Irish Tweed

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “It’s a difficult trip, not as bad as back in ’45 with the coffin ships. Most people survive them now, especially if they’re young and in good health like you are. But I don’t want to deceive you about the risks.”

  “Life is a risk, Dr. Dave,” she said, the words again leaping out of her mouth.

  “Well, I’ll ask Agatha to write a letter, and we’ll see what happens.”

  Angela was released from quarantine just before the canon said the requiem Mass for her family. All the young people her age in the townland came to the Mass. The canon preached powerfully. Angela did not understand anything he said, but she realized that the sermon and the ceremony did console her and most of the others in the church. Was that the way it was with Catholicism? Sometimes the sounds were enough. In his final words, the canon seemed to be saying that she was a child chosen by God for special deeds, and that everyone should pray that she rise to the challenges.

  What if he were right?

  Angela had never realized that she had so many friends. Maybe there was much she had not realized.

  “Are you frightened, Angela?” Eileen asked as they walked back to the doctor’s house.

  “I suppose I should be. Now I don’t think . . . well, the worst has already happened, hasn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to lose you, Angela.”

  “We’ll never lose one another, Eileen.”

  Though no one had asked her to help, Angela took over the responsibilities of keeping the doctor’s surgery neat and clean—cleaner, Mrs. Gaughan said, than she had ever seen it.

  “Child, you don’t have to work,” she said kindly.

  “Och, Missus, I’ve been working all my life. Me ma, poor dear woman, used to say that cleanliness is next to godliness.”

  “Sure, that’s a Protestant saying, isn’t it? But sometimes, maybe, they’re right.”

  Later in life, Angela would realize how important it was to maintain clean premises. “You should be able to eat off the floor,” the Polish nun had said to her.

  She had even started back to school and had rapidly kept up with the studies she had missed. She had become part of the doctor’s family, a much more peaceful and pleasant family than the one she had lost. She loved her ma and pa and her brothers and sisters, but they were often very difficult to live with, no matter how hard Angela had struggled to keep them happy.

  There was room for her in the doctor’s house. “Sure, you don’t eat more than a few bites,” Eileen had said.

  Then, one day, a post office man had come up from Galway with a cable from Chicago.

  “They’ve sent money for your trip to America,” Agatha said. “Sure, Angela, you don’t have to go. Why don’t you stay here with us?”

  “Won’t we be missing you something terrible?” Eileen groaned.

  “It’s up to you child. I could go into Galway tomorrow and buy the tickets or send a cable back, saying that you’d rather stay with us . . .”

  I’ve lost one family this year and now I’m about to lose another.

  “Hadn’t I better go and them Yanks expecting me?” she said, the words again jumping out of her mouth.

  It all happened quickly. She had a ticket for the Duke of Kent, a steam liner that everyone said was clean, safe, and fast, a note to someone who would meet her at Ellis Island and take her to Grand Central Station, and a ticket to Chicago . . . What a strange name for a city. But the Yanks were said to be strange people.

  “They say the steerage,” Uncle Dave insisted as they waited in the railroad station in Galway Town, “is better than first class was even twenty years ago. And you’ll be there in no time.”

  “They’re terrible nice people, aren’t they now? They’ll give you a wonderful start in America,” Aunt Agatha said.

  “I’ll never see you again!” Eileen sobbed.

  Angela hugged her friend.

  “We will see each other again, Eiley. We surely will.”

  “I know . . . In heaven.”

  “In this world.”

  There had been no American wake before she left. Those who left for America were thought to be as good as dead. If they survived the trip, they might well die in the American slums. Very few would return to Ireland. But the American wakes, like the real wakes, were often orgies of drinking or lovemaking in the fields. It would be a waste of good money. She had lived off the doctor’s family long enough. They should not have to spend more money to get rid of her. She should learn not to feel sorry for herself. Her friends from school had come over to the doctor’s house to say good-bye as they put the tweed blanket, which held all her possessions, into the pony trap. Many tears were shed, but none of them were Angela’s. She was leaving on a great adventure.

  She had terrible dreams. Her mother came out of the grave, an angry, half-dead skeleton, and accused her of deserting the family, “and our bodies not cold in the ground. Isn’t it the way you were when we were all alive. You thought only about yourself and your future. I hope the boat sinks.”

  “Ma, I’m going because God wants me to!”

  “God will damn you to hell for all eternity because you killed us.”

  “Ma, I didn’t! I didn’t! The meat was poisoned.”

  “You were always a great one for thinking up excuses . . . Why don’t you kill yourself and come to hell where we are . . . You belong here!”

  She would wake up shivering and hot at the same time.

  The dream was not true. It could not have been. She loved her mother and so did God. They were all in heaven. She prayed for them many times every day. They would watch over her and keep her safe on the journey to Chicago.

  She had never been on a train before. The trip to Cork was miserable. The rain beat against the dirty windows but did not clean them off. The car was cold. Other travelers complained to the conductor, who told them that if they didn’t like the train they could get off and walk.

  The train was also late at the station in Cork City. She had to transfer to another train to get to Kinsale. No one in the train station could tell her where the train to Kinsale was.

  “I need to get to the Duke of Kent,” she told one uniformed train man.

  “Shite, isn’t that focker at Buckingham Palace?”

  “Gypsies like you should be arrested.”

  “Go away or we will call the police.”

  Angela was swept away by a wave of despair, the same feeling she had experienced at the cottage when the baby died. She had failed to save his precious little life. There was no escape from her fate. America was a foolish dream. She’d die soon, sitting on the steps of the Cork Railway Station.

  She dragged her rosary out of its honored pocket in her dress, not to toll her beads but to cling to her God, who was suddenly distant. She wept for the first time since she had fled the cottage.

  “Now why would such a pretty little woman be weeping in such an unpretty place?”

  She looked up at a sturdy country woman, from Clare by her accent and herself with two small ones in her arms with a third child clinging to the hand of his da, a cheerful-looking fella if there ever was one such.

  “Don’t I have a booking on the Duke of Kent and meself lost in this terrible city?”

  “Are you the only childer in your family and going to Amerikay all by herself?”

  “Aren’t me brothers and sisters and me ma and pa all dead and buried and our house burned to the ground up above in Connemara?”

  Annie Scanlan, for that was her name, folded Angela in her arms.

  “Well now, don’t you have a family to go over across with you to Amerikay?”

  She slipped her rosary back into its proper place, told God she was sorry, and took the nervous second child out of its mother’s crowded arms, and didn’t the child sleep there all the way to Kinsale and the Duke of Kent?

  5

  WHILE THERE had been no American wake to send Angela off to America, the tradition was maintained by the steerage passengers of watching the steeples o
f the church disappear over the horizon the next morning. “The last time any of us will see poor Ole Ireland,” Pete Scanlan intoned the required ritual.

  “I’ll be back,” Angela said. “I promised my friend Eileen Gaughan that I’d come back to visit her.”

  “Detroit will be my Ireland,” Annie Scanlan said bitterly. “Ireland has already killed most of my family.”

  “English Imperialism killed them,” Angela said firmly, her Fenian convictions unchanged by the disappearing steeples.

  She was already feeling woozy from the motion of the bay. The previous night she was shocked by the steerage quarters, raw and rough and noisy and smelly, but at least clean and no sickness. The English authorities, troubled by the stories of “coffin ships” maintained a cursory sanitary inspection at dockside.

  Angela had presented her documentation from Dr. Gaughan, certifying that she had been inoculated against smallpox and diphtheria. The English doctor regarded her dubiously.

  “You’re a very tiny little one, aren’t you, child?”

  “We grow slowly in West Galway, but only because you Brits are after starving us to death.”

  He smiled and applied his stethoscope to her chest.

  “But you have strong lungs, all the better to denounce us with, I suppose.”

  The doctor was a kind man.

  “You’re not Mr. Peel or Mr. Gladstone, Doctor, it’s not your fault that me brothers and sisters and me ma and pa are dead and buried in Galway and our family home burned to the ground. I’m sorry I was rude to you.”

  “I don’t say you’re wrong in your judgments, child. But you are young and strong and you’ll do well in the land beyond the sea. God bless you and protect you.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, feeling very guilty, as she often did when her quick and biting voice made trouble.

  Despite the promising beginning and the promise in the sea air, the passage was, according to the crew who checked on steerage periodically, terribly rough altogether. For Angie, as everyone called her, seasickness began while still in the bay at Kinsale and continued intermittently all the way to New York Harbor. Often she was afraid she might die of the continuing waves of nausea. Sometimes she was afraid that she wouldn’t die.

  She tried to weave her way out into the steerage deck, where she could vomit into the Atlantic, which richly deserved her wrath. Sometimes she considered throwing herself over the side of the boat. She would be so thin, if she finally made it to Chicago, that they would discard her at first sight. She would have to become a street beggar. God didn’t approve of suicide, but the teacher had told them that God forgave suicides because they were mad with pain.

  “God forgive you, Angie, for such terrible thoughts,” a voice behind her on the deck warned.

  “Ma!” she exclaimed. “Is it yourself?”

  “Who else would it be, child?”

  Angie whirled around. The woman was covered in a long, dark shawl. But her shape was Ma’s shape. And her face was radiant as ma’s had been when Angie was young.

  “Do you still live, Ma?”

  “We all do, child, and ourselves happy. We haven’t collected our bodies yet, but we are still ourselves and all of us terrible proud of you altogether. Only don’t go jumping into the sea. You’ll be all right, and there’s still many great things for you to do.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “And that’s not meself who comes in the dreams. That’s your own memories of what I was like. I come to tell you I’m sorry for what I did to spoil so much of your young life. I was envious because you had everything I had, only you would have a chance I would never have. It was wrong of me . . . I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “Ma, I love you and I forgive. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “You were always the generous one, Angela Agnes.”

  Ma was crying. Did the holy ones in heaven really cry? Why not?

  “Will I see you again, Ma?”

  “You know what I’m like, Angie Agnes. Now that I have permission to haunt you, I might just be back on the odd occasion.”

  The figure in the dark faded away gradually, her radiant face the last part to disappear.

  Did ma have to make things right with me to get out of purgatory, she wondered. Didn’t she do it gracefully, still?

  For a few moments her nausea ebbed. She staggered back to the streerage, wobbling on uncertain legs. A huge, mean boy waited inside the door for her.

  “Looks like you need a little help,” he said, seizing her right hand.

  “Not from an overgrown lout like you, Tommy Fitzpatrick!” She shook her arm free.

  Pete Scanlan glared at the Fitzpatrick lout, took her hand, and led her back to her little refuge in the far corner of steerage.

  “The sea air help a little, small one?”

  “Made me sleepy,” she admitted and slipped into the little bed she had created with her tweed blanket.

  And she did sleep peacefully for the first time on the terrible voyage, happy that ma and the others were still alive somewhere, even if they hadn’t picked up their bodies yet, and that she and ma were friends again, like they’d been so many years before.

  She awoke next morning to cheers! They had sighted New York at last. Immigrants would land at Castle Garden at noon. They should have their papers ready for examination and remember that not everyone who had crossed on the Duke of Kent would be admitted to Amerikay. Angela had heard that ten percent were rejected even if they had a letter guaranteeing that there was a job waiting for them. Why would this strange new country want to take a sickly little waif like her?

  They were herded onto a ferry which was rocking in the surly waters of Upper New York Bay. Unsteady on her feet and feeling woozy, Angela found herself tilting toward the side of the ferry. A big New York policeman seemed perfectly willing to let her go over the side. She grabbed his thick uniform and hung on till Pete Scanlan steadied her.

  “You almost lost this immigrant, Officer,” Pete said.

  “There are so many, what difference does one make more or less? What good will this sick little child bring to America anyway, especially since she’s Irish?”

  Pete controlled his Irish temper. Annie Scanlan hugged her.

  “Someday you’ll show them how wrong they are!”

  Angela believed that, if she were given half a chance, she would indeed show them. Yet she knew they wouldn’t let her in and if they did she wouldn’t find the train to Chicago and the people in Chicago wouldn’t want such a sick little child.

  Castle Garden was a big gloomy fort which once had been a site for a battery of guns to fend off English invasion. Now it was nothing but a vast hall in which straggling lines of immigrant families, poor, disconsolate, beaten down, waited passively for America’s decision whether to admit them or to send them back to countries that didn’t want them either.

  “Why are they letting us in?” she asked Pete Scanlan.

  “Because they need us. They have more jobs than they have people. Your Yanks are no better than your Brits. They’re not hiring us out of the goodness of their hearts.”

  “How long before we become Yanks?”

  “The moment we leave this building, Angie,” Ann Scanlan told her, “won’t you be complaining about all the furriners coming into our country?”

  It was a cold December day in New York City. Angela hated the city already. The city immigration officials were snobs who hated the Irish. She was convinced that they deliberately kept the process slow so that some of the immigrants would have to spend the night shivering in Castle Garden. She was still wobbly from seasickness, hungry and sleepy. But she reserved a little of her energy to hate the New York cops.

  Finally, late in the afternoon as it was growing dark, they finally arrived at the head of their line.

  “Is this older child yours?” the cop, a man with a thin face, long nose, and suspicious eyes.

  “No, she’s only holding one of our children.”

  “Carr
y your own children, please.”

  So Angela handed over poor little Chiara, who immediately began to scream.

  Another inspector appeared.

  “Are you waiting for admission?” he barked crossly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me see your papers.”

  Now is the time I fail.

  She gave him the correspondence from Chicago and her medical papers. He read them very carefully.

  “Inoculated against smallpox and diphtheria? Isn’t that unusual in Ireland?”

  “I lived with the family of a physician.”

  “You don’t look particularly healthy . . . skinny, undernourished.”

  “I suffered from seasickness on the way over and haven’t eaten much in the last two weeks.”

  “Indeed . . . well, I’ll have to call for a doctor for a physical exam.”

  The Scanlans were permitted to enter. They waved good-bye as they were ushered out.

  “I’ll write you,” Angela shouted. “Thank you very much. God bless you!”

  Then they were gone. Angela was alone again, as lost as she was at the railroad station in Cork. It was darker now in Castle Garden. The light was failing inside and outside. The immigration officers were folding up their tables, some of them donning thick overcoats. The lines remained in place, hopeful families assuming, wrongly Angela suspected, that they would have earned the place they had when the regular day of work had ended. They were worse than the Brits.

  She started the rosary again.

  “Are you waiting for someone, young woman?” a silver-haired policeman with gold stripes suggesting authority asked her.

  “I am waiting for a medical examiner, sir. Since three o’clock, begging your pardon.”

  “I see . . . Might I look at your papers?”

  Angela handed over her stack of papers. He glanced at them.

  “Nothing incriminating . . . Why did the inspectors want a medical examiner?”

  “They thought I looked unhealthy, weak, and skinny. I told them that I had seasickness through the whole voyage from Kinsale.”

  “Well, you’re tiny all right . . . Let me look at your eyes . . . Bright enough, I’d say . . . now open your mouth and let me see your tongue . . . healthy enough . . . No fever . . .”