Ed raised his hand, as if to say no need for details.
“I was old enough the second time, but I chose badly. He deserted me. In order to go to France, I had to divorce him, Ed.”
There it was. Divorce. Not tolerated by our tribe.
“But, Margaret,” I said. “He’s dead. Tell Ed that. That husband is dead.”
Margaret nodded.
“So there’s no impediment to another marriage. Margaret’s a widow, Ed,” I said. “Tell him, Margaret.”
But Margaret was silent, watching Ed. Now Aunt Nelly had told me that Ed had taken no interest at all in any of the young women she and her sister, Rose’s mother-in-law, Aunt Kate Larney, had introduced to him. I of all people understood Ed’s reluctance. No way I could replace Peter Keeley. But Ed needed a companion, and Ed Junior a mother. Aunt Nelly had told me she was feeling her age, and longed to turn over the running of the house to a capable woman. And here was Margaret. But, divorced. I waited.
Ed got up, walked over to Margaret, took her hand and turned to me. “Give us a few minutes, would you, Nonie?”
Please, God, I prayed, led Ed be open-minded. I thought of Agnella’s fellow Erigina—God is love, not rules. Come on, Ed. Take a risk. Follow your heart.
And he did.
6
Margaret and Ed married in April of 1924 in a little church outside of Kansas City. They set themselves up in Chicago where she transformed that empty barn of a house in Hyde Park into what the Tribune called “a gracious home with a well-appointed ballroom.” A ballroom … can you imagine?
“Mrs. Kelly entertains the crème de la crème of Chicago society.”
Done and dusted, I’d thought. Ed happy and taken care of, and now if only my brother Michael could find a kind woman who would be a mother to Mame’s children, then I could ease my way out of the web of Chicago, go back to Europe, and find Peter’s grave in Ireland.
“Please don’t go, Nonie,” Rose said, when I told her I was thinking of leaving. “I don’t get over to Argo as much as I want. John has been suffering recurring bouts of croup. Stay at least a few more months.”
But where was I going to live? Ed and Margaret needed their privacy. But I couldn’t spend the rest of my life on Hillock with my brother Mart and Ann, the three of us aging together. Ann was a policewoman and valued in the department, an undercover officer. She’d get a job in a factory to make sure the bosses paid the workers properly and obeyed safety regulations. She’d insisted that there be a safe exit in the Jackson lingerie factory. And when some idiot tossed a lit cigarette butt into a pile of scrap cotton, setting the whole place on fire, it was Ann led thirty women out of the place. She and Mart, who owned a small candy store, had developed their own way of living together.
No. I had to make enough money to rent the Chicago equivalent of my flat in the Place de Vosges, which wasn’t as grand as it sounds. The servants’ quarters under the eaves really. With a tiny bathroom, where a bidet took up most of the space. Amazing how chic Frenchwomen can be with such limited options for washing themselves. Though I suppose the bidet makes up for a lot.
“I don’t understand why you can’t stay here with us,” Ann said to me, when I explained my plan to her. “Why would you want to leave Bridgeport?”
Why, indeed. I tried to tell Ann that walking those streets I knew so well, while comforting, was also disturbing. If Henrietta had convinced Michael that I was a fallen woman, and a bad influence on his children, imagine what she’d gotten the neighbors to believe. No smoke without fire, Henrietta often said, and I’m sure she’d set the meetings of the Altar and Rosary Society of St. Bridget’s aflame.
But if I were to be able to rent a place, I needed a real salary, not just the bits and pieces I got from Ed. So I went looking for a job. Hadn’t my pictures been on the front page of the Tribune? I would be a newspaper photographer.
* * *
“Who are you?” the fellow asked me. A small man with a big camera. A speed graphic, I’d say, with a built-in flash. “I’m Nora Kelly,” I said.
“Waiting for the boss?”
I sat on a straight chair, ten feet from the wooden door with a glass panel that said “Dan Lewis, Photo Editor.” His office was stuck away in the basement of Tribune Tower. Maurine had told me Lewis hated the chaos of the newsroom. Claimed he couldn’t work on visuals with all that noise. She’d arranged this interview.
I’d been so nice to Henrietta since Ed and Margaret got married that my jaw hurt from clenching my teeth. Didn’t want her asking too many questions about Margaret’s past. To be fair, Henrietta didn’t beat Michael’s children or anything. She made sure Mike and the older girls were up, dressed, and got off to school on time. As for the little ones, well … thank God Marguerite was a good little mother to Frances.
Stella Lambert looked in every day and called me with any news she got from Jesse. Henrietta flat-out told Rose and me not to visit the children during the week, as it disrupted their schedule and interfered with their schoolwork. But she couldn’t keep us away on Sundays, and we were there for dinner, though sometimes John Larney could not join us. Ed and Ed Junior no longer came … Ed and Margaret always seemed to be busy. They had taken a subscription to the opera and their pictures were often on the society page. “Who does Margaret Kelly think she is anyway? Swanning around in fur coats and diamonds,” Henrietta had said. “Making a show of herself in the newspapers, like no decent woman should.”
As president of the South Park Commissioners, chief engineer of the city, and the driving force behind the new stadium, Ed was in a good position to get rich people to underwrite construction projects by offering to put their names on public buildings. Julius Rosenwald of Sears had promised to help Ed turn the Palace of Fine Arts into a science museum, though God only knows what would happen if Big Bill Thompson got in after the next election. He was threatening to run, but for now Ed was a hero. He was news. Though I worried a bit. Too much flash and the reporters would turn on him.
“It’s Ed wants us to be out and about,” Margaret had told me. “He wants to stay friendly with the people who helped save the Fine Arts building.”
“I suppose Mrs. Potter Palmer and the society women do have influence,” I’d said.
“And the Club of One Hundred,” she’d said.
This group of businessmen also wanted to make ours a beautiful city. Bankers, business owners, the top men in Chicago. Fellows who would have seen Ed as just another Mick on the take were now inviting him to lunch at their clubs. Introducing them to his elegant wife in the lobby of the Lyric Opera made it easier for Ed to do business with them, I supposed.
I understood that Ed and Margaret needed to have a life of their own. But I missed them at the Sunday dinners. Though I didn’t blame Margaret for not wanting to put up with Henrietta. And, of course, forever contrary, Henrietta took offense that they no longer came.
“Of course, she’s a barren woman,” Henrietta had said on one of those Sundays. “So what can you expect?”
I was leaving after dinner. “Oh, Henrietta, that’s so mean. Margaret might have children yet. I know Ed would love a houseful.”
“Then he should have married a girl from Bridgeport. I had my three children in six years.”
“But you were young,” I said. Hard to hear Henrietta going on about being a mother when I’d never seen her embrace the Kelly kids.
“Oh, you always take Margaret’s side. I suppose it’s because you’re two of a kind,” she said.
“Barren women?” My teeth grinding together.
“You and that Rose Larney. Are you glad now you gave up having children for that stupid little job at Montgomery Ward?”
I sucked in my breath. Don’t say anything, Nonie, don’t, I told myself. She wants a screaming row in front of Michael so that she can convince him that I’m too unstable to be around the children. I was used to her attacking me. But to hear her slag poor Rose, who’d suffered all those miscarriages—and now her hus
band John was ill. So far, though, I’d outsmarted Henrietta and kept the peace. The thought of Agnella kept me from out-and-out war, which would have disturbed Michael and the kids. I had to get my own apartment.
So here I was applying to be a Tribune photographer.
“I’m Manny Mandel,” the fellow finally said to me after he’d looked me up and down. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other if you get hired.”
“I hope we do,” I said. See how jumping to conclusions can be wrong? Just because he’s wearing that plaid suit, I thought, and slicks the last of his hair back with tonic I can smell, doesn’t mean he’s not a decent fellow.
“I take most of the front page pictures. So you have to be sure my credit gets typed on the prints when they’re sent to the composing room. The boss’s last secretary was a ditzy blonde who couldn’t spell, but I suppose a woman of your age should be able to get things right.”
“Oh,” I said. “You think I’m applying for a secretarial position?”
“High-class, too, aren’t you?” he said. And mimicked me, saying in a high voice “secretarial position.”
“I’m a photographer, Mr. Mandel,” I said. “Perhaps you recall the three-column shot on the front page last year? Ed Kelly, Mrs. Potter Palmer, and the bulldozer?”
“Oh, right. You’re the cousin—Ed Kelly’s flack. I told Maurine it was disgraceful for her to let him dictate to us like that. She should have called me. Next thing you know, we’ll be running his press releases as news stories.”
“Now, Mr. Mandel,” I said, and stood up. “How dare you,” I started.
“Button it, sister,” he said. “Maurine’s not a real reporter. She’s lucky that crazy dames are trigger happy. She could never write a real news story.” And Mandel walked away, leaving all the things I should have said spinning in my head.
Just then a voice called out through the door, “If you’re out there, come in.” Dan Lewis was no Manny Mandel. Tall and gangly, older than me, his desk piled with prints and photographs.
“I told Maurine I could give you five minutes, so talk,” he said.
And I did. Told him about my time in Paris. Eddie Steichen’s encouragement. The camera he gave me. My work with Floyd Gibbons, the war correspondent. He nodded at that.
“I knew Floyd,” he said. “Went over to radio. Deserted newspapers.”
I said nothing, but spread a selection of photographs on the desk.
“All very nice, Miss Kelly. But the Tribune doesn’t hire women photographers. This is a dangerous job. Our people cover gang rubouts, and have to catch public officials unaware. Thank you very much.”
“I took the photograph that saved the Fine Arts building,” I said. But Dan Lewis wasn’t listening, shuffling through prints on his desk. Didn’t look up as I left his office.
* * *
“I’m trying to move out, Ed, but my job hunting has not gone well,” I said to him that night. I told him about my encounter with Manny Mandel.
“He’s a snake,” Ed said. “Always trying to catch someone in a place he shouldn’t be. He tips off Wilcox.”
“Anything for a story, I guess.”
“Listen,” Ed said. “There’s enough happening between my building projects and the events we’re holding at the park fieldhouses. How about becoming the official South Park photographer at twenty-five dollars a week?” He reached in his pocket and handed me a twenty-dollar bill and a five. You don’t often see such big denominations. “Your first week’s salary.”
So now, I was a cousin with a city job. Our numbers were legion.
But where would I live? Girls lived at home until they married, and then they lived with their husbands. Even widows set up their oldest son as “the man of the family”—a handy façade. Unmarried women attached themselves to a married brother’s or sister’s family; or lived with a bachelor brother, as my sister Ann did; or found positions as maids or housekeepers. I had to figure out how to have a place of my own without shaming the family. Concierge, I thought. A respectable profession in Paris. Why not in Chicago?
7
“And you say Ed Kelly wants you to rent a flat here?” the construction foreman asked me, as he led me down a hallway, still full of cement dust, toward a big oak door.
What a place! Smack dab on Lake Michigan on a little curve of a street coming out from the Drake Hotel. Michael was putting in all the plumbing in this new building and had talked about it at Sunday dinner. Four bathrooms in each flat. Imagine! I’d introduced myself to this man as Michael’s sister, Ed’s cousin, and told him that I was working for the South Park District office and was interested in an apartment. The foreman had laughed.
“Only the likes of the Potter Palmers or the McCormicks can afford to live here,” he said. “No place for you unless you’re married to a rich old man.”
A palace. Faced with stone that was almost too white. I could only imagine what the façade looked like when the sun rose out of the lake and flooded it with color. And to be only steps from the beach. I remembered how Granny Honora would take us for picnics on the only bit of the lakeshore that wasn’t used as a rubbish heap in those days.
“This is as close as I can get you to Galway Bay,” she’d told us. “Now, half close your eyes and pretend you’re seeing water bluer than this, turning scarlet and gold as the sun goes down. The most beautiful sight in the world.”
And how right she was, because I myself had waded in Galway Bay and seen the setting sun lay down a shining path leading toward the west—to the enchanted isles, and Amerikay. The road my ancestors had followed.
But here in Chicago we faced the sunrise. Our lake came alive at first light. To see that spectacle right from my window every morning. Amazing. And me living here would kill Henrietta. I mean literally. She’d have a heart attack and die. Just to register her displeasure.
But, of course, I didn’t really want her dead. Too much sorrow in our family—but, oh, how I wanted to live here. Surely there must be some way.
The man was laughing. Really hee-hawing, his head thrown back. “You? Live here? Not unless you get a job as one of the tenant’s maids.”
“Oh, so you do have servants’ quarters,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “We were going to put the help up in the attic, but the tenants who rented the apartments prefer to have the maid and the cook live behind the kitchen. Handier, I guess. Many of them doing away with live-ins altogether. Our tenants have big houses up North,” he said. “Only want these for when they’re in the city.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “And I suppose they’d appreciate the services of a good concierge.”
“A what?”
“Concierge. When I lived in Paris, no building could survive without one.”
“Paris, huh? Well I know Mr. Marshall wants these places to be Frenchy. Called the rooms by all sorts of foreign names. We got a janitor going to live in the basement. Is that what you mean?”
“No. No. A concierge is not a janitor. She—and it’s usually a woman—takes personal care of the tenants. Sorts their mail. Screens their visitors…”
“Oh, we have doormen for that.”
“And are your doormen available to keep someone’s cat, or take care of their children in a pinch? Find a good seamstress? Or hairdresser? Get the tenants the best reservations at restaurants, or theater tickets?”
“The people who will be living here can do all that themselves.”
“Can they?” I asked. “Should they be expected to? In France the concierge is paid a salary, but I’d be willing to trade my services for a place in your attic at a reduced rate.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, at least get me an appointment with Mr. Marshall,” I said.
Again, that hee-hawing laugh. “They’re too busy to give the time of day to some dame with a screwy idea,” he said. “Besides, what will people think?—a single woman living on her own. Not respectable!”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said
. “My cousin, Ed Kelly, is president of the South Park Board. Didn’t Marshall and Fox design that building across from Jackson Park? The Windermere? I remember Ed saying something about helping them get the land, and their permits, and—”
“Alright, alright,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Three days later, I walked right past the receptionist at Marshall & Fox, Architects, into Mr. Marshall’s office. He was the born-and-bred Chicago fellow of the two. So we began with the who-do-you-know game. And, although he was a Protestant and not woven into the web of parishes, he’d hired construction crews and bought steel girders and cement, and so we could bat a few Irish names back and forth.
And, of course, he knew all about Parisian concierges.
“I’m a frequent visitor to the City of Light,” he said. And so we went down that road of favorite restaurants and sights, with a few detours for the war, and my service at the American hospital.
“Well,” he said. “It might not be bad to have a trained nurse on hand for our tenants.” And I nodded, God help me. After all, I had nursed, and even though “trained” might be stretching the truth a bit, I could handle any first aid emergency and call an ambulance. And I could see that by having some kind of position, I became less suspect. Not a fallen woman—a concierge.
“We planned to leave the attics unfinished,” he said. “Servants’ quarters are old-fashioned.”
“I’ll finish it. Put three rooms up there.”
Irish Above All Page 8