City of Hope (10 page)

I stopped at every cosmetic stand, sampling rouge and lipstick and creamy makeup sticks to cover my freckled Irish complexion. I allowed myself to be sprayed with perfume samples at every turn, then went to the lingerie department and bought a foundation garment to smooth out my figure. The choice of outfits was vast: I fingered fur stoles, and patent bags, and scarves of a silk so light and soft they were all but indiscernible to the touch. As I had been unpacking that morning I had realized that all the costumes and clothes I so valued in Ireland either seemed to me too plain or reminded me of times when I had dressed for John. My husband had no interest in fashionable clothes; dressed hair and makeup did not impress him, but rather served only as a reminder of the time I had been away in New York, leading my life without him. I had kept myself smart nonetheless. Perhaps, I realized with a stab of guilt, to cruelly remind him of that very fact, but more often to keep hold of that part of myself that I believed was chic and discerning.

In the end I purchased two outfits, one for day—a green polka-dot dress, with a large cream bow that sat flat across my breast—and, for the evening, a cerise-pink gown that fell to just above my calves, with handkerchief sleeves and a chiffon underskirt that was just visible below the hem. A deep-navy belted coat with a wide skirt, and matching navy shoes and bag, would do for both outfits.

As I swung out of the doors back onto Fifth Avenue I felt curiously tired. The experience of shopping had consumed me so utterly that it had left me feeling drained and ill at ease. The rain had cleared and the air smelled so fresh, after the heavily perfumed atmosphere of the store, that I decided to walk back to the hotel. I swung my two bags at my sides, as if deliberately trying to fuel my limbs into a feeling of lightheartedness to suit the sunny day and my carefree girl-about-town demeanor. I needed something else, some other task to distract me. As I reached Grand Army Plaza at 59th Street I decided to call up to the apartment building of my old employer, and see if cross old Mr. Flannery was still on the door. What an excellent idea! What would he make of me now? Little Ellie Hogan, the green edge gone off her, a proper lady, surely!

I walked right past the big gold general on horseback, straight through to the park, and turned right. Past the zoo and down the tree-lined mall, on to the glorious bandstand, where Sheila and I, two young girls, picnicked on summer days. The memories hopped alongside me like a talkative child, but as I tried to scoop them up, the specifics slipped away and left me with only the broad idea that back then I was happy; that it took little more than a clement day and a new dress to make everything bad melt away. I needed Sheila here to make the past real, to bring it back properly.

I had telegrammed my old friend from the boat telling her when I was arriving, and expected there might even be a reply from her when I returned to The Plaza. She would travel from her home in Boston and stay for perhaps a week, or maybe more, with me there. Her husband was wealthy and she had no children, so she would be at leisure to entertain me, as she had always promised in her letters. We would walk in the park and things would be as they were before. There would be afternoon tea dances, and nights out in jazz clubs; we would shop and talk, and my oldest friend—silly, vivacious Sheila—would help me forget. Her jokes would swipe away the gnawing ache that kept creeping up on me, troubling me, making me feel ill at ease. She would soothe the pain and complete my denial.

I walked and walked, past the lake and the boathouse (where we had taken out small rowing boats in the company of some nameless young men who had fawned over us both), and on toward the old reservoir. But the grand tree-lined lake I had been expecting to see was gone. In its place was a field of flat, gray earth—scattered with men and machinery digging in the distance. It was such an ugly sight among the beauty that I was pulled out of my private thoughts and stopped to look and see what was going on. I tried to get my bearings and couldn't. Three shabbily dressed men were sitting on a makeshift bench of rocks and wooden planks.

“Hey, lady,” one of them said, “looking good today.”

They weren't drinking and they didn't quite have the ravaged faces of street bums, but they weren't workers, either. One of them wore a dusty suit, a grubby white shirt and a tie poking up from beneath the upturned collar.

“Got a cigarette?” he asked.

I ignored him and, gripping tightly onto my Saks bags, kept walking. The atmosphere of the park had changed. There was an air of, not menace exactly, but something else—something I recognized?
An unpleasantly familiar reminder of something I had forgotten.

Further along I noticed a small grouping of makeshift shacks in a corner behind a huge, grand building that I guessed must be the Metropolitan Museum. A gang of young boys stood at its edges, and one of them pushed forward and stood in front of me, brazenly asking once again, “Got a cigarette, lady?”

A woman's voice called out from one of the shacks, “Hey—Jake! Stop bothering people. I've told you before!” Her accent was Irish, although tainted with the tempting American twang I had gone home with. Kerry, perhaps?

The boy looked at me, annoyed to have his begging interrupted, before getting out of my path and going back to the shack to his mother.

A young girl, no more than twelve, sat on a park bench nearby, listlessly watching the drama. She was wearing dirty clothes and a broken, hopeless expression.

Poverty. That was the thing I remembered
. I had read in a paper over breakfast on the boat how the Hooverville homeless settlement in the dried-out Central Park Reservoir had been cleared some years before, to make way for the new Great Lawn. That must have been the expanse of earth I had just seen being planted. This suburb of four or five shacks had surely sprung up in its wake, to house the most desperate of families. Trying to survive the Great Depression, hungry, their children cadging cigarettes from strangers. Uprooted by city officials so that they could plant flowers and shrubs in their place. A few of them were hiding away in this dark corner, tolerated perhaps by guilty authorities who knew they had nowhere else to go.

For all that I pitied these unfortunates, I was upset to have had my fantasies crudely interrupted by their plight. Without looking back, I quickened my step until I reached the next gate and walked back out onto the street. The day was still dry and bright, but as I turned left, the Saks bags felt suddenly heavy in my hands and my spirits were tainted with the memory of hunger.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

820 Fifth Avenue had not changed so much. The red carpet and awning outside were faded, but the grand entrance with its filigree doors did not seem as intimidating as it had when I had first arrived here as a young girl of twenty in my torn coat and with my small cardboard case to join my school friend Sheila in service to the spoiled socialite Isobel Adams.

I suppose it was foolish of me to expect old Mr. Flannery to still be on the door after all these years.

A much younger man, thirty perhaps and handsome in a dark Italian way, headed me off as I reached the entrance.

“Can I help you?” he asked, but his attempt at officious authority was loosened considerably as he looked me up and down. He was not appraising my wealth, but my feminine form. Irish men never looked at women like that, at least not in such an obvious way.

“I used to work here,” I said, “for Isobel Adams?”

His stiff doorman's demeanor relaxed and he leaned against the awning post and crossed his arms. I was a mere servant like him, and he could expose me to all his laddish charms after all.

“Is that so?” He smiled, and shook his head. “Well, I've never heard of her.”

Isobel's respectable husband must have given her the flick, or perhaps he had finally persuaded her to move to the family home in Boston.

“What about Mr. and Mrs. Flannery? Old couple, Irish?”

He took out a packet of cigarettes from inside his coat pocket.

“You from Ireland? You got a cute accent. Cigarette?”

He held out the pack and I shook my head. As if I would stand smoking in the street, like a lounge girl. I was sorry now that I had dropped my act of being a grand lady.

“Mr. Flannery used to be the doorman here.”

“You staying around for long, Pretty? I could show you around.”

He drew on the cigarette and blew smoke in showy rings. This cheeky lizard was so sure of himself, so different from the respectful, formal demeanor of Mr. Flannery.

“They were an older couple—well, I suppose they've moved on.” I turned to leave. “Thank you for your time.”

“Wait,” he said, and threw his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out right there on the carpet (small wonder it was looking so shabby). “The old guy that was here before me was a Paddy, he was here for twenty years or more—fierce old bastard?”

“A respectable gentleman,” I said haughtily, “that was him.”

“Yeah, that,” he said, cowed somewhat. “Anyway, he died—that's how come I got to be here.”

I must have looked shocked, because his voice softened and he said, “Hang on, Pretty, I'll go inside and see if I can find out what happened to his old lady.”

I stood for a moment and waited. It was lunchtime and the road along the park had quietened down. From the upstairs window of Isobel's apartment I remembered seeing right into Central Park—the world from up there was green and lush, the sky close and, in the spring and summer at least, relentlessly blue. In calling on the Flannerys in this way I was seeking reassurance that things had not changed. It seemed that everything had changed. Except for the fact that I felt as helpless and as far away from home as I had the first time I stood on Fifth Avenue as a budding domestic servant. There was no beautiful view from down here, just railings and pavements and cars. People were going about their business, and I had no other business to attend to except grieving for my dead husband or waiting for the boy to come back and give me news of the Flannerys. So I waited.

“You're in luck, Pretty,” he said. “Old Sam in the basement says Paddy's old lady is living just around the corner—working in a laundry or something? Anyways—I wrote it down . . .”

I thanked him and quickly took the piece of paper from his lingering, outstretched hand, walking away before he started up his flirting again.

Time was, I thought, when I might have swung my hips for him, just for the sake of it. However, the years that had passed since I last walked on this street made it seem like a lifetime ago, and the girl I once was like a stranger.

The mystifying nature of New York building numbers had not changed. The street was easily found and was, indeed, only just around the corner from plush Fifth Avenue, but it was lined with down-at-heel brownstones, each with its crossing fire-escapes and multiple ground-floor, first-floor and basement entrances as confusing as the next. After several fruitless attempts at finding the address, a harried-looking woman at an anonymous apartment door, rollers in her hair and with a worn, angry face, nodded to the left and said, “Basement—next door,” when I showed her the piece of paper in the doorman's scrawled hand.

Ming's Chinese Laundry was not marked on the street. As I walked down the narrow steps I could feel the heat of the steam, and the smell of bleach and blue rising up from the open door. Behind the counter sat a small Chinese man, almost invisible behind shelves of piled-up sheets.

“Help you, lady?” he said, barely looking up.

“Does Mrs. Flannery work here? Mrs. Bridie Flannery?”

Behind him was the crush of a sweatshop. Dozens of small Asian men and women worked in a toiling assembly line of machinery. Among the hiss of steam irons, the one open door to the front greedily grabbed the heat and sent it out into the alley in a boiling cloud. It felt as if I were at the gates of hell and I half prayed he would say he had never heard of her.

“What you want her for?” he asked.

Oh dear God! I strained to look and see if I could find her.

“I'm her daughter,” I said firmly. “I am in town unexpectedly and I . . .”

“She not got daughter,” he said, eyeing me with deep suspicion.

“Her niece, then,” I said. I stood and stared him out. Could Mrs. Flannery, the fierce old Cork housekeeper who had taken me in and minded me in those early years, really be working here in this terrible place? “Listen, I have come all the way from Ireland to see her. Just five minutes. Ellie Hogan. Tell her Ellie Hogan is here to see her.”

I put my bags down on the floor to indicate I was going nowhere.

“Come back at three o'cloh,” he said. “She on break then.”

I checked my watch—it was ten to three—then snatched a pen and cleaning ticket from his desk, before he could object, and wrote my name on it.

“I'll wait outside,” I said, “and give her this before she comes up.”

I sat on the top step of the basement and waited, smoking cigarettes like a hooker. To hell with decorum, I thought, to hell with everything. I was angry. Mr. Flannery was dead and Bridie was working in a laundry. This was not what I had hoped for, for them or for me. It was depressing, and part of me wished I had never bothered on this stupid quest. I had been looking to escape from misery, not find more! Although, I was irritated to realize, I felt more of a sense of relaxed freedom sitting smoking on those laundry steps than I had swanning around Saks. For those ten minutes I hoped it was a different Mrs. Flannery who would come up the steps to meet me, and I could go back to The Plaza and resume my luxuries.

And it was a different Mrs. Flannery.

The plump, capable woman—the mother figure who had reminded me in her substantial build (if not her cross nature) of Maidy—was much reduced. I felt a pang of pity as I saw her walk toward me, recognizing the same brown Sunday coat and hat, which she was now barely able to fill. The clothing aside, I would not have recognized the hearty woman I had left just over ten years ago.