Ellis Island (10 page)

Then I boarded the
Killarney
, a small tender boat that took us out to the ship. As we pulled up alongside RMS
Celtic
, the side of it rose up in front of us like a monstrous wall, seeming so high and so broad that one could imagine it was holding the entire ocean at bay.

One hour later, I was on the third-class boat deck facing out to sea as the vast ship pushed through the water. Surrounded by strangers, I felt as I had on that first day at the Jesus and Mary Convent, facing the unknown—alone, but with no desire for company. The wind whipped tendrils of hair around my face, slashing them against my skin where they stuck, salty with sea spray. Most of the passengers had crowded to the stern of the boat, waving good-bye, peering at the diminishing port, searching for their loved ones in the shrinking crowd—all the wailing wives, the distraught children. I looked ahead and wondered what kind of a place I would be coming to. The ocean seemed too vast, as big as the world itself, and yet here I was, riding across it to another land. The adventure of it struck me as a swell that rose up from my feet and through the pit of my stomach. The waves were watery hills. I looked again to the back of the boat. As the sea sucked us forward, the land grew smaller and smaller. I realized that soon Ireland would be not where I lived, but a memory.

I was on my way to America.

Chapter Seventeen

The boat reminded me of school, in that I was sharing a cabin with three other girls—two sisters, Joan and Anne, from Cork, and a girl from London, called Ethel. The sisters had brothers working in Boston and they were going over to work with them there, in a food-tinning factory where one of them had risen to the position of floor manager.

“We’re going to send for the others as soon as we can,” said Anne, the elder of the two. She told us each one by name and age, babbling excitedly, her hands waving about her face, all friendly freckles and rotten teeth. Joan sat stuck to her sister’s side, looking doleful. Her eyes were cloudy and worn like an old woman’s, occasionally burning bright with flashes of fear. There were thirteen of them altogether, nine back at home with the parents and an aging grandmother, surviving on posted dollars. “Soon we’ll be all together again—in America!” Anne said.

“That ain’t never going to ’appen,” Ethel said. “Thirteen of you? You’re ’aving a laugh—don’t you Irish never give it a rest?” Ethel spoke like a cockney Black and Tan. I had heard John mimic them, mocking their harsh accents and saying words like “ain’tcha.” He would complain, “They can’t even speak their own language properly and they won’t let us speak ours.”

How Now Brown Cow.
We had had elocution lessons in the convent to teach us how to enunciate our vowels properly and speak English like young ladies. Ethel was not a young lady, but I didn’t mind. She looked like fun. She had a chubby figure and her fat feet were squeezed into tiny, high-heeled shoes. She wore a fitted maroon coat and stockings that she tugged at as if they were too tight. Her lips were painted with a slash of red and her cheeks were garishly rouged. I guessed that she would be full of stories and anticipated the entertainment of hearing them, in just looking at her exotic getup. I was hungry for distraction and could tell from the Cork sisters’ shabby clothes that their story was the same as mine. Desolate rural Ireland. Rain. Hunger. Hardship. Sadness. War. I felt sorry for them, but had also had my fill of poverty. I hoped the RMS
Celtic
might give me a taste of putting it behind me.

Our cabin was tiny, but it was clean and there was an air of luxury about the dark wood presses and paneling. There was a washbasin at the center of it, and a small cabinet above that with a mirror as a door. On either side of that were four beds, called “bunks,” one piled on top of the other and made from what looked like large pipes. Each had a new cotton sheet stretched across a soft mattress, a down pillow and a blanket with “RMS Celtic” embroidered onto it.

“Toilets is da-an the hall, I seen them on the way in. There’s a baarf in there an’ all. I’m gonna ’ave a right soakin’ later, so you lot can get to the end of the queue.”

The Cork sisters laughed. They did not have the faintest idea what Ethel was saying. I laughed with them and briefly longed to share the joke with John, but when I called his face to mind, I became paralyzed. I tricked myself into thinking of Paud instead.

Paud had taken my traveling to America particularly badly. His brother had died on an emigrant ship to America as a young man, and he was sure I would be traveling in terrible conditions. Ireland’s history of famine coffin ships and horror stories of below-deck steerage class had kept many of his generation at home. Maidy had made thorough investigations and learned that the RMS
Celtic
had been newly reconditioned after it was torpedoed in the Irish Sea by the Germans in 1918. In January of that year she had resumed the Liverpool to New York service and was considered one of the grandest ships in the world. Maidy had told Paud, “One thousand third-class passengers it can carry, and Fionoulla Nolan’s sister Nuala traveled to New York in five days and said it was like a luxury hotel.” “How would she know?” Paud had asked angrily. “It was far from luxury she was reared.” And nothing Maidy said could persuade him things had changed. I wished he was there at this moment to see that Nuala Nolan had been telling the truth.

“I’m bloody starvin’—let’s go and find some food,” said Ethel. “Hang on . . .”

She took a lipstick from a tiny bag decorated with pearl buttons and sliced it across her lips without even looking in a mirror, puckering them together and spreading the red stain in an angry blur. Then she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her coat, pulled up each breast with a pronounced guff, before lighting a cigarette, which she let hang from her lips. As she marched out of our cabin and down the corridor, we three Irish paupers scuttled after her like Pied Piper children.

The third-class dining room was enormous—rows of long tables were dressed with spotless linen and set with cutlery. At the back of the room, counters were set against the wall with lines of shiny soup terrines, piles of bowls and plates and long metal dishes with lids. Some people were sitting and eating, others standing at the counters, as young, uniformed men opened and closed the lids of the metal serving trays. I thought the whole setup very elegant. I felt for my coat buttons, wishing that I were better dressed beneath it, then I turned and saw the look on the Cork sisters’ faces: openmouthed, overawed by it all. Joan looked at her older sister as if she wanted to turn and run. Anne seemed at a loss, as if she might cry. For all the poverty I had tasted, I realized, I was from a middle-class home. I understood refinement. I had read books, and learned manners and eaten with Monsignors at tables set better than these. I could fold a napkin and I knew which spoon to use for dessert cake and which to use for soup. These girls had, by the cut of them, rarely stepped outside their farm. There was every possibility they had never been to school. If I was nervous of the adventure ahead of me, these waifs were completely unprepared.

Ethel was already at the counter flirting with a handsome young waiter, who was piling her plate with food. I stood between Joan and Anne and took the arm of each. I walked them across the soft linoleum floor and sat them down at a table near the food counter. I could feel the legs collapse from under each of them as they sat down, and I realized that they were probably half starved. I fetched them both a dish of soup and a bread roll; placing the food in front of them, I guided their hands to the correct spoon and showed them which plate to use to butter their bread. They had the soup demolished before I sat down with mine, so I collected their dishes and went up for more. Ethel was still standing flirting with the soup boy. I interrupted her firmly to ask the boy for a refill.

“Seconds already? Blimey—the starving Irish, eh?” she said, winking at her new boyfriend.

“There’s worse things in life to be ashamed of than being hungry,” I said in my very best elocution accent, looking right at her as if I knew what she was.

Her jaw dropped open and I felt guilty, but it had needed saying. The soup boy grinned and I could feel him watching me as I walked back to the table with my two bowls of soup.

Chapter Eighteen

There were all kinds of distractions on board; the RMS
Celtic
was like a city in itself. There was a games room, where the children could play table tennis, and the adults play cards. A shop sold sundries such as sweets, magazines, newspapers and postcards. It also contained a post office. There was a hairdressing salon, which had a permanent-wave machine; I noticed several women who had begun the voyage with long hair, tied up to their heads in buns and plaits, emerge down to supper with it short and curled; it was all the fashion. There was a “lounge” where people gathered in the evening to listen to the radio. Others met and sat around talking in the smoking room.

Ethel and I went into the smoking room on our third day, right after breakfast, as Ethel wanted to teach me how to smoke. It made me cough, but Ethel said I should persist as women needed to know how to smoke—it showed you were sophisticated and independent. I knew she was right. There was a yellowing American newspaper left out on a table, and the headline read:
19TH AMENDMENT PROMISES WOMEN VOTING RIGHTS
. I pointed it out to Ethel, but she just shrugged. I felt like telling her that sophisticated and independent women should be able to read as well as smoke.

Ethel’s bawdiness had started to offend me. She got drunk in the bar every night, then woke us up to tell us about the latest man who had fallen in love with her, blowing smoke all over our windowless, airless cabin. My charitable feelings toward the Cork sisters were also wearing thin. Joan would sob herself to sleep, then howl out in her dreams for her mother. After my third night of broken sleep, my pity ran out and I just wanted to throw the whole lot of them overboard. I longed to be in the company of people who knew and loved me. I was starting to forget who I was, and I needed John to remind me. Sometimes I felt as if the part of me that mattered most was still wandering the fields behind my husband’s house, while only the husk of me was here, smoking and eating my fill in the company of strangers. I wanted to be on solid ground again, to be somewhere I might settle. I was counting down the hours to seeing my darling Sheila and starting work, so that I could begin saving for my return.

On the last day, I bought a postcard with the words “Hands Across the Sea” emblazoned above a picture of two hands shaking, with the Irish and American flags in the background. I had not written to John at all since coming on board. Every time I sat down with my pen, the tears came and I was afraid of where they might lead me. I was afraid I might start crying out for him in the night like Joan for her mammy. I agonized for a moment and then wrote quickly:

It was the best I could manage.

Ethel followed me into the shop and bought a fresh pair of stockings and a fancy bottle of perfume. It cost her all the money she had. “I don’t need money no more,” she said. “Frank’ll look after me.”

I hoped this Frank, Ethel’s great benefactor, whom she had met just once in a London pub and who had sent her a ticket and an invitation to join him in America, was everything she hoped he would be. Mostly I just hoped that he would turn up and that I would not be stuck with her. But while she annoyed me, in my heart I felt sorry for Ethel. She had no family, and seemingly few friends to advise her not to chase off to America after a man she barely knew. The sisters, poor as they were, had reliable brothers to meet them.

Late that afternoon, Joan came chasing into our cabin where I was resting. “Wake up, wake up, Ellie! We’re there—we’re in America!”

I followed her, running up toward the deck. Others were running too, thumping along the narrow corridors in a steady sprint, one after the other, like rats in a pipe, pushing up the steep, iron stairs, our excited chattering and clattering picking up volume, echoing off all the metal.

As we came out into the open air, there was virtual silence. Single voices were snatched and muffled by the wind of the boat moving steadily forward. We were united in amazement at the Statue of Liberty—a beautiful white goddess, she seemed to welcome and warn us with her spiked crown and her impervious expression, and we stared in amazement at the upstretched arm and its gold cone. As we came in closer, even standing on the deck of our vast ship we came barely as high as the hemline of her folded robes. She reminded me of our enormous Mother Superior, and for a second I flickered with excitement that I would soon be able to share that observation with Sheila, in person.

Beyond Lady Liberty was the city itself. It was a dull day and the tall buildings emerged from the gray horizon like ghosts. We stood, a small and shivering crowd of newcomers, silenced by the skyline. It was as if it had emerged from under the sea itself, grown out of the vast nothingness of the ocean we had come to know over the past week.

We anchored within view of the city. The
Celtic
had docked late, so we third-class passengers had to stay on board before being processed at Ellis Island in the morning. We watched from the deck as the first- and second-class passengers were ferried across to land in fancy boats. One had a striped awning as a roof that flickered precariously in the breeze, and there was a band on it playing music for the fine people in first class. Some of the men on our deck were drunk and called obscenities across to a well-dressed lady negotiating the steps down to her fancy ferry. Shocked by their language, she put her hand over her mouth, taking it away from her head, where it had been holding her hat. The feathered confection flew into the sea, darkening into a floating stain on its surface. The men laughed and I felt a tug of anger at their cowardice. I was concerned for the woman, privileged as she was, and wondered about the lady I would be working for with Sheila—would she be as grand as the lady with the flown hat?

“Quick, Paddy, quick! There’s a party in first class!”

It was late that night when Ethel ran into the cabin, feverish with excitement and slightly drunk. She had a red feather stole wrapped round her neck and was carrying a yellow feathered fan. She looked more like a fat hen than the glamorous moll she clearly intended. “Getta move on—we’re missin’ it!” She dragged us out of our beds, pushing us into our clothes and pulling us after her.

We ran through the dimly lit corridors, then through the empty dining room, which had been our home for the past week. She dragged us through the kitchen, all closed up now that its last meal was served, and up a set of steep winding stairs—swearing as her heels caught in the metal grating. We came out in another empty kitchen and followed her through a set of double doors straight into the first-class dining room.

The walls were paneled, lined with ornate patterned paper, the ceilings and pillars decorated in gold. Tables had been pushed to one side, apart from those that were being used as makeshift stages. The carpets were too soft to dance on, but were ideal for sleeping, as one or two of the drunker gentlemen were proving. There was an Irish music session in full swing, with two squeezeboxes, three fiddle players and a bodhrán. Ethel immediately ran over to the bodhrán player and hitched up her skirt to dance on a table while he frantically drummed. As she started, another lad joined him with his own bodhrán—positioning himself to gaze up Ethel’s skirt. The last night on board, and she will surely be the popular one, I thought cruelly. To my surprise the Cork sisters joined her, leaping up on the next table and showing her how it was done. Everyone was singing and dancing, and drinking and laughing, as if there were no tomorrow. A wave of unexpected sadness washed over me. I felt alone, as if I were the only person who knew about tomorrow. I didn’t feel in the mood. It didn’t seem right to join in the fun without John.

“The Irish, eh? They sure know how to party.” It was an American accent. A man had suddenly appeared at my side. He was tall with sandy blond hair, longish and swept back from his forehead. He was wearing the garb of a rich American, a laundered dress shirt with a silk tie casually draped beneath its collar as if it might drop to the ground. If it did, no matter—doubtless he had several others to replace it. He was obviously a first-class passenger, somehow still aboard, not a third-class trespasser like the rest of us. Panic rose up through my face and I felt my cheeks burn. Then Ethel looked across and waved flirtatiously. I decided that if this man’s presence didn’t bother her, there was no reason for it to bother me. So I ignored him and took a few steps to the side.

“Say—have I offended you?”

“How would you have offended me?” I knew it was a mistake to have spoken at all. I had no desire to provide even five minutes’ amusement for this rich Yankee. That was Ethel’s domain. Yet I was curious as to who he was and, if he were a first-class passenger as he looked, why he was still on board. I took another furtive look at him and he grinned, holding out his hand. “I’m Charles Irvington. My father has shares in this ship.” My face must have betrayed fear, because he said quickly, “I like to hang back sometimes after a dull trip and party with the paddies. This,” and he spread his opened palm across the scene of drink and debauchery in front of us as if it belonged to him (which in a way it did), “happens quite often. But it seems you’re not the partying kind?”

“No,” I said. Although relieved at not being in trouble, I was now annoyed that lonely thoughts of my husband had been interrupted by the presence of another man. That I couldn’t help but notice this man was handsome was another, enforced disloyalty. Still, I bided my time before I walked away. I didn’t want to be too obviously rude, just in case. Then, as he smiled down at me, I noticed his teeth. They seemed unnaturally perfect to me—completely straight and very white, like a row of large expensive pearls, gleaming in the light from the chandeliers.

“How on earth do you get your teeth that color?” I blurted out. “They’re pure white!”

He flung his head back and roared with laughter. I threw my hands up to my eyes and pretended to be dazzled by the brightness of the teeth. Then I started laughing too—at my own joke, mind.

He said, “I had too many teeth when I was a kid, so my parents had an orthodontist fit me with a brace to make them straight. I wore it for years, so I was a pretty ugly kid, but then I guess it worked out in the end, huh?”

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but I nodded and went to walk away to indicate that the conversation was finished.

“Also I stay away from candy—though I have a weakness for Tootsie Rolls.”

I kept my back to him and continued walking, but he was making me smile.

“I have a tub of White Bright toothpaste back in my cabin if you’d care to come up and take a look?”

I laughed a little, but didn’t turn round.