...And Never Let HerGo

Patrick’s Day dinner, an opulent feast in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel du Pont. The local Catholic and Episcopal bishops, along with the governor of Delaware, the mayor of Wilmington, and every other important political figure, were present. Dancers from the McAleer School of Irish Dance entertained a crowd dressed in their finest.
    One of the couples who faithfully attended the St. Patrick’s Day dinner was Robert Fahey and his wife, Kathleen. Ex-mayor Bill McLaughlin, over eighty now, recalled how the Faheys met and fell in love. Sitting on his favorite stool at O’Friel’s Pub, McLaughlin smiled as he remembered. “Anne Marie used to say to me, ‘If it weren’t for you,
I
wouldn’t be here now,’ and I guess that’s true—I introduced her parents.
    “Robert Sr. was a handsome young man, a salesman for IBM, as I recall, and he came calling to the DuPont plant in the early fifties,” McLaughlin said. “Kathleen was working as a secretary in the chemical division, and he saw her there, and he thought she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. She
was
a very pretty girl. He asked me to introduce him, and I did.”
    Kathleen’s parents were both born in Ireland, and she had a soft brogue herself. It only made her more attractive. She was eight years younger than Robert, who was thirty.
    “They got married in about 1953, and they had good years,” McLaughlin recalled. “Really good years . . .”
    For a while there
were
abundant and happy years. The Faheys bought a new house in McDaniel Crest, a neighborhood close byState Road 202—the Concord Pike—in north Wilmington. In the postwar building boom, whole streets of houses were sprouting up overnight there on acreage that had long been farmland owned by the Weldin and Talley families. The Faheys’ first house was small, a little over sixteen hundred square feet. It was more than adequate at first, but it soon seemed to shrink, as their children came along.
    Robert switched to selling insurance. With his natural charm, he could sell anything. Kathleen stayed at home as most young wives did in the fifties. They had six children in a dozen years: Kevin first, in 1954, Mark in 1956, Robert Jr. in 1958, Kathleen in 1960, Brian in 1961, and the baby, Anne Marie Sinead Fahey, in 1966.
    “Most of us kids were two years apart,” Robert Jr. would remember. “Our house wasn’t that big, and it seemed like there was never enough money.”
    Lucy and Walter Brady, strong proponents of preserving Irish heritage, met the young Fahey family through their friends the Whalens; all of them were interested in honoring their Irish roots, and Robert and Kathleen were enthusiastic about a program Lucy and Walter helped organize to bring Irish schoolteachers to America for a summer’s visit. During the hot and humid Delaware summers, Robert and Kathleen opened their home to a number of the teachers from Ireland.
    The Faheys had a good time together. They attended church faithfully for twelve years at St. Mary Magdalen Church on Concord Pike, and Kathleen tried to plan picnics and outings, always with a bunch of kids with curly heads bobbing in the backseat. If there was any precursor of trouble, it was Robert’s problem with alcohol; if he was not an alcoholic yet, he had most of the danger signs. Kathleen tried to cope with it. At first his drinking didn’t interfere with his job or with the family. They loved each other still, and their children were all exceptionally bright and attractive.
    The five or more years between her siblings and little Anne Marie—or Annie, as they called her—put them virtually in different generations when they were children. Annie was a beautiful baby with huge blue eyes and a rollicking laugh that seemed too big for such a tiny girl, and her siblings and their friends made a fuss over her because she was the baby, probably the last Fahey baby.
    When Anne Marie was born, on January 27, 1966, her mother, Kathleen, was almost thirty-six. The two of them were very close, partly because Kathleen’s older five went off to school every day, and she and her baby girl were home together. It was natural that Anne Marie would form a special bond with her mother, even after she toostarted at Alfred I. du Pont elementary school. They were very much alike, both pretty and full of life and humor, both with a laugh you could hear a block away.
    Kathleen was very protective of Annie, maybe because she
was
the baby. She was an