Ellis Island (6 page)

Chapter Eleven

If I was going to see John again, as I was aching to, I needed to do something with myself that would make him see that I was better than those other girls. More sophisticated, worthier of his attention. But I was too plain. I had no pretty things, no frivolities that would attract the attention of a man.

I looked through the wardrobe, but even as I opened the door I knew it was hopeless. I had just my uniform and drab work-clothes. My mother had made me a yellow dress with white daisies on it a few years before, but I had long since grown out of it—it barely reached my knees and stretched tight across my chest. Embarrassed to draw attention to my curves, even from my mother, I had never asked her for another.

My mother and father were leaving the house to go into town for the day. My father had hired a hackney for them, and the gesture had put my mother in good form. She was wearing her Sunday hat and tailored navy coat as she opened the lid of the small box on our hallstand, taking out her lipstick and face powder. My father’s coat was still hanging on the stand, and she pushed the sleeve of it aside to reveal the mirror underneath, before applying the makeup carefully. I had seen her do this often, but watched her now with special care.

“Are you sure you won’t come with us, Eileen?” she said. The powder softened her skin to a creamy white and the lipstick brought her face to life.

“No thank you, Mam,” I said. “I shall study for the day. I might call up to the Hogans’ later.” Just saying it set my nerves quivering. I felt that by saying it to my mother, I would have to make it real and go, even though I was terrified.

“Good girl,” my mother said, smiling, but her approval was lost on me because as she turned to go, I caught the smell of roses trailing behind her as she closed the door.

When she had gone I ran upstairs to the chest of drawers, took my mother’s bottle of rosewater and pressed it to my wrist. It slipped and spilled onto my shoes, but I bent down and soaked up the excess with my sleeve so that it wouldn’t be wasted. I found a hair comb on the dressing table and used it to secure the dark curls back from my ears, but it made my face appear large and my jaw wide—so I quickly took it out.

I could not allow myself to despair, so I continued my search in my mother’s drawers for some trinket to brighten me up. I found her locket, but it was too valuable—and what if I lost it? She was wearing her pearl necklace. Suddenly I came across my old yellow dress and I had an idea. I ripped through the hem with my mother’s dressmaking scissors and folded it into a kerchief, which I tied around my neck. Then I ran downstairs and opened the hallstand box. I quickly puffed over my face with the powder and applied the lipstick. The top was pointed where my mother had been rolling it for years into a sharp tip. Her lips were a thin line, but I had inherited my father’s full, broad mouth; I struggled to get the color on without damaging the delicate red pencil. I checked in the mirror. My eyes looked dark and worried beneath the heavy eyebrows and the black curls of my long hair. I smiled at myself, an unconvincing smile—then threw myself out the door. I knew if I looked too long at the reflection, my face would persuade me not to go. Then John would go back to Dublin with the taste of another girl on his lips and my life would be over. I took a deep breath and told myself that the yellow of my scarf and the red of my lips made me appear bright and cheerful, even if that was not how I felt inside.

When I got to the house, John was not there.

“He went out walking,” Maidy said. “Wait for him. He was sorry to have missed you on Sunday.”

I waited for an hour, drinking tea and anxiously wiping crumbs from the corner of my painted mouth. Maidy went about her work, telling me bits of news, her gossip ebbing more and more often into an awkward silence, the longer her son stayed away.

When the hour was gone, I stood up to leave.

“I’ll see him another time,” I said. Maidy smiled at me, and it nearly broke my heart.

As I was leaving, I saw John walking along the road toward the house. He was with one of the men I had seen him with outside the church, and two girls. I knew the girls. They were from the year above me in national school. Silly, pretty girls. One of them was sitting on a bicycle and John was pulling her along. I wanted to cry.

“Here he comes,” said Maidy brightly.

“I’ve got to go, I’m late,” I said, moving forward. I didn’t want Maidy to see me upset.

“Stay.” She put her hand firmly on my shoulder. “Stay and see your old friend.”

I remembered that Maidy loved me too. So I went back into the house, dried my eyes, pinched my cheeks and got ready to face the competition.

Five minutes later, John walked into the house alone. “Ellie Flaherty,” he said, grinning with broad teeth and blue-eyed mischief, “you were very shy, running off from me after Mass the other day.”

My anxiety flew from me like a fairy and I felt immediately happy. His voice sounded deeper than I had remembered it. “It seemed to me that you had enough company to be getting along with.”

“You’d need a bit of idle chatter in your head after listening to Father Mac droning on like that.”

“John!” Maidy shouted, but she was smiling. “I declare you’ve become godless since you went up to Dublin!”

“Maybe I have,” he said looking directly at me as he said it. I tried to stop myself from smiling so widely, but I couldn’t. “Will we go for a walk, Ellie—what do you think?” It felt like a threat more than a question. In some part of me I knew what it meant and my knees buckled. “We’ll walk down to the silver birch, Ellie, and see if you can still climb up it?”

Maidy took a tea towel and flicked it to the back of his legs. “You’ll do no such thing, John Hogan. You’re not too old for me to take the stick to you. Ellie is a young lady now, and don’t you forget it.”

“I might do it all the same, Maidy,” I said, joining in. “Would you have a pair of old britches about the place that I could put on to save my skirts?”

“Go on!” she said, chasing the two of us round the kitchen with the wet tea towel. “Get out of my house before I flatten the pair of you!”

We could barely stand up for laughing when we got outside and we chased down to the bottom field. As the silver birch came into sight, the jokes subsided and our pace grew slower. We walked in comfortable silence listening to the birds and feeling the summer breeze in the space between us. When we came to the rocks by a boundary ditch, we sat down. John said, “Do you remember how you used to make me wait for the rabbits to come out?”

“Until you said you’d kill one of them and cook them in a stew.”

“You cried . . .”

“I don’t cry as easily these days.” I balked inwardly at the lie. I had been close to tears all day at the mere thought of him.

“You were sweet,” he said, looking me in the eyes. Then he looked away. “There’s something you should know about me, Ellie.” I held my breath as he paused, waiting for whatever more he was going to reveal of his feelings. His eyes still downcast and serious, he said, “There is a war in our country, Ellie. I don’t know how much of it you know about, but I need you to know I’m involved.”

“Yes, I know, you’re a rebel,” I pushed in. I was annoyed that he had broken our moment by talking about war. I could see he wanted to talk more about it, but I wouldn’t be distracted. “Who were those girls I saw you with earlier? Were you going with one of them?” I blurted it out. I needed him to stop and take notice of me.

John looked up and I met his gaze with a deliberately arched brow. He smiled and said, “Maybe both . . .”

Hurt, I turned my face away from him.

“I’m joking, Ellie—come on.”

It was a cruel joke, but then, how could he possibly have known the terror that was in my heart.

He took my chin in his palm and turned me to face him again. Gently, he reached his fingers up to my neck and untied my yellow scarf, throwing it over to the bushes, where it caught on a branch and hung.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“You don’t need it—you don’t need any of that stuff at all.”

I was going to retrieve the scarf, but he put his hand on my shoulder and held me back.

“Don’t you know, Ellie? There could never be anyone but you.”

Then he pulled me across to him and kissed me for the first time.

Afterward we lay on the grass and looked at the sky. I was bristling with excitement, my toes curled in my boots, waiting for him to kiss me again. “Tell me about your adventures, John,” I said, placing my hand across his chest. “Tell me about all your vagabonding with the rebels . . .”

John sat up, moving my hand away. “It’s not like that, Ellie,” he said. “It’s not a game.”

I was embarrassed he thought me so flippant. “I want to know, John—really.” Except that I didn’t. I just wanted to hear him talking so that I could adore him and could silence him presently with another kiss.

“I watched a man die,” he said.

His words shocked me so much, I immediately wanted him to stop talking. “John . . .”

“There was blood everywhere. I tried to stem it with my hands. His eyes were still open . . .”

I saw I had lost my courting John in this sturdy, serious profile of a man talking about war. I barely listened to what he was saying as the fear grew deeper and settled inside me. A vague, unspoken notion gathered in my heart. It was inevitable that John would get caught up in this mess. It was who he was. Finding turf for the school, attempting to rescue me from my parents, fighting for the freedom of his country. Things outside of himself called to John all the time. Despite my father’s arguments, this was a call to justice, and John would be powerless to resist. But I did not need John to fight this war for me, and I did not want him to risk his love fighting it for anyone else. This wretched war that I had mocked with my school friends might be a just war, but the only injustice I knew was that the man I had barely been given the chance to love had witnessed death, and so might die himself. My heart went cold and I shivered myself back into his words.

“He was only a year older than me. I felt the life ebb out of him. It changed me, Ellie.”

I did not know what I could say to comfort him. This was his moment of love—a soldier confessing the horrors of war. I knew I was supposed to admire his bravery and self-sacrifice, but all I felt in my heart was the terror of losing him. I wanted
my
moment back, with my red lips and my yellow scarf and the drama of love—the simplicity of kissing under a clear blue sky—the clarity of new love, fresh happiness, unsullied by the past and unworried by the future. If John wouldn’t give me my moment back, then I was going to take it for myself.

“I love you, John Hogan,” I said, and I leaned over and kissed him for the second time.

Chapter Twelve

Everything changed that year. Sheila and her family had emigrated to America, so she didn’t come back to school. We were all shocked and bewildered at her loss, as none of us had had the chance to say good-bye.

“I heard her oldest brother was in the Republican Brotherhood,” said Ger Conway, who lived in the next town along. “Her father wanted to get him out of the country, but the stupid eejit never turned up at the boat and they ended up leaving him behind anyway.”

Many of the girls came back to school that September with revolution in their hearts. A fifth-year from Sligo changed her name to Constance, after the revolutionary Countess Markovitz, and boasted about spying through the gates of Lissadell, the Markovitz stately home, and seeing that renowned aristocrat walk the grounds with a gun. Another told of how her young uncle had lost a finger when his gun misfired during an ambush. But even though I had the most exciting story of all from that summer, I didn’t tell anyone about falling in love and I didn’t boast about my lover’s war adventures. I kept John close to me by keeping our world a secret—as I had always done.

Falling in love with him had turned my world on its head.

The convent that I had enjoyed so much up till now suddenly became a prison. The comfort of my friends was cloying and intrusive; the serenity of the nuns irritated me; the silence made me want to shout. I felt at one point I was going to burst, and so I wrote to Sheila and told her about John and my fears for him. Sheila was wild and feisty and I knew she’d understand. I missed her, and trusted her partly because she was on the other side of the world. I was afraid if I told anyone else, they would try and take it away. Maeve would have been initially thrilled, but I knew that she had a vocation and that she assumed I was going to join her. “We’ll have to look after each other now that Sheila’s gone,” she’d said.

All the girls, and Sister Stephanie, the Reverend Mother and my parents were expecting me to enter the convent. I was bright. I would do my matriculation and move into the provincial house as a postulant—a formality before I was received as a novice. Over the following two and a half years I would train to teach, before taking my final vows at the age of twenty. I would then stay in the Jesus and Mary Convent, living and working for the rest of my life. It was a plan I probably would have fallen in with, had I not met John again that summer. Falling in love had swept away my flimsy vocation like a butterfly in a storm, flailing and fluttering with doubt, then dashed on the hard rocks of certainty. At times I wished things were as simple as they had been before—that my future was assured, with my teachers and my parents satisfied, and I myself content enough. The craving for John’s company, for his affection, was so great that part of me wished I had not gone up to the Hogans’ that day and learned how he and I were meant to be together forever. But I had. And there was no going back.

We wrote each other short, urgent letters. I told my friends the correspondence was with a maiden aunt who had grown attached to me during the summer. John told me little of his life, only that he missed me and loved me. He said he was cutting his apprenticeship short to come home. He was worried about Maidy and Paud; there were troubled times ahead and he wanted to be close to them, and to me. I wrote to him once and begged him to come and get me. I wanted to run away from school and get married. John would not entertain the idea. He wrote: “I need money to do well by you, Eileen. I’ll not marry you poor. Two years will be time enough to set things right.”

John came home the following summer from Dublin. He moved in with Maidy and Paud, and we were inseparable. He didn’t talk about the war and I did not ask. It seemed to me as if it was over. I made myself believe the fighting was something that had happened in Dublin and could surely not touch the simple, quiet life we enjoyed in the country. In any case, that summer it was as if we were children again, walking the fields, laughing and talking, our friendship stronger than ever. Maidy and Paud were so happy to have their John back from Dublin that they would not hear of him helping on the farm for the first few weeks he was home, and my parents trusted me to spend the days as I pleased. The sun shone, the hedgerows were heavy with fruit and we were beyond happy. We experienced the freedom of touching each other and enjoyed long kisses hiding in the soft grass, but we always held ourselves back from what we really wanted.

One day, toward the end of the summer, my father came into my bedroom. It was early evening and I was getting ready to go out. John had been in Ballymorris looking for work and I had spent the day helping my mother in the garden, cleaning out the henhouse and tearing back the weeds from the edges of her rhubarb patch. It had been a balmy day, and the room was filled with an orange light. I checked myself in the mirror and wished John was there to see me looking as warm and rosy as I did.

“I’ve made preparations for us to travel to Galway to collect what you need for the convent. They have asked that you start back a week before school opens, so you can settle in before the new students arrive.”

My stomach tumbled over on itself. I thought I was going to be sick, but I kept my voice steady and said, “Yes, Father.”

Later that day, as we lay on a mattress of heather in his father’s bog, John kissed me harder than he had done before. I could feel the savage drive in him and instead of pulling back as I usually did, protecting us both from mortal sin, I pushed my hips toward him and ground myself into him. John pulled himself away, but I could feel his frustration.

It was an opportunity and I took it. I reached over and stroked his face, down across his chin and neck, then reached down and moved his hand into a caress across my breast. “Will we marry now, John? Then we can do as we please.”

He reached up with his free hand and firmly stopped me by the wrist, but I knew that I had won.

The day before my father was due to take me back to the convent to start as a novice teacher, six weeks after my eighteenth birthday, John and I ran away and got married. He collected me at dawn and carried me on the back of his bicycle to Ballymorris, where we caught the morning train to Dublin. I was shivering with the cold and with the enormity of what we were doing. On the train, John tucked me inside his greatcoat and I clung to his chest. I didn’t speak in case I might say something that would make him change his mind. So I listened for the thud of his heart and felt the hardness of his bones, the warmth of his blood and told myself that he would look after me.

We walked to St. Dominic’s on Dorset Street. It was a Franciscan church and John knew the friar. A small, chubby man, he shook John’s hand and greeted me so warmly that I felt we were doing nothing wrong. When John told him we had no certificates with us, he asked us to swear an oath that we were both baptized and free to marry. The chapel was cold and dark, and the familiar scent of incense reminded me that my father should be there. The friar called out the sacristan, a small man with a face like a ferret. “Mr. O’Neill will be your witness,” he said. “I will count as the second.” It was clear that they had done this a hundred times or more.

The ceremony was short and somber, but we both said our vows willingly. When we were finished, the friar stood with us outside for a few minutes and John talked politely with him. He asked John about men whom I had never met, and I tugged at John’s hand to indicate that I wanted to move on. I was excited, anxious to enjoy my new husband. Before we left, the friar put a hand on both our foreheads and blessed us, “Be kind and gentle to each other always.”

The sun was shining and it was so hot that I removed my coat and carried it across my arm. We walked down Dorset Street and turned left toward the heart of the city. I remembered Sheila telling us all how she had come to Dublin and drunk tea in a cafe in the city center. Looking around me, I was enthralled, tripping over my feet as I stared in shop windows, mesmerized by the glossy carriages and the women in feather hats with pale faces and scarlet lips. I saw five or more motorcars trundle past, their noisy engines belching out smoke—smart men at the wheels with hats and suits and big, delighted heads on them. I remembered the place Sheila had talked about—Bewley’s Cafe. I would get John to take me there.

Suddenly, from about halfway down Sackville Street, the landscape changed. To our left the tall, elegant buildings gave way into a no-man’s-land of rubble. Stones and dust and bricks in a disintegrated heap stood next to half a building with ornate windows and fancy coving that must have been a grand shop. Its side torn off, it looked like a once-lovely woman now destroyed. John stopped and his arm went limp where I was holding it. He was staring at a huge building to our right—like a palace, with tall, white pillars at the front. I was reminded of illustrations I had seen of ancient Rome. “It’s beautiful!” I said.

He looked at me as if I were mad; he was as white as a sheet. I looked again. Behind the beautiful facade, there was just sky. The fifty or more windows echoed despair and defeat like the cavernous eyes of a skeleton. Burned out, gutted.

“Is it the GPO?” I felt so stupid for asking.

Now John was gazing at me strangely—it was as if he wanted to say something and had then decided to hold back. My blood ran cold. Was this where the boy had lain dying? If so, I didn’t want him to name it. I didn’t want to think about death on our wedding day. Searching my new husband’s face for reassurance, I saw that he was gone from me. His shining eyes reflected the rubble that lay all around us, piles of concrete and dust. A cloud passed overhead; the rubble disappeared from his eyes, but the war was still alive in them. There was no love here for me, only for his country and for the boy whom he had held during his dying moments. I felt ghosts were calling to him in a language I didn’t understand.

I grabbed his arm again, bending it into a crook, letting him know that I needed him too, and started to walk, all but dragging him alongside me. So we marched through the debris of my husband’s war: scraggy waifs building castles out of broken bricks; half-naked workmen hanging from the side of buildings; fancy city people—all of them blind to the destruction, as I might have been had I lived here. As I
wanted
to be.

John stopped again at a pile of dust and crumbled stone in the center of the road. A small breeze caught up a puff of gray smoke, some of which settled on the bottom of my skirt. “Bastard Nelson.” It was the only thing he had said since we had left the steps of the church, and he didn’t sound like himself, but a triumphant yet embittered stranger.

I’d had enough. I wanted my day back, my John back. I tugged at his arm and said, “Come on, you silly man, and take me into Bewley’s for our wedding breakfast.” Defiant in the face of his war reverence, I added, “Or am I not enough of a lady for you?” I held his eye firmly and did not waver. Not for one moment did I betray my fear—that I had pushed him into marriage, and so God was going to punish me by sending him back to war. I stood and cocked my head to one side, expectantly, until I drew a smile out of him. The smile that made him belong to me again.

“You are too much of a lady, Ellie Hogan,” he said, grabbing my face and kissing me firmly on the lips in front of his hated, disintegrated Nelson. “That’s the problem.”