by Anne Bennett
His biggest worry was earning enough money to put food on the table. This was especially so for the baby, who needed good, nourishing food to grow up healthily and able to fight the many infections that spread rapidly in those teeming tenement buildings. The burden of worry that he would be unable to do this lodged between his shoulder blades. As the weeks and months passed this concern often drove much-needed sleep from him as he lay in bed at night, and many more trinkets of Gloria’s had to be sold to provide nourishment for the child.
And then a letter came from Tom that put his own problems into perspective.
Ben had passed his first birthday and now that he could walk, he would toddle over to his father as soon as he saw him come in and Joe would lift him high in the air. And so, he had his son in his arms when Gloria handed him the letter and, still holding Ben, he sat in the chair to read it.
Gloria was in the kitchen doorway, waiting to hear what Tom had to say, when she saw the blood suddenly drain from Joe’s face. ‘What is it?’ she said, taking the child from him as she spoke.
Joe didn’t speak but the eyes he turned to her were full of pain and anguish, and bright with unshed tears.
‘Joe, for God’s sake,’ Gloria cried in alarm. She passed Ben over to her mother, disregarding his protests, and then she put an arm around Joe. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
Joe’s voice was husky as he said, ‘Do you mind the time I told you about my wee sister, Nuala, that my parents thought the sun shone out of?’
Gloria nodded. ‘I remember it well,’ she said. ‘I thought at the time that it was like a fairy story. She married a Protestant and when she wrote to your parents and told them that, your father had a heart attack and died.’
‘Yes,’ Joe said. ‘We were not allowed to speak her name after that. I was all for writing to her and telling her what happened, but Tom was afraid of Mammy.’
‘Afraid?’ Gloria said incredulously.
‘Mammy’s rages have to be seen to be believed,’ Joe said. ‘But it wasn’t just himself he was worried about. He was afraid of Mammy attacking Nuala if she did come home, so she didn’t even know her father had died. How I wish now we had taken the chance while we had it.’
‘Is it too late?’
Joe nodded. ‘Far too late,’ he said. ‘Nuala and her husband, Ted, were killed ina car accident over a week ago, leaving behind two children: Molly, a girl of thirteen, who Mammy claims looks the spit of Nuala, and a wee boy of five.’
‘Poor children …’
‘Ah, yes indeed,’ Joe cried. ‘Especially as Mammy is intending taking them home to live with her.’
‘Well, isn’t that the best solution all round?’ Gloria asked. ‘I mean, I can’t think of anything worse to happen than for the children to lose both their parents in such a tragic way, so isn’t it better that they are with their grandmother? If, Heaven forbid, anything should happen to us, I would like Mother to take care of Ben.’
‘As I would without hesitation,’ Norah said.
She put down the struggling child as she spoke and he toddled round to his father. Joe took him on to his knee before he said, ‘I can understand you thinking that – anyone would – and there is no one but Norah that I would like to have the care of Ben in such a circumstance. But you are talking about a rational person and one who would love and care for our son as we would.’
‘But your mother will know what a tragic loss the children have suffered,’ Gloria said. ‘I know you have often said your upbringing was a harsh one, but these are her grandchildren and—’
‘Gloria,’ Joe answered, ‘when I left Ireland my mother was still full of resentment and spite against Nuala, and according to Tom she has got no better as time has gone on. If this girl looks anything like Nuala then I worry that Mammy will make her pay for what her mother did.’
‘You can’t be sure of that!’
Joe shook his head. ‘You don’t know her like I do. I should have defied my mother and made contact with the sister I loved so much. Now I will never see her again and will never have the opportunity to get to know the children. They must think themselves so alone in the world.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Gloria said, and her heart turned over in pity for them. And yet, she thought, Joe might be building up a worse scenario than it was. Maybe his mother had been hard on him as a boy, but usually grandparents were far more lax than the parents.
In the following weeks, Tom’s letters told Joe only the bare minimum about the situation, though Tom did write that Molly so resembled her mother it was like having the young Nuala returned to them. He also told him that the boy had become so ill they had decided to leave him in the care of his paternal grandfather.
However, Joe was no fool, and he knew Tom well enough to realise it was more what he didn’t say than what he did that was worrying. Reading between the lines he could only feel for the young orphaned girl, at the mercy of his mother.
He knew Gloria, who didn’t know Tom as he did, would just take his letters at face value. Joe didn’t say anything to Gloria, either; he couldn’t expect her or Norah to understand his worries over his mother’s behaviour when they had never met her. And he had always kept a lot of his mother’s letters to himself and so Gloria was unaware of her true nature.
Joe did worry about the girl, though, but, helpless to change the situation in any way, he told himself in time she would grow up and leave the farm. She could go back to the grandfather and brother she had been wrenched from and Tom, who had evidently become so fond of her, would get over it in time.
Larger-scale news made an impact on their lives, and Joe often spoke about it when he came home from work. ‘The immigrant boats have begun arriving again,’ he said to the two women in the autumn of 1935, ‘only now they are full of Jews.’
‘Jews?’ Norah and Gloria said together, in astonishment.
‘Aye, and mainly from Germany.’
‘Why come here?’ Norah asked. ‘Isn’t America in the greatest recession it has ever experienced?’
‘Well, that chap Hitler appears not to like them at all,’ Joe said.
‘Isn’t he the one who became the Chancellor of Germany a few years ago?’ Gloria asked.
‘That’s the chap.’
‘So what has he got against Jews?’
Joe shrugged. ‘Search me. But for whatever reason, he has got it in for them. Jewish children aren’t allowed to go to school now, so one man was saying, and they can’t hold citizenship. As some of them say, they considered themselves German and fought in the last war for a country that has now rejected them. Between you and me I think we might have trouble with that Hitler.’
‘Europe might,’ Norah said dismissively. ‘But their problems needn’t involve us.’
It was an attitude that Joe had come across before. Norah, Gloria and all native-born Americans seemed immune to what was happening elsewhere in the world. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; it was more that they honestly thought European concerns couldn’t and shouldn’t affect America in any way.
What did shake their composure and stir their national pride, though, were the Olympic Games held in Berlin in August 1936, when the African-American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals. In fact, in that Games he broke eleven Olympic records and beat the favoured German athlete Luz Long in a very close long jump final. While the German athlete was the first to congratulate Owens, Hitler, regarding him as racially inferior, would neither shake his hand nor place the winner’s medals around his neck. The American people were incensed by that.
Some now started to look with new eyes towards the racially prejudiced Hitler, Chancellor of Germany and leader of the Nazi Party. Many initially might have thought the immigrant Jews’ tales of persecution far fetched, but now they were beginning to wonder if they were true after all.
But none of this essentially touched the lives of Joe and his family, while poverty did. Joe continued to trawl around the docks picking up what work he could and with the help of the sale of
Gloria’s jewellery they were able to scrape by.
Ben was the light of all their lives. By the time he was three he strongly resembled his mother, with his mop of blond curls, violet-blue eyes and the long black lashes. He would have looked angelic, if it hadn’t been for the wicked glint in his eyes. When he was playing in the yard of the tenement with the other children, if there was mischief to be had, he would be in the thick of it, and that just made Gloria and Joe love him all the more.
It was that autumn that Gloria realised her mother wasn’t well. Her face, she noticed, was grey and drawn, the lines of strain more prominent than she had ever seen them. She also walked stooped over and seemed easily out of breath. She told Gloria when she asked that she felt quite all right and she should stop fussing, and she refused point-blank to see a doctor.
‘It’s money for the doctor’s bills that she is worried about,’ Gloria said one night as she lay in bed beside Joe. ‘I think I’ll ask Bella to look in. Mother likes Bella and she just might take notice of her.’
When Joe came home the following evening, he guessed something was bothering Gloria by the shadows behind her eyes, but he knew she would say nothing until Ben was put to bed in the shakedown he had in his grandmother’s room.
When he had gone, Joe looked from one woman to the other and said, ‘What is it?’
Norah looked at Gloria before saying to Joe, ‘Bella thinks I have a growth, a tumour. She can feel the lump just below my left breast.’
‘I said she needs to see a doctor,’ Gloria said. ‘He can send her to the hospital. They can operate and take the tumour out and she will be as good as new again.’
‘But I don’t want that,’ Norah said softly. ‘Hospitals cost money, and anyway, it’s too late. I have had this lump for some time. Forgive me, but I didn’t want to be a burden to you, or have you spending money on me when you have so little of it.’
Gloria was stunned by her mother’s words, Joe could see, but he knew that he was looking at a dying woman and he had respect for her courage. But when he tried to say this, Norah cut him off. ‘Without you, Joe, both Gloria and I would have been lost after Brian killed himself. It is due to your valiant efforts that we have survived at all. Now my time is running out, but yours is just beginning and after I am gone—’
‘Mummy, don’t let’s talk about this now.’
‘Darling, I don’t know how long I have got,’ Norah said. ‘There are things that have to be faced and if I can bear it, then so must you.’
The whole ethos of the family changed from that day. For a few weeks it seemed the same, though Norah’s illness was always in the forefront of Gloria’s mind and she would have felt terribly alone if it hadn’t been for Joe’s understanding.
He thanked God that they had Ben for Gloria to focus her mind on.
Even when Norah took to her bed most of the time in mid-December, Ben accepted what his mother told him, that his grandmother was very tired. He even accepted the priest coming to the house regularly, for he was familiar and someone that he saw at Mass every Sunday. It was only when Norah eventually decided to see the doctor, a fortnight before Christmas, that he asked if his grandmama was sick.
‘It was pointless to lie, Gloria thought, and so she said, ‘She is, darling. Grandmama is very sick. In fact, Ben, she is going to die …’
‘What’s die?’ Ben asked.
‘It means that Grandmama will go away to live with Jesus.’
Ben was totally surprised. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Does she want to?’
‘I think she does, Ben,’ Gloria said. ‘She’s very tired.’
‘Will she come back when she is feeling better?’
Gloria had to swallow the lump that threatened to choke her as she answered, ‘No, Ben, she will go to sleep and not wake up again, and there is nothing that we can do about it.’
It was Thursday 6 January 1938, and, knowing the end was near, Gloria had sat beside the bed all night and held her mother’s hand. Norah was not conscious, and yet her contorted face showed the level of her suffering and Gloria prayed for God to give her peace.
Suddenly, there was a rattle in Norah’s throat and then there was a deathly silence, the only sound the muted tick of the clock from the other room. And yet, Gloria felt that her mother’s spirit was like an actual presence in the room.
It was only seconds later, but it felt longer, that the room grew suddenly very cold, still and empty, and Gloria knew that Norah’s suffering was finally over. She got to her feet with a sigh, and laid her mother’s hands across her chest. Then she bent over and kissed her cheek. ‘Bye, Mummy,’ she whispered. ‘I love you and I will miss you to the end of my days.’
She thought she had accepted her mother’s imminent death, but she suddenly felt so bereft and forsaken.
In the other room Joe was already getting dressed and he looked at Gloria standing in the doorway, her eyes glistening with tears. He didn’t need to speak, but opened his arms and Gloria went into them with a grateful sigh. The tears that she had been holding back all night began to seep from her eyes and slide down her cheeks, and Joe held her tight until she was calmer once more.
Ben had been sleeping in the room with his parents when his grandmother took to her bed and when he opened his eyes a little later, Gloria told him his grandmother had died. Joe though wondered how much he really understood, for all he was a bright and very articulate child. He lifted Ben into his arms as he said gently, ‘Would you like to see her?’
Ben remembered what his mother had said about his grandmother going to live with Jesus when she died and so he said, ‘Is she still here, then?’
‘Of course,’ Gloria said. ‘Where else would she be?’
‘I want to see,’ Ben said.
Joe set him on his feet, took his hand and they went into the room together.
‘She’s asleep,’ Ben whispered to his father.
‘It’s the sleep that I told you about,’ Gloria said.
Ben’s eyes were confused. ‘So when is she going to live with Jesus?’
‘The important part of her has already gone,’ Joe said. ‘But you will hardly understand this yet for you are too young. But the priest will understand it, and you and I will take a walk up to tell him as soon as you are dressed.’
‘Aren’t you going to the docks today then?’ Gloria asked, because it was a quarter to seven and Joe would usually have left by now.
‘Not today,’ Joe said. ‘There are things to do. And I’m sure if you ask her Bella will give you a hand, while I take charge of Ben.’
Despite the loss of money, Gloria was glad that Joe was going to be there that day for she was bone-weary. She was also very glad Bella was near at hand, and so obliging, for she had never laid out a dead body before. She had to do it, though, because it was the last service she would do for her dear mother.
There was a good turnout for Norah’s funeral although the only Mass card on the top of the coffin was from Tom. They were all quick, though, to shake Gloria’s hand and commiserate with her in her loss. Norah had been well liked and it helped Gloria to know that.
She was also well aware of the fact that ideally her mother would have liked to be buried beside her husband in the churchyard not far from their old home. But Norah had a good idea of what it would cost to transport a body halfway across the city and then reopen a grave, and so she said that Gloria wasn’t even to consider it. ‘It’s money that you can ill afford to waste and it is a waste because I won’t know a thing about it,’ she had said. ‘Let’s face facts. It is only my body that you are disposing of. The important bit of me will have gone heavenward, I hope.’
‘Oh, Mummy, don’t.’
Norah grasped her daughter’s arm and said gently, ‘My dear, I must. I couldn’t bear it if you were to beggar yourself to bury my body somewhere you thought I might prefer, so I am telling you straight now that the county cemetery will do me fine.’
‘Mummy, you must have thought, expected, that your bod
y would lie beside Daddy’s when you died?’ Gloria said.
‘You know what I expected?’ Norah said. ‘That I would end my days in the house your father brought me to when he married me, that I would see you and Joe rear my grandson there in comfort and ease. If I ever looked ahead to the future, that is what I saw and that has crumbled away like so much dust beneath my feet, so that at times it has been difficult to cope with. How does all that compare to where my body lies when I am dead and gone? The county cemetery is where I wish to be laid.’
Joe tried to hide his relief when Gloria told him what Norah had said. He wouldn’t allow his mother-in-law to lie in a pauper’s grave, but even the most basic of funerals cost money they didn’t have and Gloria had to sell the last of her trinkets and her wedding ring to pay for it.
One late February day Red McCullough said to Joe, ‘Aren’t you fed up with this life, Joe? Living hand to mouth, never sure whether you are going to earn enough to keep body and soul together for another day?’
‘Course I am fed up,’ Joe said. ‘Who wouldn’t be? But there is nothing to be done about it.’
‘Well, I intend to do something about it,’ Red said. ‘And that is make for England as soon as possible.’
‘You’d be no better off,’ Joe said. ‘Didn’t you tell us England has been hit by a slump as well?’
‘It was,’ Red agreed. ‘But England is over it now.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘My cousin, Pete, works down the docks and he says there are jobs for all that want them,’ Red said. ‘And if you don’t fancy dock work there are factories galore, he says. He claims he could get me set on easy. You too, I would imagine.’
‘Oh, what I would give for a steady and regular job that pays a living wage,’ Joe said. ‘But what has brought about the change? America seems as depressed as ever.’
‘Yeah. Between you and me, Pete thinks England is preparing itself for trouble with Germany.’
‘Doesn’t that worry you?’
‘A bit,’ Red said. ‘But I’ll take my chance. This is like a living death anyway, and in the end the whole thing with Germany might blow over.’