by Mary Gordon
Smith’s Helper wanted at McArdle & Sons, Carriage Builders, Warren Place, Cork. Must be a sober man. No other need apply.
A sober man, no other need apply. He could remember how he’d folded up the newspaper, completely, perfectly, as he did every day, to be added to the pile beneath his bed in Mrs. Tierney’s house, for there was great stuff in the newspapers in those days, stuff you’d felt you’d re-read at your leisure, poetry and essays, Swift and Dante, he’d read about in the newspaper, and the great Cardinal Wiseman, and all sorts of information about nature. Things he still remembered, like a piece about the fierce cats of Cat Island, near the Cape of Good Hope, animals so ferocious they could be tamed by no man. You didn’t get stuff from newspapers like that nowadays, it was a disappointment. He’d loved learning all sorts of things about the world. When Cam and Dan were young, he’d subscribed to National Geographic: the built-up yellow piles of them made him feel prosperous and safe. He still kept his subscription up.
He thinks of Mrs. Tierney’s filthy house. Poor soul, a widow, he supposed she’d tried, but it was still a dreadful place, in the courtyard with the other houses, dismal, and the shouting of the angry mothers, all their patience gone from being poor, the dirty washing-up water, the drunks at night, berating or apologizing. He’d been miserable there, but felt too sorry for Mrs. Tierney to move. Perhaps if he’d had better lodgings, he’d not have left for New York.
That day, in Mrs. Tierney’s house, he unfolded the newspaper and forced his eye to move slowly once again down the advertising columns, to be certain that his eye would read correctly what he feared he’d only dreamed. But no, he hadn’t dreamed it. The same words called up to him. He put his cap on, made his way through the dark courtyard to Warren Place, to look for himself at the building that housed McArdle & Sons. Nothing special on the outside, red brick, a bit of undistinguished ivy climbing up, high windows, desolate at that hour, blue and empty with the workers gone. He’d wanted some sort of message from the stones themselves, but no message had been forthcoming. The edifice did not proclaim itself superior to Capwell Carriage Works, as he had hoped it would. He weighed both sides: he had a sure place at Capwell, they knew his worth and he their weakness. But he would never rise there, as he’d hoped he would. He’d slept on it, and in the morning he walked back to McArdle’s and presented himself to the manager, a Mr. James O’Rourke.
It bucks him up to think of James O’Rourke. He’d been a father to him, more than his own dad, not that he hadn’t loved his father, but the dad had not looked after him. James O’Rourke smoothed over everything with McArdle’s for him. Later James O’Rourke had told him, “I knew from the first you were the lad for us. You had a feeling for things. I could see that. And of course your being a Pioneer did you no harm.”
Not only James O’Rourke was at McArdle’s. Vincent had had the good fortune to meet Martin Ferris there, the greatest good fortune except of course the gift of meeting Ellen. It was terrific times, working beside Martin. Born partners they were. They started the saying then, and said it always to each other, until Martin’s death, was it five years now? Six. “Partners we are and partners we shall be.” They’d said it all those years.
Both of them lived to be old. As young men they had not imagined that. A war could cut them down, an accident. They had been ready for those things that had not happened.
Martin was adventurous, quick in his mind, like Ellen. And impatient like her. But he was capable of studied concentration when a problem gripped him. Great talks they’d had, sitting on the quayside, smoking cigarettes. Everything under the sun came up in those discussions. Women, God, the bosses, the economy. Martin was a socialist. He’d lost his faith, although he said he respected Vincent for keeping his. (It was strange, in middle life he became quite religious.) Because of Vincent he joined the Pioneers, but quit soon after. The boys were not his type, and he said he couldn’t stand the presence of the priest. “I get the creeps around the blackbirds, Vince,” he said. Little by little, Vincent stopped going to the Pioneers himself.
Cork, too, bored Martin. If Vincent suggested that they save up for stall seats at the theatre, Martin would bring up the theatre in New York, and say his brother’d written about hearing Caruso at the opera. Always Martin’s talk was about New York, so when he blurted out that he was saving for his passage and wouldn’t Vincent consider going with him, together they’d be sure to get ahead, Vincent was not surprised. He’d heard about the flat Martin’s brother had, the unions that the Church could not put down, the opportunities for education. America was a place you could stretch your legs and take some giant steps, not like this godforsaken country, where your every movement was hobbled both by priests and by poverty. They’d walk along the river Lee and Martin would talk about New York as if he’d been there, and soon Vincent wondered what it was he’d seen in Cork. He thought that everything he liked in Cork would be a hundred, no, a million times superior in New York. He’d miss his family, but he could help his parents and his sisters so they’d not grow up dependent on the older brother’s whim, the girls could marry as they wished, for love or pleasure.
He consulted Mr. Flannery back home, and James O’Rourke and Father Lavery. Their advice was all the same: America was a place for a boy with go; he’d keep himself back in this country. The time was now.
He thinks about the day he told his mother.
“I knew it, I knew it,” she said, rocking like a child desperate for a sense of movement. “I knew it when you left for Cork, I knew it was only the first of it and it would end at this.”
The father quieted her, ashamed at her woman’s outburst. She responded to the father’s hand around her wrist.
He learned something from that about the life his parents had together, the life they’d had before the children came. He thought of them together, planting out their first field in the spring before the brother’s birth. “I’ll have that one day,” he said to himself then. “One day I will marry.”
He’d waited till only a week before his passage before telling them. He thought it would allow his mother less time to grieve. But she felt tricked by his waiting, began to suspect he’d had it in his mind to go for years. It was between them as they embraced, as they clasped hands, measured their hands together, their game continued from his childhood, laughing now that his hand was so much bigger. He allowed her to arrange walks for them that he knew led her to say to herself, “This he’ll not forget.” And smooth it down in her mind, one task done, a piece of linen mended, or a blanket put down in the chest for winter. And on the day before his leaving, he made no attempt to stop her tears when she said finally the thing he dreaded, “After you leave, I’ll not see you again.” He knew how she needed the spilling tears; he’d not deprive her.
Though it made it hard for him. He wanted to be thinking of New York, the great streets and the buildings, the discussion groups he and Martin would join, the job prospects ahead of him. Thinking of those things would help him before his journey; feeling his mother’s weeping body thrust against his own, would never help. She was pregnant; he’d been shocked when she’d told him. Shocked to have to think of her as a woman still young. “You may never see this one I’m carrying,” she said. “You could die never knowing the face of your own brother.” She was sure it would be a boy.
“I’ll be back in five years,” he said, knowing that he lied. The countryside was strewn with absences, the promise that he’d made his mother had been made a hundred times in this same valley, and had not once been kept. He let her do all the things she needed to do, take him to all the places, but he allowed his own mind to wander. As he walked with her on a bridge over a small creek, holding her sobbing body, he concentrated on the age of the old stones, the stress of the bridge, its span. In his mind he was calculating problems in arithmetic. How much weight could the bridge bear, how many crossed it every day, and would there be, one day, a point where there would be too many, causing the edifice to just collapse.
After telling his parents, he’d gone back to Cork to collect his things and then came home again three days before the journey. It was a foolish thing, impractical, to go home so he could leave from home, having to make the journey passing right by Mrs. Tierney’s, but he’d wanted it. They all had, even the older brother.
He remembers now what it was called, the whole town gathering before one of the young people went off: “the American wake” they called it. Never before had so many people gathered in his house. He didn’t like it. It was a bad thing, the family’s cavorting and their loudness. It stole the time. He’d wanted to sit, holding his mother’s hand. He’d wanted to talk quietly to his sisters. But all the children in the room were vexed with tiredness and Margaret and Julia fell into their beds unhappy and perplexed, unwilling to take off their day clothes that far into the night. He’d wished his mother or his father would stay up with him. He feared sleep.
But they all slept a few hours.
It was the father who came in to wake him, dressed as Vincent had rarely seen him. He stood in the silver light and Vincent’s heart flew up: today would be the last day he would see his father. He was wearing a new waistcoat with a gray-and-black front and a white back. “Time now,” he said, not looking at his son and pointing to the kitchen as if Vincent were a guest and needed guidance. In a stupor, the mother dished out stirabout and splashed the milk into it for him, as if he were a child. The older brother came in from the milking, glum, respectful, asking what time was the boat, though they all knew it, they had talked of nothing else. Margaret and Julia played at his feet, happy in their excitement. They’d lived so little of their lives with Vincent in the house that his leaving didn’t mean much to them. The older brother slung the trunk into the sidecar, nodded, said “Good luck so,” and turned away.
Then they were off. They made two stops, one to the parish priest, one to Marin Cowley, who was blind and couldn’t come to the do the night before. The mother asked couldn’t they make another stop: she wanted him to have one of the postcards people took with a packet attached and the words printed on it: “A packet of real shamrock seed.” The picture on the postcard showed a bridge in a circle. The circle was made by a quantity of shamrocks in a horseshoe shape and then “Forget not the land of your birth” in letters that joined the horseshoe into a circle. He put the postcard in his pocket but it worried him. He remembered the notice in the post office warning that if the shamrock had roots it was “capable of generation in America.” Customs would heave it off the dock. This was the kind of thing he feared, the home custom that could keep you back, the stern rules he had never heard of, the men in uniforms, like princes, raising up their white gloved hands and saying “No.”
He rode out of the town with his mother and father. The little girls stayed back with the neighbors, the brother claimed he couldn’t leave the animals that long. They’d met up with Martin, just as they’d planned, at the railway station. He’d been a great help, with his high spirits, encouraging them all to see the sights. The big hotels, “Too, rich for our blood now, but give us six months, folks, and it’ll be a week there, room with bath for all.”
Martin took the father up the hill in Queenstown and pointed out to him the look of the rooftops. “The Pack of Cards,” they called those houses up along the hill. The roofs were alike as cards, and spaced that evenly. “Isn’t if great to think of that,” the father said, “that kind of name for a thing.” Vincent had stayed down by the water with his mother; it was not a climb, he felt, someone in her condition should be asked to make.
“Will we not make a visit, then?” the mother asked, her eyes on the Cathedral. He feared Martin would refuse and cause his mother anguish worrying that Vincent, in the company of an apostate, would lose his faith. But as usual, Martin rose to the occasion. When Vincent thanked him for it later, he said that it was nothing, he was interested in architecture, it was the building he was concentrating on and not the superstitions that the building housed. “They were irrelevant to me,” he’d said, leaning out over the boat rail when they talked about it. Vincent had been impressed with his friend’s using the word “irrelevant,” and the breadth of his mind allowing him to think about a church as just another building without fear of blasphemy or being struck down. But Vincent had done the same thing that day in the Cathedral, thought about the building, and his heart scalded him for seventy-five years each time he thought that in his last hour with his mother his thoughts had not been with her, but on the engineering problems that the Cathedral, still under construction, had presented to his eye. The building was completely surrounded by scaffolding. And as he walked with his mother, he saw her body was made heavy by her grief at the leaving of one child and the burden of another growing in her. But he didn’t dwell on it. He thought of the line the columns made, the way each column carried a certain weight of roof. He could not pull his mind away from the idea that the work the scaffolding did on the outside—the iron crossbars, angles, cubes, harsh, ugly to the eye—was being done on the inside by these impressive columns, each topped with a lady’s head that looked Italian, more to him like opera singers than like saints. So, when he said to his mother, “Let’s take a turn outside,” it was not her he thought of but the way the scaffolding supported the tall steeple. And that was in his mind as they embraced at the dockside, and as his father hugged him and said, “Earn well, so you’ll soon come back to us,” he was thinking about the limestone quarries where the stones of the cathedral had come from. When his mother put the bit of hen’s dirt in his pocket for good luck, and he laughed at her, as she had wanted him to, for her superstitions, his eye, over her shoulder, was on the steeple. He kept looking at it, not at her face, crumpled up with weeping; his last sight of home was not his mother’s handkerchief waving at him but the half-constructed towers of Saint Colman’s, which he still thought more impressive than Saint Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue.
His mother was right; he’d not seen her again, nor the child she was carrying—a boy, as she’d predicted, who’d died only a year ago, whom he wrote to every year at Christmas. And every year, on his birthday, his youngest brother had received a birthday check. The amount, Vincent could take a pride in saying, had kept up with the rise of the cost of living.
Martin had made the voyage a great time, chatting everybody up, the girls, the sailors, learning everybody’s plans, and playing cards into the night. They’d walked around the deck and talked about their lives, how they were just beginning, how the past was past and everything in the world was theirs. They only had to take it.
Now, in his room in Maryhurst, he wonders if he’d been wrong to come. He might have settled down in Cork. He’d liked it then, for its compactness, it suited him to live in a city you could walk around in just an hour. He might have risen far in McArdle’s. By now he might have owned the factory. Ridiculous. The factory’d gone under when the automobile caught on. What was it now: a gas station, Cam and Dan told him, they’d looked it up for him on their trip over. For all he knew the building had been blown up by the Black and Tans. When you went over the past, you didn’t imagine the objects changing. The houses in your mind remained the same, the street, the furniture. But while you had gone on with your life, the objects had gone on with theirs, had crumbled, withered, changed beyond all recognition, disappeared.
Of course boys like him and Martin would come to America: they’d been brought up on the dream of it. Chicago, Butte, Philadelphia were more real to them than the Wicklow Mountains or the Giant’s Causeway or the Galway Bay. America was an invented country and yet one where people they had known had gone and prospered, not returning, sending money home. And exhortations: Pack up, come with us. Their voices rang across the ocean like the voices of the damned crying for clemency, or like the siren crying: Follow; like the Angel with the flaming sword or like the angel breaking, with a touch, the prisoner’s chain. Of course he and Martin would come over to America. It could only have been that way. When he’d go
ne back that once he saw he had been right to leave. But he could still feel the pain of it. The songs could make him feel it. Yet he liked to listen to the songs.
When he first came to New York he’d go to the theatre, to hear the women singing those songs. He’d think about them now; he’d let himself. “The Woods of Kylwine.” Fanny Brayton sang it; he remembers her now. In the Tara Hall in downtown New York she sang between the dance numbers:
My heart is heavy in my breast, my eyes are full of tears
My memory is wandering back to long departed years
To those bright days long, long ago
When nought I dreamed of sordid care, or worldly woe
But roved a day, light heart boy, the woods of Kilaloe.
It was great, the way some of the songs could make you see things you thought you’d forgotten. Like the second verse of that same song:
There in the springtime of my life and springtime of the year
I’d watch the snow-drop start from earth, the first young buds appear
The sparkling stream o’er pebbles flow
The modest violet and the golden primrose below
Within the deep and mossy dells, beloved Kylwyne.
He loved to see a fine woman singing a song like that. You never saw it now. And people used to sing around pianos. Families did. He’d always hoped to have that. Ellen wasn’t musical.
He remembered hearing the music of the pianos and the voices summers when he lived in Jersey, in that first house, Mrs. Kerrigan’s.
Hoboken. Weehawken. The names he thought romantic because they seemed to be Indian. (He’d looked it up once in the library. They were.) Home after work, still dirty, for the only wash-up was a filthy zinc bucket full of dirty water. It shamed him to come home so dirty. Mrs. Kerrigan was kind; she said nothing when he took so much time at the sink. He thought of the spring evenings, the summer twilights that stretched out like silk, the soft air urging, and the yearning on his skin. He’d walk the streets, past houses that he learned were owned by one man for his family alone. In each house was a child or children learning the piano. They did not play their instruments well and yet the music pleased him. He heard them playing scales that flowed like grain passing from hand to hand. And on the river you could hear the sounds of voices. Mandolins. Perhaps the songs of lovers. In the parks, for free (the country was a miracle), bands played for hours. Great songs, German music, waltzes he didn’t know the names of. There was nothing like it in the whole of Ireland. Young girls passed, their arms linked, their light sleeves touching. He would have liked to put his lips to those sleeves, to take off the hats, carefully unbutton the bodices, and with reverence reveal the white flesh of those girls who walked like angels to the music. But he spoke to none of them: he didn’t have the right. All day he did work that an animal should properly have done. He dug the subways. He lived in heat and filth. But when he saw those houses with their trees, and heard the music, the piano music coming from them, he believed he would do better. He would have a house with trees around it that the snow would lie on in the winter, that in summer would keep the house shaded and cool so that when his daughter practiced the piano she would never feel the heat.