With this assessment, she went back into the main part of the house. Cassie gripped me on the shoulders with both hands, her own immensely strong fingers nearly hurting my bones. She turned her head from side to side.
‘Thank the good Lord,’ she said.
Then she showed me our little niche over the coachhouse. One big iron bed, and the walls hung here and there with Cassie’s few possessions, a housecoat, a few interesting hats, a washbasin with a big jug and a rough slab of possibly carbolic soap, her oddments and knick-knacks on a little rickety table, her bottomless trunk, and the room in general all spick and span, but I would say never shown a paintbrush since its first going-over with cream-coloured paint a hundred years ago. I could see bits of cloth stuffed into holes in the wall, no doubt the result of efforts in winter to keep out the seeping cold. She had a small gilt-framed mirror, with the gold paint coming off it like a tiny autumn.
She showed me how to boil up the linen pots, and boil the linen, and drag it like bodies into the washing tub, and get the suds going like deep snowfall, and then haul the sheets again into the big coldwater rinsing basin, and slap and punch out the soap, and then her mighty arms manned the mangle like a piece of army weaponry, and she powered the poor sheets through the rollers, the chill water sluiced out. Toilers in the realm of St Veronica, patron saint of laundresses. All the while she told me her story, the way lovers do when they first meet, of her childhood in Norfolk, old Catus a sharecropper there, getting deeper and deeper into debt, and finally breaking north like a child escaping the armlock of a bully.
‘A child knows nothing about all that. I just did love Virginia. Chickens coming into the little iron house we had, and birds of every colour and size flocking down, and all the creatures that come and go in the year, that’s like a big clock of things, Lilly, and you never saw such a spread of lovely fields, every direction.’
Then she was turning the handle with her fierce and endless strength.
‘My mamma was killed by some ruffians going through, they caught her out on a back road, when she was coming back from town with chicken feed. Catus found her lying there in the yellow mess, where they had bust the bag in taking her virtue. But he said nothing about that to me at the time, only that she had gone to her reward in heaven, which didn’t seem so bad, though I missed her. I was only five, and I knew nothing. And I don’t think Catus ever even looked at another woman since.’
I passed muster with Mrs Bellow, and grew into the household duties, my body strengthening from Cassie’s astounding cooking. She could make the dimmest-looking vegetables shine anew. Food loved her, and almost stood up and saluted when she came into the kitchen.
There wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t beautiful. You don’t share a room with someone without seeing all the inches. The depth of safety I felt with her, sleeping at her side, and taking her instructions in the house, caused great gratitude in me. Loving Cassie was where in truth I started to love America. Maybe for me Cassie was America, and if Tadg’s old friend the Armenian had seen her, I think he would have been proud to paint her. She was a big, big woman, and it was lucky there wasn’t too much of me, or we would never have fitted in that iron bed. Cassie boiled in the covers all night, but I didn’t mind. She sweated like those American Falls.
Eventually I dared to tell her my story. From that day on she always scanned the sidewalk first thing at dawn and last thing at night, in case there was a shadowy man standing there.
Mrs Bellow was not beautiful like Cassie. She was a woman who didn’t see anything and didn’t know anything, but then, she was married to an ignorant man, so I will not blame her. She had her money from a steel-mill down by the lake. We sometimes heard cries in the night, and Cassie would pull the sheet high to her chin, and put her hands over her ears and mutter nonsense, so she wouldn’t hear.
Mrs Bellow once told me that her ancestor owned the first house on the banks of the Cuyahoga. She had a map, hundreds of years old, and there it was, a little square house in the blank wilderness. So maybe she also was a sort of picture of America.
I was fifteen years in that house, long enough to learn all Cassie’s recipes.
There are all manner of terrors in the world, and bursting with life as she was, Cassie endured her own terror, in the shape of Mr Bellow. He was forever steering her into cupboards or empty rooms in the mansion.
What is a life? What is a citizen? How was it so arranged that a man like Mr Bellow could do what he liked with Cassie, and never a word said against him? It was only gradually I became aware of something amiss. Finally it was Cassie crying in the bed, making her own small cries, that made me beg her tell me what was wrong.
So she told me.
‘And I know if I tell Mrs Bellow, that will be the end of us, Lilly, and we will be out on the dusty dry roads of America.’
‘What he is doing to you is wrong, Cassie dear. He can’t make you do that. Won’t we go down to the priest and we’ll get him to do something about it?’
Because Cassie’s people were Catholic down there in Norfolk, Virginia.
‘Ain’t no priest going to do something about this,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand, Lilly.’
‘Why don’t I understand, Cassie?’
‘You don’t understand, Lilly, is all.’
‘He’s a low little louse of a man,’ I said, perplexed. ‘I tell you, he is a tenth-grade devil.’
‘Well, maybe so,’ said Cassie, laughing despite everything.
Some nights, the great fogs and smokes from the factories far below by the lake would come up the heights and visit us, banishing the fresh air. Big fogs from the lake itself also. In the deep core of winter every blessed thing froze, seven times over, so that the year became so hard you thought it would never thaw out. Then the whole district loosened itself into spring, the poor huddled trees suddenly like a thousand girls, all gold hair and ribbons, and the rows upon rows of blossom-trees in the streets shook out their colours on the air.
At some point that I cannot quite remember, I risked a letter to Annie in Dublin, just to say I was doing okay, and not to worry, and I gave her a P.O. box number to reply to. Well, a letter came back on blue-lined paper, I thought I knew the very shop where she had bought it, in her crabbed writing, like a line of ants held up by an obstruction, and she was loving and kind in her words, but also had to tell me that our father had died. He had died in the county home in Baltinglass, and he had had a peaceful death, she said, though his wits were ‘somewhat astray’. She had not been able to be there for the actual moment of his dying. He was buried in the little graveyard of the hospital, she said, under the sycamores, and a poor enough stone put up, she said, because he had only a tiny pension and there was no other money to be put to honour him. I thought it was a sad letter. I thought it was very sad my father had died in such a way. I do remember sitting reading that letter, and feeling as if something vastly important to me had happened, that I had had a great duty to attend to, and had not been able to, because of my wretched exile.
My wretched exile.
Letter-writing. Names, postmarks, locations. Unfriendly eyes.
And I had cause then, not so long after, to wonder if I had been so wise to write after all.
Every day I would be sent to the Main Street to get whatever provisions Mrs Bellow listed. It is almost strange to me that I did that for so many years, season by season.
The mansion was set at the end of its street, and the road ended there. Automobiles often came in unawares and had to turn in the little sweep at the top, where the gates of the Bellow house were. Every house had a coachhouse, and places for tradesmen to park. You didn’t see many automobiles on the sidewalk, so this day, coming home with the heavy bags, I did take note of an old jalopy stuck up on the dirt edge, under the old oaks that finished the vista. And leaning against the jalopy in question was a man. I don’t know what he had been doing up till then, but I felt that when he spotted me coming in the distance, he rather hurri
edly turned the crank on his engine, and sat into his vehicle, slamming the loose, thin door. Then he didn’t look at me again the whole way, but kept his face turned towards the scrubby oaks, in an unlikely preoccupation with them. When, in some trembling, I reached the house, and turned down the great latch and started to swing the huge iron gates open just a little to allow me to pass through, he still didn’t turn his head.
I saw him make a little movement, and dip right towards the passenger seat. I don’t know why that startled me so, but a fear came into me like a great crowd of rats entering a warm house. Here is the moment, I thought, when he turns and gets out and points the gun, and I am to be killed. I pressed my weight against the gates, and even the tiny gap I had needed to enter seemed to take an age to close. I suddenly sensed how vulnerable I was, how vulnerable any human creature was, bones and flesh, all permeable to a bullet. I was trying to close the gate, I know not why, and he could have leapt out and shot me a dozen times. Why did I not just run like a demon? The human brain is not a logical machine.
It was dark under those oaks. The generous light of June, that ran its fingers through the dry leaves, made the shadows all the deeper. In a strange slow-motion, I closed the gate, and stood there, looking back. I thought, is this the man that took Tadg? Suddenly all I could think of was Tadg. The fact of Tadg, the remnant of him in me, how he lived in my heart, obliterated all my present fear. I was surging with love for Tadg.
My ‘messages’ as Dublin people say, my packages had fallen from my arms. I had not even noticed. They were lying now at my feet, outside the gate, carrots, sugar, coffee as may be. The man got out of the car and stood in the shadows. His dry-looking hat caused another shadow over his face and eyes. Then I said something that made no sense, and makes no sense even now.
‘Is it me?’ I said. That’s all I said. I waited for the answer with a weird patience. I could not see his face but I could feel him looking at me. I was dressed in my sole summer dress, with the pattern of olives and leaves all over it, well I remember it. Cassie loved that dress, though it was a cheap thing from the Hungarian market. As he watched me though I began to feel naked, like that dream I used to have when I was a schoolchild, the dream of being in class, and looking down, and realising I had forgotten to put my clothes on. I felt oddly out of place, clumsy. I don’t know how to describe that feeling. I felt like I was dying in front of him.
*
If he had a gun in his hand, and I couldn’t see if he did, he didn’t fire it. He swung round abruptly and got back into his bashed car. As he drove off, I saw he had a 1923 Tennessee licence plate, I did note that, in the great humiliation of my panic. He must have been driving that Model T drunk through forests to get it in such a state in only seven or eight years. My arms were useless to me, I could barely pick up my packages. My vittles, as Cassie would say.
But I went back into the house and tried to recover myself, get myself shipshape for work. I don’t think Mrs Bellow would have noticed if I had come into the kitchen missing my head. She wasn’t a woman to notice things maybe. I was even surprised to see her in the kitchen, she was rarely there that time of day, which she usually spent in her bedroom, curtains strictly closed. But she spent the whole afternoon there with Cassie, making three charity cakes for a fête, so I wasn’t able to tell Cassie anything till evening. By which time I was like a loosely corked bottle of soda, bubbling away wastefully. It was long enough after the fact now to feel the full whack of it. I couldn’t touch a bite of supper, not a bite. I was silent as a Benedictine nun. Which wasn’t like me, because whatever had gone on in our lives, Cassie and me liked to talk, we liked to sparkle away a bit at each other, making each other laugh. Well, we were queens of laughter usually.
Now it was well past nightfall and our tasks were finished for that day and we were side by side in the big bed. Her weight created a big dip, so I was always a little sideways, like a lean-to shed against a house in Wicklow. So I told her my little story. Now she was all for telling the police.
‘Mrs Bellow won’t like that.’
‘I don’t think she’ll want a strange man hanging about, Lilly, I don’t.’
Next morning right enough she asked permission from Mrs Bellow to use the telephone in the hallway, and made a call through to the station.
That afternoon a police car came in through the gates and parked under the flowering rhododendrons.
I was not in a good state of mind. I hadn’t wanted Cassie to ring and was more and more alarmed she had, thinking about it. I had fled the scene in Chicago. So I would be obliged merely to say a strange man had been acting strangely, which didn’t sound very urgent. If he really was an assassin, maybe the game was up anyway. He would surely be back again, and by the savage cut of him in Chicago I didn’t suppose any policeman was going to stop him.
All this was going round and round in my brain, and then the trooper walks in, in his policeman’s outfit.
I didn’t know he was Joe Kinderman just then, of course.
He took the whole thing very seriously, very. I gave an account of the man, on my own in the left-side sitting-room. I hadn’t wanted Cassie, I didn’t want her chiming in, because out of concern for me she might say too much.
‘You didn’t know this man,’ said the officer. He had a little notebook, and a carpenter’s pencil, with thick lead, and when he wrote something, he licked at the lead, quick, quick, snakelike. He had a full mouth with just a line of a moustache above his upper lip, like Cesar Romero. Me and Cassie had seen Cesar Romero at the Saturday picture house. If we had been two ice-creams we would have melted on the seats.
‘I couldn’t see his face,’ I said, suddenly feeling the force of childhood, when a lie was such a fearing sin. I was quite afraid of this man, in his tight-fitting clothes, and his punchy face. The strange man had had a gun, and this man had a gun. It was odd to be sitting in Mrs Bellow’s pink and green armchair, Joe Kinderman in a matching chair, trying to tell the truth and yet not to say anything about the past. I wanted to tell him my father was in the same profession, but of course I could not. And Tadg of course, a policeman of sorts. I didn’t think this man in front of me was Irish, but still I couldn’t chance it. Maybe he knew nothing of Ireland and her politics. I tried to be truthful but sparing. He was tickled pink that I was Irish, when he asked me, I didn’t know why, since there were a thousand Irish maids in Cleveland, tens of thousands.
He was heartened when I said I had seen the Tennessee licence plate.
‘If you remember the number, honey, we have a good chance to catch this guy.’
‘77170,’ I said. ‘1923 I think it might have been.’
‘I suppose you don’t know the make? Women don’t usually look at things like that.’
‘Model T,’ I said.
He let out a little whistle, or an almost-whistle, accompanied by an unintended comet of spit.
‘We had seven women killed these last two years, all over Cuyahoga county,’ he said, partly to recover himself I am sure. ‘So you look out for yourself.’
I was noticing something about his face then, it was slightly ash-coloured, like I had seen once in the steelworkers’ faces when they came up to see Mr Bellow. The furnaces baked dust into their pores. They were human pots being fired all day long, and it left a mark. But Joe Kinderman was no steelworker.
‘It’s usually quiet up here,’ I said. ‘Never a soul. That’s why he gave me a fright.’
‘Sure. And very nice up here it is too. The Heights. Yes, sir. I would sure love to live up here.’ And he laughed, like that was about as likely as iron turning to gold. ‘Salubrious,’ he said, giving the word a breeze of energy.
I found myself liking his fancy word. He might have borrowed it from my father. I liked him, even if I feared him. I smiled at him a little as he sat there, nodding his head, and patting his knees. I thought, carefree.
So then he got up and off he went, confident and ashen-faced.
His boot-shoes were so
brightly polished I could see Mrs Bellow’s windows in them, curtains and all.
Ninth Day without Bill
Well, Joe Kinderman got a name for the car’s owner, a Robert Doherty, but it was far far away in Tennessee, two states over. He was thinking now it was just a drifter, on the prowl for what he could get. America was full of uprooted men now, he said, whole families. Cleveland was filling up with them, a city he said that was never going to be an easy answer for anyone. But he had a name and he was going to make sure and certain that Robert Doherty wasn’t in Ohio any more.
I knew this because he came back one afternoon, easy as you like, and asked me out to Luna Park. He said I could bring Cassie with me if I liked. He had parked his car and sneaked in round the back to the kitchen, and checked Mrs Bellow wasn’t there, all in best policeman style.
We only had one day off a month, and we usually just went haunting the sidewalks round the various stores in Shaker Heights, and looking at the flowers in the parks, which Cassie especially loved. There were places that didn’t like Cassie coming in. But we always scrubbed ourselves, and put on whatever we had for finery, and sallied forth gamely.
This was something different, a man bringing us to Luna Park. I had to smile, because I realised properly only then that Cassie had never had a beau of any kind. Cassie was worried that she had been asked too. She didn’t want to make things difficult for Joe Kinderman. But he didn’t care about that. In his civvies he was all spark and tornado.
Nevertheless when we got on the streetcar all together, and were making to sit down at the front, so we could see everything as we went, the motorman had a word in Joe’s ear, and asked him if we wouldn’t be happier down the back.
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Joe, showing the man his police badge that he had in his breast pocket. ‘I am escorting these ladies. What you’re looking at here is out-and-out royalty. This here,’ he said, indicating poor Cassie, ‘is the Viceregal Consort of the Gold Coast. That’s her house,’ he said, indicating an anonymous mansion we were passing, ‘that’s her palace, right there.’
On Canaan’s Side Page 9