Ellis Island (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

When I got my first monthly paycheck, Mr. Flannery had accompanied me to the bank. It was his day off and he was dressed in a brown suit and tie, with a smart trilby hat covering his broad, balding head.

“You look like a proper gentleman,
Seamus
,” Sheila teased as he came into the kitchen to collect me.

“Are you ready, Ellie?” he asked, ignoring her. Nobody ever called him or Mrs. Flannery by their first names, not even Isobel. I felt slightly embarrassed when I saw how smart he looked. I had brushed my hair back from my shoulders and was wearing Sheila’s Sunday jacket over my navy twill skirt. I had shortened it up to where the hem had torn, and it looked quite fashionable.

“Don’t go sending every penny home,” Sheila said to me. “Keep some aside for yourself so you don’t have to go robbing all my clothes.” Then she winked at Mr. Flannery. “We’ll hit the town when they all go to Boston next week.”

Mr. Flannery was not amused, and poked me gently in the small of my back to hurry me out of the door.

Although it was late August, there was no hint of autumn in the air. This was only the fifth time I had left the building since I had arrived here—the other four being for Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The first time I had walked in through the enormous arch of the cathedral’s doors, my jaw had slackened and I had wept with the sheer scale of its grandeur. The marble interior, white and cold and endless; a dozen altars glittering gold in the distance; the complex piety of stained-glass windows that seemed to stretch upward forever. In Kilmoy, I had always sat with my family in the front pew, but here Sheila nudged me into a seat near the back and we sat and watched the congregation arrive and take their seats. Wealthy families, women in smart suits and hats, their children in starched shirts and dresses marching beside them, walked straight up to the front. The poorer souls gathered around us, shabby compared to the rich people, but nonetheless smarter than most folk back home. At the back of St. Patrick’s you could not hear the priest at all, only the faint clatter of the city beyond the vast carved doors behind us and the mumbled prayers and coughing of the people nearby. Mrs. Flannery walked farther up and sat in a pew nearer the front. As we walked back to the apartment, she told us that St. Patrick’s was “our” cathedral. “It was built with the dollars and the labor of Irish immigrants,” she said. “The poorest of the poor built it for everyone to pray in, not just the rich, and don’t you forget it!”

That day it was different, being out on my own business. I felt important, with my check in my coat pocket, going to the bank. Mr. Flannery walked with purpose down 82nd Street, then left onto Second Avenue. He explained the layout of New York to me: “Streets go across, avenues down. Most of them are numbered, you just have to keep your wits about you and count to get where you are going. It’s impossible to get lost.” He kept pointing out landmarks and telling me historical anecdotes that did not interest me. I wanted to ask him questions about his life: How long had he been here? What had brought him to America? How had he fallen in with Mrs. Flannery? But I kept quiet. Men of that age were experts on everything, but did not like to talk about their own lives. The people they liked best were those who kept their own counsel and listened, and in any case it suited me to walk in silence alongside him. It felt, for a time, as if we were father and daughter, out for a stroll.

The bank was one of the tallest buildings I had ever seen and there was a uniformed man who opened the doors for us. He doffed his cap at Mr. Flannery, and my escort nodded at him importantly. I thought it an extraordinary exchange, given Mr. Flannery’s job, and I blushed slightly at the thought that we might be masquerading as more than we were.

We entered a room not unlike a cathedral itself, with its tall, narrow windows and high ceilings. Desks were lined across the marble floors like pews, and antechambers were screened off by ornate banquettes. Voices were muted in hushed reverence. I followed Mr. Flannery over to a tall counter in dark wood and he spoke quietly to the stern woman in glasses behind it. As she picked up a large, black telephone receiver, he leaned down to me and said, “Let me talk on your behalf, Ellie. These matters of money can be very complicated.”

Presently a small, thin man of indiscriminate age came over to us and greeted the doorman, shaking his hand and grabbing his arm with a hearty warmth that seemed at odds with his sharp, poky appearance and his almost funereal, formal black suit. He took us over to a leather-topped desk, moving my chair back for me to sit down as if I were a real lady, before taking his place opposite us. “Mr. Flannery,” he said, “is one of our very best customers.”

Mr. Flannery was bristling with delight at his warm welcome. He was barely able to contain a smile, and put the tips of his fingers just under the starched collar, stretching it out as if allowing room for his head to grow. “Well, we are very fortunate, Ellie, because Mr. Kaplan is one of the very best bankers in all of New York.”

Mr. Kaplan’s fingers scrabbled across the blotter with the thrill of the compliment. “Now, what can I do for you today, Mr. Flannery? Another new account?”

“Yes,” he said, without even looking at me. “Ellie needs to open an ordinary checking account.”

“And will you be paying the money into the account yourself each month, as with all the others?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Excellent. Well, if we can just have a few details. What is the young lady’s name?” He tapped his finger, impatient for a quick answer, anxious to get his hands on my check. It was as if I wasn’t there. I was furious. This was the whole reason I was in America. Money. I had earned my paycheck that month. I had cleaned out fire grates, peeled potatoes, been woken up in the early hours of the morning to help undress my drunken mistress. Me. Not Mr. Flannery. This was my money and I was not about to hand it over without the bank affording me due respect.

“Mrs.,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “Eileen Hogan.”

“Ellie,” Mr. Flannery corrected me.

But I ignored him and continued: “And I would like to inquire about stocks.” I had no idea what stocks were, but there was a jolly-looking fat man sitting at a desk nearby with a sign in front of him that said: “
STOCKS: INQUIRE HERE”
and I thought I’d rather be over there talking to him than sitting with bossy Mr. Flannery and his wire-faced friend.

The two men exchanged a panicky glance. Mr. Kaplan smiled—an unconvincing bearing of small, broken teeth—and Mr. Flannery said, “Ellie, leave this to me, there’s a good girl, stocks are too complicated a matter for—”

“Did I hear this young lady say ‘stocks’?” The fat man had come over to our desk and was standing behind Mr. Kaplan, towering over us like a mountain of suit. “Why, Madam—I hate to contradict you, Sir—but stocks are not complicated
at all
!”

“This is Mr. Podmore,” Mr. Kaplan said, with open disdain. “He is a stock
broker
,” he added, dragging the last word out and opening his eyes wide as if it held some dark warning. I didn’t care. Mr. Podmore was addressing me, and that was enough.

“Stocks are pieces you buy in a company,” said Mr. Podmore.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to explain,” I said.

“You see?” Mr. Flannery said to me, all flustered. “You don’t understand. Mr. Kaplan, I—”

“You’re Irish, right?” Mr. Podmore asked me, speaking right across Mr. Flannery. “Your daddy got a farm?”

“No, but my husband has.”

“Well now, Mrs. . . . ?”

“Hogan.”

“Mrs. Hogan. Supposing your husband had nine cows and that was his farm. He supplies most of the village with milk, but he knows if he makes it up to ten cows he’s got enough cows to supply the whole darn village. Trouble is, he ain’t got the money to pay for that tenth cow.” Mr. Podmore was moving his hands this way and that as he told his story. Mr. Kaplan flinched as he sensed the fat fingers flying round the back of his head, but he said nothing. Mr. Flannery was still blushing, smarting from the humiliation of being sidelined. “So, a man comes along and offers to buy him a tenth cow. That man is called an investor.”

“And the cow is his investment?”

“That’s right. And in return for him buying the farmer the cow, the investor gets a ten percent share in the business.”

“So the man owns ten percent of all the money from the milk?”

“Hey, she’s got it!” he said, throwing his palms up on either side of his huge chest. “Young lady—you are after my job!” I couldn’t help laughing. Mr. Flannery looked at his feet and Mr. Kaplan studied his fingernails. “Now, if the farm flourishes, Mr. Investor makes lots of money on his milk.”

“But if the farm fails, his investment fails.”

“That’s true—but at any time while the farm is doing well, Mr. Investor can sell his share to another investor or the biggest shareholder, who in this case is . . . ?”

“The farmer with nine-tenths.”

“Mrs. Hogan, you have a sharp mind. Poor old Kaplan here can barely keep up.” He gave his colleague a warm pat on the shoulders that made the skinny banker flinch. “The trick, Mrs. Hogan, is to invest in things that won’t fail, and I have to tell you we have a portfolio of businesses here that cannot fail. America is changing fast—why, we’ve got indoor plumbing in nearly every home in New York City, and it’s only a matter of time before electricity is the same and—you’ll barely believe it—but we’ll all be talking into telephones before too long. Now is the time, Mrs. Hogan. Right here, right now: this is the time for investing in America.”

I put ten dollars into an ordinary bank account, and bought five dollars’ worth of shares. Mr. Podmore did not blink when he saw how little I was investing, and when I apologized he said, “Five dollars is tomorrow’s million, Mrs. Hogan. Every one of them little bills is as precious as a lil’ child—and they grow just as fast.” The balance I took out in bills, the bulk of which to send home to John.

At the Western Union office, I made a great fuss of asking for Mr. Flannery’s help in filling out the remittance forms, to soften the blow of embarrassing him in front of his banker friend. On our way back to the apartment we passed a small ice cream shop. I stopped in front of the glass cabinet filled with ice, and white bowls piled with delicious mounds of chunky, colored creams. I took a dollar bill out of my pocket and asked the man in the striped apron and straw boater hat for two strawberry ices. Mr. Flannery was still cross with me and objected when he looked back and saw what I had done, but I thrust the dribbling cone into his hand and he licked at it like a hungry schoolboy, gobbling it back while trying to hide the fact that he was thoroughly delighted.

“Good money after bad,” he said, hanging over the cone, his chest concave to protect the bib of his suit shirt from the drips. “You shouldn’t be wasting your money on fripperies like this, young woman—you’ll never have a penny.”

The ice cream man gave me back a handful of coins, which clattered in my pocket all the way home. It was the first dollar I had spent in America.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I could scarcely believe that Sheila and I were to be left on our own in the apartment while everyone else went to Boston.

Neither could Mrs. Flannery. Every time she tried to articulate her dismay, she ended up shutting her mouth again and simply shaking her head. Her only defense was to leave us a list of chores that would have taken an army of maids a full year to complete. Every piece of metal in the apartment, from brass fire surrounds to teaspoons, was to be polished; every drape was to be shaken outside to remove any dust, then hung back in its place; every tile on every floor had to be thrice-polished by hand until you could fix your hair by them.

The reason we were being left behind was that there was already a lady’s maid in full-time employment in Boston. She was a surly young girl by all accounts, but Isobel had inherited her from the first Mrs. Adams and, for reasons best known to himself, Mr. Adams would not have the maid dismissed. So Isobel had to leave Sheila behind and have this other, strange girl attend to her on her duty trips to Boston, and I was left behind to police Sheila.

The morning everyone left, Sheila and I sat alone in the huge apartment and looked at each other across the kitchen table.

“Will we make a start on the drapes?” I asked.

Sheila looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then took a cigarette out of her apron pocket and put her feet up on Mrs. Flannery’s scrubbed tabletop. She lit a match by striking it on the sole of her shoe, took a drag of the cigarette and, on the exhale, pointed it at me and said, “No. I’ve got a better idea.”

Before I could blink she had run like a hare out of the kitchen and up the service stairs. I knew exactly where she was going.

By the time I got to Isobel’s bedroom, she already had a beaded skullcap on her head and was spinning around the bed, twirling a fox fur by its tail and singing, “Let’s have a party!”

“Sheila, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Oh God, Ellie—don’t be such a bore!” She threw herself backward on the bed and took another drag of her cigarette. “You are such a stick-in-the-mud!” She sat up again and rummaged around in the mirrored side table by the bed, and pulled out an ornate cigarette holder. Stuffing the lit cigarette into it, she added, “You used to be such fun at school—what happened to you?”

I had not told Sheila anything about John’s war wound or any of the tragic circumstances that had led me to be in America. Every time I thought about telling her, I pictured the look of pity in her eyes at the thought of my being married to a cripple. I could not bear the thought of being pitied, even by my closest friend. In truth, it was my own shame that stopped me telling her. Poverty and hardship were never badges I was comfortable wearing. In any case, the subject never came up. Sheila never talked about Ireland or her own family. She preferred to live in the glimmering limbo of Isobel’s shadow. She gathered up cast-off magazines, perfumed her wrists and curled her hair in imitation of our beautiful mistress. When I had first arrived, she talked of our years together and a little of her family, but as each day passed, she appeared to distance herself a little further from Ireland. Her clothes and hair were distinctly American and she spoke with an American twang, which receded only a little now when she was alone with Mrs. Flannery and me. She was still the mischievous, lovable girl I had been to school with, but when she spoke about our days in the convent to other people, she made them sound more privileged than they were: “Ellie and I were at a fee-paying boarding school run by a French order.” I never contradicted her, in private or public. Sheila was estranged from her family, from the brothers I knew she adored. She was doing what she could to survive. Whatever her reasons, she needed to forget where she came from.

“Here . . .” She was back from Isobel’s dressing room, and threw a garment at me. “Try this on.”

It was pointless objecting, so I took off my uniform and pulled the soft bundle up over my body. I was surprised at how heavy it felt, and that it slid on so easily. I had lost weight since I had come to America. Although the best food was on offer, I was not so inclined toward eating as I was at home. I was becoming scrawny, but when I complained about it to Sheila, she told me it was a good thing.

“When Isobel throws her clothes out in spring, you’ll be able to fit into them. Mrs. Flannery gets first look and she sends most of the good stuff home to her nieces, which is a shocking waste. That’s why I don’t feel bad about borrowing when she goes away.”

The dress she had “borrowed” for me was salmon pink, in a heavy silk weighed down with intricate black beading at its hem and across the neckline. It was sleeveless and my arms hung like bleached twigs at my side. Normally I wore my hair in a tidy bun, but with the others getting ready to go that morning, Sheila had not had time to dress it for me, so it was tied back in a simple ponytail. Gathered at the top of my spine, it hung in loose pillows over my ears. Sheila stood behind and studied me in the dressing-room mirror.

“You look awful, Ellie,” she said, tugging at the sides of the dress. “You’ll never pass.”

“Pass as what?” I asked.

“It’s the hair gives you away . . .” Sheila had been hinting I should cut my hair from the first day I arrived. I always kept it a good few inches past my shoulders, but it had grown beyond that again, and I was loath to ask my friend to trim it back for me in case she cut it too short. Sheila’s eyes were shining with excitement. I caught the flash of blue steel in them as she pulled a pair of dressmaking scissors out of her apron pocket and held them over my ponytail. “Go on, Ellie, let me. A bob would look great—you’ll be all the rage.”

I hesitated. Perhaps she was right, but I loved my long hair. At night, John would take the brush from me and pull it down gently from root to end, then run his fingers through it, languishing in the otherness of its softness and length.
Snap!
Taking advantage of my hesitation as a “yes,” Sheila had sliced through my ponytail. I screamed as my hair sprang up, suddenly gathered in two blunt waves at my ears. “Oh no, Sheila, what have you done!” I reached to the space where my hair had been and felt the lightness around my neck. Instinctively, I reached down and picked the still-tied ponytail up from the floor. A part of me that had been touched and admired by John now lay in my lap, a lifeless lump of waste. I let out a shocked sob, but Sheila took no heed of me, only fluffing the sides down around my face and saying, “There now—that looks so much better already.”

Sheila chattered away over the top of my silent shock for the next little while. She ironed my hair and powdered my face and rouged my cheeks. Reluctantly, I conceded to her prodding and bossing me into several changes of dress and stockings and pointed shoes. After a while, my anger became tempered by curiosity at the transformation that was taking place in the mirror. A different woman was beginning to appear in front of me.

When she had finished, we stood side by side in front of the mirror; she pouted, “Curse and damn you, Ellie Flaherty, but you look more of a lady than I do.”

My hair was short and straight, tapered into dark points that sliced across my cheekbones. Sheila had lined my eyes in black kohl and they looked larger and bluer—an exaggerated version of themselves. My skin, always freckled at home, was now pale from the months I had spent indoors and made me look sophisticated and older. Sheila had finally chosen me a dress in dark, dark navy, with a mannish, wide-collared jacket of the same shade that came as far down as my mid-thigh. I bent my head so that she could hang a long string of glittering glass baubles round my neck. They fell almost to my waist. She touched the bare nape of my neck and said, “You look—magnificent.”

I could say I didn’t recognize myself, but that wasn’t true. The self-assured, elegant woman who faced me was somebody I had always known, but just never had cause to meet before.

“Come on—we’re going out.”

“Out?” I said, horrified. “Where?”

“Oh. Ellie!” She grabbed both my hands and pulled me down onto the narrow velvet chaise longue. She looked into my eyes. “It’s a secret and I’m not supposed to tell, but, oh, I can’t keep it in any longer, Ellie, I’m—I’m in love! His name is Alex Ward and he’s a gentleman, Ellie—a real one, with money. And he loves me, can you believe it? It was love at first sight—we kissed at Isobel’s last party. In secret, it was so romantic . . .”

I was horrified. There was a lot more than romantic kissing in the encounter I had witnessed in our room that night. I hadn’t told Sheila I had seen her with a man the night of the party, and she had not volunteered anything—until now. Now she was bursting with joy, but I had a sense of doom. My friend was reckless and impulsive—what kind of an awful situation had she got herself into?

“We’re to meet him in the Plaza Hotel at three this afternoon.”

“Sheila—you can’t possibly be serious.”

“Oh, don’t be such a nervous ninny, Ellie—we look great. Nobody will know that we’re—”

“That’s not what I mean.”

She looked back at me, puzzled.

I had a duty to speak my mind. Rich men having their wicked way with serving girls was a ritual as old as time itself. I was widely enough read to know these things, but while I was absorbing
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, Sheila was gossiping or playing camogie. “He’s taking advantage of you, Sheila.”

“You’re wrong, he loves me!”

“He’s using you, Sheila. He’s a rich man, they stick to their own—”

“La, la, la—I’m not listening . . . I love him, I love him, I love him . . .” Then, she grabbed my hands and swung me around the dressing room, singing, “Come on, Ellie—come, come, come—it’ll be fun, fun, fun . . .”

I pulled back from her and pleaded, “Sheila, please—you’re making a big mistake.”

Becoming petulant, she took up Isobel’s stoles and said, “Oh, what do you know— I’ll go alone.”

Sheila was infuriating, but I loved her and didn’t want her to come to any harm, so I went along.

We left by the front lobby. Sheila selected us two wide-brimmed hats with nets that we pulled down over our faces. “We’re ladies now—we must protect our lily-white skin from the sun,” she said, joking, although I could tell she half-believed it.

The residents’ elevator was much nicer than the service one. It had smoky, mirrored walls, and as I admired my reflection I could see an army of women in navy suits lined up like soldiers behind me. Sheila was wearing a yellow chiffon confection, a light tunic over a silk dress, which I worried would draw attention to us, but she threw her head high in the air as we walked past the temporary doorman. “Good afternoon!” she cried, waving Isobel’s yellow parasol slightly in his direction, in a parody of the way an important lady might behave.

My limbs were tingling with nerves and my stomach felt tight with excitement. If we got caught, we’d surely be fired, and I’d have nowhere to go and no money to travel home. The stakes were so high that once we were outside our own building, I nonetheless made Sheila walk a full block down Fifth Avenue before we finally collapsed onto each other giggling, relieved that we had got away with it. “‘Good ofternoon’—you’re quite the toff!” she said. “I thought I was going to explode!”

“I thought I was going to fall flat out on the ground in these wretched shoes!”

We decided to walk through the park. It was a hot day and the vague rustling of the treetops tempted us away from the noise and the cars. I had a yearning to visit the zoo. I didn’t say anything to Sheila because it felt like a foolish, childish notion, and she was so intent on keeping this liaison with her lover.

“You are going to love the Plaza, Ellie. It is quite the most glamorous place—all the best people go there . . .” Sheila’s affectations became more pronounced the farther we got into the park and the closer we came to the Plaza. The park was quiet, with only a few nurses pushing strollers and the occasional gentleman rambling by. I noticed we caught the eye of one or two of them. “Alex has said we shall have afternoon tea in the Palm Lounge and then . . .”

I stopped dead and reached for her hand. “Stop your wittering for a minute,” I said, squeezing her fingers hard as she objected. “Just close your eyes.” I tilted my head back to listen to the song thrush singing—phweet-phweet—so loudly, in the tree above our heads. I felt my heart fill like a balloon with the sweetness of his voice. With my eyes closed into the sunlight, the blackness turned a deep, glowing red and the bird’s song carried me home to the back field and John.

“Come on,” said Sheila, “I’ll race you,” tugging me back into her world.

We kicked off our shoes and carried them as we ran in our stockinged feet across the soft grass toward the Plaza Hotel.

As soon as we walked through the doors and into the lobby of the hotel, an elegant woman came up to us and tried to spray us with scent. “Chanel Number Five, ladies?” I shook my head, shy and also fearful we would be expected to pay. I realized suddenly that neither of us had a cent between us. What with parasols and hats, and purses full of powder and lipstick, we had neglected to bring any money. Not indeed that a cup of tea in this place would have cost us any less than a month’s wages. I felt a sudden shot of anger at Sheila and her foolishness. This was not exciting, after all, this pretending to be rich. It was fake and frightening, and I would much, much rather have stayed in the park and gone to the zoo. Why had she not arranged to meet her boyfriend somewhere sensible like that? Or better again, not arranged to meet him at all? Sheila stuck out her wrist, and the woman sprayed it. Then the woman said to me, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some, Madam?”