City of Hope (31 page)

“What are you all doing with my baby?” she said.

Automatically jumping up, I stood and handed him to her.

“You should not have left him with us, without asking first. He was starving.”

She pouted and said, somewhat defensively, “I don't know what the fuss is about. I fed him this morning before I went out.”

I gasped. He had been there all day.

“It's after three in the afternoon,” I said. “He's your child, Nancy, you have to take responsibility for him.”

Suddenly she shouted back, “I don't have to do anything you tell me to do. You're not my mother! I have my own life!”

Now that he had got over the novelty of his mother being back, Tom started crying loudly again and straining toward the food on the table. Maureen took him and started feeding him again, as Nancy stormed off to her room like a spoiled, angry child.

“That young woman's not fit for motherhood,” Bridie said when Maureen and I were telling her later. “She's simple. Sure, she's barely able to look after herself.”

I felt horrified by her language, but couldn't disagree.

“But she was so wonderful when he was born,” I said. “Why the change?”

“It's easy to love them when they're completely dependent on you,” Maureen said. “It's harder when they start growing up.”

“But he's only a few months old,” I said.

“Bridie's right,” Maureen added, “the novelty has worn off. It happens. I saw it as a nurse. That's how half these babies end up in orphanages—the mothers are barely more than children themselves. We'll just have to keep an eye on him.”

Maureen was such a warmhearted woman, never judging people, a calm and capable mother. Although rarely a day went past when she did not thank me for my kindness to her, I knew that the thing she really wanted was not to be living here with us, but with her husband. Perhaps she envied me my dead husband. I knew where he was. I could move on with my life. Or at least pretend to.

With the hostel now open, many of the women and children in the area were taken in by the churches and convents. To the cynic in me it seemed that the church organizations had suddenly galvanized themselves to help in the run-up to Thanksgiving and Christmas. In reality they had been helping people all along, but I had only recently come to their attention, as they had to mine. Through our local priest I was recommended to various charity groups who would send me people that they could not accommodate, sometimes for one or two nights until places came free with them, sometimes for longer.

However, it was becoming harder for us to take people in. Partly because we had no more space to spare, but partly also, I had to be honest, due to lack of will. Most of the families under our care were now living independently, earning a wage from the shop, with the men earning a stipend for me from their labor on the houses as well as any other casual work they could pick up. They were paying their way now, and not all of them were keen on the idea of taking strangers into their homes. “Eating bread is soon forgot!” was one of Bridie's favorite wisdoms and, I had to admit, it appeared to be true. Once people moved beyond their own needs, the needs of others, while not entirely forgotten, were certainly demoted. The community in general remained sympathetic to the needs of others, but while they were happy to share their meals and labor with homeless unfortunates, they were less and less willing to have somebody else's child share a bed with their own, or to meet the figure of a lonely widow on their stairs in the middle of the night. There were enough of us now that they could always tell themselves it was somebody else's problem, somebody else's turn.

For me, that was never the case. I was happy to open our house to anyone who needed it, and Maureen and Bridie went along with what I wanted, believing me to be a generous and warmhearted person. However, I knew that wasn't the whole truth. I never believed myself a better person for helping others out in their time of need, nor did I think those who did not want to were in the wrong. I knew I was no saint. I felt as much anger, spite and pride as the next person, and it was that, I sometimes believed, that drove me to do all that I did. It was not charity, but guilt that fueled my good deeds—the need to prove myself, to let others (but mostly myself) know that I could somehow redeem myself from the tragedy of my husband's sudden death. It was as if this trip to America was making up for the last one: the time when I came here to pay for John's operation and almost stayed because I was falling in love with another man; the time when John had begged me to stay in Ireland with him, but I had gone anyway. Like the last day of his life, when he had asked me to walk the fields with him and I had gone to work instead.

How many needy would I have to feed, to house, to help before I had paid myself back for losing John? One more family, one more time—I had told him I would be away for one short year and had stayed for three. I regretted those years I might have spent with him, and that one last afternoon when he asked me to walk his fields. Every needy person, every new task helped hold at bay all that I had lost.

A week before Christmas our house was packed with people. We had two extra mothers and five additional children in the house. Their husbands were sleeping nights at the hostel and, it being so close to Christmas, we accommodated them too. One mother and her infant were sleeping on mattresses in Nancy's room, and the other mother and her four children in the dining room. The men slept in the living room next to the kitchen. During the day I, Bridie, Nancy and Maureen went straight down to the shop as early as 6 a.m. to get ready for the seasonal rush that had overtaken us. The husbands walked over to Matt, who gave them odd jobs—clearing snow, tidying sheds, sorting sticks for kindling—and a few dollars to get them through the holiday. Sheila stayed behind with our women guests to look after the children, clean the house and prepare our evening meal.

Not a domestic being, Sheila turned out to be a godsend in entertaining the older children. The schools had closed early for Christmas due to the cold weather, and as soon as breakfast was eaten she would bring them all upstairs to her room, where she would have a fire lit and would keep them there for almost the whole day. She read them stories and put on plays, making their faces up with rouge and lipstick. She drew with them, and taught them to play cards. The children idolized her: the girls for her glamour and style, and the boys for her adventurous imagination and bawdy tongue.

“It's like they love me, Ellie,” she said one night when she was tipsy enough for me to question her about it.

“And do you love them?” I asked.

“Don't be ridiculous!” she snapped, then we laughed at the unlikeliness of it all. Although I could see that, in the children, Sheila had acquired an audience of admirers, it was not as ridiculous an idea as it seemed that she should be gifted with children. Sheila had been bright at school—with a vivid imagination, she had been a talented young artist, as well as an avid reader and writer. Her schooling had ended when her family moved to America when she was sixteen, and she had found herself in service when she fell out with them. If Sheila's education had continued, she could easily have become a teacher, or a writer and artist—she certainly had the temperament for the last!

Perhaps, I thought, Sheila had found a vocation in life beyond money and men.

The day before Christmas Eve the shop was hopping. It seemed as if everyone in Yonkers had ordered one of Bridie's Christmas puddings or cakes, as our customers rushed in and out doing their last-minute chores. The cafe tables were jammed with resting shoppers; Lavinia's soup kitchen needed more soup, more bread—it was mayhem.

“Nancy!” Bridie was shouting every few minutes. “Nancy! Nancy! Where is that wretched girl—I need more potatoes peeled. So help me God, Ellie, roll your sleeves up and give me a hand—I'll skin that lazy strap when I find her.”

Nancy did not come in all day. Despite being dressed early, she had been dawdling at the door that morning and told me to go on without her and that she would follow. I had assumed she must have stayed at home with Tom. Perhaps the baby had taken ill.

We closed the shop at six sharp, even though there were a few people still milling about outside. I put a notice up saying, “Closed until 29th December.” God knows, we deserved a break. The women had worked so hard, and I had taken a big lump of cash out of that day's register to give them all a bonus.

When we got back to the house, Sara—one of the mothers we had taken in temporarily—was walking a bawling Tom around the kitchen.

“He won't settle,” she said.

One of the infant's cheeks glowed an angry red. “I think he's teething.”

“Typical!” Bridie was red with rage herself. “NANCY!” she hollered up the stairs.

Sara looked confused.

“She's not here,” she said. “A car came to collect her at about nine this morning. I thought she was down in the shop with you.”

I ran up to Nancy's room and on her bed was a note in her large, childlike hand.

You killed my last beau so I found another.

Ellie, you can look after Tom.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
FIVE

Even though it had been hours since the mysterious car had been to collect her, I ran out onto the porch and looked up and down the road for Nancy and her “beau.”

She had left her child behind. How could she have done that?

Aside from Tom, Nancy was little more than a child herself—she had been fooled into trusting Dingus in a matter of an hour. Goodness knows what kind of a man she had run off with, and what his intentions were.

“We have to find her,” I said to the women after I had shown them the note. “We can't just let her disappear like that.”

“How?” said Sheila. “We have no idea who she has gone off with. Where would we start?”

“We could send Matt and the men out in the van?” I said.

“In what direction? The city is huge—they were in a car and they might have gone out of the state,” she went on.

I looked over at Maureen. Her lips were tight and angry. She was being reminded of the search for another missing man, her husband. She attacked before the thought entered Sheila's head.

“This is all
your
fault—putting vain ideas into that simple child's head.”

Sheila drew a breath, but Bridie intervened.

“It's nobody's fault, and there is no point in looking for her,” the old woman butted in. Tom had started whining, and Bridie lifted him from Sara's lap and started to bump him up and down on her hip, which made him cry even harder. “The girl was in trouble when she got here, and she'll surely be in trouble again after too long. When that happens, we can only pray she has enough sense to find her way back here. In the meantime we have to look after this little chap—he's the innocent one.”

Tom was screaming up a storm. Bridie, for all her matronly manners, had no way with children. I put my arms out to her and she handed him over willingly. He calmed down and rested his head into the curve of my neck.

From then on, apart from when he was crawling into corners and causing mischief, baby Tom was barely out of my arms. While I had not taken to heart Nancy's words that it was I who should look after her child, it seemed that the other women had. Each stepped to one side of Tom and cleared a path for me to be with him. Bridie instructed Matt to move the heavy cot from the attic down into my room the very night that Nancy left. Maureen took over the early shifts at the shop, so that I could sleep through with him in the mornings. They made a show of saying how they had enough to do, without minding an extra child, and how selfish Nancy had been in leaving us all to manage a baby, but in reality they could see how important being with this child was for me.

Nancy's leaving, and the other women's approval, had given me permission to love baby Tom. Good sense told me that I should be more cautious about allowing myself to indulge my maternal instincts. That Nancy could come back any day, and that it would be wise to hold on to some of the distance I had maintained around him up till then. However, I could not help but throw myself into the role of motherhood with absolute abandon. My attachment to Tom was as instant and as natural as if he had been my own, and it seemed to me that it was the same for him. He craved love, and much as I knew in those early few days that he was crying for his natural mother's smell, her warmth, the comfort of her milk, I made myself believe that he would grow used to love from whatever quarter it came. That my love would be enough for him. More than enough.

Perhaps it was because he had been in a house with so many of us women looking out for him that he took to me easily. I found he sat comfortably in the groove of my hips and that I could fill the kettle and butter a slice of bread with one hand. I drew my fingers gently down over his chubby face, to comfort him and draw his eyes to sleep. When I bathed him in the sink, he would scream with delight as I splashed water into the ridges of fat on his belly and legs. When he laughed I laughed—and the laughter came from a child inside me that I had thought had long since left; the child who had chased rabbits and run through fields with her skirts flying. When I was changing Tom and placed my worn, working hands against his smooth, creamy skin, I would stop for a moment and marvel at the privilege of being with him. I held him up to the mirror in my room and we would look at our joint reflection. His small, round face made mine look angular and old, even though I was far off forty. I never failed to be surprised at my own face when I was holding him.

On the dullest, plainest of days, when Tom was in my arms, I looked—even to my own critical eye—calm and relaxed and beautiful. My eyes shone with joy. Sometimes, mesmerized by his reflection, he would give me a curious smile. It was the look of an old sage rather than that of an infant, and I would think that perhaps he knew something of the truth that I was barely able to admit to myself: that he was the antidote for much of what had been missing from my life; that my loving him could change everything.