“I cannot accept such a view, Calvin. The immigrants are willing to work hard at back-breaking tasks. I see their contribution as essential to the well-being of the Republic. We could not have rebuilt this city so quickly after the fire without their work.”
“And how would they remove the miasmas from our swampland? You cannot really believe so completely in this germ theory? No one has ever seen a germ, I might remind you. We might better spend what little money we have for public health funding by clearing away the lands which generate the miasma of disease. Your germ theory is not proven, and nothing will ever be able to prove it.”
“Miasma is part of the same mythological folly,” Dr. Gaughan insisted, “as bleeding patients into weakness from which they die before the germs finish them off.”
“Paddy,” Mae Gaughan intervened, “I wonder if you could interrupt your discussion to cut the roast for us.”
Dr. Gaughan smiled slightly, grateful that his wife had cut off an argument which would grow more intense, yet sorry to yield the field of battle.
Timmy was sitting next to her at the table. He whispered a question:
“Who do you think has the better of the argument, pre-Celt little sister with the long silver-gold hair?”
Angela’s face warmed at the compliment. He was a smooth one. Dangerous? Probably not too dangerous.
“Our father, of course. Dr. Crawford is a pompous fool!”
Timmy struggled to control the laughter that seemed always to lurk inside him, at least when Angela was around.
As they left the dining room to split into men and women, he touched Angela’s arm.
“I’m happy that Dad is now your father too,” he struggled in his embarrassment. “It means you are part of the family.”
She scared the poor young man as much as he scared her. Interesting . . .
“Timothy, I have been absorbed into this family by an abundance of love which is almost god like . . . I wasn’t asked and I don’t deserve it, but I’m happy to be your sister and Rosina’s sister and Vinny’s too.”
She turned her back toward the drawing room, so she would see only the tiniest beginning of delight on his handsome face. She would keep Timmy at bay, but not too far away, by gentle teasing. Some day he might seek his revenge, but, she shivered slightly, that was beyond the boundaries of the distant future.
Minerva Crawford attacked her as soon as she was seated at the outer fringe of the women in the drawing room.
“Child! That surely isn’t the natural color of your hair!”
“I’m afraid that it is, Mrs. Crawford. Out in the West of Ireland they say it is a sign of aborigine blood, pre-Celtic like the Indians are pre-American.”
“It looks like straw . . . You simply must do something with it.”
“In the West of Ireland they say it looks like a field of fresh wheat in the morning sun and is a sign of fertility and God’s love.”
“How disgusting!”
“I like it.” Rosina, big sister, came to her rescue.
“You are not entitled to an opinion, young woman. Whatever they might say in the West of Ireland, a place which I haven’t visited and hope never to, it simply won’t do in the United States of America. Mae, you must do something about it if she is going to live in this house!”
“If I have to change the color of my hair to live in this wonderful house, I will leave it.”
“Mae! Will you listen to her! You must send her to the Academy immediately. The nuns will teach her some respect! She is simply not acceptable in your family.”
“She is new in this land, Minerva. We will see that she has time to adjust to American customs.”
“Well, I certainly hope so. I suspect that hair is the result of some sickness, the bad airs which cause disease. Maybe that’s why the rest of her family is dead.”
“My family died because of the famine which the English imposed on Ireland,” Angela replied. “Rather than starve they ate meat which was poisoned. It had nothing to do with the color of our hair.”
“Mae, this child needs to learn some respect for her elders.”
“Well, we’ll see how she gets along with the nuns.”
Minerva Crawford took that as agreement. Angela accepted it as approval from her new mom, whom she had begun to adore. Rosina grinned triumphantly.
Their interview with the Mother Superior at St. Mary’s Academy did not begin any better.
“You have a strong Irish accent, young woman,” Mother Superior observed.
“West of Ireland, Sister.”
“You have Gaelic?”
“My parents spoke it at home, God be good to them, and I picked up a little. We studied it in school.”
“English is not your first language.”
“It is in the national schools, Sister.”
“You can read English.”
“Oh, yes, Sister.”
“Would you read this piece of oratory, please.”
She handed Angela a card. It was “Let no man write my epitaphs.”
Angela began to read it and then, in the kind of bravado that she couldn’t resist, she put the card aside and recited it from memory and with feeling.
Sister grinned.
She then fired questions about arithmetic and catechism, quite unrelated to one another, cutting off the answer to one question and shifting quickly to another. Angela enjoyed the challenge and fired back her answers briskly and confidently. Sister continued to grin.
“She plays the piano too, S’ter,” Rosina said meekly.
“Ah, you took piano at school, did you?”
“No, S’ter, I play by ear.”
“Do you now? Can you play something classical for me?”
“A little bit of Mozart’s Night Music, maybe S’ter . . . Not very good, I’m afraid. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to arithemetic?”
“You are a difficult child, Angela, but I do want to hear what you do with the Night Music.”
Angela went to the upright piano in the corner of Mother Superior’s office, ran her fingers over the keys to become familiar with them, paused at a key that needed tuning, sat for a moment to get in the right mood and, eyes closed, began to play. She made it very sad music, perhaps not what the composer intended. There were tears in her eyes when she finished. She looked up at the nun and thought she saw tears behind the thick lens.
“You are a very talented young woman, Angela Tierney. Should we admit you, I’d be privileged to provide you with music lessons every week.”
“Thank you, S’ter. But I want to be a doctor.”
“All the more reason to play the piano: to keep your sanity. Mae?”
“I think it would be wonderful.”
“Then it’s settled, unless you protest too strongly, young woman.”
“Oh, no, S’ter, I’d like to be able to read notes.”
“She talks French too,” Rosina insisted.
Angela blushed. The love of her new family was superabundant, but embarrassing. Why were they that way? Father Muldoon said they were like God.
She replied in French, saying that her accent was not from Paris but from le petit ville Carraroe in Connemara.
S’ter replied in French that she had the gold and silver hair of Carraroe too and Angela remarked that it was said to be like a new wheat field under the morning sun, but she thought it looked like newly harvested straw.
“Well, Mae, we can’t be party to losing this gifted young woman to a public school, can we? I think next semester we will put her in some first-year courses and some second year, where she will have her sister to protect her against the young women who may yearn for hair like newly harvested straw. Then they will be able to do their third and fourth years together.”
“Thank you, S’ter,” Rosina and Angela said together.
“I see that Ms. Tierney is the kind of child that works very hard. Normally I would praise that, but, Mae and Rosina, we may have to insist on some occasions that she should
relax and perhaps play for family singing or take other kinds of recreation.”
“I’ll see to it, Sister,” Mae promised. “And thank you very much.”
As they left St. Mary’s, Angela said in a soft voice, “Don’t tell Mrs. Crawford. We don’t want to break her heart.”
“What should we tell her, darling?”
“Tell her that Mother Superior is taking me under her personal supervision.”
The next three years were happy ones for Angela. She moved into Rosina’s bedroom. “We can be real sisters,” Rosina exclaimed. “We can talk about boys and fight with one another just like sisters do.”
“I don’t mind talking about boys, though they’re a pretty boring subject. But I won’t fight with you, Rosina. I’ll never fight with you.”
It was a promise Angela kept through the years to come, some difficult.
She bonded with the family wolfhound, Sir Charles, who also moved into the bedroom and made himself at home. She learned how to read notes. She improved her French accent. She had the highest grades in her class and graduated summa cum laude. Her body belatedly burst into full and enchanting womanhood. Her charm and wit won over most of her potential rivals in class. She kept Timmy at a distance, but not too great a distance. Indeed she was his date at the graduation dinner for the graduates of St. Ignatius College (a six-year school) and dazzled everyone at the Palmer House with her white classic dress and her gold and silver hair, which looked like a blooming wheat field under the rising sun.
The Gaughans urged their children to invite their classmates to songfests in their parlor several times a year, the first one at her first Christmastime in Chicago. Tim’s friends from St. Ignatius were bemused by her even then. She was, as he put it, a mixture of sweet and tart, fun and serious, laughter and tears, sister and wife, that men his age found irresistible.
“Mistress and wife,” Rosina murmured.
Angela fell in love with many of them, one after another, without ever speaking to them. Tim was another matter. She asked Father Muldoon if it were a sin of incest to fall in love with a foster brother.
“I haven’t done it and I don’t plan to do it. But I want to know if it’s a temptation.”
“Tim,” said the wise young bishop as he was now, “is not a temptation to resist, Angela, but a temptation to love, which is a much more serious problem.”
“I know that.”
She was not sure, however, what it was that she knew or didn’t know.
Dr. Gaughan was a rich man, but not because he was a doctor. His fees for intricate surgeries were small for ordinary people. He had made his money in real estate and construction when he came home after the war with dreams of suffering and death that, despite his amiability, he could never force out of his life. He was a gentle, sympathetic father, but one able to draw lines that you would not think of crossing. Angela was acutely sensitive to these lines and did not wander near them. She played a slightly different role in the family than did the other children. The doctor treated her more like an adult than the others, an adult he could be frank with.
He was careful with his investments, unwilling to expose his family to the various panics that wracked the country in the decades immediately after the war. He had, however, bought a “shack” on a small lake just north of the Illinois–Wisconsin border to which the family journeyed for the month of July. It was in fact more than a shack, but the plumbing was outside and the water came from the wells. Isolated from the city and its newspapers and the demands of their friends, the Gaughans were supposed to relax and refresh themselves. There was a small beach and a pier in front of the house and small rowboats. They often were in their swim garments from breakfast to supper. A small town with a soda fountain was in walking distance, and a decent-sized forest in which young and old could hike. Life was relaxed, informal and seemingly unregulated. Only as Angela realized the two adults kept it closely observed, aware as they were of the four young people who were guests. Seamus McGourty, a classmate of Tim’s at St. Ignatius College, with fiery and unruly hair, was theoretically Tim’s guest, but he was also Rosina’s companion.
“Some of my colleagues would say, Angela, that I am taking quite a chance by inviting four young people who are in the early phases of attraction to the opposite sex into an environment that is seemingly unregulated.”
“It is wise to keep that caution in mind,” Angela had replied. “It would be a shame to ruin the vacation.”
“To say nothing of some lives.”
“I won’t let that happen,” she promised.
He seemed surprised by her response.
“I’m delighted to hear that. You are, I believe, the youngest of the four in years, but much older in experience and insight.”
“I should think,” she charged on, she hoped not being too candid, “that one very dark night of modest swimming Indian style would be quite enough, not that I would think that Rosina’s virtue or mine would be at any great risk.”
Dr. Gaughan laughed. “You are a very perceptive young woman, Anglea Tierney.”
“I’ll be in charge, Doctor, which is what you’re asking of me. I had similar thoughts myself. You have made my thoughts more clear.”
“We cannot help but notice that there is a certain attraction between you and Timothy.”
“Since that first day at Central Depot. His eyes are too magical altogether.”
“As is your wheat-field hair.”
She felt her face grow warm.
“We are very young, Dr. Gaughan, and we have many important things to do in our lives before we think of marriage, much less talk about it. In principle, however, I cannot exclude it as a possibility for discussion someday in the future.”
“Mae and I certainly would not want to exclude it either. In some ways you are years older than Tim, and in some ways so much younger.”
“That is exactly how he makes me feel!”
Angela was exhausted when the conversation ended. They had covered many matters and clarified her world. They had also made it more complicated. Her quick tongue and her “way with words,” as the nuns called it, had caused her to be much more candid than she would have expected. Now she was safer but more vulnerable.
So the days at the Wisconsin shack were uneventful.
For Angela, however, there was one jarring moment that would haunt her for years. She and Tim Gaughan had taken a long and leisurely hike through the forest to the cornfields beyond. Then, instead of retracing their steps to the lake, they walked down a country road and then around to the road that merged with the trail to the shack.
The day, which had started out cool and pleasant, had become hot and humid. Tim said there would be a thunderstorm by nightfall.
“Why don’t we sit down and rest for a few moments,” she suggested. “We don’t have weather like this in Ireland.”
“Sure.”
Perspiration had soaked the light blouse and the short skirt she was wearing.
“Hot,” she complained.
“You’re very beautiful, Angela.”
“Why, thank you, Tim! You may need spectacles, but that’s a nice compliment.”
“Would you mind terribly if I kissed you?”
What do I say now?
“I don’t suppose I’d fight you off . . .”
In fact, come to think of it, Angela wouldn’t mind that, at all, at all.
He put an arm around her, led her face to his, and kissed her very gently. His salty lips rested on hers and she did not resist the sustained contact.
“Thank you, Angela. I liked that a lot.”
Angela had yet to be kissed passionately. She knew that Tim’s kiss was not passionate. It was something less and something more. It had jarred her to the depths of her soul.
“You’re very good at this sort of thing, Timothy,” she said, recovering her smooth, conversational voice. “Lots of practice, doubtless.”
“I love you, Angela. I fell in love with you the day you c
ame into our family. I will always love you.”
He leaped to his feet and walked rapidly toward the shack, uncertain perhaps about what should happen next.
Her first thought was that she would not tell Rosina that night about the kiss. Her second thought was to wonder if Ma had been watching. Would Ma approve? She glanced around hastily. No shadowy or translucent shape. Why did she think of Ma? Because Ma was always watching. She was the only one who might have seen them. Then she wondered if she should have prolonged the kiss. She sighed deeply. They might both be in serious trouble if she had. She rose and, her body now sheathed in perspiration, walked unsteadily back to the shack, went to her room, put on her swimming costume and plunged off the end of the pier into the lake. She swam vigorously halfway across its narrow span and then turned around. Was it a mortal sin?
Nonsense. How could anything so tender possibly be a sin at all?
That night as they all sat on the screen porch watching the stars and she brought glasses of chilled lemonade to the others, she whispered to Tim, “Thank you, that was very nice.”
Would he try to kiss her again? Angela found herself hoping he would.
Compared to the kiss in the sunlight, the naked swim in the starlight was boring. Splashing and giggling and nothing remotely like physical contact, made interesting only by Sir Charles’s unexpected appearance.
And Ma’s.
A woman was next to her in the lake at the edge of the band of four young people and one delighted dog, a woman spun out of starlight and barely there.
“Well now, ain’t you the terrible sinful young woman?”
“I knew you’d be here and yourself hiding there in the lake when himself kissed me?”
“Och, sure, I didn’t think you noticed . . . and isn’t this lake comfortable compared to Galway Bay.”
“ ’Tis.”
Sir Charles jabbed at her belly with his big snout and then sniffed for the other human he knew was there but couldn’t quite see.
“Suspicious dog.”
“Any special reason to be here tonight, Ma?”
“Only watching you having fun?”
“You like me fella?”
“And what do I know about matchmaking? Sure you could do worse.”
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