Of Irish Blood (8 page)

“Is he, uhm, involved with someone else?” Hoping she’d say yes, God forgive me. Share my guilt a bit.

“You mean married?” she asked. “He’s not, but he has family obligations.” And she refused to say more.

But then Rose and Mame and I didn’t talk to each other as freely as we did. Mame was living with Rose and John now, and I walled off a whole part of my life from them.

I watched every word. Well into the third year I felt so full of shame I told Tim that it was over, we were finished. And he made a show of being a gentleman, and said of course, if that was what I wanted. But then he started going on about how much he cared for me, hadn’t he even fallen in love with me, much to his surprise, and he wanted nothing more than to marry me.

“Dolly isn’t really well,” he said. “Always had a weak heart. She won’t see sixty.”

And then he dropped hints about what he’d inherit in Dolly’s will. He said he knew money didn’t mean all that much to me, but we’d be very comfortable. He could provide for our children. On and on and then he put his head in his hands and cried. And I thought, “The big galoot is in love for the first time in his life,” and well, we made it up. Now I hadn’t been much good at the lovemaking itself in the beginning but Tim liked teaching me. Patient—from training horses I guess. I was surprised at how I got the hang of it. The Fairy Woman all pleased with herself and taking me over completely.

But then two years later on my thirtieth birthday, April 18, 1909, all of a sudden I wanted to have a child. Decided I couldn’t wait much longer. Not that women in Bridgeport didn’t go on bearing children well into their forties, but I surprised myself with a kind of longing to hold my own baby. I thought raising Agnella had filled that need once and for all, and that she’d marry and bring her kids over to me. Plenty of babies to cuddle then send home.

But at seventeen, Agnella joined the BVMs, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. Over the moon Henrietta was. The whole family celebrated.

“Your mam would be proud and your granny Honora would have been so pleased,” Ed’s mother, Aunt Nelly, said to me. “She always said the Kellys owed a daughter to the convent, what with her changing her mind about becoming a nun when your grandfather came to her naked out of the waves of Galway Bay.”

“What?” I said. “Now that’s a story she never told me!”

I wondered if I could have talked to Granny Honora about Tim McShane were she alive. Surely, Aunt Máire would’ve understood. I remember the night Henrietta accused me of having Aunt Máire’s bad blood in me. I must have been seventeen or eighteen. Henrietta had caught me kissing Kevin Connelly in the gangway. I only did it because Kevin was such a gormless fellow, and I knew he’d be over the moon if I gave him the slightest peck and really what harm? Late and Mam and Granny Honora asleep—Henrietta too I thought but she saw us from the window and began screaming: “You harlot! You’re disgracing your family!” and then, “It’s Máire’s bad blood!!” A warm night and every house on Hillock with their windows open listening to her screech and looking down on us. Kevin had run away, left me turning around like a rabbit on a spit, cooked in the stares of the neighbors. I came upstairs, ready for Mam’s scolding, but she got angry at Henrietta. “You would not be living right now except for your great-aunt Máire and the help she gave Granny Honora. Two women running for their lives with eight children and Granny Honora expecting.”

Aunt Máire must have been in her seventies then. She lived away from Bridgeport in her own wonderful place on Michigan Avenue but she heard about my disgrace soon enough and came to the house the next night with a package wrapped in brown paper. She brought me up to the attic storage space way at the top of the house and we sat there, the two of us, smoking one of her cigarettes. “Never let what other people do or say push through to your real self,” she told me. In Ireland she’d been forced to work in the Big House. Have sex—she said it right out—with the landlord’s son. I knew he was my cousin Thomas’s father, and Daniel and Grace were his children too. She said that the landlords of Ireland made a practice of taking a bride’s first night. “They had a fancy French name for it, ‘droit du seigneur,’ but it was rape,” she said.

“And no one stopped them, Aunt Máire?”

“Who would?” she said. “Anyone who raised a hand against the landlord would be evicted or worse. One more weapon they used to keep us in our place.”

“Oh God, Aunt Máire, how did you survive it?”

“Survive?” she said. “I didn’t just survive. I beat him. We won, Nora. Your granny and me, we’re the victors and you are the proof. We got out. We spit in their eye, Nora. We truly did.”

“You are so brave, Aunt Máire,” I said.

Still are, I thought, because I knew there were some women in Bridgeport who’d objected to Máire living on her own and even now whispered about her “past” and her “gentlemen friends.” Máire took no notice. Then she unwrapped the package and shook out a red silk shawl, the fringe floating through the air. She told me that the colored nun who’d taken the family in when they arrived in New Orleans from Ireland gave it to her.

After Aunt Máire left I went into the bedroom, wrapped myself in the shawl, and walked into the parlor. When she saw me Henrietta screamed herself hoarse. Me flaunting myself. Shaming her. I started crying until Mam took her into the bedroom. Granny Honora made me a cup of tea, and told me if I was going to wear Aunt Máire’s shawl I’d best show a little of her spirit, and then told me the rest of the story. How the Scoundrel Pyke, their landlord, really wanted to take Granny Honora on her wedding day and … Granny couldn’t say the word.

“Rape you?” I said.

She nodded.

“Your aunt Máire stepped in. Her, a young widow already expecting her dead husband’s child. She took my place, and if she hadn’t, Honora, you might not be standing here for your grandfather was a young man and too brave for his own good and might very well have gone for the landlord’s son who was a soldier and allowed to shoot dead anyone who attacked him.”

When Sister Henrietta, the colored nun who helped them in New Orleans, heard that story she gave Aunt Máire the red shawl as a badge of honor and protection, Granny told me. “Your namesake,” I said to Henrietta after I repeated Granny’s story to her. “Shut up,” she replied. Dead now—Granny Honora, Aunt Máire. Would I be carrying on with Tim if they were living?

Sometimes after I come home from my few hours with Tim, I slip into the bedroom and settle the smooth silk over my shoulders and pray to Aunt Máire. What am I doing? Can I believe all his talk about his change of heart and us getting married? And did I even want to marry him? Tim was a crook, pure and simple, doping his horses and gambling and I didn’t want to know what else. Being a fallen woman when no one knew was one thing, but Mrs. Tim McShane? Was a baby worth that?

As much as I miss Agnella I’m glad she’s gone to the convent. Hard to lie to her. Sometimes I want to confess to Rose but she is deep in sorrow, three miscarriages already, and one born two months early, a boy who lived for an hour. I went with Rose to arrange a funeral Mass for the poor little guy but Father Sullivan said no funeral because the child hadn’t been baptized. I told him that the baby’s own father poured water over his head and said the words while Rose held him, and that any child of Rose McCabe Larney would be welcomed into heaven by every angel in the place. Still he’d refused us. Priests! What if he knew. I was at the communion rail every Sunday while “having carnal knowledge with a man not my husband”?

That’s what the priest at St. Michael’s German church on North Avenue called it when I stopped by there that Saturday afternoon a few weeks after I turned thirty-one. Here’s the place to get right with God, I thought. And then … marry Tim? Find another fellow? Maybe if my soul were clean I’d know what to do.

Any luck and the German priest won’t understand a word I say, I thought. But wouldn’t you know the fellow had a brogue. And very impatient. A warm day in May and I could smell the sweat off him. He told me to speak up and get to the point. So I said this man and I were acting like we were husband and wife and we weren’t. He said, “Carnal knowledge with a man not your husband is a mortal sin,” and asked me if he the man was married.

“No,” I said.

“Haven’t you a father or brother who’d make the man marry you?” he said.

“I’m not sure I want…” I started.

“So you like sinning? You enjoy being a fallen woman?”

I almost said, “At times I do, and that’s the problem.”

He went on and on, and after he wrestled a firm promise of amendment from me he mumbled
“Absolvo te”
in Latin and gave me ten rosaries as a penance.

I stepped out of the box into the gilt and glory of St. Michael’s Church, so different from the Irish plainness of St. Bridget’s. The archangel himself, dressed in shiny armor, held pride of place over the altar. This had been Aunt Nelly and Aunt Kate’s church as girls, and it reminded me of the Christmas cakes their German father taught their Irish mother to make. Ten layers stacked up and held together by different kinds of jams and jellies—apricot, strawberry—and drenched with whipped cream.
“Schlag”
they called it, and marzipan fruit sunk into the top and pushed into the sides, covering every inch. Good, but so rich. St. Bridget’s looked more like the devil’s food cake with white boiled frosting that Mam made for our birthdays. Delicious and you could eat more than one piece.

So, Blessed Mother, I said, kneeling in front of the altar that displayed her picture as Our Lady of Perpetual Help. What do I do? The priest accused me of enjoying my sin and, well, I do. If I didn’t, there’d be no problem. Not proper, I suppose, to speak to you about carnal knowledge. But I’ve checked every statue in the place trying to find a “Holy Woman, neither Virgin nor Martyr” like the missal says. Such saints did exist, but most of them were queens, Elizabeth of Hungary and Bridget of Sweden and Elizabeth of Portugal.

“Powerful women, girls,” Sister Ruth Eileen had told us during religion class at St. Xavier’s, “who served God and helped their husbands.”

Most of them had hotfooted it into the convent as soon as their husbands died, but at least they’d been with men. They were saints and yet they might understand why what happened with Tim in that small room seemed so natural. So, well, pleasant. In fact, when Tim wanted to hurry through our encounters to get back to his horses or collect Dolly, it was me who tried to prolong our sessions. I wonder, was it the same for those noble ladies? The kings, their husbands, off to the cabinet meeting and them in the bed ready for more?

I glanced up at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. A queen herself, outlined in gold and stern-faced with an oddly shaped infant Jesus sitting bolt upright in her arms. Greek, and the original painted by St. Luke, Sister Ruth Eileen had told me.

And then the prayer jumped out of me. Oh please, Mary, give me the strength to leave Tim. That’s what I want! Get away from him. Sure now. I’m so tired of being a sinner.

But then that Fairy Woman spoke up. What harm are you doing?

Well, there’s Dolly, I said.

That got a laugh.

And I’m lying all the time. Living two lives.

So. You earn good money, are your own boss, and have never done better work.

True enough.

After her marriage to John Larney, Rose left the studio and I acquired a staff of three girls to make patterns of my sketches and sew up sample dresses. I sat in my studio and sketched away, humming and singing, the pencil moving by itself as I drew skirts and blouses, added flounces and feathers.

And I must say, I was easier to be with at home after my time with Tim. I stayed on at Hillock. Getting my own place as Aunt Máire had would have led to talk. Important not to arouse suspicion. We Kellys weren’t the only family of aging brothers and sisters in Bridgeport living together.

Ten rosaries!, I thought. I’ll say them on the tram, I told Our Lady. Too quiet in here, too many voices.

I stood up and noticed a box built into the altar rail with a sign that said,
PETITIONS.
Next to it, a stack of papers with a pencil tied on a string.

Petitions. But what should I ask for? I remembered that the sisters at St. Xavier’s had an all-purpose category. “Pray for a special intention,” they’d say. So I wrote “Special Intention” on the paper and put it through the slit in the box. Not even sure what I wanted.

As I had left the church I thought of another saint—Augustine. “Make me chaste, Lord, but not now.” Amen to that.

But that winter I begin to take chances. Staying late with Tim after work, missing dinner, getting home at midnight.

And then early one morning in January 1911, I found Henrietta waiting up for me.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I got inspired,” I said, “stayed in the studio, lost track of time.”

“Inspired? Is that what it’s called nowadays? I saw you get out of an automobile. Whose?” Henrietta said.

“The night porter gave me a lift home.”

Actually I was driving Tim’s car, while he nodded off in the passenger seat. Proud of the driving skills he had taught me.

“What’s his name?”

“Martin Smith. He lives way out south near Fifty-fifth Street. You wouldn’t know him.” I would have come up with a better name but Henrietta wasn’t really listening, only shaking her head.

“You’re spoiled. Always have been. And now you’re disgracing the family!”

“What?” Oh dear God, did she know?

“Coming in all hours. Riding with the porter, no less!”

Thank God she’s such a snob.

“Henrietta, would you give it a rest. I’m going to bed.”

“And I’m going to wake Mike and tell him what his highfalutin sister’s really like.”

I grabbed Henrietta’s arm. “Don’t you go near Mike, Henrietta, or I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” She laughed. Here come the hysterics. But no, she stopped laughing and smiled.

“You think Mike won’t believe me. But I’ll get proof. I’ve known for a long time you’ve been up to something. I’ll find you out, Nonie. I will.” And just like that, she went up to bed.