City of Hope (19 page)

I smiled at the novelty and delight of seeing my gruff old friend so moved by the experience, and so caught up in her own achievement in being a part of it, but I did not feel moved myself. I let the others hold the baby and nurse the mother, quietly leaving the room before the miracle of this new life scorched longing into me, branding me barren, as had happened too many times before.

We all went to great trouble in decorating the attic room for our new addition. Anna had canvassed the church to get a bag of used baby clothes, which we had washed and pressed and laid in piles on the mahogany washstand. Matt had found an old iron bed discarded in an empty lot nearby, and he and the men had carried it up the narrow stairwell and restored it for the new mother. Even pregnant, Nancy was a sweet, pretty girl, not yet twenty, and because of that she inspired great patronage among the men. They welded the broken bed back together, and fixed it up until the brass bed knobs shone like gold. We women dressed the bed in brand-new linens, and Bridie presented Nancy with a bedspread made from multicolored squares that she had crocheted using wool rescued from old sweaters. We softened and shrank woolen blankets by boiling them in soap for the baby, and placed them in a small cot that Matt had ingeniously fashioned from a dresser drawer. Bridie made a mattress from a small towel, and I caught her sewing a scapular of the Sacred Heart into the seams. On the wall above Nancy's bed she hung a picture of the Blessed Virgin that she had bought from a knickknack shop on John's Avenue. We all knew she had gone to great expense, so Nancy could not object. When the old woman offered to bathe the baby a few days after it was born, we knew she was performing a christening ritual, but said nothing. We all suffered Bridie's superstitious brand of Catholicism in the same way that we women, thrown together by a need to survive the realities of our lives, tolerated one another's foibles.

Bridie's sharp tongue, Maureen's faith in her own skills, Anna's reticence in her own and Nancy's childlike vulnerability were sources of irritation to all of us. For myself, I knew that I kept above much of the everyday bickering and, as such, was often seen as cold and aloof. However, each of us had a part to play in the successful running of one another's lives, so tolerance and endurance usually won out.

Kilmoy felt very far away. The businesses that had been so important to me for so long had receded in importance immediately after John died. Almost two full seasons gone and they were of as little interest to me as if they belonged to somebody else. Katherine was my friend, my employee and therefore my responsibility, but if the businesses sank to the ground, I would feel no hardship beyond having let her down. In some part I blamed the businesses for John's death or, rather, my attachment to them. He was gone, and with him my need for independence and money had gone, too. I was independent now, but I was also alone. Finally, my false freedom had brought me back to the New York I had craved since my return to Ireland ten years before. Except that it wasn't my New York anymore. This city belonged to the people I was helping. I was spending the money I had so urgently saved for my own future, creating a present for them. It seemed a small price to pay for the distraction and purpose that I was getting from helping them, and for the comfort of the company of people who knew little or nothing about me. Money itself—the acquisition of it—the luxuries I enjoyed and the freedom I had believed they would bring me had become meaningless. John was dead and, much as I would not give in to my own grief, I knew I wasn't free. In truth, I believed I might never be free again.

That being said, I kept up my correspondence with Katherine so that there was a letter going back and forth between us each week. We touched briefly on each other's personal projects, but kept the letters mostly about the businesses in Ireland. I gave her free rein, and signed off on documents and checks as she needed them, offering advice only when it was asked for.

As I was sitting one day, composing a letter asking her to forward the sum of five hundred pounds, the irony of asking my employee for money in this way occurred to me. I thought about how much Katherine's life had changed since she had been in my employ. She had started as a trainee typist not eight years before, and now she was managing my entire life back home. With me on the other side of the world, the scale and breadth of my business interests in Kilmoy were to be expanded further with the opening of the Fitzpatricks' shop. It seemed impossible that all this could be happening without me being there, and yet I remained curiously detached from the whole thing. With an investment of five hundred pounds, surely I could start some sort of a business here? The Depression had robbed people of so much—their work, their homes—and yet surely the greatest thing it had robbed them of was their independence.

I dashed off my request for money to Katherine and cycled down into Yonkers, where I posted the letter, then called straight away to see Mr. Williams in his office. Did he know of any empty business premises nearby for rental—in good condition? He did—any number. A bakery, an office space and a disused garage: take my pick. Would he organize a reasonable rent for me? For next to nothing, he confided.

I cycled back home and gathered Maureen, Bridie and Anna into the kitchen to tell them my idea. I was going to start a business, I explained. I would put up the initial investment, and the profits would be put into paying for the upkeep of our houses.

The three women bristled, mistrustful of my mentioning money. The bankrolling of their lives was too sensitive a subject. None of them outwardly acknowledged themselves as being the recipients of my charity, and it was certainly not a conversation I had ever encouraged. It had been insensitive of me to barge in on the subject as I had. Maureen and Anna looked at the elder of the group, and she confronted me.

“So, what's going to happen to us?” Bridie asked. “You were the one that dragged us all up here, and you're leaving? On to the next frippery? I can't run this house on my own, Ellie—and, anyway, what kind of a ‘business'? Sure, the whole country's in a Depression—or haven't you heard?”

“It's a partnership,” I explained, “a cooperative, and you will all be a part of it. We are, each one of us, capable, healthy women—I have some money to put into starting something up, and I don't see any reason why we can't get a viable business off the ground! As for what kind of a business, I have no idea. I was rather hoping you would help me come up with something.”

The three women looked at me blank-faced and I became irritated with their mistrust and fear.

“I am not going to abandon you,” I said, “but I'm not doing any of us justice with my charity. I want to start something so that we can make enough money to pay for all this.”

They were the wrong words. Anna stood looking at the floor, mortified at the mention of charity. Bridie looked fit to explode.

“Together,” I continued.

Maureen broke through the growing atmosphere, saying, “I think that's a great idea, Ellie. Why don't I make some tea, and we can sit down and talk about it.”

She went to fill the kettle, but Bridie snatched it off her and set about making the tea herself. Anna sat down tentatively at the table, hands on her lap. I took a pen and paper from the sideboard.

Maureen started. “I have an idea. Doctors' fees are so expensive—few people can afford to pay for medical treatment. If we were to start a small clinic, where people could come and have their ailments treated by a nurse? I am qualified, after all, I can treat smaller injuries and advise on nutrition and health matters generally? I could diagnose people for a small fee and tell them if it was worth going to a doctor?”

“I think that's an excellent idea, Maureen,” I said gratefully.

Bridie puffed cynically in the background and Anna shrank further into her seat. I needed the old woman's support, and she was annoying me.

“What, Bridie? Have you something to say?”

“Well,” she said, still fussing busily over the tea, “
she's
no doctor—you'd be as well off selling Anna's tomato sauce. People would pay for that quicker.”

Maureen went tight-lipped and blushed with shame or anger, or both. I got frustrated trying to figure out which. All this senseless emotion—and over what? Why were these women so reluctant to take up my offer to be self-sufficient? The men, I thought poisonously, would surely jump at the chance. I should have spoken to Matt about this first. All this awkwardness and dillydallying wouldn't do at all—I had half a mind to break the unpleasant atmosphere and let the whole thing go.

Anna coughed and quietly said, “If you think it would help . . .”

Such reluctance! I held my patience.

“Go on, Anna,” I coaxed her.

“Well, if I had the time, and some help, and enough ingredients, I could probably bottle a hundred jars a day. My mother supplied all of our neighbors in Brooklyn with her
pomodoro
when I was growing up.”

It was Maureen's turn to butt in. “And how much would people pay for a jar of ordinary sauce that they could make themselves?”

Bridie slammed the teapot down on the table.

“That sauce is far from plain, young woman, and you know it, from the way you and your greedy youngsters guzzle it down each night. You'd pay good money to eat the way me and Mama feed you in this house, woman.”

With Bridie's backup, Anna found her voice.

“I can bottle fruits, too—apples and apricots if we could get them. With Bridie's talent for pastry, we could bake tarts—and bread . . .”

“I could bake bread all day long,” Bridie said with a touch of wistfulness, then looked pointedly at Maureen, “if I didn't have so many hungry mouths to feed.”

Maureen went to get up from the table, but I put my hand over hers to hold her there. Bridie's manner was appalling, her saving grace being that she was generally kept too busy to converse, but we were getting somewhere and I needed to keep all of us together.

“Maureen,” I said, “is there anything you have a talent for—apart from the nursing?”

“Washing and ironing and general maid's work,” she said, looking directly at Bridie.

“She can iron a sheet all right,” Bridie said. “I'll give her that.”

“She can do better than that,” Anna butted in. “I've never slept on a crisper, cooler sheet.”

Maureen took her hand from under mine and gathered herself. “Corn flour and water starch,” she said.

“I was wondering where all my corn flour was going,” Bridie said, sitting down, happy now that she had wound everyone up.

“. . . and a touch of peppermint oil.”

“Very fancy,” Bridie replied, with her reluctant, sarcastic smile.

“Well,” Maureen replied, “I'm a very fancy woman.”

“As are we all,” I said.

We laughed, and our venture had begun.

We called our endeavor the Yonkers Women's Cooperative and opened a disused bakery in the village, which our men, stopping work on the houses, remodeled to suit our needs.

I bought a typewriter and a small hand-printing machine, which Jake learned to operate, and we sent the older children around to the wealthy houses in the area to drop in leaflets advertising our services.

Our shop sold freshly baked bread, Italian sauces and conserves, and gave a drop-and-deliver laundry service. I invested all the money Katherine had sent in laundry machines, irons, ovens and as much equipment as the women needed to make the business run smoothly.

The local rich, of whom we discovered there were many, were happy to support an endeavor that advertised itself as being “an opportunity to help the needy help themselves.” It eased their consciences to pay a few extra pence for their daily bread in a pleasant environment, rather than throw coins at the many vagrants who were littering their streets.

With the money we earned from the shop—even given a small premium that the women insisted I take each week, to pay off the “loan” of five hundred that it had taken to set the shop up—gradually each of the families was becoming more self-sufficient. The men had started advertising their skills as handymen, electricians and builders, and the wealthier local community came to trust us as a respectable, valuable source of both commerce and labor.

As the houses were completed and the business acquired new ideas and volunteers, I still remained at the center of the carousel, watching the people as it turned, paying attention to the safety and welfare of each one of them—concentrating all my energy on keeping it turning and holding myself steady at its focal point as it gathered speed and grew.

My world was filled by other people's stories. Characters came and went, they entertained me, and sometimes I was touched by their plight, but mostly they kept me distracted and busy. Aside from our core group—Matt, Bridie, the Sweeneys and the Balduccis—some people got on, then off, and moved on with their lives. One young man was with us for only two weeks, before he was offered a live-in job as gardener with a wealthy family, who found him through the shop. They would never have employed him, had they seen the scraggy, homeless beggar who had turned up at our door not a month before, addled with drink and crawling with lice.

The Balduccis moved into one of the houses I had bought, and turned it into as close to a palace as one could imagine. With a taste for the ornate, Anna ruched oceans of fabric and covered every surface of the house in fripperies and ornaments. An enormous “Child of Prague” statue, in his gold and crimson gown, stood on the mantelpiece flanked on either side by the Blessed Virgin, her blue ceramic robes hung with trinkets and cheap, glittering rosary beads. It was some sight for the older Jewish couple, Samuel Cohen and his wife, Judith, who stayed with the Balduccis for two months. I had found them wandering down Riverdale, struggling with four large cases and bewildered with grief, having been forcefully evicted from their home of forty years. That they set foot inside Anna's Catholic sanctuary at all was testament to their own desperation, but also to the need that we all had to help and comfort one another. Each family was anxious to help others in the way they were helped, and so there was a steady flow of the needy and the grateful. So Catholic and Jew lived in eccentric harmony. Samuel taught Angelo how to play bridge, Judith showed Anna how to make matzo balls.