Galway Bay (74 page)

“You look lovely,” I told her.

Máire pulled down the sleeves of her pink-and-white-striped dress and twirled so I could see the flounce of the skirt. “You’ll wear the dress I gave you?” she asked.

“Putting it on now.” Mine had green stripes and a pin-tucked bodice, Máire still trying to increase my bosom.

Máire turned to Patrick. “Any man would count himself lucky to escort two such beautiful women to the Fair. Catch yourself on! Honora, I’ll see you in the Irish village. Any delays, we’ll meet in the Medieval Banquet Hall for dinner.”

Máire went out the door.

“So, Honora,” Patrick said to me, “you understand why I can’t be part of the Sassenach stealing from us one more time? Medieval Banquet Hall, is it?”

I put my hand on his. “Declare a cease-fire and come with us,” I said. “I haven’t told you the real reason I wanted all the family to go together today. I’ve failed them, Patrick, and going to the Irish village may be my one chance to make amends.”

“Failed them? Honora, you and Máire saved your children. And their children exist because of you. . . . A huge number of people.”

“Twenty-seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren,” I said.

“And all of their fathers doing well,” Patrick said. “Think of that.”

“I know.”

Jamesy, fifty now, had never lost the sweet face and disposition he had as a child. He still worked in the railroad office and played the pipes at céilis in grand parish halls all over the city. And Stephen, at forty-six, had been a fireman and a policeman and was now a tavern owner, as he’d planned. Michael, at forty-four, was a blacksmith, as his da had been, and he looked so like him. He’d learned his trade with Paddy at the forge, but what he cared most about was base ball and his team, the Chicago White Stockings. He’d become great friends with Charlie Comiskey, Alderman Comiskey’s son, who played the game for a job. A pitcher, you call him. Edward Cuneen, Bridget’s husband, farmed in Summit, eight miles south of here. She’d taught at St. Xavier’s and raised four children. A young-looking forty-eight. And I’ve been very lucky in my daughters-in-law. Grand girls they are. They’ve made my sons happy and raised a fine new generation of Kellys.

Every one of my grandchildren said with great pride, “I’m Irish,” but they had no real notion of Ireland. Each of them went to Mass every Sunday, attended Catholic schools, danced at St. Bridget’s Hall, enjoyed Clan Na Gael picnics, and would grow up to support the Democratic Party. Chicago Irish, and happy to be. But they knew nothing of Maeve and Macha, St. Enda and Mac Dara.

I tried to tell them Granny’s tales, as I’d promised her, but there never seemed to be time. All the grandchildren were so busy with school and then work. The young ones didn’t gather around the fire through long winter nights as we had, in the before times. Out and about, all of them.

What did I expect? Even though I’d encouraged my own children to hold on to their Irish, not one of them remembered more than a smattering of the language. The grandchildren found even the simple phrases I taught them too difficult. An inheritance lost to them, though a friend of Patrick’s called Dan Cassidy told me Irish words were slipping into American slang. “‘So long’ is from ‘slán,’” he’d said. “And when a fellow’s told to say ‘uncle’ it’s ‘anacal’—mercy—he’s asking for.”

The grandchildren had no interest in Irish history. Too confusing, they told me. “Why burden them with all that?” Jamesy had asked me. Why indeed?

I certainly would never talk to them about the Great Starvation. I didn’t want those pictures in their minds. I’d longed to connect them to the deep down Ireland that was their heritage. I hadn’t.

I explained all this to Patrick as best I could, then told him that I believed seeing the exhibits in the Irish villages might make the grandsons and granddaughters curious, start them asking questions. A once-in-a-lifetime chance.

“Come with me, Patrick. Please.”

“It’s us!” Agnella, four years old, Paddy’s daughter’s little girl and my first great-grandchild, came running into the kitchen. “Here comes everybody!” she said.

And in minutes, Kellys came marching in, laughing and talking, the older girls wearing flower-brimmed hats and long dresses, the little ones in skirts and middy blouses. As many boys in long pants now as in knickers, all with shining hair and polished shoes, giggling and talking, anxious to get to the Fair.

“Let’s go!” Agnella said, making Jamesy and Maggie laugh.

“Here’s Mike!” someone shouted.

“And Ed!”

The leaders.

Bridget had sat down next to me, her four children part of the melee somewhere. “Mine want to see Hagenback’s Trained Wild Animals,” she said.

Stephen’s wife, Nelly, standing near, said, “I swear, every one of my eight want to see something different—Bedouins, horsemen, sword fights, or—”

“The moving pictures!” said Michael’s wife, Mary Ann. “That’s where mine want to go. Their friends say you’d think it was real life.”

“That’s all well and good,” Patrick said, “but we’re going to the Irish villages.” And he covered my hand with his.

“So we all will be together,” I said, smiling at him.

But now Mike leaned over to whisper into my ear, “My mother says she can’t go.”

I looked at him. How handsome he was and dressed so well in his white linen suit and straw boater hat. Paddy’s wish come true.

Except Paddy . . .

“I’ll go to her,” I said.

Bridget stood up to go with me, but I told her to stay. I walked through the crowd of excited children and started down the stairs.

If only Paddy hadn’t been forced to go to work in the Stockyards after he lost the forge in the Depression. And then to have to take Mike out of school at thirteen and bring him into that horrible blood-soaked place. Even little Jimmy took a job in the foundry, and him only eleven. But what could Paddy do? They needed the wages. Paddy’s poor body finally gave out—hard labor since a child and who knows what toll the years of starvation took on him, not to mention the war. His heart failed, the doctor said, sad in a man only forty-two years old. Not failed, I wanted to shout. It broke. Broke. When he saw his son Mike—who’d been studying at St. Ignatius High School with the Jesuits, who was meant to be a banker and wear a suit and a straw boater—hacking away at cattle carcasses and knew little Jimmy was sweeping floors instead of going to elementary school, his heart broke and his body followed.

“Why do hard times hit us over and over, Mam?” Paddy had asked me not long before he died. “Why did the blight have to return
three
times?”

“I don’t know, a stór,” I’d said.

“We come to Chicago and start doing well, and then it’s the war. No sooner are we back from the war than the city burns. What is it, Mam?”

I was sitting up with him while Bridey slept. She was exhausted from nursing him and taking care of the children. Máire and I helped, but it was Bridey who spent herself. “If he would only eat,” she’d say, and would cook all his favorites.

“I want to, Bridey,” he’d say to her, “but I can’t.”

This night, Paddy had awakened and wanted to talk. “Am I dying, Mam?”

“You’re very weak, Paddy.”

“I’ve been lying here thinking,” he’d said, “wondering why God lets these things happen.”

And I saw again my sturdy lad clutching the candle at St. Enda’s well, determined to keep trouble away.

“It’s not God, Paddy,” I’d said.

“Uncle Patrick would blame the Sassenach,” he’d said.

“Well, they didn’t help matters much,” I had said. “But there’s greed and badness everywhere. Think of the good people, Paddy, the ones who helped us on the
Superior
and in New Orleans.”

“Imagine! Jamesy found Lorenzo and Christophe.”

“That was a kind of miracle, Paddy. So was James Mulloy’s coming to us. Uncle Patrick bringing your Keeley cousins, lost but found again. And you, Paddy, my firstborn. You’re a wonder, too. Such a fine man. I’m so proud of you.”

But he’d interrupted me. “I killed men in the war, Mam,” he’d said. “Of course, they were trying to kill me. To think I lived through so much and here’s my own heart, doing me in.” He took my hand and looked at me, very serious—my sturdy lad, a boy turning to his mother. “Is there going to be a life hereafter, Mam?”

“I believe there will be, Paddy.”

“Will I go to heaven?”

“Father Grogan heard your confession,” I’d said, “and gave you the last rites. Didn’t he say you had the greatest gift a man could have—the grace of a happy death?”

“I’d rather a few more years of happy life, Mam,” Paddy had said.

“I know, a stór, but, well, priests, they talk like that.”

“And God will forgive me?”

“Of course. You’ve been a good son, a good husband, a good father. You love your family. God judges us by how much we love.”

“I do love Bridey and my children—Mike and Jimmy, Mary, Martin and Ed, Anne and little Honora. And you, Mam. I love you very much. And Da, of course. My brothers and Bridget, her husband, their wives. And Uncle Patrick and Aunt Máire and Thomas and Daniel and Gracie and Johnny Og, and all belonging to them. I love all my nieces and nephews,” he’d said.

“That’s a lot of loving. I’d say you’re going straight to heaven, Paddy.”

“I want my heaven to be with Da and Champion at Knocnacuradh in the before times, with Galway Bay shining below us in the sun.”

“Then it will be. That would be my heaven, too. Keep a place by the fire for me, Paddy.”

I’d kissed him and he slept. He died the next day.

Three years now, and Bridey had been very brave. Another young widow, and she had seven children to care for, though Mike and Jimmy were grown and working and Mary had married a good fellow named Pat Kelly two years ago.

Bridey and Mary were sitting together in the parlor. Mary was feeding her two-year-old, Willie.

“I’ll stay home with Mam,” Mary said to me.

“I can’t go, Honora,” Bridey said as I sat next to her on the sofa that had been Máire’s.

I remembered Máire sitting here, mourning Johnny Og.

“Very sore on you, Bridey,” I said.

She nodded.

“Today’s the day I met Paddy’s father.”

She smiled. “I know. On Saint John’s Night. Paddy told me, every year.”

“He loved you so much, Bridey. After the war, it was you taught him how to be happy again.”

“We were happy. Great joy in that fellow,” Bridey said.

“It might be good for you to go, Mam,” Mary said.

“If you’re able, Bridey, you’d be doing me a great favor.”

I told her why I wanted the family to go to the Irish villages together.

Bridey didn’t answer. We sat in silence.

Little Willie looked at us, not used to such quiet. He reached out and took the spoon away from Mary. “I feed me,” he said, and started scraping at the bowl.

Paddy’s grandson.

We laughed.

“Yes, Honora,” Bridey said. “Let’s go to the Fair.”

Chapter 37

S
TRAIGHT TO THE
Irish village?” Mike asked me as we arrived at the Fair.

“Right to it, Mike,” I answered.

Mike led the bunch of us through the entrance and down the Midway until we came to an arched gateway.

“Ireland,” I said to Agnella. “See the sign? Céad Mille Fáilte. That’s Irish. That’s our language. It means ‘A Hundred Thousand Welcomes.’”

Patrick held one of Agnella’s hands while I had the other. “There’s an even bigger welcome,” he told her. “Fáilte Uí Cheallaigh—the Welcome of the Kellys.”

“So many Kellys,” Agnella said.

And all of them here because Michael Kelly stepped out of Galway Bay on that summer morning so many years ago.

Now Mike was speaking to Patrick and me. “Will you two do the honors and lead us into the Irish village?”

“We will indeed,” Patrick said, and smiled at me.

“We’re the first ones in Ireland!” Agnella said as we stepped under the arch.

Patrick laughed. “She sounds like Michael when we ran imaginary races on the course at Gallagh, with him on my shoulders,” he said.

Then everyone else followed us into what a huge sign said was “Lady Aberdeen’s Irish Village.”

“Had to put her name right on it,” Patrick said. “They never lack for cheek. Oh well, signs can be changed,” he said to Jamesy, who’d come up to stand next to us.

“Faugh-a-Ballagh,” Jamesy shouted.

And didn’t his two small sons echo the battle cry.

“Now,” Mike said to me, “where should we go first?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked around.

Rows of cottages lined a cobbled street that led to a grassy square and a castle. In the distance I saw the other village, a Donegal version. But both were only stage sets, I thought, like the scenery put up for Irish Night at McVicker’s Theatre. Nothing real. Phony.

All these faces turned toward me, the whole family waiting for directions from me.

Then Nora, Paddy’s youngest, named for me, spoke. “Aunt Máire says Marshall Field’s has a store here, selling genuine reproductions of Celtic jewelry.”

Genuine reproductions. That’s all this is—a genuine reproduction. How could this phony place teach them anything about the real Ireland? Patrick was right. It was all a cod, with Lady Aberdeen collecting the quarter admission fee from people homesick for a place they’d never seen, could never know.

I looked at Patrick and shook my head. No, not this. No, we can’t take them here.

But we couldn’t leave. Máire and her family were waiting for us. I know what she’d say to me: What did you expect? Nothing’s perfect. We’ll have a good time. A day devoted to fun, and all of us together. Enjoy yourself.

And she’d be right. The children practically vibrated with energy, eager to explore whatever the village offered. Laughing. Teasing one another. Alive. My children’s children. Our joy. Our triumph. We’ve won, Máire.

“Should we start with the Blarney Stone?” Mike asked.

“I heard the Blarney Stone was a fake,” said Paddy’s Martin. “Just some paving stone.”

“We can pretend it’s real,” Jamesy said.

“We can indeed,” I said to Mike. “Perhaps the young ones would like to tour the Irish villages on their own and then visit some of the other attractions on the Midway. We could meet them in the afternoon and then have dinner together.”