Ellis Island (25 page)

Chapter Forty-Three

John wasted no time in doing my bidding, and over the coming days he put down soft oak floorboards throughout the cottage. He worked discreetly, moving aside the furniture as he needed to, sawing and sanding outside, then carrying in the planks as he needed them and fitting them with the minimum of hammering or fuss. He knew that my disappointment had not yet settled and that, if he hammered too hard, he might shatter my thin veil of tight-lipped decorum.

During that time we danced around each other, carefully avoiding conversation and therefore conflict. As he fixed the floor, I tackled the menial tasks of a country wife. With little pride and no joy, I scraped and scrubbed the black crust from our cast-iron oven, I swept out the hearth—cursing John for not having cleared out the chimney more thoroughly, as clumps of black soot fell down into my hair. As John was putting down the floor in our kitchen, I worked outside. I dug out planting beds around the house—throwing stones up behind me into scattered piles. I didn’t give any thought to what pretty flowers I might plant, but just worked my body as hard as I could, scooping deep trenches out of the ground, trying to redefine my surroundings by digging holes into it. When the anger was worked out of my arms, I would kneel then on the cold, damp ground and crumble the earth in my fingers until the brown muck lodged between my nails. When I felt the punishment of my inelegant predicament overwhelm me, I would stand up and dig with my anger again.

Once the floor was complete, John seemed content that his duty in persuading me to stay was done. I had asked for a wooden floor, and he had given me a wooden floor—as if that were the only obstacle to my complete satisfaction with life in Ireland. He carried on about his business as if there was never any question of my having sacrificed everything for him. After all, I felt he had reasoned, what other comfort could a woman possibly want in her house aside from a bit of wood under her feet?

I placed the small embroidered rug I had brought with me from Manhattan to my side of our bed, and each morning I slid my bare feet into a pair of Isobel’s satin slippers and went about setting the fire and preparing the breakfast without needing to put on woolen stockings or boots to keep me warm. However, as soon as I caught myself aware of the comfort in my new floor, I would start thinking about all that was missing—hot water from the tap, electricity, a future, and my freedom. I distracted myself as best I could with my daily work and kept my anger bottled, because there was no sense in indulging it. The situation was set as it was, and there was nothing I could do or say that would change things. But still, as the weeks passed, I was not only miserable at all I had lost, but inwardly raging with John for making me stay and seeming so blasé about it.

In truth, although I could see that my husband was trying his very best to appease me, he could not do anything right.

As the weather grew warmer, John hoped that my humor would warm alongside it.

“I’ll finish early today and you and I can take a stroll down to the river, Ellie? I saw mayfly hatching down there yesterday, I’ll surely catch us a trout for the tea.”

“It’s too wet,” I’d say, “the fields are muddy yet, and I don’t want to ruin my skirts.”

In truth I didn’t give a damn about my skirts. I just could not bear to be around John’s relentless optimism and childish awe of nature.

“There’s a great draw in the days, Ellie—spring is here.” “Look, the moon is full to bursting, Ellie.” “Can you hear that beautiful singing—it’s a skylark, Ellie.”
“Everything’s grand—isn’t this better than New York, Ellie?”
Although he never said it out loud, it was implied in the way he tried to cajole compliments out of me. As if a jam jar of bluebells and buttercups was a match for a career, wealth, refinement, a future full of excitement and opportunity, the litany of conveniences that I had left behind.

“You can wear a pair of my breeches, Ellie—I won’t tell,” he said, pleading with me to join him and make things as they had been. Reminding me of a past when I was a different person, with different needs and different desires. When I was a carefree child with plaits and ruddy skin and scraped knees, before I learned about life, and love—and all both could offer, and take away. I had changed and John refused to see it.

I smiled at him with weak sarcasm and he walked off. I didn’t want to hurt John, but I found that I could not resign myself to my fate.

At the same time I knew that I could not continue to be this angry forever. I was becoming pale and pinched, and I could feel an ugliness hardening inside me.

Nonetheless I clung to my grievances. It seemed that if I let go of my anger, I did not know what would be left of me. Or perhaps I hoped that if I continued to punish John with my quiet, withdrawing resentment, he would change his mind and come with me to America.

Despite my inner anguish, the farm flourished and the house improved with the distraction of my labor. The spring scallions came early, and each morning I scrambled them through our eggs and served them with soda cake spread thickly with my own, salted butter. I lit fires and polished my new floor and made the cottage as clean and pristine as it could have been. However, aside from a few essentials, I did not unpack my trunk. Instead I placed it under our high iron bed and sometimes, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I felt as if I were elevated, sleeping in a Manhattan apartment at the top of some high skyscraper block. In a place where my feet need not touch the ground for weeks on end.

One of our cows was pregnant and when John came in for his breakfast that morning he looked worried.

“Her bag is flagging, she could go today,” he said. “I don’t like the look of her, though—I’m going to get Paud.”

She was an old cow, and John was nervous about the birth, but I had no interest.

I heard the cow braying in the shed and craved the distraction of a radio to drown out her distressed hee-haw. I missed the radio more than anything else—the frivolity of everyday music was gone to me completely now, another acute source of resentment. John and Paud came back an hour later and went straight into the shed. “She’s coming,” Paud said as he rushed in onto my spotless floor in his dirty boots—“have ye some soap and water and I’ll wash my hands?”

I brought out a basin and soap and left it on a stool in the front porch for both men to wash by—then left them to it, loudly singing my favorite Fanny Brice song (“It’s cost me a lot, but there’s one thing that I’ve got—it’s my man. Cold and wet, tired, you bet, but all that I soon forget—with my man”), to drown out the cries from the shed.

I had just put the buttermilk to the flour to make bread when John stuck his head in the door. He was wild-eyed and panting. “We need you, Ellie.” As I was shaking my head and pointing at the unmade bread, he shouted, “Now, Ellie—we need another body—there’s no time—the calf is breach!”

I had no choice but to follow him. If a cow ran into problems birthing, it was all hands on deck. That much I knew. I had, after all, been around the Hogan farm through most of my youth, although I had never been present at an actual birth before.

I wiped my hands on my long apron, grateful that I was wearing it for protection. As I followed John into the shed I almost fell on my back as my feet skidded across the inch-deep puddle on the floor. The air was thick with the salty, mossy smell of this large farm animal, and her agitation mingled with the men’s obvious fear. She was penned in at each side, and Paud was at her head, holding her to the wall with a rope and making soothing noises. By the twitching of her legs, and her pained braying, it wasn’t working. A white bag hung from her back end and dripped with fluid, and above it two small hooves, crossed at the ankles.

“John,” I said, “I’m no good with . . .”

John tied a rope around each hoof and passed one to me so that both ropes crossed over each other, then handed me the end of it and placed the two of us diagonally across from each other about four feet away from the back end of the cow. Then he looked across at me and said, “Now pull like hell.”

As John started to tug, I stood holding the rope in horror until he shouted, “PULL, ELLIE, PULL!”

So I pulled. My shoes struggled to get a grip on the wet ground and I pulled and pulled, but the calf wasn’t moving. The cow was getting more and more distressed and Paud was struggling to hold her steady. John was wild-eyed and sweating.

“She’s not coming,” John said. I heard panic in his voice.

“Stretch her,” Paud said, “she won’t like it, but it might help.”

“Here,” John said, handing me his rope, “let’s give it a try.”

He stood to the side of the animal and, putting his hands inside her, pulled back the tight, steaming flesh that flanked the calf’s tiny feet.

“Pull,” he said barely able to get the words out with his physical exertion, “come in closer, Ellie, hold the weight even on either side and pull.”

I could barely believe what he was expecting me to do, but at the same time I could see we had no choice. I wrapped the rope round my forearms and wrists and leaned back with my full weight against the calf’s hooves. Almost immediately I felt some loosening on the rope, but before I knew it the back end of the animal had showered me with the contents of its bowels, covering me from head to toe in fetid brown muck. I screamed so loudly that some went into my mouth and I screamed again. The men could barely hide their amusement and when John said, “I think we’re getting somewhere, Ellie, keep pulling,” his voice sounded high-pitched as if he might laugh at any moment, and that made me so mad that I pulled even harder than before.

I pulled on the contents of that wretched cow’s womb until she hollered and struggled against Paud. I pulled until my shoulders felt they were going to tear apart from each other, and until my shoes were so full of muck that my toes were scrabbling around inside them.

“Here she comes,” John said.

As he did, the calf suddenly slithered out onto the wet floor, easily, as if it had just been waiting for its time.

It fell at my feet—a slime covered oblong of flesh—then immediately started to unfurl itself into a calf. As I watched the infant animal flick out its limbs and engage in its feeble struggle to become what it was, something stirred inside me.

I squatted down next to it and looked into the confused slits of its eyes and smelt the sweet, warm fog of its first breath. John came over and handed me some straw.

“Clean her off and rub some warmth into her there, Ellie, she’ll be in shock. I’ll go and get cleaned up.”

I sat with the struggling calf in my lap and cleaned her off, rubbing her silky black and white coat into rough peaks, until Paud came and took her away from me, leading her up to her mother’s teat.

When I got outside it was raining hard, but instead of rushing back into the house, I turned my face upward and let the shower rinse me down. I felt the cool water trickle down my scalp and the back of my dress, dripping from the tip of my eyelashes down onto my cheeks, drumming down the front of my clothes until they were stuck to me.

With my eyes closed, I could hear the thrash of the raindrops on the trees and the continuous splat of water hitting the muddy ground. I opened my eyes and turned my face toward the house. Two small birds were feeding from crumbs I had left on the windowsill and John was standing in the doorway, barefoot, stripped to the waist and holding a towel.

“Come in before you get your death of cold,” he said, smiling. I remembered that I loved him, and in that moment the part of me that I had left in Ireland with John when I went to America came back and greeted me. As much as I yearned for the sophistication of New York, for all the muck and the rain in the wake of the savagery and miracle of the animal’s birth, I felt I was home again.

Chapter Forty-Four

I wrote to Emilie and Sheila, telling them I wouldn’t be coming back to America. Sheila’s letter back contained mostly news of her moneyed life in Boston. I smiled as I read, knowing that my foolish Sheila was so caught up in her own life that she had barely noticed I had gone. Once she and Alex were married, she had given up work and I could see that she was turning herself into Isobel, complaining about getting staff she could trust and spending huge amounts of money on haute couture and lavish furnishings. She ended:

Emilie seemed to care more that I wasn’t coming back.

She reminisced and gave me news of speakeasies we had frequented and gossip about disgraced acquaintances. At the end of her letter she added the postscript:
“I bumped into Charles in Tullio’s and, although he didn’t ask me outright, he looked sad and I know he is wondering when you are coming back.”

The sight of his name on the page in Emilie’s round, looped handwriting made me flinch.

I had not been able to think about Charles. The thought of what might have happened between us, had I stayed in America for just a few more days, had been kept at bay by my love for my husband. There was no place in my mind for might-have-beens with another man because there was no room in my conscience for regrets. There was no need for John ever to know about Charles and, with an ocean between New York and my old life, it was easy for me to pretend that my burgeoning American romance had never happened. As I read Emilie’s postscript, conflicting feelings came flooding into my heart. There was guilt at having betrayed John, but also I remembered that Charles had been more than that. He had meant something to me as a person and his friendship had offered me comfort as well as confusion. I knew that, in all conscience, I had to write and tell him I was not coming back.

I waited until the following morning, when John had left for work, and sat down at the kitchen table with my paper and pen. I would have two, maybe three hours before John came back home. I decided to send Charles’s letter in a sealed envelope to Emilie and get her to forward it to him from New York. Better again, I said in my covering note to her, she could deliver it to him in person, as I was unsure of his exact address. Perhaps he had moved. She knew where he hung out and would find him easily enough, I said. Emilie would enjoy the adventure of a mission, and I imagined her trawling the docks in some frivolous confection, shrilly calling his name among all the bare-armed, muscled men.

My letter was brief and to the point.

As I reread the letter, I realized that each line of it was a lie, and no greater lie than the brevity and formal tone with which it was written. The truth would have been an impassioned pleading:

At the same time I knew that I could not tell Charles what was in my heart, as I could barely admit it to myself yet. I was firmly, happily back in my marriage and I would not risk my love for John being confounded by recalling old romances.

I hooked up the horse and cart and drove into Kilmoy myself, leaving bread, ham and a note on the table for John saying that I had taken a trip into town. The postmistress turned the letter in her hand, studying it before stamping it, as she always did, then looking at me over her glasses and smiling coldly as if she had intuited what was in it. I blushed slightly, even though I knew she did the same with every letter that passed through her hands. As she dropped it into the bag I felt a moment of panic, as if once that letter was gone there really was no going back. But as soon as the feeling came, it passed again, and I felt lighter.

It was still morning as I drove back home and the sun was just beginning to filter through, spreading watery pink and orange hues between the dusty gray clouds. Cool air pinched at my nostrils, filling them with the scent of hedgerows—elderflower, honeysuckle—masked then by the mossy smoke from my neighbors’ turf fires as they prepared their meals and warmed their water and went about their day in much the same fashion I did. We all shared the simple struggles of tending cattle and building fires, feeding ourselves from the land, and I felt the comfort of all our lives being the same.

Having let go of New York, my life fell into a routine. I helped John a little with the farming work, milking on the odd occasion, tending the small vegetable patch outside our back door, but it took every hour of the day to keep the house clean and running in an orderly fashion. Household work was trebled when ashes had to be cleared from the grate, and then turf carried from the shed before the fires could even be lit for cooking and warming water. All clothes had to be washed by hand, and meals cooked from scratch. No corner shop in which one could buy sliced bread or baloney. There were no pretzel stands or hot-dog carts—each meal had to be planned in advance so that a chicken could be killed or a cabbage pulled. When the basic chores were complete, there was plenty besides for me to do in making the place more habitable. Between planting flowerbeds, keeping the walls whitewashed against the battle of soot from the fire, sewing curtains and fashioning decorative touches, the house kept me busy.

As time passed I began to accept the lack of conveniences and was less anxious for the luxuries I had left behind—but nonetheless a nagging restlessness was tugging at me, holding me back from contentment. One sunny morning I stood at our back door and watched John as he headed off to work. Walking across our back field, his confident stride belying his uneven gait, he gradually disappeared into the landscape, became swallowed into the hues of green and gold—the emerald fuzz of a distant forest, the sun sending mirrored shards of light flying from the surface of the lake. Stretched across the sweeping scene God had laid out for me that morning, I saw my life. John owned much of the land I could see and he would continue to work it to feed us. Soon we would have a child, or two—and they would play in the fields we played in and climb the trees we climbed. I would cook them hearty dinners and teach them to read. John would sit by the fire in the evenings and watch over us, chiding the children on my instruction, but more often playing the fool alongside them.

I drew my eyes in around the house: the hay-strewn floor of the red barn, the crumbling stone wall to the side of it that I was always nagging John to fix, the mound of our turf stack—like the rounded cave of some mysterious dweller, fallen chunks of the brown mud-like fuel scattered at its rim—the circular bed of earth and stones I had started the day before as part of my continued attempts to turn our ordinary patch of ground into a garden, this was my life now. I would cook and clean and mend and soothe and love my way through the rest of my life. I was wife and, when the time came, mother. For all that I loved John, for all that my heart knew my life was to be played out in this place with him, it wasn’t enough. The nuns had told me I could have been a teacher and, but for my marriage to John, it would have happened. In New York I had been a typist, but now that I was home all my education and training were being wasted. It was no longer that my life did not feel grand enough, but rather that the part I was playing in it was too small. It was not that I wanted for anything in itself—but that I knew I was capable of more than simply being in the service of those I loved. There was a nugget of life inside me that was hungry: growling and unsatisfied. A part of me that wanted more.

Every Wednesday as we went to town for market day, to sell our surplus produce and collect our groceries, I grew less impressed with the meager sundries on sale in the Kilmoy shops. Occasionally I found something I wanted to buy—a passable ream of tweed in Moran’s or a new hat for John to wear to Sunday Mass—but I resented paying the inflated prices. I was used to bargaining, a custom that was frowned on here because it was considered an admission of poverty. It seemed to me that the shopkeepers were growing rich on our good manners, and it infuriated me that I had no choice but to give them my custom on those terms.

As we walked through the town, women stood around in small groups talking and catching up on the week’s news. Because I had been away at boarding school, the short time I had spent here as an adult before going to America had been so fraught with drama and poverty that I had never truly connected with my peers in any significant way. While most of them were friendly and greeted me by name whenever I passed, I remained wary of them and secretly believed that, collectively, they bore the same petty, jealous grudges they had against me in national school: that I had airs and graces, that my mother was a snob, that I thought I was better than them. When I reasoned it out, I knew that my fears were probably, in most cases, unfounded, but nonetheless I balked at making friends with them. I missed Sheila and Emilie, the glamour and sophistication of our lives together in Manhattan—meeting in coffee shops and restaurants, sharing lipstick and hooch, borrowing one another’s clothes and sharing the intimate secrets of our lives. Friendship in America was about fun and adventure, and it felt as if it would be some admission to the death of those qualities in me were I to replace them.

However, it fell upon me to be polite and on this particular day I ran into Maidy talking with one of her neighbors outside the solicitor’s office in Kilmoy. As I stood, half listening to their tittle-tattle, I saw a notice in the window behind them. “
SECRETARY WANTED
. Typing skills essential. Apply to Mr. Padraig O’Nuallian.”

I could barely believe it. Immediately my head started to spin with possibility. This could be the answer to everything. Working in town every day in an office, putting my skills to proper use. It was perfect!

I excused myself from Maidy and her friend and ran toward John, who was already approaching us.

“John, John—there’s a job for a typist going in the solicitor’s office, will I apply?”

John seemed reluctant.

“It will mean more money for us, John—and I can cycle in each morning myself.”

“No, no, it’s not that,” he said. I felt crushed by his seeming ambivalence.

“Well, if you’re worried about the housework, John,” I said sarcastically, “I can assure you I managed to work and feed myself perfectly well in New—”

“No,” he said, touching my arm, “you apply, Ellie, I think it’s a great idea. It’s just that—”

“What, John?” I was irritated by his hemming and hawing. “What is it you want to say?” Perhaps John wanted me there in the house always at his beck and call and didn’t want to see me better myself?

“It’s just that I don’t want to see you disappointed, that’s all.”

I smiled.

“There’s not much chance of that, John. I doubt there’s a faster, more proficient typist than me in the whole county, never mind Kilmoy.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, putting his arms round my shoulder. “I don’t doubt that for one second, Ellie Hogan.”

Mr. O’Nuallian was a stocky man with a rather ebullient head of gray hair that refused to be tamed into a tidy side-parting and instead had formed into messy mounds at intervals across his square head. He wore small gold-rimmed spectacles, and had a round, friendly face. I liked him instantly.

The room was not as large or as grand as I had imagined it would be. There was red linoleum on the floor and Mr. O’Nuallian sat behind a desk that, although large, had thin metal legs and was not in the least bit as impressive as a solicitor’s desk should be. There were law books and papers piled up on the ground, others on the verge of tumbling from a pitifully inadequate set of shelves, and I immediately thought how I would enjoy the challenge of organizing this man and licking his paperwork and library into shape.

“So, Mrs. Hogan . . .”

“You can call me Ellie, Sir.”

“Right so, Ellie,” he said fingering the application letter I had posted through his letterbox just the day before.

“Now, I see you have had some experience of secretarial work in America?”

“Yes, Sir, I worked for some time in a company that manufactured windows, and also was engaged in work for a professor of—”