Ellis Island (26 page)

He started to move papers around his desk, then found a handwritten letter, handed it to me and said, “Good, good—well, let’s see how you get on with typing this up.”

I sat at a typewriter on a small table in the corner of the room as he excused himself to get a glass of water.

By the time he got back, I had the typed letter placed on his desk and was sitting with my hands on my lap, waiting for him to return.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, “is there a problem?”

“No problem,” I said brightly, “I’ve finished.”

He let out a small laugh and picked up the letter.

“It’s perfect,” he said, his eyes scanning up and down the page from behind his spectacles. “I’m most impressed.” Except that he didn’t look impressed, he looked somewhat baffled and a little nervous. He was an eccentric type, I noted, like the university professor.

Our meeting ended somewhat abruptly. “I hope you don’t feel I’m rushing you, Mrs. Hogan, but I have another appointment.”

“No, no,” I said smiling, then I shook his hand firmly, all business, and said, “I look forward to hearing from you soon, Mr. O’Nuallian—and thank you for the opportunity to interview for the post.”

I was certain I had got the job. Over the next few days I even prepared some of my “work” clothes, rinsing out my silk stockings, pressing a suit and mending the button on a smart blouse.

Four days passed and I was just beginning to get anxious about not having heard when John came home from Maidy and Paud’s with a gloomy head on him. He sat down at the table and sucked in air through his teeth.

“Ellie—you didn’t get the job.” I didn’t say anything, just pursed my lips together. “Maidy said he gave it to the young Connelly girl, she’s his third cousin.”

“I know that,” I said and turned my face to the dresser, pretending to set the table for tea.

That wretch hasn’t even been to school
, I wanted to say.
She probably can’t even read properly, never mind type.

“They’re poor,” John said. “Padraig has the reputation of being a kind man—that’s why he gave her the work, surely. You were the better candidate, you can be certain of that.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, I
am
certain of that,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness and disappointment out of my voice. I didn’t want John to see me begrudge a poor girl a chance in life, or know how much I had come to depend on things outside of him for my happiness.

Chapter Forty-Five

“You’ll get another job,” John said, but we both knew that wasn’t true.

Jobs for people with my qualifications rarely came up in Kilmoy, and when they did they were almost always going to be given to either relatives or neighbors who had fallen on hard times.

Having come close to the possibility of earning my own money, then losing it, made me more miserable than I had been before the job had been mooted. There really was no escape from this small, rural life I was leading. I really was simply Ellie Hogan, farmer’s wife, for the rest of my life, forever and ever, amen.

Meanwhile my mother had announced that she was ready to go back to her own house. It had been two months since my father had died, and Maidy agreed that my mother seemed to be through the worst of the grief and appeared “happier in herself.” In truth, she seemed more content to me than she ever had, living there with Maidy and Paud, fitting in with their easy manner of living and casual eating customs, but it was a situation that could not go on forever. John and I had offered her a place with us, but she had said, “You have your own life to lead, Ellie. I have my house, and I have no need of a daughter’s charity.”

I planned to stay a few nights with my mother. Although it was not exactly a holiday, it was a break from my everyday life, a change of scene that, importantly, encouraged me to think of somebody aside from myself.

I picked her up from the Hogans’ in the horse and cart. The day was dry and the journey quick. It was a beautiful morning, with the lazy clopping of the horse’s hooves against the mud road, and the clouds stretched in long clusters across the sky, the pink of an early-morning sun behind them. We chatted, idle gossip, and my mother even pointed out a huge white rabbit scurrying across a nearby field, but as we drew closer, and the house itself finally came into sight, she fell into a dour silence.

I had not been back since running away from school, and had long since ceased to think of my parents’ house as my “family home.” The stark gray house I grew up in was just that—a house. I had never “lived” there, in the sense that I had come to understand through the adventure of life; it didn’t hold any joyful or happy memories for me. As I turned our horse into the driveway I remembered how truly unhappy I had been there, and yet I had no sense of fear or dread. Instead a kind of defiance took me over. I had been right to run away, from the house, from my parents and their miserable life—into the warm arms of John and his family. There was nothing for me, good or bad, in this place.

My mother opened the door and the two of us stepped into the cold, dusty hallway. The curtains were drawn throughout the house and it was as dark and silent as a tomb.

“I’ll get the bags,” I said, anxious to break the stillness, but when I came back holding my mother’s two small suitcases she was still standing where I had left her, her face pasty and blank like a statue, stiff and frozen in her navy coat as if she had had a spell cast over her.

I considered putting down the bags and embracing her, but decided against it. I occasionally showed affection to my mother, but usually during times of mutual contentment: a smile across the churchyard after Mass, an exchanged glance when Paud or John made a joke, the touch of an arm as one or the other went to clear the table. It felt wrong to intrude on her grief, so I simply walked past her into the kitchen, nudging her out of her torpor by touching her leg with the edge of one of the bags. She immediately followed me into the kitchen, lifted her apron from the hook on the back door as if she had never been away, then forgetting to tie it as she picked up an old dry cloth from the mantelpiece and began to fuss halfheartedly about the room. She was listless in all her movements, barely holding the duster, dabbing hopelessly at the abandoned surfaces in the near dark.

I realized, with a mix of horror and sadness, that my mother was not fit to take charge of the house. The dark fact of my father’s death appeared to have gripped her as soon as she walked in the door and put her back into the shocked trance I had found her in when I returned from America.

“Come on, Mam,” I said, taking her by the arm and leading her up the stairs. “You lie down.”

She lay on top of the bed and curled her legs up to her chest like a frightened infant, barely noticing as I took off her shoes.

The walk back down the stairs seemed interminable as the confused chill of my childhood crept after me, then leaped on my back and chewed at my conscience. Why did I not feel more grief at the loss of my father, or realize how much my mother must have loved him to be put into this state? Why had I brought her back here and not insisted that she come and live with John and me—and was it wrong of me not to want that? Not to love her more than I did?

I stopped and stood for a moment in the drawing room. The dreary, dark furniture crowded in on me; damp crinkled the corners of the painted walls like a creeping demon. There was no ornament or picture aside from the Sacred Heart and the cross above the fireplace. I remembered the endless rosaries we had said night after night, the turgid, miserable meals—my discomfort at my parents’ awkwardness with each other, their indifference toward me, the stuffy closed-off atmosphere—the three of us locked together in the convent-like surroundings of my father’s making. No flowers or frivolities allowed. No silly adornments—the air always heavy with the suffocating aura of solemn respectability. I remembered how unhappy I had been. How my childhood had been devoid of beauty and humor because of his authoritarian standards. Standing in my father’s house, I reached down into my heart and searched for the core of sadness that I knew must be there, the sense of loss, but couldn’t find it.

Instead, I felt myself propelled across to the windows. I pulled back the heavy curtains and tugged at the sash until they fell open in a relieved gape, miraculously loosening down like butter as if they had been waiting for this moment all their lives. I ran to the back door and opened it, filling the house with air. Without even removing my coat, I set about the place like a dervish. I opened every drawer and cupboard and rummaged about for decoration. I was amazed at how much there was: piles of embroidered linens; beautiful lace antimacassars; at least half a dozen vases of all shapes and sizes; the exquisite silver cutlery my father allowed us to use on Christmas Day; two dainty tea sets; a brass-handled coffeepot; china dog ornaments that I remembered discovering as a curious child and nervously rewrapping in the cloth that protected them and returning them to their hiding place. There was more, far more than I had accumulated in America, or could have collected if I had stayed another twenty years. I was surprised by how many things my family owned, yet there was nothing that I did not recognize. All these beautiful things had been in my life, but it was forbidden treasure. We had cake, but we weren’t allowed to eat it. The nice napkins and crockery were locked away in a cabinet in the parlor and used on high days and holidays when my father liked to pretend he was a priest.

In a matter of hours, I completely transformed the house.

I covered surfaces in embroidered cloths and placed on them vases heaving with foliage from the garden. I arranged ornaments on the mantelpiece and filled the kitchen with crockery—placing eggs in a beautiful glass bowl, and setting the table for supper with the silver cutlery and good china. I took down the heavy, velvet curtains from the windows and flooded the house with light and air. I lit a fire, baked a cake and called up to my mother to come down for tea.

As I waited for her I looked around. This was, after all, an elegant and affluent house—and now it was warm and alive. Pretty colored glassware twinkled in the light from the bare windows; brass candlesticks glowed from the reflections of the fire.

I had assumed my mother would be pleased with what I had done, so I was surprised when she walked into the room and her mouth instantly tightened in anger. She walked over to the vase on the dining-room table, grabbed it, then threw the water and flowers into the fire in one swift movement and put it back, damp, into the cupboard.

“How dare you touch my things,” she said, not looking at me. “How dare you interfere with the things in this house,” and she began to gather up everything I had taken out and to put it back where I had found it.

The truth flashed before me. It wasn’t my father who had kept these things hidden—in fact, the good china and cutlery were only used during our mealtimes with him. The penny dropped. It was my mother who had created our austere lifestyle. These accoutrements of fine living were not things that my mother loved and to which my father had denied us access. They were the vestiges of her shamed history.

The spoils of her shopkeeper grandparents’ greed, belongings that should have been given up to feed their neighbors during the famine, but were kept, instead, for future generations to hoard. Each vase, each china dog was an heirloom shrouded in guilt. My mother could not bear to look at them because they reminded her of where she had come from. She could not give them away or sell them for the same reason.

As I watched her frantically fold an embroidered napkin around a glass sweet dish and try and stuff it back into a drawer, I realized I could not let my mother go back. How could I live free of my own childhood, when my flesh and blood was still living out the miserable legacy of her ancestors? For all the love that had not been evident between us, she was still my mother and I could not, in all conscience, let her continue to live like this.

Quite out of turn, I picked up a china dog off the mantelpiece and said to her, “Look, Mother—they’re only
things
” and deliberately dropped it. She ran toward me to catch it, but then stopped herself short and allowed it to fall. The two of us stood as the pretty ornament smashed into little pieces on the floor. “Is that what you want?” I asked. “Because that’s what you might as well do, having all your things locked away in cupboards. What’s the use of having things if they are not going to be used?”

“That dog was very precious,” she said, in quiet astonishment. “You clearly don’t appreciate how valuable my things are.”

As she said it, I realized that my love of fine things was not something that I had learned in America; it was inherited from my mother. From her delicate polishing and handling of our silver cutlery, the way she pressed and folded our napkins on our side plates on special occasions, the delicate way she held her teacups. My predication for mannered living came from her. My love of beautiful things was not a reaction to poverty, but a craving for my mother.

I walked across and put my hand on her arm.

“Leave them be for the time being, Mam, and if you want to, we can put everything back away tomorrow.”

Her clench on the glass dish loosened and I caught it and placed it carefully on the polished mahogany surface.

“This house is your home,” I said, “you’ve no one to please now—only yourself.”

“And you.”

She said it so quietly and so suddenly that I almost missed it.

In those two words were all the apology for the past that I needed, and a seed of hope for the future.

The following morning she was up preparing breakfast when I rose. All of the things I had brought out the day before were still in place, but she had moved an ornate pen on an ebony stand that I had given pride of place on the mantel. It was sitting half wrapped in a cloth ready to be put away. I picked it up and she shook her head sadly and said, “That was the pen that my grandmother used to record each one of her debtors. It sat on the counter next to her ledger, and she would leave the list of those who owed her money hanging behind the counter for all to see—to shame them into paying her quicker. She was a cruel woman.”

My mother had never spoken to me about her family before. What I knew of them had been jigsawed together from overheard comments and gossip. She came from a long tradition of shopkeepers in a neighboring town. When her grandparents had inherited a shop from their parents, they had refused to give charity or credit to the thousands of starving families in the area and watched their neighbors perish while they prospered. As a result, when their own children inherited the shop, the locals kept their custom away until the business was lost. The past was never forgotten in this small place, the sins of the father were meted down generation after generation so that, four generations later, I was still being punished by my classmates for my great-grandparents’ greed.

I looked at my mother’s pale eyes, expecting to see the usual resigned sadness, and was surprised to see them flicker with defiance.

“It was a beautiful shop, though, Ellie,” she said, “elegantly laid out and full of anything you might care for. Not just everyday groceries—oh no, you could buy linens and crockery; it was criminal it was lost in the way it was, my parents didn’t deserve that.” She tapered off and became wistful again, “Although it’s true that my grandparents were very wicked people.”

“Just because your family are one way, that doesn’t mean you are the same,” I said.

She smiled and I realized she knew I was talking about myself.

“Here,” she said picking up the ebony trinket, “you have the pen.”

“No, Mam, I can’t take that, it’s too valuable.”

“Nonsense,” she said, “it has no bad memories for you and I can see how you appreciate nice things, Ellie.” I took it, closing my hand around the glossy surface of the polished wood stand.

“You must have got the knack for good quality in New York,” she said, and then, as she went back into the kitchen, she added, almost out of earshot, “or perhaps you’ve a bit of the shopkeeper’s blood in you after all.”