A Family Apart

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  A woman brushed past her, sweeping her skirts out of the way. Her snug-waisted, bottle-green coat was fastened by a row of jet-black buttons that winked and sparkled as they caught the light. Wouldn’t Ma, with her red hair, look grand in a coat like that! thought Frances. In her mind, she could see her mother, tall and elegant, with the skirt of her coat swirling regally around her legs as she walked. Frances ached as she thought of Ma’s patched and faded clothes and shabby shawl. She wished with all her heart that she could buy a bottle-green coat for her mother, but she knew that a coat like that would cost much more than all the money she made in a month.

  Near the intersection of Fifth and Broadway, Frances nearly bumped into a girl of her own size who was looking into a shop window. The girl wore a flared, pale blue velvet coat and matching bonnet, and her hands were tucked into a white fur muff.

  “Look, Mama,” the girl said to the woman who stood next to her. “Look at the doll in the pink dress.”

  Frances looked, too, at a doll with a creamy china face and blue glass eyes, dressed in a pink silk dress made with dozens of tiny tucks and pleats and trimmed with ribbon rosettes. Frances gasped aloud. “Oh! The wonder of her!”

  The girl in blue glanced at Frances and smiled. For an instant they shared the same delight in the elegant doll. But the woman turned toward Frances with a look of horror and disgust. She tugged at the girl’s hand, yanking her away. She whispered to the girl, but Frances could catch some of the words: “… do not talk to one of those children.”

  Frances turned away from them, burning with humiliation. She stared with frustration at her own reflection in the window, seeing what the woman had seen: a barefoot girl with tattered, mud-splattered clothing. It’s not fair, Frances cried to herself. She rested her forehead against the cold glass, embarrassment erupting into hot tears that ran down her cheeks. She hated being so poor. It wasn’t her fault.

  A rough hand gripped her shoulder and spun her around. A policeman demanded, “What mischief might you be up to?”

  Frances stiffened with fear. “No mischief,” she managed to stammer.

  His voice softened as he saw her tears. “Then be along with you, girl! Go about your business! Don’t dawdle here with your betters where you don’t belong.”

  Frances turned and broke into a run. Why should she be treated as though she had done something wrong? Wasn’t she allowed even to stop and rest? Her betters? Just because they wore nicer clothes? “It’s not fair!” she sobbed aloud.

  “Look where you’re going!” a top-hatted gentleman barked at her.

  She stumbled against the cane he thrust out, then angrily turned and grabbed it from his hand, tossing it to the ground.

  “How dare you—you!” he sputtered, but Frances ran on.

  Heedlessly she dashed across streets, ignoring the clang of wagon and cab wheels against the cobblestones and the angry shouts of drivers. She darted through clusters of peddlers and shoppers as she hurried back to her job. Her chest hurt, and her stomach churned with shame and anger. All she wanted was to be with her mother. Ma, with her smiles and loving words, would make everything right again.

  By the time she reached Mr. Lomax’s office, Frances was out of breath, but calmer. She delivered Mr. Waterfield’s reply, then hurried from Mr. Lomax’s office, thankful that he had made no mention of docking her wages again.

  She hurried to find her mother. She knew that Ma would be already hard at work rubbing the brass on the ornate staircase that rose from the lobby to the second story of the office building on Twenty-third Street. The narrow, two-story building was not as elegant on the outside as those in Mr. Waterfield’s neighborhood; but its sweeping, curved marble staircase and brass-trimmed, teakwood balusters and balustrade made up for it.

  Ma swept some flyaway strands of hair from her eyes, looked up, and smiled at Frances, then blinked with surprise. “Frances Mary, it’s wet and cold you are!”

  Frances crouched beside her mother, who wrapped her arms around her daughter, briskly rubbing her back and shoulders. “A cab wheel hit a puddle,” Frances said. “No harm. The running kept me warm.”

  “Better now?” Ma leaned back and smiled.

  “Much,” Frances said. There wasn’t time to tell her mother how much warmer she felt just being near her, so she reached to squeeze Ma’s strong, firm hands.

  Frances thought again about the beautiful green coat, and she clutched her mother’s hands more tightly. Ma would be the first to say she would have no need for a fancy coat like that, but Frances knew that what Ma needed and what she deserved to have were not the same. Then the memory of the girl in the pale blue coat and the words her mother had whispered sprang unbidden to Frances’s mind.

  Ma looked at Frances intently. “What is it, love?” she asked. “You look troubled. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  Frances tried to smile as she quickly shook her head. She wouldn’t want her mother to share the hurt and shame she’d felt. “No, Ma, nothing,” she answered.

  Behind Frances a voice spit out words as though they had a bad taste. It wasn’t difficult to recognize fat Mrs. Watts. “Ah, Mrs. Kelly, your girl has finally returned. Well, if she soon gets busy it will make the work load a little lighter for the rest of us.”

  “Hold your tongue, Mrs. Watts,” Ma said. “You know Frances Mary was sent off on an errand for Mr. Lomax.”

  “She’s back now, ain’t she? And I don’t see her jumping in to pull her fair share.”

  Frances quickly snatched a rag from the pile next to her mother, scooted down to the bottom stair, and began rubbing hard on the brass curlicues in the hard-to-reach places on the balusters. With a grunt, Mrs. Watts picked up a bucket and scrub brush and began to waddle up the stairs, her mouth still puckered as though she had bitten into a sour pickle. When she was sure Mrs. Watts would not look back, Ma puffed out her cheeks, pursed her lips, and waggled her head in imitation. Frances tried not to laugh aloud. She had learned not to mind Mrs. Watts’s sharp remarks. As Ma had said, “The woman sees only the dark side of life, and for that we should pity her.”

  From the circular window over the double front doors, Frances watched a deep blue twilight begin to settle over the city. Soon a lamplighter began his rounds, creating yellow puddles of light. The last few office workers hurried down the steps, chatting with one another, ignoring Frances and her mother. The heavy outer doors clanged behind them, but the lobby echoed their voices after they had gone.

  Frances polished and scrubbed, lugging the heavy bucket of water step-by-step to the top floor. She rubbed the desks with a soft cloth and swept the day’s layer of soot and grime from the carpets.

  While her body worked, her thoughts escaped to the special place her imagination had built. It was a beautiful red brick house in which Ma and Da and all Frances’s brothers and sisters lived. Its windows looked out over a vast green lawn and a shimmering blue lake that was much like the lake in Ireland Da had described so often. The living room of the house was decorated with embroidered pillows and cotton lace curtains, like a room that Frances had once seen through lighted windows at night. On an elegant, scrolled table next to the davenport, a basket of piping-hot loaves of bread sat next to a bowl of juicy oranges and tart, crisp apples. Remembering the pungent cheese in Mr. Waterfield’s office, Frances smiled as she mentally added a large wedge of it to the center of the table. Behind the davenport, she built a high case of shelves and filled it with books of all sizes and colors.

  Frances pictured Megan cradling the doll in the pink silk dress, while Mike leaned over the table, munching and reading, so captivated by his book that he ignored the apple juice dribbling down his chin. Da sat with Petey on one knee, while Peg and Danny played a noisy game of touch tag. The door flew open, and in came Ma, gorgeous in her green coat, her arms filled with packages. She smiled and laughed as she greeted them, and the children ran to her to be hugged. She tossed her packages on the nearby chair.

  Frances gig
gled as her imagination added a whole new scene to the daydream.

  “Mr. Waterfield,” Ma called. “Please put away these packages for me.” A woebegone Mr. Waterfield got up from scrubbing the floor on his knees and hurried to do what Ma had asked. “And, Mr. Waterfield,” she said, “when you’ve finished with that chore, I’d like you to—”

  Her mother broke into Frances’s dream by taking the broom from her hands and locking it into the closet where the cleaning tools were kept. “Nearly midnight. Time for home and bed,” Ma said.

  She smiled as she took their shawls from a hook and handed the smaller one to Frances, but Frances could see the dark smudges under her mother’s eyes.

  Ma clasped Frances’s hand in her warm, rough, right hand. With her left hand she opened the side door, pushing hard against the wind. Clutching her shawl tightly, head down against the wind, Frances ran to keep pace with Ma’s long stride.

  Frances knew that life had always been hard for her mother. She had left Ireland when she was twenty-one and newly married, with her husband, who was twenty-six. “No one would ever choose to leave that blessed land,” Ma had told Frances, “but the brutal fact was that we would have starved if we’d stayed there. The potato crops had rotted in the ground, and as time went on the situation grew worse. There just was not enough food to feed everyone, so many people had to leave the country. Your father and I thought long and hard about our choice. We thought about the life we wanted for our children. Then we said good-bye to our family and friends and came to the United States.”

  “Oh, Ma! How could you leave your family? I’d die if I thought I’d never see you again!” Frances hated this part of the story, feeling the terrible loneliness that had crept into her mother’s words.

  Ma had answered matter-of-factly, “Sometimes we must do what needs to be done, and that’s the all of it.”

  Often Ma spoke of the beautiful Bens, the row of mountains that stood like sentinels watching over her homeland. Frances thought Ma was like the Bens, as steady and never-changing as those mountains she loved. It was not until that terrible year when Da died of the lung sickness that Frances saw another side of her mother.

  For as long as Frances could remember, Da had worked long hours, climbing ladders up the walls of buildings under construction with loads of bricks on the hod, or wooden trough, that rested on his shoulder. With a trowel he would spread the bricks with mortar, smoothing them into place, then climb down and back with another load. The muscles in Da’s arms were thick and firm, and his skin was browned from the sun. And when he came home each night, he was never too tired to lift the children high overhead, while his loud laughter bounced from the walls of the room.

  Then, suddenly, he became ill and weak. The hospital doctors did all that they could, then sent him home, telling Ma to spoon-feed him a mixture of pulverized beef bones mixed with red wine. Ma did everything she could to care for him, and Frances helped, too, but each day Da grew more pale and shrunken in the bed. Frances, terrified and heartbroken, unable to believe how Da had changed, would hold his hand and whisper, “Please get well, Da! Please!” She’d tell him the stories that he had told her about Ireland, the green and golden country she had learned to love. “We’ll go to visit someday when you’re better,” she promised, but Da’s health did not improve.

  One morning Ma gently folded Da’s hands across his chest, pulled the sheet up to cover his face, and called the children together. She told them that their father was dead.

  Sometimes during the waking hours of the night, Frances still would be swept with the memory of the hurt and anger and wild tears that tore through her body like sharp claws. Even though she was the eldest, her own tears had left her so weak that she had no will to help comfort the others who wailed for their father. But Ma had remained strong and found room for all of them in her arms. With an energy that burnished her skin, Ma had taken care of the funeral arrangements, using what little money they’d been able to save. Then Ma had found cleaning jobs for Frances and herself in the office building managed by Mr. Lomax.

  “It’s not what we wanted for you, love, but I know I can count on you,” Ma had murmured. “I promised your Da this family would never starve.” Frances had hugged her mother in response.

  “I want to work with you,” she insisted. “We’ll take care of the little ones together, Ma.”

  But one night, nearly a week after Da’s coffin had been laid in the ground, Frances had awakened from a heavy sleep. It was that time of night in which darkness fades to gray, and shadows loom, and it’s hard to know what is real and what is not. Then, for the first time, Frances heard her mother cry.

  Little Pete and Peg were sleeping crossways in the one big bed in which all the children slept, Pete’s thumb in his mouth, Peg murmuring in her sleep. But Mike, Danny, and Megan crouched together at one end of the bed, their eyes wide with fear.

  Frances had slipped quickly from the bed and stumbled to the cot on which her mother lay. “Ma! Ma! You mustn’t cry!” she pleaded. “I’ve never seen you cry like this, Ma! Please don’t cry!”

  Her mother’s only answer was to moan through her tears, “Tom, Tom, Tom.”

  “What should I do?” Frances cried aloud, but there was no answer. Shivering more from fear than from cold, she huddled against Ma, wrapping her arms around her, and Ma curled into them like a small child. Terrified, Frances held her mother through the storm of sobs and wails, then lifted the edge of her own nightgown to dry her mother’s eyes. She stroked her hair and soothed her until Ma fell asleep.

  But Frances lay awake long after, until the sky was streaked with light. Her frantic fears had subsided into a lump of cold that ached in the pit of her stomach. Frances knew that things would never be the same. She was no longer a little girl; those moments had forced her into a world of adult responsibility, and there was no turning back.

  Ma never spoke of it, and Frances couldn’t put into words what she had learned during the night, but she was comforted by the knowledge that the bond between them had grown even stronger.

  Now, as they walked home together, Frances and her mother crossed over to Ninth Avenue, going south, on streets in which the traffic had thinned. The rows of small greengrocers, meat markets, haberdasheries, and dry-goods stores were closed, their stained and faded canvas awnings cranked up tightly. The peddlers’ carts had vanished, relegated to wherever they were stored for the night, but spoiled fruit and wilted cabbage leaves still littered the curbs.

  In spite of the hour, the streets teemed with people. Some of them sat on stoops or leaned against the corner gaslights. Frances shot quick glances at them. Many were boys, some no older than Danny or Peg. There were gangs of thieves in their neighborhood, but she knew they wouldn’t try to rob a pair of poor cleaning women. It was obvious that Frances and her mother carried nothing of value. Frances kept a lookout, but she wasn’t afraid. Mike had taught her well how to handle herself. “Too well,” he had grumbled after their last lesson as he held a rag to his own bloody nose.

  As they turned onto Sixteenth Street, which cut through rows of crowded tenements, Frances thought she saw a familiar figure ahead of them. Mike? What would Mike be doing out so late? Rapidly the figure slipped into the doorway of the building in which the Kellys lived.

  Frances quickened her step and entered the building ahead of her mother, wrinkling her nose in disgust as the familiar stench of cooking odors, garbage, and unwashed bodies that clung to the walls of the long, narrow hallway surrounded them like a smothering gray ghost.

  As Ma quietly opened the door to the room that was their home, Frances thought she heard a low groan. She glanced in the direction of the room next to theirs where her friend, Mara Robi, lived with her aunt and uncle. Through the cracks around the door she could see the flicker of candlelight. Mara had been ill with a cough and fever. Maybe she was worse.

  “Ma,” Frances whispered, and clutched her mother’s arm. “That could be Mara! Come with me!”

/>   Ma murmured, “It’s late. You can visit Mara tomorrow.”

  “But what if she needs—”

  “Hush,” Ma said, patting her shoulder. “She has her uncle and aunt to care for her, and you need your sleep.”

  Frances hung her shawl on a hook as her mother lit the small whale-oil lamp that stood on the table in the center of the room. The glass of the lamp shimmered as the store window had, and Frances shuddered as she remembered her ragged, dirty reflection. But she looked around at the clean, spare furnishings in their room with pride: a few straight-backed wooden chairs, a table on which lay a Bible and a small framed wedding picture of Da and Ma, a double bed for the children to share, a cot for Ma, a small wood-burning stove in the corner, and floors scrubbed so clean the wood was bleached nearly white. Ma was bending over the sleeping children, a smile on her face. Frances knew that Ma wanted better for them. That they had so little was not her fault.

  Frances glanced at her brothers and sisters, automatically checking to see that all were safe and accounted for. Dark-haired, fragile Megan—who at the age of twelve had the job of caring for the little ones—was deep in sleep; seven-year-old Peg, with her bouncy red curls and splash of freckles, snuggled on Megan’s arm. As usual young Petey, a curly-haired, blue-eyed six-year-old, had managed to work his way crossways in the bed, his feet almost in Danny’s face. Redheaded Mike, one year older than ten-year-old Danny, who was almost his carbon copy, lay sprawled on his face, breathing heavily.

  Too heavily, Frances thought, and she stood by the bed silently listening and watching. She recognized the uneven breathing of someone who has been running hard, and suddenly she was sure that she saw one of Mike’s eyes flick open for an instant’s peek before it was squeezed shut again. Ha! She’d been right! That had been Mike dashing home ahead of them.

  Ma had already splashed her face and arms in the bowl of water that stood on the corner stand. She looked up from the cloth she had dried herself with and whispered, “Get a move on, Frances. You haven’t washed yet.”