City of Hope (22 page)

“I'm sorry, Ellie.”

I had not heard Charles come in behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin.

“I thought you'd left with the others.”

“I just wanted say ‘sorry'—for pushing you, Ellie. I had no idea.” He reached across and caught the crockery as I almost dropped it.

“No—no,” I said, “I started it. I shouldn't have been so rude about your wife.”

“Ex-wife.”

“Well, I'm sorry anyway.”

I wasn't sorry. Charles was divorced from a woman he barely loved, while I had been widowed at thirty-four from the love of my life—it was hardly the same thing. I picked up more dishes and carried them over to the sink. Charles followed me with a dish towel. I wished he'd leave. Leave me alone. What did he want? What was he still doing here? (Although I knew the answer to both questions.)

“When did he die?”

Oh Jesus, pretending to care when he didn't even know his—

“John—wasn't it?”

A flurry of rage spiraled around inside me, searching for a way out. I wanted to scream at him to get out of the kitchen, the house—the question hung in the air like a hungry dog, glaring at me:
When did he die?
It was not the question that offended me, but the answer.

It had been less than four months since John died, and I was ashamed to say it out loud. The distance I had traveled, and all the things I had done in the time since he had passed, made it seem as if I didn't care. Charles looked at me, querying and concerned; he was innocent in this. A character from a chapter in my past, asking me what had happened next. Wanting to know what I had done after I had left him and returned to Ireland some ten years ago. He could have no idea what I was going through.

“Some time ago,” I said.

“Well—I'm sorry, Ellie. Perhaps more than anyone, I know how much you loved your husband.”

That was true. I had walked away from all that Charles had offered me before—a life of independence and wealth and freedom in New York, a place that I had come to love—and returned instead to the simple life of a farmer's wife in Ireland. To a life with no electricity, no telephone, no radio—none of the luxuries, large and small, that I had become used to. John was the only reason I had stayed in Ireland. There could have been no other. Not to Charles' mind at least.

If he had been jealous then, he wasn't now. There was real compassion in his voice.

I looked at his face: the whiskers made him look older and wiser than his years, and his expression somehow indeterminate, less easy to read.

I didn't know who Charles was anymore. In truth, I felt I didn't really know who
I
was anymore. Not the girl he fell in love with and yet, with the two of us here together, alone in the house, I felt not so far away from that girl as I would have imagined.

I had a sudden urge to cross the room and kiss him. Not for his pity or his kindness, but rather to silence him; to stop the talk of John and death. I wanted to turn his friendship to passion—to lose myself in the distraction of desire.

“I need a drink,” I said.

I took a bottle of whiskey from the larder and two cups, then sat at the table and nodded for him to join me.

“John died of a heart attack,” I said. “It was sudden, a shock. I came here to . . .”

I paused. It seemed suddenly ridiculous, me sitting here with Charles, drinking whiskey in the shabby kitchen of this large house in a New York suburb. How strange life was! Stranger still that I had been propelled into this situation by John's death.

“To escape?” Charles suggested.

“Something like that.”

I knew he would continue to ask me about my marriage and John, if only out of politeness, so I sensed his next question and answered it for him.

“We didn't have any children.”

I drew a line under the conversation by drinking back a shot of whiskey. Raising my cup, I invited him to join me, before immediately pouring us both another.

“So,” I said, “when do you start work?”

“Now? Tomorrow?” he said, smiling. “Whenever you want me.” He was flirting. I felt a flutter of desire—prettier, more casual, less willful than before. Perhaps I had not simply been running away after all, but had come to New York in search of an adventure thrilling enough to make me forget. Perhaps the coincidence of meeting Charles again was that adventure. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, soft white cotton pressed in a tight line against the muscular arc of his arms. He played with a packet of cigarettes, his fingers square and strong as they deftly maneuvered the pack back and forth across the backs of his hands.

“Are you all right, Ellie?”

It was Maureen, followed by Bridie.

“She's fine—look at her. I'll put the kettle on. Matt said you had a ‘turn' and insisted that we rush back. I said there was no need . . . Who's this?”

Charles stood up and put out his hand. Bridie ignored it and looked him up and down, her eyes finally resting on his beard with open disapproval.

“Where are we going to put this one? He'll have a shave before he rests that head on any of the good linens in this house.”

“Charles, this is Bridie,” I said.

“Well, you must be the lady who runs things around here. I'm very pleased to meet you, I'm sure.”

Maureen was standing behind me rubbing my shoulder. She knew there was something up, and her touch was meant to be reassuring and loving. I felt it only as patronizing and infuriating.

I was at the center of a warm, convivial, amusing scene, but I felt only anger and confusion.

In that moment, when everything should have seemed ordinary and comfortable, nothing felt right. Nothing—not Charles being there, or Bridie's familiar gruffness, or Matt's concern, or Maureen's warm friendship. It was all a contrivance, a construct. Inside me I could feel the pain brewing like an ulcer.

I slipped the whiskey bottle in my apron pocket and took it to my room, then drank myself into a deep, impenetrable sleep.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FOUR

Charles put up the scaffolding on the house and, as Matt had said, proved useful both in sourcing cheap materials and in making contacts with other skilled tradesmen who were willing to put in a few hours to help out a friend. Charles got along with everyone he met—that was his gift. He had been earning little or nothing since the breakup of his marriage. He didn't volunteer much information about his ex-wife and the life they led together, and I certainly didn't ask, but it seemed to me that for the last year or so Charles had been living like a happy vagrant, relying on the hospitality of friends and colleagues, much in the same way as he had always relied on the generosity of his parents. A bicycle and a bag of books and clothes were all the possessions he had in the world, and he slept on the floors and shared the meals of the families and individuals he met through his work.

A privileged upbringing meant that, unlike the people he mixed with, Charles had never known personally what it was to worry about money. While he paid lip service to the horrors of poverty, he had never experienced hunger or hardship himself. As a result he had a carefree attitude toward money that I found both curiously admirable and very irritating.

“Property is theft,” he joked—which basically meant that we should all help ourselves to the communal pot of food and money and beds.

Charles differed from the people around him, including me, in one crucial way. We revered money because we had suffered the hardship of being without it. Charles had no interest in money
per se
. Despite having dedicated his life to the protection of the workingman, and through his union work to the ideal of an honest wage, he felt no need of one himself.

His union principles and natural leadership meant that, as he worked alongside Matt, Charles began to share his responsibilities in managing the men. Matt still oversaw their everyday work, but it was Charles they turned to for counsel.

As his weeks with us went by, I learned that Charles had been more deeply embedded in union life than I had at first thought, often earning a small stipend from the unions for negotiating with the bosses on their behalf. For a long time, especially on the docks, the unions had been run by mob bosses, who charged the ordinary men a fee for getting and keeping them in work. Charles had been a member of the Communist Party and stood by their ideal of a ruling proletariat, but he became frustrated with the infighting and politics of unionism. He talked the talk in order to recruit men around to his way of thinking, and to strengthen their resolve in getting their dues, but Charles was more of a negotiator than a fighter. He was excited that Roosevelt had passed the second phase of his New Deal of reform programs and seemed to be actively encouraging strong labor movements, but Charles was still skeptical as to how that was going to pan out with the bosses—both mob bosses and legitimate ones. Charles, for all his talk of “men standing together,” was a lone operator. He plowed his own furrow as a freelance troubleshooter for the unions, who recognized his unique ability to play each side so that both thought they had won.

I got a taste of this when he negotiated a deal with some local landlords for me. Two more families had been sent to us, looking for our help. One of the women was very ill, having just lost a baby, and their need was so urgent that, despite already running three houses, I decided to try and lease another house nearby for them. Instead of paying a set rent, Charles suggested that I get Mr. Williams to set up a meeting with two of the speculators who were leasing us their houses. His idea was that the men could do up the properties, thus increasing their value, in exchange for either a part-share in the property “. . . or whatever else I can drum out of them!”

“Gentlemen,” Charles said, walking into the small meeting room at the back of Mr. Williams's office, “such a pleasure to meet you both.” He shook their hands and greeted them with such natural and charming authority that they seemed happily engaged in anything he might say, before the meeting had even begun.

Despite his casual attire, Charles oozed money and privilege and class. I had learned that although America welcomed every­one, it was as snobbish as the next place. The American elite were newer, but they were nonetheless powerful, and the two landlords were smitten. I served them coffee and cake from our shop, and explained the nature of our cooperative.

“Of course, none of this would be possible without your generous patronage,” Charles said, as the landlords glowed. He then went on to explain Roosevelt's policy of labor reform, as if they would soon have to negotiate something of this nature by law anyway. The veiled threat was that if they left it much longer, they might find themselves dealing with angry sitting tenants over whom they would have no control, rather than a reasonable chap like himself. The landlords did not want to give away a share in their properties, so we left with an agreement that the men would be paid salaries for their work, which would be offset against a small monthly rent, requisite with the state of the properties. When they were fully refurbished, the rent could be negotiated again along the lines of a ten-year lease, and the men would be paid a smaller salary to maintain and caretake the properties on the landlords' behalf.

Charles would get one of his Communist Party comrades, a lawyer, to draw up watertight contracts that would secure homes for our six families for a good fifteen or twenty years to come.

“Are you impressed?” he asked, as soon as we were out of earshot.

“Should I be?” I said.

“Well, it's money you don't have to shell out from your pocket, and we came out of it with a wage for the men, which should keep them happy. For a while.”

“I suppose.” I shrugged. I didn't really pay much attention to what he was saying, because it had occurred to me, as we were walking side by side along the street, that Charles and I made something of a dynamic partnership. He had helped me out before in our past; he had secured me a first-class passage back to Ireland, all the more generous a gesture given that I was returning there without him.

“Where are you staying tonight?”

Matt had moved into one of the new houses (albeit temporarily, as he was working day and night to make it more habitable for the tenants) and so it seemed only natural that I would offer Charles his place in the small drawing room downstairs.

“I'm all out of favors with everyone else,” he said. “Are you offering me a floor?”

And so that very evening Charles joined our family.

For the first five nights I lay awake in bed knowing that Charles was lying on a mattress in the room beneath me, staring up at the ceiling, willing me to come to him. Over and over again lying alone in my bed I euphorically recalled the first time we kissed. It was in the pink-rimmed dawn after a party on his brother's Hamptons estate, with me in my best party dress, Charles in a smart cream blazer. He had asked me to marry him before the party, despite the fact that I was already married to John. I had sharply refused, but later had been lured into the kiss by the glamour of my surroundings, the distance of home and the persistent friendship of my handsome pursuer.

My propriety, and his respect for my status as a married woman with good Catholic morals, had held us back from making love that night. I was young and beautiful and my love was a precious gift, and to grant or withhold it was my moral duty, however difficult it was at times. If I had not been forced to return to Ireland by the death of my father shortly after the incident, perhaps Charles and I would have consummated our affair. In the end I left him brokenhearted, with his failed dreams, and returned to my husband in Ireland with my morals shaken, but broadly intact.

No such quandary stood in the way of our needs now. He was below me, separated by a mere set of stairs. I could go to him anytime I wanted. I was sure he would not turn me away. My stomach burned with excitement, my mind curled over a picture of his face, blocking out everything but his sharp blue eyes, the curve of his mouth, until it was all I could see when I closed my eyes. But I held myself back. If he wanted me, he could come and get me. I would wait and, in any case, I was enjoying the distraction. As long as I folded myself around thoughts of Charles, I was able to put John out of my mind. It was a familiar path—the quandary of choosing one over the other, except that now one of them was no longer here. I wanted Charles and knew, or sensed, that he wanted me. That was distraction enough for me. I did not ask myself if I loved Charles, if I was being true to my heart, because I feared that any love I had within me had been buried with John. I loved Maidy, and if I had been coldhearted enough to leave her behind weeping over her dead son, perhaps all love was gone from me.