A Song Across the Sea

by Shana McGuinn

  “I have a job,” Tara put in.

  “The Titanic!” Delores led her to a comfortable chair, clucking sympathetically. “Oh you poor dear. It must have been horrible. I’ll get you some tea.”

  Without waiting for a response, she vanished from the room. Tara squirmed under Hap’s unconcealed scrutiny.

  “Picking up stray cats again, Reece?” he bellowed.

  Stray cats! What did he mean by that? Should she be offended? Was it some sort of a joke? Tara decided to hold her tongue until she was sure of his meaning. These Americans were so confusing, so casual in manner. And their speech! It seemed little more than a bewildering collection of colorful slang expressions. It was not going to be easy learning their ways.

  “At least you found a beauty this time, although she looks much too classy for a guy like you.”

  That sounded better. Tara relaxed and sipped the tea Delores brought her.

  The arrangements for her lodging were concluded by Reece and Hap as if she wasn’t even in the room, but she didn’t mind. It had been a long day. With her hunger finally sated, she wanted nothing more than to crawl into a bed somewhere—one with a lumpy mattress would do—and surrender to sleep. While she listened to the men she felt a drowsy numbness creep over her.

  Reece got to his feet and was moving toward the door before she even knew it.

  “Wait!” She followed him out the door. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” he said. “You’ll be comfortable here. It’s not fancy, but it’s clean. You can pay your rent when you receive your wages at the factory. Oh, and here—” He pressed something into her hand. “You’ll need some clothes before then, I imagine.”

  She saw that she was holding several bills. “It’s very kind of you, but I’m not in the habit of acceptin’ charity.”

  “It’s not charity. You can pay me back, next time I come around.”

  “And when might that be?” Did he guess at the deep interest behind her question?

  He shrugged, waved and was off. She stood on the wooden-planked front porch and watched him recede into the night, her heart sinking a little with each step.

  Delores, standing beside her, followed Tara’s gaze and smiled affectionately. “He’s something special, isn’t he?”

  When Tara didn’t answer, Delores said; “My dear, don’t get…too attached…to Reece. He’s engaged to be married. Didn’t he mention that?”

  “It must have slipped his mind.” But what right did she have, truly, to know anything about him? He’d shown her the same kindness he’d show a stray cat off the streets, nothing more. The fledgling romantic delusions had been hers and hers alone. The room Delores took her to was tiny but, as Reece had promised, clean, and furnished with a narrow bed and a small chest of drawers upon which sat a pitcher and wash basin. Tara was thankful that she’d ended up here. It was immeasurably better than the squalid tenement boarding houses she’d seen earlier. The mattress on the bed was thin but not lumpy and the lavatory was actually inside the building, down the hall, instead of outside as she’d expected. What a luxury!

  She undressed and eased herself under a blanket whose color had faded to an indeterminate gray. The previous night, spent shivering under a wagon, seemed like an absurd dream. This little room wasn’t so bad. She could brighten it a little, decorate the walls with pictures cut from magazines…

  Sleep’s oblivion reached for her but she resisted it, so that she could think for a little while longer about Reece Waldron.

  Chapter Eight

  The turbulence of the past few weeks made the monotony into which Tara’s days now settled tolerable, even welcome.

  After breakfasting on strong American coffee and toast at the boarding house—sometimes with a fried egg and a strip of bacon on the side—Tara was better able to cope with her long hours at the factory. With the money Reece had loaned her she purchased an inexpensive skirt and two new blouses, a nightgown, a pair of stockings and a camisole to wear under the blouses. The new clothing she alternated with the old, doing her washing in her room and hanging the wet garments near the window to dry. She intended to pay him back as soon as possible.

  The work at the dress factory was not strenuous, only mind-bendingly routine. The repetition of it threatened to drive her mad. Over and over again she guided fabric through her sewing machine, working the treadle with her foot and watching the needle bob up and down to form stitches. She often looked around at the other women toiling at sewing machines in the cavernous second story of the factory and wondered how they coped. Did they simply detach their minds and let their hands and feet make the automatic motions necessary to their jobs? The Polish woman who worked at the machine next to hers hummed incessantly. It annoyed Tara at first, until she learned to ignore it, with a grudging admiration for the hummer. The woman had discovered her own secret way to alleviate the boredom.

  Maybe it was easier to endure drudgery like this if you had hungry children waiting at home. If only Padraig had lived! These long hours in the factory would wing by for her, knowing, as she would, that her wages would feed him, buy him a new shirt or a pull of toffee or a book to read. He’d provide an anchor for her life—a cheerful face to greet her at the end of each day.

  But Paddy was gone. Why was his death even worse to her than those of her parents? She mourned her mother and father, but with a peaceful acceptance. With Paddy, though, the wound never seemed to heal. It festered with guilt. She’d give the world to go back and change her decision to come to America.

  “You dumb Polack!” Mr. Van Zandt, on one of his sneak patrols, had heard the woman next to Tara humming. “Shut yer yap! We don’t need that noise around here.”

  The woman cringed as if expecting a blow. Tara’s few attempts to speak to her had failed, so she knew her neighbor didn’t comprehend the English that was being stridently shouted at her. The other workers hunched over their machines and pretended not to listen.

  Van Zandt leaned his greasy face close to the Polish woman’s, gratified to see her quaking with fright. “Whatsa matter, dummy? Dontcha understand English? I said, ‘CUT OUT THE STUPID HUMMING!”

  “She’s not a dummy. And you’d be doin’ yourself a favor to have a little more patience when speakin’ to her. She’s a grand worker, she is.” Tara could scarcely believe it was her own voice she heard, speakin’ up to Van Zandt that way. She’d be let go faster than she could sneeze, sure enough.

  Van Zandt was incredulous.

  “If you want to keep yer own job, miss, you’ll keep yer nose out of this.”

  “And how can I, with yourself bellowin’ loud as a bull right next to me?” She’d certainly gone too far this time. She might as well go a little farther. “Sure and the poor woman’s just hummin’ a little to make the work lighter. There’s no crime in that.”

  He ripped a handkerchief from his back pocket in a rage and made a great show of wiping his face with it while continuing to glare at her.

  “Get yer things and get outta here. You’re through.”

  Tara heaved a sigh and stood up. She turned as if to leave then changed her mind. She walked up to him and stood as close as she dared, reeling from the pungent odors emanating from his sweat stained shirt, and looked down at him from her superior height. Suspicious, he took an uneasy step backward.

  “You’ll not fire me,” she said calmly.

  “Oh no?”

  “No. I’m a grand worker, too. You know the truth of what I’m sayin’. The boys cuttin’ the fabric can hardly keep up with me. You’re much too clever a man to discharge a worker who can turn out dresses as fast as I can.”

  Heads turned their way. Sewing machines came to a stop as their operators paused to listen to Tara.

  “You’re just a wee bit out of sorts today, is all.” She pinned him firmly in place with her unblinking gaze. “A man in charge of a factory like this—a man with such enormous responsibilities—is smart enough to know that his people work harder when they respect him.
” She sat back down at her sewing machine and said, with finality, “I’ll go back to me work now and there’ll be no more said about it.”

  He didn’t move or speak.

  Deliberately ignoring him, she bent over her machine and started pumping on the treadle. The other machines resumed their buzz of activity as well, although every eye in the place was surreptitiously turned toward Van Zandt, waiting to see what he would do.

  He stood there watching Tara for a few minutes, looking as if he was about to say something. Finally he stuffed the damp handkerchief back into his pocket and strode away.

  • • •

  With her first wages, Tara paid Delores for her lodging and purchased some writing paper and a pen. She’d borrowed stationery from a Carpathia passenger and sent a brief note to Aunt Bridey and Uncle Kevin soon after the tragedy, notifying them of Padraig’s death.

  The letter she wrote to them now was longer, but it still omitted a few of the events she’d experienced in the New World. She told them that she’d found lodging in a respectable boarding house—giving them the address—and pleasant, well-paying work in a factory. This last was a gross exaggeration. Paying Delores the rent had made Tara keenly aware of the meagerness of her income as compared to her expenses. After covering room and board each month, there wouldn’t be much left over. It would take her awhile, even, to save up enough to pay Reece’s loan back.

  It wasn’t pride that spurred her to stretch the truth. Her aunt and uncle loved her as one of their own, even if she was a bit independent for their liking. She didn’t want them worrying about her welfare in a foreign place so far from home. With their limited resources, they were powerless to help her anyway.

  She left out any mention of how she’d slept outside under a wagon her first night in New York, or of fainting from hunger and allowing a strange man to help her. She didn’t tell them how much she hated her work at the factory.

  Instead, she embroidered her letter with colorful descriptions of the people she’d met and the sights she’d seen, especially things she knew would make them laugh. “I haven’t encountered Her Duchess Miss Connelly,” she wrote, “though it’s not many mansions I’ve been in. Herself must live in a grander part of town, far removed from the little people.” She closed with: “Although I’m desperately sad about Paddy, you needn’t worry about me. I’m getting along quite well.”

  She was a little more forthcoming about her unhappiness in the letter she wrote to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. “I sometimes think about savin’ the money and comin’ home, though there’s nothin’ there for me anymore. If this is all my life will come to in New York, sewing in a factory and coming home to an empty room, without the comfort of friends and neighbors around me…then I wonder why I left at all. What on earth was I thinking?”

  Indeed, once the basic needs of food, lodging and work had been met, Tara fell prey to a stuporous melancholy which she knew was homesickness. She’d awaken in the dead of night with a start, imagining she was in her own bed at home in Ireland, hearing the ghostly clump-clumping sound of her mother churning butter in the kitchen downstairs and her father clearing his throat while he sat in his big leather chair, reading the evening newspaper.

  It was worse than homesickness. She was pining for a home and for people who were no longer there.

  Tara didn’t tell Mrs. O’Shaughnessy of the terrible dreams she’d been having about Padraig. She didn’t want to think about them herself.

  She posted the letters and then strolled slowly back to the boarding house, thinking hard. Writing down her thoughts had helped put things into perspective. She was caught in the grip of the past like a bird trapped in a snare. She needed to break free from it, with a great heaving effort that would hurl her forward, into a new life of her own making. She’d surround herself with people, like that flaxen-haired German girl at the factory who sometimes smiled shyly at her. Maybe she would be friends with Tara.

  And lads… Tara was increasingly aware of the appreciative looks that came her way from laborers digging ditches and laying bricks when she walked past them. With clean clothes and her thick hair brushed till it shone, she supposed she was not at all that bad to look at.

  She remembered Dominic’s tingling kisses on the deck of the Titanic, and was seized with a desire to know that physical closeness with a man again. It was time to stop dreaming about the unattainable, unavailable Reece Waldron, who was always—accordin’ to Hap—off tinkerin’ with silly airplanes or—accordin’ to her own guesses—escorting his fiancée to dances and balls. She would put him out of her mind, she would.

  • • •

  It didn’t help that he came to dinner at the boarding house three nights later.

  Her heart thudded dangerously in her chest when she saw him sitting at the table next to Hap, deeply engrossed in conversation with the older man.

  “…and I hear the Russians have some big ones nearly ready for production. Big enough to carry a five-man crew.”

  She’d never seen Reece was so animated, then had to laugh at herself for the thought. How often had she seen him anyway? How well did she really know him?

  Hap, too, looked unusually jovial. These occasional visits from his friend must enliven his otherwise dull routine. Hap spent his days ambling crookedly around the boarding house, a hammer and screwdriver tucked into a leather pouch at his belt for the minor repairs he was often called upon to make. Had he always been a cripple? How had he gotten this way?

  And where did Reece fit into the picture? The two men couldn’t be more dissimilar. The struggles Hap had endured in his life were clearly etched on his ruddy, good-natured face. From his speech, she guessed that he must come from what the Americans called, “the wrong side of the tracks.”

  Reece, on the other hand, had obviously had a fine education and all the other benefits of money. Although there was nothing of the dandy of him, he wore his expensively casual clothes with the confident air of a man used to the best.

  “What about the engine?” Hap wanted to know.

  “100-horsepower Argus engines. Four of them. And there’ll even be compartments in the rear fuselage of the plane for eating and sleeping.”

  Hap snorted forcefully. “Never happen. Too heavy to get off the ground.”

  Delores ladled bean soup from a large enamel pot into her bowl and shook her head disapprovingly.

  “And just as well, I think. Airplanes are dangerous toys for silly fools. I can’t imagine why the two of you get so excited about them.”

  “Toys!” Reece was indignant. “Airplanes may not be good for much right now, but you just wait. Why, someday they’ll carry passengers and cargo all over the country—all over the world, even.”

  Delores was unimpressed. “If man was meant to fly, God would have given him wings. You and your engineer friends are flying—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the face of nature.”

  The rest of the boarders at the long wooden table sat in silence, uninterested in the conversation. It was little wonder, since most of them barely understood English. However, Tara did notice that another Irish immigrant, an annoyingly pert girl of twenty named Kathleen, kept shooting veiled glances in Reece’s direction. Tara doubted very much that it was the subject of airplanes that captured Kathleen’s attention.

  “Do you know the U.S. Army has pilots flying airplanes?” demanded Reece.

  “More nonsense,” said Delores. “And a waste of good money, besides. What good would airplanes be in a war?”

  “They can fly over enemy positions and take pictures.”

  Tara laughed out loud. “Sure and that would frighten the enemy, wouldn’t it? A madman in a flyin’ machine, swoopin’ down and snappin’ pictures of them. They’d probably turn their tails and run away.”

  Reece looked momentarily offended, then broke into laughter. He tried for a retort, but couldn’t get the words out. Tara loved the way he looked when he laughed. His entire body shook with it.

  Delores giggled del
ightedly, a surprisingly girlish sound coming from a woman of her mature years. “Now that Tara has explained it, Reece, I agree with you. Airplanes could be useful in a war.”

  Hap, for his part, tried to suppress a smile. “I can see we’ll get no respect from the womenfolk at this table, Reece.”

  Kathleen, at the far end of the table, unexpectedly piped up. “Tell me, don’t you ever get frightened when you’re way up there in the air?”

  This question was aimed at Reece in something approaching a breathy squeal, along with a worshipful gaze. Tara could easily have slapped the girl at that moment.

  Oblivious to Kathleen’s intentions, Reece took the question at face value and turned serious as he answered.

  “No, not usually, although I have found myself occasionally in some sticky situations. But you have to understand what a complete…freedom you feel up there. The road you’re on is the entire sky. It’s so…wide open. You look down and see people the size of ants, crawling over the earth and never even realizing how big the world is.”

  Kathleen appeared to be mesmerized. “I still think you’re very brave,” she cooed.

  Reece, embarrassed, cleared his throat and twirled his spoon in his hand. “Oh, it’s not as exciting as all of that. Most of my time is spent on the ground, anyway, working on modifications. Only after all that do I get to take my planes up, to test them out.”

  Kathleen wasn’t finished yet. “Maybe someday you could give me a ride in one of your airplanes. I think it would be—”—her voice dropped to a throaty whisper—”so thrilling.”

  Reece shrugged. “Sure. If you think you’d like that.”

  Tara could have kicked herself. Why hadn’t she thought to ask for a ride? In the next instant, however, pride reasserted itself. He was engaged to be married. She would not flutter her eyelashes and stare adoringly at him. If he could be indifferent to her, and not feel the same breathless lurch in his stomach that she did whenever they were in the same room, then she could force herself to be as cooly detached as he was.