City of Hope (15 page)

However, when I got up to my hotel room I felt suddenly exhausted. The first thing I did was check if Sheila had been back, and I found that she had. All of her belongings were gone from the room, and there was a note on the bed scrawled quickly on Plaza notepaper:
“You missed a great night! Geoff invited me up to the Hamptons for a ‘holiday'—here's the address, if you want to join us.”
The address was illegible. Whether she had fled my company through embarrassment or chagrin did not interest me. Certainly the other events of the night before had put her to the back of my mind. I was relieved that she was safe, but also relieved she had gone.

The bed was turned down from the evening before, the chocolates still on the pillow. I lay down on the firm mattress with its tapestry coverlet and closed my eyes, but found I could not sleep.

I had been awake for twenty-four hours, yet I felt anxious to get back to my mission.

This was ridiculous. What mission? What was I doing? What madness had overtaken me, pledging responsibility for the welfare of a whole family, getting involved in somebody else's hardship, when I had myself to look after? I had my own family back in Ireland. Maidy, would she forgive me for having abandoned her, as I had?

Sitting up in frustration with myself, I looked about the room. The luxurious curtains, the ornate black-lacquered lamps, the deep, velvety carpet—I felt my heart heave with a sadness that this was not where I wanted to be. However much good sense told me that this was where I belonged, that this was what I had earned, that the luxury and privilege of The Plaza were my rightful reward for years of work and due comfort for the terrible thing that had happened to me, it felt wrong.

I changed out of my evening clothes and put on some slacks and a light sweater. As I took them fresh from the bag I had purchased them in, I realized that they had cost me as much as a month's rent for the Sweeneys in a decent apartment. The barrette had fallen from my hair somewhere on my travels, but I felt nothing at its loss except for the hope that somebody deserving had found it.

I packed a few of my new clothes into a bag, with the thought of giving them to Maureen, and left the hotel again.

I shopped for food in a small grocery store, then stopped at a drugstore and considered buying a few bits of inexpensive crockery. I decided against it. In all likelihood Maureen would have some already, which she had used in her ramshackle home, and I did not want to insult her pride further by suggesting that she had less than she had. As I placed the dime-store plates back on the shelf, I had a peculiar feeling that I needed Maureen's friendship more than she needed mine.

On my way into the brownstone I saw Flora playing nicely on the steps with another girl of around her own age, and Jake standing nearby smoking the last of my cigarettes. Flora greeted me cheerfully, but the lad merely nodded at me briefly, defensive at the lack of a gang of followers, and doubtless looking to acquire new ones. He was a good kid who loved his mother, but would surely not be for much longer, if their lives did not change.

Maureen answered the door and, as I entered, I saw that while the room was far from transformed, it was clean and orderly and I was relieved to see that I had been right about Maureen salvaging things from her past life. The table was set with decent, Willow Pattern crockery, and stretched across it was a linen tablecloth—in want of a good iron, but nonetheless with pretty, hand-sewn embroidery at its hem.

“I have some tea,” she said.

I took a fruitcake out of my bag and laid it on a plate.

“Tell me about yourself, Ellie,” she said, pouring tea from a simple brown earthenware teapot into one of the Willow Pattern cups. “I know nothing about you, only your name.”

Maureen had lost the fraught stare of the victim I had rescued, and I saw at once that she was an ordinary woman like me. She had tidied herself, her long brown hair was up in a neat bun, her face was kind and relaxed, on the pretty side of plain, although still too thin for her bone structure. Her eyes were warm and interested.

I gave her a condensed history of my life. How my well-to-do parents had disowned me when I refused to enter the convent, and about running away at eighteen to marry my childhood sweetheart John. His injury in the War of Independence had plunged us into terrible poverty, and that was how I had ended up in New York, working as a maid to help pay for his operation.

“You're not a maid now, I take it?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I trained as a typist, then went back to Ireland when my father died and started up a business in my home town.”

“So what brought you back here?”

I girded myself against telling a lie, but found I did not want to.

“My husband died.”

She leaned toward me and put both her hands over mine.

“I'm sorry,” she said. For the first time since it had happened it felt right to say it out loud. I did not feel the pain rising. Perhaps it was gone.

“So I came here for a holiday.”

“And you chose to spend your holiday rescuing poor creatures like me from the street?”

I smiled. I could not explain myself further, nor did I want to give her details of my stay in The Plaza, or of my old friend Sheila giving me the runaround.

I stood up and walked to the window. Tenements crowded in on one another, grimy windows with scraggy net curtains barely hiding one family from another. Treacherous metal steps butted up against each other, with children sitting out on them, five floors up, smoking, and flimsy rags of washing flapping around in the filthy air. There was no room to breathe; this place was one step up from a slum, the whole area a prison of sorts.

“Where was your house?” I asked her. Maureen politely took my cue to talk about her life again, although she doubtless would have preferred to explore my troubles further.

“Yonkers,” she said, “in the Bronx, but a respectable area nonetheless. We had a fine garden and the children were happy in school. We've been gone from there five years now.”

“I wonder if it is still available for rent?”

She saw where the conversation was going.

“Really, Ellie, you have done enough . . .”

“No.” I was adamant. “This place is not suitable for you and the children, and the rent is outrageous. I am almost certain that for a few dollars more we could get your house back.”

“Really, I can't let you do any more for us, you've already been so kind.”

I sat down and looked her straight in the eye.

“Maureen, please”—and the words came from nowhere—“I need some purpose, something to do. Let me help you, for my sake, if not yours.”

“The house will surely be gone,” she objected.

“Well, let's go and see—do you remember where the landlord works?”

She nodded.

“Then it's settled.”

We left the children with neighbors, and a message at the laundry instructing Bridie to feed them during her lunch break, then took a taxi to Grand Central, and the train from there out to Yonkers.

We walked up a short, steep hill from Ludlow station, then left down Fairfield Road toward Yonkers village. There was green space between the large, airy, clapboard houses and pink blossom scattered on the ground. The air smelled of lilac—it was so much lighter and fresher that it was hard to believe that the stodgy, crowded atmosphere of the city was less than an hour away. It felt as if we were in the country. My walk was purposeful and brisk, but as the houses gave way to the shops and bars at the heart of Yonkers village, Maureen's step slowed and her demeanor became slumped and sullen.

“I don't think this is a good idea, Ellie, really.”

Shame—the humiliation of a life lived and lost. I became even more determined to restore her pride. Kind words or condolences would only diminish her further and, in any case, I was full of action.

“Just show me where the landlord's office is,” I said, firmly taking her arm.

She stopped outside an office in whose windows there were drawings and some photographs of houses. Maureen balked at the door.

“I can't go in,” she said.

I slipped a dollar into her hand and left her sitting in the cafe next door while I went about her business.

Her landlord, a Mr. Williams, was in, and I found him to be an amenable man. In any case I was all business, with money in my pocket; and I understood, more than most, that a transaction was a transaction, whatever its past history or cause—money in the present was always welcomed. I encountered no suspicion or doubt, which told me that the Sweeneys had perhaps been more decent tenants than Maureen had feared. Their plight was the plight of many, and as the circumstances of the Depression had revealed themselves, doubtless men like Mr. Williams were more sympathetic than their harsh roles of landlords had formerly allowed them to be. Evicting families was an unsavory business, and I guessed that this mellow-faced man had his own family to feed and was simply doing his job. I explained that I was a friend of the Sweeneys and had come to restore them to their family home. He explained, regretfully, that the house had recently been sold. Despite, or rather because of, the slump in property prices, the area had become popular with prospectors as a place for good, cheap investments.

Were there any other houses in or near that particular street? I asked.

“There is one,” he said. “It is for sale, but it has been on the market for some time and there is little interest being shown in it. I could certainly let you have it for a reasonable rent, until such time as we find a buyer.”

“Can we go and see it now?” I asked.

“I should warn you it is in a state of disrepair.”

“There is no harm in looking,” I said.

And he nodded. “My car is just outside.”

I stuck my head into the cafe and called Maureen out, giving her no room to object. Whatever had passed between her family and this landlord, I would insist that she face the demons of her past. It seemed to me that the level of her shame was greater than it had a right to be, and the landlord's attitude to her confirmed that.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Sweeney,” and he held out his hand as if at a church fete. “How nice to see you again.”

She took it and said, “Mr. Williams.”

“I trust your husband is well?”

She looked at me nervously and replied, “He's very well, thank you.”

He opened the door for us and we both climbed into the back seat, then he drove us up and down nameless hilly streets lined with mostly empty houses, many of which were derelict. Countless windows gaped emptily, like sad eyes behind overgrown shrubs, their clapboard sidings peeling and torn, with broken pots and baby carriages in the porches, the debris left behind by the thousands of ordinary families whose lives had taken an extraordinary, shocking turn for the worse. There was no reason for Maureen to feel ashamed at what had happened to her. It seemed that her plight was that of many families in this area—the genteel stature of the buildings decimated by the poverty of neglect; the hope for the good life they promised now dashed.

I pointed out to Mr. Williams that there seemed to be a lot of empty properties in the area.

“Prospectors are only interested in investment, not development. They buy the houses cheap and just leave them empty, hanging on to them until the market picks up,” he explained, “which they believe it will.”

“And what will happen then?” I asked.

“Then they'll sell them off again, or rent them out for a great profit.”

“It seems a shame to leave them like this, when so many people in the city are homeless,” I said.

“Sure does,” he replied, looking at me briefly in the driver's mirror.

Maureen stared pointedly out the window, her lips set, and I felt a stab of guilt for my insensitive remark.

He pulled up alongside a large clapboard house. “Here we are,” he said.

The house was huge and, I could see at once, in as bad a state of disrepair as the landlord had warned us. Several of the windows were gone, and the garden was a jungle of high thistles and weeds. But the boarding looked sound, and there was a large porch wrapping the whole way round it. He took the keys out of his pocket and walked us around the vast inside. There were cobwebs everywhere, and in the dining room my heel went through a rotten floorboard and almost snapped off. The few sparse furnishings left by the last tenants were broken, and damp wallpaper peeled from the walls. But there was a large kitchen, which, while filthy, still had a small stove and a large refrigerator that would have been too heavy for even the most determined of looter to carry, so it was possibly still in working order. There were seven bedrooms, and at least four of them had functioning beds, even if the mattresses were musty—they would soon be aired. There were no fewer than two indoor bathrooms, with baths and toilets intact. An idea formed itself inside me.

“We'll take it,” I said.

“I can let you have it for five dollars a month,” he said, sheepish to be asking for any money at all.

“Not to rent,” I said, “to buy.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Maureen looked at me as if I had lost my mind. For a moment I thought that perhaps I had. But if I bought this house and restored some order to it, it would rise in value. I had enough cash on me to make a good deal there and then and, in any case, I disliked giving money to landlords—especially the class of landlords here who were throwing families out of their homes, only for the buildings to stand empty and rot. This way Maureen and her family would have the security they deserved. And as for me? Well, I had my sense of purpose back.

Aside from my love for John, that had always been the thing that had kept me going.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

I did not stop to consider anything beyond the setting up of the house in Yonkers. I had a sense of elation and excitement that dwarfed all thoughts of returning home. In deciding to purchase the house, I was certain I had found a solution of sorts. I now had a reason to be here. This was a fresh start, a new beginning.