Ellis Island (5 page)

Chapter Nine

The first school year flew by and, before I knew it, I was facing three long months with my parents again. This time I was armed with books to help me against the boredom. Knowing I was an only child, Sister Stephanie had packed me a box from the school library, including
Little Women
and the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard. She also packed some religious works, as a consolation to my father, who disapproved of fiction.

I had not seen my mother in nine months and, when the carriage driver left us at the gate, I saw she was standing, waiting for us at the door. Her hair was pinned back, but escaped tendrils were flickering about her face. As the car pulled up, she brushed her hands down her front to straighten her dress and I realized she was still wearing her apron. She began frantically to untie it, and I felt a clip of love. I held on to the feeling so that when she greeted me with her cheek, I embraced her with my two arms and put a warm kiss on her dry skin. She did not respond, but she did not pull away.

My father took the car straight back into town and, after unpacking my things, I joined my mother in the kitchen. She was at the fire boiling some linens—the kitchen smelled of carbolic from the soap.

“Can I help you, Mam?” I asked. There were some eggs and butter on the table. “I could make a soda cake—I know how.”

My mother raised her eyebrow, almost imperceptibly, and nodded at the table. I could not believe how easily she let me help her, and realized, shamefully, that I had never offered directly before. As I walked round the kitchen, gathering ingredients—a mixing bowl, a jug—I kept waiting for her to tell me to stop, that she did not need my help, but she didn’t. Just before I began measuring out my ingredients, she came over to me and carefully put an apron over my head, tying it at the back. When she had finished she patted me gently to indicate she was done, and I felt her touch as tenderly as if it had been a kiss.

That evening she presented the bread, spread with butter, to my father.

“This is excellent bread, Attracta,” he said. “Sweet—like a cake.”

My mother and I exchanged a smile. It felt like a reward. “Ellie made it,” my mother said.

“Well! Did she really?” He looked over at me and I flushed with pleasure at his approval.

I called up to the Hogans’. Maidy looked older and Paud smaller than I had remembered. It had been less than a year since I had seen them, but so much had happened.

“Look at you now, you’re a young lady,” Maidy said. “All tidied and smart.” She put a mug of milky tea down in front of me and a slice of apple tart directly onto the table. When I hesitated slightly, she asked, “Would you prefer a plate, Ellie? Of course you would . . . Where are my manners?”

“No, no!” I felt terrible. “No, Maidy, don’t be silly, it’s fine.” As I bit into the tart, its acid sweetness made me remember how much I had missed being here. “When is John home?” I had not realized how much I had been wanting to see him until I asked it.

“John won’t be home for a while yet again,” said Maidy.

I nodded and smiled. Then, quite unexpectedly, I began to cry. I had hardly spared him a thought that past year, and yet now that I was faced with the prospect of not seeing him, I was all upset.

“Whist now, Ellie—poor, poor love . . .” Maidy said it under her breath, then came and put her arm round me.

“I’m sorry.” I made myself stop crying. “How is he getting on in Dublin?”

Maidy sat down at the table with me, something she rarely did, and cut herself an enormous slice of pie and started to talk. She told me how the boss in Dublin was working John very hard, every day of the week barring Sunday. He had nice digs, cheap, and the landlady was kind and a decent enough cook—but not so decent as to be better than Maidy. He had made friends, a lot of friends from all walks of life, she said.

“I thought he might have written to me,” I said.

“Sure, he doesn’t know where you are, love.” Then her face saddened and she said, “Although he writes to us seldom enough now.”

“Why is that?”

She got up from the table and started to busy herself. Her tart was left, untouched on the tabletop. “Oh, he’s busy, you know. With his new friends.”

Paud, who had been quietly plucking a bird in the corner, suddenly called out, “He’s joined the Volunteers, Maidy—say it out, why don’t you?”

“Quiet, Paud—she’s only a child!”

I knew who Paud was talking about. They were the rebels who wanted the English out of Ireland and for us to run the country ourselves. My father didn’t approve. “They say they are seeking justice, Father,” I often heard him argue with the priest after Mass, “but in truth they are vagabonds, intent on destruction and anarchy.”

I liked the idea of John being a vagabond—it sounded exciting, like Robin Hood. Then I felt upset again, because he was living a wonderful new life without me. So I started chatting and boasting to Maidy and Paud about my own life—how delighted I was with the convent, how I loved my new friends, how kind the nuns were, how we ate like princesses and each had a bed to ourselves. As I was leaving, I said, “So, I do hope John is happy in Dublin.” I didn’t mean it as I said it, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew it was important for me to wish him happiness. My year at the convent had turned me into a good person. Being good worked. It had paid off with my parents, and now somehow it would pay off around my feelings about John. My childhood friend had moved on, and so had I. However hard my summers would be without him, it was essential to wish him well with all my heart, and let him go. More than anything, I had to keep proving to myself that I could be happy without him.

Chapter Ten

I called up to Maidy and Paud a few times over that summer, and the next three summers, but John was never there and, by and large, I really did end up forgetting about him. I got caught up in the drama of convent life: the sharing and betrayal of each other’s small secrets, girls sending flirtatious messages out to the working boys who came to dig the gardens, others trying to win favor with the nuns. Only the brightest girls were accepted for vocations, and only the truly wicked allowed themselves to get caught up with romance and boys. Between the bad girls committing—or threatening to commit—sins of the flesh, and the rest of us speculating as to which of us were going to enter the convent, we had plenty to keep us entertained.

As for the holidays, I found they passed more quickly and easily if I conformed to my parents’ way of doing things—cooking and housekeeping with my mother, and saying the rosary each night with my father. They allowed me, then, to spend the rest of my time reading. Books were my escape. I was able to leave my own cravings behind while I absorbed myself in the lives of my heroines.
Anne of Green Gables
,
Little Women
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Jane Eyre
—I read each of them over and over again, stepping into the hearts and loves of the women, feeling their passions and their grief.

The summer of my seventeenth birthday, my father took my mother and me to the shrine at Knock to see where the Blessed Virgin had appeared in 1879. My father had been a child himself when it happened, and he said it had been the news of that miraculous event that had inspired his great devotion. We stood by the church wall where the miracle had occurred and tried to count the number of crutches that cured invalids had left there over the years. There were too many to count. “The Lord’s mercy knows no end!” my father declared, merrily. Inside, we said ten full decades of the rosary kneeling on the stone floor before the altar.

I was freezing cold and bored throughout the day. I kept remembering how I had celebrated my birthday with my school friends before the term broke up. The girls had gathered round my bed after lights out, and Sheila had got in beside me, her cold feet warming themselves on my calves, gripping my hands under her arms and releasing them only to kiss them and tell me she loved me. We talked by the light of our single “birthday” candle and nibbled at Maeve’s secret stash of biscuits. They presented me with gifts they had made themselves: a napkin embroidered with my birth date; a crocheted cap; a knitted bobble to sew onto a scarf; a pretty cozy for a boiled egg. It was pure joy.

The journey home from Knock was long and we stopped for a “birthday picnic” on the way. The rain slashed loudly on the roof of our hackney carriage, and the windows steamed up while we ate our sandwiches in the awkward company of our driver. “I think I might like to join the convent,” I said. I don’t know why I said it, except that I had been thinking how much nicer it was at school than it was at home. How wonderful it would have been to stay there for the whole summer. After the chatter at school, I had become unused to the terrible silence in our family and sometimes felt compelled to break it. Saying I wanted to be a nun seemed an appropriate silence breaker after a day in Knock. We talked about becoming nuns in school all the time. It didn’t mean anything. We were just speculating—making conversation.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I had made a terrible mistake.

My mother did not look at me at all, but studied the back of the driver’s neck, and chewed cautiously on her sandwich as if she feared it was going to choke her. My father paused from eating, then held my eye for a moment, smiled gently and said, “We will have to talk to Mother Superior and see if she thinks you are suitable, Eileen.”

“Probably she will not,” I said, looking away. But it was too late. I could tell by his face he was bursting with joy.

The following day was a Sunday and, unusually, we slept through early Mass at eight and went to the busier service at eleven. I wore my navy school uniform and cap, as I always did on a Sunday. Some of the village girls that I knew from national school wore brightly colored cardigans and adorned themselves with brooches and lace gloves and the like. None of the local girls spoke to me, not even Kathleen Condon. I wondered if Sheila and Maeve had friends in their parishes or dressed prettily for their Sunday Masses. We never talked about our lives outside the convent.

Father Mac had a low, slow, droning voice that would put you to sleep—and, with some of the older parishioners, actually did. The day was warm, so the wool of my uniform was making me itch and I found it was a struggle to sit still.

When Mass was ended, I separated from my parents and hurried out by the side door of the church so that I could disappear for a few moments and scratch myself. I stood by the back wall of the church and shoved my hand as far down the back of my tunic as I could stretch. Then, to my horror, I realized that I wasn’t alone. There was a group of young men standing over by the cemetery wall, some fifty feet away from me. There were three of them, huddled together, talking quietly and smoking. The tallest of them looked over. I noticed that he smiled at me as I walked quickly back around to the front of the church to find my parents. They were standing with Father Mac and the pig farmer, Frank Collins, a broad man with big whiskers and strong opinions. “They were
not
our leaders, Frank,” my father was arguing with his usual authority. “As British citizens, it is our duty to obey the law of whatever land we live in. As Christians, we must answer to a higher force than Mr. Padraig Pearse—isn’t that right, Father?” Neither man answered him.

It was all anyone ever talked about these days: the Uprising. “Please be upstanding for ‘the Uprising!’” Sheila used to call in the refectory. Then she would leap up on a chair, raising her hand to her forehead in a mock salute, and we’d all follow. We knew what was going on, but our interest was vague because the war never touched our lives. If any of the girls had brothers who were involved, they were never told. They were sent to convent school where they’d be safe. It was fashionable among us older girls to mock the rebellion as men’s foolish obsession with war. Nobody we knew had died; it was just something that seemed to be happening far, far away. Like the World War. Terrible—but nothing to do with us.

I stood there politely, my eyes wandering across the dispersing crowd. I had just noticed Maidy and Paud when one of the young men I had seen around the back—the tall one who had smiled at me—walked up to them. He had sideburn whiskers trimmed to the top of his mouth, and he wore a shirt and tie. His hands were tucked into his trouser pockets and, beneath the side of his tweed jacket, I could see the suggestion of braces. He was broad and mannish, and the world stood still when I looked at him.

It was John.

He smiled at me, and it was the same smile from the same face I had always loved, but the love felt different. It shot through my skin in a wave of heat until my hands were trembling and my cheeks burning. As he moved toward me I became overwhelmed with a feeling I did not recognize, so I turned my back and began to walk away from the church, my mother following me. As we reached the road, I suddenly felt foolish. John was my old friend. My brother. When I turned to go back to him, I saw that he was surrounded by people. Or, more specifically, girls in brightly colored cardigans and hair combs. A volcanic anger rose up in me. If he wanted to talk to them before me, then that was that. He was welcome to them!

I practically ran home from the church, my mother trailing after me. But when I got back to the house I could not settle. I tried to help my mother, but I was nervous and kept dropping things. I was too anxious to read, too distracted to pray. I lay awake all night thinking about John with the stupid girls from national school, John smoking with his friends, John smiling at me. When I tried to think of John and me playing together as children—the John I knew and loved—the years of soft images in my memory kept getting wiped by the brief, bright pictures from that day. His chin was broader, his cheeks harder, his eyes narrowed with experience; the shadows of a man made his face so compelling to me that, when I closed my eyes, I could think of nothing else but looking at him again.

I felt sad and angry and wanting.