by Peter Quinn
In the room Margaret was called into the clerk sat behind a battered desk, watching intently as she entered, making no effort to disguise that he was examining her clothes and deportment. Once she was seated, he barely glanced at her again; he stared at the folder on his desk and talked rapidly, in the Yankee style. She was used to it now, the nonstop monotone, but had trouble with it then, the clerk’s face pointing down, his eyes evading hers, his words running into one another.
“You have little real experience, which under ordinary circumstances would be a serious impediment to employment as anything save a laundress or scullion, but these, as we are all well aware, are anything but ordinary circumstances, and I have several positions for maids-of-all-work that would normally be unavailable to someone like yourself.”
He glanced at her for an instant, then shot his eyes back to the desk. His hands were folded in front of him, long white fingers with carefully tended nails. He unfolded them and reached into a drawer and took out a blue pamphlet.
“We shall keep your name on file here, and enter the comments of your employer. Those whose diligence and dedication win them praise, and are with one employer for a period of not less than three years, shall be awarded a certificate of merit from the Society, an invaluable aid in the obtainment of future employment.”
With his slender index finger, he opened the pamphlet to the back page. “Here you will find a facsimile of that certificate, a reminder of what you should be working toward.” He handed her the pamphlet. A Decalogue for Domestics: A Primer of Rules, Regulations and Suggestions for Those Engaged in Household Service. By Mrs. Sarah Benning Oswald. He removed from the folder on his desk the sheet she had filled out earlier. Under the space marked References, she had entered three fictitious names and addresses. She would have left it blank, but the girl from West Cork wouldn’t let her. “Fill it in,” she said. “They’re sticky about these things. Doesn’t matter what you put down, so long as there’s something. They know it’s a lie, but it gives them comfort that you tell it. It’s the way the Yankees are.”
“Everything’s in order.” He handed her a slip of paper. “Here’s the name and address of your prospective employer. All the particulars, wages, hours, responsibilities, will be settled with them.” He extended his hand. She shook it. A weak grasp, as though the long fingers had no bones in them. “Good luck,” he said with a smile as unsubstantial as his handshake.
Two and half years since then. Six months away from her certificate of merit. Little she wanted it. Margaret went down the stairs slowly. Today would be quiet. Mrs. Bedford had left for Long Branch. Be away until September, glory be to God. The other two maids, Minnie and Eileen, had been dragged away with her, swept up in the torrent of trunks, hatboxes, carpetbags, cartons, and parcels. It had taken half a morning to pack the coach, which then had to be unloaded at the pier and repacked on the boat. Mr. Bedford had grown exasperated watching the whole affair, and yelled at Andrew, the coachman, a thing he never did; speaking harshly to the help wasn’t Mr. Bedford’s way.
On the second landing, she stopped outside his door. She could hear his snoring. Last summer, when he and Mr. Ward had joined Mrs. Bedford in Long Branch, they had left her behind. Mr. Bedford was staying only a few days, and didn’t want the city house closed or left unattended. The first summer, the summer the war started, they had closed the house, taken down the drapes, rolled up all the rugs, covered the furniture, and all the servants had been dragged into the Babylonian Captivity of the Jersey seashore, a pitiless sun, swarms of mosquitoes and flies, a cramped house, the help condemned to an attic where the heat turned the candles into puddles of wax. But Mr. Bedford had never decamped. His business kept him in the city, and Margaret and Miss Kerrigan had been sent back.
Margaret was glad to stay in New York. Miss Kerrigan said that Margaret was left behind because Mrs. Bedford had no regard for her. “She won’t have you with her because you’re more a bother than a help,” she said.
“And she won’t have you,” Margaret said, “because she wants to remember what life without stomach pain can be like.”
Miss Kerrigan prided herself on the way she ran her kitchen. “Wellington of the pots” was how she said one former employer had described her. Margaret would watch Mr. Bedford’s face as she served him his meals. He wore an expression of resignation, like Wellington’s adversary at Waterloo. Mr. Ward picked at his food; he never seemed to have much of an appetite. Mrs. Bedford was away so much and ate so little when she was home that she didn’t seem to take much notice of what came out of the kitchen, and the guests were few these days.
When Margaret had started working at the Bedfords’ in December of 1860, the house was always filled with dinner guests, many of them from England. There were dinner parties three or four times a week. The cook then was a former assistant kitchen master at the Astor House, a small Welshman with a vile tongue and a knack with the cookstove that brought renown to the Bed-fords’ table. Margaret couldn’t remember exactly when Mr. Bedford began missing those dinners, but it had been sometime shortly after the war started. At first, she and the other servants hadn’t given it much thought. The city was in an uproar, and the likes of Mr. Bedford, with all their duties and responsibilities, and the demands of the money trade, were no doubt awash in work. Yet even after life had returned to its routine, and when except for the content of the newspapers and the presence of so many soldiers on the streets the war had faded into the background, Mr. Bedford stayed away.
One evening, as she prepared Mr. Bedford’s bath, Margaret heard him arguing with his wife, and not the usual kind of argument, hushed and angry tones, each of them trying not to shout and draw the attention of the servants. This time you didn’t have to lean your ear against the wall or crack the door just the slightest to hear what they were saying: Their voices echoed through the house. Standing next to the tub, even with the water running, Margaret didn’t miss a word.
“It’s another woman, Charles. I knew your drinking would eventually lead to this, that’s what keeps you from this house. Tell me the truth, and at least spare me being made a laughingstock; don’t add that to your sins.”
“Sins?” You could hear the rage in Mr. Bedford’s voice. “I consume my life in the task of providing for you and that drone of an uncle of yours, and you have the Goddamn gall to speak of sins? My sins?”
A month later, Mrs. Bedford hired Miss Kerrigan as cook. Whether or not Mrs. Bedford had done so to spite her husband, that had been the effect. Whatever had been keeping Mr. Bedford away from home had lost its—or her—grip. He came home most nights to eat his evening meal. He was almost always unfailingly polite, and hadn’t any of the contemptuous airs of some of the guests that stayed in the house; nor did he call you by a wrong name most of the time, in the manner of Mr. Ward, as if it didn’t matter who you were. He also paid a bit above average, even if there wasn’t much left after Margaret sent her monthly remittance back to Ireland. And Mr. Bedford wasn’t like some of them she had heard about, running his hands where he shouldn’t, always pressuring the girls to grant him privileges that weren’t included in A Decalogue for Domestics. Yet there was a distance to Mr. Bedford that had always made him seem more a boarder in the house than its master.
This morning there was no sound from behind the door save the buzz and growl of his snoring. When he went to Long Branch for a weekend and Margaret was left to keep the house in order, turning on lights in the evening to discourage burglars, she would wrap herself in one of Mrs. Bedford’s robes. There would be no need to use a chamber pot, or wash from a pitcher or bowl, or dash down four flights to the water closet next to the kitchen. She would lie in the tub in the evening, and when the water grew too tepid, she would turn the handle with her foot and let more hot water in. As she had the previous summer, Miss Kerrigan would howl in protest, and threaten to turn her in. “A sin against your employers,” she called it. Mrs. Sarah Benning Oswald agreed. Commandment No. III in the Decalogue: “Und
er no circumstances shall any servant violate his trust by in any way availing himself of those quarters, amenities and conveniences reserved for the exclusive use of his employers.”
She forgot what she had done with the pamphlet. Put it in her bottom drawer, probably. There was precious little Mrs. Sarah Benning Oswald knew about a domestic’s life, the small opportunities to relax, to share in the amenities and conveniences, and as long as you cleaned the tub and put everything back in its place, what was the harm? It would take more than Miss Kerrigan’s scoldings or Mrs. Sarah Benning Oswald’s pontifications to convince Margaret otherwise.
In the kitchen, Miss Kerrigan was standing at the cookstove. She didn’t turn when Margaret entered. Margaret took down the teapot, cups and saucers, and two plates. The same fare every day. One coddled egg for Mr. Ward, lightly toasted bread, a slice of ham. An hour or so later, nothing save coffee and two fried eggs for Mr. Bedford, who was in the habit of eating a large meal at midmorning, when he was at work. There wasn’t much Miss Kerrigan could do to ruin two eggs.
Still facing the stove, Miss Kerrigan said, “Well, praise be to God, Her Royal Highness has reported to work.”
Margaret yawned loudly. Miss Kerrigan looked over her shoulder, her eyebrows arched in disapprobation, and took down a small pot. She put it down with a clang.
“You want to know what’s wrong with you?” Miss Kerrigan asked.
“No, but I suppose I’ll be told anyway.”
“Same thing wrong with your whole generation, with all the Irish girls coming over here now, and you know what that is?”
“Can’t it wait until I’ve had my tea? Tea softens the blow of bad news.”
“You’re spoiled. Think the world owes you something. Come over here on one of them big, fancy steamships in ten days flat, your meals provided.” She filled the pot with water and put it back on the cookstove. “And your heads filled with fantasies.”
“Put the kettle on, too.”
“Do it yourself.”
“It’s right beside you.”
“I’m not the tea maker, I’m the cook.”
And not much of one, at that, Margaret thought but did not say. She went over next to Miss Kerrigan, lifted the kettle high into the air, and brought it down slowly.
“There we are,” Margaret said, “and a mighty effort it was.”
Miss Kerrigan was hunched over her pot and didn’t seem to notice. “Not in my day, it wasn’t like that at all. It was hunger we were fleeing. Real hunger. And we came without any royal notions of what we’d find, and them that had any fancies didn’t keep them very long, not after five weeks in the hold of a packet ship, people dying every day, the fever leaving some of them raving mad, and the runners on South Street, some of them our own kind, robbing whatever they could, and the Yanks spitting on us when we went to look for work.”
Margaret opened the door to the dumbwaiter and put cups and saucers, silverware and plates, on the tray inside. She wasn’t without memory of the hunger. As a girl of four or five, she had watched her mother stand at the door of their house in Cork City and give food to those who stopped, shadowy creatures who quickly moved on. Once she looked out the window and watched a steady stream of people move through the street toward the center of Cork and the harbor beyond. It was twilight, the weak, washed-out eventide of winter, and although she hadn’t been concentrating then on watching the passersby, she could recall now the impression they made on her, the straggle of slow-moving strangers, the air of some terrible defeat hanging over them. At night, after they said grace, her mother ended with the same petition: “And we pray especially for God’s mercy on the poor starving people of this country.”
“And we had no contraptions such as that,” Miss Kerrigan said. She motioned with her head toward the dumbwaiter. “We carried everything up and down the stairs, didn’t matter if it was a dinner for forty, up and down we went all night, and if we dropped anything, it came out of our pay.”
The kettle began to steam and sputter. It gave out a shrill whistle. Margaret made the tea. Miss Kerrigan handed her the cup with the coddled egg, a plate with a slice of ham, and two burned pieces of bread. Margaret turned the bread over. It wasn’t as badly burned on the other side.
Miss Kerrigan stood by the cookstove with her arms folded. Margaret formed her mouth into the shape of a smile and turned it on the cook. Miss Kerrigan glowered back. A thin, short, gray woman, no breasts or hips.
Margaret went up the stairs into the butler’s pantry, hoisted the dumbwaiter, and took the tray into the dining room. The room was cool and dark, the portraits on the wall hidden in shadows. She drew back the curtains, and the faces on the wall seemed for a moment to be startled by the light. She set Mr. Ward’s place. The cup, saucer, and plate sat forlorn on the great table. She had barely finished when Mr. Ward appeared. Punctual as ever, he always wanted his breakfast on the table when he sat down.
“Good morning,” he said. He glanced up at the portraits as if the greeting were as much for them as for Margaret.
“And a good morning to you, sir.” She curtsied slightly.
Ward put the book he had brought with him next to his plate, and began to read and eat at the same time. With Mr. Bedford, it was the newspapers. Sometimes, when they dined together, the two of them sat at opposite ends of the table, the one with his book, the other with his paper, and they would scarcely speak a word. It was hard not to be nervous in a situation like that, with every sound, from putting down a plate to collecting the silverware, echoing through the room. Margaret preferred when they talked and argued, which with Mr. Bedford and Mr. Ward was usually the same thing, Mr. Bedford becoming red in the face, and neither of them taking the slightest notice of what was going on around them.
“Would you like your tea now, sir?”
Without looking up from his book, he nodded. “Please,” he said.
She left him alone, went into the butler’s pantry, took her own cup and saucer off the tray, and poured herself a cup of tea. She decided to wait in the pantry until Mr. Ward wanted his second cup of tea, and not return to the kitchen for another lecture on the slothful state of her existence, more of Miss Kerrigan’s comparisons, her life as the standard for all others. Little wonder at Miss Kerrigan’s constant state of grievance if she took life under the Decalogue for her ideal, every coming and going prescribed, every hour of the working day given over to routine. Service was better than a rented corner of a tenement, at least for the amenities it offered, no matter if most of those were forbidden to the help, yet the possibilities were as narrow as the attic beds the servants slept on; this was a life chosen not in the manner a nun chooses the convent, certain that the bare, celibate boundaries of her cell are the thresholds of eternal happiness, but one that unfolded like age itself, minute by minute, hours turning into days, years into decades, until the mirror reflects a face that is old, unwed, unweddable, a virgin by default, a permanent Irish domestic, 3rd class.
In the end, famine or not, they had all come to America for the same reason: There was nothing else. At home the prospects were not so much bleak as nonexistent. Servant or shopgirl, the whole of life would be determined by your accent and religion. If it could be arranged, a match with some farmer; if not, celibacy. Ireland was a country haunted by the memory of hunger, by the ghosts of its starved children, by a final and terrible humiliation.
Some rebelled—that was part of the country, too, hands raised against the English, or against custom and tradition—and tried to act out their own romances. But Ireland was more comfortable with tragedy. Margaret’s parents had tried for romance. Her father, Augustine O’Driscoll, had come to Cork City as a small boy, the year after his parents had been swept away in one of the local potato-crop failures that drew little notice outside the affected area. He and his two sisters had been divided among their relatives around Baltimore, a fishing village on the coast of Cork. The uncle he was sent to was scraping by as it was, and could barely feed him. In the
mornings, Augustine ran down to the fishing boats and begged for what they could spare him. He roasted the scraps they threw him on the end of a stick held above the pitch fire that served as a beacon for the boats. Afterward, he washed his face and hands in the seawater so that his uncle would not smell the fish.
In the last years of his life, when he had abandoned politics and come back to the Church, as ferocious in his devotion as any man in Cork, there was hardly any spark that could light the old fires that had blazoned his reputation as “Pagan” O’Driscoll, nor any that could rekindle the burning oratory of his Irish Confederation days, except when he wandered into the subject of his childhood, the ache of hunger that never went away, the one-room cabin with the farm animals living beside the family, the constant fear of eviction.
When he was ten, he set out on the road for Cork City, alone, with nothing. He got a job in a linen mill as a glider, and ran across the wooden frames in his bare feet and reached into the clattering apparatus to stop the cloth from bunching or tangling. Some gliders lost a limb, a few their lives, but Augustine O’Dris-’ coll, save for the loss of a toe, escaped unharmed. At fourteen, he was made a full-fledged hand, and at eighteen, a foreman in charge of several looms. That was the year he met Catherine Murphy, from Macroom, who had been sent by her father to work in the shop of some distant relatives. It was her father’s hope that since he couldn’t give her a dowry of any worth, she would become skilled in the ways of the townspeople, and make a suitable candidate for marriage to some shopkeeper in Macroom. But it was in Cork City that she met Augustine O’Driscoll, fell in love, and eloped, a girl of seventeen, and was disowned by her father.
