The Girl Who Came Home

by Hazel Gaynor

  “You romantic old fool,” she said and chuckled quietly to herself.

  She agreed to let Jimmy take a photo, as he’d promised to do for their entire trip, to capture the memories for her so that she need never forget or wonder again.

  They strolled then to the edge of the town, to where the fields began. Grace and Jimmy hung back a little as Maggie walked purposefully toward a derelict stone cottage almost hidden from view by the long grass and weeds that grew rampant around the crumbling stones, creeping and twisting through the empty window frames.

  “This was my home,” Maggie told them as she pushed open a rickety wooden gate, which groaned and creaked against the thick grass that snaked around it. “This is where I once lived.”

  She stood at what remained of the doorway and imagined herself back there on that calm spring morning as she’d watched Peggy throw the petals onto Maura Brennan’s head, laughing with excitement about the journey ahead of them. She remembered the swell beneath Maura’s coat and closed her eyes against the memory of her standing on the deck of Titanic, one hand grasping her husband’s, the other placed protectively over her belly. What a happy life they would have led had things worked out differently.

  Standing in the ruined doorway, surrounded by rubble and gnarled, thorny branches, Maggie could almost feel her aunt Kathleen beside her: stiff, forthright, practical, confident Aunt Kathleen, standing with her hands on her hips as she watched Maggie go off to tell the others the traps were ready. Maggie recalled her face, the hint of a smile playing across her lips, so much to look forward to, so much to show her niece when they arrived in America. The image faded as a cloud passed overhead, momentarily casting Maggie, and the house, into a cold shadow.

  “We never knew what happened to Aunt Kathleen that night, you know.” Maggie said, speaking softly to Grace and Jimmy as she puttered around among the remnants of her home. “She made sure we were all aware of the danger and knew what we must do—and then we lost her. Gone, without a trace. All sorts of dark thoughts filled my mind while I watched that ship lurch and groan as she broke apart—maybe Kathleen was trapped somewhere; maybe hers was one of those desperate voices I could hear screaming in the waters around me.”

  “Don’t, Maggie,” Grace said, placing her arm gently around the old woman’s frail shoulders. “Don’t think that. She was a very good woman. She’ll be at peace now.”

  “You’d never believe a lovely little home used to stand here, would you?” Maggie said. “But it did, and I can see it now if I shut my eyes, every last brick and stone. The kettle hanging over the fire, the smell of Mammy’s oatcakes baking, the air musty and damp from the turf fire. Ah, it was a grand home. I was very sorry to leave it.”

  After giving her a moment to say a prayer among the stones and weeds, Grace and Jimmy walked with Maggie to the other homes that she wanted to visit. Most of them stood now as her own home did, blankets of weeds covering everything, obscuring the ancient windows and walls. And yet, in what appeared as just piles of rubble and weeds to others, Maggie saw memories. She saw familiar faces in every crumbled stone, saw smoke rising from the fallen chimneys; heard conversations through the broken doors, caught snippets of laughter through the open windows. Although they were all long gone from this place, something about the people who had lived in these broken homes endured.

  For all the passing of time and the changes in how people lived, there was a sense of history retained by the people of Ballysheen. Maggie had seen it with her very eyes on the engraved stone slab in the church and at the remembrance bell. It comforted her to know that she, her aunt, and all the others were not forgotten, not ignored, but remembered and commemorated for the lives they had led here and for the courage and fortitude they had shown in daring to leave it all behind in search of something better.

  As the light of the afternoon sun began to fade, there was just one place left that Maggie wished to visit. It was a long walk, so she asked Jimmy if they could return to the car. From their parking spot at the church, she navigated from memory, down a side road that led in a slight incline toward the foot of the mountain. Halfway along the road, she asked Jimmy to stop.

  “I won’t be long,” she said, getting slowly out of the car and walking through the gate that blocked the entrance to a field. She looked about her from right to left and waited for a moment before returning to the car, closing the gate behind her.

  “Were you hoping to see something else, Maggie?” Grace asked tentatively.

  “I was, dear, yes. This is where Séamus used to live with his father. It would seem that the house has disappeared without a trace. There’s no sign of it, no trace at all. Well, never mind,” she continued. “It cannot be undone now.”

  They returned to the lake to eat the provisions they had bought in the local shops. Maggie decided to stay in the car, letting the cool early evening breeze drift in through the open window while Grace and Jimmy stretched out easily on the coats spread on the grass. Maggie momentarily envied their youth and the ease with which they could move their bodies from sitting to lying to standing. Things you take for granted when you’re in the flush of youth, she supposed, biting into the soda bread, savoring every mouthful.

  She watched silently as the young couple strolled happily down to the lakeside, scouring the ground for the perfect skimming stone, laughing and joking as their various attempts succeeded or failed. It reminded Maggie very much of herself and Séamus and the many, many happy times they had spent at this very spot, doing exactly the same. From the back, Grace could almost be Maggie, except Grace’s hair tumbled around her shoulders in a way that Maggie’s never had. Maggie laughed at the memory of her obsession with her hair. And as for Jimmy, he could easily be mistaken for Séamus; the same broad shoulders, stocky build, and tousled sandy hair. How easily those two people could be us, lost in time, she thought. As she watched her great-granddaughter now with a man she clearly adored, Maggie was proud of the decisions she had made in her life, was proud of her family and how far she had come. But above all, as she looked at the stunning landscape around them, she was proud to be able to call this place home.

  As dusk fell, they drove out of Ballysheen toward the nearby guesthouse they’d arranged to stay in. They were silent in the car, each taking in everything they had seen that day. Grace had been so moved watching Maggie walk around the ruins of her home and the homes of those she had known so well, and she had been touched by the way the parish remembered those who had sailed on Titanic. These were her relatives too. This was the land her ancestors had worked in their struggle for survival. She felt grounded by it, by being able to stand amid the bricks and stones where they had once baked their daily bread. And yet she was still a little unsure whether it had been the right thing to do bringing Maggie back here, and was a little worried about her great-grandmother’s silence since they’d left.

  “So how do you feel having seen it all again, Maggie?” she asked, leaning forward from the backseat so she could be heard over the sound of the car engine.

  Maggie considered the question for a moment.

  “I’ve been thinking that myself, dear, and do you know something, I’m glad. I’m glad I came back to see for myself, and yes, it’s very sad to see the homes all fallen about themselves, but what could I expect really after seventy years? It doesn’t matter somehow. I can still feel the spirit of the place, and just by touching those fallen stones, I feel that I’ve reached out to everyone I knew, that I’ve touched them again in some way. It’s as if they never left—as if they’re still there among all the weeds and the rubble. How do I feel? Peaceful, I think. Yes, peaceful.”

  “I’m so sorry that Séamus’s home wasn’t there,” Grace added. “I know you’d have liked to see it.”

  “Yes, it is a shame, but after all this time it’s no surprise. The farmer who owns that land now wasn’t to know that an old lady would come back one day looking for the home of a man who used to live there so many years ago.”

&nb
sp; “I think I would have liked Séamus,” Grace mused as she looked out of the window at the passing countryside. “He sounds like such a lovely man. I’d like to have met him.”

  Maggie smiled to herself as she watched a rabbit darting back into its burrow, startled by the noise of the car.

  “Well, dear, as it happens, you did. You did meet him.”

  “What?” Grace and Jimmy both reacted together.

  “What do you mean?” Grace continued as Jimmy slowed the car and pulled off the road beside a gateway. “I never met him! How could I have met him when he lived in Ireland all his life?”

  Maggie turned in her seat to face Grace.

  “He was your great-grandfather, Grace. The man who used to tease you with his mixed-up words and smoke his pipe and tell you all those tall tales. That was Séamus Doyle—James Doyle, as you knew him, the English version of his name.”

  Grace’s mind was reeling.

  “Séamus was James? Great-Granddad James? But . . .” She burst into laughter. “I can’t believe it. So you married Séamus? The Séamus. The Séamus who you loved and who wrote those letters. After everything you’d both been through, you married him!”

  Now Maggie was laughing.

  “Yes, dear. I married him! There was a big mix-up after my telegram from Titanic was delivered incomplete, and the poor lamb thought I didn’t want to see him ever again, but luckily, after he’d learned of my survival, he got hold of my aunt’s address in Chicago and wrote to me. I’ll never forget the day that letter arrived. It was the first contact I’d had from home since the terrible disaster, and he said such kind things about hoping I would live a long and happy life and that with his da dead, he was selling his land and going to work in the English cotton mills.

  “Of course, then that confused me, as my message had said for him to come to America as soon as he could. Oh, it was a dreadful time. You kids would be able to sort it all out now with a quick phone call or one of them fancy fax machines, but we didn’t have anything like that back then and had to wait for letters to cross the ocean on steamships and chug down train tracks and trundle across dusty tracks in a horse and cart.

  “Well, eventually we sorted it all out, and after he’d sold his father’s bit of land he had enough money for a passage to America and he arrived in Chicago one day at Union Station, and as soon as he saw me he sank to his knees and wept and asked me to marry him, and I wept and said yes! He never mentioned that he’d already proposed to me in his lost letters. To his dying day, he wouldn’t tell me what he’d written in those letters. He said it didn’t matter now.”

  “Wow! So Séamus Doyle was my great-grandfather! But why did he change his name to James?”

  “Well, he got so fed up with having to spell his name out for everyone. You see, the Americans didn’t know how to pronounce Séamus properly—‘Sea-mus’ they used to say! Oh, how I used to giggle at him. So one day he announced that he was going to change his name to James, the English version, and that’s how he was known for the rest of his life: James Doyle.”

  Grace couldn’t take it in. She was so happy to know that Maggie had married Séamus after all—and that he was the same man as the great-grandfather she had been so very fond of. “It’s amazing!” she said. “Oh, I’m so thrilled, Maggie. I’m so happy it was him—that I knew him. And you loved each other so much and, oh, it’s just wonderful, Maggie. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection.”

  “Well, why would you, I suppose—I always got so upset thinking about him since he died, I didn’t really like to talk of him too much. And then all this started happening and that kind man found his letters and I was so wrapped up in all the memories. I guess I kind of assumed you knew it was the same man—it’s so long since I’ve spoken about our life before Titanic, when I was Maggie Murphy and he was Séamus Doyle. We were different people for so many years afterward, it’s almost like those two teenage kids were lost somewhere along the way.”

  They chatted for a while about the man Grace had known and how fate had conspired to keep Maggie and Séamus apart but they had found a way back to each other after all.

  “Yes. He was a truly lovely man, and I was the luckiest woman in all of Chicago to marry him. I loved him very much. And, Grace,” Maggie added, “he loved you, you know. He loved you very, very much. You were named after his own mother. He insisted on it.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Cass County, Illinois

  September 1982

  The leaves were already taking on all the wonderful hues of autumn when Grace left for college, the russet, gold, and copper shades glistening in the early morning sun, casting a warm glow over the lanes and fields that surrounded her home.

  It wasn’t easy leaving her mother, or the memories of her father that had surrounded and comforted her while she’d remained in the family home. But somehow, reconnecting with Jimmy, discovering the truth about her great-grandfather, and visiting the land of her heritage that summer had given her a renewed sense of purpose—a real sense of belonging, of security. It was a feeling she and her mother had been missing since the death of Grace’s father, and it was the grasping hold of it again that meant it was all right to leave, to move on. Having seen the majesty of Nephin Mór, having walked on the land where her ancestors had worked, and having touched the stones of the walls of the humble homes where her family had originated, Grace was filled with a sense of existence and continuity that extended way beyond the boundaries of the white picket fence that surrounded her mother’s neatly tended garden.

  As she sat on her bed for a moment, taking in the memories and conversations that buzzed and flickered in the air around her, Grace recalled the time she had watched a calf being born, with her father beside her in the candlelit barn. “The continuity of life,” he’d whispered as they sat on a hay bale and watched the wondrous event unfold in front of them. “The most primal of instincts. Whether it’s a human baby, a calf, or a field of wheat being sown, we are all driven to continue—to carry on, to begin again. I hope you always remember this moment, Grace, and that you can always find a reason to begin again, whatever life has in store for you.” Part terrified and part mesmerized, she’d been unable to tear her eyes away for a second as the young calf slipped onto the clean straw. She’d continued to watch as the cow licked the calf clean, and she’d clapped with joy as it stood on its shaky legs and took its first tentative steps.

  Grace remembered all this as she glanced around her childhood bedroom. For so long, she’d been unable to find a reason to go on, to begin again. Sitting here now with the man she loved waiting for her in the car downstairs, her mother—who hadn’t suffered any serious attacks for several months now—whistling contentedly as she puttered around with pots of paint and brushes ready to redecorate her daughter’s room, Grace realized she had her whole future ahead of her. She felt a joy in her heart and a will to move on, to continue.

  Before leaving for the interstate, Grace asked Jimmy to drive her over to Maggie’s to say a final good-bye. She’d always loved this dear old lady but had grown so close to her in the last few months, knowing details of Maggie’s life that even her own children had not been privy to. She felt privileged to have shared the most intimate thoughts, hopes, and fears of this incredible woman’s mind—both as a seventeen-year-old girl and as an eighty-seven-year-old woman, who, as they’d flown home together from Ireland, had told her that finally, after all these years, the pain and fear from that dreadful night had for the most part faded away.

  “It’s like echoes, Grace, like I’ve been hearing the same echoes for seventy years—of the traps rumbling out of Ballysheen, of the train thundering down the track to Cork, of the uilleann pipes as we sailed away from Ireland’s shores, of the laughter in the general room the night we celebrated Katie’s birthday, of those poor people thrashing about in the icy water, of that ship ripping apart, of the waves slapping against the lifeboat—all of it’s been with me all my life. I don’t hear it now, Grace. For
the first time, I can’t hear those echoes anymore.”

  After returning home to Illinois, Maggie had continued to be inundated with requests to appear on TV and radio to talk about her Titanic experiences. She didn’t mind being a bit of a celebrity for a while, and made the most of the fancy lunches and bouquets of flowers. But there was one invitation to lunch that she treasured more than any of the lavish events. It had arrived in the form of a handwritten letter.

  My dear, dear Maggie,

  I can hardly believe I have found you again. After all these years! I open the newspaper over breakfast and there you are, a seventeen-year-old girl, smiling out at me, and your great-granddaughter is writing about your voyage on Titanic. I nearly passed out into my granola, I’ll tell you!

  I was so thrilled to know that you are still on God’s good earth—and looking so well for your years. It cannot really be seventy years since that terrible night, can it? After we lost touch I didn’t think I would find you again, Maggie—but here you are, living in Illinois, and here am I living in Chicago for the past thirty years—who could have believed it! It’s a wonder we didn’t turn out to be neighbors!

  Well, I spoke to my granddaughter about you, and she insisted on ringing the paper and getting an address for you. Of course, they wouldn’t give me your address, so I had to write to them and they have promised me they will pass the letter on to you. So help me God I’ll cause some trouble for them if they don’t. So, I hope this reaches you, Maggie, because it would mean so much to me to see you again. There is so much to tell you, so much I want to hear.

  I wondered if we might be able to meet for lunch sometime.

  I have enclosed my telephone number and address and would dearly love to hear from you.

  With all my fondest wishes,

  Peggy Kelly (Madden)

  The two ladies had met on a sunny August afternoon. Grace had insisted that she drive Maggie, Maggie had insisted that they have tea and cake at the Cherry Tree Café, and Peggy had insisted that they all wear gloves and hats. There were many tears and much laughter as they recounted times past and shared intimate details of their lives. Nobody could have possibly known from looking at them now what terror these two dignified, gentle ladies had experienced on that April night in 1912, but they knew, and they held each other’s hands and looked into each other’s faded, watery eyes as they nodded silently at the memories they shared and the bond they would always share, whatever amount of time or distance lay between them.