“And Father Larkin too. They reigned him in too, I’ll bet.”
No answer.
It’s been more than three years since I’ve seen Lady Liberty this close. It’s a different statue altogether now than when I was an unplanned immigrant coming from a feudal, agrarian past among the grassy hills of County Clare, Ireland, back in October 1915. She seems damaged now. Run-through herself, and hurt, and as we pass her I see she is pockmarked and wounded. Although I know it’s from the explosion on Black Tom’s Island and the weather always beating on her, I feel like she has changed. She still stands, yes, but more astute and with a heavier heart. Wary, yet wise. Angry and aching.
I think now, in my old age, of this exact day I tell you of now. Sitting upright, wiping away my old man’s tears. The old memories that remain. Romanticized surely, but there they are. Seeing the statue on the island up close. Then Ellis Island again for the first time since 1915. Harry’s profile and stern kindness. The mist in the air. All these memories. Always there.
The mother. Too many teenagers pull away from their mother, but I was the opposite. I missed her so much. Missed my family. And so a new family had adopted me in the interim. A family of men had brought me in and gave me a place in life. A wage to earn. A roof and food. But I think of my mother and her love for me. I think of her. And I think of how sad it made me to see my mother and sisters again after so long a wait. How different they were, also wary and wounded.
Their dresses are gray and long and handwashed too often and fraying. I am struck by how small the three seem. Ireland’s diet during the war not much accommodating the physical growth in people, their clothes hang about them drably and they have that unplanned look about their eyes, staring at skyscrapers to the north and the sea air new to their noses—so many thousands of miles away from the only place they’ve ever known, and at the end of it, they are bitten by the ancient Atlantic crossing that our people have known so well. Tired and bedraggled, they look malnourished, pale and with windswept manes, but with flinty-faced pride holding high in them still.
My God how I remember how they looked when first I see them again after close on four years. I can’t write at this moment and instead walk away for a tissue, my hands shaking like a helpless old fool. It took me this long to write this story, and now I know why. It’s so close to the bone of me. These memories that I rush out here for you to breathe in. I sit back down and sigh deeply, try again to finish.
It isn’t so much what my mother says, but rather her facial features and gestures and glances that catch me by surprise. Remind me for the first time in so long of my childhood growing up on the rainy farm out in the middle of the Irish countryside. And they have the smell of turf fires on them and soup and Ireland altogether. The smell of memory.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph and Bernadette and John and . . .” my mother’s voice summons every honored saint the church has, and there are a lot. “My bhoy. My bhoy, William James. We did it. We did it. We did.”
“We did,” I say, my face filled again with tears.
Abby and Brigid holding their hands over their mouths around us, hoping for some kind of welcome, but unsure if I am willing to touch them. Feeling as though the time is appropriate for such a thing, I open my arms to them and they jump into us. Harry leans against a wall watching us closely, tugging on his nose with a nervousness that I don’t recognize from him. But he watches us and in trying to discourage any emotion, he crosses his legs and arms and looks down the long hall filled with others greeting their own people for the first time in many a year, employees walking by without notice, selfish in their New York City faces. I hold close to my family, mother on my chest, a sister on each arm until we begin coming into the recognition that we should get moving to the moment’s concerns.
Gathering herself, my mother peers up at me, “Look at the size o’ this one, won’t ye? And with muscles abound, bhoy. Ye been werkin’ hard, haven’t ye?”
“This is Harry Reynolds, Mam,” I say, waving him over. “I work with him a lot. He’s a good man. Helped me out quite a bit.”
Wiping tears from her eyes, she greets him and cordially he receives Abby and Brigid too as my mother offers an apology, “I’m so sorry for all o’ this, Mr. Reynolds . . .”
“No worries,” he smiles, which reminds of what my mother said to me before I left, so I repeat it now to her.
“Not to werry, Mam.”
“Ya’re in good hands wit’ William,” Harry assures.
“You’re home now,” I say as Harry and I pick up their tattered bags and rags. “Let’s get moving—we still have to take a boat and a couple trolleys.”
“Ye know, William, ye’re bigger than ye’re own big brother, ye know it? Ye are too,” she says as we move toward the landings. “Ye were such a humble bhoy, ye were. So good, too. Sweet apple-cheeked little William followin’ his da round the place, never once givin’ me the lip. Ye should know, Mr. Reynolds, the bhoy was as gentle as the River Shannon is shy. I couldn’t know how he’s seen here in New Yark, but the bhoy was a pleasure round the home.”
“We like’m here too,” Harry smiles at my mother.
From the island, we get back on the tug and allow the women to ride inside the pilothouse with the driver while Harry and I ride in the back with the wind and the mist. I don’t know why I think it remarkable, but Harry’s facial features haven’t changed at all. I suppose my surprise is only due to the big excitement I have with my mother and two sisters’ arrival and everything else, but there is a safety I feel in Harry Reynolds’s subdued strength. A safety that influences my behavior in front of my mother and sisters, even.
When we land back on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, all three are helped off the tug onto the wharf. We walk back through the maze and while doing so, I think about how odd it is to escort my family through an area where I’d seen so many fist fights, men beaten, bludgeoned, and even killed. At the trolley station on the corner of Columbia Street and Atlantic Avenue, we wait with our bags on the ground in front of us. Reticently I look across the street at the saloon I spent a week inside, drinking my insides out.
The girls have never ridden a trolley before and are almost as enamored by the street train as they were the tugboat. Down the tracks, we change to the Flatbush trolley and afterward continue on down the Prospect Park West line and finally get off at Ninth Street. From there we walk the three blocks to 518 Eighth Avenue. Standing in front of the thin brownstone building built back in 1893, my mother looks up, then looks over at me.
“We’re on the third floor,” I say, knowing just how strange the stacked city tenement homes look to her.
We walk up the stairwell and eventually make it to the front door. I reach across everyone and unlock it, open it for my mother and sisters to enter.
“Oh my,” my mother quickly says.
The new lace curtains are open for the natural light to come through the kitchen window, and a small folding table is flush against the wall with four chairs under it, a rocking chair to the side and a round rug in the center where the hole used to be. The floors are sanded and smell a bit of lacquer, the walls of fresh paint and new cabinets filled with glass dishes and one set of china, a new teapot on top of the Quincy oven. In the women’s room there are three beds with metal headboards and footboards and bedskirts with new sheets and shams for the pillows and rugs under each one with small nightstands to the side. A closet we built with little running doors on them is opened, showing three Sunday dresses, and three hats, three pairs of new shoes, and two small dressers against opposing walls await their filling, a low window with lace curtains splayed open, showing the fire escape attached to the building and a view of Prospect Park a block away where the treetops can be seen swaying in the breeze over the building across the street.
“One day maybe we’ll get something bigger, Ma,” I say. “I know it’s small, but . . .”
“No, no, no, no,” she whispers, choking back her tears while sitting at the kitchen
table alone, next to her rags and bags from Ireland.
“What’s wrong, Mam?” Brigid asks, kneeling down.
My mother sits at the little table and buries her face in her hands as she weeps. She gasps and takes a deep breath as her face is swelling with redness and tears and exhaustion.
“Where will you sleep, William?”
“In there,” I point to the door to the right where Harry and I built a room only big enough for a small bed and a small nightstand to its side.
Without even looking at it, she holds both hands over her face again, ashamed that she is crying.
“What ails ye, Mam?” Abby asks gently.
Catching herself finally, she manages, “I can tell ye two clean’t the place spotless before we arrived here today.”
“Yeah, we cleaned it up.” I look at Harry with a smile.
“That means more than anyt’ing else in the werld to me, William. Anyt’ing.”
We spend the late afternoon and dusk unpacking in the orange, swaying candlelight even as there are gaslights available.
“Would ye like me to wet ye a sup o’ s’more tae, Harry?” my mother asks.
“Thank you.”
We heat up some stew and open the table in the middle of the kitchen. Harry and I smile at each other as we are all sitting exactly over the hole that once reached down through the second floor. Without a fifth seat for Harry, he uses a nightstand to sit on. Abby smiles with Brigid while looking at him, and when my mother notices, she pokes the girls in the thighs. Sitting taller than the rest of us, Harry either does not notice them or ignores it all out of respect for their youthful age and his being a guest.
“Do you two work on the docks?” Mam asks.
“We do,” I say.
“Must pay very well,” she smiles. “This home is grand.” Harry and I look at each other again and with half-lies I say, “In America, hard work pays.”
Harry looks away, shame-faced.
A knock at the door echoes in the kitchen.
“Is someone here?” Mam asks quizzically.
Harry walks over to it, reaches across his waist for the handle to his shiv as my sisters and mother watch him closely. A second knock comes that scares them all.
“Who is it?” Harry asks.
“Burke. Is that you, Harry? Listen we have big . . .”
Harry opens the door quickly and lets himself out.
“What is all this about?” my mother asks.
“It’s the man downstairs, he has a family. Very nice people, I’ll introduce you to them, but for now, I have to go and see what is happening, all right?”
Instead of answering, she watches me closely as I step outside.
Burke has the look of death on him while Harry has already left. “Dinny and The Swede and Lumpy and Vincent all have been arrested. They found a bunch of shoes in the basement of Lumpy’s brother’s restaurant. Hanan shoes, remember? Harry went to get Dead Reilly.”
“Oh shit,” I say, then look up. “Time for Mickey Kane to step up. Us too.”
CHAPTER 27
Everyone Knows
HARBOR TRAFFIC HAS DIED OFF A bit since the ending of the war. Contracts voided, bought out. No new ones needed. Still the wind rings up, yet there are not as many ships coming in. Not as many needed going out. The longshoremen that load and unload goods are less in demand, but the jobs left are highly sought after. Money tightens up, for there is not as much in circulation. Still though, we own the rights to those jobs and the bites of money that come in, The White Hand.
Gathered outside the Dock Loaders’ Club and at every terminal are angered labormen that are wanting for work, desperate for it. They line up and grumble when not picked. Cast slurs. Some pleading mothers come too, their hands holding the hands of children. Facing starvation and already malnourished, they brave the winter weather at the waterfront, keening for help to those that own sway. They don’t give a care that our leaders are locked up. The Swede, Vincent Maher, and Lumpy Gilchrist. Least of their worries is that Dinny Meehan is not here. He who always knows what to do. The January cold is here, though. But the wind and the cold and the lack of work are no enemies to challenge, beat back.
The gusts are in my face. Make me blink. This is my day. My day on the docks. The day I become myself. Larger than myself. Bigger than how others have seen me. I stand up to the wind and the banshee screeching of the Manhattan Bridge above me.
I look across the icy East River toward Manhattan a block from the Dock Loaders’ Club in front of the freight house of the marine-rail terminal at Jay Street. A float bridge is being pulled by a tug from the Lower East Side to us along the waterway. I can see it coming slowly. The first of six. We are to connect the train cars onto a locomotive that will take the thousands of bags of raw sugar to the Arbuckle Refinery at 10 Jay Street and unload them. This morning’s work, though, Cinders Connolly is back at Bridge Street filling in for Dinny upstairs at his desk. I in Cinders’s place here. Mickey Kane too, holding down the fort above the Dock Loaders’ Club. Learning as they go, the two of them.
“You ready?” Burke says to me as a flag is shimmied up a dock shed by the super. A pier house whistle rips open the morning air and everything begins to stir. The metal stevedore’s table is carried out and three men sit behind it, their backs to the water. A chain of train cars are slowly pulled from the walkway by a locomotive. Philip Large is licking his lips and holding a fist, and coming up from the Baltic Street Terminal I can see Big Dick Morissey here to help me like a good man. Many others begin strolling out of the Dock Loaders’ Club down Bridge Street, and to the east, others saunter and amble half-asleep from row houses and framers in Irishtown.
“Liam,” I hear, yet no one has called me by that name in well over a year. “Liam.”
I see a man crutching down the ugly cobbles of Marshall Street from Hudson Avenue in the middle of the road. He has one leg, a shaved head, and is thin by all means of men.
“Liam, it’s me. I heard ya takin’ over the Jay Street Terminal ’til Dinny an’ them get out,” the man says, ably crutching at a quick speed and talking at the same time.
My first inclination is to ask who the man is. His shorn head has long, healed scars across it, and though he is younger than thirty, his jowl and throat are drooping with extra skin and his eyes are circled with a black that shows his lack of sleep or fair rest.
“Happy Maloney?” Big Dick says.
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m back. Gee, ya sure are taller than I remember, Liam.”
Big Dick and Philip and myself look down to his leg, though Burke has never met the man before.
“Got shot’n it infected so they cut it off. Listen, can I work wit’ ya t’day? I ain’t eaten since two days now and I knew ya guys’d help me so . . .”
“Ya heard about Johnny Mullen?” Big Dick asks.
“Eh, what about ’em?”
“Died.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. Him and I was good friends back when, but we got split up over there.”
“Ya learn how to shoot a gun, did ya?” Big Dick says.
“Yeah, I did learn how to . . .”
“Take this then,” Big Dick pulls out his revolver. “Sit right there on that cleat and hold that piece in ya hand. Look nasty too. If the tunics come, throw it in the river.”
“Right,” he says walking toward the water with the Manhattan Bridge above us.
“We’ll get ya some breakfast here in a minute,” Big Dick says, then turns to me as men are slowly gathering. “You’re on, kid.”
We shake hands. Behind us in a horseshoe shape are gathered more hungry men looking for work. Sixty, seventy day laborers, drunkards, and immigrants most of them.
I wipe a hand across my mouth and chin, gather my strength. Stomach turning. Burning. Nervous. Then turn round and yell from the belly, “We got six train cars t’unload s’marnin’ and if there’s a man among yez, I yet can’t see’m. So in a circumstance such as this, we’ll be happy to wait fer th
e man’s willin’ to werk like his name says he should, fer we don’ need no feckin’ navvies and we don’ need no feckin’ spalpeens loafin’ their way t’rough the livelong day, so we’ll wait then. And we will.”
I cross my arms, Philip Large at my right, Big Dick Morissey to my left, and Thomas Burke supporting them with Happy Maloney scowling on the dock’s cleat, pistol on his knee.
“I wanna work wit’ ya, Mr. . . .”
“Kelly, as ye know me by,” I say. “Patrick Kelly. Who else is interested in werkin’ then?”
I see some hands spring up and move forward from the circle. I pick them and tell them to stand to the side and eventually all the men raise their hands and I now have their attention. But I hear a whisper. One head tilts toward the ear of another with arms crossed. And as we all know too well, there’s more to hear in a whisper than a scream.
I tap on Big Dick and Philip’s shoulders and as the whisperer passes in front of me, I grab ahold of the back of his coat and fling him to the ground. Burke grabs one of his feet, Happy stands up with the pistol, and Big Dick is smiling as he kicks at the back of the man’s head.
“Ye got werds do ye?” I yell, as everyone turns round to see what is passing.
“Let the man go,” one laborer yells out and before he can finish his sentence, Philip Large grabs him from behind. The man’s hands are stuck at his side and there is nothing in the world that can loosen Philip’s grip now that his hooks are sunk in.
“Hold him up,” I say, as Burke and Big Dick and Happy and the stevedoring men and the gang of bedraggled laborers watch carefully.
“Don’t, don’t . . .” the man cries, his face uncovered and scared.
Barge horns bleating on the river, freight elevators chuffing, trains worming by in their maniacal metal churning on the bridge above with the dank brine of waterfront in the mouth, the Manhattan skyline leaning over us across. I wind my fist tight and strong, wrap it round my head and grit my teeth as it thwaps on the man’s face, then with a left and then another right and an elbow to the brow until Philip leaves the man for the cement to have, the stevedoring company men talking amongst themselves.
Exile on Bridge Street Page 29