Exile on Bridge Street

by Eamon Loingsigh

  Lore of the Great Grippe during the Great War is mostly lost to time now, but out of the many of the stories came one that grew legs and was picked up by physicians and medical researchers. That was of a visitor to Brooklyn from Albany in the winter of 1918. It was an uncle in the Sullivan family that had come to the city to visit a newborn niece. Mary Regina was the child’s name, and this uncle infected the baby with the grippe without his knowing it, and within hours of his journey back upstate did the uncle die. Little Mary Regina took deathly ill too and could barely breathe with her tiny lungs bubbling in fluid, and gasping and wheezing did wee Mary Regina go until her parents had no choice but to make plans for a miniature coffin. But just as suddenly, the baby recovered and for the rest of her very long life she never again got sick. Not a-once. Even as she worked as a nurse for more than forty years, caring for people with the most contagious diseases the port of New York could throw at her. She lived deep into her nineties, in fact, stronger than any man. Immune to all flus and colds and survived long enough to tell her great-grandchildren what it was like growing up in old Brooklyn.

  Such stories give hope, but with the government and businesses doing all they can to avoid panic, the topic is mostly ignored, as usual. But we don’t have time to point fingers at them anymore. We already know they’ll not help us, even as they say they are doing all they can. They let us starve and freeze, as usual. And as usual we see the past repeating itself forever in the present. It is us at the bottom that see the worst of it, the longshoremen families of the New York Harbor and the city’s poor. Every morning when ships come to the Brooklyn anchorage, we look for the Yellow Jack on them. This flag signifies that the ship is contaminated, but we always take them in anyhow. Some ships are quarantined, though, and sent to the Atlantic Basin in Red Hook or Wallabout Bay, left for the cargo to rot like the old British prison ships during the Revolutionary War.

  One day I admit to The Lark and Big Dick down at the Baltic Terminal that I feel a bit of a fever and fatigue, and out of their coats they pull bottles of potato vodka, “Swish it around the mouth, kid. Spit it over there. Wash yer hands wid it.”

  I’ve never seen them act so serious and I feel that at any second they are going to tell me the vodka is actually made out of urine or something. When I try to give the bottle back to them, they pass and tell me to keep it.

  “Go home for the day, kid.”

  I have nothing to do, so instead of going back to Harry’s room on Atlantic Avenue, I go to my place on Eighth and, climbing the stairs to the third floor, sneezing and wheezing, bottle of vodka in my hand, I enter and see the black floors. The hole in the kitchen is covered and has new wood slats contrasting with the old black ones, making the place look undone altogether. I can’t take off my coat because I feel so cold, but on my hands and knees I begin sanding from the far corner of the girls’ room with nothing but my bare hands and a few pieces of sandpaper. I am coughing and swishing out my mouth and rinsing my hands in the new sink and getting more and more nervous because I feel I am getting worse. And on top of it, I am alone. I have to gather energy to stand up and open the windows because my nose is getting filled with sawdust and I am dizzy from the vodka and the fever and my sinuses feel tender and swollen and my eyes are heavy and after two hours I am so exhausted I fall asleep in the doorway between the girls’ room and the kitchen on the floor.

  * * *

  “Hello?” I hear the door open with a woman’s voice. “Anybody in here?”

  “Hello there, Mrs. Burke,” I say, coming to an elbow.

  “Are you sick?”

  I look away. She crosses herself, “Can you tell the man that you are always with that we are very thankful and that we feel safe in his care?”

  “I will,” I say, knowing that she is speaking of Harry.

  She quickly closes the door behind her and I lie on my back and look to the ceiling, palm on my forehead. Within seconds I am back asleep still in the doorway and I don’t wake until the next morning, but when I do I have to pee so badly that I run to the lavatory in the hallway and moan in relief loud enough that I’m sure everyone on the third floor hears me.

  When I come out, Harry Reynolds is there. “You sick?”

  “Uh . . . ”

  He puts his hand on my forehead. “Feverish. C’mon.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Hospital.”

  “I thought we don’t go to hospitals?”

  “Only the ignorant don’t. You ignorant?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  I AM LEFT IN A LARGE room with many sick men, yet I am isolated by a partition. It is at Long Island College Hospital a couple blocks from Harry’s room on Atlantic Avenue that I’m interned. They keep me here. They are very strict about my not leaving too and ask me to stay in bed, but I love to sit on the ledge of the large open window and look out onto the water.

  They have books, too. Lots of them. In one long day and night I read the entire book called Treasure Island. I’ll never forget Jim Hawkins’s description of a buccaneer picking his teeth with a huge knife on the beach. And there’s Gulliver’s Travels too, which I love so much I read it twice. And there are translations of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I read them so fast that the nurses bring in their own books for me to devour.

  “Well he’ll be caught up in no time,” one says.

  But sometimes I don’t feel well and sleep for many hours during the day. Then at night I lie awake, unable to sleep and sit on the big window ledge overlooking the East River and the Hudson River darting west of Manhattan. Again Lady Liberty standing proud, holding her torch. I can see the Atlantic Terminal, too, though it is covered with one large warehousing structure after another and pier houses and dock sheds and train depots and overhangs and so many different edifices that all contribute in sending goods out from the manufacturers’ factories here in the neighborhoods and in to New York from abroad. The shorefront being a place of great exchanging, I see it differently from on high here. The longshoremen and laborers seemingly moving in peace among each other like ants below, maneuvering existentially from one place to another on the piers and on the decks, in hulls and docks. The tumult and turbulence of life on the waterfront doesn’t exist up here, and I can see why the newspapers and the men of the Waterfront Assembly would think us all a bunch of wild men who love nothing more than the drink and the fight.

  The nurses are quite often nuns, and with their headdresses, long white garments, and masks covering their mouths and noses, I feel like I am certain to die. They never come too close, but when they do they look at me with only their eyes visible, I believe I see pity in them, but I can’t be sure. When they cross themselves and curtsy before leaving me, I can’t help but to think they’re planning last rites. I feel we are treated well enough here, but in my memory are the old stories, told to me when I was a child, of the workhouses in Ireland of my grandfather’s time. Erected under the auspice of the poor and desperate gaining work after the great blight and famine came, in actuality they became a place to die for hundreds of thousands stricken with the diseases that come with starvation and malnutrition on a mass scale.

  Many men are taken to another floor where the sickest are sent never to be seen or heard again. To pass on. What they do with all the bodies is up to my imagination only, but there are rumors of a crematory in the basement. Better than mass graves in the hospital’s courtyard, I suppose.

  Despite this, it is maybe the most peaceful time in all of my younger days with the bleached-white sheets and the breeze. With no docks, no fighting, no cold weather, and no need to defend myself, I am left to my imagination and at night I think of Emma McGowan. And in the morning, too. Then in the afternoon I close my eyes and I think of the two of us walking down a suburban street with children following us and she is so proud of me, because I’m a man who thinks about his wife and his family, and our children will grow up to be city c
ouncilmen in small towns where there is peace and where the wind wisps through the trees in our backyard and we drink tea on Saturdays and her mother, Mrs. McGowan, sits in a rocking chair on the back porch smiling in her golden years, fat and happy. The gentlelife. Dreaming of the gentlelife. But that is not all that I think of. Emma and I spend a lot of time alone together, in my imagination. She shares everything with me and allows my hands to wash over her hips and to kiss her neck. I can smell the passion in her breath as she breathes into my mouth and together we hide from the world to enjoy each other’s bodies. I already know about masturbation, but with so much time alone I become an expert. I am not the only one, of course, at night behind my partition the air is full with the symphony of the pleasurable moanings of men followed by the timbre of snores.

  One morning while lying in bed, I tilt my head when I read an article in the newspaper: Police Corruption in Brooklyn at its Height. Detective William Brosnan is mentioned in the article, but both the police chief and the district attorney come to his defense. In the article below that, I read what makes my stomach turn completely: Temperance Leaders and Waterfront Assembly to Meet with Bishops of Local Roman Catholic Churches.

  I put the paper down and the first thing that comes to my mind is the look on Dinny’s face when I spoke to him last about the Waterfront Assembly. How he avoided the conversation when I asked what we could do about them. Now this. “Oh they’re comin’,” Brosnan had told us. “Like the great suck’d o’ the ocean and leave ye bathin’ in a welter o’ yer own blood and bones, all o’ ye.”

  Just then a man stands over my bed with his chart and his airs. I can see that he grew up in a rich household by the way he demands things from the nurses. His white coat is pristine in its cleanliness, and I can also see he takes great pride in never getting his hands dirty—always giving orders and never taking them.

  “You can go,” he says without ever looking at me, then signs my chart at the end of the bed, walks away without the slightest concern of anyone’s ideas other than his own.

  I grab my clothes and put them on as fast as I can, tie my Hanan boots in a flash. I have never been more sure of anything in the world, and as I walk out the hospital doors, I take to the wind toward the McGowan home. I stop only for flowers and with the wind and everything in life all new again, exciting and different and strange and yet familiar, I sprint down the street and run up the stairwell to knock on the door.

  Mrs. McGowan again answers. Slowly opens the door on the third floor.

  “Good morning,” I smile, filled with excitement and energy.

  “William?” she looks up surprised, as if I’m supposed to be dead.

  I smile, “Do you think it’ll be all right if I take Emma . . .”

  “William, William,” she interrupts, her face turning color, then looking away from me. She shakes her head no while looking up and hides behind the door, then slowly closes it while crossing herself, leaving me and my flowers outside.

  Then quickly the door is back open and Mrs. McGowan is angered, “Ye tell Dinny—that’s right, I say his name! Ye tell ’em if he wants to help us, then let us go. Let us leave Brooklyn and stop enslavin’ us to it. That’s right, bhoy, it’s fer him we can’t leave and it’s fer him my daughter’s dead now. An’ me son too. Who’ll be next? Is it yerself then? G’on then, tell ’em.”

  The door slams in my face. I drop the flowers at my arm’s length. I’d never known anyone to be angry with Dinny like Mrs. McGowan is. And . . . Emma is dead. Emma.

  I walk down the stairwell slowly, my head tingling. I lose my breath for a moment and stop and lean against the banister. My chest heaving and heaving until I see spots and sit down, cold sweats raking through my body like shock waves. I just want to ask questions, I think to myself. I just want someone to answer all my questions. I have so many, I just wish there was someone to help me with them. But orphans don’t have what is most needed: the mother. The father. The grandparents. The siblings. The cousins. The infrastructure for a child’s mind.

  Thinking back on it now as I stand from the typewriter and my pencil and paper, looking out through the window onto the New York Harbor, I know that not having my family close to me for those years set me back. For a long time, I was behind others who’d grown up with the support structure that a family gives a developing mind. I’m an old man now and certainly I’ve caught up, but for so much of my life had I been behind those of my own age.

  I had a family, true. I had Dinny Meehan and Harry Reynolds and Sadie and others. It’s true, I had them, but there’s nothing replaces a mother. A father too, but it’s the mother that makes us who we are. And why she couldn’t be there to answer my questions was, well, yet another question I wanted answered.

  For a moment I thought I might have a new family. The McGowan family that has loads of women in it. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, I got a slammed door in the face. I walk outside and curse the cold weather. The godforsaken wind that never stops. Curse all that I can’t control. It’s everything in the world I can’t control that ruins me. I fight back tears, even though I long to feel sorry for myself.

  But when I do, I think of Emma. Died in her blooming years.

  She’ll always be beautiful.

  CHAPTER 26

  Lace Curtains

  ON THE ELEVENTH DAY OF THE eleventh month at the eleventh hour of 1918, an armistice is called in France. The Great War is over. The world is changing, but in our neighborhoods most things stay the same. The wind, ships, bridges above us and death always there. A week or so before the war ends, a train derails on the other side of Prospect Park from my Eighth Avenue room by Ebbets Field—almost one hundred souls scrubbed clean from the dirty earth in seconds.

  In the West Village of Manhattan, Harry waits for me with a hat over his eyes and his hands in his pockets at a waterfront ticket box as I finally book passage for my mother and sisters. I take the receipt and place it in my wallet. Harry pushes off the wall he’d been leaning on and together we walk away without celebration. It’d only be months now until they arrive, if all goes well. But long months, they are.

  * * *

  JANUARY, 1919

  WITH FATHER LARKIN’S VOICE BANKING OFF St. Ann’s long ceilings so often, it seems as though the entire neighborhood is within reach of the ecclesiastical homily and the funeral rite. Again, we show up in force for what we all simply call “sayin’ goodbye to people.” The lot of us wearing our wake attire once more. With Sunday morning beer on our lips from the Dock Loaders’ Club, we wash south up the Bridge Street hill again, little boys admiring us from windows upstairs, mothers shaming and appreciating us all at once, the Great Grippe taking another of the Lonergan brood, freezing and malnourished, just as it had taken Emma away from us, and many others too.

  Again we are on the march through the neighborhoods, a Lonergan casket on a dray. Death everywhere, whether from grippe or war, death is the great constant. Fred Honeybeck last week. Gimpy Kafferty the week before that, died in France defending England, the both. And Quiet Higgins too. A pair of Simpson brothers to boot, Whitey and Baron, and many more. We just shaking our heads, for while we are funding a revolt with Germany in Ireland against England, they are fighting against Germany for England in France.

  Today, the procession walks sullenly again in front of the open-shuttered refineries, half-opened stable doors, dusty stonecutter shops and wheelwrights and farriers and harness makers, the long and skinny smokestacks looking dolefully down on us all. Shuffling anew along the Navy Yard wall with the clopping feet of dour draught horses until we go west on Water Street. Beside the wood-fenced area in front of the giant Brooklyn Union Gas fuel tanks we continue, pulling the horses by the face and bits over the freight rails and rough cobbles. Looking over their shoulders, black-faced men inside foundries are lit only by the glowing orange of the smelting furnace and the casts pulled out by crucible tongs. The air smelling of ferric oxide and steam, we stop in front of St. Ann’s Church again. Next door
is Moore & Co. Paints that has for so long been there that its owners simply find it ineffective for its workers to honor each melancholic funeral cortege. Especially during the war and the horrible sickness that falls drooling out of its gluttonous, toothy gob.

  To her credit, Anna has not budged since May 1917 when she sent us from her home, and she stands here now arms crossed, sneering at our like. But we keep our heads low, cross ourselves respectfully, and fill the church with flowers, pay for the casket and the gravestone at Calvary Cemetery.

  But here we part, half of us entering the house of God for the Requiem Mass, others remaining outside. Families separated too—Sadie and L’il Dinny heading in with the procession, the father breaking off.

  Inside is silence but for the shuffling feet, the gentle dropping of kneelers from under pews, a distant cough, and the medieval ringing of the pipe organ extending notes long for to bless the bier that holds the child, feet facing the altar.

  L’il Dinny is already squirming as he sits between myself and Sadie. Behind me is the Burke family, including the son who mouths wordless sounds every so often. Ahead I see Cinders Connolly with his pregnant wife and their four young ones. Philip Large among them. Detective Brosnan in civil clothes next to his daughter, and holding her hand is Patrolman Culkin. To our right is Mrs. McGowan and her remaining daughters—her son’s widow still in her weeds four years on and her children next to her. The Lark and Big Dick Morissey as well as Red Donnelly, Henry Browne, Paddy Keenan, Beat McGarry, and many others sit amongst themselves and theirs. The Lonergan family in the front row, Mary surrounded by Anna on one side, the dead child’s father at the other, arm wrapped over his wife’s shoulder. The familiar scars of the mother ever-present. Burnt skin on one side of her face and scalded hair over one broken ear, tears and sobbing muffled. The eldest son Richie sitting with his fists in his lap, another new tie and coat over him for the occasion. Matty Martin and Timothy Quilty behind.