A Song Across the Sea (13 page)

Deliberately ignoring him, she bent over her machine and started pumping on the treadle. The other machines resumed their buzz of activity as well, although every eye in the place was surreptitiously turned toward Van Zandt, waiting to see what he would do.

He stood there watching Tara for a few minutes, looking as if he was about to say something. Finally he stuffed the damp handkerchief back into his pocket and strode away.

•  •  •

With her first wages, Tara paid Delores for her lodging and purchased some writing paper and a pen. She’d borrowed stationery from a Carpathia passenger and sent a brief note to Aunt Bridey and Uncle Kevin soon after the tragedy, notifying them of Padraig’s death.

The letter she wrote to them now was longer, but it still omitted a few of the events she’d experienced in the New World. She told them that she’d found lodging in a respectable boarding house—giving them the address—and pleasant, well-paying work in a factory. This last was a gross exaggeration. Paying Delores the rent had made Tara keenly aware of the meagerness of her income as compared to her expenses. After covering room and board each month, there wouldn’t be much left over. It would take her awhile, even, to save up enough to pay Reece’s loan back.

It wasn’t pride that spurred her to stretch the truth. Her aunt and uncle loved her as one of their own, even if she was a bit independent for their liking. She didn’t want them worrying about her welfare in a foreign place so far from home. With their limited resources, they were powerless to help her anyway.

She left out any mention of how she’d slept outside under a wagon her first night in New York, or of fainting from hunger and allowing a strange man to help her. She didn’t tell them how much she hated her work at the factory.

Instead, she embroidered her letter with colorful descriptions of the people she’d met and the sights she’d seen, especially things she knew would make them laugh. “I haven’t encountered Her Duchess Miss Connelly,” she wrote, “though it’s not many mansions I’ve been in. Herself must live in a grander part of town, far removed from the little people.” She closed with: “Although I’m desperately sad about Paddy, you needn’t worry about me. I’m getting along quite well.”

She was a little more forthcoming about her unhappiness in the letter she wrote to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. “I sometimes think about savin’ the money and comin’ home, though there’s nothin’ there for me anymore. If this is all my life will come to in New York, sewing in a factory and coming home to an empty room, without the comfort of friends and neighbors around me…then I wonder why I left at all. What on earth was I thinking?”

Indeed, once the basic needs of food, lodging and work had been met, Tara fell prey to a stuporous melancholy which she knew was homesickness. She’d awaken in the dead of night with a start, imagining she was in her own bed at home in Ireland, hearing the ghostly clump-clumping sound of her mother churning butter in the kitchen downstairs and her father clearing his throat while he sat in his big leather chair, reading the evening newspaper.

It was worse than homesickness. She was pining for a home and for people who were no longer there.

Tara didn’t tell Mrs. O’Shaughnessy of the terrible dreams she’d been having about Padraig. She didn’t want to think about them herself.

She posted the letters and then strolled slowly back to the boarding house, thinking hard. Writing down her thoughts had helped put things into perspective. She was caught in the grip of the past like a bird trapped in a snare. She needed to break free from it, with a great heaving effort that would hurl her forward, into a new life of her own making. She’d surround herself with people, like that flaxen-haired German girl at the factory who sometimes smiled shyly at her. Maybe she would be friends with Tara.

And lads… Tara was increasingly aware of the appreciative looks that came her way from laborers digging ditches and laying bricks when she walked past them. With clean clothes and her thick hair brushed till it shone, she supposed she was not at all that bad to look at.

She remembered Dominic’s tingling kisses on the deck of the Titanic, and was seized with a desire to know that physical closeness with a man again. It was time to stop dreaming about the unattainable, unavailable Reece Waldron, who was always—accordin’ to Hap—off tinkerin’ with silly airplanes or—accordin’ to her own guesses—escorting his fiancée to dances and balls. She would put him out of her mind, she would.

•  •  •

It didn’t help that he came to dinner at the boarding house three nights later.

Her heart thudded dangerously in her chest when she saw him sitting at the table next to Hap, deeply engrossed in conversation with the older man.

“…and I hear the Russians have some big ones nearly ready for production. Big enough to carry a five-man crew.”

She’d never seen Reece was so animated, then had to laugh at herself for the thought. How often had she seen him anyway? How well did she really know him?

Hap, too, looked unusually jovial. These occasional visits from his friend must enliven his otherwise dull routine. Hap spent his days ambling crookedly around the boarding house, a hammer and screwdriver tucked into a leather pouch at his belt for the minor repairs he was often called upon to make. Had he always been a cripple? How had he gotten this way?

And where did Reece fit into the picture? The two men couldn’t be more dissimilar. The struggles Hap had endured in his life were clearly etched on his ruddy, good-natured face. From his speech, she guessed that he must come from what the Americans called, “the wrong side of the tracks.”

Reece, on the other hand, had obviously had a fine education and all the other benefits of money. Although there was nothing of the dandy of him, he wore his expensively casual clothes with the confident air of a man used to the best.

“What about the engine?” Hap wanted to know.

“100-horsepower Argus engines. Four of them. And there’ll even be compartments in the rear fuselage of the plane for eating and sleeping.”

Hap snorted forcefully. “Never happen. Too heavy to get off the ground.”

Delores ladled bean soup from a large enamel pot into her bowl and shook her head disapprovingly.

“And just as well, I think. Airplanes are dangerous toys for silly fools. I can’t imagine why the two of you get so excited about them.”

“Toys!” Reece was indignant. “Airplanes may not be good for much right now, but you just wait. Why, someday they’ll carry passengers and cargo all over the country—all over the world, even.”

Delores was unimpressed. “If man was meant to fly, God would have given him wings. You and your engineer friends are flying—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the face of nature.”

The rest of the boarders at the long wooden table sat in silence, uninterested in the conversation. It was little wonder, since most of them barely understood English. However, Tara did notice that another Irish immigrant, an annoyingly pert girl of twenty named Kathleen, kept shooting veiled glances in Reece’s direction. Tara doubted very much that it was the subject of airplanes that captured Kathleen’s attention.

“Do you know the U.S. Army has pilots flying airplanes?” demanded Reece.

“More nonsense,” said Delores. “And a waste of good money, besides. What good would airplanes be in a war?”

“They can fly over enemy positions and take pictures.”

Tara laughed out loud. “Sure and that would frighten the enemy, wouldn’t it? A madman in a flyin’ machine, swoopin’ down and snappin’ pictures of them. They’d probably turn their tails and run away.”

Reece looked momentarily offended, then broke into laughter. He tried for a retort, but couldn’t get the words out. Tara loved the way he looked when he laughed. His entire body shook with it.

Delores giggled delightedly, a surprisingly girlish sound coming from a woman of her mature years. “Now that Tara has explained it, Reece, I agree with you. Airplanes could be useful in a war.”

Hap, for his part, tried to suppress a smile. “I can see we’ll get no respect from the womenfolk at this table, Reece.”

Kathleen, at the far end of the table, unexpectedly piped up. “Tell me, don’t you ever get frightened when you’re way up there in the air?”

This question was aimed at Reece in something approaching a breathy squeal, along with a worshipful gaze. Tara could easily have slapped the girl at that moment.

Oblivious to Kathleen’s intentions, Reece took the question at face value and turned serious as he answered.

“No, not usually, although I have found myself occasionally in some sticky situations. But you have to understand what a complete…freedom you feel up there. The road you’re on is the entire sky. It’s so…wide open. You look down and see people the size of ants, crawling over the earth and never even realizing how big the world is.”

Kathleen appeared to be mesmerized. “I still think you’re very brave,” she cooed.

Reece, embarrassed, cleared his throat and twirled his spoon in his hand. “Oh, it’s not as exciting as all of that. Most of my time is spent on the ground, anyway, working on modifications. Only after all that do I get to take my planes up, to test them out.”

Kathleen wasn’t finished yet. “Maybe someday you could give me a ride in one of your airplanes. I think it would be—”—her voice dropped to a throaty whisper—”so thrilling.”

Reece shrugged. “Sure. If you think you’d like that.”

Tara could have kicked herself. Why hadn’t she thought to ask for a ride? In the next instant, however, pride reasserted itself. He was engaged to be married. She would not flutter her eyelashes and stare adoringly at him. If he could be indifferent to her, and not feel the same breathless lurch in his stomach that she did whenever they were in the same room, then she could force herself to be as cooly detached as he was.

Still, his presence at the table tonight only fanned the flames higher. Why didn’t he just stay away? She should have pleaded a headache and skipped dinner. Maybe up in her room, away from the very sight of him, she’d be able to concentrate on something else.

Hap and Reece excused themselves. Tara helped Delores clear the table. From the foul smell soon emanating from Delores and Hap’s apartment, he could tell that the two men were already sequestered in there, smoking cigars and talking, no doubt, about flying machines.

When the cleanup was finished Tara retired to her room to read a book she’d borrowed from Delores. “Leticia’s Folly” was an engrossing, somewhat farfetched tale set in the American west, sometime during the previous century. It did not contain, in Tara’s opinion, a satisfying number of cowboys, Indians and “shoot-outs,” but primarily concerned itself with the story of Leticia Morton, a proper young woman from New England who rode a train and various stage coaches to Wyoming to be a mail-order bride. When the lovely but flighty Leticia arrived in the dusty, tumbleweed town of Durkin, she was highly displeased with both the homely but kindly rancher who’d ordered her and the appallingly primitive conditions of the ranchhouse he’d built with his own two hands.

Tara’s nightly excursions into the book had already taken her well into the story. The betrothed Leticia, during her weekly visits to town to shop at the general store (with the homely rancher’s money) fell in love with a charming, unscrupulous gambler named Mack MacCracken. They conspired to renege on Leticia’s agreement with the ignorant, trusting but homely rancher and soon ran off together, leaving him brideless and humiliated.

Leticia’s life was glamorous enough at first. She and Mack paid for their stays in fine hotels with the gambling winnings he raked in, night after night in saloon after saloon. He dressed her up in the best clothes money could buy, and bought diamond studs to be set into earrings for her and a matching set for himself, for cuff links.

Before long, however, his luck turned south. He lost more than he won, started drinking heavily and swearing loudly and more than once staggered back to their hotel room just before dawn with smudges of rouge from a dance-hall girl’s cheek on his starched white shirt. He growled and snapped in a most ungentlemanly manner when Leticia sweetly inquired where he’d been all night, and with whom. The dastardly Mack would not even consider marrying Leticia and making an honest woman of her, even though he always signed hotel registries, “Mr. & Mrs. MacCracken.”

Tara knew that a dramatic showdown was near. Sure enough, the chapters she read that night chronicled a poker game culminating in MacCracken’s card-playing cronies accusing him at gunpoint of cheating, after which he and Leticia had to climb out of a hotel window and steal horses tied up to a nearby hitching post because they could afford to pay neither their hotel bill nor their fares on the next stagecoach out of town.

Leticia, having finally come to her senses, told Mack she was leaving him.

Tara couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, although she dearly wanted to see how the book ended. Would Leticia return to New England or go back to the homely rancher?

She turned out the light and settled into bed. The poor fool of a rancher would almost certainly take her back and marry her, even though she was a fallen woman and he could hardly fail to hear the whispered gossip of the townsfolk. They’d have six children and Leticia would decorate the ranchhouse with flowered curtains and braided rugs, giving it the woman’s touch it so desperately needed. In time, her wicked past would be forgotten.

Yes, Tara thought, sinking into oblivion. That’s how the book will end. And wasn’t it wonderful that she’d spent several hours concentrating on the plight of that fickle-hearted Leticia, and not thinking of Reece Waldron even once?

•  •  •

Ice. A mountain of ice sailed past the window and she turned to Dominic and screamed, but no sound came out. The Titanic spun crazily around in the water like a top so that she couldn’t get her footing. Dominic looked at her sadly and reached for her even as he was being pulled away by an unseen force. “No let-a men inna boat. No let-a men inna boat,” Leticia and the homely rancher chanted mournfully from their stagecoach window. Where was Padraig? She banged on the window of the First Class restaurant but the people inside went on eating and talking as if nothing was wrong. She grabbed a little boy by the arms but when she turned him around it was redheaded Danny Flaherty. Then she was running, running fast across the deck and down the steps to the Third Class sleeping quarters, but her brother was nowhere to be found. “It’ll be all right. He’s with Lionel,” Mrs. Rutherford said in a reassuring tone, but Tara impatiently shook the woman’s hand off her arm and ran to the captain, trying to tell him that something was very, very wrong. The captain turned into Mack MacCracken, who was shooting a gun into the air and whooping loudly. The bullets inexplicably became white rockets but Mrs. Flaherty was dressed in black, the color of mourning. “It’s God’s punishment,” she whispered again and again, making Tara cringe and wish the woman would just stop talking,