Of Irish Blood (9 page)

Oh, great. Now I have her stirred up. Jesus Christ. Blessed Mother. Help.

But the next morning Henrietta said no more so here I am, running for the tram and off to work every morning as always. Though now automobiles clog Archer Avenue. Model Ts mostly. Prices have come down so much working fellows can afford to buy an automobile. Mike says that the man who makes them, Henry Ford, is Irish though Ford doesn’t make much of his heritage. Still Mike felt a kind of connection to Ford or Forde as the name should be spelled, Mike said, when he bought the automobile. Doing very well, Mike is.

Mike and Ed and their friends have started what they call the Irish Fellowship Club and love to trade stories about successful Irishmen. All the boys in the club are making money and not just from taverns or politics. Look at John M. Smyth with his furniture store, though Mike says it’s a shame he’s not called Murphy so everyone knows he’s Irish. And there are lawyers and doctors falling out of the trees now and building big houses far from the old neighborhoods. A march of new parishes as the Irish on the way up go farther south or west or north, depending on whether they’d started in South, West, or North Side neighborhoods. No more from Henrietta and I’m grateful. Glad almost when August comes and Tim’s gone to Saratoga.

On Sundays, Mike takes us for spins in his automobile. Henrietta climbs up next to Mike in the front seat of the Model T, while Mart, Annie, Henrietta’s kids, and I fit ourselves into the back, and we cruise the boulevards that link one park to the next. Garfield Boulevard is Henrietta’s favorite. She knows who owns every house.

SEPTEMBER 1911

We’re out for our Sunday drive on Garfield Boulevard to see the fancy new houses south of Bridgeport.

“See, there’s the place Mrs. O’Leary’s son built,” Henrietta says. A lovely fall day—the trees along the avenue bright yellow. Warm.

“Look there, a bust of her carved into the post for all to see. That’s a devoted son,” Henrietta goes on.

“Didn’t Mrs. O’Leary burn down the city?” Henrietta’s son Eddie says. We call him Toots—so many Eds in our family.

“She did not,” Henrietta says. “They blame her just because she’s Irish.”

Mike says that Mrs. O’Leary’s devoted son makes his money from casinos.

“Why can’t we buy a big place on the boulevard? Crazy to be still renting in Bridgeport when all the best people are moving out,” Henrietta says to Mike.

Mike says nothing. “We could be evicted,” Henrietta says. “Just like the people in Ireland.”

“Never,” I say. “Mike’s put in all those bathrooms for the landlord. He’d beg us to stay.”

“Why take on a mortgage?” Mike says, and asks Henrietta if she really she wants to leave St. Bridget’s and all her friends.

“My friends are moving too,” Henrietta says as we get out of our Model T and climb the stairs of 2703. “Nobody’s in the old neighborhoods anymore.”

“That’s not true, Henrietta,” I say. “Our cousin Ed and Mary Roche are still in Brighton Park.”

Ed married the daughter of an alderman. The Democratic Party could turn her parlor into a small-scale convention hall as far as she’s concerned. Born to it, she is.

“I don’t mind the men,” she said to me once, “but the smoke! Can’t see my hand in front of my face. Sometimes I worry about little Eddie breathing in all those cigars, but Ed says he might as well get used to it.”

A fine sturdy little boy, their son. Two years old. And redheaded like Ed and me. Three of us now.

Henrietta is always asking Ed’s wife why they stayed in Brighton Park. “Ed’s getting rich. You could move to the avenue.”

“But this is his base,” Mary Roche tells her.

Not that Ed intends to run for office himself. He tried that six or seven years ago, going for a place as trustee of the Sanitary District. But that was a Republican year and he lost big. “Better to be the man choosing the candidate than out there yourself,” he told me, and I think he was quoting his friend Pat Nash. I met him at Ed and Mary’s a time or two.

Older than Ed, tall and quiet, Pat is one of the boys in the know, no question, and shares Ed’s dream of building Chicago into one of the great cities of the world. And Pat can do it. Owns a big construction company.

OCTOBER 1911

Then, about a month after that Sunday drive, October it is, Mame comes up to my studio at Ward’s. Unusual for her. She has her own office way on the other side of the building. When I stop by for a chat her head will be down, fingers pushing the keys of the big black typewriter that looks to me like a giant insect striking out with its spindly legs leaving a trail of words on the paper. I’ll call her name at least three times before she looks up. That machine of hers is bewitched. Not natural. Something about having a pencil in your hand, forming the letters yourself, that feels human, but to turn your power over to a machine … Still Mame was connected to her typewriter and never left it to wander the halls.

So what is she doing here, I wonder, as she stands in the doorway of my busy workshop.

Five women now cut out the patterns, and three are making samples on sewing machines. They are as tied to their contraptions as Mame is to her typewriter. Startled when I tap them on the shoulder to ask them a question. Still a pleasant place, my studio. No one bothers me as long as we meet our deadlines. Mr. Bartlett promoted high up in Montgomery Ward—a vice-president now, on the strength of the success of our ladies’ dresses.

“Nonie,” Mame says, “come out in the hall.”

“Oh God, is something wrong? Has Rose miscarried again?” I whisper.

“No, no.”

I follow her out onto the fire escape. “What?”

“Good news, Nonie, great news. I’m getting married.”

“Married? Mame, my God! Is it the fellow with the obligations? Jerry Kehoe, I bet. His mother just died and…”

“Not Jerry, Nonie.”

“Well, who? You’re not a very good friend to keep such a secret!”

“Ah well, Nonie, I promised I’d say nothing until the time was right. Save a lot of upset.”

“But still…”

Mame lifts her finger. “Nonie, sometimes saying nothing’s best. I haven’t been quizzing you about your life, have I? We’re not girls together anymore. I always liked the bit in the Bible where Jesus says, ‘Judge not and you shall not be judged.’”

She knows, I think. Oh my God, she knows!

But she smiles and says, “I hope you understand, Nonie. It’s Mike. I’m marrying Mike.”

“Mike? Mike who?”

“Michael J. Kelly. Your brother.”

“My brother!? Oh Mame, but he’s … forty-five years old!”

“And I’m twenty-nine,” she says.

“But you’re young…”

“Young enough, I hope. We want a family. A big family. We plan to marry in November. Oh Nonie, we’ve found the most beautiful house out of the city, in Argo.”

“House? Argo?”

“Well, I could hardly move in with all of you. Mike waited until Henrietta’s boys were working and all of you settled and, well, I’ve loved him for the longest time. We write to each other. He’s been worried about your sister Henrietta’s reaction but really, if we want a family we can’t wait any longer.”

“You can’t,” I say. At least one of the Trio with children. How I’ll love Mike and Mame’s babies!

Mike and Mame. Perfect. Mam would have been over the moon. I wonder, did Our Lady of Perpetual Help get mixed up and think
this
was my special intention? Fair play to her. But Mike and Mame McCabe moving into a house … Our Lady better start dumping grace on my sister Henrietta. All hell is about to break loose.

*   *   *

“Dolly wants to come to the wedding,” Tim tells me as we get dressed one evening a week before Mame and Mike are to be married, on November 11th at St. Agnes Church in Brighton Park. If only Mam were here to see them wed, I think, still aching for her nearly nine years after her death.

I designed a dress for Mame, and Rose came back to the studio to run it up on the sewing machine.

Henrietta shouted and roared about the place for weeks after Mike told her he and Mame were to marry. She said she would not come to the wedding. “Never!”

Mike looked up from reading his newspaper to say, “All right, Henrietta. We’ll miss you, but do what you must.”

After days and days of silence she announced at breakfast, “I’m coming for Mam’s sake. Though what she’d say about your breaking the promise you gave her on her deathbed, I can’t say.”

Henrietta remembered whole conversations with Mam that none of us had ever heard. Still hard to think about those last, sad days. Mam had said “Be good, Nonie,” to me. Ah, well, Mam, I tried. We’d all heard her call for my da at the end, but no messages to Henrietta that anyone else remembered.

“Mike, how can you leave us to eviction or worse?” Henrietta asked him—a sob in her voice.

“I paid the rent for the next year, Henrietta. There are four people working in this house and more now that your boys have jobs.”

Generous when Mike will have his own family to support, please God. But through all Henrietta’s raving, Mike stands firm. Surprising really, but he waited so long for Mame, writing letters to her for years, as I found out. And saying nothing to me, either one of them.

“You would have told Henrietta,” Mame said to me.

“I would not,” I started, but stopped. She was right. I probably would have thrown it at Henrietta during one of the arguments that flared up out of nothing, leaving me guilty and saying, “Sorry.” If Henrietta ever found out about Tim McShane … And if Dolly and Tim were at the wedding … Henrietta’s not stupid. Always ready to believe the worst about people, and too often right.

“Jesus, Tim, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say to him.

“Dolly gets these notions, Nora. She says you’re like a sister to her and she’s always admired Mike Kelly, and your cousin Ed is a good man to know.”

I do like Dolly even though I’m betraying her every Tuesday and Thursday and sometimes on the weekends.

“She just bought herself a diamond necklace for ten thousand dollars and wants to wear it. She’s taking out mortgages on property all over the place. But when I told her we needed a new car, she wouldn’t discuss it!”

For all Tim’s bluster, Dolly rules the roost. When she’d decided to sell all of her horses after Brighton Park closed, nothing he could do but say, “All right, Dolly.”

She finally agreed to set him at Arlington Racetrack, but its more expensive there, and not as easy to “help” one horse win or slow down another. Racetrack officials watching. So Dolly bought Tim a share in Jake Logan’s casino to keep him occupied. Now he spent his nights there, swanning around, and gambling with her money—which Dolly doesn’t know.

“Be careful, Tim,” I said and told him what James McKenna said to me when he’d taken over the tavern his father and grandfather had run.

“I never touch alcohol,” James had said. “Too many fellows drink their own bars away.”

“Easy to lose your shirt gambling,” I told Tim.

“Not when you own the place.”

“You only have a share,” I said. “And those partners of yours
will
collect from you one of these days.”

He ignored me. Be glad he’s not your husband, I tell myself. Not my worry. But to have him enter my real life, be around my family?

“No, Tim, you can’t come to the wedding,” I say. “Please, no.”

But at her next fitting Dolly catches my eyes in the mirror and holds them. “Looking forward to the wedding, Nora,” she says.

Does she know? Is she planning a showdown in front of everyone? Oh, please, dear God. Please! I know I’ve done nothing to deserve your help but think of Mame. Don’t let Dolly make a scene—I’m the sinner. Punish me. Leave my family alone and don’t give Henrietta the satisfaction. Bad for her character. Please!

Mame chose November 11th for her wedding day because she is sure 11/11/11 would be lucky. And she seems to be right. I mean we’re having summer weather! Seventy-five degrees, unheard of in Chicago, when Rose and I arrive in the vestibule of St. Agnes Church.

Dolly’s all smiles as she comes in on Tim McShane’s arm. He doesn’t look at me. She wears a dress the like of which I’ve never seen except in a magazine, swishing a big feathered fan in front of her.

“My gown is from Paris,” she says to Rose and me.

“Charles Worth?” I ask.

“Better. Madame Simone,” she says.

“Whoever that is,” I say to Rose as we wait for Mame and Ed. Ed is giving the bride away, standing in for the father, who died before Mame was born. Rose and I watch Dolly, calculating yardage and counting pleats and tucks, as she and Tim move up the aisle and sit right behind our family.

John Larney turns his head so sharply I think I hear his neck crack, but he says nothing to his mother or the cousins next to her. His family’s very well dressed. His two uncles’ grocery store at Larney’s Corner in Brighton Park’s becoming very prosperous.

And all our Kelly relations look polished and presentable too. The men wear new suits, the women lovely dresses and expensive hats. Doing all right for ourselves in America.

But the bride could have walked up the aisle in her shift and would have still outshone everyone. The happiness pouring from Mame lights up the gloomy church. Mike waits at the altar, grinning. My serious big brother—forty-five years old now, president of the Knights of Columbus, the master plumber, the head of our family since the age of eighteen—is suddenly young.

Thank you, Mame, I think. Mike is happy. I’m sure he’d never even hoped for such a thing.

“‘Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed,’” Dolly sings as Mike and Mame move across the polished wooden floor of the gym at the Brighton Park Athletic Club, the boxing ring put away for the occasion.

I see Tim talking to a few fellows around the punch bowl, my brother Mart and Joe Murphy among them, all of them laughing out loud, not listening to Dolly’s performance. He still hasn’t spoken to me, thank God.

I see Dolly look over at Tim. Does he ever think of her happiness? Or mine, for that matter? I can’t do this anymore. Not to Dolly, not to myself. There. My special intention answered. I know my time with Tim is over. The Fairy Woman gone. Free of him, I think, as Dolly finishes to applause.