City of Hope (38 page)

“Be on your way now,” she said and lightly tapped the door.

At the station Matt got out of the truck and walked to the train platform with me and Tom.

“Are you sure you don't need me to take you as far as Grand Central?” he asked. “This bag is awful heavy.”

“Here is fine,” I said, “we'll manage.”

I didn't know what to say.
“Thank you.” “I'm sorry.” “I love you.” “Goodbye
.
”
They all seemed so trite and meaningless and inadequate. I had promised him so much and wouldn't—couldn't—now deliver.

Should we hug, or kiss, or have some grand farewell? That, too, seemed like a lie now. We were friends, then lovers: now what? Friends again—maybe someday—but not today.

Matt kissed Tom on the head and then, as he opened the door of his pickup, he turned and said, “Is there any point in my waiting for you, Ellie?”

I closed my eyes and thought carefully, then replied, “No, Matt, there isn't.”

So that chapter of my life ended with another truth, except that it was one of my own making, and with it I felt free to start the beginning of the rest of my life.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their emotional and practical help and their personal and professional contribution to the researching and writing of this novel: Johnny Ferguson, Peter Quinn, Dan O'Connor, Jimmy Kelly and Lisa Ferguson, Helen Falconer, Marianne Gunn O'Connor, Pat Lynch, Vicki Satlow, Trish Jackson and Thalia Suzuma.

To my husband, Niall Kerrigan, for putting up with being married to a writer, and last, to my mother, Moira, for letting me read aloud my work to her every day and providing me with a constant supply of love and encouragement.

R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE

  1. Discovering that she is unable to have children, how does Ellie handle her disappointment? Do you think that it's possible for her to reconcile her desire for children and be satisfied in her life with John? Is she happy with village life in Ireland after her taste of the big city in America?

  2. Ellie knows that John “would have preferred to have less money and just farm himself for our table, and have me at home keeping the house tidy, baking and preparing the food he grew.” How are Ellie's desires different from her husband's? Do you think Ellie and John have a good marriage?

  3. After John's death, Ellie finds it too difficult to participate in the traditional rites of a funeral, choosing to isolate herself and run away. What do you think makes her decide to run? Were you sympathetic to her decision?

  4. When Ellie arrives in New York City, she finds that all is not quite the same as she remembers. What changes does Ellie encounter, in the city itself and in the people she knew there? How has she changed from the girl who explored the city with Sheila ten years earlier?

  5. Ellie can't forget about the boy she sees living in a makeshift shack in Central Park with his family, and feels “the truth of this family's plight coursing through me.” Why does the sight of this homeless family effect her so much? What do you think makes Ellie want to help them?

  6. After getting Maureen's family situated with Bridie, Ellie's group in Yonkers continues to grow and she keeps herself busy at all times. Having left her old life behind in Ireland, what does this new endeavor mean to Ellie? How is she handling her grief for her husband? Is she handling it?

  7. When Ellie first sees Charlie Irvington on her doorstep, “for a moment my dead heart fluttered and I was drawn back.” Did you think Charlie's reappearance—the one who got away—was a good thing for Ellie? What does she feel for him, and how is it different from how she felt with him as a girl? At a time when Ellie has become frustrated by men and their demands of her, what role does her relationship with Charlie play in her healing process?

  8. The mobster who comes around threatening Ellie and her community meets a violent end when he tangles with the women of the house. What effect does this event have on the women involved, and on their household dynamic?

  9. After months of repressing it, what finally makes Ellie feel the loss of John's death—“the raw, untethered hugeness of this terrible emotion”? How does she manage to climb out of the hole of her grief? What has she learned?

10. Thanks to events she could never have expected, Ellie finds herself a mother to baby Tom. After years believing that she would never raise children, how does this new role change her life?

11. What do you think of Ellie's decision not to marry Matt and strike off on her own—is she “mad to be leaving this walk-in life; this secure, domestic paradise”? What makes her change her mind and close this chapter of her life? What has this year taught her?

T
EASER

If you enjoyed
City of Hope
, you might like to read the first installment of Ellie's story in
Ellis Island
.

She was living the American dream in the 1920s, but her heart was still at home. . . .

Ellie and John are childhood sweethearts. Marrying young, against their families' wishes, the couple barely survive the poverty of rural Ireland. When John is injured in the War of Independence, Ellie emigrates ‘for one short year' to earn the money for the operation that will allow him to walk again.

Arriving in Jazz Age New York, Ellie is seduced by the energy and promise of America. When the year is up Ellie chooses to stay, returning to Ireland only when her father dies. A trunk full of treasures helps fuel Ellie's American dream, but as the power of home and blood and old love takes hold she realizes that freedom isn't the gift of another country, it comes from within.

The next book in Ellie's story,
Land of Dreams
, will be published soon.

LAND OF DREAMS of Kate Kerrigan

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The first time I fell in love with John, I was eight and he was ten.

One day, Maidy Hogan called down to the house with a basket of duck eggs and asked my mother if I could play with her nephew. His parents had both died of TB and he was sad and lonely, she said. But for his aunt coming to ask for me in the way she did, my mother would never have let me out to play with him. My mother didn't approve of boys, or playing, or of very much at all outside of cleaning the house and protecting our privacy. “We like to keep ourselves to ourselves,” was what she always said. She didn't like us to mix with the neighbors, and yet she was concerned that our house was always spotless for their benefit. Perhaps the fact that she made an exception for John Hogan made him special to me from the first.

John called for me later that day. He was tall for his age, with bright blue eyes and hair that curled around his ears. He didn't look lonely to me. He seemed confident and looked me square in the eye, smiling. We went off together, walking and not talking at all, until we reached the oak tree behind Mutty Munnelly's field. Before I could get the words out to challenge him, John was a quarter of the way up the oak, sitting astride its thick, outstretched arm. I was impressed, but angry that he had left me standing there. I was about to turn and walk off when he called, “Wait—look.” He ducked suddenly as a fat blue tit swooped past his face, then took a white cotton handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and inserted his hand into a small hole in the trunk. He carried the fledgling down to me, descending the tree awkwardly with his one free hand. “It's hungry,” he said, carefully parting the white cotton to reveal the frantic baby blue tit. “We could feed it a louse—there should be some under that stone.”

I hated insects, but I wanted to feed the blue tit, and I wanted to impress him. So I kicked back the rock, picked up a wood louse between my thumb and forefinger and carefully placed it into the bird's open, hungry beak. As it swallowed back, I touched the top of its little head with my finger and felt how small and soft and precious it was. I looked at John and my heart flooded through. It was the first time I remember sharing love with somebody.

“I'll put her home,” he said, and climbed back up the tree.

My parents were never loving—that is, not toward me.

My mother was from a shopkeeper's family who were largely deceased. Her grandparents had survived the famine years through holding on to what they had while their neighbors starved. They were hated in the locality, and her father had lost the business because of his own father's sins. My mother bore the scars of her family history in her acute privacy and unwillingness to mix with anybody, not even her own child.

My father at least loved the Church. He had failed the priest-hood and been sent home from Maynooth College. Nobody ever knew why, but it was certainly not that he had disgraced himself in any particular way. It seemed he was just not considered devout enough. He had made the mistake of thinking that God had been calling him, when in fact He hadn't. My father was fond of saying that it was his decision. That he had chosen a life in the civil service over life as a priest, yet he went to Mass every day—twice on holy days of obligation—and took as many meals in Father Mac's house discussing parish business as he did in his own. Whenever he was asked, my father would say that it had been a difficult decision to make, but that marriage and children were his vocation. Yet he and my mother slept separately and had only one child. My father's room was as austere as a monk's, with a huge crucifix over the bed. My mother and I shared a bed in another room, and yet I could never say that I felt close to my mother or knew her especially well. We slept with dignified respect for each other's privacy, arranging ourselves back to back, silently, never touching.

Maidy and Paud Hogan were in their late sixties when John came to live with them. They had never had any children of their own and treated this young orphan as if he were their son. Maidy was a generously built and warmhearted woman, well known in our townland as she had delivered half of the children in the area. Even though she wasn't trained, Doctor Bourke recognized her as a midwife and nurse and consulted her on matters of childbirth and nutrition. Paud Hogan was a quiet man, a hard working small farmer. He was not schooled, but he knew by its Latin name every plant and flower you could point out—facts learned from the
Encyclopaedia of Nature
, which he kept high on the mantel over the fireplace. John's father had been Paud's beloved younger brother, Andrew. When Andrew died and his wife, Niamh, was tragically taken six months later, Paud closed up his brother's house and took John in straight away.

John knew how to do everything. The Hogans were old, and they wanted to be certain he would be able to fend for himself after they were gone. So they taught their charge how to grow vegetables, cook a decent meal, and one end of a cow from the other. John was an easy child to love. Andrew and Niamh Hogan had showered their only son with affection, before turning him serious and dutiful with their early, tragic deaths. I knew John's story before I met him. Everyone knew everything about everyone in our townland. Aughnamallagh numbered fewer than one hundred people scattered in houses across miles and miles of identical fields bordered with scrappy hedgerows. The monotony of our flat landscape was broken in places by shallow hills and lakes, which were little more than large puddles.

My parents' house was on the edge of the village, just three miles from the town of Kilmoy. My father was an important man, a civil servant working for the British government. And we should have been living in a grand stone house in the town itself, where he would not have to walk for an hour each way in the mornings and my mother could get turf delivered directly to the back door, and not have to muddy her boots walking to the stack herself. However, the house they had given us was outside the town, and as my father was apt to say on the rare occasions my mother questioned him, “Who are we to argue with the Great British Government? It is our duty as citizens to be governed by them as we are by God.” Even though my parents kept us deliberately apart from our neighbors, news of one another was unavoidable. It carried across the church grounds in hushed tones and sideways glances after Mass, across the still air of the grocery shop, in the sucking of teeth and clicking of tongues when someone's name was mentioned. My mother's ear was sharply attuned to secondhand scandal, for the very reason that she was too distant from our neighbors to receive it firsthand. So I had heard my parents talk about John as a pitiful orphan—although, as I got to know him, John's life seemed anything but pitiful to me.

That first summer, my mother was taken up nursing an elderly aunt in the village and so it suited her for me to spend my days with the Hogans and their nephew. My mother told me I had to be kind to John because the Lord had taken both his parents from him. She saw that she was doing the Hogans a favor by allowing me to keep their orphan nephew company.

John called for me each morning and we went exploring. Through his eyes, the ordinary fields between our houses became a wild, exciting playground. John turned grass into Arabian Desert sand, and ordinary muddy ditches into raging rivers we had to conquer.

“Slip at your peril,” he would say, as my small feet walked comfortably across a narrow fallen tree. “These waters are infested with sharks!”

He knew every animal, noticed their presence in shaking leaves. “Rabbit!” he called on our second or third day out together, and I chased after him into the boundary bushes. John foraged around and pulled aside clumps of leaves to reveal the smooth, dark burrow entrance. I sat firmly down on a large stone and insisted that we wait there for a fluffy ball to come out. “It won't come. It's afraid of us,” said John, peering down into the tunnel. “There are probably hundreds,
thousands
of them down there—but they won't come out.”