The Walking People (36 page)

She moved her mug of tea to the table and sliced the envelope open with the handle of her spoon. Six pages, she counted before she began. Front and back. She took a big swig of tea and began to read.

 

Dear Greta,

You will be surprised to find out where I'm writing from—an Aer Lingus jet headed direct to Shannon Airport. I tried to write this letter twice before leaving California, and even thought about making a surprise stopover in New York for a visit. Then I decided the stopover might make you nervous as you seem to get nervous every time I mention passing through New York.

Greta, you won't want to face this but I think it's high time we talked seriously about what Julia is to be told about her birth. I've thought a lot about what's fair to everyone and I really believe she should know that I

 

Greta stopped reading, refolded the letter, and returned it to the envelope it arrived in. Immediately after, she was surprised at how
easy it was to pretend she'd never opened it at all, that it had never arrived. Later, she would tuck it into the cookie tin she kept at the back of her bedroom closet along with all the other letters that had arrived over the years, and putting it there, out of sight, sealed tight under the lid, would feel like she'd put a final close to a conversation she didn't want to be having in the first place. She finished her tea and listened to the second hand of the clock tick off the time. It was one forty-five. She had to be at Bloomingdale's in seven hours. Michael would be up any minute, his sleep cockeyed—as he put it—from working so many nights. She got up, rinsed her mug, and left the kitchen to recheck the locks on the apartment door. They were bolted tight. She returned to the kitchen and tried to remember how she felt when she discovered Johanna's plan to go to America. If she could have chained Johanna to Ballyroan, she would have. If it meant chaining Johanna to Greta's own hands and feet, she would have, and would have been happy to do it. But something had changed since then, doors had opened and then closed. New York had turned out to be the place where Greta became a mother, became partner to a man, became an earner of steady wages, a navigator of public transportation, an expert in building maintenance, a maven of local parks and playgrounds, a master of coupon shopping. All of the busy, racket-filled days since arriving in America had risen up between her and Johanna. Maybe Johanna was onto something—a week in the silence of Ballyroan might put them right again.

Michael would be generous, Greta knew. If I told him all of this, he'd tell me to go home and be back in two weeks and he'd think it's as easy as meeting me at the airport to hear all the news. He was simple in some ways, or maybe it was because he'd never had anyone in the wings threatening to take fatherhood away from him. Let her see the child, he used to say when Johanna's requests got more insistent. It might put an end to all these ideas she has. You are her mother. That's clear a mile away. He'd made few friends since arriving in America. Ned Powers, a man he worked with, was one of the few he ever brought around to the apartment. And only Ned, Greta suspected, because Ned didn't ask too many questions. Michael was protective of even the most innocent information about his life. How he came to live on a nice block like East Eighty-fourth Street. The
number of children he had. His age. He was especially careful when he was with other Irish. That way he guarded personal information was another leftover from the camp, and it seemed to Greta that these two sides of him—his increasingly casual outlook on Johanna's role next to his guarded secretiveness toward the rest of the world—were a contradiction. Johanna is your sister, he explained. Your blood. That's all the difference. How many years in America, Greta wondered, until that explanation stops making sense?

At two
A.M.
Greta heard Michael clearing his throat in the bathroom. It was a practice that was taking up more and more of his routine lately, and it would get worse, he predicted, the longer he worked in the tunnels. Quickly she plucked up the paper where she'd written the phone number of the B and B where Johanna was staying, and she went over to the telephone. She misdialed the first time but got the number right on the second try.

"I just want to leave a message for a guest," she said when a man answered. "Please tell Johanna Cahill I cannot be there, but to please give everyone my love." When she returned the phone to the receiver, she noticed that she felt very calm.

 

They were waiting for her at Bloomingdale's when Greta arrived at nine o'clock. There was Mr. Halberstam and another man Greta had never seen. Mr. Halberstam wasn't normally in on Sundays. She nodded hello and made for the back room, but they stopped her and asked her to accompany them to the top floor, where Mr. Halberstam had his office. Greta tried to catch Bonnie's eye as they passed, but Bonnie didn't look up, only handed Greta one of the smallest of the famous little brown bags, which held Greta's blouse from the day before.

The three of them rode the elevator in silence, Greta in the middle feeling her heart jumping against her ribs. I'll tell them it wasn't me, she decided. They were just little things, here and there, not nearly enough to matter with all that goes in and out of this place. I'll remind them how many years I've been here and how I've never been late, not a single time. She thought of Lily's old warnings in case Mr. Grady should find her alone and ask what she had for supper. She dropped her hands to her sides and tried to keep perfectly still.

"Greta," the strange man said when Mr. Halberstam had closed the door to his office. "I think you must know why you're here."

 

Greta was back on Third Avenue by nine-twenty with a partial paycheck covering what they owed her for that period. Unable to face the subway, with the check still pinched tight between her first finger and her thumb, she turned and walked north up the avenue. They'd been patient. They'd wanted to be sure.

Michael wouldn't understand, Greta knew, feeling the trembling in her legs when she put one foot in front of the other. He didn't like liars. He didn't like thieves. I'll tell him I quit, she decided, but then two blocks later she realized there would be too many questions, and also the chance of him being hurt that she hadn't discussed it with him first. How could she quit with the possibility that he might get laid off? When had she ever been so careless? I'll tell him I was fired because of the milk, she decided, and the way that possibility settled her stomach and calmed her trembling legs meant it was the right one. For the next twenty blocks, she chewed on what she would say. Yes, customers had seen and had lodged a complaint. It offended them, seeing that kind of thing where they shopped and when they'd hoped to have a nice day. Women in America don't know what breast milk is, she'd tell him. They bottle-feed, and even that they hire out to dark-skinned nannies. He would believe it, she knew, with all the stories she brought home about the ladies who bought thousand-dollar winter coats and five-hundred-dollar belts. But Michael, she would say, how could I have helped it?

It was a white lie, she told herself, and recalled Lily sweeping out the henhouse one afternoon and describing to Greta all categories of lies. Little ones, big ones, good ones and bad.

Lily in a hospital bed in Galway. Now she could go to Ireland for a month and not worry about missing work. My pet, Lily might say from the bed, reaching for Greta. My best girl. Their secret. And maybe it would even be fine to bring Julia; Johanna wouldn't be able to pull anything with Lily there to keep things fair. She thought of the weight of Johanna's letter in her hand. She didn't need to read it to know what was in it: Johanna making her case for motherhood so that even a goose like Greta would understand.

When Greta finally got home, she opened the door to find the apartment strangely quiet and Julia sitting cross-legged on the floor with Eavan in the hollow between her knees. It was as if she were waiting for Greta to come home even though she wasn't expected home for another five hours.

"Dad got called in," Julia explained. "The pumps failed or something."

"It happens," Greta said, tossing her keys on a pile of papers. Julia was not a worrier, but something in her face seemed tense and afraid. Even Eavan seemed not herself—subdued, watchful—as if at almost four months she knew something her mother didn't.

"I have bad news," Julia said, and at almost thirteen, felt very grown up all of a sudden, more grown up than she was prepared to be that day. "Aunt Johanna called. Your mother"—Julia sighed as she cast around for the best word—"died." She froze, never having broken such news before, not sure what was supposed to happen now.

At first Greta didn't do anything—didn't move, didn't even breathe. Then she made a sound Julia had never heard her make before. It was a sob, throaty and heartbroken. The couch springs creaked as Greta's body sank into it.

"Mom?" Julia whispered. When Greta didn't answer, Julia set Eavan on the floor and crawled over to Greta's knees. "Mom?" she said again, louder this time.

"So your Nana is gone to heaven," Greta said, huffing back a wave of sobs in a style Julia recognized as her own. Julia handed Greta the piece of paper where she'd taken down all the information. The time, the doctor's name, and again, the number of the B and B where Johanna was staying. There was no extra information.

"What else did Johanna say?" Greta asked. "Did you talk for long?"

"No, just a minute or so. She said Tom was waiting for her. She said she hoped to see me. She said that you said we're going over there and I'd meet everyone for the first time."

"I never said that," Greta corrected. No point now, she added silently. Mammy gone. That feeling of a fire always warming the kitchen of home abruptly put out. Even though she had had no real intention
of going back, the news of Lily dead felt as if that option were stolen from her and that she was in America for the very first time not as a foreigner trying out a new life, but as someone who'd come for good and could no longer return to the life she'd left even if she wanted to. Going home now, she knew, would only mean being reminded of all the years she had not gone. Even when Lily had begged, and Greta knew well what such a return would mean to her, she'd put her off with "later" and "soon," until Lily could hardly get up the energy to ask.

And Johanna, stuck there now because she'd been present for this. Stuck to make decisions about the farm and the cottage and what's to be done about Little Tom, the very last person left in Ballyroan.

"Which one is Tom?" Julia asked softly, and then watched as Greta slid from the couch to the floor and covered her face with her hands.

I
N THE HOGHOUSE
of the shaft site in Red Hook, there'd been talk of layoffs for weeks. At the three daily shift changes—7:00
A.M.
, 3:00
P.M.
, 11:00
P.M.
—the muck-covered and bone-soaked men who were spit out from the throat of the shaft greeted the clean and shaven group making their way down as if they hadn't crossed paths in years, as if seeing one another again came as a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Before the talk of layoffs, there had been thoughts of layoffs, but superstition held that the possibility should not be spoken out loud until it appeared inevitable. Once the ban was lifted—you'd have to be blind not to see it was coming—men who'd been working the water tunnels since the project began recalled the layoffs of 1978, showing up at work to find the gates closed and locked, returning home with sandwich and apple still in hand. Michael Ward, who had been one of these, knew men who packed up their rooms in the Bronx or Brooklyn or Staten Island and headed for the pipeline in Alaska the very next day.

For Michael, those lean years of the late 1970s had been a onetime thing, a stretch of twenty-six months once survived would never return. If he got through it, Michael told himself then, he'd be rewarded for it. That was the way the world had to work, after all. From August of 1977 to October of 1979 he'd shaped for day labor, he'd gone back to moving furniture three days a week, he'd driven a cab for a friend who
owned his own medallion and needed his vehicle on the road twenty-four hours a day. Greta, who'd lost her job just a few months before the layoffs, got a new job at Macy's but had to start over at the minimum hourly pay. And on Sundays, while the Koreans across the street were at church, she worked at their laundromat doing dark load after light, folding and tagging each batch as she plucked the hot clothes from the dryers. Julia usually went with her to help, and sometimes Eavan went along to crawl among the humming machines while Greta and Julia worked. Inside the locked and shuttered store they listened to the radio and played games Julia had learned in school — twenty questions, alphabet trip. If Michael was home for supper, they reported on the various styles of underwear they'd encountered and told him they would decide on the funniest one and bring it home to show him, one of them ones with the string going up the crack. Michael knew that all this talk of underwear was the same as saying they didn't mind the extra work. The bags under Greta's eyes told a different story.

"I'm pregnant," she told him one night after Julia had gone to bed. "Eight weeks gone." That was October 1977. Julia was thirteen, Eavan was about to turn one, and Greta had far less of that astonished joy she'd had when she told him she was pregnant with Eavan. With Eavan she hadn't even been able to wait for him to come home; he'd walked through the gate of the job site one afternoon to find her sitting on the curb, chin on her fist, the bus map in her hands twisted into a tight cigar. She had told him the news as if she'd finally been awarded the title she'd long deserved. Carrying a child of her own made her feel even more like Julia's mother, and the first thing she noticed about herself when her belly began to grow larger was that she loved the unborn baby no more and no less than she already loved Julia. Michael was surprised to see that the realization came as a relief to her, when he knew all along that she could not possibly care for Julia any more than she already did. When the baby kicked and turned and Greta gasped at the pain of her ligaments stretching, her bladder being pressed, it was not only anticipation of the new baby that made her suffer these discomforts without complaint, it was also the knowledge, finally, of how Johanna had felt all those months when she curled up on the bed she and Greta shared, a pillow between her knees.