Ellis Island

Ellis Island

Kate Kerrigan

Dedication

For Niall

Contents

It was snowing on the Jersey Shore. My mistress had wrapped herself in fur. A gray mink coat trailed behind her on the ground like a wedding train, her snug cloche hat forcing her glossy bobbed hair into neat curls under her cheekbones. Standing in the grand entrance of her country home, Isobel Adams snapped open her purse and quickly applied a slice of scarlet lipstick, puckering her perfect lips together a few times to secure the stain. “How do I look, Ellie?” She seemed nervous.

“Very well, Ma’am.”

Isobel was beautiful, like a photograph. She shrugged with delight, plunged her hands into a mink muff and called, “Wish me luck . . .” as she ran out the door.

Alone in the house, I walked up the grand sweeping staircase that divided and curved out on either side toward the bedrooms. Bedrooms that would soon be filled with strangers with whom I would be obliged to share the intimacy of my servitude as I prepared hot bed-jars, emptied chamber pots, washed out socks and undergarments. Chores that had once been acts of love for my husband had become a job for which I was being paid.

Once, picking up some socialite guest’s clothes from the floor, I had noticed a lost button, and a hemline torn by a sharp heel—snagged while dancing the Charleston, no doubt. When I pointed out the flaw to the lady and offered to repair it, she said, “You’re a darling!” and gave me a dollar tip just for offering, and another dollar later when the job was done. I was delighted, but then that night as I slid the bills into an envelope to send home to John, I felt cheapened. I was being paid to perform these small acts of domestic love for strangers while my husband set his own fires and cooked his own dinners. John needed the dollars, but he needed me home more.

I lit a fire in the mistress’s bedroom and picked out an outfit for her to change into when she came back from her walk. A black satin robe embroidered with brightly colored peonies, a red silk nightdress, fresh stockings and her favorite pointed slippers, which earlier I had packed in tissue paper. I laid them across the bed, wiping a layer of dust from the black lacquered bed-end with the hem of my apron, then went to the window and stood for a moment to look at the day. The crisp, sunny morning had turned gray and watery. Snow fell in heavy, sloppy clumps from the trees. The white blanket that had descended in the night and made the world glistening and magical was slowly disintegrating. There was a car outside, crystals of snow still sitting on its roof. There was no driver, but as I looked farther down the empty street, I saw my mistress walking with a man. He was much taller than her, and her head leaned into his shoulder, her arms tucked under one of his, clutching him as if she were cold—despite all the fur. Their backs were to me and they were walking toward the promenade. Knowing she would be gone a while, I decided I had time for a cigarette. Turning away from the window, I put my hand into my apron pocket and it fell upon John’s last letter. In the mere touching of the envelope a wave of sadness pushed me down onto the bed.

Would I ever again walk with him on a cold day, feel the breeze of his breath on my face or look into his tender eyes?

I always had more life in me than I knew what to do with—but it was John who had taught me how to love.

Chapter One

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 woodlouse 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 priesthood 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 hardworking 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 less 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 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.”

I imagined the ground beneath us alive with busy, burrowing rabbits, frantically hopping over one another, panicking about John and me. The idea of the two of us sitting quietly in the still day with all this mad activity going on underground made me laugh. It was as if there were two worlds—their world and ours—and I liked that. “If it came out now, I’d only want to kiss and cuddle it,” I said.

John looked embarrassed; he picked up a stick and sliced the air with it. “I’d chop its head off and skin it and cook it into a stew.” I started to cry. Once I started, I couldn’t stop—not because of the rabbit any more, but because I was embarrassed to be crying in front of John and I was afraid that he wouldn’t like me; that I would ruin everything. “I’m joking,” he said, “I wouldn’t ever do that to a rabbit, Ellie, sure I wouldn’t, stop crying now, Ellie, don’t cry.” I did stop, but I remember thinking how boys were different from us, and that I should be more careful how I carried on if I wanted us to stay friends.

When the sun was directly above us in the sky, we ran over to his house, where Maidy had our dinner waiting for us.

I loved eating in that house. My own mother was frugal with food, not for lack of money, but because she had no fondness for it. My father ate in the presbytery in town in the middle of the day and she felt there was no need to go to trouble for me alone. Her meals were meager, modest portions organized in shallow piles that never touched one another and made the plates look huge. In contrast, Maidy Hogan shoveled piping hot, sloppy stews onto our plates until thick, brown gravy spilled over the edges of them onto the table. There was never any room left for the potatoes, so they went straight onto the scrubbed wooden tabletop where we piled them with butter, often still watery with milk from the churn, then tore them apart and ate them with our hands. Afterward we’d have apple tart, or soda cake with butter and honey.

Maidy was as round as her cooking was good, and Paud was wiry and still strong at sixty. He worked hard to provide food for her, and she made sure that the meal she prepared with it was worth the work. I ate like a savage at that long, wooden table. I ate until I thought I would burst inside out, until I could barely move and would have to sit teasing ants with a stick on the front step, waiting for my stomach to settle. The first time I ate with them, Maidy asked, “Does your mother not feed you at all?” I stopped eating, blushing at my greed, my spoon still poised. She patted my head as apology, encouraged me to continue and never said anything again.

John always cleared the table and cleaned up after dinner; that was his job, wiping the grease and crumbs from the table and sweeping the floor beneath it, then washing the four plates in a bucket of water warmed on the fire and polishing them dry before placing them carefully back in the cupboard. I was never allowed to help. The Hogans made me a part of their family, yet they treated me like a treasured guest always. They loved me like a daughter, but they never overstepped the mark and made me into one. They had a talent for knowing the right way to be with people.

Late in the afternoon, John would bring me back to my own house. Although I was still full of Maidy’s food, I ate a silent meal with my parents. In the gray twilight then we would kneel and say the rosary. The coldness of my father’s praying voice settled on me as a vague fear. An ache for life burned in my stomach.