through his left eyebrow. “Some other kid tried to take my truck the last year I was at the orphanage. I slugged him, and he hit me with the truck, which is how I got this scar and how he lost his two front teeth.”

“Sorry, but that’s not really proof that you were her child,” Gabe said. “Maybe she just thought you were cute, or she felt sorry for you.”

“I figured you’d say something like that,” C. D. said. He leafed through the packet of papers on his lap and held up another document. It was a photocopy of a typed page.

“Now this here is what’s called the intake report from St. Joseph’s. The sister in charge filled it out when they took in a kid. This is a copy of my intake page. Take a look at that, why don’t you?”

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 typed Unknown. Also unknown were the child’s exact date of birth, although someone had typed Approx. 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 8:00 A.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 who their people 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’s 275th 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 of her holding 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.”