Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  It was Rosalie who drew her attention, Rosalie who timed her visits to her mother-in-law carefully so that she never saw her husband, who had moved back into the family house leaving her in possession of the smart apartment on Tremont Street, beyond the Common, to which they had gone when they married. Twenty minutes after the brothers had climbed into the car each morning, to be driven by Liam, Mary Margaret’s nephew (a man as taciturn as his aunt was loquacious) to the offices down by the harbour, she would arrive, slipping silently into the house by the side door to sit by Blossom and read with her and listen to her murmurings and to go with her to church. She always slipped away equally silently at lunchtime, preferring not to see old Timothy, but back she would come as soon as Liam had taken the old man downtown, and renew her vigil by Blossom’s side.

  But Blossom dozed in the afternoons. She wasn’t that old, Maddie knew, but she chose to behave as though she were, and an afternoon nap, taken sitting bolt upright in her chair with her head neatly arranged against the petit point cushion set behind it, was part of that pose. So, that was the time that Maddie chose to take over Rosalie for herself.

  It was not difficult. The first thing she did, after persuading the girl in a whisper to come and sit with her while Blossom slept, was confide the facts about her pregnancy. She had no intention of telling anyone else yet; it was her ace in the hole, she decided. Later, if necessary, she would use it as a way of putting pressure on all of them to arrange that the Jason Kincaids had their own house; they would not want a squalling infant around, she was sure of that. But there was time to wait, to see whether she needed that sort of weapon to deal with them. But it was a useful one now for Rosalie, and after swearing her to secrecy she confided the details to her, whispering into the small ear beneath the wispy fair hair and then leaning back with a nice air of weariness, to watch the effect of her news.

  It was as she thought it would be. Rosalie was one of those women who made a strength out of her weakness. She never hit out at anyone or displayed any rancour or hurt. She would sit and look pathetic and wait for the people she cared about to feel first embarrassed and then irritated, and finally guilty enough to do something about her obvious misery. It was a technique Maddie had seen others use and she had always despised it. Her friend Audrey at home had been just such a one with her parents, drooping and weeping if she was refused anything, but never asking or arguing or demanding as Maddie always did. And eventually Audrey had always got what she wanted just as Maddie had, but with the expenditure of much less effort. Maddie had learned a lot from Audrey. And now she put the lesson she had learned into action with Rosalie.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said now piteously. ‘Jay isn’t making enough out of the business to get us our own house, and I can’t nag him, can I? I think the trouble is that he just doesn’t know much about what happens there – if he could have more responsibility then Pa’d see he ought to have more pay and we could move out. But as long as your Timothy is there, what chance has Jay got?’

  ‘I wish he were my Timothy,’ Rosalie murmured, bending her head forwards so that the sheet of fair hair swung forwards to hide her face. ‘He isn’t. He’s theirs – especially Blossom’s. She’s like that with all of them – wants to hold them and make them do things her way because they’re her men. All of them, not just Pa. It was she who wanted Timothy to come back here and leave me, you know –’ And she lifted her head and her pale blue eyes were oiled with tears.

  ‘But you come here and sit with her and –’ Maddie began and then stopped and smiled. ‘I see. If Blossom likes you and decides it’s all right for Timothy to live with you, then she’ll make him go back to you –’

  Rosalie said nothing, sitting with her head bent again as the tears dripped on her hands, clasped in her lap.

  ‘You’re very sensible,’ Maddie said firmly. ‘It’s the only way you can get what you want, isn’t it? And if you want to have a baby too, like me –’ and she saw Rosalie’s shoulders tighten as she said it and knew she was right in her estimation of the effect of her news ‘– then you have to get Timothy to come back. Unless you want to divorce him –’

  Rosalie threw her one shocked stare, and then bent her head again. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘That couldn’t – Blossom wouldn’t … No, that’s not at all possible. We’re Catholics, you know that.’

  ‘But you do want him back?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Rosalie sniffed lusciously. ‘Oh I do, so much. I do love him.’

  ‘If I tell you how to get him back, will you help me and Jay to get what we want? Our own house? And soon? I’m only a couple of weeks pregnant, really. If you and Timothy get together again soon, you could be having your baby not that long after me –’

  Rosalie still sat with her shoulders sloped with sadness and her head drooping but then slowly she looked up and turned her head so that she could look into Maddie’s eyes. There was an expression there that was familiar and Maddie stretched a little, almost catlike, as she identified it. That was how that silly Bobbie had looked at her, when she had been a sixth former in her last term at school, Bobbie who had been fourteen to Maddie’s seventeen and who had adored her with so much passion that it was almost frightening. But very useful too, for Bobbie had been so willing to do anything her angel Maddie wanted that Maddie had come out of school with much better exam results than she had had any right to, considering how little school work she had done. She had left it to Bobbie to deal with her notes and her essays for prep. Bobbie had won her a respectable class placing, and here was Rosalie, who would do something just as useful and for the same reason.

  ‘But what can I do to help you? If there was anything I could do for you, I would gladly. You’re – you’re so kind and friendly to me. But I’m not a brave person like you, Maddie. I daren’t even talk to my own husband –’

  Maddie leaned forwards confidentially. ‘I’ve been talking to Jay about your husband. They’re not as close as I thought –’

  For the first time Rosalie showed a flash of spirit. ‘He’s always been jealous of my Timmy –’

  ‘Jay says it’s the other way about – oh, Rosalie, it must be awful to have too many brothers and sisters and always be jealous and have to fight them for what you want! I think I’ll only have this one baby, you know, to save the misery for him or her –’

  Again Rosalie looked shocked. ‘That’d be a sin, Maddie, you know that. You can’t not have babies just to suit yourself.’

  ‘But you were married a while before Timothy left and you’ve no babies,’ Maddie said with an air of innocence, knowing full well why.

  Rosalie reddened painfully. ‘I had some miscarriages. I was too – I didn’t rest enough –’ And she went brick red and looked at Maddie with a scared glance and then down at her hands again. ‘Timmy, he’s such a passionate man, and even when he knew I was pregnant he – well, he said it shouldn’t matter in a healthy woman, but I was always delicate – and so there it was, you see, a miscarriage. But the next time the doctor says I’ll be fine, just fine. If there’s a next time –’ And she looked agonised again.

  ‘There will be,’ Maddie said confidently. ‘Now, listen. Like I said, I’ve been talking to Jay about his brothers. Not asking, you know, just chatting –’

  Rosalie’s eyes glinted for a moment and Maddie thought joyously – she isn’t that bad after all. She can laugh, too, when she understands, and she grinned at her. ‘Well, you know how it is with men. They’re too daft to know what it is you’re after half the time,’ and now Rosalie managed to produce a smile of real amusement and for a moment a bubble of amity hung between them like a tangible thing.

  ‘The thing is, Jay told me your Timothy likes the idea of politics.’

  Rosalie seemed to catch fire for a moment. ‘Oh, my, yes. He makes the best speeches you ever heard! So fiery you know, and so – he wrote the best paper of all his year at Harvard, when he was starting his law degree, all about why America shouldn’t mix in fo
reign wars and they thought very highly of him, but then the war happened and well, it sort of wasn’t right not to want to be in it. But then he wrote another paper, more like a little book it was, and his Pa got it published for him, and they talked a lot about how much political wisdom he’d developed. The papers, they were full of him for a while then. But then –’ Her face clouded. ‘Then Pa did something to annoy the papers. I don’t know – I never did get that clear in my head, and the people who’d been so interested in Timothy for election sort of lost interest. But it’s what he wants. It’s always been what he wants –’

  ‘He couldn’t stay with Kincaid and Sons if he was elected as something or other, could he?’ Maddie said sharply, trying to dredge her memory for what she knew of the system at home in London. Local councillors and MPs there could still be businessmen – she’d met several who were, but she had an idea it was different here.

  ‘Oh, no, Timothy hates the business, he says. He’s good at it, and knows how to make money, but he says Pa’s already got so much it’s boring to make more and if he had gone into politics then Kincaids would have bankrolled him and he’d be able to concentrate on what he was doing in Washington.’ She looked wistful then. ‘But I can’t see how that’ll ever happen now, since Pa lost those people who used to back him –’

  ‘But you have a family too, Rosalie,’ Maddie said gently. ‘Jay tells me that your family has always been very busy in politics.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Rosalie said. ‘My daddy used to be very active. I never quite knew what it was all about but he used to be out a lot. My mother always said if he put half the time in at home he did in the South Boston taverns drumming up votes we’d be richer than the Kincaids, and they’re lousy rich.’ She went pink. ‘That was what my mother used to say.’

  ‘She was probably right. Is your father still in politics?’

  ‘Oh, he died three years ago. Before I married Timothy. He’d never let me marry Timmy. He was a Democrat, my father, and Timmy, he wanted to run on the Republican ticket.’

  ‘Does it matter that much which sort of ticket they run on, as long as they get in?’

  Rosalie looked startled. ‘I always thought it did.’

  Maddie shook her head firmly and spoke from the depths of her total ignorance of the matter. ‘Of course it doesn’t. It’s the same at home in England. If a man wants to be a Member of Parliament, what matters is getting elected, and if the only way you can do that is by joining a particular party then you join it. I dare say it’s the same here. What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats, anyway?’

  Rosalie looked disapproving. ‘I never talk politics. My mother hated it and said no girl ever-should. It bores the men if you do. Leave it to them.’

  ‘Well, I dare say someone’ll tell me eventually,’ Maddie said and lifted her chin as she heard a faint sound from the dining room across the hallway from where they were sitting in a corner of the big living room. ‘Listen, before she wakes up and you have to go back to her, the thing is, there must be people you know, who your father knew, who are still involved with elections and the rest of it?’

  ‘My brother Joe,’ Rosalie said. ‘He works for the Democrats in Washington.’

  Maddie looked triumphant. ‘Then you talk to him! Make him see to it that Timothy is invited to join them. It’s all you have to do – or introduce me to your brother, and I’ll see to it he gets the idea –’

  Rosalie was staring at her with her mouth half open. ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said at length. ‘What has that got to do with me and Timothy being together again?’

  ‘Everything!’ Maddie said. ‘If Timothy wants to be a serious politician he has to have a wife and a family, doesn’t he? I think politics are boring, but even I know that. Wives and children, they’re as good as votes for a man, and separation and divorce are as good as votes for the other side. Isn’t it the same here?’

  They heard the sound again as Blossom pushed back her chair and got to her feet, and at once Rosalie leapt from the low stool, where she had been sitting beside Maddie’s armchair, and hurried across towards the hallway.

  ‘Will you talk to him, Rosalie? To your brother Joe? If he can persuade Timothy to take a chance on the idea, then I’ll start to work on Pa. I’ve listened to him a lot, and he’s a very ambitious sort of man. If he gets the right prodding, we might be able to get your Timothy out of the office downtown and into Washington. He’d have to take you with him then –’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosalie said, and then turned her head to look as the sound of Blossom’s footsteps on the parquet floor came thinly out of the dining room at them. ‘I’ll try. Joe’s a good brother to me. He’d do a lot for me. I just never thought to ask him this –’ and she threw another glance at Maddie, who leaned back satisfied.

  She hadn’t thought so drippy and silly a girl could look so alive, to tell the truth, as Rosalie had at that moment; there is no doubt, she told herself as she wriggled back into her armchair and reached for her magazine, that I’m on the right tracks. Timothy is the log that’s jamming things here and Rosalie’s the lever that will fetch him out. Rosalie and Pa, of course. I’ll start work on him tomorrow.

  20

  January 1951

  Working on Pa was ridiculously easy. She started by sitting beside him as he read his newspaper and asking him to explain things in it to her. At first he was irritated, and merely rattled the pages at her, but she sat there quietly and timed her questions carefully, so that he was not as aware of being interrupted as he might have been, and slowly he thawed and began to talk and once he had started, and discovered the pleasure of having a rapt audience who clearly respected and admired him and never questioned his opinions, went on talking.

  She would sit beside him, carefully choosing the same low stool on which Rosalie had sat beside her, knowing how appealing it was to have someone sitting looking up at you, and would hug her knees and rest her chin on them so that she had to keep her eyes even more upturned, and he clearly found her very beguiling indeed. She would laugh often, too, as they talked and he became more expansive than ever, trying little jokes and sallies for the pleasure of hearing her laugh again, and slowly and easily she threaded him on her line and pulled him in.

  Blossom became aware quite soon of what was happening, and took to coming into the sitting room, instead of remaining in her favourite place in the dining room, to talk to her husband, but he became gruff when she appeared and returned to his reading, and after a while she would go away again, clearly put out but unable to do anything about the situation. Maddie would sit there demurely, smiling at her and leafing through a magazine that she kept beside her in case she needed it and, baffled, Blossom would take herself and her missal and her rosary to the dining room, leaving the two of them alone again. And after a while the old man would look over the top of his paper at Maddie and glint at her and she’d grin back and they’d return to their discussion of the day’s news. And if Blossom came back they would lapse into silence again until she went away. It really became a most diverting game.

  Maddie concentrated on politics after the first few days of the game, chattering artlessly about her inability to comprehend and he would set his paper on his knees and give her an account of how the American political system worked which, though she pretended to find it too complicated, she understood well enough to know that it should not be all that difficult to get Timothy Two out of the family business and involved in public life.

  But it was not so easy to bring the subject of Timothy into their conversation. Any attempt to talk about family business made the old man shut his lips and she would have to be very adroit to get him talking again on the innocuous subject of American doings in the world. Until she hit on the idea of asking him questions about his own history. ‘Tell me about Boston,’ she said to him. ‘How you started, the sort of people who live here, how it was for you when you were young –’ And then he was away.

  He did not in fac
t tell her anything that was outside his own experience. He said nothing about the city or its history as part of America; he only spoke of Boston as part of him. He talked of what it had been like in the nineties growing up in the streets of South Boston as a first-generation American, the third son of an Irish immigrant who had arrived from County Tyrone with no money, no skills apart from his experience as a barman in a tiny country inn, and huge ambitions. He told her how his father Eamon had worked his way up from being a barman, in a tavern that was not all that unlike the one he had left behind three thousand miles away, to owning four taverns of his own within ten years. He spoke of his mother, Katy, as illiterate and as hungry when she arrived as old Eamon himself had been but who had made herself genteel and respectable with great speed (‘Lace-curtain Irish, she became,’ Timothy said. ‘As fast as bloody lightning, too.’). He chuckled as he described how she had dragged her children from the streets to the church, only to have them escape back into the excitement and glamour again, but had gone on doggedly trying. He boasted of how he had been educated in spite of himself and eventually set up by his father in his own tavern when he was nineteen and heart-set on marrying the daughter of the man who was Eamon’s most disliked rival in the South Boston politics in which so many immigrants became involved. And he ended with great relish telling her how, as the years had gone on, he had worked and slaved to make a living for himself and his family – only to explode into riches when the government in their wisdom had brought in the Eighteenth Amendment just at the end of the Great War, as he came home again from his army service, and made his fortune.

  ‘Oh, Maddie, Maddie, I tell ye, it was a gift from heaven! There were all those good thirsty men everywhere and the government saying it was prohibited to take a drink! It was a mad business, crazy to let it start, but if the government wanted to be crazy, who was I to stop ‘em? I just set to work and well enough I did.’ He leaned forwards confidentially. ‘Do you know how much I made that first three years of Prohibition? Three million dollars, that’s how much. I counted up my assets on Armistice Day, 1922, when my first son was born, Timothy Two, and it was three million. Three million.’ And he chanted like a litany over and over again, ‘Three mil-li-on dollars. Ther-ree! Ther-ree mil-li-on –’