by Mary Gordon
“It was a good job. I was proud to be associated with the IRT.”
“Why were you proud?”
He tried to answer what she wanted. He felt sorry for her. She was always the child with the worst luck of any of them: If there was a rusty nail, a piece of broken glass, she’d step on it; a patch of poison ivy, she’d go through it. When she woke from her naps her eyes were always crusty and her mother blamed her for it. It hurt him to hear Theresa talk to her. And then leaving the convent like that, under a cloud, marrying a priest, you’d have to say that there was shame in it. Thou art a priest for ever. They said the ones that left never got over it. Although they seemed all right, the two of them. So maybe that was wrong too. Maybe some of them did get over it. And the little boy seemed nice. She was a good mother to him, warm, although her mother hadn’t been. And she was proud of him, her Diarmid. But she had what every woman in the family had. That set mouth. Angry. Judging. He saw her hating Cam. Who did Cam hate? Sometimes he could understand why Cam would hate her mother. But that couldn’t be right. She did everything for her mother. She was at her beck and call.
So he told Sheilah that the IRT was the best line, the oldest, and the shops were by far the most advanced of any in the system. Which meant the world.
“Tell me whatever you want, Granddaddy. Tell me about the shops. Whatever you can remember.”
He remembered quite a lot. The big shop of 147th Street and Lenox Avenue.
“It was quite a place,” he told his granddaughter, who listened to him, holding a machine, so she could get a pay raise.
“What do you mean, Granddaddy, when you say ‘quite a place’? I mean, do you mean that you liked it? That you liked working there?”
He wanted to tell her: You’re asking the wrong questions. Questions like that are not the kind I like to answer. He wanted to describe how the place looked. As he had done for Ellen.
“It was a huge place, that old shop. Of course they took the whole thing down, they had to. Two blocks it took up. That’s why some people will tell you it was on One-forty-eighth when to be exact you should say One-forty-seventh Street. Everything was there: Inspection, Maintenance, Repair. We replaced parts there. Everything you needed for the system we made there. It was a huge place, all sorts of departments, blacksmiths working, tinsmiths, carpenters, even weavers to weave and reweave the caning for the seats. You can remember that, I think, you’re old enough, the caning on the seats. There were a thousand of us working at a time there, and a night shift—not as large, of course. Two hundred fellows. It was made of concrete, the shop itself, ‘reinforced concrete’ they call it. There were those huge doors at the bays, we called them ‘bays,’ the bays held different things, different equipment. You could hear the racket all the time those doors made going up and down. The doors were steel, you know.”
This wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear about his feelings. “Did you like working there? What did it feel like to work there?”
“It felt great. You felt proud to be a part of it. A small cog in a big wheel. You did your best.”
He couldn’t tell her of the love, the peace that fell upon him when he walked into the shop, buzzing with each man doing things that he was good at and machines you felt it was ah honor to be working with. He’d walk in every morning. The wave of the place would lift him up, its fast smooth movement a delight to him. “Here, Vincent,” one of the engineers would say, handing him plans. “Could you make this up for me?”
He’d take the blueprint. And his mind would sink down, into the lake of this new problem. There was nothing in the world but this thing that needed to be made, constructed. And you could do it. You gave yourself up to it and in the end presented it, what it was that you’d done. Or they’d say to you, “Vincent, we want fifty-three fittings pronto, hole 73/38,” and you’d have to make them. You thought at first you couldn’t; then you realized you could. You gave them what they asked for. You ground the wheels to make them perfectly round. They had to be perfect or they were useless. And you couldn’t make mistakes. It didn’t matter what was going on around you: noise, heat, bad language or bad temper; “We need this thing, goddamn it, I said we need it now.” Sometimes you looked up at the windows in the ceiling and the light came down. You thought: Ideas come to me like this, the thick light straight through the glass, coming down in a line. He couldn’t explain it all to Sheilah. “I felt I was swimming in one of those seas where the water keeps you up. I felt I was part of an important enterprise. My mind was always taken up.”
Instead of all this, he said into the machine: “It was a great bunch of fellows I was working with. You felt they’d share and share alike.”
“And what was the ethnic component of the workers?”
“What did you mean by that, dear? The different nationalities?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we were mixed. A lot of fellows from overseas, not just the Irish. German fellows. Poles. A lot of them well educated, you’d get your more skilled fellows in the shop. You could learn a lot.”
He had learned a lot about the world there. High ideals they had, some of those Europeans. World peace. No national boundaries. One world: the international republic of workers.
It was there he’d first heard talk about the union. “The union talk got started in the shops and barns; well, it was natural, because in the other jobs the men were isolated, alone, maybe a pair of them, but they weren’t together to talk among themselves out on the tracks.” He told Sheilah that but she didn’t seem interested. She wanted to know about his feelings.
“It felt great being there,” he said. “Every day you felt great.” She turned her machine off. He knew he’d disappointed her. He didn’t know what it was she wanted, but it was something he couldn’t give.
He is sitting in a green plastic chair that is pretending it is leather. Leatherette. His youth fills up his veins. The old blood, tired, hopeless, vanishes. He breathes again the air of his youthful hope.
He’d been in on something, he could say that. He’d seen something historical. The making of the Transport Workers Union. He’d been part of that. When he’d signed on with the IRT he’d joined the Company Union, the Brotherhood; he’d known no better. Martin too, for all he was a great one for the TWU later on. They’d had no choice but to join the company union. He’d thought at first it was great stuff the Brotherhood could do for you. The libraries at all the major terminals, the recreational facilities with pool tables and lunchrooms. Hot showers. Just for them. For the workingman. 145th and Lenox, 180th Street, Van Cortlandt Park had one too. At the time he thought it was a great thing for the men, their lives were hard, living in boarding houses, some of them were filthy, and the terrible long hours and the danger. Though they boasted about these things, you’d see it took its toll. So many of them at the bars the minute they got their paychecks. He’d seen a few others lose their mind. One walking the track, they all were terrified, him shouting he was all right, the train couldn’t hurt him, he was Jesus Christ, his body had been glorified. So many of them marrying so late, they said they didn’t have the money, but you felt it wasn’t that, they didn’t have a taste for married life, they held back from it like so many did at home.
He had only loved one woman in his life, and minutes after he had met her knew that he loved her. He saw the things she had, the treasures she would bring: Courage, a quick mind. She could make decisions, see things. He wanted a life beside her. She was a tree on a high ground that beckoned. Irresistible. There was no kind of life apart from that. Nothing he’d want to live.
So, when he brought Ellen to meet his best friend and Martin warned him, “Don’t be rushing into anything that you’d regret. You haven’t got it too bad now. The job’s good and your time’s your own,” Vincent felt a door come down between him and his friend. Though he said nothing, or “There’s a lot in what you say.” But in his mind: “My life is with her now.”
And was it still?
He doesn’t want to go back to the house where they had lived, where children had been born and sheltered, and the mother sheltered, or hidden, and the news of the son’s death received, and the children of children, history, ideas they’d had about the world. How could he not want to go back to that place?
Because she isn’t the person she had been.
And if she isn’t, there’s no sense being with her.
He doesn’t want to live again under the tyranny of that nurse who filled the house with noise and theft. The theft he saw and couldn’t stop. When he’d said, “A silver brooch of my wife’s seems to have been misplaced,” she’d answered him in her false accent, pretending she was from the South (he knew she wasn’t really). “Darlin’, you gave away so much of that old jewelry to the girls, Theresa took a lot of it, remember. You get things mixed up in that old head o’ yours.” But he knew that brooch hadn’t been given away, it was one he’d given Ellen when they were courting, he wouldn’t have let Theresa have it. He told Cam and even Cam couldn’t stop her. The nurse, Mary Davenport, stood in her white uniform, in her white shoes, her stiff hair like a weapon. She said to Cam, “If I’m not trusted, I’ll just have to leave.”
That terrible time. He knew Mrs. Davenport had falsified her time sheets, she had not bought groceries that week and claimed she had, and Cam demanded strict accounting. Cam stood in front of the cabinets asking, “Exactly which of these purchases was made this week,” in a lawyer’s voice, the voice that could stand up to everyone, talk to judges and make some people go to jail and some be given money and protection by the court, Cam that knew Latin like a priest, his Cam. The woman shook her finger under Cam’s nose like Cam was a bad child, shook and shook her finger so it was in Cam’s face. “I will not be doubted and I will not be abused. I’ll quit this instant. And you’ll see. She won’t live a day after I quit, it’ll be on your heads. Go on, now. Just come in with me, we’ll tell her to her face. We’ll tell her that I’m leaving and it’s you that’s sending me “away.”
Cam called her bluff. They went into the room where Ellen was strapped into her bed. The nurse went up to her and said, “Your granddaughter here is trying to get rid of me. She wants to separate you and me, it’s what she wants to do.” She leaned over Ellen, putting her big face into Ellen’s face, the face that was a skull.
And Ellen, Ellen who feared nothing, Ellen who stood up to everything, lay back, her hand a claw, her arm bone, grabbed the hand of the nurse, and began to whimper, then to cry, opening her mouth, showing everyone her gums.
The nurse turned to poor Cam, with a look of triumph on her thievish face. Cam backed down. “Let’s keep stricter accounts from now on, if possible,” she said.
The nurse said, “Well, it’s not my problem.”
As if that meant anything. As if any of them knew what that meant.
He won’t think about it now. He has only an hour left to be in this room he has enjoyed, where he has learned again that he is interested in living life. He wants to remember hopeful times when he was happy, young.
The year is 1933. The shop is full of talk of a new union. The Brotherhood does nothing for them, gives them a sop—the libraries, the recreation halls—but they are slaves, they work like slaves, they are humiliated and in danger and uncared for. He recalls a speaker standing on a platform at the shop gate so the men would hear as they left work, “Even the slaves in early civilization had a few hours for recreation, but for transit workers it is work, sleep, and a few hurried meals. We are unable to go to our bosses and talk to them like men, looking them in the eye, man to man, not with eyes to the ground like a dog.”
He listened to the speeches and the conversations of the men who seemed to him full of ideas, great ideas for the world. He took the papers that were handed out at the shop gate. He brought them home to Ellen.
The children were older now, even John was independent, the mother was dead, Ellen had gone back to reading. Every day she was more hungry for the talk he’d listened to about the union, for the plans and the ideas.
“Then what was said?” she’d ask him, leaning forward like a girl. “And what was said to that?”
One day a fellow at the shop, a machinist like himself, asked him would he sign up with the new union. Hundreds of other fellows had signed up. Vincent said he would sleep on it. What he meant but didn’t say was he would talk it over with his wife.
“Of course you will, why wouldn’t you, you’re not a coward and you never have been. All your life you’ve never done an act of cowardice and never will.”
He said, “We’re in the middle of a black Depression, I could lose my job for this, in a minute, they’d love it, there’s thousands of guys wanting a good steady job like mine. You just must realize I’m putting my job at risk.”
“Of course I realize it. What was there ever of value in this life that couldn’t be put at risk? Our whole life was a risk, think what you risk every day of your life living beside someone of my bad temper.”
“We’ve done all right.”
He wants to kneel down before her where she sits, bury his head in her apron, she is the mother he has left, the mother of his children, comfort to him and support. And at the same time he wants to stand up beside her, he can feel her grow erect because of this, their taking up a larger life. He wants to take her hand, to walk to some high place with her. At the same time he wants to plant kisses on her body, kisses of praise, of consolation for the sadness of her childhood that was stolen from her, kisses for her bravery, her love of life. But she would never agree to it in the morning; he doesn’t ask her, it would shame the both of them, his asking.
She says, “Come help me feed these foolish creatures.”
It is June, a Sunday. She puts grain into the pocket of her apron and a bit into his hand. Joyfully she opens the screen door, the springing sound is hopeful to both of them. She calls the chickens to her. She’s had chickens since the mother came; and they’d been handy, particularly with the Depression, and the garden she began first for her mother throve and was her pride.
They scatter the grain; the birds feed on it and he takes the children off to church. It is a Sunday. She’d never go, she hated everything to do with it, the priests, she said, and their black hearts. You take the children if you like, but expect no help from me. I’ll not listen to their catechism; I’ll not hear their prayers.
The girls to spite her have grown pious. They kneel with their heads on their folded hands.
He prays for the success of the new union and vows to Saint Joseph, the patron of workers, that his membership in the new union will not stand in the way of his faith. Some priests were dead against it, since the Communists were giving strong support.
“Where are the priests to give support?” Ellen said, when he’d spoken to her about his worries. “The Communists are out for us, rain or shine. The priests are in their churches, worrying their beads like old women. Taking tea in the houses of the rich.”
He felt she’d be a Communist, like her friend Bella, only she knew he’d be upset.
He signed up for the union in June of 1934. All of that year there were weekly meetings of the union held at the shop gates. And soon after he joined, there was an outdoor rally in the Bronx, a thousand people showing up, and stirring speakers telling them their day had come. The speakers had had rotten eggs thrown at them from passing cars, rocks, broken glass. They were undaunted. All that summer he and Ellen went to rallies in the open air, in neighborhoods where the Irish were strong, Hell’s Kitchen and Bay Ridge, which had a lot of fellows from the BMT. Bella would come along, the three of them like a big family. Bella approved of him at last and when he wouldn’t sign with the CP when she asked him, she’d laugh and say, “You will one day.” Ellen said she would but didn’t like giving her name to anybody. Bella never challenged her; “All right,” she said, “Ellen, I know you’re with us. A comrade through and through.” Ellen had smiled with pleasure. He knew she wouldn’t join unl
ess he joined.
Bella came to them Friday nights. The three of them went to meetings and rallies every Friday night. After their meal of fish.
That fall, or maybe it was ’35, an organizer at the shop asked if the MacNamaras would be willing to have their house serve as a meeting place for a small group to discuss plans and work out strategies. He said the leadership encouraged small meetings, five fellows or so, that way in case there was a spy among them only three or four of them would lose their jobs. “You talk it over with the wife,” the fellow said. Vincent couldn’t think of his name now. “Sometimes the wives get scared.”
“Not mine,” said Vincent, “she’s a great supporter of the cause.”
The man laughed, not kindly. “Talk it over with her first.”
She was thrilled. “What’s the use of a house like this if it can’t be used for something important. It’s an honor and our privilege to open it up.”
As if it was a thing she’d always done, opening up her house. As if she hadn’t kept the house closed, furiously, to strangers.
Nearly everybody was a stranger to her.
They’d moved to Queens Village in 1922. And though she talked to people in the shops, was friendly, bantered with the neighbors, she invited no one in the door. If someone came, a woman, offering her some gift, or food, asking her advice on schooling for the children, which they often did, or asking her advice about their gardens, she’d talk to them on the porch or at the door or in the back yard. She was genial; they left glad they had spoken to her. But she never let them through the door.