by Mary Gordon
That was her job for Claire Fitzpatrick: hiding, covering, so that the woman could appear before the world, walk down the dark staircase, a woman in civilization, covered up and holding in. She hated the lie of it. Service. She was in service to the clothing and the body of a fool.
She was good at it.
“The hairbrushes, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”
Claire Marie Jameson Fitzpatrick. Wife of James. Mother of James, William, John. All of them gone to their graves old men. None taken from their mother untimely.
Claire Fitzpatrick. She was a machine with moving parts: legs, organs, pumps, bolsters, entryways. Producing substances. Some of which were useful, most of which were waste. Her whole life was about her body: to preserve, to ornament her body, more important, to conceal the nature of it from men’s sight.
“Tell me about the hairbrushes, El,” Delia had pleaded.
She’d have liked to throw them through the glass, that was it about the hairbrushes. She dreamed of a clean break, silver, glass, the window frame gaping shamefully like a ruined mouth, the ragged hole unstable, dangerous, glimmering in the clear morning sun. And the brushes themselves, lying on the sidewalk. Would anybody pick them up? Step on them? Sell them for money or trade them in?
Who are you to call me by my name?
Ellen. She was Ellen to any of them. They were not her betters. No. Not one of them was.
The hairbrushes with their patterns of leaves—acanthus, laurel—pressed or cut into the metal, was it? And what for? Nobody thought of the weight of them. In all her life Claire Fitzpatrick, and the women like her, had not done their own hair. So what would it matter to them, the weight of the brushes? The arms lifted above the thick hair were servant’s arms.
Each morning as she dressed her own hair, Ellen thought how glad she was to have it, not Claire Fitzpatrick’s. Her hair was a pleasure to her. Smooth. She’d pull it so it lay straight against her skull. She loved the fineness of it, loved taking it, forming it into a roll, pinning it low against her neck. She could imagine the pleasure it must be to look at, that thick knot of hair against the white skin of her neck.
She’d loved her hair.
And Vincent had loved it. Lovely moments they were, he would take the pins out of her hair, sometimes he’d kiss each of them as he took them out, then lay them down, always in perfect rows. His ardor didn’t let him lose that part of his nature. He respected tools. Hairpins, he tried to tell her once, were tools. She doubled over laughing. She’d tease him for it, his laying the pins in rows, call him “the engineer.” But it was lovely, when the last pin would be taken out and then there was a moment of real stillness when the hair would hold of itself its own shape, and then it would fall, wonderful, onto her shoulders. He’d take her hair in his hands, kiss the smooth hair he loved and kiss the places of her body. She allowed him everything. He understood, he learned of her. His hands, his mouth learned. He knew.
Claire Fitzpatrick’s hair was dreadful. Coarse and no color, not a hint of sheen, no smoothness, to arrange it was to battle with it. And Ellen had clever fingers, she could do things with the rough, unpromising material, quicker than the others. Claire Fitzpatrick praised her, for she knew the value of a thing. She’d been brought up to it. Her father, Owen Jameson, had made the money they lived off in his business, furs it was, she’d never known exactly. The hidden sources of the Irish money. James Fitzpatrick’s father’s money, too, came from a source that no one spoke of. James himself was a great lawyer, he’d a way with money, so even the Protestants took his advice, although it stuck in their throats.
Claire and James Fitzpatrick. Both of them brought up thinking themselves royalty. The Jesuits, the Madames of the Sacred Heart, the dancing classes for the children of the wealthy Irish so that they might mate. They’d known each other from their cradles, Claire and James Fitzpatrick told Ellen a million times, as if it were a smart remark. It made her sick. “I see you’re a good girl, Ellen, and a clever one,” Claire Fitzpatrick would say, smiling at Ellen in the mirror while Ellen looked down at the ugly hair, would not meet Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s gaze. “Mind that the one does not get in the way of the other.” And she’d quote her a poem about the Virgin Mary that was supposed to be clever because the BVM was never mentioned:
And was she clever in her words
Her answers quick and smart?
We know not: we know of the secret love
For her son in her heart.
“I understand from the others you have a quick tongue in your head, and find yourself ready with an answer. But remember, Ellen, a girl in your position can lose everything by forgetting who she is.”
“Yes, madame,” she would say, refusing in her resoluteness to meet the eye that searched, demanded that she meet it in the glass. I know who I am. And where I’ve come from. She longed for the relief of the abuse that could come from her own mouth. My father, a gentleman. My education, the Presentation Sisters. And my mother. She would see the mother in these moments, young and running, singing, lifting the towel on the bread dough as she checked its rising. But then it would come to her, the real truth of her mother, silent or gibbering, an animal, no woman now, bearded, with lifeless eyes. Ellen had feared that any slip, any faint hint of her past would reveal the truth of her mother to Claire Fitzpatrick’s eye. So she remained above reproach and when Mrs. Fitzpatrick questioned her about her past she made up what she knew the woman wished to hear: the small farm, the countless brothers, cheerful sisters, stoical hardworking father, and her sainted mother, who slaved for the family but was never too busy for a laugh.
“You must think of me as your mother now,” Claire Fitzpatrick would say from time to time, in love with herself for her good heart.
“Yes, madame,” Ellen would reply. The perfect servant with her eyes kept down because of her emotions: gratitude and missing home. And in her heart: “I’d slap the face of you for that suggestion if there was a way on earth I could. I’d tear out your ugly hair. I’d leave you here, bald and disfigured from the blows of my fist on your face. You’d be unable even to find your underclothes, so little do you know the workings of your own life. Never dare to speak of yourself and my mother in one breath. You are unworthy to kiss the hem of her garments. The strap of her sandals you are unworthy to loose.”
Ellen is lying strapped to her bed, over seventy years later, and refusing to become the one event, her death. Refusing to forget. No one remembers but herself and if she lets go of the memory, it will be lost forever. The memory of the young mother singing, her bare arms covered in soapsuds to the elbows, singing as she scrubs her husband’s shirts. The clever fingers making shapes out of the dough: birds, animals, a pointed flower. If I forget, she will become nothing, will disappear, will be homeless in the universe, wandering, her arms outstretched, rootless if I lose the picture of her.
Do not speak to me, Claire Fitzpatrick. Do not say that you would be my mother. Did you lie in blood, the children of your life lost to you not once, but again and again? Your husband’s money, your fathers keeps you from your body. That is its purpose, so the men can tell themselves: The bodies of women which we covet we will never know the truth of; because of our wealth you must let us believe that what we feared has ceased to be. Cover, muffle, pare, remove, keep down the evidence, the secret smells.
That was her job, they paid her for it, used her talents for it and her wits and her dexterity, her nimbleness and memory, her understanding of the place of things. And of her own place.
At first she’d been taken by the size and richness of the house, and felt grateful to be there, grateful for the woods and porcelains, the dinner gong with its somber, reproachful tone.
Her early pleasure fed her subsequent rage. She knew they counted on that pleasure. The homeless girl, the unhoused voyager, taking her solace from the house, taking the measure of her worth against its objects. They’d counted on it, and in her case it had served them for a time. Until her understanding choked her and stopped her
breath. People like Delia and Jimmy Flaherty were their meat. Their excitement when Matt Corrigan, chauffeur to the Fitzpatricks and a pal of Jimmy’s, suggested that Ellen present herself to the Fitzpatricks’ housekeeper, for they were looking for a ladies’ maid. An Irish girl they wanted, no French or English for them, no, they were that loyal, but a girl with breeding, like Ellen herself, who made a good appearance, spoke well, and had her wits about her. “I’d just put in a word for you,” said Matt Corrigan, thinking she’d be impressed. She was; he had been right to count on it. On him more than the others her anger fell. In her bed, old, dying, she curses Matt Corrigan. Then curses them all, their sense of gratitude and having been well situated. WE ARE OF THE HOUSE, WE ARE THE HOUSE. We count for something, as the house does; we weigh, as it does. The greenhorn cod that kept them slaves. She’d been taken in at first, because she had been frightened. Even now, her hands claws and her mind a fog in which she has misplaced her present life, she won’t forgive herself that weakness. A slave’s weakness. She was not a slave.
You must possess yourself.
She’d known that early. There must be a place, shored up, defended, reconstructed daily, where that thing that kept itself that was yourself, could stay intact. Fragile, pointed, dark, sharpened. Precise. You kept it from the sight of others. You could not soften, open. You kept yourself held in. Then you belonged to yourself. “She kept herself to herself,” people had said about Ellen all her life. Resentful, not knowing it was her triumph. Weakness made you open up. Weakness and fear. You had to stop it happening.
She thinks now, making her claw hands fists, what she has always thought, that it was living next to Delia, in the house with Delia, that gave her her first weakness. Delia with her tears, her fatness, her too-quick confidences, dreams, obedience, remorse. Her delight that Matt Corrigan thought so well of Ellen, her friend. The honor beamed back to her, to Delia. Matt had worked first with Jimmy Flaherty. He came by on the evenings he was free, when the Fitzpatricks didn’t want him, in his uniform (Livery, she corrected him, an ugly name, but call it by its right one), he’d sit with his beer and tell them about the Fitzpatricks at the opera, what the cook had told him, what was eaten: champagne, canvasback duck. Mr. Fitzpatrick was the finest gentleman in all New York, he put the Yankees all to shame, they knew it. The finest houses in New York he’d driven to. Later she knew that he was wrong, they weren’t the finest houses in New York, the finest houses in New York would not receive the Irish. How could he live among them and not know?
Matt had complimented her on how she poured the tea, her lovely diction, her white hands, her talent with a needle and the way she’d write a letter for any of them, and read the papers from the government, and know the right way to reply. She’d taken comfort in his praise. She curses him now for this comfort. All her life she’d hated Matthew Corrigan, and he never knew why.
Life in the city, in the flat with the Flahertys, had tormented her, the lack of solitude, life lived among strangers. Unlike the Flahertys, she could never go back home. A criminal in her own town, she had escaped by night, with stolen money. If she put a foot in the town, her father would have her arrested. They could dream about going back, sing about it. How she hated them for every song, and every tender word that was denied her. “My mother died last spring / When Ireland’s fields were green / Snowdrops and primroses beside her bed.” Her throat closed up when she heard them, with their Irish mother songs.
Would you like to know about my darlin’ mother? Gibbering, a beast now in the darkened house my father built to hide her in, not a green field but desolation, dead grass and the colorless sharp choking weeds that cannot and will not be cleared. My darlin’ father that would jail me if he saw his darlin’s face. So sing on. Choke yourselves with lies about what you never had, and weep now for not having.
She felt her shame amidst the other greenhorns and held it up against their sorrow. Families that wept to see them go and letters of lament. Come home and let me see your face before I die. She was the criminal among them. Only Delia knew. Ellen would die grateful to her for that. For all her foolish tongue, she’d always kept Ellen’s secrets. But among the weeping sons and daughters who’d been sent off with tears, with grieving, Ellen felt herself flayed. It made her credulous and grateful, grateful for the presence of Matthew Corrigan, who’d no more mind than the horses he tended. Grateful to be told by first the housekeeper, then Mrs. Fitzpatrick herself, that she would do. She seemed a girl of promise, but she must work hard.
The work was never hard. It was the nature of the life that killed her. All the lies that stopped her breath.
The room they gave her could so easily have been a pleasant room. Its darkness was no burden to her, nor its size. She brought in small objects for pleasure: a postcard she liked, showing the harbor, and one handpainted one, a scene of Brooklyn Bridge; a tin she’d asked the cook for, Famous Cake Box; a picture of a blonde child and a large black dog. It was the cast-off, the raggedness that was the room’s cruelty to her, and the sense that what was deficient could so easily be fixed. Nails for her clothes instead of hooks. The comforters stained, marked with the waters of who knew what life or what disaster. The mantel and the floor inadequately varnished, ready to splinter, to cause pain. At least the door closed: she thanked God for that. But it didn’t lock. In time, when she thought she had her mistress’s favor, she asked: “Could a lock not be put on my door? It would mean something to me.” Claire Fitzpatrick didn’t hesitate, didn’t give it a moment’s thought. “Our servants’ rooms are never locked.” Reminding Ellen of what she hated most, making her hate herself and all of them because she had forgotten or assumed it could be otherwise. She was a servant, what they wanted was that she would not be herself to herself, but lay herself out to them for their own use.
The worst of it was living among the others. Coarse, ignorant, filthy girls, thinking themselves so great and fortunate. Matt Corrigan the king among them; the undermaids, fighting for the joy of polishing his boots. The cook a drunk, the housekeeper a pious ninny, always pressing on Ellen holy pictures and novenas, urging her to thank God for her good situation, offering her suggestions about underwear as she offered her mints so strong you’d kill your stomach with them. And all of them—the tradesman, the butcher’s boy—thinking they had the right to call her by her first name. The impudence, the theft of it. She’d stopped them talking to her by her coldness, her coldness was her joy.
Delia had begged to visit, wanting to see the inside of the Fitzpatrick house. “Maybe you’d slip me up to the mistress’s room itself, one day when she’s out, El. I could take a look.” But Ellen never would. Her job meant something. She was paid to keep things concealed. The thought of Delia in the mistress’s room shocked her. It was Ellen’s place to keep back the intruder, the violating eye or foot, the hand that touched and spoiled. She knew her part in the conspiracy: it was her understanding of the nature of the human eye, that thing that leered and gaped and sought to steal the good of everything, that loved defilement and the ruin of a thing, her understanding of all that made her good at her work. She hated the fine lace, the covered buttons, the exact folds, the silk ribbons, veils, false flowers, the embroideries, the small stitches: she knew the blood of slaves went into them. And yet they were her province. She was honorable; she valued, above all, her honor. Why would she let Delia into places that were not hers? Why would she let her into the library, the dining room, let her finger the silver or the coffee set that stood out on the sideboard, the chintz draperies with their pattern of choked carnations, hollyhocks, chrysanthemums? Why would she invite her friend? She hated all those objects but they were not hers, and she respected separations. She would not let the trespassers trespass.
So, when the day came that she couldn’t stick it, it wasn’t the disliking of the job itself that pushed her over, it was the sudden awareness that the Fitzpatricks, in paying her, thought they had bought her life.
“Ellen dear, stay in today, I
must ask you this favor. I would never insist, you know that, but my sister…from Chicago…very suddenly….We were, of course, surprised…and all must pull our weight….Three weeks she’ll be here, and her girls. She’s always been that way, thoughtless, perhaps, but charming. Very charming. Well, I must ask you this favor….Your day off, I know…but stay today, and help me….Nothing I can name right now, just to have you around…a million little things.”
She’d had no plans that day. It would have been an easy thing to give it up. But, seventy years later, she can feel what she had felt then. She raises the claw hand that will not obey her. Memory enlivens it, makes it quick-witted; life flows through her arm. The memory of her refusal gives her back her biddable, compliant limbs. “I will not stay in,” she hears herself say aloud.
“Surely it can’t mean that much,” Claire Fitzpatrick had said.
It means my life. It means I draw my breath outside your presence and your will. It means that there is justice and you too abide by it. Shining justice with its buckler and its shield. I want no part of mercy, womanish and yielding. I will live by justice. My day free from you you may not have. My life apart from you you may not have. My life.
She did nothing on her days off. Walked. Bought thread, elastic. Rice powder she admired. Paper for her bureau drawers. Ink. Buttons. Throat lozenges. Not stamps. She was not one of those who needed to send money to the other side. To whom would she send money? The mother sitting in the dark? The father who would have her put in prison if he could? To Anna Foley, she had sent her address. Just that. She had money for luxuries. She did not covet clothes. But hats, ornaments for her hair. Yes, those she liked.
It was the walking on her free day that she loved. The wide high avenues, their carriages and trees. She knew those avenues were not meant for her kind, except as far as they were meant to be the servants that kept the fine houses running smoothly. Invisibly her kind held up the houses, were the stones of their foundations, their beams and props. But she did not begrudge the streets as she begrudged the rooms in the Fitzpatrick house. No, not at all. These avenues that were meant for the pleasure of the rich could do you good in spite of themselves. They gave hope; your lungs filled with the rich air of them, your tired bones could let themselves enliven and grow light.