City of Hope (33 page)

“He most certainly has not,” said Bridie, “unfortunate godless mite.”

“Perhaps we should talk to Father Michael about it this Sunday?”

“Excellent idea,” she said.

Matt had seemed to grow in stature in the few months since we had been together. While I would never had described him as being weak in character, the unfortunate circumstances in which I had found him had caused him to be a somewhat reluctant person, almost deferential both in his manner and in the way he carried himself physically. It was only after we had been together a few weeks that I realized how very tall he was. He had been compensating for his great height with a slight stoop, but since we got together he had started to walk with a straighter back, and the sleeves of his jackets actually seemed to shrink.

Being with me had increased Matt's confidence to such an extent that he began to take much greater pride in his appearance, too. He started to shave every morning, sometimes in the evening as well—and his way of dressing and carrying himself took on a more respectable, gentlemanly demeanor. I was pleased that he had decided to smarten himself up, although I insisted that it was entirely unnecessary to make such efforts for my benefit. If I had any reservations at all about being with Matt, it was that he tended to change the person he was to please me.

When the question of religion came up, I was irritated at how eagerly Matt embraced Bridie's ingrained conventional attitudes, especially after flying so thoroughly in the face of them by sleeping with me. However, there was something comforting about the idea of falling back in with the old habits of church and religion. After all, and God aside, the familiarity and routine of prayers and priests had formed the solid moral backdrop of my childhood and most of my adult life, and there would be surely no harm in allowing myself to be drawn back into the Catholic world of good coats and respectability.

The following Sunday Matt and Tom and I made our “debut” as a threesome at Mass. I wore a mid-calf-length navy-and-white houndstooth coat with a hat trimmed in the same fabric, navy gloves, bag and silk scarf. I stuffed Tom into a new sailor suit I had bought him, alarmed to note how big he was getting, as it was already slightly too small for his chubby frame. I knew the little peaked cap would not stay on his head past the porch, but put it into my bag anyway, along with a big pile of dollars for the contribution plate and a lipstick for retouching just before we went in. Matt wore a new brown suit with draped trousers, and a jacket that hung loose almost down to his knees. He was all style, cocking the trilby on sideways over his freshly shaven short back and sides.

Matt insisted on pushing the buggy, even though his enormous frame made it look like a small toy in his hands. Tom's head moved from left to right, silenced with awe at this new, fascinating view of the world, and he pulled on his pacifier with the excited ferocity of an old film gangster pulling on a cigar. A man walking to Mass with his woman and child on a sunny Sunday morning: Matt looked fit to explode with joy, and for a moment I too felt impossibly grateful for this slice of ordinary life in what had been an extraordinary year.

“I didn't know you'd bought a new suit.” I said.

“There's a lot you don't know about me,” he answered. I raised my eyebrows in reply to the implication, although it was far from the truth. Matt was not the mysterious type—that was one of the things I had come to like about him. The fact that he was an open book, and I knew everything there was to know, made me feel safe. I had seen the menswear bag hanging in the hall two days beforehand and had accurately guessed what it contained, and why.

“What a smart pair you are!”

Lavinia French pulled her car up alongside us. Lavinia had been courting my friendship of late, and I had surprised myself by finding that I liked this older, rather strident, confident woman. She was wealthy, but no silly socialite—and I had come to admire the straightforward, to-the-point manner that had so offended me when we first met. I was also, in honesty, flattered by the attention of this doyenne of the Yonkers establishment. She had doubtless thoroughly investigated my background through Mr. Williams before befriending me, and discovered that I owned several properties in the area and had not only independent means, but the business acumen of a man, as well as a woman's charitable nature. In her desiring my friendship, I saw myself briefly through her eyes and felt some pride in my own achievements.

“Good morning, Mrs. French,” Matt said, touching his hat like a servant boy. His deferential attitude embarrassed me, but seemed to delight her.

“Good morning, Matt—and so handsome in a new suit? Off somewhere special?”

“Church,” I said.

“How terribly worthy.”

“Somebody has to pray for the saving of our souls, Lavinia, and I'm afraid that today that somebody is me!”

“Well, good for you—why don't you call by our house on your way back? Jack is having some rather rich friends over for luncheon, and I could use a hand squeezing some more cash out of them for the hostel.”

“I don't know,” I said. Although I knew where Lavinia lived, I had never been to her house before—and for a meal? I wasn't dressed for it, and my nails needed a manicure if I was going to sit down and eat with strangers. “We have the baby with us, Lavinia, and he's so much trouble . . .”

“Oh, nonsense, Ellie—one of the maids will take him: we can put him out back with the dogs if he gets too rowdy.”

“If you don't mind—another time.”

“Matt, talk to her! I'm only joking about putting the precious child out . . .”

“Of course we'll be there: about one?”

“Perfect, see you then!” And she drove off, waving cheerily.

“Matt!” I was furious. “How dare you make arrangements over me like that.”

He was undeterred.

“What?” he said. “You like the Frenches—you were just being polite.”

“I was not! I am not in the mood.”

“Of course you are,” he said. “You're all dressed up anyway—we all are. You just say ‘No' to everything because you are still afraid.”

I was furious because I knew he was right.

“I am not afraid! Afraid of what exactly?”

“Afraid of life, Ellie—afraid of settling down and making a proper life for yourself. It's always about other people, for you. You need to make something for yourself, Ellie. Make friends of your own standing, and don't always be helping those less fortunate.”

Like him—that was what he was thinking. Yet how had I been fortunate enough to find him? A sensitive friend who wanted to put me back together again.

“You build people up, Ellie—that's what you do. You need to build yourself up now. Take a break from helping others, and help yourself. Show yourself off to the Frenches—you're as good as them . . .”

“So are you.”

“You said it, lady! Anyway, you're dying to get a look inside their house. I know I am. Sure, what else would we be doing today?”

He was right. This was what I wanted, what I needed. To socialize with nice people, to settle and feel safe and happy again in my own life. If I wasn't sure exactly how that was going to happen, if I was ever uncertain or wavered in what I wanted, then I had found a sensible man who loved me and could fill in the gaps.

I made a mental note to say “Yes” when Matt asked me to marry him.

I knew it was only a matter of time before he would.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
SEVEN

Over the next couple of months Matt took my hand and I slowly stepped off my spinning carousel and onto solid ground. He had a way of making things steady and it seemed that my world was easier, and the ground beneath me more stable, with him around. I felt as if my life was falling into place, and I allowed myself to be persuaded to pass the responsibility for the businesses and houses more thoroughly onto others' shoulders, so that I could enjoy some of the rewards of my hard work and charity. “Let us look after you for a change” was the message from everyone, and it felt like progress to be able to take a step back.

Maureen and Bridie took over the everyday running of the shop, and Matt had the building end of the houses running like clockwork, with Mario now managing the men so that Matt could take more time off to spend with me and Tom. On top of that, the money kept rolling in from Ireland, with letters that contained neither questions nor complaints from Katherine. She assured me that Maidy continued to cope with both John's death and my absence. In short, there was nothing to worry me, and nothing to run from anymore.

So Matt and I built a life for ourselves.

In May we took a day trip out to New Jersey. Matt sat Tom up on the railings of the ferry and he stretched down, reaching frantically for the separating lines of foaming sea. Matt put him up on his shoulders as we walked along the beach; I tasted the salt on my lips—watched the swell and crash of the spring waves until they crumbled into simpering gold sniggers of sand—and I felt alive.

I became interested in fashion again. Finding that I could not face the grandiosity and bustle of the city stores, I discovered a competent dressmaker in Yonkers and bought fabric and Vogue patterns, which she made up for me, adding quirks and tailoring details of my own—a ruff across one shoulder, a ribbon detail to the collar of a jacket.

I had both the opportunity and the inclination to dress up after I became something of a figurehead for charitable causes. It started when the Yonkers newspaper,
Home News & Times
, came to interview me at the shop. I insisted that they interview and photograph all of us women together as a group, but they took me aside afterward. The photographer stood me under the sign saying “Yonkers Women's Cooperative” and urged me to smile a broad, proud smile—that was the picture they used alongside my words alone, in a two-page article entitled “Irish Woman in Successful Endeavor for the Homeless.”

Matt's brown suit was quickly added to, with full black dinner dress, as we dined with judges and councilors and, with Lavinia's social patronage, entered the elite world of philanthropists and power mongers.

Any sense of self-doubt or insecurity that I may once have felt at moving in such lofty circles was gone. John's death had changed me; so perhaps had my other brush with death—that of Dingus. I could no longer judge other people, or myself, as harshly as I had once done. Life and death were not opposites after all, but close allies; prince or pauper, beggar or banker—we were all made of nothing more than bone and sinew, flesh and blood. We lived at the mercy of the delicate operation of our bodily functions; the heart could stop beating in an instant, by whim of God or gun.
“Pow!”
—as Dingus himself had so aptly put it—and life was gone.

What, then, was the sense in worrying about etiquette or what other people thought of you? I found that now, when I was faced with the trivialities of social etiquette that used to concern me—the tidy appearance of my nails, the cut of my dress, the positioning of my hair, the manners and status of my gentleman companion—the very moment such concerns entered my head they were banished just as quickly, for the insults to humanity that they were.

I dressed well and observed good manners, as I had always done; it was just that I worried less about how I would be perceived, and was therefore better able to present myself properly as an intelligent and opinionated person. Matt proved to be a sociable companion. Unfazed by other men's wealth or erudition, he found that being by my side gave him all the confidence he needed in any company.

“They have money and education, Ellie, but I've got you!” he once said, as I was fussing over his collar on our way into a fundraising dinner in the Waldorf.

As I moved around the tables, gathering donations with Lavinia, I looked across the vast, glittering ballroom and saw Matt flirting with two judges' wives. He looked right at home, and as I saw his broad Irish face laughing heartily, a punch of reality thudded through me. I got a picture of how I had found him: down on his luck—broken. I may have plucked Matt from the Labor Exchange line, I thought, but that was where his luck had ended. Everything he was now he had earned, through hard work, respect for the dollar and his love and loyalty to me.

That's how things are in America, I remembered. You can go from pauper to president—reinvention was not only encouraged, but admired. Change, progress, the shedding of one life and stepping into another were what America was built on.

In Ireland you could never shake off your history; the sins of your forefathers clung to your coat, leeching you of your achievements, constantly reminding you where you came from. You were kept so busy seeking atonement that there was never the opportunity to move on, never the room to breathe freely. No matter what success I achieved in Kilmoy, I was always the daughter of a crown-loving, traitorous father and a stand-offish, unpopular mother. The best I ever was—despite my achievements in business, my efforts to ingratiate myself with the local people—was John Hogan's wife, now widow.

In America, nobody knew John Hogan, and they liked me anyway.

Matt and I even appeared once in a tiny picture in
Vanity Fair
magazine. All dressed up and smiling, we grinned out of the pages with all the swanks and socialites as if we were part of them. For a split second I allowed myself to wonder if Charles had seen it. I was mixing in the world that he had been born into. He had rejected that world, and so would certainly not have seen my picture. Perhaps he had heard I was with Matt now? Charles had not come back, but, in any case, I could barely recall him without being carried back to the tremendous black pit into which I had fallen after he left. He was the lover who had plunged me into the terrifying chasm of grief, while Matt was the one who had lifted me out of it.