Of Irish Blood (4 page)

“Why not take the rest of the day off,” Mr. Bartlett says. “Miss Allen will find some space for the Fashion Department, and put a desk and a typewriter in my outer office for you, Miss McCabe. Thank you, girls. Good afternoon.”

We three can’t move. Stunned is the least of it.

Finally Rose says, “Thank you, Mr. Bartlett. Thank you very much.”

Mame adds, “We’re very grateful.”

And I say, “We will do a good job for you.”

“I believe you will,” he says, “and Miss Kelly, please give my regards to your brother Mike.”

“You know him?”

“I do. And your cousin Ed, too, a fine boxer.”

“You, you don’t go to the Brighton Park Athletic Club, do you?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” he said. “On Saturday when I visit my grandmother, Kate O’Connor.”

“Of the shop?” says Rose. “Are you her daughter Mary’s son?”

“Yes,” he says.

“But Aunt Kate Larney says Mary O’Connor married a rich Protestant and left the neighborhood.”

“Not entirely,” he says, and then, “Miss Allen, close your mouth.” He smiles at us. “I married a McCarthy from the Patch. My wife and I are at Faith, Hope and Charity in Winnetka. I’ve had my eye on you three for a while.”

“Oh Jesus,” I say. “You had us shaking in our boots, not knowing you were one of us.”

“I am first and foremost an employee of Montgomery Ward. I am offering you these jobs because I believe you have talents that will benefit the company. But there will be no favoritism, and certainly no disruptions of our labor force by troublemakers of any denomination. Is that understood, Miss Kelly?”

“I’m a Democrat, not an agitator,” I say. “But I do want women to vote and workers to be treated fairly. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” he says, “as long as you do a good day’s work.”

“Oh, we will, we will,” Rose says.

“Come on, Nonie,” Mame says, “before our afternoon off is over. We’ll be back promptly at nine, Miss Allen.”

Our former supervisor stands up, straightens her back.

“Eight-forty-five,” she says.

“But…” I start.

The McCabes take my arm and push me out the door.

“For Lord’s sake, Nonie,” Mame says to me when we are safely down the stairs and in the hallway. “Were you trying to talk the man into changing his mind?”

“What do we tell the others?” I say as we stand before the door to the telephone room.

“They’re probably sure we’ve been fired,” Mame says. “They’ll be happy for us.”

“Will they?” I say. I’m thinking of Henrietta’s begrudgery and wondering how I’d react to such a tale of good fortune. Jealousy and Envy—two of the deadly sins according to the catechism.

I want to hold on to the good news, to protect it, but Mame’s through the door saying, “Girls! Girls! We didn’t get fired! We have lovely new jobs! Isn’t that wonderful?”

All of them look at us, surprised, and I see some of that deadly sinfulness on a few faces.

But then Alice Jennings, who sits next to Mame, gets up, comes over, and hugs her. “I’m so glad!”

And then from the others, “Good on you! Good girls, yourselves!”

Well, I think, Tim McShane should know that Dolly McKee’s not the only professional woman going. What God has for you won’t go past you.

2

When I tell them at dinner that night that I’m a dress designer now, making money from my sketches, Agnella, good girl that she is, is over the moon, which annoys Henrietta no end, especially when Mam says, “I loved to draw when I was a girl in Mayo. I used a charred stick and a bit of slate to get the look of our cottage and the fields around it. Such a lovely little place.”

Mam mourns for Auld Ireland just as Granny Honora did. As a little kid and the youngest grandchild I loved hearing Granny’s stories about her home on the shores of Galway Bay. At fourteen, I stopped listening to her stories.

“Too busy, Granny,” I said, rushing out to St. Xavier’s High School myself or to the dances at St. Bridget’s parish hall, one thing always leading to another. By good luck Ag was living with us then and glad enough to settle herself into Granny Honora’s lap and listen. Especially after Granny took us all to the World’s Fair and the Irish Village. Four years old, Ag was, and thought she somehow saw Galway Bay from above. “No Ag,” I told her, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, her watching me do my homework, a year or so after the Fair. “We went up in the air in the Ferris wheel and looked down on the thatched cottages of the Irish Village on Lake Michigan. That is what you remember.”

“But I can close my eyes right now and see Ireland,” she said. “The green grass, the hills, the white cottages, the blue water rushing in to break on the stones.”

“Well, Ag,” I told her, “I see that too, in my imagination. I suppose all of us whose parents or grandparents came from Ireland have pictures in our heads that come from their songs and stories.” And then I sang to her, “‘When the fields are fresh and green, I will take you to your home, Kathleen.’”

My great-aunt Máire, walking through the kitchen, heard us. “I’m one who doesn’t want to go home,” she said. “The songs don’t talk about people starving to death and bodies laying in the street and the landlord stepping over them. Be glad you are in Amerikay, girls. I am.”

I knew Máire’s children had a landlord for their father. It was her son, my cousin Thomas, told me that day at the Fair when we were all having our dinner at Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Castle. The menu said, “Ye Olde Medieval Fare,” but it was corned beef and cabbage.

Thomas had settled in San Francisco and must have been about fifty then, never married, and a dour kind of fellow, not laughing and chatting away like the rest of us. A drinker, nipping from the silver pocket flask he offered to no one. He leaned over to me and said, “I own a real castle in Ireland, my father’s, and I’m his oldest son.”

I saw Aunt Máire watching us and later as we walked along the midway she took me aside.

“Thomas blathering away to you about his lost inheritance?” she asked me.

“A bit,” I said.

“Poor Thomas,” she said, “made up a story in his head and I haven’t the heart to tell him his grandfather Pyke was a monster and the son, his father, not much better.”

She pointed ahead to where my great-uncle Patrick—my grandda Michael’s brother—and Granny Honora walked together. Married to each other now. Something to get your head around. “Your uncle Patrick told my sons Thomas and Daniel that their father, Robert Pyke, had died a soldier’s death in India. Knew it would please them. Though why anyone would be glad to see the English taking some other poor country by the throat I don’t know.”

When I was small I thought Uncle Patrick was my grandda. But Uncle Patrick said I’d had the best grandfather in the world, his brother Michael Kelly. “A better man than I am.”

“But he’s dead,” I said. I was about ten. I liked to help him dig potatoes from the patch he cultivated in a clear space not far from the riverbank where he told me the last Potawatomi family in Bridgeport had camped. Lots of good stories from Uncle Patrick.

“And what does how long a fellow lives have to do with his greatness?” he asked me.

“But isn’t living better than dying?” I said.

“Not always,” he said.

And I wonder if that wasn’t the day I started turning away from the stories Granny and the black-shawled chorus of women who gathered at our fire told. Such sad tales—lovers separated, soldiers dead, ships going down. In Chicago, Irish people lived happily ever after. Danced to McNamara’s band, the finest in the land, got better jobs, bigger houses, sent their sons to Notre Dame, and cheered the “Fighting Irish” to victory after victory. We lost in Auld Ireland but we are winning in Chicago. Look at me: head of design for Ladies’ Fashion at Montgomery Ward. “Hurrah for me!”

Except Henrietta’s saying, “Montgomery Ward must be soft in the head. No one’s going to buy some silly dress that you’ve concocted, Nonie. Something else is going on here. What’s this Bartlett expect from you?”

Mam and Agnella only look to her, not understanding, but Mike speaks up sharply.

“Now Henrietta, that’s enough. Al Bartlett is a fine fellow and a member of the Knights of Columbus. Nonie has plenty of talent.”

“Thanks, Mike,” I say. “Besides, I’ve Rose McCabe helping me.”

“And Mame?” Mike asks. “Is she part of this new enterprise?”

“She’s got her own job writing letters to customers as Mr. Bartlett’s special assistant.”

“Now that’s wonderful,” Mam says. “Such a nice young woman, Mame.”

And Henrietta grunts—the noise coming through her clenched teeth. “When I think of how I worked,” she says, “scrubbing floors for those ungrateful bitches on Michigan Avenue…”

“Language, Henrietta!” Mam says.

“That’s right! Criticize me when I’m only telling the truth. But then no one cares about what I think, not when Miss Nora Kelly, who’s too good to lift a hand to help keep this house clean and tidy, is bragging away about herself.”

“Oh, Mother,” Agnella says, reaching her hand out to touch Henrietta’s shoulder.

“Don’t ‘oh Mother’ me, Agnella Kelly. Letting yourself become infected by Nonie. I named you for my own teacher, Sister Agnella, who appreciated me and to have you, my own daughter…” And then Henrietta stands, her face all red and squinched up, forces out whatever stray tears she can muster, and leaves the table.

Ag gets up to go after her, but Mam says, “Finish your dinner, Agnella,” and follows Henrietta to her room.

So, there we sit, picking at the food on our plates. Deflated.

“She holds us all hostage,” I say. “With her begrudgery and…”

“Please, Nonie,” Mike says, and points at Agnella and her brothers—Bill, a silent little fellow at twelve, and Ed, ten, a charmer who entertains us all with his stories. Both are subdued now. And Annie—the policewoman who arrested a bank robber, for God’s sake—looking out into space and shaking her head. Jim and Mart silent.

“Well, not me,” I say. “Tell Mam I’m going to spend the evening with the McCabes.” I get up and walk out.

I stomp down the stairs and onto Hillock. Henrietta ruins everything, and we let her. The worst kind of begrudger, Granny Honora’s word for somebody who resents someone else’s success. I know she’s had a hard time of it, widowed and all, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, she’s never missed a meal. Mike bears the biggest share of the burden but all of us contribute to the rent and the food, supporting her and her children. I clench my fist so tightly my fingernails cut into my palms. She makes me so angry. “Ignore her,” I tell myself over and over. But I can’t.

A lovely evening and the wind blowing from the Lake, pushing away smells from the stockyards. Seven o’clock, still light. The clouds cluster around the sun just starting to set over the prairie. The West. Uncle Stephen, Ed’s father, tells stories about how covered wagons gathered right here at the edge of Bridgeport, ready to follow Archer Avenue until it disappeared into the high grass and open spaces. If I saw a wagon taking off right this minute, I’d climb on it no question. California, here I come.

Instead I walk west for two miles until I reach Brighton Park ard Aunt Kate Larney’s boardinghouse, where Rose and Mame McCabe live. The sisters are sitting on the porch with Aunt Kate’s son John Larney, a pleasant-looking man of about thirty. You’d not guess he was a police detective unless you noticed how his body seemed packed into the navy blue suit he’s wearing.

Rose gets up and comes to the top step. “Nonie, what’s wrong? Somebody sick?”

“Not physically,” I say.

“What…” Rose starts.

I run up the steps to her and say, “Not to worry, Rose, I’m out for an evening stroll.”

“And just in time to celebrate with us,” John says. “Your new jobs and the return of the wanderer.”

The door into the house opens and out comes Ed with two pitchers, one of beer and the other of lemonade, followed by Aunt Kate with a plate of cookies.

“Ed,” I say, “when did you come home?”

“Just today, a little while ago,” he says, setting the pitchers down on the big white wicker table on the porch.

“Looking fit,” I say. He’s taken his suit jacket off, wearing a very white starched shirt and bow tie.

He’s added some muscle out there surveying with the army. Always tall, the Kelly men, both Ed and Mike well over six feet but Ed the only redhead among the boys and men, and me the only girl with red hair.

“The Twins,” Granny Honora called us, though Ed was three years older than I. Always a special bond between us. Funny how I could tell him things I couldn’t talk about to my own brothers. Maybe because Mike and Mart and Jim only saw me as the little sister.

I was so happy when Henrietta brought me Agnella. Finally a little sister for me. I loved Henrietta’s boys, too. Only babies when they first came to us. Hard for them growing up around that gang of big men, their uncles, tromping in and out of the place, filling our small apartment, beds in every room. Mam, Granny Honora, Annie, and I in one bedroom, with the four boys sharing the second and the third for Henrietta and her children.

“This is how we lived when we came from Ireland,” Granny Honora would say. “Máire and I with nine children between us.”

“I moved out as soon as I could,” Máire had whispered to me.

And then the visitors; some fellow connected to us somehow coming from ‘Auld Ireland,’ sleeping up in the parlor for a month or two until he found work and a place of his own.

Wouldn’t I love a room to myself in Aunt Kate’s boardinghouse, I think as I settle myself in one of the wicker chairs. John Larney and Rose share the swing, moving with a breeze that brings the freshness of Lake Michigan to us. And now Ed sits next to Mame on the loveseat.

Aunt Kate pours out lemonade for Rose and Mame and me and beer for the boys and herself. Kate’s father was German and her mother was Irish, and although she and her sister—my aunt Nelly, Ed’s mother—have both married Irishmen, they still take a glass or two of Pilsen at night. A no-nonsense woman Aunt Kate, with her flowered apron and thick-soled shoes, gray hair pulled back in a knob. But kind. A second mother to Rose and Mame McCabe, who’d lost their own so young.