by Rose Doyle
I was thinking a lot about Moll.
The worst of the storm had died by midday. The shipping company, when we called, were hopeful that it would have died out at sea within three days and that we could leave Londonderry before the end of the week.
The Saturday and Sunday passed slowly. Our lodgings were clean, as Toby Magee had said they would be, and not far from the city's centre, which was known as the Diamond. Londonderry was full of narrow streets, lanes and alleyways and when it wasn't raining we walked along the wider thoroughfares and by the waterfront. On Sunday we went to mass in St Eugene's Cathedral, an outing James didn't enjoy. I thought it would do no harm to pray for a safe sailing, and maybe Sarah did too. In the event we left with the wailing James before any prayers were said.
What we did mostly after that was sit by the fire in our room, lit by the landlady at the cost of an extra sixpence per day and well worth it. There, with the rain against the window, the fire warm at our feet and James doing his funny, sideways crawl about the place, we wrote together into our journals. It was the first time we'd done this since childhood. Sharing the writing was like praying together, letting the final pieces of all that had happened go from us on to the pages. Some day, when we were older and had lives lived in another land behind us, we might read them together.
Then again we might not. The journals might, by then, belong better in the past. What we'd written would, at the very least, be faithful records of a time, place and people for those who came after us. They would explain too why we'd left it behind for a dream of something better.
On Monday the sun broke through the clouds.
'We'll buy the gloves and ribbons today,' Sarah announced, 'and I'll wash my hair in the evening. You should think about buying a proper bonnet, Allie. We'll leave Ireland in style, with our heads high and our hands covered. No one will ever know what's behind us.'
'I didn't fancy the look of any of the milliners we passed,' I sniffed, 'I've seen nothing in the window compares to the bonnets I have with me.'
'Maybe ribbons will do us both,' Sarah said. 'I've decided to get violet-coloured ribbon. Velvet, maybe. I'll tie my hair back in a bow and it'll match the shawl you brought me from Paris. Only I don't want to put my hands on the shawl again until I've got the gloves, so we'll buy the gloves first.'
Her hands were indeed a sight, red and chapped with old scratch marks showing white. My own were much the same but at least I had a pair of gloves already covering them. A second pair would be worth having.
'We'll get the gloves first,' I agreed.
The streets were thronged. Confined for days by the torrential rain, it looked as if the entire population had taken to the outdoors and fresh air. Not all that fresh either; the overriding smells were animal, not as bad as but not unlike Dublin. Impatience fouled the air as well. Everyone was rushing and pushing and in the short ten minutes it took us to get to the glove shop we were twice forced off the footpath.
'They say New York's one of the busiest places on earth,' I warned Sarah after the second time.
'If busy means rude then we won't stay there,' she answered firmly, 'we'll move on.'
The glove shop was on the corner of Harvey Street. It was small and there were two women already inside, making a great fuss about buying a cheap pair of cotton gloves. Sarah, choosing from a tray of satin gloves, would take a while. I quickly decided I didn't like anything in the shop and that James and myself added nothing but congestion to the proceedings. I took him from Sarah.
'We'll wait outside,' I said.
There was a greengrocer's on the corner opposite. When a gap came in the carriages and carts turning in and out of the street I crossed over with James.
The greengrocer's was bigger than it looked from the outside and it took me a while to find the dried fruit. The cheerful owner had just finished weighing me a pound each of raisins and currants when I turned and saw Sarah come out of the glove shop.
'Wrap them for me,' I said, 'I must tell my friend where I am.'
I waved from the footpath. She saw me and waved back. She was wearing lilac-coloured gloves, close in shade to the Paris shawl. She was laughing.
She was still laughing when she stepped off the footpath and began running across the street to join me.
I saw the runaway horse and cart at once. Sarah never saw it at all. She heard the warning screams though, mine and others', and her face froze and her waving hand dropped just before the animal careered into her.
Long before I fought my way with James through the milling crowd, long before she was pulled from under the cart and laid on sacking and a long, long time before the police came and a doctor confirmed it, I knew that Sarah was dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Allie
The street fell silent. Death will do that. I knelt beside Sarah and held James so as he could have one, last look at her.
'Remember,' I whispered to him, 'remember always how beautiful your mother was.'
But he cried, so I turned his face away and held him against me while I smoothed a curl of hair from Sarah's forehead. There was no doubt that she was dead but I felt no loss yet, nothing but emptiness and chaos in the places inside me she had filled for all of my life. I couldn't conceive of a world without her. I'd never known a world without her.
Daniel's death had somehow seemed more possible. He'd carried a vulnerability about with him. Sarah had always seemed to me invincible, so full of life and of dreams. All ended now, her life and her dreams, all ended.
I knelt on, afraid to touch her, afraid to feel the cold coming into her skin. James's crying had become a whimper. People ebbed and flowed around us but no one tried to move her, yet. I wouldn't have allowed it. She had been my courage, she'd even been a part of whatever soul I had. All that I'd known and thought and felt, she'd had a share in. No one but me had a right to touch her.
I smoothed her skirts. I still couldn't bring myself to feel her face. I closed my eyes but even then I saw her. Images came to me, a lifetime of them, all of them to do with Sarah. I saw her in Henrietta Street, running to meet me as I came up the hill.
Her face was laughing and her black hair loose and I wished, how I wished, that we were back there again, girls together and not women separated by death. I kept my eyes closed for a while, burrowing through the places and people we'd loved together. When Bess appeared and asked me what was wrong, asked why I was alone and where Sarah was, I opened them again.
I touched Sarah's face then, resting a finger first on one eye, then the other. She was warm, not going cold at all. I lifted her hand and held it against my heart. But there was no consolation, no matter how much I touched her, for either of us. I was alone now, alone with my life as Sarah was with death. The desolation of it took my breath away and began an ache in me that I knew would forever fill the places where she had been. I put her hand to my mouth to stop an anguished moan. Fear went through me like an ice storm. I began to shiver. I'd no idea how I would face life without her, how I would bear the ache.
James moved then in my arms, kicking with his legs. When I tightened my hold on him he began to cry again in earnest. I let Sarah's hand go. I had to. I laid it gently across her skirts and I touched her beautiful hair one last time. Then I abandoned her to death.
And faced the future. 'Goodbye, Sarah,' I said out loud, 'and don't worry about James.'
I would grieve for Sarah every day of the rest of my life. Grieve for a sight of her long black hair, the sound of her quick voice. I would carry her in my heart and mind and that would have to do. I would miss her, every long day, and I would curse, every one of those days, a fate so unjust as to have taken her.
Someone lifted me up, with James. I cradled his head and rocked him gently as they lifted Sarah into a horsecar. After they'd covered her they helped us in beside her. An old man who said he'd been a doctor came with us to the hospital.
I didn't plan. Everything I did afterwards I did because I knew it was what Sarah w
ould have wanted me to. What Beezy Ryan, who had trusted me to look after Sarah, would have wanted me to do. Much, much later I would rage at life's injustice, cry for answers to a God I'd long ago believed in. He would give me no answers then, either.
In the hospital they said Sarah had died from severe contusions caused by the cart wheel catching her head when she fell.
'Her skull was shattered instantly,' a white-haired doctor tried to make me sit down. 'She wouldn't have known what hit her.' He cleared his throat, embarrassed that his remark might have seemed flippant. 'She didn't suffer,' he amended.
'She just died,' I said.
'Won't you sit down?' He was holding my arm, pointing to a bench by the wall.
'Things will have to be done,' I said.
'Is the child hers?' He touched James's black curls.
'He's mine,' I said, 'his name is James and he's my son. We sail on the Minnehaha for America the day after tomorrow. I must arrange my friend's burial before we go. Will you help me?'
He stepped back, looking at me as I imagined he would a patient, coolly assessing but not unkind. 'What do you want me to do?' he said finally.
'I would like my friend to be buried in Londonderry. She has no family to be buried with elsewhere. I'm expected in New York with James and would be glad not to be delayed by formalities,' I said.
'You were to sail together, you and your friend?'
'Yes.'
He touched James's curls again. 'Along with this little fellow . . .'
'Yes.'
'You can give me the details and I'll make out the death certificate straight away,' he became brisk, 'I'll bring a priest to you too, but you must sit down. You look ready to collapse and we've no beds here for any more patients.'
He made out the certificate for Alicia Buckley, the name I
gave him. When the priest came I gave the certificate to him along with two hundred pounds.
'It won't cost a quarter of this to bury her.' He was a young man and he kept looking at the money.
'I know that. But I don't know Londonderry. There's no one I can trust to bury her so I'll have to trust you,' I nodded to the notes in his hand. 'I want you to put up a headstone too, with her name, Alicia Buckley, her birth and death dates and the words ". . . and thence we issued out, again to see the stars". Whatever's left over can go to the church.'
'The words . . .' he hesitated, 'they're from the Inferno of Dante?'
'Yes. Will you need me to write them out for you?'
'I'm familiar with the work,' he was offended, 'you of course mean to say that your dead friend has left this hell for the beauteous things of heaven.'
'Yes,' I said again.
I meant the words to include me and James too, to have us together on her stone, at least. James and I were also issuing out, leaving everything we and Sarah had known to find our own stars. I said none of this to the priest.
He said he would do as I asked. He was no Father Mangan and I knew he wouldn't fund the church without doing the honourable thing and burying Sarah first. He would give her a decent burial too. He would pray for her. I was beyond prayer myself.
I went with him to see Sarah one last time. She looked beautiful, her face white as the sheet and her hair blacker than I'd ever known it. There was no outward sign of the injury which had killed her.
The young priest walked with me to the door. It was the last I ever saw of him too.
I told the police all that I'd seen and how the accident had happened. There would be a hearing in the new year, they said, for which I would be needed. I didn't tell them I would be long gone by then, nor that I was going to make sure they would never find me.
The Minnehaha sailed on Thursday morning.
I hired Toby Magee to take us to the quays. He said he was sorry to hear about my friend's accident and helped me get everything of Sarah's on to the ship. I gave him eighty pounds and asked him to care for her grave.
'There is no one who knew her here and no one else in Londonderry I can ask,' I said, 'you met her, at least. You seemed to admire her beauty . . .'
'She was a fine woman,' he said.
'Once a month is all I'm asking,' I said, 'once a month to ensure she doesn't lie under a wilderness of briar and grass. There's a lot of money here. Will you do it?'
'I'll do it,' he said.
I believed him. I'd no choice. The money I'd paid for Sarah's burial and for her grave to be looked after was exactly half that which Beezy had given her. The other half I would keep for James. Beezy, thus appeased, wouldn't haunt me.
I didn't stay on deck to watch and wail with the other passengers as the land slipped away. If I allowed tears to start they might never stop.
I went to the cabin with James and made us as comfortable as I could for the journey. I hadn't a single doubt but that I was doing the right thing. It would have been the act of a lunatic to go back to Dublin with James. Not only would he have no father there, he would have no mother either.
This way, since I firmly believe that truth is made and not born, he would at least have a mother. He would also have the new life Sarah had wanted for him. That Beezy Ryan had wanted for him.
There was nothing so very special about Allie Buckley that she should be kept alive. Dead she was at least serving some purpose.
We took thirty-five days to cross the Atlantic to New York.
I'd never been alone for so long a time in my life before and would never have borne it but for James.
I'd been made strong by the Curragh, by the months alone in Haddington Road with my mother and Mary Connor, by my work in the dispensary, by all that Daniel had shown me about life. But it was James needing me and having no one else which made me strongest of all.
We both knew I was his mother by the time we got to New York.
The weeks on the Minnehaha prepared me for life in America too. I kept myself and James apart from the other second-class passengers, partly because their notions of superiority reminded me of my parents' but mostly because I thought it best not to draw attention to us.
Our second-class tickets gave us privacy, but not immunity, from the life in steerage. The partition between us was so thin I could all the time hear the passengers being sick, their children's confused and terrified crying, the rattle of their dishes and spoons as they sat to eat.
When we ran into storms and were tossed about the fear and hysteria of people too closely packed oozed miasma-like through the partition. During my daily walks on deck with James the stench from steerage was even worse than the hot and putrid Dublin smells I'd arrived home to more than a year before. Steerage passengers, when I met them, had dried vomit in their hair and on their clothes.
It made me both glad and ashamed of my cabin and privacy. I never reconciled the two.
And still there was hope in steerage, and excitement and sometimes joy. Most evenings someone would play the fiddle and there would be singing. I listened to heated arguments about politics and stories which made New York seem both a heaven and a hell.
The hell had to do with the overcrowding in New York's tenement houses. This meant that fevers of a typhoid character were rampant, that people lived in water filled cellars, that small rooms were constantly divided into even smaller ones, that the air was damp and poisonous. The word in steerage too was that such houses were built with only the profit and economy of the owner in mind. The good news was that there were jobs, more for women than for men, and that the city was growing fast, and furiously.
I listened hard too to what the steerage passengers, and the second-class passengers walking on deck, had to say about other American cities.
By the time we were halfway across the Atlantic I knew that James and I would not be staying in New York. We would move on, cross the continent to a city where the sun was said to shine and where the life was bohemian and easier for women than in any other. We would go to San Francisco.
San Francisco also lay another three thousand miles from Londonderry and
questions about the identity of a young Dublin woman buried in a grave outside that city's walls.
We sailed through Christmas and the New Year and were a part, but apart, from it all in our cabin. This suited us fine. I was in no mood for either seasonal celebrations or charitable thoughts and James wouldn't remember his first Christmas anyway.
We dropped anchor in North River, New York, just before noon on the third of January 1869. Never before, or since, have I seen it rain like it did that day. Steamers and barges brought us in to the emigrant landing depot at Castle Garden. There, I was able to change mine and Beezy Ryan's money into American dollars.
In the same building, under the gaze of a blue-coated, brass- buttoned dignitary, I recorded the entry of Sarah and James Vance through what they called the Gate of the New World.
I also wrote that San Francisco would be our final destination and, under the same roof, bought tickets to cross America by train.
EPILOGUE
San Francisco, 1879
I read about the wrens today.
A newspaper from Ireland called them an 'irrepressible evil' and said they were 'carriers of disease'. It held them responsible for the rampant immorality of 'half the country's married men and half its youths'. The writer went on to demand they be forced into the Magdalen asylums and kept there.
‘Plus ca change’, as the French say.
I put the paper away as my daughter came into the room. But not quickly enough.
'What's that you're reading?' she said.
'Nothing of interest,' I said, 'just using the excuse to dawdle.'
'It interested you,' she held out a hand.
Clara never changes. Even in this wilful, half-grown city of gamblers, new rich and adventurers she is one of its sharpest, most acutely alert citizens. The lessons of her early life never desert her.
I handed her the newspaper and stood at the window while she read.
I liked the view. Our home on its hill, bought with my father's money, is high enough to watch the late afternoon sun burn itself out over the clippers and steamer ships in the bay. High enough to look down on the hilly streets between, all laid out in their parallel lines, and on the great stores, church spires and hotels. It gives views too of elegant wooden houses like this one, springing up every day next to wooden shanties. The pot-pourri that is San Francisco suits me well.
