Ellis Island (20 page)

The official I had spoken to earlier came and put his hand gently on my arm. “Last ferry to Manhattan is about to leave, Miss,” he said. He smiled at me—a sad, apologetic smile—and I realized he had seen this before. A girl left waiting for her love at the Kissing Point in Ellis Island.

The promise of a new life—broken.

Chapter Thirty-Four

I walked the length of Manhattan Island, as I had done the day I arrived, willing my legs to gather strength. I was weak with grief and knew that if I stopped and sat for one moment, I might never get up again. I did not want to travel by subway or bus because I could not bear the human contact of buying a ticket. I felt raw and rejected, as if my skin had been peeled back and my soul exposed for all to see.

When I got back to the apartment I crawled straight into bed, without even the energy or the wherewithal to get undressed, pulled the blanket up over my head and wept until I fell asleep. I was woken late the next morning by the postman knocking.

My hands tightened around the letter and crushed it.

I must have passed a dozen Western Union offices on my way back to the apartment yesterday, any one of which I might have gone into to send a telegram home. An urgent telegram to Maidy and Paud asking them to check that John had not been waylaid or robbed on his way to Queenstown, or injured before he got on the boat and wasn’t lying, alone, in some shipyard infirmary. But I hadn’t, because buried deep down in a locked grave at the bottom of my heart was the knowledge that John was never going to come to America. Lying on that grave was my heart’s desire, my need to be with him, and surrounding it were the dreams and aspirations of how things would be if only he would join me there. Yet all along I’d known my John well enough to understand that he would never leave Ireland.

When I received his letter, the morning after a terrible night of grief, I was nonetheless enraged by it beyond the point of all reason. I had become entirely engulfed by my desire for a new life in America with him, and here he was rejecting it without any consideration. Without reason, without care—without, I told myself, any thought for what I wanted. Furthermore, he had been heartless enough to let me go to Ellis Island and endure the pain and humiliation of waiting for him when he must, surely, have known that his letter would not reach me on time. If he didn’t, he was that much of an idiot, it was worse still.

He should have come—for a year at least. To try it out, to humor me. It was only cowardice and selfishness holding him back.

If he loved me, if he truly loved me, John would have known how important this was. He knew me well enough, surely, to realize that I had my heart set on his coming here, and that should have been enough to carry him to me. I had sacrificed so much to be with him—my education, my family—I had made the ultimate sacrifice in leaving Ireland, leaving him behind to come here, and this was the thanks I got.

I walked around “our” home—the painted chair, the shimmering glass cat sitting next to the sparkling window, the shiny new toaster all rendered meaningless now that he wasn’t coming, and I reread the letter, over and over again—
“I am not inclined to leave Ireland,” “. . . it is time for you to come home”—
each line making my blood boil more than the last. How dare he order me back in that way merely because he was
“not inclined”
to make the journey to join me? So his operation
“was not as much of an ordeal as having you away from me these past two years”?
How did he think it had been for me? Did he not think that my heart had bled for him and my body craved him every single day since I had been here? The very idea that he had been the only one suffering, the only one who had been through this “ordeal,” and seemed to be blaming it all on me, when he—
he
—had been the idiot who had got his legs shot off and led me to be here in the first place.

My rage got the better of me and I picked up the glass cat and threw it to the ground. Miraculously, only the tip of its curled tail snapped off, so I decided to go out and get some air to clear my head.

With Alex and Sheila gone, I had no one to confide in, so I walked over to Fifth Avenue and called in to see Mrs. Flannery. I had called in a couple of times since I had moved out and, despite the comfort of my apartment, her kitchen still felt the closest thing I had to home here. I had John’s letter in my pocket and threw it to her. It was a deliberate betrayal, sharing his personal correspondence in that flippant way, but I need not have worried on his account.

“The poor man,” she said. “Go home to Ireland to your husband at once, Ellie Hogan, before your head is turned any more and you end up like that fool Sheila.”

“She’s moved to Boston,” I said, then added, somewhat triumphantly, “they’re getting married before Christmas.”

“That won’t last,” the old woman said nastily. Then, thinking better of herself, her voice softened and she said, “Although God help me, I wouldn’t wish bad on the girl, but these grand passions, they rarely work out. People running away with themselves ‘falling in love.’” She paused and looked off as if she was thinking of something else before coming back to herself. “Notions, Ellie, silly girls with silly notions—this place is full of them. You’re too sensible for all that nonsense. Go on back to Ireland to your husband, and get on with your life, is the advice I’d give you.”

It was not what I wanted to hear, though I should have expected little else from an old-fashioned woman like Mrs. Flannery. “But my life is here,” I said.

“Aragh, ‘
life
,’ ” she said dismissively, although not without humor. “What kind of a ‘life’ would that be?”

“Well, I have my job and my apartment.” I stopped, and touched my neck.

“Look, Ellie,” she said, handing me back John’s letter and picking up her tea towel, “there’s a lot more to life than bobbed hair and pretty things, and all that nonsense you and Sheila and the ‘Grande Dame’ upstairs do be going along with . . .”

“Yes, but—” I tried to interject, but Mrs. Flannery was not in the mood for listening.

“Go on back home to Ireland, girl, it’s where you belong, it’s where we
all
belong. I’d go back in the morning if I had half the chance.”

But I didn’t believe her. Not for one second.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I did not reply to John’s letter.

As the days passed my initial fury hardened into a selfish resolve. I was not going back. I was going to stay in New York for as long as it suited me, which would be, in all probability, forever! As I went through the humiliation of explaining to my work colleagues and boss that he was not coming, I softened the blow for myself by saying that my husband was still badly crippled and needed me to stay here and continue sending money home for his medical treatment. I said it with such sincerity that I almost came to believe it myself; and I kept sending money home to Maidy “until John was well.”

Maidy wrote back to me—short, cheerful letters about how my money was being put to good use and detailing the improvements they were making about the place. She gave me news of John only in passing—
“John is extending the henhouse,” “The two men are busy whitewashing the barn while the weather is dry”—
but her letters were free from the pleading and pressure with which John’s were always laden. I received nothing more from my husband, which I guessed was Maidy’s doing. I could almost hear her saying to him: “Leave her alone, John. She’ll come home in her own good time.”
I was grateful to Maidy, but she could not possibly have known the depth of my resolve to stay.

To say I did not think of home for the next six months would not be true. Some mornings I rose early, opened the windows of my room to take the cool, damp air into my lungs and briefly longed for the silence of a dewy country morning instead of the yammering city sirens. I thought of John every day, until the anger and frustration and pain of his not being there with me became so repetitive that I trained myself to banish thoughts of him altogether. If I missed my husband, my people, the life I had known before, it was in flickering moments—small interruptions in the vast, busy seeing and doing and tasting and listening excitement of my New York life.

With Sheila gone, I became friendly with the other secretaries at work. One girl, Emilie Andruchewitz, and I became good friends. Emilie was a year older than me and lived at home in the Bronx with her Polish parents. When she heard I was looking for somebody to share my apartment, she offered to move in with me, and the two of us settled into the same routine of work and friendship that I had enjoyed with Sheila.

All of the girls were unmarried and most of them shared apartments, like Emilie and me. We went out together to coffee shops or ice-cream parlors and gathered in one another’s homes on the weekends, playing music on one another’s radios and phonograms. I didn’t care for drink, but one of the men in work supplied hooch and some of the girls took it at these parties mixed with lemonade and went half mad dancing, flinging feather boas about the place and kicking their legs up in the air so that you could see their drawers, which was great fun to watch. Often, on weeknights, a couple of us would go to the picture house and wonder at the drama and style of Clara Bow, Mary Pickford and Louise Brooks, imitating them the next day at work with inappropriately smoky eyes and dark, defined cupid’s bows drawn on our lips.

Emilie had no man, and was desperate to find one. She was unusual looking with nut-brown, almond-shaped eyes and small, bowed lips like a doll set in a round, pale face. I thought she was beautiful, but her looks weren’t to everyone’s taste. She was longing for love and was constantly complaining that all the men at work were already married.

“I’m
twenty-four,
Ellie,” she used to say when I tried to placate her, “I don’t want to die a
spinster
.”

Neither of us especially liked to cook and so we took the habit of eating once, sometimes twice a week, in a small café near work run by an Italian family. They always gave us the same red leatherette banquette facing the kitchen, and we sat like patient children as the Mama, built from the same cast as Maidy but with a sterner face, silently served us a mountain of spaghetti and meatballs in a rich tomato sauce, which we wiped greedily off the plate with slice after slice of the air-bubbled bread that she kept piling into a basket in the middle of the table.

Emilie also enjoyed Tullio’s because of the number of good-looking, presumably single, young men who came to the restaurant. The trouble was, they usually walked straight through to the kitchen. However longingly she fixed her smoky Slavic eyes upon them, few of them paused to sit and eat before disappearing into the mysterious den behind the heavy swing of the kitchen doors. It was clear to me that Mama and her diminutive husband, Antonio, were running a speakeasy out the back. If it was anything like the ones at home, it was a men-only affair.

On one particular evening we were waiting for our food—Emilie staring in disappointment at the kitchen doors—when those very doors were flung open and, at great speed, three young men propelled themselves across the floor and pushed in beside us at our banquette. A couple of them grabbed our napkins, shoving them into the neck of their collars, while the others snatched up lumps of bread from the basket, deliberately scattering crumbs on the table. With great speed Mama threw each of us a plate and a fork, then disappeared into the kitchen just as two policemen marched into the restaurant, clearly casing the joint for illegal goings-on. The cross old woman came back out again seconds later, with a huge bowl of steaming pasta, which she thrust down onto the table between us. She glowered at the two uniformed officers, then shouted into the kitchen for her husband, who came out all exuberant charm and offered them dinner, which they, with some reluctance—given the seductive aroma of our garlicky spaghetti—declined. Meanwhile, the three men at our table quickly tucked in, curing the smell of alcohol on their breath. Emilie was smiling as if all of her prayers had been answered at once.

The whole thing had happened in such a whirl of hurried confusion that it was some moments before I realized that the man sitting next to me was Charles Irvington.