City of Hope (18 page)

The salon is thriving due to Pauline's skills, but, as you already know, the girl is a flibbertigibbet and incapable of running the business end of things. I have employed another girl to manage the till—Assumpta Kelly, she was trained with us some two years ago, but has been unable to find a post elsewhere. She is a somewhat “glamorous” type, but reliable and trustworthy, certainly more so than the other one. As instructed by you, a percentage of the shop takings are being kept as cash in the safe under my desk—and I am anxious about the amount, and wondering if there is anywhere else it can be safely kept, or perhaps you would like it sent over to you as bank drafts?

I should also let you know that the Fitzpatricks were very upset that you reneged on your offer for their drapery, which is still up for sale. They asked me to ask you to reconsider, and are willing to negotiate a better price for you. If you don't consider it presumptuous of me to say so, I would argue that the business as it stands is a good, solid proposition and, while I lack your flair for fashion, I would be more than happy to oversee its purchase and refurbishment for you. I attach a document proposing my ideas.

On a personal note, I have taken up your kind offer to move into the apartment, and am very comfortable and happy here. I have taken the liberty of packing away some of your things to make room for my own, and they are ready for me to forward, should that be your wish. You did not mention how long you would be away for, but I gathered from the tone of your letter that it might be for some time yet. I have also, on your advice, learned to drive, and am finding it to be an easy and most useful pastime!

As well you might imagine, everybody in the town is asking after you. I have told them that you are taking a holiday in America, and that I am holding the fort in your absence, and you may be assured of my discretion in giving news of your whereabouts or personal circumstances. I have reassured Maidy that you were asking after her and will doubtless be in touch soon. While she is still very sad after John, as we all are, I have called out to her a few times and taken up the habit of driving her to Mass each Sunday. She was in good spirits when I saw her last week and we took lunch in the hotel in Ballyhaunis afterward, enjoying a most convivial afternoon. I feel sure that time will heal, as it always does, for dear Maidy and also for you, dearest Ellie.

I hope that you are well, and that New York is providing you with all that you hoped it would.

Your friend,

Katherine

Nancy was six months gone when she arrived with us. She was a quiet, pretty girl, not yet twenty, and contributed to the running of the house as best as her age and condition allowed. However, the few days it took us to adjust to our new housemate were short-lived.

Two weeks after we had settled, Maureen arrived home with Anna Balducci, an Italian mother in her thirties with five-year-old twin boys. She had long black hair, slanting eyes and full ruby-red lips. The two tall boys' arms clung to either side of her curved hips.

“The house is full,” I argued, “we can barely fit them in.”

“I'm sorry,” Maureen said, “but she has nowhere else to go. They can all sleep in my room.”

We camped them in the dining room, bringing in our old mattresses from the shed. A few days later I was awoken from my sleep at 6 a.m. by the babble of Italian on the porch. I found Anna and the children outside with her husband, Mario, who had been sleeping rough. They were taking him out food. He looked desperate and they were all so apologetic at “stealing” a few hunks of bread and some cheese that we found room for him, too.

It was Matt who first put into my head the idea of buying another house. Katherine's letter only compounded the idea. First because she was managing so well, and second because she had reassured me about Maidy. Then there was all that cash that she wanted to get rid of.

“That house across the road is pure wrecked,” Matt said, “and nobody has been to look at it in the time we've been here. I've half a mind to go in and tidy it up myself, just for the sake of it. Mario can turn a piece of wood, and there's precious little left to do in this place.”

There was no For Sale sign outside, but I guessed that Mr. Williams might know who to contact. The house had been repossessed and was now owned by a small lending institution, which was, in turn, in receivership to the bank with which I had my account. The bank was willing to sell the house for virtually any price I would offer them. I offered them two thousand dollars. They had another house in the area, and for an extra thousand dollars I could have that, too—they even offered me a mortgage to cover half the entire sum. I took them up on both.

Within a matter of months I had found myself in ownership of no fewer than three houses in the area. I had found there was no need for caution in wasting time thinking over business transactions here. In any case, I found that either because of the property owner's greed or the efficiency of the American legal system, all dealings were done at double the speed they were in Ireland. Under Katherine's care the typing school and salon were doing well, so raising money was not an issue. More important, the need for shelter was there, and the desire to help people had become all I needed to drive me forward. No mere practicality would be an obstacle to my plans to house the needy. I was on a mission, and I felt invincible.

Our new community now comprised more than thirty men, women and children—and we lived as one family. As the men, under Matt's supervision, worked to bring each house up to a reasonable living standard, the women cooked and cleaned and looked after the children. For the sake of both economy and ease, we ate all our meals together, ensuring that every man, woman and child had at least one full meal a day.

Bridie ran the kitchen in our house like a canteen, serving soup from two huge pots every day, spooning each serving into large tin mugs, and we mopped it up with hunks from the eight loaves of bread that she left rising overnight and put into the oven each morning. The two pans were then cleaned out and used to cook the dinner that evening.

Anna proved a worthy kitchen-mate to Bridie, and won her over with her matronly, frugal, traditional Italian cooking. Bridie called her the “mama” and together the two women came up with ingenious ways of saving money, not just on ingredients, but on fuel and electricity. They cooked one vast batch of spaghetti, barely bringing the water to the boil before switching off the electricity to let the pasta cook in its own heat. That night they would serve it with a sauce made from tomatoes and cheap cuts of minced meat, then again the following evening as the main ingredient in “Poor man's pasta”—frying it up with our own onions and eggs, with olive oil and cheese to bind it into a delicious, hearty cake.

Anna picked tomatoes and also boiled them up into a sauce with olive oil and onions, then put them into empty jars that the children collected from the neighbors, and stacked them up in the store cupboard to keep for the winter. Piles of empty tins built up in the porch, and the children bored holes in the bottoms of them, filled them with earth and planted seeds in them.

On Bridie's insistence, we fed the men first in the evenings, then sent them all out onto the porch to smoke before washing the plates and cutlery and letting the women and children sit down to their food. I objected initially—we all worked as hard as one another, I argued—but she won me around saying, “Men are selfish creatures, they will always eat quickly. Women and children need time to take their nourishment. That child Nancy is as thin as a stick—the baby is sucking all the good out of her. If we eat late, I can make sure she gets what she needs and goes to bed with a full stomach.”

For all that she puffed and moaned about her work, Bridie was my greatest asset. It was on her advice that we kept a “dry” house. She had caught two of the men “helping themselves” to sugar and yeast from her store, and suspected, correctly, that they were making liquor. They confessed immediately and, apart from their kitchen foray, had both proved themselves to be good, hardworking men. I would have had no argument against a man's natural instinct for alcohol, and was ready to allocate them the ingredients to make it themselves. However, Bridie wasted no time in putting them in their place, before I had time to draw breath on my suggestion. “Mark my words, you'll be out on the street if there is any more of that nonsense. Liquor! Is your time and energy not fully taken up, looking after your wives and children? You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

So the men washed down their meals with jugs of cheap, diluted lemonade poured into the same tin mugs that we took our soup in, making no complaint, and the house remained a sober, peaceful place of work—everybody knowing their place, every­body occupied with their chosen chores, and grateful for the opportunities we were creating for ourselves, and for one another. Although I was still paying for our basic welfare, I would not claim that the progress we made was all of my doing. I had my own reasons for getting involved in helping the needy, but every­one was eager to rebuild their lives, putting all of their work into the tasks in front of them and, when these were complete, finding more.

Matt and I met every morning to discuss the progress of each house, and to decide what materials he could salvage and what he needed to buy. He was creative in his thriftiness, disassembling a garden shed to replace floorboards, taking sidings from one house to complete another. In one of the sheds he found the carcass of an abandoned pickup truck. One of the lads was a young mechanic, and together they put new wheels on it and bought a secondhand engine. Using this, the men trawled the city dumps for bits of discarded pipe and other building materials.

In the evenings all families slept in makeshift bedrooms, made up in whatever houses they could, rising early and coming back to the communal comfort of our house for their breakfast and to plan the chores for the day. I placed myself at the center of our routines, working alongside the women—washing out sheets in tin baths in the gardens, wringing them in a mangle that we had found abandoned, digging and planting vegetable gardens in whatever fresh piece of ground we could find, feeding and managing our poultry.

As time went on I came to rely on Matt as the man of the house. Aside from the fact that he took charge of all the building and renovation work on the houses, I sought his advice in most matters, and enjoyed his support in all things. In the evenings, after everyone had retired, Matt and I would sit on either side of the kitchen stove. Our hands warmed with tea or cocoa, we had already shared every detail of our day with each other and, there being nothing left to say, we would just sit and share the heat of the fire and the reward of a busy day being over. Sometimes we would be made awkward by the intimacy of our silence, and one or the other of us would break it with some trivial comment or movement: “Those dishes won't wash themselves,” or “I'll tackle that shed in the morning.” At other times I would relax into the closeness; listen for the fall of his breath as he stood to make his way to bed, and for a second I would imagine myself following him and crawling into the comfort of his strong body, as I did with John. But at the memory of my husband, any notion toward Matt would disappear with the speed of a falling stone.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

Nancy's labor came on suddenly while I was alone in the house with her. I moved her upstairs and sent Jake down to the village to call for Maureen immediately, praying that the girl would not get too far along, causing me to deliver the baby myself. Although I knew what to do, I was not capable of the emotional upheaval of bringing a new life into the world.

In Kilmoy I had aided Maidy, a midwife, with childbirth twice before. Once on a farmer's wife already seasoned with seven children, of whom five had survived, and another time on a young woman in a similar circumstance to Nancy. The newborn had been removed almost immediately by a nun who had sat in on the birth, then taken the baby away with her to a convent that organized adoptions. At that time I had lost one baby already, and the secret thought that I could have taken the infant myself from the girl had played on me for years afterward. I was concerned that I would have to guard against those same instincts with young Nancy, and was relieved to find, as I struggled her tiny frame up the stairs, that I had no such feelings now. The powerful need for a child—the jealousy that had plagued me in seeing women heavy with child—had surely left me with John.

In any case, Maureen arrived before the pain took hold and was as experienced a midwife as any doctor. Despite the fashion and facility that cities had for giving birth in a hospital, Maureen had chosen to have both of hers at home and insisted that she would deliver Nancy's baby herself when the time came.

Bridie insisted on helping her. The old woman had no children of her own and, as far as I could gather from her initial flustering about, had never experienced childbirth before. However, her pride would not allow her to openly admit it, so she gathered water and clean towels, even sharpening and sterilizing her precious dressmaking shears to within an inch of their life. Bridie involved herself at the center of the drama, as she always did, gripping the young girl's hands throughout and, when nodded at by Maureen, encouraged Nancy to “take a big deep breath and push hard now, like a good girl.” The courage Nancy showed in barely calling out during what turned out to be a mercifully short ordeal, less than three hours in all, had warmed the old woman considerably to the “scrawny hussy” to whose tenancy with us she had so vociferously objected. And afterward Bridie was finally given to concede that, in medical matters, Maureen was good for more than merely turning a nurse's sheet.

When Maureen pulled the infant and we heard its first urgent, squalling breath, Bridie blurted out, “Merciful Mother in Heaven, the Lord Be Praised!” Her face was as red as a beet, not with exertion, but with emotion in response to the great miracle of birth. She openly swept her swollen, bloodied palms across her eyes to wipe away the tears, before cutting the cord with the same deftness with which I had seen her gut a turkey.