City of Hope (23 page)

What I felt for Charles was not love—the mental obsession, the burning physical sensation, the desire to be held by him; but it was the closest thing I had felt to it since John died, so I hung on to it.

On the sixth night the house was empty. Bridie and Maureen had taken Nancy and the baby to visit one of the new families.

The front hall door was not yet closed on the women when he grabbed me and we staggered backward onto his bed. We made love with urgent, impassioned hunger—hard and hurried. I shut my eyes and strained my body against his, enjoying the intimate thrill of flesh on flesh, and when we were finished I closed myself confidently in and around his limbs, locking myself into the comfort of his strong body. John was the only man I had known in this way before. Just being with Charles made me feel alive and warm again—human.

We didn't speak for a while afterward, but just lay there, breathing onto each other's skin. As the blue light of the evening started to turn dark gray I broke the silence and said, “You'd better go, the women should be coming back soon.” My voice sounded hoarse and heavy, breaking through the stillness.

“Goodness, we can't upset the women.”

His words were light and teasing. But for a moment I felt hurt. Had he got what he came for? Then I remembered that I didn't, or at least shouldn't, care whether he loved me or not. I was a mature woman of the world—a widow, for God's sake, not a lovesick schoolgirl. I moved to get up, but his arm held me down for a second more.

“Ellie . . .”

As he paused over what to say next, Charles' arms loosened and I sat up and started to pull the dress over my head.

“. . . oh, it's nothing.”

I was convinced that Charles had been about to tell me he loved me, then realized, perhaps, that it was too soon. In that moment I wanted to be loved again. The loss of John's love had hardened my warm, womanly spirit. Perhaps, after all, Charles' love could open me up, make good on John's abandoning me with his untimely death. Perhaps life could return to how it had always been. With a man's love, I could feel whole again. That being said, I did not push him.

In truth, I was not ready for Charles to proclaim his love for me out loud and was relieved that he thought better of it.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
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FIVE

Bridie did not approve of Charles.

She did not approve of his union activities, and she did not approve of the amount of time Charles spent in our house, “eating our food and contributing nothing but hot air.”

She pushed aside the fact that he was working alongside Matt. “Matt is a
completely
different sort of man,” she insisted, but would not elaborate further. “How long is he staying?” she asked, after Charles had been there for a week.

At the center of the old woman's objection to Charles was his background as a “gentleman.” Save for the past few difficult years since her husband's death, Mrs. Flannery had been in service to the Boston-based industrialist James Adams all of her working life. She was proud of her position as his housekeeper. Even when she was posted out to his Manhattan apartment to keep an eye on his flighty young wife Isobel, she always spoke of him in hushed tones as a “true gentleman.” “Manners are bred into a man—and position, Ellie. It's important in this life to know your place.”

Bridie would have disapproved of me having moved from my “place,” in making money through business, but in reality she was more concerned that it was a masculine pursuit. I had never adopted the airs and graces that are the rich woman's entitlement, at least not so that Bridie had ever seen them; and in that sense, at least, she was able to accommodate the fact that her little parlor maid was now her patron.

However, for a gentleman to turn his back on his birthright and eschew the privileges and status that it was his responsibility to uphold—that was a travesty to the class structure that had been the backbone of Bridie's social system. It was a betrayal not just of his own class, but of hers, seeming to make a mockery of her servitude. The more Charles tried to woo Bridie by helping her around the kitchen and teasing her with schoolboyish pinches to the rump, the more I could see that he was offending her. Aside from those one or two early barbed remarks, Bridie made no comment to me about Charles one way or the other, which only made things worse. When she huffed and puffed and complained about people, she got everything out of her system and usually came around to them. I valued her friendship, and her dislike of Charles made me uncomfortable, although Charles was such a likable chap that I knew what was really bothering Bridie was his relationship with me. Two unmarried people “carrying on” with each other under the same roof—and, in her eyes, one of them still married.

“She's Catholic, Charles,” I told him.

“So are you,” he objected, as I pushed him out of bed and back downstairs to his own room to sleep.

“That's different,” I said, “and you know it.”
It used not to be,
I thought.
I used to pray and go to Mass every week. I used to believe in it all.

“A good—little—Catholic—girl.” He marked each word out with a small cross from my shoulder to my neck.

“Stop it,” I said, wrenching myself away. “It's not right to mock religion.”

“I'm a Communist—it's what we do: we minister for the Devil.”

He pressed his lips to the nape of my neck, slipped his hands through my arms and around my breasts, until I collapsed back onto the bed.

We tried to be as discreet as we could, or rather I did, but as the weeks went past it became harder.

The dangerous thrill of passion passed into the comfort of being with somebody again. I still couldn't say if I had fallen in love with Charles, but I knew I liked the feeling of having him close. I slept better when he was in the bed next to me. At night, half asleep, I would not know whether the warm mound of muscle lying next to me was Charles or John, but just to be sharing our breath in this small, closed space made the night feel safe.

Automatic acts of intimacy crept into our everyday lives. Standing up from the table, Charles would briefly rest his hand on my shoulder as he passed and I would reach for it. I would lay claim to him with a touch on his arm during conversations with him, and with others. These small signs of affection diluted the heaviness I felt pressing against my inside. His love lifted the rock that my soul had become. Although I did not think I was trapped, Charles somehow made me feel free.

“Is anyone else coming to Mass?”

Bridie was putting on her gloves. She wore gloves to Mass, even in summer, to hide the coarseness of her hands. She had on a brand-new coat that I had insisted on buying for her, and a beret that she had knitted herself, which was surprisingly smart.

“I'll come,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me and muttered, “Makes a change.”

Not being able to express myself in my own home because I had to humor Bridie had started to wear thin. I needed to confront her, and this was my best opportunity to get her on her own.

“Well, you'd better hurry along—Matt will be here with the van in a minute.”

“We'll walk, Bridie,” I said. “It's a fine day, and we've plenty of time.”

Bridie was no fool. She took the hint, and as we turned left down the hill toward the village she folded her handbag into her chest and walked in stern silence, waiting for my cue.

I was not nearly as afraid of confronting Bridie as I should have been. Her fierce, authoritarian manner was the matronly old woman's armor. It had seen her through a lifetime of servitude, and in the poverty and hardship of her senior years it had kept her pride intact. Bridie Flannery used her staunchness to protect herself, but also to control others. I was not going to be bullied by her.

“Why do you dislike Charles so much, Bridie?”

“I don't dislike him.”

“Oh, come on, Bridie—you're so frosty around him.”

“I can see he is very charming and, in his own way, a kind man . . .”

“But?”

“But—well, I don't like what he is doing with you, nor you with him.”

So now it had been said. Much as I liked and respected Bridie, I wasn't going to have my life run by somebody else's moralizing. Religion was a personal choice, and my choice was to bypass the “rules.” I had lived by them all my life, and where had placing my trust in God got me? Widowed, childless—so confused and unhappy that I had run away from my own life and started another. When I had begged God to give me a child, He had simply used my womanly need to torture me, snatching two babies from my warm womb to keep their souls for Himself, in His cold, eternal Limbo. Perhaps Charles was right and it was all nonsense. In any case I was going to play by my own rules from now on. I wasn't going to turn away pleasure and happiness for the sake of some outdated moral code. Especially not when it was simply for the benefit of not offending somebody else. No matter how much I liked and respected Bridie, she wasn't going to dictate to me how I should live my life.

I told her as much, in no uncertain terms.

By the time I had finished admonishing her, her religion and her God, we had both come to a natural halt at a low suburban wall some yards away from the church. Churchgoers were quickly ducking in through the tall creamy doors, mothers poking their dawdling children in the back, waving angrily at their husbands to hurry along, indicating that the Mass service had started. Bridie did not rush to join them, although she was never late for Mass. Instead she looked at me carefully and said, “You can't hide from yourself, Ellie.”

“What do you mean?”

Immediately I had said it, I wanted to take it back. I didn't want to know what she meant. I didn't want to hear it.

“You think that by being with him, you can either bury John for good or bring John back, Ellie. You can't run from grief, Ellie—it'll find you. Believe me, I know.”

With that she grabbed my arm in her gloved hand and gave it a tight squeeze and, shaking it gently, said, “I'll light a candle for you,” then walked off into Mass.

Bridie knew I wouldn't follow her; she knew that a part of me was lost to God and to the world.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
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SIX

The shop in Yonkers was completely different from my small country shop at home. There you could sew or read from one end of the day to the other, greeting customers from your chair until they sat down and joined you for a chat, more often than not forgetting what they came in for.

Everyone here was in a hurry, although it made little sense. The wealthy clients were ladies at leisure, and the poorer customers had no jobs to keep them busy, but rushing about was the New York way and it suited me just fine. The shop itself, thanks to Matt and the boys, was beautifully laid out. At the back was the bakery and kitchen, where Bridie and Anna worked; a refrigerated countertop separated the work area from the front of the shop, whose walls were lined with shelves full of storable produce, and the floor taken up with a hodgepodge of tables and chairs where we had set up a cafe. Put simply, our prices were low and Bridie's bread was the best in town. When she added cakes and biscuits to her repertoire, we bought a coffee machine, dug out a few side tables and chairs from our own houses, and the cafe was born.

We had two contrasting types of clientele. The first was the middle-class women of Yonkers. Many of them had had to tighten their belts and let housekeepers go, and shopping for Bridie's and Anna's produce was the next best thing to having somebody in your house cook for you. The business had built up at an extraordinary rate, developing different services in a matter of weeks on a supply-and-demand basis. One day a woman came in and lunched on a plate of lasagne that Anna had tried out on the customers, and asked if she could buy a tray of it for her family. It went down so well that her friends started coming in looking for homemade takeaway Italian meals.

The opportunity to make money meant that we never refused a customer. Maureen ran the sales and cafe, the front of house, and never said that we couldn't do something. One day a man came in looking for a sandwich, and she went out back panicking to Anna, who scooped a ladle of bolognese sauce into the husk of one of Bridie's loaves, and he declared it the best sandwich he had ever eaten. That night Bridie roasted a huge ham, and the sandwich bar was open. Scandalized at the price of smoked fish, Anna sent Mario down to the docks to negotiate with the fisher­men, then built a small smoking shed in their garden. Before long she had added a smoked-fish counter at the front of the shop, and while Mario was doing that, he might as well try and get a better price on wholesale pork and start curing ham, just the way his mama did.

Another day a woman came to the back kitchen door of the shop with three children, looking for food. Young Nancy opened the door and, seeing her own well-fed infant strapped into a chair, chewing on a lump of bread, she took her life in her hands and gave the woman a loaf and a hunk of good ham that Bridie was keeping to feed the house that evening.

When the old woman found out, Bridie roared at her. “You can't feed every hungry person that comes looking for food, child!” Then, realizing how bad that sounded, she added, “There were more ordinary cuts you could have given her.”

“She was a really nice lady—not a beggar or anything—and she was so embarrassed. She gave me a dime,” Nancy said, taking the coin out of her pocket and, rather sweetly, handing it over to me. “She just said she couldn't afford the food in the cafe, and the children were hungry and—”

“A dime!” Bridie said. “Sure, what good is that to anyone?”

I knew Bridie. Her particularly hardline huffing meant that she was flustered with guilt. She'd have fed every homeless waif in the city from her own kitchen.