A Mother's Spirit (10 page)

So the following morning, when Joe got up a little later than usual, Gloria assumed that he was going to be doing a tour of the factories, as he had done before.

‘No, not yet,’ Joe said, when she asked him. ‘I am off to see the Empire State Building opened officially by President Hoover first. D’you want to come along with me and see it for yourself?’

Gloria stared at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears. What good was watching the opening of the Empire State Building – or any other building, come to that? It wouldn’t affect their lives in any way. They needed money and Joe hadn’t time to go gallivanting.

‘See it for myself?’ Gloria repeated scornfully. ‘I have no desire to see it and I am surprised that you want to. As you have no work, shouldn’t you be out looking for something?’

‘I will look for something,’ Joe said. ‘The opening shouldn’t take all day.’

Gloria, however, was dreading going back to the way they had lived before, and worry caused her to lash out at him. ‘Joe, I don’t believe that I am hearing this,’ she cried. ‘You know yourself that there is not a chance of a job unless you are out early. You have said so yourself. When you are watching the President cutting the tape, as if you are a man of leisure, just remember that.’

‘And when have I ever wasted time?’ Joe ground out.

‘Well, you are proposing to now,’ Gloria retorted.

‘Dear God, woman …’ Gloria saw the rage building up in Joe. His face was crimson and his eyes flashed fire. She waited for the onslaught, but it didn’t come. Joe didn’t trust himself to speak. He couldn’t trust himself to stay in the same room as Gloria either, and he wrenched the door open, then slammed it so hard behind him that it shuddered on its hinges.

Gloria sank onto a kitchen chair, and burst into tears. She knew how unjust she had been. Joe was out every day, in all weathers, and was willing to work his fingers to the
bone for them. Why hadn’t she gone with him to see the opening of that magnificent building? He would have been so pleased if she had, but instead she had driven him out with her angry words.

Norah lay in bed and listened to her daughter weeping. She knew Gloria was very near breaking point, for she had heard it in her voice, and now she faced the fact that she was partly to blame. Instead of being a help to her – to them both – she had been more of a hindrance. True, the way they lived now was as far from her former life as it was possible to be, but it was the same for Gloria and she hadn’t crumbled, but had soldiered on, making the best of it, though she was now at the end of her tether.

It was time that she herself took an active role in the family again, Norah decided, and she threw back the covers.

Gloria heard her mother’s approach with surprise. She lifted her tear-stained face and said, ‘Are you all right, Mother?’ for Norah spent much of her time isolated in her room. ‘Is there something I can get for you?’

‘There is nothing you can get me, girl, and yet I am definitely not all right,’ Norah said. ‘I am selfish and self-centred.’

‘Oh, Mother …’

‘Hear me out, Gloria. I have watched you and Joe struggle for months and as yet have not lifted a finger to help you.’

‘Mother, we understand. What has happened was a terrific shock for you.’

‘It was a terrible shock for all of us and my withdrawing from life helped no one. Your father took the coward’s way out, Gloria, and yet I envied him. At one point it crossed my mind to make an end to it all when I realised that I had lost the house. I felt that I was in despair. But I have finally got over that nonsense now, and for all he seldom complains I imagine Joe gets as fed up as the rest of us.’

‘Yes,’ Gloria said. ‘And I have driven him away.’

‘You are under strain as well,’ Norah said. ‘And that is
why you said what you did – because you know your man works himself to death for the pair of us.’

‘I know,’ Gloria said, ‘and I will apologise to him as soon as he comes in.’

Many hours later, when the early summer’s evening had a dusky tinge to it, Joe arrived home, worn out and footsore. His face was grey and lined with fatigue. Norah, looking from him to her daughter, felt that her presence wasn’t necessary and took herself off to her room.

Gloria said gently, ‘I was worried about you.’

‘Were you?’ Joe asked wearily. He looked at her steadily. ‘I don’t think you were. You probably just wanted to establish that I was out looking for work and not wasting time.’

‘No, Joe,’ Gloria maintained, ‘I was truly worried. I thought something might have happened to you and I couldn’t have borne that. I am so sorry about what I said to you this morning. I was wrong and I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.’

Joe’s face lightened a little, but still he asked, ‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Yes, Joe,’ Gloria replied earnestly. ‘I mean it from the bottom of my heart.’

‘That, my dear girl, is all I wanted to hear,’ Joe said, and as he held her closer she heard the rumble of his stomach.

She pulled away from him slightly. ‘Joe, you’re hungry.’

‘Well, I haven’t eaten all day,’ Joe said. ‘You can’t buy anything when you haven’t even a dime in your pocket.’

‘Oh, Joe,’ Gloria said, ‘I only have bread in, but I have milk and tea.’

‘Tea and bread is a banquet to a starving man,’ Joe said, giving Gloria a peck on the cheek. ‘Lead me to it. You must feed me up anyway, for I have at least a day’s work at the docks tomorrow.’

Gloria used to love the docks, she remembered, and would nag her father to take her as often as she could. It had all stopped when she was fourteen and Joe had put his
life on the line to save her from greater injury or death. That, however, had been in her other life when she had been living, rather than merely existing. Now she said, ‘Oh, Joe, that’s wonderful.’

‘Aye, isn’t it,’ Joe said. ‘I would have hated to come home with nothing, and I only got this because I can drive.’

‘Oh? What are you driving?’

‘Trucks. One of the hauliers is a driver down, and I wish the man no harm, but I hope he takes a while to recover from whatever it is he is suffering from.’

‘Ooh, yes,’ Gloria said. ‘A whole week would be lovely.’

‘A week,’ said Joe. ‘That is nothing at all. I was thinking more of six months or so.’

‘And I would say you were tilting at windmills.’

‘You shouldn’t be saying anything at all,’ Joe said. ‘You should be putting food on the table before I start gnawing on the table leg.’

Two months later Gloria looked down from her fourth-floor window to the dusty yard below and thought she had died and gone to hell. She could see the doors to the communal lavatories sagging open on broken hinges, and the dustbins spilling onto the yard, and she wanted to die. She never in all her life thought that people lived like this, let alone that she would be counted as one of them.

She faced the fact that she was no longer a person in straitened circumstances, but part of New York’s poor, and that realisation was hard to take. They no longer had an apartment, for despite Joe’s semi-permanent jobs at the docks, they couldn’t pay the rent. Instead they had rooms in a tenement building. Her mother had the one bedroom, and in the other room the family had to live, Joe and Gloria sleeping on the settee, which opened up as a bed at night. Any basic cooking would have to be done in what was laughingly called ‘the kitchen’, which housed a battered table and four rickety chairs, a sink under the one cold tap, a
couple of shelves and two gas rings. The lighting too was from gas. They had no bathroom, and the toilet was a shared one, with access to it across the dusty yard. Gloria bitterly resented Joe bringing them there.

She hadn’t really believed Joe when he told her in July that they were going to have to move to a cheaper place because the money in the biscuit tin was almost all gone and they could no longer afford the rent of the apartment. When Joe had taken Gloria to see this place she had been appalled. She couldn’t believe that he could possibly think she could live here. Now the apartment she had once thought of as small and squalid seemed like a palace in comparison.

Joe knew how she felt and he felt a failure because he could provide nothing better. In fact they were lucky to have anything at all, for many in the same circumstance as Joe lived on the streets. A man he worked with at the docks, named Red McCullough because of his shock of red hair, had told him of the vacancy, in one of the tenements in Ludlow Street, nearby where he lodged in Orchard Street.

As Orchard Street was where Patrick Lacey lived, before Joe went to look at the place Red had mentioned, he looked him up. He was, however, long gone, the neighbours said, and none seemed to know or care where.

Later, when he saw the rooms at the tenement in Ludlow Street, he realised that, with no indoor toilets, they were far worse than those in Orchard Street. The whole area was more run down and shabby, yet Joe knew he had to take tenancy on those rooms, though he guessed what Gloria’s reaction would be.

She didn’t disappoint him. Like her mother before her, she tried to pretend the move wasn’t going to happen. It was Joe who packed their few meagre possessions and he bore Gloria’s glares of resentment and barbed remarks, for he knew she was dying inside at the thought of moving to the place she had seen for the first time the previous day. He knew even the day they were leaving, as he was stowing
their things away in the truck that he had hired with the last of their savings, she was hoping that Joe would relent, or something else would happen to prevent them leaving the apartment.

Nothing had happened, however, and as she surveyed the room that first day she looked at Joe, her eyes full of reproach and said, ‘What are you thinking of, bringing me to a place like this? Mother and I cannot stay here, Joe. You must find somewhere else. In the whole of the city there must be somewhere better to stay that we can afford. It’s just a question of looking, I’m sure.’

Joe had had enough. ‘Look, Gloria,’ he said, ‘there is nowhere. I know that this is not what you or your mother are used to, but I am doing my level best to stop us all dying of starvation or exposure. Just at the moment this is the best that I can do, for it is either this or the streets. Sorry if it isn’t good enough.’

Gloria heard the hurt in Joe’s voice and so did Norah. She was hiding her utter shock well, for even as Joe told her about the place she hadn’t been really prepared, but she heard his words and knew he spoke the truth. She knew that Gloria had taken almost as much as she could, and it was up to her to try to rally her daughter, and so she said, ‘Come, come, Gloria. The place won’t look so bad when it has had a thorough clean. And any day now Joe may get a regular job and we won’t be here that long.’

Gloria knew what her mother was about and she felt mean. Joe was trying so hard for them all. She felt a momentary flash of anger for the father she had once adored who had got them into this mess and then couldn’t stay around even to attempt to put some of it right.

‘It’s me that should be saying sorry, Joe,’ she said. ‘I know you are trying always to do the best for us. It’s just this place … It’s such a shock. Maybe, though, Mother is right and we won’t have to stay here for too long altogether.’

‘Perhaps,’ Joe answered. He didn’t believe that for a
minute, though. He knew just how bad the unemployment was and he couldn’t see any let-up in the grip it had on the city.

Month after month passed and the recession worsened. In the winter of 1931 severe blizzards began to paralyse the whole city and early in 1932, a gold pendant of Gloria’s and a set of pearl earrings had to be sacrificed to prevent the family from starving or freezing to death.

By 1933 food became less freely available and more expensive, because a severe drought had followed the blizzards of the previous year, turning the farming areas into huge dust bowls. Farmers began leaving the land in desperation and seeking other forms of employment in the towns and cities, adding to the problems already there and causing a food shortage.

The country had elected Theodore Roosevelt President in 1932. He was a popular man and people said he would be good for the country, but even a president has no control over the weather, and Joe began to wonder seriously how much longer they could survive.

Eventually, the churches began to work with the poor and starving people. St John the Baptist, the church that Joe, Norah and Gloria attended every Sunday, was no exception and they operated soup kitchens. Each person was entitled to one bowl of thick, nourishing soup and one thick slice of coarse bread every day, which was dispensed from the streets to the homeless and destitute, and from the church hall to those in the tenements. For many that meal was a life saver.

Gloria also thought it was good for her and her mother to get out of their small rooms, where they lived on top of one another. As the summer passed and autumn brought the cold and the damp, it was good to gather in the warm church hall, thereby saving money on coal. They met some of the people who shared their tenement and the neighbouring ones.

Norah and Gloria had never associated with such people, and though many cursed and swore worse than any rough man, Gloria enjoyed listening to the ribaldry and banter between them.

It gave them something to talk to Joe about in the evenings too, for though he had met many of the men as they roiled around the streets together looking for work he had had little to do with the women. ‘They are destitute, Joe, some even poorer than we are but many refuse to let life wear them down. You can’t help respecting an attitude like that.’

‘I agree,’ Joe said. ‘Sometimes life seems one wearying and never-ending struggle.’

‘And yet you wouldn’t think some of these people had a care in the world,’ Norah said. ‘Today for example a few of the Irish women lifted up their skirts and danced a jig for us.’

Gloria smiled at the memory and added. ‘Yes, and a boy, little more than a child, was there playing the tune for them on a battered old violin.’

Unbidden there flashed into Joe’s head the picture of himself and Tom playing the music for Aggie to dance to. He remembered her plaits bouncing on her back and her eyes alight with delight, for she adored Irish dancing and yet, in the end, dancing had been her downfall.