Ellis Island (11 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Long barges took us into Ellis Island early in the morning. Now that we had abandoned the monstrous, solid safety of our ocean liner, the barge felt flimsy, even more so on the first floor. Beneath us was our baggage, and it almost seemed as if we were characters from a children’s nursery rhyme floating across the ocean atop a large suitcase. We sat facing one another on wooden benches, our bodies tipping from side to side—adrift, uncertain, many of us silently wondering if our future in America would be secure.

Talk among the Irish over dinner each night had often included horror stories of our ancestors being left to die on coffin ships. One man, Michael O’Beirne from Strokestown, took to always sitting near us and talking of little else, much to his wife Mary’s embarrassment. “1847, ladies, the
Naomi
and the
Virginius
. Major Denis Mahon of Roscommon—the dirty black Protestant bastard—chartered them to get rid of his tenants, and my family among them.”

“Oh quiet, Michael, we’ve heard it all before,” his wife chided him, but to no avail.

“Strokestown, a ravaged district, ladies, and so he threw those of us that couldn’t fit in the poorhouse on a boat and shipped us off to America.”

“Canada, Michael.”

“And half of us died.
Half.
How do you like that?”

“Stop being morbid, Michael, it’s impolite,” she’d say, looking across at me apologetically. “Besides, times have changed.”

“You say that, Mary, but look around you . . .” Michael was a nice man, but all his talk of the famine made me uncomfortable. There was still shame in my family as to how we had survived the famine and, like his wife, I had been reared to believe it was uncouth to talk about such things as poverty and illness. However, that was not the case for Mr. O’Beirne, it seemed. “And you and I both know that your own cousin was sent home with TB not two years ago . . .”

“It was nothing more than a chest cold,” Mary said, looking over at me, mortified.

“Worse again,” the husband interjected, “to be sent back for no good reason, on the whim of some official.”

“And she was a distant cousin, hardly related at all,” she added, pleadingly.

Michael and Mary O’Beirne now sat across from me on the barge and were uncharacteristically silent, the reality of our journey finally hitting home. I caught the sharp stench of sea, which had become so familiar to me, and felt suddenly tired. I was tired of eating with people I didn’t know, of sleeping badly in a room with strangers, of missing my husband, my home. I was exhausted, yet I had spent my first week away from home just sleeping and eating; the working part of my emigrant journey had not even begun.

Across the harbor, large ships were offloading onto vessels like ours. As we came closer to the island, what had seemed to be a small scattering revealed itself as dozens and dozens of packed barges, hundreds of people pouring off them onto the jetties as others hung back to wait.

On land, the walkways were packed with people, pushing past one another to get inside the long, redbrick building. The two Cork sisters clung to the back of my coat as I pushed my way through the front door and into the baggage hall. Bags, trunks and cases were everywhere. Enormous carpets rolled into huge colorful pipes, exotic cushions, sacking packages bound with rope, wooden stools tied with blankets—all piled up on top of one another. Everyone’s life was hidden in these dense mountains of belongings—people pulling and poking at them, trying to get their things back, their carried remnants of home. Strong men wheeled boxes as big as themselves on enormous trolleys, stronger women pulling trunks five times heavier than themselves. I felt relieved, suddenly, that I had been able to fit my life into one small bag. I looked around to ask somebody where we needed to go next. There was a woman in a long black dress with a sharp nose who looked as if she might know. “Excuse me,” I said, “do you know where we are supposed to go?” She threw up her hands and shouted at me in a foreign language. I pretended not to be shocked, said a pointless “sorry” and looked around.

People were lining up a long, wide staircase to my right, so I went toward it, hoping this was the next stage along. The two sisters were still clinging to my coat. “Where’s Ethel?” I asked, but they both shrugged, wide eyed and overwhelmed. I was looking forward to passing them into the care of their brothers, but at the same time felt that perhaps it was good that I had somebody else to look after, otherwise I might fall apart myself. I noticed that most of the people on the stairs were from our ship, but, as on the barge, few of us were in the mood for talking. Some of them had already fetched their luggage and were hauling trunks and large cases up with them, step by step. I did not know what we were lining up for and was glad when Mr. O’Beirne came up behind me. “Ladies,” he said, “here we are queuing for the good doctors of America—hope we’re all feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?”

“We’re to be tested again?” I asked. We had already been examined in Queenstown.

“Indeed,” he said, anxious to share his expertise with us. “Six-second medical exam, they call it—just a quick once-over. They pull the eyelid back with a hook . . .”

“Wh-at?!” his wife Mary shouted.

“. . . it’s just a formality. You fine, healthy young girls have nothing to worry about.”

The sisters’ hands tightened on my coat, and a bad feeling rose through me. I had felt the truth when I first saw Joan’s cloudy eyes, but had buried that knowledge like a bad memory. I reached back and took a hand from each girl and gave them a squeeze. I didn’t look round because I didn’t want to draw attention to Joan. In my mind’s eye, I could see again that almost imperceptible veil of fine cotton which shadowed that frail child’s view of the world.

I held their hands and chatted nicely to the O’Beirnes until we reached the top of the line, then stood in front of the three doctors who were performing the inspection. They had peaked caps—like police or army. I went first, standing with my back against a pillar to steady myself as the man gently pulled back the lid of my eye with a small hook. It didn’t hurt—just stung as the cold air hit my eye and made it roll from left to right. When he was finished, he looked me up and down coldly for a few seconds. His look was not offensive, but studious, like the way a man might look at a cow on market day, checking it for health and vigor. When he gave me his approval and asked me to move along, I stood aside and nodded across to Joan, who was watching me anxiously. Anne had to push her forward into my place. She stood in front of the doctor and began to cry.

I said a silent prayer that her tears would clear the clouds away like rain, then went back up to the doctor and said to him, “Excuse me, Sir—my friend had something in her eye yesterday and, in trying to clear it out, I used perfume instead of water and . . .”

He was surprised I was still there, but said nothing. He had barely touched Joan’s eye with the hook when he shook his head and took a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote “CT” on the arm of her coat. I looked round and saw Michael O’Beirne whisper something into Anne’s ear. Anne called out, “No!” and rushed forward to Joan and, in fairness to him, Michael O’Beirne came with her. The doctor looked at me and said, “I’m sorry, your friend has trachoma and needs to be sent to the infirmary.”

“It was just an accident,” I persisted. “There’s nothing really wrong with her!” We all of us—Anne, myself and Michael—converged on Joan. “It’s all right,” I said. “They’ll have a hospital here to make you better.”

“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said, “she’ll have to be sent home.” Two uniformed men moved from the side of the room when they saw us gathering around the doctor. “It’s all right,” the doctor said, waving them aside. His kindness was not reassuring, but rather an indication that our situation was tragic and not uncommon. “Are you related to this girl?” he asked me.

“No,” said Mr. O’Beirne, firm and paternal, his arm round Anne’s shoulder. “This girl is her sister and I am their uncle. They are in my charge.” The doctor was happy to be talking with a man, and Michael said to me softly, “You go on ahead there, girleen, I’ll deal with this. Don’t fret, I’ll look after them.”

I looked back one more time and saw Mary O’Beirne next in line, looking scared as her husband was taken through another door with the sisters.

I was now in a room that was as wide and as big as a town. It was packed with people sitting on row after row of long wooden benches. At the top of the room were little cubicles with desks in front of them, where officials were calling people up to answer questions—about what, I didn’t know. There were two wide pillars and a massive banner of the Stars and Stripes hung between them, supported by a balcony that went round the whole of the room. One or two people were up there looking down on us. We were some sight, surely. A thousand, maybe two thousand people? I didn’t even know what a thousand people looked like, to help me guess. The noise was deafening. Above the base sound of people chattering in a dozen languages, and the pierce of crying children, men were walking through the crowd calling names. Red with the effort of shouting, and the frustration of not being heard, they belted out: “Mary Murphy!” “Antonio Balducci!” “Ludmila Kuchar!”

I looked round for somewhere to sit. There were children asleep on boxes, their fathers’ greatcoats thrown over them. Mothers wearing scarves wrapped round their heads like nuns, and blankets slung round their shoulders, cradling nursing children to their breasts. Small, dark-skinned people with slanting eyes and straight hair cut into severe shapes, swathed in fur that looked as if it was still warm from the animal. There were Africans—I recognized them from textbooks on the missions I had learned about from the Jesus and Mary sisters. There were groups of men with beards down to their waists and curls at each ear, wearing long coats and strangely formal hats. There were impossibly beautiful women with jet-black hair and skin the color of cooked honey, gesticulating wildly with equally beautiful young men. There were old women in long skirts patterned with garish flowers, their heads swathed in brightly colored fabric, their skin like old leather, their expressions blank—beyond sadness, beyond confusion—following some stubborn son.

I saw a group of Irish people, unmistakable among all this exoticism, white skinned and grubby, so I went and sat with them. I can’t remember who they were or how long I sat there or what small talk we made, but I stayed with them until my name was called. My stomach was churning with an unnamed fear. That I would get in, or not get in, to America was not it. Rather, it was just the realization that I was here. That I had made the journey and was now in a room, on the other side of the world, with all these people from every corner of the world. I felt invisible until I heard a man shout behind me, “Mrs. Eileen Hogan!”

I went up to the desk and a man checked my particulars against the ship’s manifest. Within a few minutes I was walking down a staircase. The bottom of it was clogged with people kissing and hugging one another. I saw two young men standing together and knew at once from the look of them that they must be the Cork brothers. I went over and introduced myself, and explained about Anne and Joan. They were distraught, but thanked me. They were healthy-looking, strong men—they would know what to do. “Where are you going?” they asked.

“Manhattan,” I said, showing them Sheila’s address.

The shorter, older of the brothers nodded toward a crowd of people at a desk marked Money Exchange. “Do you have money to change?”

I had the money order that Sheila had sent me as evidence for the authorities that I would not be arriving in America empty-handed. But I had to return it to her untouched. “No,” I said.

He walked me out of the hall and onto the Manhattan ferry, giving me instructions on how to get to Fifth Avenue. Before he rushed back to his younger brother, he pressed two dollar bills and some coins into my hands, saying, “Thank you for taking care of my sisters.” I took the money, my hands closing around it too eagerly. Fear had made me forget my manners.

The final leg of my journey took less than ten minutes. As the barge drew into my final port, Manhattan, my eyes strained into the sun as it glittered off a million windows, buildings that stretched up to the sky—yearning toward God Himself. This was a new world, a new life, a new beginning, and for the first time since leaving Ireland I felt intoxicated. My fear turned, finally, to excitement. I wished John was with me, but this was an adventure I would have to experience alone.

I stepped off the boat onto the jetty at Pier A and then onto solid ground at last.

Ireland was in my heart, but under my feet was America.

Chapter Twenty

The crowd fanned out from the quayside, bustling past me as if they had been here before. My insides were swaying, so I just started to walk. I stopped at the mouth of a wide road and pulled Sheila’s letter out of my pocket, even though I had memorized the directions.

“The address is 820 Fifth Avenue. Walk up Broadway as far as Madison Square Park, then take Fifth.”

I took the wide road and at the first junction looked up to where the street names were placed. “Broadway,” said a small, neatly placed plaque on the side of a building. It seemed strange, such a small sign on such a wide, important street.

The buildings stretched upward forever, and I had to strain my head back farther than it would go to see the top of them. In places it seemed as if they had closed in and made the sky disappear. As I passed a horse carriage plodding nervously at the edge of the road, the smell of its dung crawled up my nostrils—sharp and pungent. My ears rang with motorcars’ horns and streetcar bells, as the various vehicles crudely negotiated one another on the wide road. Only the streetcars seemed to move at any speed, belching out black smoke, clogging up the atmosphere even more; the car drivers called to one another, their voices like angry sirens.

The air closed in on me, hot and wet—there were so many buildings and so many people that it seemed as if there was not enough air to go round us all. The pavement was so crowded, I kept crashing into people. “Look where you’re going!” one woman said, pushing her sharp elbow into the top of my arm, glowering at me with protruding, angry eyes. She was my mother’s age, but was covered in rouge and wearing shabby high-heeled shoes and no coat.

I kept wanting to stop and stare: at a man in a full-length black-and-white fur coat and a wide-brimmed hat; at a woman being pulled along by two huge gray dogs as big as donkeys on leather leads; at a couple arguing outside a bar; at a shop window filled with flowers in buckets—flowers for sale, in a place with no air and no sky. I walked past drugstores selling electrical appliances that could toast bread; billboard advertisements advertising everything from evaporated milk to ladies’ hosiery; barber shops with men having their chins shaved, the barber standing over them as if to slit their throats in full view of the passing public. After one, maybe two miles, I began to doubt my sense of direction. Was I going round in circles? How could any place be so relentlessly . . .
occupied?
Surely, after almost an hour of steady walking, I must be near the end of the city itself, and yet Broadway seemed endless, far longer than any street had a right to be—even in America. My bag was getting heavy, my feet were pinching in my boots. Perhaps I had missed the turning for Fifth Avenue. I decided to cross the street to check another sign up high on the side of a building.

I negotiated the road carefully, squeezing myself between the tight line of cars, but just as I nearly reached the other side, one of them started up and nudged me, no more than that. I tripped and fell onto the pavement, my bag spilling its contents out in front of me. For a moment I lay there, shocked at what had happened. I expected somebody to stop and help me, but as dozens of shoes—clacky high heels, smart black leather, dusty-brown boots—passed by my face, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. Mortified more by my lack of composure than actual pain, I stood up and dusted down my coat. My petticoat had torn and a foamy strip of it was dipped in the muddy gutter. As I picked it up to tear it off, I caught the eyes of a passing Negro man—there was a soft pity in his face, and a reluctance. Neatly dressed, his skin and hair as glossy as his shoes, he came over and, pointing up the street on whose corner we were standing, said, “If you need to sit down, lady, Washington Square Park is just at the end of Fourth Street. There’s benches there where you can rest.”

“Thank you,” I replied. I was too embarrassed to ask him if we were still on Broadway or where Fifth Avenue was. I just wanted to get away from where I was standing and get my dignity back.

“I was new here once,” he said, holding me back briefly with his words. Then, as he walked away from me, he pushed his hands out either side from his waist, his pink palms in a theatrical spread, and said, “We all was.”

I walked up Fourth Street until I reached the park. It was a short walk, and the man was right, it was a good place to wait and rest. I sat down on a bench and looked around me. The grassy areas were parched and patchy—hardly green at all and scattered with crunchy leaves, the messy debris of the giant trees that rose up from the dead earth like ancient buildings. Over to one side there was a woman feeding pigeons. She stood in the center of the gray mass of birds pecking frantically at her feet, their wings flicking their black undercoats, making dust of her coat. There were squirrels too. As one sped up a tree, another identical one rushed up after it—tricky twins, unbothered by the humans who were occupying their space. A young woman lay on the grass next to my bench, her elbows resting on a pretty woollen rug and a day bag of intricate tapestry gaping open at her feet, as a young man tried to distract her from her reading. There were numerous people talking and eating together and alone; several lay snoozing in the warm, muggy air. I thought what an extraordinary place this was, when people could perform such intimate acts as sleeping and eating in full public view. At home, even the old men of the road who tramped homeless around Ireland didn’t eat in public. There was one who called to our house and my mother always gave him a cooked potato. He was too dirty to let in, but she wouldn’t have him dine alone and always stood with him as he ate it at the door.

The animals seemed more relaxed here too, quite content to mix with us humans. The rabbits and pheasants at home hid away from us in case we’d catch and eat them. Here the people were feeding the wild animals, and dressing their dogs up in fancy collars and being dragged down the street by them! I wanted to share my revelation with John and felt the customary shock of grief that he wasn’t there at my side—a feeling that had become familiar to me in the past days. It seemed so pointless, seeing all these interesting things, having all these adventures, without him to tell them to. I steadied myself. I would write, I told myself.

But then I caught the smell of cigarette smoke—that familiar smell of Paud and Maidy’s kitchen, in mid-afternoon after the dinner was done. And suddenly John was there . . . and not there. The full cruelty of our parting hit me for the first time: not the usual sharp stab, but a heavy body blow to my chest. The absoluteness of grief. Winded with the reality of what I had done, I collapsed into a wretched mound of shuddering tears right there on the park bench. I was in full view of the world, but it wasn’t my world.

The young man who had been on the grass next to me was standing in front of me singing. He was wearing a straw boater hat and a white shirt rolled up to reveal bony, hairless forearms, which he stretched forward in a comical, pleading pose, before sitting down next to me, grabbing both my hands and, still without introduction, belting out his chorus in a surprisingly low and confident baritone, given his skinny stature.

“Oh, shut up, Bradley—can’t you see the poor girl doesn’t need singing, she needs food?” The girl had been lying on the grass listening to him sing, but now he was sitting down next to me. She stood up and came over. “Here,” she said, pointing a large round cake at me with sugar crystals stuck to its top. I blushed with a mixture of shame and anger at the implication that I looked as if I needed charity.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.” I was starving of course, and the proximity of the cake was making me hungrier still.

“Oh, take it,” she said crossly, thrusting it into my hands. “I’ve two more in my bag.”

“She’s Jewish,” the boy said. “They always carry food around.”

“Don’t be so bloody rude, Bradley—in any case, there’s no shame in being hungry.”

“Only in being a lady . . .”

“I’m not a lady, I’m a woman!”

“Ruth’s a suffragette,” he said to me, by way of explanation. “They think they’re men, actually.”

“I wish I
was
a man, then I’d punch you to the ground.”

“No, you wouldn’t, because you’re in love with me!”

“Of course, Bradley, because
everyone’s
in love with—”

“Ugh—it’s salt!” I suddenly cried out. The cake had become irresistible with their bantering, but it wasn’t sweet as I had imagined it would be. The crystals on the top of it were lumps of salt!

“What’s the matter?” Ruth said.

Bradley started laughing. “She thought your pretzel was a sweet cake.”

“Oh my goodness, what a shock.” Ruth was full of concerned panic, as if I were a child who had burned myself. “Make yourself useful, Bradley, and get the lemonade out of my bag—here, spit it out.” And she thrust a white cotton handkerchief at me.

“No,” I said, “it’s good.” And it was. Once I got used to the flavor, the dry cake-bread tasted wonderful and, washed down with the lemonade, it revived me and I felt completely cheered. Ruth sat and watched my face as I ate, checking my approval and delighting in my pleasure. As soon as I was finished, she offered me another. “Bradley can go without,” she said. “His
maid
is probably cooking a meal for him as we speak.”

I looked at him, trying not to appear hungry as I was.

“Truly—I insist,” he said, sweeping his hand dramatically in front of him.

So I took it, willingly and gratefully. “Thank you. You’re a real gentleman,” I said, teasing.

“And you,” he said, resting his hand on his concave chest and sweeping the other out in a dramatic bow, “are a
lady
.” Then we both looked pointedly at Ruth and laughed.

We passed an hour or so in the park, the three of us talking and teasing one another like old friends. I told them about my journey and, in the telling of it, it turned from the ordeal of leaving Ireland from harsh necessity into an exciting adventure that had led me to enjoy their amusing company and their lemonade. I did not tell them I was married or talk about the war or the tragic circumstances that had led me here—and in the not telling of it, the pain of my reality melted away.

“Are you poor?” Ruth asked. “Is that why you came to America?”

I bristled briefly, then thought of explaining how my parents were rich, and how I was educated—but in the end, I realized, it didn’t matter. These people were happy to talk to me in any case. So I swallowed my pride and said, “Yes, I’m poor. That’s why I’m here. I have a job working for a lady on Fifth Avenue.”

“My parents were poor,” Ruth said. “That’s why we came here. Bradley’s a blue-blooded boy, never done a day’s work in his silly little life—hardly a man at all.”

“Nonsense. I work for a living!”

“Oh yes, that’s right—writing poems.
Very
hard work . . .”

Bradley and Ruth walked with me part of the way up Fifth Avenue, amusing me with anecdotes, pointing out landmarks—their benefits and pitfalls. They distinguished hotels from brothels, theaters from music halls, private gardens from public parks and tenements from apartment blocks. They layered sites with their stories, making the city seem dense with all that had happened within it. As its newest inhabitant, I felt eager with the promise of what might happen yet.

I barely noticed the time pass until we stopped under a gold statue of a man on a horse and a beautiful winged woman leading him along.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Some savage general who plundered the South in our Civil War,” Ruth said. “Men are such
fools
for fighting.”

“We’d better say good-bye here,” Bradley said. “We’ve a long walk back.”

We said good-bye fondly, but made no plans to meet again. It was enough that the lighthearted kindness of these two strangers had made this huge and frightening city seem more like home, and had given me enough faith to believe I could continue on. As they waved and headed back downtown, I found myself feeling excited at the prospect of seeing Sheila again.

I ran so fast toward her, I almost missed 820 Fifth Avenue.