“And I’m Aunt Nellie,” said the old lady by Theresa’s side. “I guess I have to do everything, even introduce myself.”
“My mother,” Mrs. Quinlan said, as if she were just receiving the bad news. “Now, shall we say grace? Show our new arrivals that we’re not a pack of heathens?”
They did, joining hands before they ate. Nora pretended to close her eyes, but she couldn’t help herself from squinting, trying to get a good look at Mrs. Quinlan. Charlie’s brothers Matthew and Jack, and his sister, Kitty, had lived in the house too when they first arrived in this country. Lawrence had been here two years. He would leave as soon as he was married, just as Nora and Charlie were meant to.
She wondered if Mrs. Quinlan liked all the company, the comings and goings of relatives she didn’t even know, or if she merely saw it as a duty. Nora knew they all paid Mrs. Quinlan something, whatever they could afford, but even so. She herself wouldn’t have been able to stand it. She felt guilty in a way she hadn’t before, for staying here. She and Theresa weren’t family. Charlie had joked about the inconvenience of Babs coming unannounced to dinner. Imagine what they said about strangers who just showed up and stayed.
There were bowls of turnips and carrots and peas on the table, and a platter of white fish. For dessert, Mrs. Quinlan gave them each a baked apple with vanilla ice cream on top.
She scooped the ice cream from a cardboard drum right there in front of them, and when she reached the bottom, she sent her son to fetch more from the icebox. Nora had never known anyone who kept ice cream in the house. It seemed a luxury beyond imagining.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you both to meet my friend Mrs. Byrne,” Mrs. Quinlan said. “I’ve sorted something out for you with her. She’s the busiest seamstress in Dorchester. She can use your help. The Irish still teach needlework to girls in school, don’t they?”
“Yes ma’am,” Nora said. “Thank you.”
“I hope to find work as a teacher,” Theresa said. “A friend of mine is going to be a teacher in New York.”
Conversations around the table grew quiet. Nora stared at her sister, her own face going red. Theresa ought to have said thank you and left it at that. The audacity of her.
Mrs. Quinlan was dismissive, cool. “That would take a lot more schooling than you’ve had, I’m sure.”
Now the old woman, Aunt Nellie, spoke up. “I worked in the mills when I was young. My husband, God rest his soul, swept up peanut shells at Fenway Park in summer and shoveled coal into the furnace of the hospital up the road in winter. He dug subway tunnels and was happy for the work. I swear he died from whatever he breathed in down there.”
Nora knew what the women were trying to say. They didn’t think Theresa should want so much so soon. She agreed with them. But this was the only good reason she had for being here.
She looked over at Charlie. He was chewing his dessert with his mouth wide open.
It took every bit of courage Nora had to say, “My sister was recommended to the teacher’s college in Limerick. She’s finished secondary school.”
“Is that right?” Mrs. Quinlan said. She looked impressed. “I was a nurse for years myself. But I know a lot of teachers. Maybe I can talk to a few people. You could earn your certificate in the evenings. If you’ve gotten that far already, it wouldn’t take long.”
Nora smiled, with gratitude big enough for them both, since Theresa wouldn’t know there was anything to be grateful for.
“Thank you,” Nora said. “That would be grand.”
4
WHEN THERESA FLYNN was a child of seven, she mistook the Lives of the Saints, with its green leather cover and golden lettering, for a book of fairy stories. She spotted the thick volume on a high shelf in her grandmother’s room and read it straightaway. She fell in love with Saint Cecilia, a noblewoman who became the patron saint of musicians, among the most famous of the Roman martyrs. In the year 180, she was stabbed three times in the neck with a sword but lived for three more days, time enough to ask the pope to convert her home into a church.
Theresa loved Saint Seraphia, a devout orphan who refused to marry, sold all her possessions and gave the money to the poor, then sold herself into slavery, eventually converting her master. When they threw her into the fire for her faith, she would not burn. Theresa loved Saint Catherine Labouré, a French nun in the nineteenth century, who had a vision of the Virgin Mary telling her, God wishes to charge you with a mission. You will be contradicted, but do not fear; you will have the grace to do what is necessary. Tell your spiritual director all that passes within you. Times are evil in France and in the world.
How often had Theresa read those words to her uninterested family. Again and again, she told them how Saint Catherine woke one night and heard the voice of a child calling her to a chapel. There, the Virgin presented herself in an oval of light, standing upon a globe, surrounded by stars. She instructed Saint Catherine to ensure that the image was placed on medallions that would bring good graces to all who wore them. These became the Miraculous Medals, the oval trinkets carried or stowed in a drawer by every woman they knew. Theresa was awake many nights thinking about Saint Catherine’s incorruptible body, so holy that it never decomposed after her death.
She paid no attention to the male saints. She cared only for the women, the way most girls loved the princess in a story and hardly noticed the prince. As she read, Theresa saw how many of these brave and righteous women had been nuns.
An older cousin of hers, Mary Dolan, was a nurse with the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin. Theresa knew that under Mary’s wimple lay a mass of thick brown curls, which were somehow more beautiful to her in their invisibility than anything her eyes could behold. Mary came home only once, for her sister Annabelle’s funeral. Theresa just gazed at her as if she were a film star.
“I’m going to be a nun too one day,” she said.
As she grew up, she noted that most of the nuns she met were nothing like the ones in her stories. The nuns at the convent school had foul breath and saggy arms. They would sooner sprout wings than endure flames or stab wounds in the name of devotion. When Sister Florence thwacked Theresa across the head with a rolled-up copy of the Clare Champion for talking in class, there was nothing saintly in it.
Magdalene nuns ran the orphanage in Cloonanaha. Their father had threatened to send them all there on some occasion or another. And so, from a young age, Theresa was terrified of the place.
Later she read about the scandals throughout history. About the ancient aristocrats who moved their daughters into the convent only because it was a more affordable alternative to a dowry. About poor Arcangela Tarabotti, forced into monasticism like many others in the seventeenth century because she was disabled. About the Medicis, and the lay nuns called skivvies, who were made to be servants to the dowried nuns.
But it was none of this that deterred her. Only that at some point, Theresa discovered boys. She tucked away her dream then, as if it were any other childish thing, a stuffed toy or a soft baby blanket, designed to be cherished and then forgotten.
—
With her gran’s permission, Theresa brought the Lives of the Saints to America. She kept the book by her bed in the room she and Nora shared on the second floor of Mrs. Quinlan’s house. It was a simple space with three small beds, one of which remained empty. There were two dressers, a closet. The walls were painted a plain cream color. Nora said it would be rude to ask whether they could hang anything.
Babs McGuire had laughed when Theresa told her this. Babs was her favorite person in Boston. Theresa adored her from the start. On one of the first nights they met, over dinner at the house, Babs told Theresa that she worked as a lady’s maid for a well-to-do family in Chestnut Hill. Every winter they went to Florida and Babs got to go along.
“I just do the nice work,” she said. “I don’t have to scrub pots and clean up the way a scullery maid does. The women of the family treat me like one of their own.”
“The only one of their o
wn who happens to work for a living,” Lawrence said.
Babs ignored him. She said most of her friends worked in grand houses in Newton or Brookline. They made good money cooking and cleaning. Instead of having to pay room and board, they lived with the families they served.
“It’s the best job a girl can have. It gives her a skill. She gets her independence, no one looking over her shoulder every minute, telling her what to do.”
“It sounds lovely,” Theresa said.
“An awful lot of rich people have live-in housekeepers, a cook, a lady’s maid. I’m sure you could get hired on by someone.”
“Theresa’s going for her teaching certificate,” Mrs. Quinlan said. “In the meantime, she has a fine job already.”
Theresa would have loved to be a maid in the meantime, but like everything else, her job was decided for her long before she arrived.
She spent her days in a small seamstress’s shop, sewing hems or stepping behind the curtain to measure bulging waistlines and pale legs covered in blue veins. She listened to women complain about their achy backs and their useless husbands and tried not to die from boredom. She sometimes missed the factory back home, where at least there were so many girls her age to talk to. All of them lined up at their machines in long white coats. They weren’t supposed to talk while they worked, but they had the lunch hour in the canteen to gossip and chat and buy biscuits and tea. At the end of a shift, they all got on their knees and said the rosary together.
Theresa told Babs about the great highlight of her short career at the factory, when they were given the task of making blouses for the Aer Lingus hostesses in Shannon. All she did was wind the yarn that would be placed in the knitting machines, but as she did it, Theresa thought about those young women who flew through the air, the life of adventure they led. The way the wool in her hands somehow bound her to them.
She told Babs how she envied the way women dressed in Boston. Everyone here seemed to have piles of clothes. In Ireland they only had a few different changes. She had arrived in America with just a small suitcase.
Babs brought over a bag containing a few of her old things.
“If you have two skirts, you’re in business,” she said, spreading an emerald green one out on Theresa’s bed. “You can wear them again and again, and if you change the blouse, no one will ever be the wiser.”
Babs brought forth a pink flowered shirtwaist with a convertible collar, a grosgrain ribbon belt. Theresa had seen her wearing it once and told her how much she loved it.
She squealed. She hugged Babs tight.
“Would you believe I got that at Filene’s Basement, half off?” Babs said.
Theresa said, “I’m putting it on right now and wearing it forever.”
She had never owned a dress that wasn’t handed down by her sister. And Nora’s taste was nothing like Babs’s. Nora liked a dress that would last. Something sensible. She didn’t care what they were wearing in the magazines.
“We girls who come here alone must stick together,” Babs said. She lowered her voice. “How do you think your sister’s getting on? She’s so quiet, it’s hard to tell what she’s like. I want to get to know her. I guess we’ll be family soon.”
“I don’t know about that,” Theresa said.
Babs frowned. “What do you mean? They’re engaged, aren’t they?”
“I suppose.”
Theresa thought Nora was too serious a girl for Charlie Rafferty, too special. Going together was one thing. But marriage! He wanted to be married the minute Nora stepped off the boat. Mrs. Quinlan was always pushing them to book the church. But Nora kept finding reasons to wait. Theresa didn’t believe she loved him.
Nora was only fun when she wasn’t nervous, and since they arrived in Boston, she was nervous all the time. The best version of her appeared when they were alone in their bedroom in the evenings, and even then not very often. She bossed Theresa no end. She always had, but it was worse now than ever.
Nora chastised her for wearing lipstick and for traipsing over cobblestones in heels. When Theresa mentioned that it seemed like Mrs. Quinlan’s husband didn’t do much but sit in the parlor and read all day, Nora hissed, “Don’t go repeating that.”
“I wasn’t going to repeat it, I only told you. Who would I repeat it to?”
Nora got flustered when she asked too many questions. At home Theresa’s precocious inquiries were indulged, even encouraged, especially by her father when he was in a particular mood. But here she was a guest. Her sister liked her to remember it.
—
“A girl’s first Dudley Street dance is a rite of passage,” Babs declared over dinner a month after they’d arrived. “How have we not taken you yet? We’ll all go on Thursday.”
Theresa was delighted. She counted down the days. Even Nora seemed to pep up some when Thursday came.
“Try this lipstick,” Theresa said before they left. “You’d look good in pink.”
“I wouldn’t,” Nora said. But then she ran the color over her lips.
“Beautiful!” Theresa said.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” Nora said, as if it had been her idea.
Thursday was maid’s night out. It thrilled Theresa to see the girls pouring from the train station in their skirts and blouses, in groups of three or four. She envied them their friendships and their freedom. She didn’t know another girl her age in all of Boston. She missed her friends from home and the girls she had met on the boat.
After that first time, Babs took them to the dances every week. There were three halls to choose from on Dudley Street. Theresa was partial to the Intercolonial. They played some rock and roll, but mostly the songs were Irish. Accordions, fiddles, banjo, uilleann pipes. The first waltz started promptly at eight. Couples floated in a circle around the room, the crowd of dancers growing denser as the night wore on. By eleven o’clock, you could hardly move.
Back home, Theresa cycled two miles to a dance in the parochial hall and paid five shillings to see all the same boys she had seen there the week before. She had enjoyed those country dances when she didn’t know any better. But after Dudley Street, she couldn’t imagine ever going to one of them again.
On her fifth visit to the Intercolonial, she met Walter McClain. He had a face like Clark Gable. A mischievous smile. Hair so dark black and shiny that it could have been patent leather. After she danced with him once, Theresa felt sure she would marry him. The light touch of his fingers on her back filled her body with delight. He was twenty-four, seven years older than she was. He was a junior executive at the Boston Edison plant, not far from where she lived. He said he had never been to the Intercolonial before that night. His friends at work had tried to get him to Dudley Street in the past, but he refused.
“It must have been written in the stars,” he said, and she felt so grateful, to God or to chance—imagine if he had come sooner, met a different girl.
“That one looks like trouble,” Nora said, which made Theresa like him even more.
He wasn’t there the next time or the time after that. Theresa danced with other boys, and with her sister, but she had her eye on the door. Sometimes Charlie and Lawrence and their brother Matthew came along, or Bobby Quinlan, with those big white teeth that put her in mind of a cartoon shark.
On what would be their last visit, it was just the girls—Nora and Theresa and Babs. Theresa watched as a handsome young sailor spun her sister around the room, Nora’s brown hair flying behind her. She had forgotten what a good dancer Nora was. She hadn’t seen her sister dance since Charlie went away.
That next weekend, Lawrence and Babs got married. After passing out cold at his own wedding, Lawrence found the local chapter of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association.
Nora said Lawrence had tried it before, back home, and failed. Babs told Theresa in confidence that she hoped he’d fail again, and soon. Lawrence wouldn’t let her go to the dances anymore. She was only allowed to go to PTAA table quizzes and talent shows with him
, where the women sipped apple juice and talked about the Lord.
That left Nora to accompany Theresa to Dudley Street, but Nora refused no matter how she begged.
“We can’t go, just me and you.”
“Why not? You had fun.”
“I don’t have time for that nonsense.”
“Why?”
“Theresa, please stop asking me about it.”
“You just want me to be miserable. A miserable old crone,” Theresa said.
Nora’s voice turned sharp. “Not everything is about you.”
She could tell then that there was something Nora wasn’t saying, but she knew that, as with most secrets, her sister would keep it to herself.
Theresa missed every last lovely thing about the dances. Handing her fifty-cent admission to the doorman, climbing the two flights up to the hall. The girls in their skirts and sweaters lined up on benches along one wall, and the boys standing against the opposite, hands folded behind their backs. For a while, they’d just stare across at one another, the air buzzing with hope and fear and possibility. Theresa’s stomach was full of jitters as she wondered whether one of those boys might cross the room and ask her to dance. She would dance with anyone, if he was handsome enough. Even though her heart was with Walter.
She tried to behave. To fill her evenings listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the wireless, or studying her books. She sometimes sat beside old Aunt Nellie after dinner, as she spread her prayer cards out on the dining room table, deciding who needed which one tonight. Theresa’s grandmother had a similar collection, each printed with an oil painting of a saint or a religious scene on one side and a prayer for a particular worry or hardship on the other.
Aunt Nellie’s cards came in a bright blue box, the words Saints for All Occasions printed in gold foil on the cardboard cover. Theresa flipped through them, memorizing each one. Prayer for a Pet. Prayer for Widows. Prayer in Time of Economic Hardship. Prayer for a Safe Return Home. Prayer for Grace. For Students. For Patience. For Divine Mercy. Prayer to a Guardian Angel.
Saints for All Occasions Page 5
