A Moment in the Sun (89 page)

“None will be my age, either.”

“Ye look no older than ye are,” says Grania, pulling the laces taut and tying them off. “Turn sideways—there, d’ye see?”

“Hand me the waist.”

“Yer not wearin the plain one—”

“And why not?”

“Because yer going to see the Elephant, not to a temperance meeting.” Grania pulls her own striped blouse from the peg beneath Father’s fading portrait of Parnell. “This might fit ye.”

“The Elephant burned down, and I’ll not wear that, whether it fits me or not.”

“Ye liked it when ye bought it for me.”

“It’s too flossy for a woman of my—” she is about to say age, but that isn’t it. They bought it from a jewcart because it looked like the one Grania had admired in a store window on Grand Street, the three of them out dream-shopping together one night when Brigid wasn’t too tired. But the material is not the same and up close you can tell that it is only an imitation.

“Ye have to wear somethin.”

“Give me the black.”

“That ye wore for Father’s funeral?”

“It’s the best I own.”

“But—”

“Black will set her hair off,” says Maeve, putting the mirror down and hurrying to the dresser. Trying to spare her feelings, it’s clear, but Brigid appreciates the effort. Maeve jiggles the broken drawer till it opens, then pulls out the blouse, black bombazine with vertical pleats that Mother brought from Donegal.

“And it goes with my skirt—”

“He’ll take one peep,” says Grania, sighing with exasperation, “and offer his condolences.”

“One more word,” says Brigid in the tone that Mother would use when she’d had her limit with them, “and I’ll jerk a knot in ye.” She feels a fool, standing there in corset and gauze stockings, girding herself for an excursion with a man she hardly knows, and her sister’s mockery on top of it—

Maeve has to climb on a chair to deal with her hair, plaiting it first then artfully piling it over the pompadour frame on the crown of her head. She does it with the same nimble care as when she hung the cloth to cover the grimy walls, as she applies to the funeral wreaths assembled by lamplight each evening after school. “
A dexthrus hand
,” Father used to say. “
She’ll earn a handsome wage someday
.”

“If ye had a poof,” says Grania, “ye could wear it higher.”

“Any higher and I’ll topple from the weight of it. And I haven’t even got the shoes on yet.”

Rivka who scrubs with her at the Musee has loaned her the shoes, calf-high leather with a heel as long as her middle finger.

“They’ll shape up your legs,” she said, winking. “Just in case he gets a gander at em.”

Brigid can’t bend over with the corset on so Maeve kneels to button them up.

There is much discussion over the hat, ending with Grania allowing her the simple black straw as long as Maeve is allowed to decorate it with ribbon and rosettes. Grania studies Brigid’s face as she buttons her collar tight.

“Ye should do yer lips over.”

“I’m a working woman,” says Brigid, “not a streetwalker.”

“It’s not who ye are, it’s the idea of ye they carry in their heads.”

“And what do you know about men?”

Grania sneaks out with older ones, girls sixteen and seventeen with money from their shops and lunchrooms, and Brigid has warned her and threatened her and pleaded with her not to be so fast, to enjoy what she can of life before giving up to the hard weight of family the way that Mother did, just a girl herself when Brigid was born. Mother who was wore out at thirty when they took the boat, and dead within the year.

“I know enough,” says Grania. “Take a few steps and lookit yerself.”

Grania holds the mirror for her and she totters around a bit, getting used to the shoes.

“You look lovely,” says Maeve, on the chair again to pin the newly adorned hat to Brigid’s hair. “Like a queen.”

Brigid turns to kiss her cheek. “Yer a darlin to say so. But I don’t feel like meself at all.”

“It’s only a different you,” says Grania, taking her hand. “A special you.”

“You’ll have a grand time,” says Maeve. “Ride the wheel, shoot the chutes—”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Neither of the girls has ever been to Coney, and Brigid only the once with Mick Cassiday the bricklayer who was so full that halfway through the day he pulled her out on the crowded beach and proceeded to fall asleep right on the sand, herself sitting on his little square of a handkerchief till his snoring attracted a gang of little mischief-makers and she took the steamer back alone.

“It’ll be loads of fun whatever you do.”

Brigid turns her head this way and that, studying the damage in the ancient looking glass. “Fun,” she says, “has nothing to do with this.”

The girls accompany her down the five dark flights and watch from the stoop as she starts down 38th toward the river in her borrowed shoes. Father stood that way, watching them when Maeve went to make her First Communion, chuffed with pride but firm in his promise never to set foot in a priest-house again after the way they’d banjaxed the great Parnell. A trio of cadets lounging at the corner make their kissing noises at her but stay where they are. After the one incident when Grania was little, words mostly, but words a young girl shouldn’t be hearing, Father had asked a few of the lads from the Clan na Gael to come by and remind the gang they weren’t the only Hibernians in the city with some clout behind them. Since then it’s been the occasional dirty-mouthed pleasantry, but never a hand laid on any one of them.

Harry offered to come for her, of course, gentleman that he is, but if the sight of her wreck of a tenement on Battle Row didn’t chase him the Gopher boys surely would. He’d have given her trolley fare too, if she’d asked, but the boldness of it, asking a man for coins in the hand, made her blush at the thought. American girls could manage such things—Grania was full of stories how’d they’d get this one or that one to treat them, how they did the town and never parted with a cent. Brigid turns left on Ninth, weaving through the crowds and pushcarts of Paddy’s Market, trolley cars rushing overhead, each shopkeeper with a barker in the doorway shouting out wares and prices, scullery maids searching for bargains for their mistresses, dray wagons empty and full rattling up and down the Avenue. The shoes aren’t as bad as she thought, only a matter of leaning forward on her toes, but the corset is a mortification. It is a warm day, and even in the shade under the shop awnings or the Elevated tracks Brigid is soon damp all over, sweat running down her forehead, and begins to feel resentful. This is it, she thinks. Our only adventure, our great single drama in life over in a flash, and then motherhood and the labor of home until the grave. Mr. Manigault is stepping into a hack about now, she imagines, comfortable in his clothing and not a worry on his brow. No wonder the men in Bunbeg were known to wait till their first gray whisker before they married, no wonder the silver-haired gents in the offices she cleans are full of laughter and boasting. Even Rivka’s own intended, a Second Avenue sport Brigid has never liked the look of, nipping off to this new war as if it is a weekend excursion. Her collar is choking her.

Brigid pauses a moment at the corner of 24th Street. Father died here. Scraping horse-pies off the stones, the job his cousin Jack Brennan high in the Twentieth Ward Democrats had secured him, and a pair of university boys racing their phaetons, Father able only to stand and face them and hope they’d pass on either side. The Brotherhood had paid for the funeral, so the eulogies quickly turned to calls for Home Rule and the expulsion of Tory landlords.

“Saint Patrick drove the first nest of serpents from Ireland,” said Jack Brennan, mourning band on his arm and golden harp pinned to his lapel, “and it’s our lot to finish the job!”

Brigid has gone to a few of the IRB dances and thrilled to hear Maud Gonne, tall and elegant, scold the British in her triumph at the Grand Opera Hall, but the blighted nation’s problems are not hers anymore. If she woke tomorrow with Mount Errigal itself looming outside the cottage window she’d throw the blanket back over her head and pray for the nightmare to end.

“
The most beautiful spot in the world
,” Mother would sigh. “
But beauty never filled a stomach
.”

He’d been trampled into the stones, Father, first the hooves and then the carriage wheels. Brigid had been called away from work to identify his remains.

She turns west, breathing through her mouth as the stench from the slaughterhouses thickens the air, hurrying now, afraid he’ll be there early and give up on her, looking out for the Tenth Avenue cowboys, young lads who ride up and down ringing their bells to warn of an approaching freight train, then high-stepping over the tracks and there are others now, the girls all putting on style in bright colors and gaudy hats, American girls by the ease of their movement, people joining in streams from north and south, a human flood driving shoulder to shoulder toward the pier, crowded like the flocks of sheep that follow their belled Judas to be butchered at 42nd. Grania was right, she thinks, among this lot I look like a grieving widow and an old one at that. There are some couples, but more groups of girls and groups of young men, pairs, trios, quartets of them, laughing and shouting from group to group and now the smell of the river and thousands on the pier, it must be thousands.

“I’m an eejit,” Brigid says out loud, too late now to turn and fight the current of bodies. She can tell that every eye that falls on her sees nothing but a poor Irish scrubwoman from Hell’s Kitchen itself, an ignorant country
cailín
tarted up like a spud in a silk handkerchief.

“An eejit,” says Brigid McCool out loud. “And when he sees me he’ll know it for sure.”

It is more people in one place that he’s seen in his life. Harry is not a small man, but his view is blocked by any number of young giants with bowlers tilted high on their heads, and the hot, indecent human crush of them all, men and women together, has him anxious and wet-browed, struggling to keep his feet. This is not his crowd. Many, if not most, are younger, loudly dressed and raucous in their speech, a half-dozen foreign tongues as well as the grating New Yorkese shouted past him as he pushes through with his uneven gait and tries to locate her in the multitude. I’m the freak attraction they’ve come to see, he thinks, or merely an annoyance to be trodden underfoot in their rush for the pleasure boat.

And then there she is, striking in satiny black among the garish stripes and dots of the shouting girls, her glorious red hair pulled up on her head, a calm watcher amid the frenzy. Her smile when she sees him seems reserved and he feels his knees go watery with uncertainty. What can a woman like this see in hapless Harry Manigault?

“I’d almost given up on you,” she says when he reaches her.

“Next time I’ll come for you in a carriage,” he says, stomach tightening at his own boldness. As if he assumes there will be a next time.

“We’d better get on board.”

Harry holds up the tickets he’s bought, limp from the wet of his hands. “They said there’s another in twenty minutes.”

“It won’t be any less of a mob then.”

They walk side by side toward the gangplank, ropes narrowing into a chute, the crowd pressing in on them and Harry takes her arm, trying mightily to even his step and be the leader. The bored-looking ferryman yanks the tickets from his hand—

“Step to the rear, keep moving, step to the rear—”

They push their way to a spot on the starboard rail, bodies and noise all around them, and Harry is twisted with a sudden shyness.

“And how was your week?” he asks finally.

She gives him a sideways glance. “Thursday we polish the glassware,” she says, “and ye can stand or sit. I do look forward to a Thursday.”

He feels chastened by her tone. A cheer goes up, then, as the ferry horn blasts and the boat begins to churn the water, backing out of the slip.

“And yerself?” she asks.

“We made a story. Little boys fool their grandfather with a garden hose.”

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“That would be the French version.”

“Ah,” says Brigid, nodding her head. “If I had any French I would have known.”

She is mocking him, he knows, but in a gentle way.

“And yer machine is well?”

“I’ve been working on a swivel mount for the tripod. It would allow the camera body to be moved—”

“From side to side,” she interrupts, swiveling her head to take in all of the far shore, “like this.”

“Yes, actually, that would allow us to—”

“It would be grand,” she says. “I saw one that was the general who led the byes in Cuba, the fat man—”

“General Shafter—”

“—and he rides on the poor little horse across the variety screen and off into nowheres, not more than a few seconds—”

“Bill Paley shot that before he got sick and the device was damaged—”

“But where is he riding?
That’s
what we want to know. If you could turn the head—ye told me ye call it that—”

“We do—”

“—ye could follow him along the trail. Even—” and here she raises a finger, imagining the scene, “—swinging the camera view a
head
, and see if there’s any Spaniards up in the bushes waiting to do the man harm. I’d have me heart in me throat to see that.”

It shocks him sometimes, how much she understands his work, how interested in it she seems, and then he chides himself for seeing the cartoon and not the woman.

“I’ll have to bring you to the shop sometime,” he offers.

“I’m sure it could use a good cleaning.”

“I meant,” he has to look away, suddenly embarrassed, “I meant to talk to the boys. Your ideas.”

She says nothing, but slips her arm into his again. “Will ye look at Her-self, now.”

They are chugging past Liberty, gulls swooping around her handsome face.

“I saw the photographs when I was a boy. Postcards. But I must say, close up—”

“She came out of a fog.” Brigid turns to look after the statue. “We were all of us sick with the waves and sick with not knowing what was here for us and then Herself—” She shakes her head. “If it had been your eagle, or a man with a rifle in his arms—but one look at Her and I felt, all right now, Brigid McCool, this might turn out well. And then they took us there,” she points to the brick buildings on the low island beyond the Statue, “and they put a hook in me eyelid and peeled it back and asked Father a thousand questions, each one I was sure would be our undoing.”