City of Hope (4 page)

Secretarial skills were something I had brought back with me from America, and although the machines were relatively scarce when I had first returned, they had grown in popularity almost overnight when the Civil War had ended—and the typewritten letter was fast becoming an essential part of Irish business. I was almost instantly overwhelmed with requests of work, not just from local solicitors, but from all the businesspeople around about. Many of the poorer small farmers had missed out on their schooling, and our service offered them the opportunity to write letters without the embarrassment of highlighting that they could neither read nor write. Within weeks of opening the school good families from all over the county, and neighboring ones, were signing up their daughters to learn these essential new modern skills, without having to go to the bother or expense of sending them to Dublin. Many families in the town were taking my students as paid boarders, and this, in turn, had turned me into something of a heroine among the local women, who had once disliked me for the ambitions I had brought back with me from America.

As I opened the door, I could hear the clacking of typewriter keys that always caused a tingle of nostalgic joy in my fingertips. The sound of a busy office brought me to New York, much as the smell of freshly burning turf reminded me I was in Ireland; to experience the two of them together always gave me a stab of pure happiness. Katherine Murphy came bounding down the stairs to greet me, her ear tuned to the subtle sound of the opening door beyond the clamor of the typing pool. Katherine was my right-hand woman, an exceptionally bright and capable person in her mid-thirties, who managed and tutored the students. She was wearing her usual ensemble: a long dirndl skirt in Foxford tweed, sensible cream cotton blouse, heavy stockings and a pair of flat, manly brogues.

“Morning, Ellie—all under control here.”

They were her first words to me every morning, a brightly conveyed invitation to go away and let her continue her work in peace. I paid Katherine well, and she was worth every darn penny, not only for her reliable work practice and skills in managing flighty young girls, but for her loyalty to the job. Despite the fact that she had natural attributes, glossy hair and a broad, friendly smile, Katherine kept her appearance dowdy and her manner abrupt so as not to attract attention from the opposite sex. She was not even within a whiff of finding a husband, but I recognized that it was best to leave a woman like that well alone, and resisted the urge to offend her with offers to glamorize her.

I liked Katherine as she was and, my mind having been opened in New York, readily accepted her somewhat masculine manners for what I believed they represented. In any case, romance and marriage were the death knell of my business, especially with de Valera's law that women give up work and keep house after they get married. The country needed the women to keep the home fires burning, for the country to get back on its feet, he claimed. Yet who was going to do the typing, and run the shops and hair salons, I frequently argued with John. My husband would look at me sideways and say nothing. The Taoiseach's manifesto of an old-fashioned Ireland with comely maidens baking bread in whitewashed cottages was John's dream for us. He would not fight me over it, particularly as it was understood between us that my love of work was only a poor replacement for our not having a child. There were times when I was guiltily glad to have my sorry condition to excuse my hunger for business, my greed for success.

Directly above the typing school on the top floor of the house was a one-bedroom apartment where I sometimes worked late and caught up on our paperwork. On the rare occasion that we stayed in town, John would meet his farming friends in the pub and join me later, when we would eat a meal together, then fall into bed exhausted and make love to the sounds of the townspeople bustling outside. The apartment was indulgently decorated, the walls covered with the finest damask paper, with good mahogany furniture, delicate china and embroidered linens I had inherited from my mother. I had made us a cozy nest there, trying to lure my husband into town life. Move him to where the action was. Distract him with the luxury of light switches and hot running water. He indulged me by staying there for perhaps two, sometimes three nights a month, but tonight would not be one of those nights, I thought wistfully.

“Are you coming up?” Katherine asked.

“No, just popping my head in to see if you're okay. I'm gonna check out the salon.”

“Rightio. See ya later.”

Katherine had trained in England and I in America, and we often spoke in colloquialisms to remind ourselves that there was more to us than the parochial constricts of our small surroundings. Kilmoy was officially a town, although it was, in truth, no more than a village by English or American standards. Placed in the heart of sprawling County Mayo, it was too far from the sea to be truly scenic, and too far from anywhere else to be of much interest to anyone living outside it. With little experience of life outside its one trading street and the farming townlands around about it, its inhabitants looked to studying one another's lives for entertainment.

On the ground floor of my building was an old shop-front where I had started the hair-salon business just a few months beforehand. We had already taken delivery of the first permanent-wave machine in our county, and within days there had been women lining up for the wooden chairs against the green tiled wall. News traveled fast in Kilmoy, and from the first day we opened our doors I knew this risky venture was going to be a success.

“Morning, Ellie. Good night?”

Pauline had opened up the shop and was setting up the perm machine—a metal Medusa, with twenty coiled springs protruding from a wide head-height center, lobsterlike claws clenched treacherously at the end of each one. These opened onto the curlers, which were then doused in a foul egg-smelling liquid, the claws gripping them, then setting the curls into place by means of the miraculous feat of electricity. It was as dangerous as any medical operation that I knew, but Pauline moved around the metal beast with deft confidence, her chubby fingers with the pointed red nails pulling the silver snakes into neat curves.

Pauline was a rather plump, vivacious English girl who had a broad north-of-England accent and wore far too much rouge. She had come to Ireland chasing after a handsome local lad whom she had met and fallen in love with while he was working over in Yorkshire. After four days' traveling, hitching lifts to the boat in Holyhead, then down from Dublin, engaging in God knows what kind of adventures en route, she arrived in Kilmoy, only to discover that young Rory Gallagher was already married with a child on the way. I found her crying on the street, her gaudy appearance disintegrating in the rain.

Having been an outsider myself, both in my own town and then in New York, I took the waif home and fed her, giving her a bed for the night. A trained hairdresser, Pauline repaid me by refreshing the fashionable bobbed haircut that I had been maintaining myself (rather badly) for years. The idea of the hair salon came to me then, and as she did not want to return to England (having stolen the money from her hardworking parents' savings to pay for her boat passage), I opened the salon in her name—and had the local sign writer boldly paint “Pauline's English Hair Salon” above the door. My shocking rebellion in marketing Pauline as a daughter of our former oppressors worked in so far as—whatever else one said about the English—they knew how to beautify themselves better than us poor Irish.

“Not bad, Pauline, thanks. Quiet.”

My wildest night could not, I suspect, compete with Pauline's soberest midweek flings. She was out on the town with a different local lad every evening, and had quickly gained a reputation as quite the popular party girl, determined to show Rory what he was missing, while the poor lad was still trying to appease and reassure his young wife. I was lucky that the hunger for a neat hairstyle in most of the local women outran their horror at her promiscuous behavior. I wished she would cool herself down, but there was little point trying to explain the presiding Catholic outlook in rural Ireland to this young, godless Englishwoman.

The perming process took some time—up to two hours—and we only had one machine, so I had a small chaise of my mother's by the door, and a pile of fashion magazines for customers to flick through. I picked up the latest copy of
Vanity Fair
magazine and rifled through it. I had been so busy with the salon that I had not gotten around to reading it. I still wrote to my old school friend Sheila, with whom I had been in service. She had married a wealthy businessman of good stock, and in every letter pleaded with me to come over and visit her:
“Alex has become so boring, Ellie—tediously bourgeois in his attitudes. I long for your company and the fun we used to have.”
Sheila always sent me a copy of the American magazine, and I loved to keep up to date with the comings and goings of New York society, indulging in the fantasy that I might see news of some of the people I knew from my time over there.
Vanity Fair
sometimes promoted the
Ocean Liner
in the small advertisements near the back. I vaguely noted them every time, and had kept my passport and papers up to date, out of a kind of willful sentimentality. I knew I would never travel to America again. John would not entertain the idea of traveling abroad, and the subject of my going alone would have been too fraught with the memory of how I had left him before. I could live without America, but I couldn't live without John. That was the choice I had made ten years ago when I returned to my husband in Kilmoy. I had known then that it was an irreversible decision, so I just nursed my occasional dream and made sure it never grew large enough to make me bitter or to fill me with longing.

The real truth of my return from New York was that I had left someone behind there, too. I had fallen in love in America. John didn't know that, although I sometimes thought he must have suspected as much, but he was sensible enough never to ask me directly. I had been so young, so impressionable, and it was no surprise that my head had been turned. Charles was young and handsome, like John, but as the son of a shipping magnate he was wealthy, too. He had asked me to marry him, but before I had the chance to make up my mind, the decision to return to Ireland had been made for me by my father's death. When I arrived back in Ireland, that old love—for home, for John—took hold, and America, Charles and all they had both meant to me became as vague as a photograph.

Although sometimes—on mulchy rainy days when I was feeding the hens, or cleaning the cow dung off the front step, or John came in looking for his dinner and my hands were sore from peeling spuds—when my spirit deflated with the ordinary drudgery of everyday, married life, I would call to mind my old lover and allow myself to remember Charles and me standing in the porch of that rose-covered cottage on his brother's grand estate and him giving me a bottle of Chanel No. 5.

The perfume was long since gone and, as time went on, the image faded and seemed more remote and my dreams of girlish romance became a distant memory. Other desires took over—motherhood, success in business—and I gradually let go of my New York past and built up my life in Kilmoy, making sure that I had all the glamour and excitement I needed on my own doorstep.

I puttered over to the cosmetics counter and started to apply makeup at a large, beveled mirror that sat on the wide counter built for that purpose. I had originally created this scented corner in the salon to mask the chemical smell of the permanent-wave machine. Clients were invited to sample scents and cosmetics from the fashionable companies Max Factor and Helena Rubinstein, a small range of which we had on sale. However, the goods on offer in the local chemist shop were so meager that I found within weeks I had to replenish our stocks and we were making almost as much money from the cosmetics as from the hairdressing services.

I looked in the mirror and groaned with frustration. I had tried to keep my skin fashionably pale, but there was already a scattering of freckles across my nose where I had been out tackling our overgrown vegetable patch the week before. The rustic nature of my country life with John and the relative sophistication of my working life in town were incompatible, I had long since decided.

Beads of sweat were already forming on my temples and fuzzing my hair out of the newly straightened bob I had painstakingly fashioned the night before. I had to heat the irons in the solid-fuel stove, instead of using the perfectly good electrical ones in the salon. I was shot through with frustration at John's stubbornness.

The day had not even begun and the salon was too hot already, with the sun shining in the front window and boun­cing off the mirrors. Once the machine went on, it would be unbearable. I had yet to get a proper blind for the window, and wondered if there was any such thing as an air-conditioning unit over here that I could purchase to cool the air. I had seen one advertised in an American magazine, but it would be impossibly expensive to ship to Ireland from there. Did my suppliers in England have them? I wondered. Oh, there was still so much to be done. My head was buzzing and the day not even begun.

As I opened the door, old Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the draper's wife, came in. She had long, graying hair that had been tied up in a bun for as far back as I could remember.

“Hello, Madam.” Pauline marched over to her. “You after a perm?”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick ignored her, pointedly. In all probability Pauline had led one of her grandsons astray the night before, and I had missed out on the news. I'd surely catch up as the day went on.

I gave the English hussy a firm look, to let the old lady know I did not wholly approve of my charge, and said, “Pauline, go and give those mirrors a good polish through, would you? The sun is showing them up.”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick followed her with a poisoned look, until I thought perhaps she had come in exclusively to reprimand the girl.