by Kate Kelly
He looks up from her hand still held in his, dark eyes alive with mischief. “Don’t you?” The question like a dropped stone ripples in the quiet pond around them. “Now, about that drink?” Leland graciously breaks the tension.
“I’ll have a ginger ale.”
“Ruby Grace.” Leland laughs hard and loud. “Prohibition is over. Let’s not snub our noses at those who risked life and limb in order to imbibe.”
Laughing again, enjoying this banter, Ruby replies, “Prohibition was never big in Canada, although being American by birth perhaps I will have a drink in salute to those brave souls.”
“That’s my girl. What would you like? I’ll get you anything, Ruby Grace.”
Ruby laughs again, feeling a rush of happiness bubbling up with the sound. “Anything?”
Looking squarely into her eyes, Leland is suddenly serious. “Yes,” he replies. “Anything.”
So it goes, this love growing between them. Their words become caresses as their eyes lock each other in place. Their connection is like a drug, an addiction that neither one of them can control, a selfish, driving need that grows stronger with each encounter.
They both feel a palpable heat, frightening and exciting at the same time. She wants to hold him, to smell him, to be overwhelmed by him in every way. Only when she is physically away from him does she allow herself to feel any guilt. She has begun to lead a double life. During the long days at home—the work of a wife and mother never done—she yearns to be in the company of another man. She is constantly moving between two realities, stealing from one to be with the other. The songs she sings are for him, are about him: “I’ll be loving you always / with a love that’s true always; your eyes so blue / your kisses so true; Ain’t misbehaving / I’m saving my love for you.” He fills her head the way only the music can fill it, completely and without compromise. Living without Leland would be like living without music.
“MOM. MOM, WE’RE HERE.” Gary’s voice, gently disturbing, breaks into her dream. Ruby opens her eyes; the overpowering light of the late afternoon sun blinds her momentarily. A shadow pulls her focus; her son holds the car door, his hand extended to take hers.
“Sorry, Gary, I must have dozed off.” She sounds confused, even to herself. She has lived both of these moments. They are separated only by time, and that separation, the border in her mind that holds them apart, is growing thinner with every minute.
“Well, that’s understandable. It was a long afternoon.” he says, taking her hand in his.
“Yes, it was.” Extracting herself with surprising agility from the back seat, Ruby looks around, allowing her mind to catch up with the present. “The mayor was lovely, wasn’t he? Although his speech was a bit too long, don’t you think? I began looking around and wondering who the hell he could be talking about. But that’s politicians for you. They can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, ha!”
“Nan!” Lisa says, feigning shock, as she closes the car door and hands Ruby her cane. “I thought what he said about you, all of it, was excellent and true. You’re a pioneer; you were out there doing things that not too many women were doing. Really, Nan, it’s something to be proud of. Not too many people accomplish what you have in your life, especially at a time when women didn’t really have the freedom to pursue such things. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t such an effort—it was what I had to do. I was following my passion, I suppose. Yes, I did accomplish things, it’s just that the speech sounded too much like a eulogy to me. I’m not dead yet, you know. Ha!”
“And from the look of you, you won’t be for a while,” Gary says, smiling down at his mother and then at Lisa and Jacklyn.
“Thank you, son, that’s reassuring.”
Stopping, she places her hand on Gary’s arm, and he turns toward her quizzically. “Gary, I’ve been thinking, ha! —I know it’s not like me—but I’d like to take a trip to Chicago to meet up with your sister, Phoebe.”
Startled, Gary laughs. “This is a bit sudden don’t you think, Mom? How do you propose to get there? Did you want me to drive you? It’s quite a distance from here.”
“No, I was thinking more along the lines of taking the train. The train is so much more civilized. It’s the way we travelled when I was young.”
Straightening her shoulders, she continues. “I thought I’d call your sister, and then she could meet me at the other end. I’ve never been to Chicago in all these years, and I’d like to have a look. And I would like to spend some time with Phoebe. Maybe I could even go from there to California and visit Francis. You know if Mohamed won’t come to the mountain. Ha!”
Staring at his mother, Gary is at a loss for words. Typically, she sees the adventure and he, the enormity of what she is proposing.
“Gary, close your mouth. You look like you’re catching flies.”
“Mom, you are not a young woman anymore.” Gary cajoles. “Chicago is a long trip. Why don’t you wait until Phoebe comes back and have her come visit you here? She’ll have no trouble catching a cheap flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Then you can call Francis, and maybe he can come for a visit too. Classes are finished for the year. He’ll have time.”
“No, that would defeat the purpose. I want to go to Chicago, and I want to see Phoebe there.”
“But, Mom, I don’t think it’s a very good idea. It’s not the smartest thing. You’re in a retirement home with twenty-four-hour supervision—there’s a reason for that.” Gary shrugs.
“I know, I know. It’s twenty-four-hour supervision, and I feel like an exhibit in a cage, what with the feeding times and bed times, only getting out for special occasions, ha!” She laughs, but there is sadness behind it.
“Yes, because you can’t be by yourself anymore. How do you expect to travel to Chicago on a train?”
“Like everyone else does. With a ticket! Really, Gary, unless you want to crate me and send me in the shipping car. Ha!” She laughs, patting him on the shoulder reassuringly. “It would only be half a day. What’s the worst that could happen? I would nod off and miss my stop? I’m sure someone would wake me.”
Gary’s head is swarming with thoughts as he stands before his mother, her usual determination emanating from her. “It’s more than just a few hours, and you don’t have … you can’t … we couldn’t…”
“Dad,” Lisa’s voice is level, almost soothing as she taps his hand. “I can go with her. I have some time off—I’ll go with her.” She pushes her dark hair from her face and drops her hand to encircle her father’s fingers with her own.
Gary’s face reflects the trepidation he is feeling, but before he can formulate an argument, Lisa continues. “We can see about going this weekend—maybe leave Saturday and return Monday or something. It would be fun, Nan and me on a trip, meeting up with Aunt Phoebe. She’d love it too. I don’t think the California thing is doable, but Chicago is.” She turns to Jacklyn. “Could you make it this weekend, Jackie? It would be fun. All the Grace girls having a weekend together—your mom would love it.”
Ruby smiles at her granddaughter’s enthusiasm. “Good, it’s settled. We can try and make it this weekend, Lisa, you’re right—God knows I’m not getting any younger. Will you make the arrangements, honey?” She takes Lisa’s hand.
“Not a problem, Nan.” She turns to her cousin, a look of excited encouragement on her face. “Jackie?”
“Well, it sounds like an adventure, that’s for sure, but it’s pretty sudden. I’ll talk to Greg and see if I can swing it. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll see.”
“Good, that’s my girls! It’s settled—we will all go to Chicago. Phoebe will be so surprised.” Heading for the door of Hill and Dale Retirement Home, Ruby turns back to the others. “Maybe the following weekend we’ll go see Francis. Now let’s get in—it’s bloody cold out here for May.”
2.
FOR M
ORE THAN FIFTY YEARS, thousands of steamships sailed into the New York City harbour. One by one they came, moving slowly through the muddy waters of the Hudson, carrying millions of immigrants. They passed under the iconic gaze of the Statue of Liberty. A generous gift from the French in 1884, it stands as a beacon to the world, then as now, heralding in the huddled masses of Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Albanian, Dutch, German, French, Macedonian, Irish, English, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish immigrants. Between 1846 and 1915, millions of men, women, and children came to America. By 1915, fifteen percent of America’s total population were newcomers, fleeing prosecution and poverty. In 1846 and 1847, crop failures and mortgage foreclosures in Europe forced tens of thousands of the dispossessed to travel to the new world. In that same year, Irish people of all classes emigrated as a result of the potato famine. In 1882, thousands of Jews fled anti-Semitism in Russia. Between 1894 and 1896, Armenian Christians emigrated to escape Moslem massacres; they were all fleeing prosecution, persecution, poverty, segregation, and degradation. They were all seeking to make their way in “the land of milk and honey,” a land where “the streets are lined in gold.” When they descended the gangplanks of the ships—Bretta, Saxon, Santiago, Freeman, Rhine Mara, City of Paris, City of New Orleans—they imagined themselves to be stepping through the doorway of opportunity. They arrived in the United States, where the dream of America becomes the American dream. They entered in droves into the chaotic madness of Ellis Island, where twelve million newcomers were inspected and processed, and where the U.S. bureau of immigration enforced order in haphazard, accidental ways. It was a chaotic kind of order—like the universe itself—where the heap of humanity became society. Where sweating, swearing, clammy bodies crushed against bags, boxes, suitcases, section boards, and other bodies, their odour thick and pungent, inhaled like the breath of hope, translated through the masses in hundreds of different dialects, murmuring through barrel-vaulted ceilings, ringing through the air like discordant music, hesitant, tired, confused, but with the promise of life—the voice of the new world.
And from Ellis Island to where? Between 1861 and 1865, many young men went straight to the Union Army, shipped to a hostile frontier to die in a war they knew nothing about, a civil war, the worst of wars. Later, new immigrants were sent by subsidized rail to northern and western cities in order to populate a country in need of physical labour. New York, Boston, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Chicago. New people bringing new ways, new stories, new languages, new religions. The overheated, dizzying mix of the melting pot, lumpy, congealed, confused; life screaming for meaning, crying, laughing, singing, puking, chaotic. Life, messy and tumultuous, making its way toward civility.
JOSEPH AND ANNIE KENNY and their five-year-old son Michael are part of the squalling mass. They are a tired, huddled family overwhelmed by the crowds of people and connected through shared grief. Katie-Rose, their two-year-old daughter, is among the thousands who die in the hospital facilities on what was known as “The Island of Tears.” The burial is quick, the sorrow deep.
After two harrowing weeks, they depart Ellis Island, unsure of their direction and clinging to each other for sanity. For Annie, death has stolen the light from the future, leaving her stunned and hollow, blind to the world. The rail trip to Chicago, the days of adjusting, of surviving, the confusion, the cold, the night, the day, all are eclipsed by grief. Even the quickening of life within her cannot shake the sorrow from her heart.
Joseph watches Annie as she stares out the train window at a landscape that is harsh and unfamiliar. He reaches to take her hand. As he leans forward, the movement of the train rippling through his upper body, Michael, asleep on his lap, groans at the disturbance. “Are you well, Annie?” Joseph asks, his pain evident in his weak smile.
“Aye, Joseph. I’m well,” she answers, but does not turn from the window. The countryside slipping past means nothing to her; her eyes are unable to focus on anything past the image of Katie-Rose, her face pale and beautiful, her body limp and solid in Annie’s arms. Unconsciously Annie pulls her arms across her chest, expecting, hoping to find her child there. But it is a daydream, she knows, a painful yearning that she cannot let go.
Joseph tries again, anxious to have any interaction with his wife. “It won’t be long now. Soon enough, we’ll be arriving in a new city, in a new country, and with a new beginning.”
Annie turns, a weak smile on her face, and takes in her husband. His face hardly recognizable as the young man she married, but she recognizes his efforts as his form of love. Her eyes soften, but when she answers, her voice, holds no conviction. “A new beginning, Jo Jo.”
The train jostles them, and they move as one with the rest of the passengers, squeezed in shoulder to shoulder, children held on laps or on the floor, leaning against legs. It is uncomfortable; the air is stale and ripe, the odour of unwashed bodies and broken spirits, an atmosphere of sour hope. Annie has come to associate this odour with the new world, but she knows there is no going back. She takes Joseph’s hand and leans more solidly against his body.
“Sure. We will be all right, Annie,” he whispers to her, encircling her with his arm and kissing the top of her head.
WHEN DANIEL JOSEPH KENNY is born on April 1894, it is a new era. It has been five months since his parents and brother were nationalized, and six months since twenty-seven million people visited the Chicago world’s fair—where they saw new sights, new inventions, glimpsed the future, romanticized the past. Thousands of these visitors, recent immigrants—mostly single young men and newly emancipated women—decided to settle in Chicago, increasing the land value and forcing developers to make room by moving in the only feasible direction: up. At the time of Daniel’s birth, tenement living is becoming a way of life for the working class of Chicago’s north side. The steerage passengers of Ellis Island find themselves on the lowest rung of society; the American dream, held in their collective unconscious like an overfilled balloon, has deflated in degradation and squalor.
Joseph Kenny has no trouble finding employment in the growing city. He works long days in the rail yards, where a thousand trains a day enter and leave Chicago with insatiable momentum. He enjoys the work, hard and dangerous but steady and honest.
“I’m away to move the world,” Joseph jokes each morning, kissing Michael, Annie, and the new baby. “He’s a fine looking one, is he not, Annie?” Touching Daniel’s fingers, that curl around his own, Joseph smiles at the new life.
Michael has found adventure and a new way of life on the Chicago streets. Taking to them like the proverbial fish to water, he runs wild in a world without rules. His mother’s efforts to restrain him are feeble at best.
“I want you straight home from school today, Michael. No Hurley in the streets.”
“It’s not Hurley, Ma. I told you—it’s stick ball.” Michael’s young voice is edged with impatience.
“And don’t you be using that tone of voice with me, young man. Or I’ll stick ball you all right.” Annie playfully cuffs the top of his head.
Michael smiles. “All right, Ma, I’ll come straight home. But after I set the fire can I go back out?”
“We’ll see.”
Annie has no road map in this new world, no tethering post to steady herself; at times it’s as if she is stumbling through darkness toward something too undefined to realize. She understands the baby—his immediacy, his dependency, his existence, so tied to her own. She holds him close, along with her fears and her faith, focused on this new life. He is clever, this youngest son of hers, the first born of this land, and like the young country he is full of promise. Annie pins her hopes on him with unabashed enthusiasm that can’t help but spread to Joseph and Michael. Daniel is the one to lift Annie back from the darkness.
Katie-Rose’s death stopped Annie cold; she moved as if she were living in the depths of the Atlantic, unable to feel, unable to care. There was no comfort in Joseph’s body or in Michael’
s laughter. She could feel only the need, the hollow, empty pining for her daughter, her baby, whose absence filled her to distraction, obliterating the days as they passed. Joseph found himself adrift in a land without family, with a wife absent with despair, and a son confused and frightened by his unfamiliar surroundings, unfamiliar emotions.
For those first months, Joseph’s life is a narrow band of worry. He is forced to leave Annie and Michael in the morning with the porridge he made and push through the work day at the rail yard, his need to return to Annie, all consuming.
“Try and eat something, Annie-girl.” Joseph’s voice, soft in her ear as he places the plate of mince before her.
“I can’t. I’ve no appetite, Jo Jo.” She is quiet and tired, with a weakness that nests in her bones and clouds her mind. With a start, as if waking from a dream, she says, “And tell me what it is we are doing here? A new life, a new life. It’s all I ever heard from you and look,” she lifts her arm to indicate the shabbiness of the room, “this is the new life. And my Katie-Rose … left…” Her voice breaks, her throat constricting with the pain in her heart.
Joseph can do nothing; her sorrow excludes him. Placing his arm tentatively around her shoulder, he continues in a voice that sounds as absent as he feels. “Eat something for the new baby. Keep your strength to tell Michael and the new wee one all about Katie-Rose.”
Sitting next to her, he takes her in his arms, the contact of their bodies the only comfort he can offer. Rocking her, she weeps for life—its endings and beginnings, confusing and unfair. Grieving for one child and worried for the one to come. Would she love this next child? Could she allow herself to love this next child? Thoughts she can hardly form, words she will never say, lie like weights on a drowning soul.
Daniel’s birth changes all this. Holding his small, warm body, Annie responds to his demand for life, feels the waters around her recede. The pained look of loss is replaced by the smiles the new baby begins to pull from her reluctant heart.