Brooklyn (3 page)

“That’s it,” Nancy whispered. “I’m going home.”

“Wait, don’t do that,” Eilis said. “We’ll go to the ladies’ at the end of this set and then discuss what to do.”

They waited and crossed the floor, empty of dancers; Eilis presumed that George Sheridan had spotted them. In the ladies’ she told Nancy to do nothing, just to wait, and they would go back out when the next dance was in full swing. As they did so, and Eilis glanced over to where George and his friends had been, she caught George’s eye. Nancy’s face, as they searched for somewhere to sit, had turned a blotched red; she looked like someone whom the nuns had told to go and stand outside the door. They sat there without speaking as the dance went on. Everything Eilis thought of saying was ridiculous and so she said nothing, but she was aware that they both must seem a sad sight to anyone who paid any attention to them. She decided that if Nancy made even the weakest suggestion that they should go after this set, then she would agree immediately. Indeed, she longed to be outside already; she knew they would find some way of making a laugh of it later.

At the end of the set, however, George walked across the hall even before the music began and asked Nancy to dance. He smiled at Eilis as Nancy stood up and she smiled at him in return. As they began to dance, with George chatting easily, Nancy seemed to be making an effort to look cheerful. Eilis looked away in case her watching made Nancy uncomfortable, and then looked at the ground, hoping that no one would ask her to dance. It would be easier now, she thought, if George asked Nancy for the next dance when this set was over and she could slip quietly home.

Instead, George and Nancy came towards her and said they were going to get a lemonade at the bar and George would like to buy one for Eilis as well. She stood up and walked across the hall with them. Jim Farrell was standing at the bar holding a place for George. Some of their other friends, one or two of whom Eilis
knew by name and the others by sight, were close by. As they approached, Jim Farrell turned and kept an elbow on the counter. He looked both Nancy and Eilis up and down without nodding or speaking, and then moved over and said something to George.

As the music began again, some of their friends took to the floor but Jim Farrell did not move. As George handed the glasses full of lemonade to Nancy and Eilis, he set about introducing them formally to Jim Farrell, who nodded curtly but did not shake hands. George seemed at a loss as he stood sipping his drink. He said something to Nancy and she replied. Then he sipped his drink again. Eilis wondered what he was going to do; it was clear that his friend did not like Nancy or Eilis and had no intention of speaking to them; Eilis wished she had not been brought to the bar like this. She sipped her drink and looked at the ground. When she glanced up, she saw Jim Farrell studying Nancy coldly and then, when he noticed he was being watched by Eilis, he shifted his ground and looked at her, his face expressionless. He was wearing, she saw, an expensive sports jacket and a shirt with a cravat.

George put the glass on the counter and turned to Nancy, inviting her to dance; he motioned to Jim, as if to suggest that he should do the same. Nancy smiled at George and then at Eilis and Jim, left her drink down and went to the dance floor with him. She seemed relieved and happy. As Eilis looked around, she was aware that she and Jim Farrell were alone at the bar counter and that there was no room at the ladies’ side of the hall. Unless she went to the ladies’ again, or went home, she was trapped. For a second, Jim Farrell looked as though he was stepping forward to ask her to dance. Eilis, since she felt she had no choice, was ready to accept; she did not want to be rude to George’s friend. Just as she was about to accept him, Jim Farrell appeared to think better of it, stepped back and almost imperiously glanced around the hall, ignoring her. He did not look at her again and when the set was over she went and found Nancy and told her quietly that she
was leaving and would see her soon. She shook hands with George and made the excuse that she was tired, and then walked from the hall with as much dignity as she could.

The following evening at tea she told her mother and Rose the story. They were interested at first in the news that Nancy had been dancing two Sunday nights in succession with George Sheridan, but they became far more animated when Eilis told them about the rudeness of Jim Farrell.

“Don’t go near that Athenaeum again,” Rose said.

“Your father knew his father well,” her mother said. “Years ago. They went to the races together a few times. And your father drank in Farrell’s sometimes. It’s very well kept. And his mother is a very nice woman, she was a Duggan from Glenbrien. It must be the rugby club has him that way, and it must be sad for his parents having a pup for a son because he’s an only child.”

“He sounds like a pup all right and he looks like one,” Rose said.

“Well, he was in a bad mood last night anyway,” Eilis said. “That’s all I have to say. I suppose he might think that George should be with someone grander than Nancy.”

“There’s no excuse for that,” her mother said. “Nancy Byrne is one of the most beautiful girls in this town. George would be very lucky to get her.”

“I wonder would his mother agree,” Rose said.

“Some of the shopkeepers in this town,” her mother said, “especially the ones who buy cheap and sell dear, all they have is a few yards of counter and they have to sit there all day waiting for customers. I don’t know why they think so highly of themselves.”

Although Miss Kelly paid Eilis only seven and sixpence a week for working on Sundays, she often sent Mary to fetch her at other
times—once when she wanted to get her hair done without closing the shop and once when she wanted all the tins on the shelves taken down and dusted and then replaced. Each time she gave Eilis two shillings but kept her for hours, complaining about Mary whenever she could. Each time also, as she left, Miss Kelly handed Eilis a loaf of bread, which Eilis knew was stale, to give to her mother.

“She must think we’re paupers,” her mother said. “What would we do with stale bread? Rose will go mad. Don’t go there the next time she sends for you. Tell her you’re busy.”

“But I’m not busy.”

“A proper job will turn up. That’s what I’m praying for every day.”

Her mother made breadcrumbs with the stale bread and roasted stuffed pork. She did not tell Rose where the breadcrumbs came from.

One day at dinnertime Rose, who walked home from the office at one and returned at a quarter to two, mentioned that she had played golf the previous evening with a priest, a Father Flood, who had known their father years before and their mother when she was a young girl. He was home from America on holidays, his first visit since before the war.

“Flood?” her mother asked. “There was a crowd of Floods out near Monageer, but I don’t remember any of them becoming a priest. I don’t know what became of them, you never see any of them now.”

“There’s Murphy Floods,” Eilis said.

“That’s not the same,” her mother replied.

“Anyway,” Rose said, “I invited him in for his tea when he said that he’d like to call on you and he’s coming tomorrow.”

“Oh, God,” her mother said. “What would an American priest like for his tea? I’ll have to get cooked ham.”

“Miss Kelly has the best cooked ham,” Eilis said, laughing.

“No one is buying anything from Miss Kelly,” Rose replied. “Father Flood will eat whatever we give him.”

“Would cooked ham be all right with tomatoes and lettuce, or maybe roast beef, or would he like a fry?”

“Anything will be fine,” Rose said. “With plenty of brown bread and butter.”

“We’ll have it in the dining room, and we’ll use the good china. If I could get a bit of salmon, maybe. Would he eat that?”

“He’s very nice,” Rose said. “He’ll eat anything you put in front of him.”

Father Flood was tall; his accent was a mixture of Irish and American. Nothing he said could convince Eilis’s mother that she had known him or his family. His mother, he said, had been a Rochford.

“I don’t think I knew her,” her mother said. “The only Rochford we knew was old Hatchethead.”

Father Flood looked at her solemnly. “Hatchethead was my uncle,” he said.

“Was he?” her mother asked. Eilis saw how close she was to nervous laughter.

“But of course we didn’t call him that,” Father Flood said. “His real name was Seamus.”

“Well, he was very nice,” her mother said. “Weren’t we awful to call him that?”

Rose poured more tea as Eilis quietly left the room, afraid that if she stayed she would be unable to disguise an urge to begin laughing.

When she returned she realized that Father Flood had heard about her job at Miss Kelly’s, had found out about her pay and had expressed shock at how low it was. He inquired about her qualifications.

“In the United States,” he said, “there would be plenty of work for someone like you and with good pay.”

“She thought of going to England,” her mother said, “but the boys said to wait, that it wasn’t the best time there, and she might only get factory work.”

“In Brooklyn, where my parish is, there would be office work for someone who was hard-working and educated and honest.”

“It’s very far away, though,” her mother said. “That’s the only thing.”

“Parts of Brooklyn,” Father Flood replied, “are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish.”

He crossed his legs and sipped his tea from the china cup and said nothing for a while. The silence that descended made it clear to Eilis what the others were thinking. She looked across at her mother, who deliberately, it seemed to her, did not return her glance, but kept her gaze fixed on the floor. Rose, normally so good at moving the conversation along if they had a visitor, also said nothing. She twisted her ring and then her bracelet.

“It would be a great opportunity, especially if you were young,” Father Flood said finally.

“It might be very dangerous,” her mother said, her eyes still fixed on the floor.

“Not in my parish,” Father Flood said. “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than in Ireland. And there’s work for anyone who’s willing to work.”

Eilis felt like a child when the doctor would come to the house, her mother listening with cowed respect. It was Rose’s silence that was new to her; she looked at her now, wanting her sister to ask a question or make a comment, but Rose appeared to
be in a sort of dream. As Eilis watched her, it struck her that she had never seen Rose look so beautiful. And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance. In the silence that had lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America. Father Flood, she believed, had been invited to the house because Rose knew that he could arrange it.

Her mother had been so opposed to her going to England that this new realization came to Eilis as a shock. She wondered if she had not taken the job in the shop and had not told them about her weekly humiliation at Miss Kelly’s hands, might they have been so ready to let this conversation happen. She regretted having told them so much; she had done so mostly because it had made Rose and her mother laugh, brightened a number of meals that they had had with each other, made eating together nicer and easier than anytime since her father had died and the boys had left. It now occurred to her that her mother and Rose did not think her working for Miss Kelly was funny at all, and they offered no word of demurral as Father Flood moved from praising his parish in Brooklyn to saying that he believed he would be able to find Eilis a suitable position there.

In the days that followed no mention was made of Father Flood’s visit or his raising the possibility of her going to Brooklyn, and it was the silence itself that led Eilis to believe that Rose and her mother had discussed it and were in favour of it. She had never considered going to America. Many she knew had gone to England and often came back at Christmas or in the summer. It was part of the life of the town. Although she knew friends who regularly received presents of dollars or clothes from America, it was always from their aunts and uncles, people who had emigrated long before the war. She could not remember any of these people ever appearing in the town on holidays. It was a long jour
ney across the Atlantic, she knew, at least a week on a ship, and it must be expensive. She had a sense too, she did not know from where, that, while the boys and girls from the town who had gone to England did ordinary work for ordinary money, people who went to America could become rich. She tried to work out how she had come to believe also that, while people from the town who lived in England missed Enniscorthy, no one who went to America missed home. Instead, they were happy there and proud. She wondered if that could be true.

Father Flood did not visit again; instead, he wrote a letter to her mother when he returned to Brooklyn, saying that he had spoken, soon after he arrived, to one of his parishioners, a merchant of Italian origin, about Eilis and wanted to let Mrs. Lacey know that there would soon be a position vacant. It would not be in the office, as he had hoped, but on the shop floor of the large store that this gentleman owned and managed. But, he added, he had been assured that, were Eilis to prove satisfactory in her first job, there would be plenty of opportunity for promotion and very good prospects. He would also, he said, be able to provide suitable documentation to satisfy the Embassy, which was often not so easy nowadays, and would, he was sure, be able to find suitable accommodation for Eilis near the church and not far from her place of work.

Her mother handed her the letter when she had it read. Rose had already gone to work. There was silence in the kitchen.

“He seems very genuine,” her mother said. “I’ll say that for him.”

Eilis read the sentence again about the shop floor. She presumed that he meant she would work behind a counter. Father Flood did not mention how much she would earn, or how she would raise the money to pay the fare. Instead, he suggested that she should get in touch with the American Embassy in Dublin and ascertain pre
cisely what documents she would require before she travelled so they could all be arranged. As she read and reread, her mother moved about the kitchen with her back to her, saying nothing. Eilis sat at the table, not speaking either, wondering how long it would take her mother to turn towards her and say something, deciding that she would sit and wait, counting each second, knowing that her mother had no real work to do. She was, in fact, Eilis saw, making work for herself so that she would not have to turn.