Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “Mmmmm,” I said. Sara Roosevelt was dead now and Eleanor Roosevelt in charge. I found the First Lady wearing a coverall as she supervised the movers who were packing boxes in the front room of the town houses at 47-49 East Sixty-Seventh. One front door led into both buildings. Plain enough for such a prominent wealthy family, but then I couldn’t imagine the Roosevelts enjoying the kind of fancy decorations I’d just seen at the Bouvier altar. I’d noticed a steep stairway going up five floors. Not easy for a man in a wheelchair.

  Grace had called her, so Eleanor Roosevelt greeted me as if we were long-time friends. “Welcome, welcome,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind if I continue working.”

  “Must be a lot of memories,” I said to Eleanor Roosevelt as we stood together among the boxes, while a maid wrapped china figurines for packing. The First Lady looked at me and shook her head a bit.

  “Five of our six children grew up here,” she said, “and one died here.” She walked across the room, took a clock from the mantel and handed it to the maid.

  She walked over to two straight-backed chair with woven bottoms. She gestured for me to sit down and sat facing me.

  “Grace said you wanted to see me but didn’t tell me why.”

  “Well, first, I wanted to let you know that we managed to find jobs in the Park District for those last two young women you recommended, and a place in the clerk’s office for the third.”

  “Good,” she said. “So many educated young Negro women have difficulty getting positions that they’re qualified for, and all three of these women have husbands in the service. I’m grateful for your help with them and the other young women over the years. It’s a shame that young Negro men face such blatant discrimination in the armed forces. Why the Navy won’t even allow Negro sailors to serve in the jobs that they were trained for. Won’t let them on ships. But I’m working on that,” she said.

  “Good,” I said.

  “I think at least one ship should have a colored crew, a kind of a test case to show that they can do the job. I’m trying to convince Franklin,” she said.

  “Good luck,” I said. “My nephew is serving in the Navy. In fact—” She interrupted me.

  “Please, Miss Kelly, if you are here to ask me to interfere as far as his assignments go, I beg you to please say no more. As you know, my own sons are in the service, one in combat with the Marines and though I would of course like them to be in some safe billet, Franklin and I have made it an iron-clad principle not to use our influence. It wouldn’t be honorable.”

  “Of course not,” I said. Now what do I do?

  “And now it’s teatime. We still have some semblance of a kitchen.” She turned to the maid. “Could you please bring us tea?”

  Case closed.

  “Thank you,” I said, though I really wanted to get out of there. Tea was just that. Tea. No cookies, no little sandwiches, no sugar, no milk. I took a sip. It was weak. We sat in silence for a minute and then really just for something to say, I found myself describing Mike and Mariann’s wedding. I guess I got a bit carried away telling her about the handsome Navy flyers in their white uniforms making an arc with their swords on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  “I was married on St. Patrick’s Day,” Eleanor said.

  “You chose that date?”

  “Only because my uncle Teddy was in New York to lead the parade and so could be in the wedding. He left the parade at Seventy-Sixth Street and came to my cousin’s house. We were married in their parlor.”

  “Not in church?”

  “Better for Uncle Teddy that it be private.”

  “Oh.” Now what? I started to tell her about how I’d gone to Mike’s graduation at Pensacola and how Rose had pinned on his golden wings. “Such excellent pilots in the Navy,” I said. “Is your air crew from the Navy? Or are they from the Army Air Corps?”

  “My air crew?”

  “Yes. The fellows that take you around when you visit the troops. I’ve been reading the articles that talk about how important your visits are to the men’s morale.”

  “I think so. Unfortunately there are some in the military who disagree.”

  “They think a woman’s place is in the home?” I said.

  “More or less,” she said.

  “And you let them restrict you?”

  “What can I do? I depend on the military for transport, and every time I mention going overseas there’s one general who gets so red in the face I fear for his blood pressure.”

  “Too bad. It’s not just the GIs. Imagine what a visit from you would mean to the people of England, or even Ireland for that matter. I mean Mike has been escorting convoys across the Atlantic and he tells me there’s a large Navy base in Derry with a full complement of Marines.”

  “Really? I’ve been wanting to visit the Marines in a combat zone because of my son, but I was told they’re all in the Pacific and General MacArthur absolutely refuses to give me permission to go there.”

  “Ireland is a lot closer,” I said. “And Mike knows the route very well.”

  “It is, and I suppose your nephew just happens to be available to fly me over there.”

  I took a sip of the tea and said nothing. Let her think.

  “It’s interesting, Franklin has been fretting about the Irish prime minister, that man de Valera. Neutral, but is he leaning toward Germany?”

  “Oh no, definitely not,” I said. “I’ve known him for years. He’s awkward but you couldn’t expect him to commit Ireland to war. The country’s barely supporting itself. And you know there are tens of thousands of Irishmen serving in the British Army, not to mention the millions of Irish-Americans serving in our own forces.”

  “Perhaps if I did go to Ireland I could speak to him. Unofficially of course.”

  “That’s an excellent idea and I could arrange a meeting.”

  She put her teacup and saucer down on a table. “Yes, you might be an asset on such a trip,” she said.

  “Think of the good publicity you’d get,” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean much to you but still, the papers would love it if a young man named Kelly was flying the First Lady over to the Old Sod.” I almost said shure and begorrah.

  “Something to think about,” she said.

  Come on, Eleanor, please, please, please. But she didn’t say any more, only wrote down the name of Mike’s squadron commander.

  At the end of June half the squadron was transferred to the Pacific, but Mike, Jerry, and Denis Barnes stayed at Floyd Bennett Field, and in October Mike called me.

  “You won’t believe it, Aunt Nonie, I’m flying the First Lady to north Ireland.”

  And I’ll be going with you, Mike, I thought but didn’t say. Some things should be a surprise.

  3

  NOVEMBER 1942

  “Good for you, Nonie,” Ed said to me when I told him about the trip I was planning with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mike.

  The war had taken over Ed and Margaret. More and more responsibility for him as head of the civil defense area covering four states. He was in charge of all war production facilities. Margaret and Lucky Davis now oversaw the care, feeding and entertainment of tens of thousands of servicemen and women—women were enlisting too—passing through Chicago.

  Lucky’s daughter, Nancy, was a kind of junior chairman with them and took charge of the amateur dramatic shows put on at the USO. She was a good actress herself and had grown into an attractive young woman in a way familiar to the young men watching. Pretty, not beautiful. Dark-haired and small. She wasn’t a blonde vamp or an unapproachable movie star, but the girl-back-home all the servicemen hoped was waiting for them. That was the part she played in the skits, always ending with a song. Not a great voice but a lot of personality. I know both Ed’s sons had crushes on Nancy.

  An intelligent girl, she’d graduated from Smith College. I’d thought she would resist following in her mother’s footsteps into acting as a profession. She was Nancy Davis now. Loyal Davis had adopted he
r when she was fifteen. Lucky Davis told Margaret that Nancy herself initiated the adoption. “She actually met her father for lunch to tell him she was more or less divorcing him.” So Nancy became the doctor’s very respectable daughter. A student at Girls’ Latin School of Chicago and then Smith College. A Chicago Junior Leaguer. I expected that soon she’d marry some young officer and join Margaret and her mother in that mix of shopping, lunch, and good works that occupied the ladies who lived along Lake Shore Drive. But a few years before, President Roosevelt had sent representatives of the March of Dimes, his favorite charity, to see Ed. They wanted to make a film in Chicago to use as a fund-raiser to dramatize the threat of polio.

  Ed suggested Nancy for a part and she got the role and did a good job. Her mother still had a lot of friends in Hollywood. I’d met ZaSu Pitts in their apartment and found out that she knew Maurine Watkins.

  “Women used to run the place,” she’d told us. “Wrote the scripts, even directed the movies. My friend Frances Marion must have done a hundred scenarios but now, well, it’s big business and the men have taken over. But there are still a few of us out there and if Nancy wants to give it a go we can help.”

  That was before the war. Before all of our lives changed. And yet Nancy was finding a way to act and help in the war effort. Chicago was going to lose one of its young matrons to Hollywood, I’d thought.

  Ed told me that only about a quarter of the Army was actually fighting on the front lines. Most were still training. There had been landings in North Africa and terrible battles in the Pacific where the Marines had suffered high casualties, but that was only a small percentage of everyone serving. Sailors were in danger from U-boats but by now the battle of the Atlantic was going our way. Most men were relatively safe except for the airmen. The airmen. Mike and his friends.

  We’d gotten more details now about what had happened at Midway and Guadalcanal. The March of Time newsreels had shown footage of planes shot down by Japanese antiaircraft guns. A blast of flame and then a plunge into the sea. There were also pictures of planes crashing into the decks of carriers or over-shooting and dropping into the sea.

  No safe billets for flyers. I hoped Eleanor Roosevelt’s trip would at least buy Mike a little time. How would he react to me riding along? Would he catch on? Think I’d compromised his honor?

  Mostly he was confused.

  “But surely there are military photographers who could accompany the First Lady?” he said to me when I arrived at his apartment in Brooklyn the night before we were to depart.

  “Yes, but I speak the language of the country we’ll be visiting.”

  “Wait a minute, Aunt Nonie, they speak English in Great Britain and Ireland.”

  “They do but you’ll see. Some translation is needed.”

  We were flying in a bigger plane than the SBDs Mike was used to, and he’d had to undergo extra training. There were three on the crew—Jerry Boucher was his copilot and Denis Barnes the navigator. They were all on board as I climbed the ladder onto the plane the next morning.

  “Thanks,” Denis Barnes said to me and smiled. I think he understood that I had engineered the assignment. He’d been in combat, had seen friends’ planes burst into flames and taken fire himself. No foolishness for him about honor. “Don’t tell Mike,” I whispered to him as I sat down.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was already aboard along with her secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson. At fifty, she was the youngest of the three of us. The First Lady was fifty-nine, and I was sixty-three.

  We flew for about six hours and then landed at Gander Airport in Newfoundland to refuel. Took off and continued on through the night. Uncomfortable and cold in the plane, but exhaustion put us all to sleep.

  Mike called me to the cockpit to see the sun rising out of the sea.

  “That’s it, Aunt Nonie,” Mike said pointing down below, “that’s Ireland,” a kind of hitch in his voice. He had never known his great-grandmother Honora, or even my mother, his own grandmother or any of the Kellys who had been born here. But still Ireland was the land of his ancestors, and the birthplace of his own mother. We were flying over Ireland, headed for England, but we’d be stopping here on our return.

  “It really is green,” Mike said, pointing at the fields lit by first light, rolling down into the sea, waves breaking against the rocks.

  “Oh, Mike. Mike. That’s it. That’s Galway Bay. See where the water turns from blue to gray, that’s Galway Bay meeting the Atlantic Ocean. Your great-grandmother Honora and her sister rowed a currach full of their children out just at that place and somehow caught a ship and that’s why we’re alive today.”

  “Is that true, Aunt Nonie? I thought it was just a made-up story. Aunt Henrietta laughed at Dad when he told it to us.”

  How dare Henrietta … “It’s true,” I said. “It’s true! My father, your grandfather, was one of the little boys.”

  Jerry Boucher was looking down too. “My family’s from somewhere in Ireland but I don’t know where.”

  “Kilkenny, maybe, with a Norman name like Boucher,” I said. “What about you, Denis?”

  “My family’s been in North Carolina forever. My father said we were Scotch-Irish originally.”

  “There’s no such thing,” I said. “When your ancestors came from Ulster to America they thought of themselves as Irish. After all it was over three hundred years since they’d come from Scotland and some of Ireland’s greatest patriots were Presbyterians from the North—”

  “Aunt Nonie,” Mike said. “Too early for a history lesson.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt was standing in the door of the cockpit. “So, land,” she said.

  Tommy Thompson had come up behind her. “I’ve never seen Europe before,” she said.

  “Well, Ireland’s not strictly Europe,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “There’d be no Europe if Irish monks hadn’t traveled over there bringing Christianity and education to people who would have stayed stuck in the Dark Ages.”

  “Aunt Nonie,” Mike said again.

  “Sorry. It’s just that Ireland is the ancestral ground for tens of millions of Americans. Even some who don’t even realize they have such a rich heritage. Charlemagne and his court couldn’t even read or write until we showed up and—”

  “Maybe you ladies better take your seats. Denis tells me we’re going to hit some rough air,” Mike said. “We should be landing in England in two hours.”

  He was right. We got a pretty good bouncing as we flew across Ireland and the Irish Sea. I didn’t get up to observe the English countryside and we stayed in our seats as we landed at an RAF base in Bristol.

  The First Lady, Tommy, and I would take a train to London where the king and queen would meet us. The royals didn’t come to airports.

  Our own Army Air Corps had squadrons stationed in England. Mike had told me that B-52s took part in bombing raids over Germany and that soon there’d be more American bases all over England. But it became obvious when we landed that the Brits were in charge.

  Two black cars waited for us on the tarmac. Denis opened the door of the plane and jumped down. Jerry handed him a ladder that he attached. Rickety-enough looking and steep. Denis offered a hand to Eleanor Roosevelt but she settled the fur piece she wore around her shoulders and stepped down on her own. Not a bother on her. Tommy followed. But I was glad to reach down and accept Denis’s help. Wouldn’t do to fall on my face on arrival. A British officer, very correct in his uniform, stood waiting for us. An older fellow. I could see gray hair under his cap. He had a long wrinkled face, though not from smiling, I’d say, because his lips hardly moved as he nodded to Eleanor Roosevelt.

  The British officer gestured the First Lady and Tommy toward the car, where a soldier held the door open. They got in. I stepped forward. The boys will probably bunk on the base, I thought. Wonder where we will be staying.

  Mike handed me my camera bag and valise. Jerry gave Mrs. Roosevelt’s and Tommy’s
luggage to a British soldier who put it in the trunk of a car. The officer started to get in the front seat of the car.

  “Excuse me,” I said to him. “I’m with Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “Who are you?” he said. Oh that accent. My teeth clamped together. He both swallowed and elongated those words, making them an insult. Listen, buddy, I wanted to say, I’ve met your type before. One of you tried to hang me as a spy and look where I am now, traveling with the First Lady of the United States on a plane flown by my nephew. So don’t you drawl at me.

  “I’m Nora Kelly. Mrs. Roosevelt’s official photographer.”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt is spending the next few days with the prime minister and his wife at their country house, Chequers. It’s a private visit. Your services will not be required,” he said.

  “But I think a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt with Winston and Clementine would really be swell,” I said. “The American papers will eat it up.”

  The officer couldn’t stop himself from making a face. Only a flicker, but definitely he squinched his forehead and pursed his lips. I’d gotten to him. Good. He sees me as a crass American. Well, I’ll be one.

  “I regret Miss, what was your name again?”

  “Kelly. Nora Kelly.”

  “Irish?” he said. And the squinch came back. “I’m surprised that…” He stopped himself.

  “Yes. I’m looking forward to introducing Eleanor Roosevelt to Ireland. Derry is such a beautiful city,” I said.

  “You’ll be going to Northern Ireland which is part of the United Kingdom, and the city is Londonderry,” he said.

  Mike and the boys had heard the last of this exchange.

  “As a matter of fact our whole crew has Irish roots,” Mike said. “So we’re all looking forward to that part of our trip. But of course we’re anxious to see London, too.”