Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “A place to gather,” he said and pulled a sheet from the bottom of the pile. “Look at this. We’re going to have our own movie theater. With the projector in the loft and speakers in every corner.”

  “Impressive, Ed,” I said. I didn’t think there was a private house in Chicago with its own movie theater. Can’t ever forget that Ed is an engineer. Leave it to him to make the simple complicated.

  “We need this house,” he said. “And I’ve got to have someplace where I’m not always looking over my shoulder. Lots of people I respect are building homes up there.”

  “Our own Tír na nÓg,” I said.

  In June, Ed called me into his office. “Patrick is ready to start on the interior. I want you to go and supervise the decoration.”

  “Me? Surely, Margaret wants to fix up her house…”

  “She’s busy with the twins, and besides, this place is for all of us,” he said.

  “House of O’Ceallaigh,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s our name in the Irish language.”

  “Good,” he said. “I like that. We’ll carve the words into the stone gates.”

  So. I was on the train the next day.

  * * *

  The exterior was impressive. A two-storied house with a wide center section flanked by two arched roofs. Windows galore. Dozens of panes of glass outlined in white fitted together. Walls of windows, just as Ed Junior had wanted.

  I vaguely remembered Granny Honora’s story about how her husband, our grandfather Michael Kelly, built her a cottage with a glass window so that she could look out and see Galway Bay and the fisherman’s cottage where she’d been born. Very proud of that window Granny had been. I’d heard her tell Mam that before she left Ireland she’d smashed that window so that the thief who’d stolen their cottage would not get pleasure from her husband’s gift.

  Wish you could see your grandson’s cottage, Granny, I thought, because that’s what the workmen called it. The Indian Point cottage. And your nephew Patrick is building it, Granny, son of your husband’s brother. The man who was your second husband. Nothing straightforward in our family. I heard Granny Honora in my head. Her laugh, and then her voice saying, “So now the Kellys are flaithulach with windows.”

  I stayed at Ed’s Everett cottage and was up at dawn every day. The workmen started at 7:00 a.m. and sometimes worked well into the night. Patrick was determined to finish, and Ed authorized double pay for overtime.

  The men were paneling the first floor in wood but weren’t using local pine or balsam. Ed wanted his floors made from redwood—stronger—so these planks came on their own freight car from California. Two German woodworkers directed this part of the project. A pleasure to see the way they stroked the fragrant woods as they fit one next to the other.

  After the floor was laid, they used the remaining wood for the stairs and the banisters. When it was time to panel the walls, one of the men had an idea.

  “Plaster,” Gunther Himmelsbach said to me when Patrick brought him over to the desk I’d set up in what would be Ed’s study.

  “Plaster,” Himmelsbach repeated.

  “What?” I said.

  “In Germany, I worked on many churches,” he said. “I covered the walls with pictures.” He brought out a sheet of paper where he’d drawn pine trees, boats, deer. A fish jumped out of the lake, a beaver pounded the ground. “I can make these from plaster.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  Himmelsbach would start his work when the crew left. He worked by the light of lanterns to create the amazing scenes in the great room.

  When Patrick’s mother, Bridget, came to inspect our progress, she was not impressed with the bare floors. “Little children will fall, hit their heads. You need carpets.”

  Bridget organized a team of Ojibwe women to weave squares that could be sewn together. She drew the designs using woodland flowers—daisies, buttercups, orange Indian pipes, black-eyed Susans, and a load of others that had Indian names she couldn’t translate. I paid three dollars a square, and soon the women were doing eight, nine, ten a day, making more money than the men. Gorgeous, each one of them. Every one just a bit different.

  As I got to know Bridget I found her knowledge and spirituality fascinating. How this Ojibwe lore would have intrigued Peter. The tribe had the same connection with nature that the early Irish monks had. Very Celtic altogether.

  “It’s a full moon,” I told Bridget, “and the summer solstice. I wonder? I mean, is there…?”

  “A ceremony?” she offered. “Yes. At Lac du Flambeau, the reservation. Hundreds will be there.”

  “Oh,” I said. I was still disappointed that Peter Keeley had not appeared to me in that first ceremony. Maybe …

  Bridget seemed to know what I was thinking. “You wish to contact someone.”

  Not a question. “I do,” I said, and went on a bit about Peter. Tried to explain how her philosophy and Peter’s would intersect and why, I was sure, his spirit would manifest if the circumstances were right.

  So once again, Bridget and Peter drummed and chanted, while the fire danced and the full moon lit the lake. And I was visited—by a whole array of figures from my past, including Michael Collins. But not a trace of Peter.

  I was silent the next morning as Bridget and I sat, drinking coffee in the cottage. Patrick had gone off to work. Finally I asked, “Why didn’t Peter come to me? I’ve been so faithful to him.”

  “Maybe he wants you to go on with your life. Marry again.”

  “What about you—where’s your husband?”

  “Dead for many years.”

  “And … what did you do?”

  “I too have been faithful,” Bridget said. “Also … I don’t want to risk being bossed around by a man.”

  I laughed. “But do you see your husband during the ceremonies?”

  “Of course,” Bridget replied.

  “Then why don’t I?”

  Bridget set her coffee cup down. She closed her eyes and sat still and silent for what seemed a long time. Then she began talking. Praying, I suppose, in her own language. Finally she opened her eyes and looked at me. “Your Peter is not in the spirit world,” she said. “He’s still alive.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “I wish it was true, but he was killed. Fell in battle. Maybe warriors go to a different place and you’re just not seeing him?”

  Bridget didn’t answer. What could I say? Cyril Peterson had seen Peter die. I had to accept his death. No point in pretending. As Agnella said, I must go through the pain. And yet …

  There was a knock at the door. Our women weavers were ready to go to work. Bridget stood up. “You have to believe in order to see,” she said.

  Whatever that meant.

  * * *

  By mid-July, we had a thousand squares. One night we laid the squares out on the floors of the Great Room and sun porch, then knelt down to stitch them all together. It was Bridget who started the singing. Not an Ojibwe chant, but old songs—“A Bicycle Built for Two” and “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly.” By dawn, both rooms were covered. The flowers of the forest bloomed all around us. Light poured through the windows as the sun came up, and we looked up to see the workmen staring at the entrance.

  One by one, the men entered the room, took off his work boots and stepped on the carpet. The two fellows from the Micmac tribe crouched down, rubbing their hands along the surface. The Ojibwe men on the crew crawled along the carpet on their hands and knees shouting out words to each other.

  “What’s going on?” I said to Patrick.

  “My mother has drawn flowers and plants that are medicine for us, and the women have made them grow right here. See this?” He pointed to a spread of leaves with a few white blossoms. “In English this is sheep sorrel, and that”—he pointed to the next square—“is burdock root. There is rhubarb. Combined, they make a tea called Essiac. A very strong medicine.”

  An apothecary had sprung up under ou
r feet.

  “As you can see,” Patrick said, “the gifts of the Creator are endless. Giving not only beauty, but health.”

  During all this hubbub, the women stood silent—looking at each other and then to Bridget. “I had no idea,” I said to her, “I just thought they were pretty flowers.”

  “This is the herb”—she pointed with the toe of her moccasin—“that cures fevers.”

  Was the medicine Uncle Patrick had given to Stephen made from this herb?

  “Wonderful,” I said. “This will mean so much to Ed and to Margaret. They’ll be so grateful. I am, too. Thank you, thank you,” I said to Bridget.

  “We are all grateful to the boy,” she said.

  “A boy? Where is he? Bring him here.”

  Now Patrick spoke, “He’s been with us from that first day. Every morning he stood at the lakeshore smiling at us through the mist. A little soldier in a gray coat,” Patrick said.

  “Shiny buttons,” Bridget went on, “round glasses.”

  “Dear God,” I said, “Ed Junior. You saw Ed Junior.” I started weeping. Bridget took me with her to sit on the bench under the tree with the eagles’ nest.

  “But I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “And, until today, you didn’t believe that the flowers of the forest can cure sickness. Your believing or not believing doesn’t matter. The boy was here. Those who can’t believe can’t see. Tell Ed Kelly the house is ready,” she said. “My mother is pleased. Our two peoples united. Blessed.”

  * * *

  And so we were that summer. Blessed. Margaret and the twins, Ed’s mother, her sister Aunt Kate, and Rose and John came along with Michael and his kids. We all spent those last weeks of August together.

  I remember the sun shining every day. Magnificent sunsets and a dark sky full of the brightest stars, with a week of meteor showers that thrilled the children and me. Every morning, Patrick would take Ed, Michael, and Mike out fishing, while Rose, John and I, Aunt Kate, and Aunt Nelly would sit with Margaret on the screened-in porch. Meanwhile, Rosemary and Ann, thirteen and eleven now, spread a blanket on the lawn, set the twins in the middle, and invited Frances, six, and Marguerite, eight, to their picnic.

  “Henrietta would not allow that,” I said to Rose.

  “No,” said Rose. “She’d worry about grass stains. Was she always such a tyrant?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just be glad she decided to visit Agnella and left the children to us.”

  “Nice to hear the girls laughing,” she said.

  “That’s what this house is going to be for. Laughter,” I said.

  Aunt Nelly and Aunt Kate had both fallen asleep in their big wicker chairs, and Margaret had gone in to see about dinner. John was napping upstairs.

  “Ed was talking to me about buying a house in Chicago for his mother and Aunt Kate,” Rose said, “if John and I would agree to live with them and take care of things. He’d pay for everything and even give us a kind of stipend but…”

  “But what?” John could not work. Money was tight. This would be a great chance for her. To live in comfort while helping the family.

  “Ed’s looking at places in Beverley,” she said.

  “But it’s lovely out there and you could sell your house and have some money.”

  “Right,” Rose said, “but Beverley’s very far from Argo. I want to be close if the kids need me. There are hardly any trains, and the buses take forever.”

  “Ask Ed for a car and driver.”

  “Nonie! Such an extravagance.”

  “He’ll do it, believe me. Ed has decided to spend his money to make us all happy. He built the house for good times and family. That’s what he and Ed Junior planned. This will be a space apart for all of us.”

  “Kind of him. So strange. I know we’re up here in the Northwoods, but when I look out at the water, it’s the little lakes of Cavan that I see,” Rose said.

  “And for me, it’s Galway Bay.” I wanted to tell Rose about my efforts to contact Peter Keeley, but I didn’t. She was so very Catholic.

  * * *

  “We make a good team, Nonie,” Ed said to me the last weekend of that summer at the lake, when we sat fishing at the pier watching red and yellow leaves drop from bare boughs onto the water. “Lots of projects to complete and document.”

  “I can’t promise I’ll be in Chicago forever,” I said. “I’ve unfinished business in Ireland, Ed. You see…” And I launched into the whole story of my love for Peter Keeley, his death, and what Bridget had said. “I have to be sure, I have to find his grave, kneel and say an Ave there, so he can sleep in peace until I come to join him.”

  Ed’s rod hit the wooden slats. He was fast asleep. He hadn’t heard a word I’d said. I shook him.

  “Dreaming,” he said.

  “They came to you?”

  He didn’t answer … only nodded.

  “I’ll never be the same man I would have been if Ed Junior, Mary, and the baby had lived. But they want me to go on with Margaret and the twins now. A family. I need to get back to work and I need your photographs to make the progress real.”

  “Good,” I said. Help Ed, Agnella had said. He needs your support. Alright then. Peter would have to wait a little longer.

  11

  OCTOBER 1926

  Back in town, I got a nun pal of Agnella’s to write out these words in calligraphy on a piece of parchment: “Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work.” Ed’s favorite quotation from Daniel Burnham, the fellow whose 1909 Plan of Chicago included a magnificent lakefront with parks and museums. Very aspirational at a time when the people of Chicago used our beaches, or any bit of open ground for that matter, as garbage dumps.

  I’d put it in a nice oak frame, brought it to Ed’s office, pounded in a nail and hung it on the wall. He had already built the stadium now named Soldier Field, created six miles of new shoreline using landfill, and turned piles of refuse into Grant Park.

  Ed’s determination to finance new projects with private funds was paying off.

  Which was why I was in Ed’s office, to photograph him with Kate Buckingham. She had donated $250,000 to construct a monument to her brother Clarence on the plot of land Ed and the South Park Board had given her at the entrance to Grant Park. The Buckinghams were a well-known family in Chicago, originally from Ohio, I think. The father, Ebenezer, had made his fortune in grain elevators, as had so many of the early Chicago pioneers, and like a number of them, he’d started collecting art, as a tribute to his success. His son, Clarence, had made more money and expanded his father’s collection. And here was Kate. She had inherited the whole shebang when her unmarried brother had died suddenly ten years before, at age fifty-four, and their sister had followed a few years later.

  Something of a recluse, Miss Buckingham, but here she was in Ed’s office. About seventy, heavyset with strong features and lovely white, white hair. She wore black. In constant mourning, I’d say. The dress wasn’t fashionable. The hem touched her shoes, but it was well cut, custom-made from expensive material. She and Ed stood next to his drafting table under the double windows, with the afternoon sun lighting the papers spread out there.

  “Miss Buckingham and I are discussing the progress of her fountain.”

  “My brother’s fountain,” she said. “A monument to him.”

  “She’s concerned. The groundbreaking was last year, and there’s not much to see. But I’ve assured her that now the preliminary excavation’s been done, the real construction can begin,” Ed said.

  “I hope you’re correct, Mr. Kelly. I’m not confident…”

  “Oh, you can count on Ed to get things moving,” I said. “Look at Soldier Field. How many were there for the Tunney-Dempsey fight last week? A hundred thousand?”

  “More,” Ed said.

  “And millions of dollars coming into the city…,” I said.

  Ed interrupted me. Kate Buckingham had
swayed just a bit, and was holding on to the drafting table. Not a fan of prizefights, I guess.

  “Buckingham Fountain will bring a touch of the sublime to Chicago,” Ed said.

  Kate stood a little straighter.

  “Miss Buckingham, I’d like to introduce my cousin Nora, my photographer. I’d very much like to have a picture with you.”

  Miss Buckingham nodded. “Nora’s spent some time in France,” he said. Ed didn’t usually mention my career in Paris.

  Now Kate Buckingham smiled at me. “Then perhaps you know the Latona Fountain in Versailles that inspired me.”

  “Latona?” I repeated.

  “It features the goddess who was the mother of Diana and Apollo, though she wasn’t married to Jupiter, their father, which annoyed his wife.”

  Miss Buckingham looked at Ed, and could it be? Was that a giggle?

  “Instead of mythological figures, we are going to have four giant bronze sea horses,” Ed said, “each representing one of the states that border the lake—Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.”

  “All based on Indian words,” I said.

  Since our time with the Ojibwe, I’d become more aware of all the native words that we’ve claimed and distorted.

  “The English did the same in Ireland,” I went on. “Twisted place names from the original Irish language into their own labels because they could. Those early settlers that we are so proud of were imperialists and—”

  “Very interesting, Nora,” Ed said in a tone that meant that’s enough. “As Miss Buckingham and I were saying, the statues are being designed and cast in Paris. Buckingham Fountain will be twice as big as the one in Versailles, over ten stories high with water that shoots a hundred and fifty feet into the air.”

  “Colored water,” Kate Buckingham said to me. “Rainbows.”

  I posed the two together, first looking down at the plans then smiling at each other, and snapped a few good pictures.