So Far Away (9780316202466)

by Moore, Meg Mitchell

  Even if nobody ever reads this, even if I hide this in a box and hide the box somewhere in the house and nobody finds it, it will be enough for me to know that the story has been told.

  You could say there were lots of things that led to what happened.

  But it all started on Christmas Eve, 1925, so I will begin my story there.

  “Here’s where I stopped,” whispered Natalie. It seemed appropriate suddenly to whisper.

  “Okay,” Neil whispered back.

  This is what I remember. Christmas Eve, cold, and the wind coming off the Merrimac, hard and driving, blowing my hair back from my face. I was Bridget O’Connell then, hatless, and gloveless too, and late to boot. I walked as quickly as I could, and every so often I attempted to break into a run. But I had hurt my ankle the day before, twisting it on the servant stairs, and now it was tender and swollen and I could run only a step or two before the pain forced me to slow.

  There was a song going round and round in my head. I saw three ships come sailing in, come sailing in, come sailing in…

  Anna played that song over and over again on the Victrola, she’d been playing it since the beginning of December, and I, despite my determination not to love anything that Anna loved, had grown very fond of it.

  I turned from the post office onto State Street, past the shops and on toward the dignified homes, then onto High Street. It was just past two in the afternoon, but I could feel the darkness coming on already, the evening rushing to overtake the day.

  Of course I wasn’t meant to be calling her Anna, I was meant to call her Mrs. Turner, and I did, to her face, but in private I called her Anna. Because despite what Anna, with her volunteer work, with her letter writing, with her morning naps, thought, the two of us were more equal than anyone wanted to believe. I knew that.

  And Charles should have been Dr. Turner, but in my dreams he was Charles. There were many of those dreams, and they were secret, so secret I hadn’t told anyone, not my dear friend Norah, who worked in service for a wealthier family a quarter of a mile away, not my sister Grainne, who had encouraged me to come over from Ireland and who was married to a Cork boy and living, chubby and complacent, in Lynn.

  I saw three ships come sailing in…

  One time I came into the parlor to dust and saw Anna dancing the baby around while that song played. She was singing too. I had never heard Anna sing. She had a beautiful voice, lovely and sure. This was a surprise because I loved to sing, and I sang throughout much of my workday, and more than once I encountered Anna’s stare as she came around the corner. The Protestants, my mother told me, didn’t care for music the way the Catholics did.

  The baby, James, was laughing with his mouth wide open so I could see the little stumps of teeth that were beginning to come in. When I entered, Anna stopped, and James stopped laughing, and for a second both regarded me seriously, as though I had walked in through the wall. Then the baby put his fat dimpled arms out to me and made the little mooing sound he sometimes made. Anna handed him to me and swept out of the room, shaking her skirts.

  It was nothing, really, an incident that should have been easily forgotten, an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. And yet after that time I found I often thought of that, of the way Anna looked with her head thrown back, her hair coming loose from the pins. I could see the girl Anna might have been not so long ago. I could see, however briefly, the girl Charles had fallen in love with.

  That was a few weeks ago, of course. Before I found the blood on the sheets.

  Natalie’s fingers were starting to cramp: she never wrote this much by hand, almost everything she did for school was on the computer. She hadn’t written this much since second grade, Mrs. Foster’s class. She remembered the teacher’s fleshy neck and the way she opened her mouth really wide when she laughed. Natalie’s other hand held the notebook open, while Neil ran his forefinger down the page as he worked out the words.

  “Okay?” said Neil.

  “Yes,” she said. She shook her fingers to loosen the muscles. “Keep going.”

  Ah, Charles had said when I first arrived at their home, a Bridget named Bridget. Because that was the name they gave to all the girls over from Ireland, they called them all Bridgets, and while I should have been able to laugh that off, the terrible coincidence of my name, the way it made something I always thought was individual to me common and everyday, I often felt a flame of anger when I heard it. How funny, Charles said. We got the actual Bridget! The real thing. But he hadn’t sounded mean when he said that, the way some might, there was something kind behind his eyes when they caught mine.

  Christmas Eve, then. I forced myself to walk faster. All that way to the post office and back on a sore ankle. Underneath my stockings the ankle was swollen and purplish blue, and the buckle pressed into the tender skin in just the wrong place. But there was a letter from home for me, and that made it all worthwhile.

  I was tired, I remember that. I remember so much about that day, and the weeks and months that followed, and yet I can’t remember what I did last Christmas. I am sure my son Patrick, who is a brain surgeon, would have some sort of explanation for that.

  Natalie put the pencil down and flexed her hand. It hurt.

  “You okay?” asked Neil.

  “Well,” she said, “not really, no.” She made a fist, released it, made another fist. “I’m not sure I can keep writing.”

  “Kids these days,” said Neil. “Bunch of wimps.” But he smiled when he said that. “You know, when I was in college, one hundred and eighteen years ago, we had to write all of our exams in a little blue book. And I was an English major, so those were some long exams. Essay questions, all of them, hours and hours of writing. I remember I had a callus on my middle finger the size of a boulder. Well, never mind. I wonder if they still do that? No, there’s no way. Nobody would survive it.”

  “I don’t know,” said Natalie. College seemed impossibly far in the future.

  “You know what?” said Neil. “Forget the writing. You look like your hand is about to fall off. Why don’t I read, and you just listen. We’ll transcribe it another time.”

  “Okay,” said Natalie.

  I had risen at five that morning, which was half an hour earlier than I normally rose. Because of the holiday there was plenty to do. Besides the usual—the table to set, the breakfast to prepare, the beds to air out and make once the family had risen—there was Christmas baking to finish and a spit-and-shine all over the house, for there were guests expected that evening, Dr. Turner’s family coming up from Boston. His difficult, beautiful sister, Elsie, and her husband.

  At last I arrived at the house after my trip to the post office. There was Anna, standing in the doorway. Two of the children were swirling around her, pulling on her skirts, and in her arms she held James. The older two were Harry and Edward. So many boys! Boys everywhere in this house. I remember that when I arrived the previous March, still woozy from the ship, and from the trip up from Boston, I was unprepared for all of this masculinity; I hardly knew what to do with it. My home back in Kerry was dominated by women, even after Grainne departed for America: my mother, sharp-tongued and assertive; my sisters Fiona and Claire; and little baby Siobhan, who was no longer a baby, really, because she had just turned five, but in my mind a baby she would remain forever.

  In the presence of so many females, my father, with his wide, freckled cheeks, his work-worn hands, seemed to fade and recede, year by year, into the background.

  But these boys, the Turner boys! They frightened me. They had their father’s quick dark eyes, and his lean build, and the oldest one, Harry, had a way of looking at you that made him seem far older than his years. It could set your teeth on edge, that look.

  Edward was more physical. Once he bit me on the leg so hard I bled.

  The baby was different. I loved James unwaveringly. I loved his fat pudding face. I loved to bury my face in the warm folds of his neck and blow gently, and I loved the eruption of a laugh that cam
e from deep in his belly when I did that. That I could feel such love for someone I bore no relation to was a fact that astonished me. But there it was.

  Here’s something nobody in the Turner home knew: in the middle of the night I woke and tiptoed down the steps from my attic room and into James’s room. Every night I did this; despite the fatigue, something pulled me to James’s room. I checked the rail of the crib to make sure it was fastened tight. I checked the windows to make sure they were closed and locked. And then I stole back to my room, barely breathing, lest Dr. Turner or Anna emerge from their room and see me in the hallway.

  Why did I do this? I don’t know. But somehow James felt as close to me as he would have had I given birth to him myself. And I to him, I believed that, which made what happened later all the more unspeakable.

  “What happened?” asked Natalie. “What’s she mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Already, at nine months, though he could not yet walk, James showed signs of being a dexterous climber. He had ways of pulling himself up and over things, belly first, his whole chubby face intent on gaining the object he desired. He had a fire in him, and I felt a responsibility to keep him safe from himself until he was old enough to spot the dangers in the world on his own. Soon he would walk, and then he would run, and then he would no longer be a baby. My baby. That’s how I thought of him! As mine. Can you imagine if Anna knew I thought of him that way?

  There was a game we used to play where James crawled away from me outside his bedroom, looking back to see if I was following, laughing when I did. Sometimes I crawled too, and that made him laugh even harder.

  Anna was horrified the time she caught us playing that game. “Bridget!” she said. “Whatever are you doing?” Her lips had gone cold and white.

  I righted myself, standing and smoothing out my skirts, straightening my hair, forcing my expression from laughter into gravity. “Oh, we are only playing, ma’am. No harm in it.” A latent giggle exploded from James, and he looked from one of us to the other: were we still playing?

  “Only playing! No harm in it! He could have fallen right down the front stairs.”

  I felt my face grow warm. “I wouldn’t let that happen, ma’am. I always catch him in time.”

  “I should think you’d know better.” Anna’s face hardened. “Even you.” His mother’s harsh tone and the fact that the game had stopped conspired to make James start crying. Anna went on: “Maybe it’s done differently in Ireland, but in America we protect our children from harm.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, looking down. “That’s the same as we do in Ireland.”

  “Tell me, Bridget. Did you grow up in a home with stairs?”

  I shook my head.

  “I didn’t think so. Did you grow up in a home with a stove? With automobiles driving outside on the street? With a river within walking distance?”

  No.

  “Then you don’t know. You can’t know. The dangers we face—”

  “We have the hearth fire, ma’am,” I said. “There’s plenty of danger there.” I meant that sincerely, but I knew as soon as I said it that Anna would take it as impudence.

  “The hearth fire,” spat Anna. “Hardly the same.”

  After that, Anna made Dr. Turner fashion a wooden gate to go against the front stairs. The gate had a small hook that fastened into a ring on one side of the stairs, and you had to lift the ring out of the hook to open the gate and insert it again to close the gate.

  “Can’t have the doctor’s son taking a tumble, can we?” Dr. Turner had said when he nailed the thing together. He winked at me when he said that. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make light of what he thought was a necessary precaution, to make me feel better about things, or if he truly thought Anna was making a lot out of nothing. Either way I was glad of his winking, and when he smiled at me after I felt something drop in my stomach: an unfamiliar sensation to which I couldn’t give a name.

  Back to Christmas Eve, then, and me coming in from the post office. I could see by Anna’s face that I was in trouble. This was not unexpected. I felt the letter in my coat pocket, caressed the corner of the envelope. Anna began talking even before I reached the doorway so the effect was that of watching a film from the street, with Anna as the actor. I had been to see The Gold Rush with a couple of the Kerry girls earlier in the year at the Strand on Pleasant Street, and that’s where I got the comparison. There’s no theater there anymore, of course, but when I walk by the spot where it was, on my way to where the post office now stands, I still remember how we laughed and laughed, the girls and I.

  As I drew closer I could begin to make out the words. The beds, something about the beds. I felt my cheeks heat up. I had forgotten to do the beds! Anna’s face was red, and there was an angry squiggle in the center of her forehead. The anger made Anna uglier, and I took some pleasure in that, for she was not a very beautiful woman to begin with.

  “Bridget! It’s Christmas Eve. We’ll soon have the house filled up with visitors—” Here Anna paused to shake Harry off her skirt, and he looked at her, wounded and befuddled, and began to cry. “And I can’t get anything done with the children here, not a single thing. You must know that.”

  I did know. I thought of my mother back in Kerry, in our cramped little home, so different from the homes here in America. Back there the roof had only recently been thatched. The lot of us were stuffed in so tightly that I knew my sisters’ smells, the sounds they made while they slept, their wishes and disappointments, as well and maybe better than I knew my own. Our dear mother! Poor, yes. Hardworking, certainly. Tired, much of the time. But not angry like this. Never pinched and angry, like Anna.

  James reached his arms toward me, his plump, delicious arms. When I was alone with him, I pretended to eat them and he laughed and laughed. He was a great one for laughing, James, and his laughter was the brightest part of my day. James, and then the master, of course, Charles, Dr. Turner. I smiled.

  “Bridget! Faster. What are you smiling about, then?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. I didn’t know I was.” I walked up the steps. I had swept those steps that morning, as the sun was just beginning to rise. I had been awake for so long that that seemed like yesterday. I was often so tired at the Turners’ house, and the work was so monotonous, and so physically demanding, that the days melted into one another, one task becoming the next, infusing even my dreams with their tedium.

  I think a few things led to what happened. The first is how much I loved the baby. James. I loved that baby so much that I never thought I could love another baby in the same way, even when I had my own not so long after that. I did, of course, love mine as much, but I didn’t know if I would.

  The baby, my baby, was also named James.

  “What?” said Natalie. “I don’t understand.” Once she had stopped trying to write down what Neil was saying, his reading picked up pace; Kathleen had been right, he was a genius at this, reading through the spidery writing just as easily as most people read through the newspaper. How’d he do it? She didn’t know. But she felt as though this was a real, honest-to-God story, something true and dramatic, not just a dusty notebook from the bowels of her basement. When was the last time an adult had read something to her? When had her parents stopped reading to her at bedtime? When she learned to read herself, she supposed, kindergarten, first grade. Had she been on her own at bedtime that long? She supposed she had. This realization was suddenly woeful and telling to her, a signal of the end of her childhood that she hadn’t noticed enough to mourn.

  “I don’t understand either,” said Neil. “But I bet if we keep going, it will all become clear. You game?”

  “Yup,” said Natalie. “I’m game.”

  I have never spoken of the events of that time, the winter of 1925 and the spring of 1926, to anyone. Declan knew what happened, of course, but he never asked me to talk about it, and so I never did. He was wonderful that way, the sort of husband you wish for your daughters: ki
nd and loyal and unwavering.

  It is funny which memories your mind keeps and which it discards.

  I remember—I will always remember—the shoes that Elsie wore to dinner on Christmas Eve in 1925. They had silver buckles. I had never seen anything like those shoes.

  After all that happened later, I forgot the shoes; I forgot nearly everything about Elsie and Arthur. Or if it wasn’t forgetting, exactly, it was a pushing down of certain details, a burying. I didn’t think consciously about Elsie or her beautiful and ridiculous costume until very recently, long after those fashions had gone out of style, when I came across a pair of similar shoes in the window of an antiques store in New York City. Funny, said one of the women I was with, how something that used to be current fashion can become an antique! Something that was fashionable in our lifetime.

  I thought I heard once that in order for something to be considered an antique it had to be one hundred years old or older, but I didn’t say anything. The woman—her name was Helen—was close to my age, and I did not know her well. We came together on a bus trip, one of those excursions planned for groups of older women who have lost their husbands and are looking for some way to pass their time.

  Yes, I said, I suppose everything becomes an antique eventually, and I sighed in a world-weary way that was meant to mask the thumping in my chest, the sudden rush of blood to my cheeks.

  This was… oh, a couple of years ago. I was, as I am now, gray, veined, a widow, my Irish accent greatly diluted from years and years of living away, dressed in a cardigan and sensible slacks: the uniform of my current life, but with a new blouse underneath the cardigan in honor of the bus trip to New York City.

  I must have had a look of some consternation on my face because the young woman who was in charge of the trip took my elbow and asked if I was all right. This young woman, Nell, was cheerful and freckled, with a wide, moonlike face and curly reddish hair held back with a headband. She could have been a girl from the village, she could have been that, swinging around in a ceili, though her feet turned in when she walked. Back in Ireland in my day, they’d put your shoes on the wrong feet on purpose to correct that; there was a whole family, the Murphys, walking around with their shoes on the opposite feet.