Of Irish Blood (7 page)

He points to the big window. “North light.”

“Oh, Rose,” I say when he’s left. “Remember what Sister Immaculée called those Paris painter’s studios? Ateliers? We have our very own atelier.”

“Except we need paper and pins and scissors and … Oh, Nonie, do you think they’ll get me a sewing machine?”

“Let’s make a list. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’” I say, using Granny Honora’s brogue.

And how fast the day goes. We don’t even think of lunch. I forget about Jim’s cold and we wave Mame away when she comes by for a chat. Rose and me in a fever—our place, our studio.

Atelier, I whisper to myself. The Fairy Woman can’t get me here. More pleasure in working than from kissing Tim McShane. Taking my pleasure like an artist, I think.

Late when we leave, and later still when I get home. Long past dinner, startled to see every light on in the parlor. Jim …

Dr. Haley is leaving when I come in, standing in the doorway talking to Mike. I hear him say, “Keep them drinking water and hot tea, steam to help them breathe, and hope their lungs can throw it off.”

Them?

“Is Jim worse, Mike?” I ask.

“He is, Nonie. And Mam’s … Henrietta said she started coughing this morning. Couldn’t stop.”

“Did Henrietta try tea with lemon and honey? Did she call the doctor right away?” I say.

Henrietta comes out of the bedroom. I start to go to Mam but Henrietta puts her hand on my arm.

“Mam’s finally sleeping,” she says. “Leave her alone.”

But I shake off Henrietta and go in. Annie is sitting in the chair next to the bed watching Mam. Terrible jagged gulps of air Mam is taking in, not breathing easy in sleep.

Annie takes my hand. “She’s strong. She’s not old like Granny Honora.”

Yes, I think. Mam’s only fifty-three and she’s never been sick. Had seven children and not a bother on her. Only a young girl when she traveled from Ireland with her brothers, her parents dead, the worst of the Great Starvation over, but bad times nevertheless. Always proud she lived in New York.

“Well, Jersey City, really, but I’ve walked the streets of Manhattan, I have,” she’d say.

“Are they paved with gold, Mam?” I asked, teasing her.

“They were, Nonie, because my brothers were well paid for paving them.”

Her brothers. Luke and Dominic. Do they know?

I go out to the kitchen to ask Henrietta has she told them Mam is sick.

“No need to make a show of ourselves,” Henrietta says. “Mam’ll be fine, and we don’t want to look like fools alarmed over nothing.”

Saturday the next day, thank God, and my day off, though I’d not have gone in to work anyway. Late afternoon when Jim becomes delirious, trying to get out of bed. Mike has to hold him down. Jim is saying that he has to help Da at the blacksmith shop, the place he’d worked as a boy.

Mam says nothing. Coughing and coughing, her shoulders shaking. We try steam, me holding the towel over her head and Annie offering the bowl while Agnella sits on the floor next to her holding Mam’s hand.

Henrietta comes marching in. “Too many people,” she says, and makes us leave.

We wait in the kitchen, taking our turns sitting with her. No change Sunday. Jim in the parlor, Mam in the bedroom as Dr. Haley goes from one to the next not saying much. We eat cold spuds and chunks of ham for dinner, but that night Joe Murphy’s wife brings a pot of stew and loaves of fresh-baked brown bread. I don’t go to work on Monday. Rose comes by. She’ll tell Mr. Bartlett why I’m missing.

Mam’s brothers come, and Aunt Kate and Aunt Nelly with Uncle Stephen, and Uncle Michael and his wife, Mary Chambers. Dr. Haley only allows each one a few minutes.

“How’re you keeping, Bridey?” they say to her, and Mam tries to smile.

Two days of this and Dr. Haley says, “That’s it. She must rest.”

What with sleeping and coughing, Mam is only able to take a little soup, some tea.

“Mam, Mam,” I murmur over and over when it is my time to sit with her. She tries to talk but then the coughing takes over. “Don’t, Mam, stay still.”

We don’t tell her when Jim dies, early in the morning on June 30th. Jim—my silent brother—keeping himself to himself but a good fellow. Oh, Jim, I hardly knew you! Lost in our big chattering family. Me, too busy bickering with Henrietta to take much notice of you. Dear Jim, forgive me. Rest in peace. And then another prayer. Dear God, you took my brother. Leave my mother, please God. Please!

Ed lays Jim out at his new funeral home. Only one night for the wake, and the funeral Mass is the next morning. I stay with Mam while the rest go to church.

She wakes up. “Jim, Nonie. How’s Jim?”

“He’s fine,” I start.

But she tries to sit up. “Jim?” she calls out. “Jim?”

“He’s … he’s gone, Mam. The Mass is going on now.”

She turns, reaching under her pillow, grabbing for something.

“Your beads, Mam?”

“Please.”

I take the rosary from the dresser and put them in Mam’s hands. She lies back against the pillows and starts fingering the wooden beads Da carved for her.

She crosses herself. “In the name of the Father,” she manages to say before the coughing shakes her. “And of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” I finish. Then I say the Our Father, the first Hail Mary.

The spasms weaken Mam but she tries to pray with me. I hate saying “now and at the hour of our death.”

“Hold on, Mam,” I whisper to her. “Outlast it.”

“I’m tired, Nonie. So tired.”

“Rest, Mam,” I say.

“Nonie,” she says. “You must be good, Nonie. Promise me. A woman has only her good name and without it…” Another spasm.

“Quiet, Mam.”

I stroke her forehead. Now why would she say such a thing? I haven’t seen Tim McShane—or thought of him even—since last week. Far too worried about Mam.

“Mam,” I whisper.

She closes her eyes. Breathing easier. Asleep. She’ll wake up better. But she doesn’t.

Thank God all of us are with her as the end comes. Even my brother Ed and his wife come from Indiana.

Henrietta kneels at the side of her bed, sobbing. Annie stands between Mart and Mike, not moving, Ed next to Agnella behind them, Henrietta’s boys in the doorway, and me sitting on the bed beside my mother, stroking her hair, holding her hand … not sure she is still alive.

But then she opens her eyes. “Paddy,” she says, looking off toward the window, and then clear as anything to us: “Your father’s come to take me home.”

Gone in that moment. Her spirit free before that awful sound—the death rattle—goes through her body.

Gone. And the rest of us more alone than ever before.

*   *   *

Tim McShane comes to my mother’s wake, he and Dolly McKee marching right into the Kelly and Doran Funeral Parlor. Dolly stands by the coffin and sings an “Ave Maria” that no one will ever forget. I feel nothing when Tim shakes my hand. Thank God. Only thinking of Mam. How can I go on without her?

“You’ll feel her presence,” Aunt Nelly promises me.

And I do have a sense that she’s glad to take her place next to Da, not in Calvary. No room. We bury them both in the new cemetery Mount Carmel. Ed arranges everything, buys the plot, sends a crew from the Sanitary District to dig Da’s coffin up in Calvary, drive it to Mount Carmel. All done in one day, and Da ready to be buried with Mam.

“Excessive,” Henrietta says. “Expensive.”

But Jesus Christ, don’t we want them to be together?

“What about Granny Honora?” I say to Ed. “You left her there in Calvary.”

“She’s with Aunt Máire, Uncle Patrick, and Maire’s son Johnny Og,” Ed says. “Colonel Mulligan’s there too, all the soldiers from the Civil War. Let her be, Nonie.”

Jim and Mam, gone within a week. I can’t even form the thought. Still expect Mam to walk into the kitchen …

*   *   *

Another week before I can go back to work. Awful staying home with Henrietta. I resolved for Mam’s sake to be kind and loving to her. After all, we share the same sorrow but, dear God, Henrietta would try the patience of a saint.

“If only you had told me that first night,” she said to me. “Jim should have been moved to the hospital. Wouldn’t have infected Mam. Could have saved them both.” Ridiculous but still …

Glad to be in the studio with Rose again.

“You’ll never get over losing her,” Rose says. “But your mother’ll be with you. And you will be happy again, Nonie. I know it seems impossible, but she’ll make sure of that. She wants you to be happy. I know she does.”

And some solace in the work. We get the new Singer and Rose makes a dress from one of my sketches that Mr. Bartlett approves. The pattern will be sold in the catalog.

But I’m so lonely for Mam! A month somehow passes. And then one night I come out of Ward’s to find Tim McShane standing on the corner. He takes my arm and leads me across the street to where the Oldsmobile is parked.

He helps me up, and I sit close to him as we drive north and then east to a small hotel on State Street and a shabby room where the Fairy Woman takes me over.

And so it begins.

3

STATE STREET HOTEL

1903–1911

Now, in Granny Honora’s stories the women do not go back and forth to fairyland, but that’s me during the next eight years. For all Tim’s talk about how he and Dolly McKee live separate lives, they reside together. He has a suite down the hall from hers at the Palmer House. But he also rents a room in that small hotel on State Street near Holy Name Cathedral and the big white stone church reproaches me every time I pass it on my way back from Tim’s to my real life. We meet every Tuesday and Thursday from four to seven when Dolly has her special beauty treatments, though not during Christmas when I’m with my family or in August when Tim and Dolly go to Saratoga.

Sometimes he’ll telephone me at Montgomery Ward. Bold as you please, telling my assistant that Mrs. Dolly McKee would like to see Miss Kelly’s latest sketches or wants to try on a dress. Yes, believe it or not, Tim makes Dolly our go-between. She doesn’t know it, or so I think, and of course everyone at Montgomery Ward’s only too delighted to have the great Dolly McKee actually ordering our designs. No one more than Rose, who not only makes the patterns for Dolly, but sews them into beautiful dresses for her. Not the fabulous gowns Dolly wears onstage, or even the daytime costumes she appears in for her lunches at Henricci’s or the Berghoff. No, our dresses are the simple clothes she wears “in my private time” as she told the
Tribune
in the article Tim arranged to have written with my sketches of Dolly in our dresses as illustrations.

Now, I thought I’d be so consumed with guilt that I wouldn’t be able to look Dolly McKee in the face, but instead I laugh with her over lunch, and take my entire family to McVicker’s Theatre when the Cohans come to town. Dolly sings “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms”—going on about love’s constancy to George M. while offstage Tim and I betray her every week.

Oh, I am bothered at the beginning. During that first year I resolved over and over not to climb the stairs to that room ever again. But Tim said I was helping Dolly really, as he was much kinder and more caring with her now that we had our afternoons on North State Street. I have to admit I was nicer to Henrietta, too. She didn’t annoy me as much. Still ranting and raging at the drop of a hat but now I’d say to myself, “She’s frustrated,” because Tim had told me women needed sex just as much as men did only most of them didn’t know it.

“Always going on about love when it’s really sex they want,” he’d say, as if love was the greatest fool’s game going.

“And you’re speaking from experience, I suppose,” I said as we got dressed one afternoon a year and a half into our, well, our “special friendship,” as Tim called it.

“I am. ‘Do you love me?’” he said in a high voice. “How the hell do I know? No such foolishness with Dolly or you either, Nonie. Sorry,
Nora
.”

I insisted from the beginning that he call me only Nora. Nonie was the real me, the Bridgeport girl who went to ten o’clock Mass at St. Bridget’s on Sundays and gave Henrietta a share of her pay every Friday, who danced at Rose’s wedding when she married John Larney in 1905 and walked along the Lake with Ed two years later when he told me with a kind of matter-of-fact sadness why he and Mame would never marry.

“Politics,” he’d said. “She doesn’t understand why I spend so much time on campaigns and elections. I told her what Uncle Patrick said. Remember?” he asked me.

Of course I did. Drummed into our heads. Politics would save us. The Irish died during the Great Starvation because they didn’t have their own aldermen and precinct captains.

“If our people had been in office all that food would not have been sent out of the country. One million people would not have been murdered,” Uncle Patrick told us.

“I don’t know, Ed,” I said to him. “Sometimes it’s hard to see fellows like Bathhouse John Kelly or Hinky Dink McKenna as noble figures. What would Uncle Patrick think of them?”

“A few bad apples,” Ed said.

“Well, you know, Ed,” I said. “Mame’s not fond of drink or drinkers, and politics always seems to happen in saloons.”

“What do you expect when half the City Council members own one or more bars?” Ed said. “Where else can workingmen gather? All right for the rich with their gentlemen’s clubs.”

“Seems like a lot of these champions of the common man are getting rich themselves,” I said.

“So what, Nonie? A bigger house, a car. That’s not being really rich. Our boys don’t own companies that gouge workers. They stand up for us. Where would I be right now without Tom Casey?”

As John Larney had predicted, Ed’s old job at the Sanitary District was given to the brother-in-law of a Republican alderman while Ed was away with the army surveyors. Tom Casey, our Democratic alderman, had enough clout to get it back for him.

“But that was only right. You were the best man for the job,” I said.

And Ed only laughed.

I didn’t tell him that I thought there might be another reason for Mame’s reluctance. At Rose’s wedding she told me she was in love with someone, waiting for him, though she wouldn’t tell me who it was.