Ellis Island (4 page)

Chapter Six

John and I were barely parted after that until it was time for us to leave national school. Most children finished their education at twelve because secondary education was too expensive for the majority, but my parents had arranged for me to go on and board at a convent school. John had missed a year of schooling when his parents were sick, so he had been held back a year. Although he had already been offered an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker in Dublin, Paud—who had left school at nine himself—believed that fourteen was time enough to start work. So he and Maidy arranged for John to stay in school for an additional year.

I was there when they broke the news to him.

“Now you can stay with all your friends for another year, John. Isn’t that grand?”

I got a thrill, because it meant we would be leaving national school at the same time, and I wouldn’t be left behind there on my own. But it disappeared when I looked at John’s shocked face. He was devastated. I knew he was longing to get out into the real world. When Paud had originally told him about the apprenticeship, John had come running over to me at break time and nearly exploded with excitement. “I’ll be in Dublin, Ellie, working like a man. The cabinetmaker is an important person, making chairs and drawers for all the big nobs in the city. I’ve started on a box already, and a leather belt for my tools!”

John had talked of nothing else for months, only his toolbox and belt, and had made me study each of them a dozen times. That was my penance. His was this—being told he had another year of school to get through. I had never seen John lose his temper, but surely by the look of him he would lose it now.

Maidy and Paud hadn’t a clue what they had done. They thought they were doing the right thing, and that John would be happy. When my parents did the “right” thing, they didn’t care whether I was happy or not. Sometimes I was happy with what they decided—like deciding to send me to board in the convent school when I was twelve. But sometimes I wasn’t happy—like the time they wouldn’t let me see John. With the Hogans it was different. Everything they decided was to make John happy. But this time they had got it very, very wrong.

“Thanks, Ma; thanks, Pa. That’s great.” He smiled—a forced, halfhearted smile, but at least a smile—then shot out of the house calling over his shoulder, “Come on, Ellie, we’ll go and see if that poor bird has flown us.” He ran and ran to the bottom of the field, me chasing after him, and I thought that maybe everything was all right after all. But when we got to the stick shelter we had built to hide an unfortunate fluttering blackbird we had found the day before, he threw himself down on the grass and put his head in his hands. “No! No! I can’t stick another year of school, Ellie! How—
how
—could they have done this to me?”

I was shocked, and a little hurt. It seemed he was desperate to leave me after all. “Then why didn’t you say anything?”

“There would be no point.”

“But Maidy and Paud would do anything for you. You’d easily be able to get them to change their minds.” I peeped into the shelter, but the bird had gone—recovered and flown, I innocently hoped.

“That’s not what they want, Ellie—you wouldn’t understand.”

I hated it when he said that. “I
am
eleven years old.”

John smiled at me, but it was a poor excuse for a smile. He was sad in a way that frightened me. John was my protector and my sunshine. I didn’t like it when he was worried or when his face was darkened by shadow. “They need me,” he said. “That’s what it is. Maidy and Paud need me at home for another year.”

“But that’s terrible,” I said stoutly. “That’s selfish of them.”

“No.” He started to pull the delicate, but now empty, bird-cage of sticks apart with his hands. “I’ll be gone from them long enough.” He said it wistfully, as an old woman might say it. As if it was a fact of life, just one of those things. But it struck me like an iron rod. John would enter the adult world before me, and I was being sent off to school. In a year’s time we would be separated. I too needed him for another year, to get used to the idea of his leaving. Dublin seemed so final. Maybe he would never come back. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want John to think I was a crybaby. So I stood up and went behind him, put my arms round his neck and buried my face in his shoulders, and tucked my knees in around his waist as a signal for him to carry me. With me draped round his shoulders like a cloak, John stood up and carried me on his back until we reached the silver birch. I couldn’t climb it anymore; I was too big.

“Carry me all the way home,” I said. I knew I was heavy for him, but he kept walking. I didn’t want to get down because I was still feeling sad, and I thought perhaps he was feeling sad too because he didn’t run or throw me about like he usually did when we played piggyback. He just walked on steadily, like the donkey carrying Mary through Bethlehem. Just before we reached the house I leaned down and whispered: “Don’t let me go.”

I wondered briefly why I had said it when we were so near home already, but then John said, “I won’t,” and the sad feeling became something else. Something warm and comforting, like one of Maidy’s special teas.

Chapter Seven

We said our good-byes at the beginning of the next summer. I went to the train station with Maidy and Paud to wave him off.

“Don’t cry.” He said it to Maidy, although she was crying already, so I knew he was really saying it to me. “I’ll be back before you know it.” But the train was already moving away from us, and he was moving with it, toward his new life, waving and delighted to be leaving us behind. As his eager hand disappeared into a fog of smoke, I had a sudden fear that I might never see him again.

It was the longest summer, the summer he left.

My parents let me loose, but most of the time I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. I went up to Maidy and Paud a few times, but it felt like a betrayal of my own parents, being with them while John wasn’t around. So I wandered through the fields, made chains out of daisies, held thick blades of grass between my two thumbs and tried to make a single flat note, as John had shown me. I found a hedgehog one day, a frog another—but both of them meant nothing without somebody to share them with. I was lonely; but worse than the loneliness was the boredom. I thought that summer would never end.

My father took me about with him a little. Dressed up in my good coat, sitting in presbytery parlors nibbling dry biscuits and listening to him talk “parish business.” Sometimes the priest would ask my father about English politics. On account of his being a civil servant, my father was something of an expert on Home Rule and the possibility of Ireland separating from En-gland and governing itself. “I have said it before and I will say it again . . .” My father always sounded so certain, so authoritative when he spoke about politics. “. . . the House of
Lords
will never pass Home Rule for Ireland.” His accent altered slightly when he said the word “Lords.” Delineating it from the religious “Our Lord” with an English inflection, yet infusing it, somehow, with equal respect.

When any subject came up that was remotely interesting to me—a snippet of gossip about a morally unsound woman, or a neighbor who drank too much—I would be sent outside to “play.” Standing listlessly, pointlessly, in the center of a manicured garden imagining what would happen if I climbed a tree . . . How many people would gather to talk me down? How long could I stay up there before I got cold and hungry enough to face the mob, to take my punishment? I hadn’t climbed a tree since John had gone. There was no point in climbing trees without an audience. John was my audience.

One Saturday, my father took me to visit the Monsignor. “He is a very important man,” he reminded me as we approached the lane up to his house, “so mind your manners.” I could tell he was regretting having brought me.

The house was huge, like a palace, and the housekeeper laid out a table with more food than I had ever seen in one place at any one time. My eyes nearly popped out of my head when she brought in the first few plates and laid them down on the starched tablecloth. Currant scones, a cream sponge stuffed with raspberries, two apple tarts; a tiered cake rack piled with tiny sandwiches, made with slices of bread so thin they were almost transparent. And still the food kept coming: slices of turkey, ham and beef; a whole cooked chicken; soda cake spread with butter and glazed with honey. “Is there a party?” I wasn’t allowed to speak without being spoken to first, most especially to clergy, but I just couldn’t help myself. My father glared at me, but the Monsignor laughed. He was from the North, so he had a funny, swingy voice and a pleasant face. He was friendly, but also fat—small wonder, I thought.

“No, my pretty wee girl—it’s all for us. We call it ‘high tea.’”

My father seemed to calm down. When we sat, he took my plate and served me a piece of ham, a slice of turkey and some soda cake. When I had finished it, carefully chewing with my mouth closed, I crossed my knife and fork on my plate and waited. I was longing, longing for more. There was so much of it—and all for us. The housekeeper, who was pouring the tea, said, “What lovely manners” and gave me a plate with a slice of tart dolloped with thick, whipped cream. The cream was sweet and cold and the tart still slightly warm. I wanted to tell the housekeeper that, in my opinion, this was the best tart I had ever tasted, and that I knew a thing or two about apple tarts on account of having eaten in Maidy Hogan’s house. But I didn’t dare.

When I had scraped every morsel from my plate, the Monsignor smiled broadly at me and said, “You’re a great wee girl altogether—have a piece of cake,” and he held me out a slab of the sugary, fruit-laden sponge.

“No,” my father said. “She has had enough—haven’t you, Eileen? We don’t want to indulge the child.”

The Monsignor’s face fell further than I would have expected. “No,” he said, “I suppose not.”

The girls in national school said that boarding in a convent school was like going to prison. Kathleen Condon said the nuns beat the bad girls at the beginning of the first term, so that by the time their parents came to take them home for holidays, the bruising had gone down. She said we’d be eating nothing but porridge and bread and water day in and day out, and that we wouldn’t be allowed to speak outside of mealtimes. She said we’d have to say the rosary at least five times a day and would be made to do the stations over sharp stones in our bare feet until they bled.

Despite their warnings, by the end of that summer, I was desperate to go.

Chapter Eight

The Jesus and Mary Convent was ten miles away from our village.

I had never been so far away from home before. The night before we left, my mother packed my father’s navy suitcase with my things. There was a heavy Foxford blanket in Madonna blue with a wide, silk ribbon trim. A soft feather pillow with a spare linen case, a brand-new dressing gown, along with two nightgowns, pressed and starched. Pants and vests were folded discreetly in a corner. There was a new, leather-bound prayer book that my father had bought me, along with a box containing mother-of-pearl rosary beads. I opened the box to check the beads, and my heart fluttered with excitement at the sight of them. Without thinking, I lifted the glittering string and laid it across my wrist like a piece of jewelery.

My mother took the beads from me, saying sharply, “Remember what they’re for, Ellie.” She snapped the beads back into their box and packed them away. “You are a big girl now, you must remember your rosary every day, now that your father won’t be there to guide you.”

The convent building was like a white palace, square at the front with steps up to an ornate door and two long wings at either side. My father asked my mother to stay in the car with the driver; he knew the Reverend Mother and would take me in himself. She kissed me, a cold dry peck, but I felt it as a fond good-bye. When I looked back, her face was set and staring straight ahead and, for the first time, I understood my mother’s sadness and discomfort toward me as a kind of love.

It was early in the morning, before nine, but it had been a hot summer and the air was wet and heavy with the stench of manure from the carriage horses, snorting discreetly and biding their time before the long journey home. I could feel my skin prickling beneath the heavy wool shift and my hair frizzing under the navy bonnet. There were girls, all dressed like me, everywhere—hundreds of them, kissing and hugging their parents, talking to one another, flattening their starched pinafores, straightening their bonnets, giggling, gesticulating, clattering into the still morning air like a huge flock of squawking birds. Suddenly I was terrified. This was going to be like school, only a million times worse because there was no John and there was no escape—not even to my parents’ house. I didn’t want to go to prison after all. I reached for my father’s hand and he took it with no verbal acknowledgment, but a firm squeeze. I wanted to cry.

He walked me up the steps toward the door. It was made of very dark wood and had scenes from the crucifixion carved into it: violent, bloody images. “It’s always good to remind us of Christ’s suffering,” my father said, although I knew he meant to comfort me. As we reached the top of the steps the enormous door opened and out stepped the tallest nun, the tallest
person
, I had ever seen. She was a full foot taller than my father and he looked up at her and said, “Reverend Mother, what a pleasure to see you again.”

“Aloysius Flaherty? God bless you! How is the Monsignor?”

“Very well, Reverend Mother. This is my daughter, Eileen.”

I wished he hadn’t drawn her attention to me right at that moment, because I was struggling not to laugh. I could feel the stream of giggles bubbling up inside my chest. She was so tall that she made my father look small and silly. She wasn’t a bit frightening, as one might imagine a very tall nun would be. Her head, with the wimple and everything, seemed as big as my own body, and yet her face was sweet. She looked as amused as I was by her gargantuan size. “Eileen, I am so pleased to meet you.” She smiled (her teeth were the size of duck eggs!) and I felt she meant it. Then she leaned down and looked me in the eyes. “You’re a good holy child, Ellie, I can see that.” Now I was sure I would laugh, but then to my surprise I found that I didn’t want to anymore. She said to my father, “We’ll take very good care of her, Aloysius.”

“Thank you, Reverend Mother.” My father gave my hand to the nun, and as my fingers disappeared entirely into her enormous fist, he patted me briefly on the head and went back to the car without turning round.

Standing on the top steps, the Reverend Mother called the crowd to order. The parents said their last good-byes in a matter of seconds, and the girls were ordered into a silent line. All this time she was holding my hand, and I was mortified, having to stand there beside her with every girl in the school looking up at me. I think she had forgotten I was there. As the last of the girls filed into the building, she absentmindedly let go of me and prodded me gently into the line.

The girl in front of me had a bold face and a shock of unruly, curly red hair on which her bonnet was obviously straining to keep itself from falling off. Just before we got to the refectory, she turned round to me and said in a thick Mayo accent, “I’m sticking with you—you’re in with the Mother.”

Silence was a feature of life in the convent school, but it wasn’t the cloying, dead silence of my home. It was the silence of reverence and respect, and it sat like a light veil over the joyful, excited babbling of busy girlhood.

My first friend was Sheila, the redhead from Mayo. That first day, she stayed with me all the way into the main hall, where we were instructed to gather for assembly. In the time it took us to shuffle in line through the gray, unfamiliar corridors, and despite the calls for “Silence in the corridor! Silence in line!,” she told me her name, that she was a “townie,” that her father was a “prominent tailor” in Westport, that she had three older brothers and that her mother suffered from “nerves,” which is why she had been sent away to school.

“I don’t mind,” she whispered, as we sat down together in the hall. “It gets me out from under my brothers’ stinking feet in the bed. You’re a townie too—I can tell by the cut of you. We’ll stick together, you and me, against all the dirty aul culchies.”

“Poor people live in towns because they’ve no land,” interrupted another girl, leaning across me to admonish my new friend. “All hunched together like hens in a box. My father has five hundred acres of fine farmland—we don’t
need
to live in the town.”

“And dirt under his nails like a savage!” Sheila retorted, shockingly.

For a moment I was frightened of being in the middle of these two scrappers. Frightened mostly that all the other girls would find me out—realize that I was the one no one liked. Perhaps Sheila, with her daft hair and her frank manner, was Kathleen Condon, and I’d be stuck with her in a corner with the whole school hating us, day-into-night, for the next five years.

“I’m Maeve. What’s your name?” The farmer’s daughter poked me.

“Ellie.”

“And where are you from?”

“Kilmoy.” I added quickly: “It’s only a small town—and my father’s a big man in the government office.”

The girls looked at me and then at each other. I wasn’t sure if they were impressed or appalled, neither culchie nor townie. Then Sheila pinched me in the arm—“Clever girl you are!”—and I laughed out loud as a young nun called, “Silence for the Reverend Mother!”

My life had changed completely and I embraced it. Each day began with Mass, and even though the church was cold, and the prayers no different from the ones we said at home, there was a feeling of holiness that I liked. Our priest, Father Matthew, was softly spoken, so that the ceremony became a seamless stream of words and actions, spilling off the altar like the morning mist rolling across the fields outside.

Breakfast was simple, but it was the best meal of the day because you felt hungry and deserving. Warm porridge with honey and creamy milk, brown bread with plenty of butter, and hot tea—sweetened with sugar on a Sunday. The nuns kept a small farm and they grew all their own fruit and vegetables; there were plenty of them and they weren’t afraid to work, so we enjoyed the fruits of their labor. Sugar was limited generally, but the nuns could afford it and they were passionate bakers. They fed us like princesses with a different dessert after each meal: apple sponge; bread-and-butter pudding; soda cake dripping with raspberry jam. And in case their food turned us hungry girls into hogs, they drummed etiquette into us at every turn. In our first household-management class, Sister Agnes called the girls around to watch me set a place for dinner. “Very good, Eileen.” I glowed with pride as my knowledge of correct cutlery placement, taught to me by my mother, finally came into its own.

A lot of things fell into place for me that first year. The etiquette and good manners that had made me feel stilted and punished as a child now stood me in good stead. A devotion to the Virgin Mary deepened inside me with the nightly rosary, in a way it had never done before, despite my father’s daily efforts. The twenty girls in my dormitory all knelt by their beds, knees softened by the blankets that we were allowed to put under them, our bellies warmed with hot milk as we chanted by the light of Sister Agnes’s lamp.