Paddy’s oldest son, Mike, had organized fifty-seven tickets for my twenty-seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, their parents, and Patrick and Máire’s family.
A master plumber at twenty-seven, Mike’d helped transform the six hundred acres of swampland along Lake Michigan into the fabulous White City that contained, as he’d told me, “the grandest buildings ever constructed in the history of the world. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building alone covers thirty acres and has room for three hundred thousand people. Imagine that!”
Stephen’s oldest boy, Ed, sixteen and the only redhead in the bunch, had worked with Mike. “I’m going to be a civil engineer,” he’d told me, “and build bridges and tunnels and skyscrapers.”
“But your father—” I’d started.
“Wants me to be mayor of Chicago,” he’d finished my sentence. “I know. I’ll do that, too.”
Real goers, my grandchildren.
Mike and Ed had shown Patrick and me photographs of these brand-new Greek temples, Italian palaces, and Roman amphitheaters that had risen up along the lakeshore. We were impressed with what the boys called “architectural wonders” and admired the pictures of the buildings that each state in the Union had constructed: California’s Spanish mission with its tower of oranges—“They give the fruit away every day!” Ed said; Iowa’s pavilion made from corn; Washington’s giant log cabin. And France, Spain, Austria, the countries of South and Central America, India, Japan, Russia, and Turkey all created massive pavilions to display their products, they told us.
We could see the most popular attraction right from the parlor window—the Ferris wheel.
“Two hundred and sixty-four feet tall,” Ed said as we’d looked at the huge wheel, visible across the distance of four miles that separated Bridgeport from Jackson Park and the Fair.
“It’s the centerpiece of the Midway,” Mike had said.
“I’ve heard about the Midway,” I’d told them.
They’d laughed. The Midway Plaisance provided the fun of the Fair. Algerian snake charmers, acrobats from Java, Hungarian Gypsy bands, and every manner of dancer and musician entertained in the villages set up along the mile-long strip where thousands of people from dozens of exotic places lived and displayed their cultures to the crowds.
And there, right next to the Cairo street where the famous Little Egypt performed her belly dance, stood not one but two Irish villages, each with its own complement of “native” performers and craftsmen.
That’s where I wanted to take the family—to Ireland. But there was a problem.
“I’m boycotting both Irish villages,” Patrick said to Máire, sipping his tea and looking up at her from his place at the kitchen table.
“Boycott? What’s that?” she said.
As Patrick explained to her how a village in Ireland got rid of an agent called Captain Boycott, I sat Máire down and gave her a cup of tea.
“Refused to serve him in the shops, work on his estate, wouldn’t speak to him or even look at him. He finally left.”
“The Land League did it,” I put in, sitting at the table. “They stand up to the landlords without violence.”
“But what does that have to do with going to the Fair?” she asked.
Patrick pointed his finger at Máire. “Who built the so-called Irish villages? Who’s collecting the admission fee, pocketing every cent spent there? The English!”
True enough. A Lady Aberdeen was sponsoring the Blarney Castle Irish village, while two British women had put together the Donegal version.
“An insult!” Patrick said, pounding his fist on the table. “As if Irish people couldn’t organize ourselves. Remember the Fenian Fair? The neck of them . . . You can capitulate, but I won’t.”
“Listen, Patrick,” Máire said, “the Sassenach don’t give a fiddler’s fart if you go to the Fair or not, but the kids do. You haven’t seen Daniel since Canada. He’s coming all the way from California with his wife and three children. My grandchildren will finally meet their cousins and Aunt Honey.”
Colonel Daniel O’Connell Leahy commanded a cavalry company in San Francisco—not fighting the Indian Wars anymore, thank God.
Silken Thomas owned a share in a saloon in San Francisco. Máire was hoping he’d come with Daniel today. But with Thomas, you never knew.
Gracie and James Mulloy were definitely bringing their four from Nashville—all grown up now, and their oldest girl, Molly, had two children. “She’s called her boy Johnny,” Máire’d told me, “and really, he’s the image of Johnny Og.” Máire visited the Mulloys often, and she’d been there cheering in the stands when Askeeboy won the Kentucky Derby.
Máire had traveled to California soon after Patrick and I were married. (When I think of the way I tortured myself over that dispensation—and there’d been nothing to it.) She might have stayed in San Francisco except for the Great Chicago Fire. “I have to help Marshall start again,” she’d said. She’s still there—a great treat for all my granddaughters when I take them downtown to have lunch with Aunt Máire in the Walnut Room.
It was Máire who suggested placing stationery in the ladies’ restrooms, and it was her idea to have a bargain basement so all the typists and office girls could shop at Field’s, too.
The Shop took up a whole block on State Street. All the trolley cars met and turned around there, at the place we called “the Loop.”
Máire’d found herself an apartment in one of the new skyscrapers rising twenty stories into the air. Amazing. Mike had explained to Patrick and me how steel could now be forged into frames that bore enormous weights. “Chicago’s the pioneer,” he said. A forest of these giants filled the streets of downtown.
“Thrilling!” Máire’d said. “And see how the windows are set back to let in the light without throwing shadows down on the street?” she’d added.
“Louis Sullivan’s the fellow designing the best of them,” Mike had said. Mike had gotten a lot of work from Louis after Máire and I’d introduced them. We knew his father, Paddy Sullivan, a great fiddler and dance teacher.
Good to know people in Chicago. Mr. Onahan was still going strong, and John Comiskey, too. But James and Lizzie McKenna were gone. And Molly Flanigan. Barney McGurk, too.
I sipped my cup of tea and looked from Patrick to Máire. “You won’t convince him, Máire,” I said.
“You’re a pain, Patrick Kelly, no question. I don’t know how you put up with him, Honora.”
“He has his moments. Besides, it was you urged me to marry him,” I said.
“Jesus, God forgive me,” Máire said, and made such a face at Patrick that he laughed.
Máire had been right. Michael wouldn’t have wanted me to lock myself away in a prison of my own righteousness. Michael had paid the bride price: no jealousy, never a begrudger, no meanness, no fear. I’ve had two fine men to love, two Kellys, I thought, and I’m very grateful.
Patrick and I often talked of Michael to each other and to the grandchildren. Sharing these memories made Michael real for them. Michael had stepped out of the sea to me fifty-four years ago this very day. My young hero, who would never grow old. A ghrá mo chroi.
Yet Patrick and I had built a strong, steady love, deep and satisfying. He’d sustained us in the hard times, all through those terrible days after the Great Fire, with Chicago burning and Stephen, a fireman, missing in the midst of the fury.
Patrick had stood with me, Paddy and Bridey, and their little ones on our roof, watching fireballs shoot across the sky and stone and steel buildings explode, all the while knowing Stephen and his fellow firemen were trapped in the center of that hell.
Paddy had wanted to run out and find Stephen, but Patrick kept him home. “Stephen’s a smart, brave fellow. He will survive,” Patrick had said.
For three days, the fire raged. Embers reignited, carried by the wind. Only for a drizzling rain, the whole city would have been ashes. As it was, the flames didn’t reach Bridgeport or the South Side, but the North Side and downtown had been destroyed completely.
It was a week before Stephen came home.
“You’ve seen battle now,” Paddy had said to him.
And I remembered the tiny baby born into Black ’47 who’d sucked a rag soaked with Champion’s milk in order to live. Stephen’s been fighting since he first drew breath.
Three hundred people had died in the Fire. A miracle it wasn’t many more, Stephen said. Buildings burned or were saved based on a shift in the wind. So many churches gone. Stephen had seen Father Conway standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s, holding high St. Grellan’s crozier, the flames rushing toward him. But the winds changed and the church was saved. “I’d say they were very glad Uncle Patrick had given Father Dunne the crozier,” Stephen said.
Stephen had moved up his wedding date and married Nelly Lang that summer.
During the Fire, I’d thought of Billy Caldwell and that last Potawatomi war dance. The Indian campfires had blazed up again. Getting a bit of their own back? Chicago’s wild heart still beating.
And then we’d gone to work, building a better city.
I’d always been grateful to Amerikay, to Chicago, for taking us in. I’d desperately needed Chicago, but now Chicago needed me. We hadn’t spared ourselves. Still battles to be fought. Strikes. The Great Depression in ’77 struck us hard, but now Chicago and my family were prospering.
The Fair proclaimed that triumph. Only twenty-two years since the Great Fire and we’d invited the world over to see what we’d accomplished. And how had Chicago opened this grand celebration? With what the newspapers called “the Greatest Display of Pyrotechnics in the History of the World.”
Fireworks.
Very Chicago.
I’d said all this to Patrick and now listened while Máire set out the same argument. It wasn’t the Fair he objected to, Patrick told her, only the Irish villages.
“But I’ve asked the whole family to assemble, so we can go to Ireland together,” I said to him.
“No mean feat, gathering them all,” Máire said.
“They’re coming here first, aren’t they?” Patrick asked. “I’ll see them then.”
He was dressed in his best suit, looking well, his face brown from working in his potato patch. He grows five different varieties, still experimenting, trying to find a prattie that would resist the blight. The grandchildren delighted in helping him, and in eating the potatoes they dug from the ground. Patrick still had a feeling for the land after all these years of city living. We’d our one great trip to the country, to remember.
Right after the July day Michael married Mary Ann Chambers, Patrick and I had left Chicago and spent that summer wandering through the Great North Woods.
We’d gone by train and canoe to Medicine Lake in northern Wisconsin to stay with his friend Migizi, Bald Eagle. Night after night, we sat up with him and his family by their fire and heard the Ojibwa tales. I felt as though I were in Mam’s cottage listening to Granny’s stories.
Then Patrick and I had gone on alone, canoeing along rivers, across lakes, following Indian trails through the forests. We ate sweet, plump berries and wild apples and caught more different kinds of fish than I’d have thought existed.
We slept under a night sky crowded with stars. One time, Patrick woke me to watch streaks of red and green and purple light up in the darkness. “A mearbhaill,” we told each other.
I’d worn leather pants and a tunic Migizi’s wife had given me and became sixteen again, washing my hair in the cold, clear lake water. Patrick, always fit, carried the canoe and chopped wood. The Ojibwa don’t mark ages. Numbers aren’t important to them—every season brings gifts, they believe.
The Fianna lived like this, I thought. Queen Maeve had ridden in her chariot through just such wild country when Ireland still was clad with towering oak trees.
We’d reached Canada and had a reunion with Joseph and Hughie and their families. I’d met Dennis’s girls—grown-up women now—one was the image of Josie, and the other had a son the spit of Dennis. A part of the two of them, going on, something saved from the suffering Dennis and Josie had endured.
I’d been worried about Patrick’s being in Canada. After all, he’d invaded the place and was a wanted man. Patrick said there was little danger as long as we stayed in the French villages along the St. Lawrence. He rather enjoys the thought of being an outlaw, still, I’d thought. Keeps him young. We shared a moment of regret for the Republic of Ireland that might have risen on Canadian soil.
“We will be a nation once again,” I’d said.
“We will,” he’d answered.
“And no more lives lost in the process, please God,” I’d said.
On the way home, we stopped to see the mysterious dolmens in the forest and the stones with ogham writing.
“We were a wandering people,” I’d said, amazed.
We never left Chicago again. And Patrick seemed content, busy with Irish politics and Chicago politics and the wide place where both came together. We’d made our own Ireland of the mind and spirit. Patrick told me about places I’d never known—the little lakes of Cavan, the Speerin mountains of Tyrone, the cliffs of Donegal and Dublin town—all places where he’d worked and wandered. Now I could imagine John Comiskey’s Cavan and see the McKennas in Donegal, Barney McGurk in Tyrone. “At home,” I’d said to Patrick one night, “I knew only Galway people and my Connemara cousins. I had to come to Chicago to meet the Irish.”
And really it was easier being Irish in Chicago. In Ireland families were still being evicted, still struggling and starving, a steady stream of them coming to Chicago. Paddy’s wife Bridey’s brothers, Luke and Dominick, had survived the Great Starvation, held on to their land, paid their rent, but the blight had struck again and they’d lost everything. Paddy and Bridey had sent them their fares.
“Well, I’m not sitting here arguing,” Máire said. “I’m going to the station. The train from California comes in an hour, and after that Gracie and James are due.” She stood up from the table.
“I’ll ask Mike to go with you.”
So handy to have Mike still living at home with Bridey and his brothers and sisters. Though it was time he got married. Still, what would his mother do when he left? She needed his wages, even with young Jimmy and Martin helping.
“No,” Máire said. “But I will stop to get my ticket to the Fair from Mike, and ask him to come up and talk to Patrick.” She settled her new hat on her head and stood up.