City of Hope (36 page)

“It was as much for me as for you—you trusted it to me and that was so important.”

“I was able to trust you, Katherine: you were so capable, and you never questioned me.”

“Yes, but you let me—”

“Stop—take your due.”

We both laughed, realizing we could go on complimenting and praising each other like that all day.

“Sometimes,” she said, “things happen for a reason, Ellie.” Then, realizing how I might take it, she quickly added, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that . . .”

“No, no,” I reassured her, “I understand what you mean.”

“It just makes you realize that God has a plan for us after all, the way life works out sometimes. Don't you think?”

I didn't like to think about God or His plan for me. I had been paddling my own canoe for the past year, and wasn't planning to hand the reins back to Him anytime soon. This fortuitous arrangement that had come about was down to me and Katherine, and the strength of our professional capacities and personal will power. In any case, none of this would have been necessary if He hadn't taken John away from me. If God had snatched my husband from my arms just to give this young woman a business and me a future in America, then He was more callous and coldhearted than the Devil himself!

“God works in mysterious ways surely,” was as much as I could say, but it was certainly true, and Katherine seemed happy with that.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY

Maidy was standing at the door as we pulled in through her gate, her arms already open to greet me. I pulled up and, without even switching off the engine, scrambled out of the car and ran to her.

“Maidy, oh, Maidy . . .”

I said it over and over again, my face buried in her bosom, and she stroked my head and said, “There, there, sweetest Ellie—you'll be all right.”

This was the moment we should have had a year ago. The tears I should have cried at John's funeral, the comfort I should have garnered from my dearest, oldest ally before running away to America. Perhaps if I had done this, I might not have gone to America at all. Or perhaps, when somebody you love dies, there are no answers, only questions.

I went to the car and gathered Tom up, half asleep, into a blanket and carried him over. I had not told her I was bringing him.

“This is Tom,” I said, “the baby I adopted from the young girl who couldn't manage?”

Maidy put her hands up to her face and let out a squeal, her emotions switching from pain to joy. As she took him, Tom began to bawl, but Maidy gathered him firmly to her bosom and kissed him on the head and said over and over again, “Come here to me, my precious, precious boy,” with as much voracious love as if she had been his own true grandmother.

We went inside and Maidy had prepared all of my favorite food. Boxty pancakes sat warming on a tin plate by the fire; there was an apple tart on the table and the very best of her crockery all laid out. Tom sat at my feet, and Maidy handed him morsels, which he chewed sporadically between going on explorations. “Maidy, you went to so much trouble . . .”

“And my girl home from America? And with such a precious gift you've brought me in this little ladabuck?”

She ruffled Tom's hair and he looked up at her like a suckling lamb. I felt a momentary shot of gratitude.

Katherine had followed us in and sat at the table with me as Maidy served us both. Then Maidy stood and watched us eat, as she had done with John and I when we were children. She never sat down with us, but watched smiling as we glugged down our milky tea—replacing each hunk of bread, each slice of tart with another, until all of the food was gone and we felt like exploding.

I had noticed at the station that Katherine had put on weight, and as she shared Maidy's table with me (the only other person ever to have done so, other than John), I had to brush aside my childish petulance as I realized that she was the new recipient of Maidy's unique hospitality.

When we had eaten, Katherine took the car back into town.

“Would you like me to send a taxi for you?” she asked. “Jack Flanagan has a new car—will I get him to come out and collect you? You're welcome to stay in the apartment?”

Katherine had my business, my car, my apartment and my Maidy. I had given them all to her, and yet now I felt I wanted them back. This was my life, after all. My history, my heritage—everything I had worked for, barring this past terrible, peculiar year.

“They'll stay here!” Maidy exclaimed.

Neither of them suggested that I go back to my own house.

When Katherine had gone I didn't waste time, but just blurted straight out, “Maidy, I want you to come back to America with us. You're on your own here, with John and Paud gone—we only have each other left and, I promise, you will love it. I could use your help with Tom here. I have a big house, and you'll have everything: electricity, a beautiful room, the weather is wonderful—the heat will warm your very bones, Maidy—you won't know yourself . . .”

I trailed off because, as I spoke I realized how pointless each of my words were. The very idea of Maidy coming to America was ridiculous; there was no argument that could make it otherwise. She loved me like a daughter, but she had dozens of friends and old neighbors around Kilmoy, and if she missed me, Maidy would always find someone like Katherine to satisfy her mothering instincts. Everything she needed was right here—she had no interest in pretty things or grand furniture; she was terrified of electricity; and her creaking bones would be just as well off where they were, rather than taking her across the world when, in her eighty-odd years, she had never been as far as Galway!

Maidy laughed—her eyes were bright, but not with the possibility of adventure. They were filled with the good-hearted love she had always shown me when I came up with one of my schemes. Her laughter was for the way she knew I was: her ambitious daughter-in-law Ellie—always wanting more, always trying to persuade people around to my way of doing things. It had not worked with her when I was a child and wanted to leave my parents' cold, gray house and move into her cottage. Nor when I had tried to drag her up to Dublin on the train simply to buy a new hat.

“You pick one out for me,” she had said.

“I'll need you for size,” I had insisted, determined to take her on a great adventure.

“Here's my old bonnet—I trust you to find one that'll suit me.”

Maidy didn't like what she didn't know: trains, cars, cities—they weren't for her.

She wore that hat on every special occasion after that. On Christmas Day she tied a red ribbon around its navy felt base, to give it a seasonal trim. Each time she wore it, she inflated with a pride that was unusual in someone with such a humble demeanor. She would stand in front of people in that hat, smiling until they commented upon it.

“I like your hat, Maidy,” the same people would say year after year, as if they were seeing it for the first time.

Her voice would rise with the slightest affectation and she'd say, “Ellie bought it for me—in the millinery department of Clerys of Dublin.” And that was her boasting over for another year.

That somebody had shopped for fashion on her behalf was as much adventure as Maidy wanted, or needed. She had no need to chase after life; she was content to sit and let it come to where she was. John had been the same. All he had ever wanted was already under our roof in Kilmoy, including me. His adventure was in his fields, in the miracle of a good crop of potatoes, a breeched calf, gray clouds chasing him home as he scrambled across streams and ditches to get back before the rain came.

“I'll stay then,” I said, “I won't go back—I'll stay here with you. We'll raise young Tom a proper Irishman.”

Maidy laughed again, but I leaned over and took her hands.

She was a substantial woman, but her hands were wiry and worn with work, mottled with age. I looked up into her face and she stopped smiling for a moment. She was certainly an old woman now, her eyes sinking behind her skin, her hair thin and pure white.

“I want to look after you, Maidy.”

“I know you do, Ellie,” she said and squeezed my hands. “You're a good girl, but you're to go back America. Both of you.”

I flinched, for I felt as if she was turning me away.

“You don't want me to stay?”

“Of course I do, Ellie. I miss you every day.” And she nodded toward the mantelpiece. There was a photograph of me that I had sent home to John from America during my first trip there. I was posing in a photographer's studio in 1922 wearing a tight-fitting cloche hat; my eyes were heavily made-up and burned out at the camera from under the tight brim; my lips were dark and pencil-thin with lipstick. The picture was in a new frame.

“I hope you don't mind,” she said. “I took that from the house, and Katherine had it framed in Archer's for me. I light a candle for you every day, Ellie.”

“And John?” I said.

She patted her heart, then reached into the top pocket of her apron and pulled out a photograph, which she handed to me. I recognized it as a picture taken of John just after he'd left Kilmoy as a young man of fifteen. He was wearing a woolen waistcoat and cap standing in front of the General Post Office building in Dublin, grinning. It was his first year away from home—the big man working in the capital on his apprenticeship as a carpenter. He was so happy then. Maidy and Paud were so proud of him, but I was miserable that I was still a schoolgirl and that he had left me behind. Five years later I pressured him and we ran away and got married against our parents' wishes. I knew I could not live without him and, as with all things in my life, I could not wait.

The picture was so worn you could barely see the image. Neither of us needed to, for the familiarity of John's face in that photograph was etched into our memories. Maidy didn't need to light candles for her son because his light was still alive inside her.

“Don't you want me to stay?”

“You need to go and live your life, Ellie, you're a young woman. You don't want to be wasting your time minding an old soul like me.”

“Suppose that's what I want to do, Maidy?”

She stood up, moved the steaming kettle from the stove and reached up into the tin on the shelf above the fire for more tea.

“Things happen for a reason, Ellie. It's time to move on— things can't always stay the same.”

It felt like something of a rejection; she must surely have been injured when I ran away on her after the funeral, although it was not like Maidy to hold a grudge.

“If you ask me to stay, Maidy, I will. It's what John would have wanted, for me to be here with you. I'm sorry I went away—I realize now I was wrong.”

“No, no, Ellie.” She shook her head. “You were not wrong to go—look at all the wonderful things you did there. Of course I want you to stay in Kilmoy, Ellie, and to see you every day, of course I do; but I won't ask you to, and neither would John if he was here . . .”

“That's not true . . .”

“Perhaps not,” she said, laughing. “God, he was an awful stick-in-the-mud!”

I was shocked.

“How do you mean?”

“I tried to persuade him to join you in America all those years ago—you didn't know that, now did you?”

I didn't.

“Oh yes—even Paud tried to give him the push. . . .”

“Why didn't he come?”

“Too stubborn, I thought at the time. He wanted you to come back—wanted to prove his point.”

“That's what I thought—God, I was mad with him!”

“But now, Ellie, I think differently. I think he was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of you, Ellie—of all you could do without him. He loved you so much, you see: he wanted to be your hero.”

“And he was!”

“Ah, but you could look after yourself too—always, even as a young one—and he didn't like that. John wanted to keep you on home turf where he could keep an eye on you, where he knew where he was—I told him that if he didn't give you your bit of freedom, Ellie, you'd stray.”

“I would
never
had done that . . .”

“Well, indeed, and you might have, Ellie, and I wouldn't have blamed you. You were great to come back to him at all, and that's the truth of it.”

This was all a complete revelation to me. I didn't know what to make of it.

“We're too stuck in our ways, this family—you're different, Ellie, you're a breath of fresh air. . . .”

And with that she started to cry, pulled a dish towel out of her pocket and wiped her face, before the tears troubled themselves on her skin.

“So come to America with me, Maidy . . .”

“That's what I miss more than John himself, more than Paud, more than the men themselves: it's the way things were—with all four of us together.”

“. . . or I'll stay. I'll stay. One or the other, Maidy, but I'll not leave you again.”

She pulled herself together.

“You'll go—and you'll go without me, Ellie, and I'll not have it any other way. You came back this once and you'll come again, and sure if you don't, we'll write.” Then, before I had time to object again, she turned her back to me and started picking potatoes out of a tin bucket by the back door. “Make yourself useful and fetch me over the peeler and basin from the press, then get yourself out of the house, like a good girl—you have me distracted.” She leaned down and picked up Tom just as he was about to pull a saucepan down from the fire. “And you can leave this little fella here with me while we become acquainted. . . .”

I conceded not least because, after two weeks in his constant company, I was glad to get a break from Tom.

I found my boots on the wooden stool John had made for that specific purpose, under a rack jumbled up with a curtain of long coats and rugs in Maidy's porch. They sat there alone—John and Paud's boots were both gone, while Maidy wore the same shoes inside and out.