by Ann Moore
Twenty-one
IT was the food that amazed Grace most of all. Even in the dead of winter, she found fruits and vegetables on every corner; windows filled with breads, cakes, pastries of all kinds; penny candies and something called ice cream; milk and cider and ale; so many cheeses; fresh fish; any cut of meat or fowl, as well as kidneys, livers, hearts and brains, bones, tails, sausages, and liver spreads. It was an incredible abundance, and the sight of it all left her feeling giddy and tearful and unable to make a purchase even though Sean had given her money. Just go out and look, he told her. Look around each day, and soon it will be real.
He took her himself in those first weeks, showed her the famous streets and the parks, the mansions and the tenement district, took her to the Irish Emigrant Society, where they registered Liam’s name and posted that of his father, Seamus Kelley of Dublin. Sean taught her how to use the strange money, how to ride the omnibus. Soon enough, she could do it herself and out she went each day, adding block after block to her rounds, until she began to get used to sights and sounds and smells. Tara sent her on errands—for fish, for shoes, for pickles, for meat—and slowly she became oriented.
Karl Eberhardt, the butcher around the corner, was like many Germans who’d decided to stay in the city rather than go north to Albany, west for farmland. They stayed and conducted their business in aprons streaked with bloody swipes, sons working alongside if they had them, wives or daughters if not. Karl’s wife, Dagmar, worked beside him, weighing out meat, counting out money—every day but Sunday.
There were no Irish butchers that Grace had found; Irishmen were street peddlers selling buttons, thread, fiddle strings, suspenders, soap, matches, any little thing that could be easily bought and sold. They were carters, drivers, dockworkers, laborers, runners, bootblacks, saloon sweepers, muckrakers, beachcombers crying out “Fresh shad!” and “Rockaway clams!” in lyrical voices that took her instantly, heartbreakingly home. These were the men; the women were needle workers—either in dim, noisy factories that made them blind or deaf, or consumptive from breathing the fibrous air; or they worked at home doing piecework for pennies, often cheated by managers who paid a fraction of the price originally promised—if they paid at all. For who was there to represent the poor, ignorant Irishwoman, surrounded by her hungry children, stitching shirts by candlelight in a cold basement corner? They were the vulnerable, invisible behind the doors of dirty tenements. More visible were the maids of all work—scrubbing the floors of the wealthy, cooking meals, polishing silver, laying tables, washing dirty linens—their white faces, Papist though they might be, preferable to the dark ones who previously occupied these positions.
These dark faces fascinated Grace, and she’d been scolded by Sean on more than one occasion for staring as she watched them peddling their buttermilk and bedding straw. They were also the chimney sweeps and waiters, drivers and doormen, sailors and back-door errand boys. Were they all from Africa? she’d wondered aloud, and Sean had told her all about slavery and those states of the union where it was rigorously defended. Most of the blacks Grace saw were freemen, Sean said, but others were runaways who lived in constant fear of being picked up by the bondsmen who roamed the city looking for them; even freemen weren’t safe from these thugs, who thought nothing of kidnapping a black man or woman, then transporting them down south to turn in for the reward or selling price. That was why they keep their eyes lowered, Grace thought, and why they moved quickly through the crowds. Like the Irish, they preferred the company of their own kind and mistrusted all others.
The Jews kept to themselves, as well, but she had come to know their differences—the Russian and Polish Jews through their cries of “Glass put in!” as they hawked their glazing skills, and the German Jews from romantic-sounding places like Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Posen, who haggled with customers in front of their used-clothing stores along Chatham and Baxter Streets.
The Italian men were laborers, their women ragpickers; they saved their money for fruit stands, like Mister Marconi, who hoped one day to operate a grocery. The French were more established—they owned restaurants and millinery shops, were dressmakers to the upper class, had wonderful bakeries like the favorite of Liam and Mary Kate, who always stopped in front of the glass to peer in at the tiny iced cakes, tall layer cakes, braided sweet breads, long crusty loaves of bread.
Her children were immigrant children, but they did not work yet like the other children who stood on the corners in summer and sold hot buttered corn, who swept the streets in winter when mud was at its worst, who peddled newspapers all year long. They had to work, these children, in order for their families to survive; and if they were orphaned, this was all that kept them alive.
America was the land of plenty, true enough, but there were plenty who had nothing, and most of them were Irish. Every immigrant group had its community, had found its place, and Grace had understood from her first day out that the place of the Irish was last, that the Irish and the blacks had been left to fight each other for the last rung on the slippery ladder of daily survival with no hand reaching down to pull them up. NO IRISH NEED APPLY was a common notice in shop windows and ads, and Grace had begun to worry. She could hire herself out as a serving girl, but only if they would let her go home at the end of the day, which was highly unlikely. She was further unnerved by the cartoons that abounded, poking fun at the assumed stupidity and incompetence of Irish household help. They were all called Brigid, these cartoon girls, and depicted as monkey-faced and ignorant of the basic civilities of sophisticated society. Grace cringed whenever she saw one of these, battling shame and anger.
There was shame and anger, too, over the reputation of the Irish as incorrigible drunkards. In Ireland, there had been too much daily labor and too little money for drunkenness to be a problem, but here liquor was cheap and plentiful, a balm to those who felt displaced and disoriented, disillusioned and disheartened, disliked and disappointed. There were saloons for the everyday man and grog shops in tenement housing for the boarders; porter houses for day laborers, carters, and sailors; taverns for the artisans, clerks, and tradesmen; pubs for newspaper men and the literati; corner whiskey sellers for those wanting a cheap bottle; and the private clubs, each of which had its gentlemen’s lounge. There were the enormous German rooms—Duetsches Volksgarten, Atlantic Gardens, and Linden muller’s Odean—where hundreds of people went at one time to hear music, dance, and drink. But not the Irish. They couldn’t afford it, they were afraid, they stayed closer to home.
She knew they’d have a drink at the end of a day when no work was found, though plenty available, and soon enough they’d begin each day with a drink, as well—a drink to steady themselves against the blows to their pride. And then, the morning drink and the evening drink would blur into one long day of drink, for how could they return home to face those who depended upon them with nothing for it? No money nor bread nor promise of better lodgings; just manure on their feet and the stink of cheap whiskey and tobacco in their clothes, bitterness settling in as the look in their children’s eyes turned from hopefulness to disappointment.
Grace understood that the consolation for disenchantment could be found in a penny shot, that like sought out like for comfort and the reinstatement of pride, and that was why they gathered in saloons and grog shops, one on every block, two on the Irish streets. The lowest of these was no more than a board across two barrels in the dank basement of an old building, down a steep flight of steps rank with urine and vomit; if the liquor itself didn’t kill you, the man beside you might. This was where the most desperate gathered, men and women who had exhausted their money and their credit at better places like the Harp, whose days had become nothing more than a search for cheap drink—forget food, they couldn’t stomach it; forget family, they had none left; forget pride, it was gone forever; forget God, He couldn’t see them in Hell.
Grace’s heart bled each time she passed these holes and saw an Irishman stagger out, barely alive for another
worthless day. She steeled her heart against the misery of the women, abandoned by husbands, taken in by lovers who later abandoned them, with child more times than not. So many children on the street alone: Italian and German children begging pennies for a song; dark, tinker children running in packs, picking pockets, disappearing into alleyways; fair English children eyeing each passerby warily, sizing up the possibility of begging a coin or stealing one. Grace had read the editorials deploring the ragged and hopeless situation of those whose ranks seemed to swell each day. Decent society could not be held accountable for the beggar children of immigrants and slaves, it was said, but there were others who pointed out that ignoring the problem now only meant facing it later—later, when these children had grown up and become menacing men and women, embittered by a society less charitable to them than to its horses, who allowed them to be victimized by any degenerate with a lust for children. Grace had never in her life imagined that children might be prostituted, but it was among the many nightly vices offered in this city. She agreed with the editor who said that for want of examples of kindness, consideration, and morality, these children would grow into a breed of predator unlike any other; they would be the most cruel of adults, devoid of moral conscience, if something were not done for them now. She had thought Dublin’s poor the most desperate until she’d seen Liverpool; coming here, she’d realized man could sink even lower.
And yet, here in this city, she had seen the finest things man could accomplish—magnificent architecture, glorious art, radiant music, beautiful parks; schools, businesses, transportation, machines, advancements everywhere she looked. But she had also come to realize that the heights of man’s achievement were equally matched by the depths of his degradation; the face was strong and confident, but it fed from an underbelly ripe with corruption. The Irish floundered in this environment, removed as they were from the influence of old parishes and generations of family. Men became distanced from wives and children, pulled down by drink and self-loathing, finding no relief in any quarter. The great irony to Grace was that the Irish—to whom land was everything, who had fought to the death for every inch—had settled so completely into the city; and not just into the city, but into the worst, most crowded slums. They were too lonely, Sean told her, too lonely and heartsick to move out west, where a day’s pay might buy acres of land, but the closest neighbor was miles away.
Grace thought with longing of acres of land—room to breathe, privacy, the children running free out of doors—but she knew it was out of the question. Maybe when Patrick and the baby came, maybe by then she’d have saved enough to buy a farm for all of them. She hoarded what little of Aislinn’s money was left, but knew she must find work. Sean earned some through writing and speaking engagements, and Ogue charged them next to nothing for their room and board, but Grace was mindful of the debt they already owed, though she did not for an instant begrudge her brother the medical expenses. He now wore a specially built shoe that added two inches to his leg, and a brace that held his knee steady, reducing the severity of his limp; his arm was slowly being straightened with the help of a leather shoulder harness that he wore at night, and the benefit of all this was that he had become a new man. He walked taller, moved confidently through a room, and conversed without self-deprecating remarks. He had filled out, was healthier—no long, chest-racking illness so far this winter. His skin glowed and his eyes shone; his hair had grown long and he wore better fitting clothes now, as well as boots for the first time in his life. He was thriving in America, and she was glad for that as she knew he could easily have died had he remained in Ireland. She worried that her arrival with not one, but two children would become a burden and so she lay awake in the small hours of the morning, considering her options.
It would have to be needlework, she decided. Her sewing skills had been among the most excellent in County Cork, but she had no idea what her value would be in a city full of skilled seamstresses. She did not want to leave the children for sixteen hours each day to work in the garment factories, not if she didn’t have to, and was considering piecework—she’d seen advertisements in the paper; Daniel Devlin, an Irishman from Donegal, was paying seventy-five cents a week for out-work. She knew seventy-five cents wasn’t much, not when in-house cutters and tailors—mainly men—made as much in a day, but it would be a start. Finally, after pacing the city for hours with the children in tow, she came back to the saloon and raised the question with Dugan.
“Ah, now, Grace, the home-men are all crooked thieves and the factory-men are slave-drivers!”
“I must do something,” Grace insisted, shaking the snowflakes from her shawl. “We’ve got to earn a real living, Sean and I. We’ve got to save up and get a place ready for Da and the baby.”
“You can all live here!” Ogue waved his arms expansively. “What’s another old man and a wee one?”
Liam and Mary Kate nodded enthusiastically, and Grace sent them over to the fire to warm up.
“It’s two more mouths to feed,” Grace said. “And you’ve got your own to think of. How is she, today, by the way?”
Ogue’s face clouded. “Not so well, darling. She’s not young, Grace, you know. I was a sorry bachelor all my life, and thank God she married me when she did. I never minded us having no babies, never even thought of it! I was just happy to have her. And now …” He stopped, at a loss for words. “Well, ’tis a miracle, this. A true miracle. But I don’t mind telling you, it scares me.”
“Don’t let it.” Grace took his hand. “What can I do to help?”
“Well, that’s just the thing, you see.” His eyes shone again. “I know you’re wanting work, and I’ve wanted to offer you some but”—he lowered his voice—“a woman like yourself, you know, you shouldn’t be working in a place like this.”
“Don’t be a great eejit,” Grace scolded. “Doesn’t your very own wife work here?”
“Not anymore,” he confessed. “She’s got to stay abed, the doctor says. Because of the spots. She’ll lose the baby otherwise, but it’s not easy for her. She’s been working all her life, you see.”
“So you want someone to see to her, and do the kitchen chores?”
“Aye.” He nodded, relieved. “I’d have to hire a girl anyway, Grace, and it’d drive herself mad having some flighty thing in and out of our rooms, messing in her kitchen. Do you see?”
“I do.” Grace knew how proud Tara was.
“But she says to me, ‘Ask our Grace if she’ll do it. She’s a good one,’ she says to me, ‘and I trust her.’” He put out his hands, begging. “So I’m asking you to please take the job, and I’m telling you that we’ll make room for your da and the boy when they come.”
“I could save then,” Grace thought aloud. “Repay you, and when Tara’s back on her feet, we’ll get out of your hair.”
“Live here as long as you like, darling, and I’ll never care,” he said honestly. “But will you do it, then?”
“Oh, aye, Dugan. Of course I will.” She threw her arms around the big man, who patted her back shyly.
“Go up and tell her, then. Before she thumps on that floor one more time to ask me.”
Grace grinned, fished a couple of pickled eggs out of the jar on the counter, and took them to Mary Kate and Liam, along with a thick slice of bread. She admonished the boy not to wolf it down in one bite, and warned the girl to eat all, no hiding any under her pillow for later. They nodded solemnly, but she knew neither one had yet come to count on a next meal, and she shook her head as she climbed the stairs.
Dugan and Tara lived over the kitchen at the back of the saloon; she knocked quietly, then pushed the door open and entered a parlor with lace curtains hung at the windows. Tara had a clean rug on the floor, her two good chairs, a settee, a sideboard, and an oval table with an oil lamp and a mantel clock; it was warm here above the kitchen, peaceful with the ticking.
“Is that you, Grace?” Tara called from down the hall. “Come here!” She smiled anxiously when Grace ap
peared in the bedroom door. “Has he asked you, then? About the work, and all?”
“Aye.” Grace sat in a chair near the bed. “And I’m grateful to the both of you. You’ve been so kind to us.”
“Ah, no—’tis God’s will you’re here for this, I believe that, Grace.”
“Don’t worry about a thing.”
“I do, though,” Tara admitted. “I keep thinking of my own mother. I come along late in her life, and she died of it, you see. Of having me. And I’m even older than she was.”
“Well, but that was a long time ago, and don’t you live in a great city with doctors nearby?” Grace smiled encouragingly. “Every time you worry, close your eyes and see yourself with a lovely baby in your arms. I’ve lived through it three times, myself,” she assured her. “Three times and four babies.”
“Four!”
Grace bit her lip, realizing her gaff. “Two died young, but I’ve two still living. Mary Kate you know, and my boy back in Ireland.”
“I’ve wanted to ask you, but Dugan told me to leave it alone. The boy—he’s Morgan’s, then?”
Grace nodded, her vision suddenly blurred.
Tara picked up her rosary beads, thinking. “I had a husband before Dugan,” she confided quietly. “Me and Caolon come over on the boat together a long time ago, full of plans for a new life in America. We grew up together—I never knew a time without him.”
I know, Grace thought. I know.
“He was hit by a runaway carriage one night as we walked out to look at the shops. Not ten days after we come to the city. There was a commotion, and then he shoved me out of the way, but not in time for himself.” Her face stilled, remembering. “One minute we were walking out, arm in arm, our whole lives before us—and the next he lay on the ground, his head cracked right open and all that blood spilling out …” She winced. “’Twas a young gentleman in charge of the carriage, he in his fine clothes, more than a little drunk. Rushed off by other men in fine clothes, he was, but not before he give me a wallet full of money—for the doctor, he said, though ’twere a burial I paid for instead.” Her eyes cleared and she searched Grace’s face. “Since the day you come, with your terrible loss and all, the memory of himself has been strong upon me, and I guess I just wanted you to know.”