Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “There’s no plumbing,” he said. “That could be an expensive proposition.”

  “Mr. Marshall,” I said, “my brother is Michael Kelly. Give me a week and I’ll have it ready.” He agreed to charge me only $50 a month.

  I needed to live there. I had to be close to the lake, and Michigan Avenue was as close to Paris as I could get in Chicago. The Magnificent Mile—shops and hotels, and … Well, I wanted to bring the Kelly kids and Ed Junior into a world different from their own.

  Oh, Mame, wouldn’t that be swell? Your kids and Ed Junior, staying the night with me in a playhouse in the sky. Take them right away from the sadness for a bit. Malts at the Drake Soda Fountain. Summer swims in the lake. Shopping with the girls at Saks. Watching Ed Junior and your Mike throw a football around the park.

  “Let’s go visit Aunt Nonie,” they’d say. “We’re always happy there.”

  “Please, Mr. Marshall,” I said. “It’s very important that I live in your building. Please.”

  “Bring me a letter from Ed Kelly, and we’ll see,” Marshall said.

  * * *

  So now I was “please, please, pleasing” Ed in his office on LaSalle Street. “I don’t know, Nonie,” he said. “I thought our family had gone beyond being servants.”

  “Come on, Ed. In Paris, a concierge never considers herself a servant.”

  “Margaret thinks it’s still not quite respectable for a woman to live on her own, even in 1924,” Ed said. “But I suppose widows do become housekeepers, and maybe you are, technically, a widow, and—”

  “Write the letter, Ed,” I said.

  “Alright. Alright. But you realize if Marshall gives you this position, he’ll expect something back from me.”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  Ed opened his desk drawer. Took out a sheet of paper. Unscrewed the fountain pen on his desk—one of the new ones where the ink is on the inside. “I think this should be a handwritten note from me. Not typed up on official paper.”

  “Fine,” I said, as he began writing.

  Only a few lines. He looked up at me. “Marshall and Fox might want to know about my plans for the parks. Building apartments near them would be a good idea. There are acres and acres belonging to the board that are still empty.”

  “I thought that land was unstable. Half submerged in the lake,” I said.

  “It could be shored up,” he said. “We could take the garbage that’s still being dumped on the beaches. Compact it, and turn it into landfill. It would be a start.”

  He got up from his desk. Walked over to a cabinet. Took out big sheets of paper with drawings on them, and spread one on the top of his desk. “This would be an aquarium—the biggest one in North America. Showing marine life in its natural habitat is a popular attraction in Europe.”

  And here it was. The moment that Ed let me in on his plans, when I saw for the first time that he intended to remake Chicago. No longer just the “City of the Big Shoulders—Freight Handler to the Nation,” but a gracious city with attractions that would both entertain and educate its citizens, and bring in tourists. I mean, they’d come for the White City, why not offer a permanent world’s fair? And he was confiding his dreams to me.

  He went on, “John Shedd’s very interested in the sea, and he’d give money to build an aquarium here on the lakefront.” He laid another sheet down. “Max Adler is interested in astronomy. He wants Chicago to have a planetarium, and he’ll pay for it. See? Here’s a design of the roof. It’ll open up to see the stars. We’d have the very latest telescopes.”

  “With Adler footing the bill?”

  “Rich people want to have their names on things. Monuments to themselves. So why not the Shedd Aquarium? The Adler Planetarium? The Clarence F. Buckingham Fountain?” He showed me a complete drawing. “This fountain looks like the one in Versailles. But better, because ours will shoot up colored water—and Kate Buckingham will pay for the whole thing in memory of her brother, plus set up a fund for maintenance.”

  “So what’s stopping you, Ed?”

  “The other Parks board members. They’re all Republicans and don’t want to do anything while a Democrat like Dever is mayor. They’re Big Bill Thomson’s boys, and think they can drag their feet until Thomson gets reelected. Then he’d get all the credit.”

  “So your projects will get built then?” I asked.

  “Maybe, but not by me. If Thomson is elected, he’ll kick me off the board. Put his own man in. Thomson’s a clown. He shouldn’t even get the Republican nomination. But politics is a funny business.”

  “But you’d still be chief engineer of the Sanitary District?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “You’ve got to get yourself into the newspapers again, Ed,” I said. “Those articles saved the Fine Arts building. Why not let the people know about your ideas? You…” And I stopped.

  “Are you crazy, Nonie? All the papers care about are scandals.”

  True enough. The Tribune called them the “Whoopee Boys”—the men who worked, or rather didn’t work, for the Sanitary District. They’d been indicted for fraud, taking bribes, giving out no-show jobs, the usual, by the state’s attorney, who was a Republican. Most of the Whoopees were Democrats and Irish, and could be relied on to say nutty things that made good copy, so the headlines persisted.

  Now the worst of the offenses happened before Ed took over as chief engineer, so he’d escaped the spotlight—so far. But that Protestant minister, Wilcox, was convinced that Ed was allowing the same kind of wild and wooly behavior, just being more devious. “The unsanitary engineer,” Wilcox called Ed. The other reporters in town often ran quotes from Wilcox, because he said things that even their newspapers would have been afraid to print as their own opinion.

  Wilcox always made sure his readers knew a fellow’s religion. He called Alderman Jake Arvey of the Twenty-Fourth Ward “The Israelite” and Ed a “follower of the pope of Rome.” He’d documented all the overages on Soldier Field.

  Ed folded up the plans for the aquarium.

  And that could have been that—no lakefront, no biggest-in-the-world attractions for Chicago. I wish I could have leaned across the desk and whispered, “You’ll do it all, Ed.” I mean, now it seems as if that cluster of monumental buildings was always there—but without Ed Kelly they wouldn’t exist.

  I began to photograph events like the Silver Skater races, the monthly Polish Polka Party at the fieldhouse on Cicero, the track meets in Jackson Park and place the pictures in neighborhood newspapers. I made sure every caption included “Sponsored by South Park Board, Edward J. Kelly, President.”

  Another year in Chicago … but now I’d have a place of my own.

  * * *

  So. A somewhat bemused Michael had a crew run pipes up to the attic of 209 East Lake Shore Drive, and Ed sent the carpenters, who usually worked building fieldhouses for the Parks, to make three rooms in the space Mr. Marshall allotted me in the attic.

  “You Kellys know how to get what you want,” the building manager said to me. And I only nodded. Our family has had more than its share of sorrows, so why not use what clout we did have?

  “Oh, Aunt Nonie, it’s like a fairyland,” Ann said to me. The whole bunch of them—Kelly kids and Ed Junior were lined up to watch the headlights of the cars sweep past us on the drive below. Delighted with my new flat, which, they said, was like a tree house.

  “That’s my dad’s road,” Ed Junior said.

  “It is indeed,” I said.

  “Now watch,” he said to the other children, “all the cars will slow down.” And we did see a long line of red taillights, as the cars were braking to cross the narrow bridge that connected the North Drive to the South.

  “My dad’s building a new bridge, isn’t he, Aunt Nonie?”

  “He is, Ed. He is,” I said.

  I should know. Haven’t I spent the last week tromping through snow up to my knees to take pictures of the site of this new bridge? I then moved on to what Ed
was calling Grant Park—not as grandiose as his other projects, but one he’d managed to get the board to agree to. Just a big empty space now, but Nash Brothers were busy putting in a sewer system, blasting through the frozen ground. But how do you make a sewer system visual?

  Pat Nash instructed his workers to dangle sewer pipes from cranes, and I shot them just when the sun was rising. I did wonder what Eddie Steichen and Matisse would think of my work, but I was earning money, and snug up here in my attic, warm and cozy, entertaining the children I had grown to love so much.

  I peeled the kids away from the window and tucked the girls up in the twin beds I’d bought at Smyths with a good discount, because Smyth was a member of the Irish Fellowship Club. I’d sleep on the couch I’d also purchased.

  The boys had made themselves a fort with pillows and my two armchairs. Also from Smyths.

  “One last battle before we go to bed?” Ed Junior asked me. I nodded and watched as he and Mike moved the lines of toy soldiers back and forth, yelling at each other, and then making terrible groans as one of Ed’s soldiers knocked down Mike’s.

  I had to look away. Images from Belleau Wood came into my mind. Those young Marines marching straight into machine gun fire. And still tit-for-tat violence going on in Ireland. De Valera and his fellows were ambushing Free State soldiers whenever they had the chance, and the government reacted to these attacks by rounding up rebels and sticking them in jail. Men who’d stood together fighting the British were killing each other. I’d finally received a letter from Cyril Peterson, forwarded on by the Irish College in Paris. “Don’t come over here. Not a time for sentimental journeys. Say your prayers for Peter Keeley from that side of the Atlantic,” he’d told me. Yes, take care of my responsibilities here, and then …

  I’d framed the one photograph I’d managed to take of Peter, and kept it on a small table near my bed. Always a nod good night to him. Soon, Peter—soon.

  “Come on guys. Bed.”

  “Aunt Nonie,” Mike said to me as he burrowed down next to his cousin in their pillow fort, “next year I’m going to soldier school with Ed.”

  “Nothing’s decided,” I said. “Ed might not even be going.”

  “Oh, but I am,” Ed said. “My dad told me.”

  “But won’t you be homesick?” I asked.

  “I will miss Dad, Nana, and Lou,” he said.

  “And your, errr … Margaret?” I asked.

  “She’s nice enough. But she hates noise, and I forget, and run up and down the stairs ‘louder than a freight train,’ she says.”

  “Me too, Aunt Nonie,” Mike said. “Aunt Henrietta calls me the fire engine. She says children should be seen and not heard. But that’s very hard, Aunt Nonie.”

  “Now that Mike doesn’t have a mother either, like me,” Ed said, “we’re going to be blood brothers and join the Marines when we grow up, and fight in wars, and—”

  “There’s not going to be any more fighting,” I said. “And how do you know about the Marines anyway?”

  “I saw them in a movie,” he said. “Everybody knows about the Marines.”

  * * *

  “I really think he’s too young,” I told Margaret when I dropped Ed Junior to Hyde Park, after I’d delivered the Kelly kids back to Argo. Henrietta hadn’t even offered me a cup of tea, and Michael was out fixing someone’s frozen pipe. The two boys had actually saluted each other when they said goodbye.

  “But Ed Junior wants to go, Nora,” Margaret said. Now I had to be very careful. Margaret was my friend, and she was good for Ed, no question. Look at this house, lovely altogether and hospitable. The two of us having tea and home-baked scones right now. None of Henrietta’s begrudgery here.

  The newspaper on the table before us was open to a double-column photograph that headlined “Edward J. Kelly, President of the South Park Commission, Chief Engineer of the Sanitary District, and His Wife, at the Opera.” Margaret wore a full-length white ermine coat, and Ed was in white tie and tails as he smiled down at her.

  “Quite an outfit,” I said, pointing to the picture. Wilcox will love this, I thought. He’ll start doing sums with Ed’s salary.

  “Ed likes me to dress well,” she said. “Now as far as Ed Junior goes…”

  She was sitting up very straight with her back away from the chair. “Ed thinks it will be good for him to be around boys his own age. Boys from good families.” Those good families, again. “The fellows from St. Ignatius high school are from good families,” I said.

  “But not much variety there,” she said.

  “You mean no Protestants?” I asked.

  “Culver Military Academy will give Ed Junior a chance to meet and make friends with boys who will become men of influence,” she said.

  “Margaret, he’s eleven years old,” I said.

  “Mrs. Armstrong, who was in the box next to us at the opera, told me that her husband and his business partners all went to the same boarding school, and they’re millionaires, every one of them.”

  “Ed’s not doing too badly,” I said, “and he left school at twelve.”

  “And regrets it every day, Nora. He wouldn’t have the newspapers questioning his competence as an engineer if he had a degree.”

  “But Ed learned from experience, from hard work,” I said.

  “Which is why he doesn’t want that for Ed Junior. Four years at Culver and then Notre Dame, or even Harvard or Yale.”

  “Oh, please, Margaret, you can’t send him east, or we’ll lose him entirely. And I suppose he is a bit of a handful, loud and all.” I stopped.

  “Has he been complaining to you?”

  “No. No. It’s just—well, little boys. And I suppose if you get into a delicate condition and need a rest or do start considering, um, adoption…”

  “So Nelly’s been talking to you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well I suppose we wouldn’t be able to keep an adoption secret. You see, Nora, the doctor says it’s very unlikely that I’ll be able to have children of my own.”

  Barren women, I hear Henrietta shouting, barren women!

  “So I have inquired with the sisters at St. Vincent de Paul. Early days though. Ed thinks we should wait a bit. Doctors have been wrong, he says. After all, his mother had her youngest at age forty-two.”

  “And my mother was thirty-nine when I was born,” I said.

  “Funny, isn’t it? I always felt sorry for those women who had a child a year,” Margaret said, “and now I envy them. You know Ed’s first wife, Mary, was pregnant when she died.”

  “I know,” I said. And me far away in Paris.

  “If she’d lived, I’m sure they would have had a large family. Another reason Ed still mourns her.”

  “Oh, Margaret, Ed loves you. I know he does.”

  “I want to be a mother, Nonie. I want Ed and me to be parents together.”

  “But you are. And then Ed Junior is—”

  “Mary’s son. He looks like her, doesn’t he, Nonie? As he gets older, I see the resemblance to the portrait of her.”

  She pointed to the oil painting on the wall of the dining room.

  “Well, he does have her eyes, and that smile. A grin really. So full of fun, so warm…” My voice trailed off. “Sorry,” I said.

  “No, Nonie, I’m not jealous of her. The poor woman died so young.”

  We both looked up at the portrait.

  “It’s just that I wonder sometimes if Ed and his son aren’t too close. Culver will teach Ed Junior to stand on his own two feet. Be his own man. And the parents of his classmates won’t be bothering Ed for jobs, which is sure to happen at St. Ignatius. I think Culver will be good for him, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interfere, Nora.”

  “Well he’ll have the summer, and I suppose by next fall he’ll be older and…”

  Margaret took a sip of tea. She drank it black, no sugar or milk. Careful of her figure. “He’s starting after Christmas,” she said.

&nb
sp; “Of course,” I said. What else could I do?

  * * *

  “I suppose I have to remember that Ed’s boy and Michael’s kids are not my children,” I said to Rose.

  John just couldn’t seem to get better. That vital man relapsing over and over again. The fever wouldn’t leave his system—Rose was housebound with him. People were afraid to visit, though I knew John was not contagious. We met at her house the day after my tea with Margaret.

  “Alright for me to take them for treats, even have them for a night over now and then, but I’m on the sidelines of their lives,” I said.

  “We’re the aunts, Nonie. We have to keep our love for these children contained.”

  “Build a breakwater, I suppose,” I said. “Not easy.”

  “Not easy at all,” Rose agreed.

  Mike insisted on seeing his cousin off on the train. He was with Margaret, Ed, and me on that early January morning. “I’ll be with you next year, Ed,” I heard Mike tell him. Already in uniform, our little soldier off to the wars. At least he’s not in danger, I reassured myself. Safe. Except he wasn’t. An ear infection. He’d been away three months when the school called Ed. His son was sick. Ed immediately drove down himself, to take him to a hospital in Chicago. Too late. How can a strong young boy die from an ear infection? Dear God, how could you? Dead.

  8

  MARCH 1926

  It was the guard of honor made me cry. I’d held myself together during the last terrible days, trying to be strong for Ed. But now, Ed Junior’s entire class from Culver, all in their dress uniforms, marched up the main aisle of Holy Name Cathedral and stopped at his casket, draped in black, waiting in front of the high altar. Their uniforms were modeled on those at West Point. Gray jacket and trousers with a stripe down the side of the pants. Their hats had a strap under chins that have never known a razor. Babies, I thought, these little boys, eleven, twelve years old. Dear God, marching no less. What did that Marine Martin Berndt, an officer at Belleau Wood, tell me?