Ellis Island (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I was booked on the
Celtic
again, and I was glad of its familiar surroundings. The ship was more sparsely populated coming back from America than it had been in going there, so I managed to secure a cabin to myself. I barely spoke to a soul on the journey, as I had no desire for adventure and I had neither the energy nor the appetite for new friends; I was not in the humor to start explaining myself to anybody. Instead I read for company, because books can’t ask questions.

There was a small library next to the dining room and after breakfast each day I would borrow two dog-eared paperbacks to take back to my cabin and devour, sitting up in the hard bed until lunchtime. When I started to get cabin fever, I went up and read in the smoking lounge or took a walk around the deck, my book in hand. Thinking about what lay ahead of me, or what I had left behind, was a torture. So every waking hour I immersed myself in penny-dreadful crimes and romances, existing solely in the imagined world of girls in dramatic costumes falling hopelessly in love with vagabonds, or troubled men catching out clever criminals in hotel rooms. In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else’s imagination. My life was suspended—I was in neither one place nor the other. In that sense, I was sorry when the voyage came to an end.

I did not go up on deck when we were within sight of land, but stayed on the boat until the last minute. When I finally faced the cold, wet air of Queenstown, reality hit home. The quayside was packed with people arriving to take the boat the following day, the atmosphere noisy with expectation and emotion. My green winter suit, silk stockings and buckled shoes felt flimsy as I walked across to the station office to buy my ticket.

“Home for a funeral?” the dour-faced ticket attendant asked.

For a second I thought I must know him, but then remembered where I was and how even strangers presumed to know everything about you in Ireland. Sizing you up from the first second they saw you, so that they could strip you of any mystique. It wouldn’t have taken much. He knew from my clothes and the size of the bag that I was off the boat, and he knew that people only returned from America for one reason—to bury their dead.

“My father is ill,” I said. “I don’t know that he’s dead as yet. But thank you for your kind inquiry.”

“Please God, he’ll be all right,” he said, not at all embarrassed.

On the train, I stared out of the window. I was home, but it didn’t feel like home anymore. The landscape that had once been so beautiful to me was soaked in the dread I felt at being back, and at what would face me at my journey’s end. The dread infected everything: the bare branches of the faraway trees spiked against the gray sky; the smaller branches blurring in the soft excuse of Irish daylight; the messy piles of twigs lacing along the limp hedgerows; the miles of bleak barren bog and the small grazing fields bordered with tumbling stone walls; the sad-looking cows, as they stood their patch of ground waiting for more rain to come, resigned to their dull fate of chewing the cud. Was my father alive or dead? I tried to draw my mother’s pinched, worried face to mind and felt nothing but barren cold where love should have been. I thought about John. What would he make of me now? He was sure to be angry with me.

The platform at Ballymorris station was empty and I felt suddenly lonely at the lack of people there. I missed all the strangers in the city. I caught the vague hint of turf smoke in the air—a dusty, depressing smell that told me I was home. Back where I started, but not where I belonged. Not anymore.

Maidy and Paud were drawing up in front of the station as I walked out. The train had been a few minutes early and they had just arrived to collect me. Paud was anxious that they had not been on the platform to greet me, and ran to grab my bag, hauling it up onto the back of the horse and cart without saying a word. Maidy enveloped me as if I was still a child, and immediately I started sobbing with relief into the familiar warmth of her soft bosom.

“You’re daddy’s gone, Ellie. Your daddy’s gone and we buried him five days ago,” she said, rubbing my back and kissing the side of my head.

I didn’t know if I was crying for him or for the relief of seeing my adopted mother again.

As Paud silently drove his aging horse along the muddy paths that passed for roads, Maidy told me she had thought about sending a telegram to the ship to inform me of my father’s passing. “But what would be the point of spending money on bad news when you couldn’t get here any quicker and you’d be alone on the boat, grieving? So we decided it was time enough to wait until you got here.” I told her she had done the right thing, and she seemed relieved, then caught me up with all the news. My father had contracted TB and was taken to the county hospital. Maidy had insisted that my mother stay with them, so that Paud could drive her up and down to the hospital every other day in the horse and cart. It seemed unlikely to me that my mother—or my father, no matter how ill he was—would agree that she travel any way but in a hire car. When I wouldn’t let the point drop, Maidy finally spat it out that my parents’ “hire car” days were over. My father had lost his good British government job when the Free State was legally formed. He was offered another position, which he had refused out of loyalty to the Crown.

“Why did nobody write and tell me?” I said.

“Sure, you were in America, Ellie—what could you do from there, only worry?”

I was shocked that this drama had happened without my knowing and didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful for the conspiracy not to tell me.

She continued, “They tried to put him out of the house, Ellie—the IRA. John had a word with a few of them and they let him be, but there were arguments in our house over it, I can tell you. It was a disgrace the way they treated him. They should have had more respect for a man like your father—with all his experience and a God-fearing man too, God rest his soul. He’s with the Blessed Virgin and all her angels now.”

I thought about what a trial it must have been for the Hogans, dealing with all of this. My parents were not easy people and I had not thought about how my father’s pro-British politics would have gone down with the new order. I sat there taking it in—as if it were relevant, as if he weren’t dead. Something strange was happening to time. Talking to Maidy felt so familiar that it seemed as if I had only been away for a day or two. Yet huge things had happened—the birth of the Free State, Civil War, the death of my father. It was as if I was reading about it all in a book. It seemed implausible that these dramatic events had taken place in my life and I knew nothing about them. All I had thought about was John, or rather his injuries and his operation—and that had seemed like enough.

“Where is my mother now?” I asked.

“She’s still staying with us, Ellie. She won’t go back to the house now that your father is gone.” Her face tightened and I got a glimpse of how difficult a houseguest my mother had been. When Maidy saw my worry, she opened her face into a deliberate smile that in a split second had reached her eyes. Maidy could change her mood simply by smiling. “Oh, she has been so looking forward to seeing you, Ellie. She has missed you so much.”

I doubted that was true, although I did not doubt that she bitterly resented all that had happened to her in the past few years and would have a clear opinion of the part my elopement and emigration had played in it.

I took a small woven blanket out of my bag and wrapped it round both of our legs. Maidy made a tremendous fuss about how beautiful it was, saying, “Oh no, Ellie—it’s too good, it’ll get ruined!” and made me put it back into my case while she tugged out an old sheepskin from under the bench.

The flatulence of Paud’s aging horse, the rancid smell of the sheepskin and the rough tugging of the cart wheels on the stony ground made me nauseous. I leaned into Maidy and, closing my eyes, buried my face into her neck and took in the familiar smell of her kitchen that always seemed to resonate from her skin and clothes. I was a grown woman, but I would never be too old to revel in Maidy’s motherly warmth.

“My wee girleen Ellie,” she said. “But it’s good to have you home.”

Loved as I felt in that moment, I knew it was temporary. I was out of place here, chugging along in a cart. This wasn’t who I was anymore. I felt the contrast of my shoes on the stained wood, the suit fabric against the sheepskin, and I felt sad that I had moved beyond all of this. But I had, and I could not go back now.

On the one-hour journey I did not ask about John, and Maidy did not offer.

There would be time enough for him to tell me himself, and the longer I could put it off, the better.

Darkness descended in the last mile of our journey, so I was barely aware of where we were when we arrived. As we drove up the lane, the exhausted horse trotting the last few yards in a final push for home, my stomach tightened. I did not want to go in.

The house was in total blackness, and Paud muttered to Maidy about my mother not lighting the lamp or preparing the house for our arrival, and she hushed him up. I followed them in. My mother was sitting by the dying fire in a hardbacked chair, gazing at the pathetic puffs as wind from the chimney blew them back into the room. Maidy ran about immediately, putting on the lamp, rushing to throw a few dry sticks on the fire to breathe some life back into it, filling the cottage with friendly chatter: “Now, we’ll have some stew heated shortly—and there’s a few spuds hidden in those embers, so no need to worry about them. Look who’s back, Attracta, and wait till you see the cut of her, she’s like a movie star . . .”

My mother did not even turn her head.

I walked across and stood in front of her chair. “Hello, Mam.”

“Welcome back,” she said coldly. Her eyes crawled across my face briefly, then settled back on the fire.

My stomach tightened, the painful clench of reality taking hold. Paud was bringing turf in and loading it up to the hearth, saying nothing. I could see frustration and anger in his eyes. Maidy passed by my mother’s back and nodded at me to stay where I was.

I knelt down at my mother’s feet and said, “I’m sorry, Mam. I’m sorry I went away and I’m sorry I wasn’t here when Father died.”

She didn’t look at me, but said, quick and sudden before I had my last words out, “He asked for you, Eileen. He asked for you at the last to say his final rosary.”

And as suddenly as she said it, I realized he was dead. The loveless slab of life they offered to me as a childhood, their rejection of me for refusing to join the convent, then disowning me for marrying John—none of that mattered now. Death had taken all the bad things with it. All that was left behind of my father for us was the endless, meaningless hours he had spent in devoted prayer.

“I’ll say it now, Mam,” I said. “I’ll say his rosary now.”

She shrugged, but I picked up the beads that were hanging on the arm of her chair and placed them round her frozen hands.

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty . . .”
Kneeling at her feet, I said the words to the crackling of the growing fire. Presently, my mother’s voice was added to mine. Maidy and Paud continued to potter about their tasks as they also joined in,
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . . Amen.”
The old couple’s actions—piling up sods of turf, stirring a pot of stew, sweeping the floor—played out in a kind of methodical dance, making the rhythm of the words seem almost melodic. This would have been considered an appalling irreverence by my father, and I looked up at my mother for her disapproval, but there was only the blank resignation she always displayed in prayer. Then, as the decades of the rosary mounted up, something unusual happened. Her voice and mine became stronger and more in unison. During the third decade, my mother leaned over and poked some more life into the fire, and during the fourth I stood up and pulled over a chair to sit opposite her, in preference to kneeling. It was as if the prayer itself was sending us a message, or we were sending each other a message through the prayer. He was gone and we were to grieve him in a way that suited us. My father’s death had given us both some of the freedom he was unable to give us in life.

At the very last prayer, “Hail, Holy Queen,” I got a shock as a fifth voice joined our chorus. For an instant I thought it was my dead father, but, in the spirit of our enlivened, sacrilegious rosary, I turned round and saw that it was John.

Chapter Forty

Without thought or hesitation, I ran across the room and threw myself at him with such force that he staggered against the table, toppling a chair. He laughed, and grabbed me round the waist and kissed my face. The memories of him, as he was, came flooding through me with his familiar smell, the confidence of his touch. Despite our parents being there and the circumstances of our loss, my limbs were straining to wrap themselves around him.

“Be careful, John!”

I knew Maidy’s reprimand was meant for me.

“Stop fussing, woman!” John said, angry with the public reminder of his failings. He gently pulled away from me and walked across the room. His limp was pronounced, his hips circling as he moved, his trousers airy—suggesting that his legs were thin and wasted. I was shocked. Maidy had warned me that his recovery was not complete, but in some sense I had not truly believed it, or indeed prepared myself for what he might look like, or that his injuries might have changed him forever, not just for a short while.

“There look, our boy is walking again, Ellie. And it’s thanks to you.” Maidy’s voice was full of gratitude and I tried to see the miracle of John being on his feet, but all I could see was his disjointed gait, the imperfection.

He picked up a lamp and said, “Right, people, you’ve had enough of her now—it’s time for me to take my wife home.”

“You’re not going back to the cottage at this time of night, John?” Maidy said.

“Ah now,” Paud said, “it’ll be time enough to travel in the morning.” He had one eye on my mother, who was setting the table for dinner.

“I’m taking Ellie home to our house, and that’s that,” John said. “I’ve the cart all laid out with blankets and everything, we’ll be grand.”

My heart sank at the word “cart.” I would not have expected John to own a car, but I could not help the image of Charles in his Rolls-Royce flying across my mind.

“Will I get changed out of my travel clothes?” I asked, then immediately regretted how foolish it sounded.

John shrugged, but my mother suddenly burst in, “It would be a disgrace to ruin those good shoes, Eileen. I have a pair of boots in the back, I’ll bring them in for you.” When she disappeared into the scullery, Paud looked after her, astonished, and Maidy whispered to me, “That’s as much as your mother has said since your father died, Ellie. She is so happy to have you back.”

“She can move in with us as soon as you’re settled back home,” said John. “Then Maidy and Paud can get their bed back.”

All these decisions being made about and around me. The curve of my life had been taken out of my hands and was being drawn into a crude circle made of old-fashioned assumptions. A life where I traveled in carts on dirt roads, wore borrowed boots and martyred my married life to my mother.

A flint of anger sparked inside me and lit a flame of resolve in my heart. My family meant well, but they didn’t understand who I was anymore.

John drove the horse as far as the road, then stopped, pulling in among the hedgerows. I looked up at him, finding his face in the dark. The moon came out from behind gray, painted clouds and cast blue shadows across the contours of his face. His features had matured, become sharper, their scoops and hollows carved by the realities of war and physical pain. I saw the last dredge of loneliness drain out of his eyes as they became soft, and he was looking at me with that curious mixture of pride and amusement that was John’s version of love. Nobody else had ever looked at me in that way because nobody knew me the way John knew me. For all we had both changed, for all I had feared seeing him again, the bond between us remained intact.

By the time we got to our house it was dark. John lit an oil lamp and I followed behind him up the path, my mother’s old boots sliding on the muck, the acrid smell of burnt oil catching in the back of my throat.

“Here now,” he said, as he lifted the latch.

As I went inside my hand instinctively scraped the wall next to the door for an electric light switch. Of course, there was none.

John turned and his face cast ghostly shadows on itself. He laid the lamp down on the table and I took it all in. The cold stone floor, the rough walls, the open fireplace for cooking and the meager scraps of wood that passed for furniture.

“Home,” John said, smiling. “You’re home at last.”

That night in bed, I kept my clothes on to try and protect my skin from the rough wool blankets that John had on the bed instead of cotton sheets. At dawn, I woke with cold as John had pulled the blankets off me in his sleep. At first, I did not know where I was. In my half-wakened state I thought I was still in my New York apartment, and had merely dreamed I had fallen down some freezing black hole. Then I noticed the breath in front of my face and the spikes of branches tapping against the bedroom window, witches’ fingers against the growing dawn, and I remembered.

I turned toward John. The low, dozing sun shone a pink light on his back and, as I reached my hand out to touch him, I felt the same thrill of his being there as I had the first time we had kissed. It was really John. He was really mine. His back was a wall of muscle, harder and more defined than I remembered it, and as I drew my fingers in a feathered stroke down his spine, he rolled over and crushed me against the mattress in an immediate and desperate kiss. We made love as the sun yawned in a new day, then fell back into an easy sleep, our limbs locked into each other like branches woven together by time.

I woke late. I was alone in the bed and the house. The blankets itched me horribly. My skin felt raw where I had scratched at my arms in my sleep, and when I finally hauled my legs from under the rough blankets, I saw I had clawed my good silk stockings into tatters. I threw on an old woolen sweater of John’s that I found hanging on a chair and walked out to the kitchen to review my domain. In the daylight I could see that John had made a good attempt to prepare the house for me. There was turf stacked to the side of the hearth and a fire set with twigs and folded paper sticks ready for me to set a match to. The floor was swept, and the walls whitewashed. Above the fire, John had put up a wide rough-edged shelf, which held a number of books and a picture of the Sacred Heart, which I recognized as Maidy’s—kind gifts for my return. In pride of place at the front of the shelf were two framed photographs. One was the “Hands Across the Sea” postcard I had sent him from the boat, the other was of me posing in a photographer’s studio. My back was straight and I had one leg crossed over the other, so that my smart T-bar shoes were pointed one to the side and the other straight ahead. The coat was crushed velvet with a dropped waist and a wide fur collar, and I was wearing a tight-fitting cloche hat; my eyes were heavily made up and burned out at the camera from under the tight brim. Both the hat and coat belonged to Sheila; it was she who had made me get my photograph taken, to send to John with the ticket for his journey across. “Let him see what he’s missing,” she had said.

The old anger made me flinch and my hand shook as I reached up for the frame. It was heavier than it looked, and was good quality with a mirrored finish and delicate shamrocks etched into the beveled glass. Even though he had sent the ticket back, John had gone to some trouble to display my picture properly. I swallowed the anger and replaced it with a little hope. Perhaps this was a sign.

There was little else to impress me. No ornaments and the skimpiest of practical implements: a battered brush, its handle worn with use; a few tortured-looking dishcloths. The dresser was well stocked with simple crockery and basic food, but there was so much that needed doing to make this place into any kind of a home. The day was dull and the room darkened with rain clouds. I looked absentmindedly around the white walls for a light switch, and with growing horror absorbed the magnitude of what I did not have. No electricity. No electric lights; no electric cooker; no electric iron. I had become as reliant on electricity as I was on my own breath. I wanted to cry.

No sink; no toilet; no shower; no soft towels or nice soaps or scented tinctures. The list went on and on those first few days. The primitive living conditions were not a surprise to me, and the absence of many of the smaller household items could have been remedied. Nonetheless I could not stop my mind becoming a litany of what was missing. My resolve hardened with each new lack. I would not live in this poverty for any longer than I had to. In time, my mother would recover her strength and settle back into her own house. After that I would insist that John come with me to America. Till then, I would have to make do as best I could.

The trunk was delivered to the post office in Kilmoy, from where we had to go and collect it. When we got word it had arrived, I wondered why I had bothered bringing it at all. It would have made better sense leaving it in New York. However, it would be our first outing into town since I had arrived back and, as it was also fair day, John and I got dressed up for the occasion.

I washed in tepid water in a shallow tin basin at the kitchen table, using a slither of soap I had kept from the boat. I consoled myself that my trunk contained a few luxuries from home that would tide me over for the few months I’d be here. John had insisted I keep the water from the kettle for my own toilet, while he bathed in cold water outside. I watched him through the kitchen window as he stripped naked, balancing the large tin bucket on a milking stool. It was a cold day to be washing outside, but I knew John. I knew he would relish the sharp air on his skin and the smell of morning and the feeling of being naked against nature.

It was the first time I had seen his body fully unclothed since the operation. When we made love it was in the camouflage of night or under covers. Once, I had felt the deep ridge of the scar along his hip. The tips of my fingers had curled unexpectedly into the hole and my hand leapt back in horror. Neither of us said anything, but I knew John had felt my shock.

Now, watching him, I could see that his arms were stronger than they had ever been, from doing the work of his legs while he was in the wheelchair; but the defined muscular broadness of his torso threw a bad light on his legs, which were thin and saggy—the limbs of a much older man. Across one hip, two deep ridges were carved out of the skin, shockingly deep; one of them ran in a bending road, almost down to his knee. I recalled the day of the shooting, carrying him back to this house, staunching the blood, trying to press together the shattered flesh. I felt the miracle of him still being alive, and pride in the fact that he was standing there in front of me—war torn, but standing nonetheless.

Unaware he was being watched, John lathered himself with carbolic soap and then, turning his hands into wide bowls, scooped the freezing water across his hair and face, letting out an amused shout with the shock of cold before picking up the whole bucket and throwing the contents over himself, shaking and laughing and rubbing himself with a rough towel until he emerged pink and smiling. I felt such a surge of love that I knew I could never again leave him behind.