now red.
“Was I to wait forever?”
She climbed down from the cart and sat by the side of the road and wept.
“Could you not have written a letter?” she asked bitterly, angrily.
Such crap and nonsense, he thought.
“And I that had no schooling?” he asked. “Was I going to be sending letters in the handwriting of a child, to be laughed at?”
And so that was the welcome in Ireland.
He came back to the States, and he went to school at night, and he got the job in the brewery, and he worked his way, in fifteen years, to Maintenance Superintendent. He built a home in Riverdale and banked money when all he knew were starving in the city. But he had no family, and no happiness. He cursed the one in Ireland, and he cursed God, and he cursed whoever the unfortunate woman was who happened to be with him when the black mood came on him.
Finally, his own misery drove him to his knees. He went one Saturday night to the church.
In the dark of the confessional box, he mumbled out the words.
“It’s been fifteen years.”
The priest led him down through all of it. When all was said, Mr. Meagher heard the words half-remembered from so many years before.
“Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat; et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis et interdicti in quantum possum et tu indiges.”
The priest paused.
“Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii. . .”
Harry made the sign of the cross out of memory.
“et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”
Then Harry went out to the pew outside the confessional, and looked up to the Blessed Sacrament, and asked for a wife.
Two weeks later she was waiting for him outside of Sunday Mass. Con Aiken introduced her. Mary McInerny. She was a year over from the old country, and was working for the telephone company. At first he wasn’t sure she was speaking to him, for she had a wall eye. But he knew that this was her, the wife he had asked for.
He courted her. There were those who wanted to make a hare out of him because of her eye. “Sure,” said Finn Dolan, “You won’t know whether she’s looking at you or across the street.” He had grabbed Dolan by the throat and thrust him against the wall so that he’d have no more breath to make jokes about her. And sure, it turned out in the end, she was worth two of the one in Ireland. A clean, good woman and a hard worker, she made him laugh in the house, he who had never laughed.
Then God saw fit to take her. When James was born, and she was up and about again, they went to a picnic in Fort Tryon Park at the beginning of the trolley line.
In the heat of the afternoon, she drank a glass of water. Later that night, Mary complained she felt nauseous. She got up that night and vomited. Neither of them paid it too much attention at the time, and the next day she said she felt a bit better.
Three days later she was dead of cholera.
Perhaps the best thing would have been for him to find another mother for the children. He went back to the church and asked again. But another Mary McInerney did not come. So he raised them himself, with the help of his sister Nora.
What kind of a job had he done? The boy was stealing. That’s what it was. Cut it five ways and put jam on it: it still came down to theft. He’d like to take him by the shoulders and shake him. If a man wasn’t as good as his word, he wasn’t worth a damn.
Harry drank the glass of milk and whiskey and got up, and went out to the back to see if Nora’s kitchen light was on. It was. She was sitting in the kitchen, a long face on her.
“He’s not in yet?” Harry asked.
“He’s not. What are you doing up?”
Harry didn’t answer; he looked at the piece of soda bread she had in her hand, a layer of butter on it.
There was a time, Harry thought, when his sister had been so beautiful the reporter from the Irish Record called her: “the prettiest lass ever came out of Kerry.” God save the day the reporter ever laid eyes on her: for it was Arthur Connolly. She still had the article upstairs. Michael Murray had been mad for her, but she wouldn’t give him a look. She wanted Arthur and she got him. He didn’t bring home ten checks in a year, while Michael Murray was building the government buildings now in Washington. There wasn’t a sawhorse on the street down there, they said, that didn’t have his name on it.
Ah, but how could you blame Arthur, Harry thought. He didn’t want to get married. She dragged him to the altar. He stumbled on the altar step, and whimpered during the service. The priest got through the ceremony and dashed for the sacristy, and shut the door, and laughed so loud he could be heard above the wedding march. Arthur was no man for a family, but Nora had to have her way.
“He’ll be in soon,” said Harry.
Nora grunted, but didn’t say anything. Harry went back home and went upstairs. He hung his pants neatly. He put his shoes in trees. He knelt down at the bedside, and put his face in his hands.
Why were there so many disappointments? He had worked hard and seemed to have got so little. He had plowed at eleven years of age a straight line, a man’s work.
He prayed that Florence’s young man might turn out all right.
He prayed that Jim might find a good, homely girl who would love him, like Jill next door.
He prayed that he’d be able to look Mary in the face when the time came, and be able to tell her that it had turned out all right.
Chapter 8
Jim Meagher awoke Sunday morning at seven o’clock with a headache. He got up and pulled the shade, and lay down again for another five minutes, but he couldn’t sleep, so he put his shoes on and a sweatshirt over his pajamas and went downstairs. There was orange juice in a plastic container in the refrigerator, and he finished that, tilting it back on his head. He wanted to make coffee, but he knew there would be no chance of sleep after that, so he made tea. With a lot of milk and sugar, it tasted good.
He thought about Eva, and he went over the pros and cons of a plan he had been thinking about the night before: to invite her to that night’s party. He had about made up his mind to do it, in spite of his father. He wondered if it would be a good tactic to tell the father ahead of time, but he was doubtful. The father was liable to get mad, and this was no morning to alienate him, with the visit to Father Phelan in prospect.
He noticed how clean the kitchen was. The linoleum was spotless and the refrigerator shone like mother-of-pearl. Ralph was getting the full twenty-one-gun salute. There was even a basket of flowers on the table, with a red velvet ribbon around the base. Jim leaned close to read the tag: “pink and white sweetheart roses, babies’ breath and coxcomb.”
Florence padded down the stairs. Jim was surprised. She could usually sleep forever, cuddled up in a ball, especially on Sunday morning. She came into the kitchen wearing
