Mike hadn’t said much, but now he put his hand up, spread his fingers, and I realized he was holding the setting sun against his palm.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“What? What?” Mike asked.
“I just remembered Granny Honora told me that my da, your grandfather, would stand and salute the sun going down into the bay as a little boy just as you are doing now, Mike.”
“Mmmm,” Mike said. “I’ll come back, Aunt Nonie. I promise you that—for my father, for Michael Joseph Kelly.”
“You will,” I said.
“Has Uncle Ed ever been here?” he asked.
“He hasn’t,” I said. “But he’ll come too. Let’s make a pledge to get the whole kit and caboodle here someday.”
We followed the coast another thirty miles. Somewhere down there, under the sea he lay.
Rest in peace, Peter, I prayed. Aunt Máire had said that sometimes Galway Bay was lit from below. Phosphorescence. May that perpetual light shine upon you, my love.
“Someday,” Mike repeated, as the other Michael J. Kelly turned us away from the red and purple clouds and headed east.
* * *
“You cut it close enough,” Tommy said to us. She and Maud and Major Duggan were back in the general’s house. The whole lot of them sipping whiskey by the fire. I’d never seen Eleanor Roosevelt drink hard liquor. Preferred sherry usually. All very at ease. The meeting must have gone well.
“I quite understand, Mr. de Valera,” Eleanor Roosevelt was saying, “why you are trying to urge a continuation of the simple life. I, myself, facilitated the building of such a community in West Virginia.”
As we left de Valera shook each of our hands.
“Thank you, Miss Kelly,” he said to me. “I think we’ve reached a new understanding.” Still not sure if he remembered me. Not one to let on was Dev.
“Quite a nice man, Mr. de Valera. Related to the Spanish royal family I understand. So, not just…,” Eleanor Roosevelt said as we drove away from the general’s house.
I was between Eleanor Roosevelt and Tommy and so could stick my toe into Tommy’s foot. Not just plain Irish, Eleanor Roosevelt had meant to say but didn’t.
* * *
We’d left at first light but were flying into darkness. The sunrise and Ireland were behind us. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to find Peter’s grave. He was gone so completely. I thought I had accepted his death. But now, with Eleanor and Tommy asleep, and the stars right there in the plane’s window, I let myself weep. Raging inside. Killed because of politics! At least, to die fighting the Nazis had a certain nobility, but to lose your life in what was essentially a family feud seemed beyond sad.
I hadn’t realized that Tommy Thompson was awake and was watching me. But now she said, “A very emotional visit all around. I wish I could have brought my mother here. Her name was Kathleen, and at family parties, her brother would sing ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.’ But she never made it back. The saddest thing she ever said to me when she grew old was that so many of her friends had died, she didn’t look forward to reading the obituaries in the Boston papers anymore. All her generation was gone.”
“They were great women,” I said.
“They were indeed. I tried to explain them to Eleanor but she’s got this picture of an Irish washerwoman stuck in her mind and—”
“My granny was a washerwoman. She fed her children by scrubbing dirty laundry.” And so did the mother of the elegant First Lady of Chicago, I thought but didn’t say.
“Of course,” Tommy said, “and I’m proud of every one of them. But I want Eleanor to appreciate the drive and determination of those women. Their intelligence. We stand on their shoulders.”
“We do,” I said and I remembered Atlas holding up the heavens framed by the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The statue should have been a woman, I thought then and laughed out loud.
“What?” Tommy asked.
I told her that it should be a statue of a woman in the plaza of Rockefeller Center.
“Not a bad idea but fat chance.”
“There is one statue of a woman-warrior in New York,” I said. And I described St. Joan of Arc standing up in her stirrups looking over the Hudson River from that small park on Riverside Drive.
“Lots of Irish live up in that neighborhood,” Tommy said.
“I wonder if they might not visit her and say a quick prayer for courage like I did at the statues of St. Joan during the war in Paris. The sculptor was a woman too.”
“Have to tell Eleanor. Take her up there when things get tough,” Tommy said.
I wondered how many times Eleanor Roosevelt had talked out her worries to this woman, with her serviceable face and the deep laugh that had surprised me so often on this trip. She was a decade younger than I was but there was something wise about Tommy. How valuable she was to the First Lady. Even now a portable typewriter rested in her lap. Eleanor dictated copy for her column “My Day” to Tommy, who took it down in shorthand, then typed it up and sent it out to the syndicate of newspapers. Unusual for any woman to reach such a big audience. “Maybe someday there’ll be a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt in that park,” I said.
“Sshh.” Tommy touched my arm. Eleanor was stirring. “Funny, she has trouble sleeping at home but put her in a moving vehicle and she drops right off. But if she wakes up…”
“You know her needs,” I said.
“Too well, my husband said.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“I’m not now. Fred was a good man. A schoolteacher. I was working for Eleanor when I met him. So he knew my job was demanding. But I think it’s hard for a husband not to expect that his wife will be, well, a wife. Dinner on the table, children. You know.…”
“And did you? Do you have kids?”
“No. Might have been different if we had. But when I hit forty-five and it was obvious to Fred that he’d never be a father, he began to really resent the time I spent with Eleanor. I’d wasted my life and his too, he said, serving a woman who doesn’t really appreciate me. But, of course, he was wrong. Eleanor knows that she couldn’t do what she does without me.” Tommy laughed softly. “I’d say the efforts of Malvina Thompson Schneider may not be everything but they’re something.”
“Something indeed.”
“And you, Nora, did you sacrifice a husband and children on the bonfire of Ed Kelly, mayor of Chicago?”
“No. When I went to work for Ed I was already a widow, I think.”
“You think? How could you not be sure?”
“My husband was killed in Ireland during the Irish Civil War in 1922, but I’ve never seen his grave. I was hoping to visit it during this trip, but I was told his body had never been recovered from the sea.”
“Have you ever thought of marrying again?”
“No. Not that there have been many opportunities, but I couldn’t guarantee getting a dinner on the table. Although I would have liked to have had children.”
“Me, too. I regret not having at least one. Eleanor doesn’t understand how lucky she was. She had six no bother. Although she still mourns the baby who died. The first Franklin Junior and now the grown-up children are giving her fits.”
“My friend Rose says the children we didn’t have will never make us smile but they won’t make us cry either,” I said.
“Tommy.” Eleanor was awake. “I wonder if there’s coffee.”
We’d had none at Beech Hill. Mrs. Nicholson didn’t hold with coffee. She was a tea drinker. Plenty of tea in the North and she’d been trading it for butter with a farmer in Donegal who was suffering because British merchant ships weren’t going into Irish ports. The tea ration in the Free State was down to half an ounce a week, she’d told me, quite a hardship for people who usually drank four or five cups a day.
“Maybe you should tell FDR if he promises to send a fleet of cargo ships stuffed with tea, Ireland will sign on with the allies,” I’d said to Eleanor Roosevelt.<
br />
Tommy took out a thermos and some cups and poured Eleanor a coffee. “Got it from the kitchen of the camp mess.” She’d even brought along a bottle of milk and added some to Eleanor’s cup.
“No sugar,” Tommy said. “I didn’t like to ask for any. Even the servicemen have a restricted sugar allowance, which I am told they share with local families.” She turned to me, “Coffee, Nora?” and handed me a cup.
“Thanks,” I said. “What about Mike and the others in the cockpit?”
“I made sure they had their own thermos.”
“Good woman, Tommy,” I said.
“She is indeed,” Eleanor said. “I couldn’t live this life without her.”
“Now, Eleanor,” Tommy said.
“It’s true. You keep me organized and are so good in a crisis. After that incident in Miami, I wanted to fly down to Florida immediately and ride back on the train with Franklin. Tommy had a cooler head. We talked it over. Franklin said that it would be wrong to give the attempt on his life too much importance. We’d always known the risk was there. After all, Theodore Roosevelt became president because that Pole shot McKinley, and then when Uncle Teddy was campaigning for the Bull Moose Party, that crazy German shot him. Franklin always admired how he carried on. The bullet hit the folded-up pages of his speech, which he showed the crowd. Then he went on to talk for an hour. It was only when he reached the hospital in Chicago that it was discovered the bullet had gone into his chest. The press never knew how serious the wound was, though the incident certainly took the wind out of Uncle Teddy’s sails. And it might have contributed to his defeat. Edith Roosevelt kept her feelings to herself, and I knew Franklin would want me to do the same. After all, the Italian had missed.”
“Of course, not all assassins are immigrants, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “Look at John Wilkes Booth.”
She didn’t respond. Caught up in her own memories. “At first, we thought everyone had survived the attack and that Mayor Cermak would recover,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We all did. I was there.”
“You were?” Tommy asked. “Why?”
“Cermak hired me to photograph him with President Roosevelt. I was taking the picture when Zangara fired. I told them to move closer and sometimes I wonder…,” I said.
“Surely, you don’t blame yourself,” Tommy said.
“My goodness, Nora,” Eleanor said. “The only one responsible was the assassin.”
“But here’s the strangest part, Walter Winchell took me with him when he interviewed the gunman, so I took Zangara’s picture too. Winchell still believes the Outfit hired him to kill Cermak,” I said.
“And what do you think, Nora?” Eleanor Roosevelt asked.
“That an ignorant little man with a bad stomach who was full of hate and resentment almost changed history,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said.
Period. The end.
Suddenly, the plane plunged.
“Seat belts. Seat belts,” I heard Mike shout from the cockpit. I grabbed the arms of my seat. Held on tightly. Turbulence? A storm? Tommy was leaning over Eleanor, fastening her seat belt.
“My goodness,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.
I eased my hands away, found the buckle of the belt and the tongue and jammed them together. Now it felt as if we were climbing. I looked out the window. Where was the dawn? Shouldn’t there be more light by now? But a solid bank of dark clouds surrounded the plane and then suddenly lit up. Lightning flashed around us. Streaks of it. If one hits the plane, we’re finished.
“Bad,” I heard Tommy say. “Bad, bad, bad.”
The plane shimmied, and now I could see sheets of water on the window. Rain slashing at us.
“Mike,” I yelled. “Mike, what’s happening?”
“Be quiet,” Eleanor said to me. “Don’t disturb him.”
I remembered that Tommy had told me that the First Lady had taken flying lessons. Had wanted to get a pilot’s license. She seemed to know what was going on in the cockpit.
Help Mike, I prayed. Please, God, help him. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
I must have said the words aloud because Tommy looked over at me and put her finger to her lips. Eleanor had her forehead against the window, but pulled back when a rattatatat hit the plastic. Gunfire, I thought. Gunfire. A Nazi fighter plane was using the storm as a cover to attack us. There were no weapons on our plane. No defenses at all.
“We must hope the plane’s wings don’t ice over,” Eleanor said. “The sudden drop in temperature caused by the storm is dangerous and now with this hail…”
“Hail? That was hail?” I said.
“Relatively harmless. It can’t pierce the skin of the plane but if the winds don’t shift soon…”
The plane shook, and the wind pushed us to one side and then the other.
“Oh my God,” I said. “We’ll break apart.”
“Contain yourself, Nora,” Eleanor said. “We don’t want the pilot to hear you. Show some faith in your nephew. After all you were the one…” She didn’t have to finish the sentence.
I’d recommended Mike to lead her personal air crew. Plotted to take this trip and now … I’d saved Franklin but would kill Eleanor Roosevelt. Not Mike’s fault. He hadn’t the experience. I’d let my love for him blind me to the obvious. Now our aircraft seemed to be spiraling down. I remembered those awful newsreel clips from the Battle of Midway. The planes on fire twisting down into the ocean. Had lightning struck us? Were the instruments out? Maybe the wind had loosened the nuts and bolts holding the wings on. These planes had been turned out one after the other from factories proud of the speed in which they’d been constructed. Maybe more time should have been taken. Had Rosie really riveted this craft well?
Stop it, I told myself. She’s right. I do believe in Mike and women factory workers. Then I heard Mike shout.
“We’re through the worst of it. I’ll be able to find us some smooth air now,” Mike said.
And he did. Not five minutes later, we were cruising along as if nothing had happened.
“Well done, Captain,” Eleanor shouted toward the cockpit.
“Yes. Yes,” I said. “Great, Mike. Thank you. Thank you.”
We were safe but I was appalled. I’d been in worse situations. Had Tim McShane’s hands around my neck, ready to squeeze the life out of me. Nursed Marines at Belleau Wood, and yet I hadn’t lost the run of myself. But I had never been so frightened as I was during the storm. Bad enough for me to die, but losing the First Lady would have devastated the country. Especially if a Nazi fighter had shot us down. I’d been told since childhood that I had too much imagination and, as I sat back in my seat, I had to agree. But worse, had I become a coward? Me who had fought the Black and Tans. Acted as a messenger for the IRA. Me? Surprised yourself didn’t you, Nonie, said that voice inside me. This will teach you some compassion.
I looked over at Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one brave woman.
“I feel as if I’ve made a friend,” Tommy said, as she and Eleanor Roosevelt got into the car that would take them to New York from Floyd Bennett Field. The crew and I were having dinner at Mike and Mariann’s Brooklyn apartment, where I’d stay the night and leave on the train the next morning.
“I do, too, Tommy,” I said. “And it was an honor to travel with you, Mrs. Roosevelt.”
“I think it’s time for you to start calling me Eleanor, Nora,” she said to me.
“Thank you, Eleanor,” I said.
Mike asked me not to mention the “turbulence” to Mariann. I didn’t.
8
LATE NOVEMBER 1942
“You’re not yourself, Nora,” Margaret Kelly said to me a week after I arrived back in Chicago after my trip. She and Ed and I were driving home from what had come to be called “the Kelly Bowl,” the annual high school football championship game Ed had initiated in 1933, which was held at Soldier Field around Thanksgiving. The winner of the public league played the top Catholic
school team in a hard fought contest that always attracted a huge crowd. In 1937 the west side Austin High School defeated Leo, the south side high school named for a pope. One hundred twenty thousand fans filled Soldier Field—the biggest attendance anywhere ever for a football game. This year Leo had faced Tilden High School and the Catholics had beaten the Publics. Margaret wasn’t much of a sports fan but the proceeds of today’s game were going to the centers for servicemen and women that she oversaw. So she’d come onto the field at halftime to receive the check for one hundred thousand dollars from Ed, and I’d photographed the presentation. Cold on the field, and I was glad for the green Donegal tweed coat with the fur collar that was an early Christmas present from Ed and Margaret. A bit funny, that gift, because usually the money raised at the game went to Chicago’s own Christmas Benefit Fund to buy clothes for needy children. Ed had started the Fund in 1933, his first Christmas as mayor, and the Democratic Party organization in each ward delivered the packages to families. Even with all the New Deal programs, there was something to be said for the personal touch, and not bad to remind voters that the mayor cared. But this year the Armed Forces had priority, so I was the only one getting a coat from Ed Kelly.
And to be fair, with all the jobs in defense industries most kids in Chicago were fairly well dressed, as Ed told the newspapers. He was trying to explain why the second event in the annual fund-raising effort wasn’t going to happen at all. For the last eight years Ed had spearheaded the “Night of Stars,” an extravaganza at the stadium that lasted seven hours, with as many as forty acts mixing movie stars, big bands, opera singers, church choirs, tap dancers and vaudeville comics, in the come-one come-all spirit of our city. Where else but in Chicago would Gypsy Rose Lee introduce the surplice-wearing boys of the Paulist choir? Almost a half million dollars raised to clothe poor children, between the two events. But someone in the federal government had decided the “Night of Stars” was too frivolous for wartime, and besides, was charity really necessary when the economy was booming? Best not to draw attention to the pockets of poverty that still existed.
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