City of Hope (16 page)

That very afternoon we returned to Manhattan and Maureen packed up. We waited for Bridie to finish work, and when she came back I informed her that I had acquired a house in Yonkers and was enlisting her as my housekeeper, and she was to start work the next day. The old woman objected huffily, but had begun packing her things before she had finished pretending she had better things to do.

“We need to establish now, Ellie,” she insisted, as she wrapped her crockery in kitchen linen and placed it carefully into her small leather bag, “I'll not do heavy lifting, and I don't clean ovens, or windows . . .”

I wondered if I should tell her what I was leading her into, but decided it was just her pride talking. Whatever dirty jobs might face us all when we got there, it was surely better than the long hours and endless exploitation she was currently experiencing at the hands of her ruthless employer.

Maureen, who had quietly remained in a state I took to be speechless shock—not just at my purchasing the enormous run-down house, but at the determined vigor with which I was moving—looked at me pleadingly as if to say,
If only she knew.

Doubtless she was nervous of what must have seemed like a kind of mania that had overtaken me. I was nervous about the feeling myself, but kept moving nonetheless. With each new task I gave myself, I became more and more convinced that I was on the right path. I was running again, away, away—as I had been on my journey from Ireland. Except this time I was moving toward the right place. Not merely escaping, but going to a place of my own determination.

Early the following morning I checked myself out of The Plaza, then collected the others, stuffed the five of us into a taxi with all of our belongings and headed for Yonkers.

I asked the driver to stop along East 54th at the dime store where I had seen the homeless mother and infant.

There was no trace of them. The doorway where I had remembered them sleeping had been swept clean. Perhaps I had imagined it, but a sign in the window saying NO VAGRANTS reminded me that I hadn't. I determined at that moment that I would never walk past such a sorry sight again.

I made one more stop on the way, to Mr. Williams's office to settle our business.

I had negotiated hard, and the owners had agreed on a price quickly. With so many properties lying empty, and theirs one of the worst of them, they could not believe their luck. I gave Mr. Williams a cash deposit and, as promised, he allowed us to move in straight away. The process was fast, and as I finished signing the documents he expressed to me how impressed he was to meet a woman who did business with such confidence and expediency.

“In my experience,” I told him, “men are equally likely to dither about as women.”

It put him in his place, but I was flattered nonetheless to have been singled out.

As we were leaving I turned to him and asked, “One more thing, Mr. Williams. Do you know any honest men who might be willing to do some work on the house? Help us fix the place up a bit.”

He let out a sort of dry laugh, but not unkindly. “Any number of men are available all the time. Come back after lunch and I'll bring you down to the Labor Exchange.”

We arrived up at the house on Fairfield Road and the taxi man deposited us and our dozens of bags in the front yard. As he drove off, heavy globules of rain began to drop onto the bags, and I was grateful for the excuse to move us all quickly inside, before the awful magnitude of my task had hit home.

The house looked grimmer than I remembered it. The electricity had been switched off, and we were hit at once with the sweet, acrid smell of rotting flesh—dead mice under the floorboards, I hoped.

As we stood in the half-light I saw Maureen look over at Bridie. I didn't dare look at her myself.

“Now,” I said, “here we are,” and moved purposefully toward the kitchen.

“Well . . .” Bridie said, in a thunderous whisper.

Maureen scuttled ahead of me into the kitchen, terrified that the old broad was going to give vent ungraciously to her own trepidation.

“Jake, Flora,” I said, taking a deep breath, “go outside and gather all the rubbish from the yard and put it into a pile at the back of the house.”

“. . . this is a
fine
house for you to take a woman of my age into.”

“I'm sorry, Bridie,” I started. She lifted her small bag, indicating to me that she planned to walk out there and then.

“I shouldn't have taken you here, I just had this idea that . . .”

She put her bag up onto a chair and opened it. Then she took out a starched white apron, pulled it over her head and tied it around her shabby coat.

“No time for any more of your silly ideas, girl,” she said. “Let's see what has to be done and get on with it.”

All three of us went to work and tried to fix the place up as best we could. Maureen found an old sweeping brush, and Bridie huffed and puffed, opening and closing kitchen cupboards and exclaiming in horror at how anyone could leave anywhere in a state like that.

The children barely followed my instructions to tidy the yard, for they were so excited running in and out of the house telling their mother about various finds: a broken doll, the guts of a swing “with a real seat,” which needed only new rope to make it work again.

Jake found an old, rusting bicycle hidden in the back shed.

“It's working, Mom,” he said, red-faced with excitement, pulling it up onto the back porch, “and a pump right here.”

His surly demeanor had disappeared and he was like a young child.

“Can I keep it, Miss?” he asked me. I looked at Maureen, uncomfortable at him deferring to me.

“Ask your mother,” I said, “and please, Jake, if we are to live under the same roof, you can call me Ellie.”

“Are you going to live here with us?” Flora asked.

“For a while anyway,” I said, “if that's all right with your mother?”

“And her?” Jake asked, looking at Bridie doubtfully.

“I have a name,” she glowered at him with a teasing, grumpy face. “It is
Mrs. Flannery
—and as I have no place else to go, we'll have to put up with each other for a time yet, young man, so you had better get used to it.”

We had passed a grocery shop on the way up the hill, so I sent the children off with Jake's “new bicycle” to get us some supplies: Ajax, matches, a new sweeping brush, soap, polish, white vinegar for cleaning the windows, bread, milk and tea—anything I could think of that we were in immediate need of. I paused slightly when giving Jake my dollars, and he looked so sweetly ashamed at handling my money that I immediately felt guilty.

“Would you like some cigarettes?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but perhaps some candy would be nice.”

They returned quickly, and we women scrubbed and wiped and swept and polished, barely making a dent on the place, until it was time for me to keep my appointment with Mr. Williams.

I declined Jake's offer to use the bicycle and walked down the hill to the village. In my head I listed all of the jobs that needed to be done to the house, in order of importance. A number of windows needed replacing, plus several of the worst floorboards; the kitchen table needed to be sanded and brought back to a habitable standard; mattresses carried to the garden and aired—we could do that ourselves, once we had a fine day. The list of jobs immediately reminded me of John, a trained carpenter. I was in the habit of instructing him in building shelves and cupboards—he had built our shop from the ground up, with the help of our neighbors. I was well versed in describing what I wanted done in the way of building work, and assessing how long it might take! The value of it I had never had to worry about, because my husband had been my most willing employee. I missed him. As I walked I breathed in the wet, muggy air and remembered where I was: New York. Not Ireland, where the air was fresh and sharp, and filled with the waft of turf fires and wet grass and mint. I brought myself back to my previous time here, full of purpose and determination. This time was the same. As before, I missed John and wished him there by my side to share this new life. As before, he was somewhere else, a long way away, and I would have to make do without him and carry on. I held on to the angry betrayal of John in not joining me here, convincing myself it was his choice and not God's design that kept us apart. I used anger to steady my brisk walk, and did not allow myself to long for him.

Mr. Williams suggested that, as it was dry, we walk to the recently opened Labor Exchange in Yonkers.

I followed his lead. A block from his office, we came upon a group of men lining up in the street. Barely speaking, they exchanged nods and cursory male mumblings, and smoke curled up from the cupped palms of their hands as they hid the luxury of their cigarettes from one another. I looked ahead and saw the line stretch for almost two blocks: gangs of men, tall, short, young and old, in a uniform of jackets and caps and with resigned, bored faces. They moved quietly aside as we passed them, and it gradually dawned on me that this was the line for the Labor Exchange.

As the line began to thicken to three, four, five men deep, Mr. Williams leaned in to me and said, “It's best to come up the front—these men have been in line the longest and are the keenest for work.”

Cars and trucks were parked carelessly around the street, and the men gathered in rowdy bunches around affluent-looking employers looking for casual laborers, raising their arms and shouting out, “Mr. Joyce!,” “Hey, Bill!,” trying to get their attention like keen schoolchildren with a teacher. The employers pointed out faces in the crowd, calling out names when they could, and the men rushed forward, piling into the backs of pickups, where they sat, their feet tapping, bristling with relief.

I felt a rush of gratitude that I had Mr. Williams with me. I would not have known where to start in approaching these men, and was terrified of getting caught up in their hungry mash. Already overwhelmed with the scale of their joint desperation, I considered walking away, simply buying a hammer and some nails and doing the job myself.

“Wait here,” he said into my ear, steering me aside from the heaving crowd at the door and closer to the road. “I've a man in mind.”

As he turned I called after him, “I want a carpenter,” afraid that he might return with a pitiful weakling who wouldn't be qualified for the job. Mr. Williams smiled knowingly, and I realized that he had the measure of me. “And a good one at that, who can glaze a window—and somebody strong!”

The landlord deftly negotiated himself into the center of the crowd, disappearing among the mass of flat caps and raised arms, and emerged a few moments later with a man of around his own age, in his mid-forties, whom he brought over to me.

“Ellie,” he said, “this is Matt Murphy. He's as good a handyman as you'll find anywhere in New York.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Matt had the look of an Irish day laborer. His square head was topped with thick, short brown hair that he struggled to comb to one side; his broad shoulders and wide chest seemed vaguely uncomfortable in a brown suit that hung badly and looked as if it had seen better days. But his face was open and warm, his eyes sparkled with intelligence and although he had the stodgy, awkward demeanor of a country Irishman, it was something that I was familiar with, so I hired him on the spot. He had a faded canvas knapsack secured to his back, which indicated to me that he was homeless, and a heavy-looking bag of tools that he lifted with one broad fist as if it were filled with feathers.

We walked back to the house, with him towering above me and slowing his stride so that I could keep up. As we crossed the main roadway he shuffled awkwardly, clearly uncertain as to whether he should offer me his free arm or not, anxious to do the gentlemanly thing, but not wishing to offend me. Although I had no need to, I slipped my hand in between his torso and upper arm, hooking myself onto his big frame. I felt him freeze with embarrassment and immediately regretted it, but it would have been worse to pull away, so I linked with him all the way home.

On the ten-minute walk I dragged his story out of him. He was from Leitrim, a quiet, unpopulated place. The only child of a widow, Matt had been thirty before he found himself a wife, and his mother (having expected him to stay at home looking after her, as was the way with the last son left at home) was so disgusted that she threw him out of the house. A wealthy cousin living in England gave him a small cottage and some land, but the land was poor and they had no stock, so he came to America to earn some money. He sent his young wife home every penny that he earned in the building trade during the boom years—a small fortune. She sent him back letters with descriptions of a new house, cattle and a tractor. There was no need to come home just yet, she said, for she was managing the farm herself with the help of his brother and some local men. When times turned hard in America, he asked her to send him the price of his boat ticket back. It was then that she finally confessed that she had hooked up with one of the local men helping on the farm and had married him. He delivered all of this in a matter-of-fact tone that was surprising, given his quiet manner.

“How did she do that,” I asked, “when she was already married to you?”

“She told them all I was dead.”

I gasped.

“Even your mother?”

“I was dead to my mother the day I got married,” he said, “she made that very clear.”

“That's awful,” I replied. My parents had disowned me when I married John, but I had become reconciled with my mother after my father died. Such cruelty, to be cut off from them like that. I could scarcely believe what he was telling me, but while Matt's tone suggested he was making little of it, I surmised that it was more due to pride than a carefree attitude.

“I don't mind,” he said, and there was, I noted, no hint of regret or cynicism in his voice as he added, “America is my home now.”