Never Look Back (2 page)

Yet Castle Clinton was still much the same, though in her time it had been an island, reached by a walkway from the Battery. The shore area had been reclaimed for many years now, filled in with tons of rubble and grassed over to make Battery Park. Castle Clinton had become a clearing-house for immigrants, now it was an aquarium, but back in 1842 it had been a concert hall, with a green around it, and it was there she met Flynn O’Reilly.

She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering his first kiss. It seemed odd that after all these years she could still recall the magic of it, and all the turbulent emotions he awakened in her heart.

‘I wonder what would have happened,’ she thought aloud.

‘To who, ma’am?’

She was startled to find the young girl at her elbow looking quizzically at her. Yet she wasn’t embarrassed. One of the few advantages she’d found in becoming old was the freedom to do and say exactly what she pleased, even talk to herself.

‘To me, if I’d run off with my first love,’ she explained with a wide smile. ‘My life might have turned out quite different.’

Fanny was delighted the old lady seemed to want to talk. Aside from intense curiosity about this odd passenger, her working life was male dominated, and she often longed for female company.
So, armed with a warm rug as an excuse to strike up a conversation, she’d approached her to see if she was cold.

‘Was he rich?’ she asked, keeping her tone light.

The old lady shook her head, her faded blue eyes twinkling with merriment. ‘Oh no, just a poor Irish lad.’

‘Then it’s a good thing you didn’t run off with him,’ Fanny retorted. ‘There sure as hell ain’t many Irish men who make their fortune. But there’s many a brewery made one from their drinking.’

‘They might drink, but they sure can love,’ the old lady replied reflectively. ‘I think I’d sooner have passion than riches.’

Fanny was thrown for a moment. While well used to her own kind making earthy comments about the opposite sex, she hadn’t expected a remark like that from a real lady. She offered the rug, explained that the wind would get up once they were out in the bay, tucked it around the lady’s lap, and then, taking a deep breath, she blurted out her question. ‘Why did you want to come out here, ma’am?’

The old lady looked appraisingly at Fanny for a moment. She was wearing a threadbare, far too large seaman’s coat and a striped muffler wound round her head and neck. The tip of her nose was red with cold, yet her blue eyes sparkled with interest. She thought it was yet another thing they had in common, she had always been incurably inquisitive too.

‘I guess old age makes you sentimental. I wanted to see all the changes,’ she said, waving one gloved hand towards the shore. ‘You see, honey, I was your age when I first came to New York, I only spent a few years here, but it kinda coloured and shaped my whole life. Now I’ve got a yen to go home, and I want new memories to take with me along with the old ones.’

‘Which state would “home” be?’ Fanny asked.

The old lady laughed, not a dainty little tinkle, but a deep, throaty belly-laugh.

‘Which state would home be?’ She repeated the question, mimicking Fanny’s accent. Then laughed again. ‘Honey, you have pleased me. For half a century I’ve done my damnedest to sound and act like an American. But everyone I ever met guessed I was English the moment I opened my mouth. Then just when I’m about to leave, you take me for a Yank. Bless you.’

‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ Fanny said, sinking down on to the
bench beside her. She had noticed something unusual about the woman’s speech, but in New York there were as many different accents as there were saloons. ‘I had the notion you were from one of them fancy mansions up on Fifth Avenue! Do tell me about yourself. That is, if you’ve a mind to.’

‘My name’s Matilda Jennings,’ the old lady said in a crisp, clear voice. ‘I have come from a fancy mansion today, but I was born seventy-four years ago in a part of London that’s as bad as anything you’ve got here on the Lower East Side.’

Fanny’s mouth dropped open in shock. She hadn’t met many English people, but those she had spoken to had created an image in her mind that England was filled with castles, palaces and grand mansions. Not one of them had ever admitted it had slums too. But surprised as she was by that, she was more astounded to hear this woman’s age. Where she lived people rarely reached sixty and looked ancient long before that. Yet this woman had walked on to the tug unaided, her step was sprightly, and though her face was lined, it had a softness, her skin a clarity that a woman of twenty years younger would envy. ‘You’re kiddin’ me?’ she retorted. ‘You can’t be that old!’

Matilda didn’t reply immediately, but instead slowly peeled off her soft leather gloves and held her hands out to Fanny. ‘So what do you see there?’ she asked.

Fanny’s own hands were calloused from hauling ropes, redraw with the wind and water, yet the old lady’s proved that age could be even more cruel than the elements. They were big hands for such a dainty, slender woman, the backs puckered with wrinkles and engorged purple veins. Her knuckles were swollen and misshapen, and a couple of nails were missing, leaving ugly scar tissue.

‘You’ve had to work very hard,’ Fanny said in a low voice, stunned because she hadn’t expected that. She turned the hands over and looked at the palms, running one finger over the skin which felt very dry and crackly, like leaves in the fall. They
were
the hands of a very old woman, yet as she held them, suddenly she didn’t feel as if there was a half-century separating them.

‘They are ugly, and better out of sight,’ Matilda said reflectively, slipping her gloves back on. ‘But they tell you a great deal about my life, you can probably guess that they’ve scrubbed floors and dug fields, but there’s a lot more hidden. They’ve soothed babies,
shot guns, driven wagons, buried the dead and plenty more besides.’

Fanny wanted to ask how she eventually got rich enough to afford such a lovely coat, but she knew that was too impertinent.

‘Once I began to make money,’ Matilda continued, ‘I spent a fortune on creams and potions, but it was too late, nothing could make my hands pretty again. I was so ashamed of them I always wore gloves. But I’m old now, and vanity fades, just like heartaches do. So I tend to look at them and remind myself that it wasn’t my brain or my looks which got me through the bad times, just these hands and my will. I was lucky they were both so strong.’

Fanny felt a surge of intense admiration for the plain-speaking English lady. She had grown up surrounded by immigrants, and mostly they were the kind that ran out of ambition and energy a few weeks after they got off the boat. They stayed in their squalid, overcrowded tenements, and as the years went by they blamed others for their poverty and lack of success. Yet this woman in her expensive furs was proof not only that with a will, courage and determination anyone could make it out of the Lower East Side to Fifth Avenue, but that you could still retain kindness, and humility too.

‘I thought at first you were crazy,’ Fanny said hesitantly, all at once very ashamed for prejudging her. ‘I’m sorry.’

Matilda took the girl’s hand in her gloved one and squeezed it. ‘Fanny, perhaps I
am
crazy, wanting to smell the East River on a cold March day, and see sights I know will stir up painful memories. Even crazier for wanting to go back to a country I’ve almost forgotten, and almost certainly outgrown. But when you’re as old as me you get that way. I have a hankering to see if the river Thames is as wide as I remember, if the Tower of London can still scare me. I guess too I want to die in my own country where no one knows about the more scandalous parts of my history.’

Fanny’s eyebrows shot up into two inverted Vs.

Matilda chuckled at her shocked expression. ‘Oh yes, Fanny, I’ve been quite a girl in my time, but that’s a long story and much as I’d love to tell you about it, this might be my last chance to look at the old sights and remember how it all came about.’

Fanny knew that was a signal for her to go. She wasn’t hurt
for she sensed Matilda meant exactly what she’d said. She got up and tucked the rug more securely around her. ‘I’m real glad I met you, ma’am,’ she said. ‘You enjoy your trip and if you want anything just holler.’

‘I knew I was right to choose this boat,’ Matilda said with a warm, appreciative smile. ‘You put me in mind of myself as a young girl.’

Fanny went back to the wheel-house and Matilda concentrated on the view across the bay. The sky was dark grey, the wind strong and bitterly cold, but that suited her, she didn’t want warmth and bright sunshine slanting her mind towards only the happier memories.

As Giuseppe steered towards Ellis Island, she found her eyes remained glued to the majestic Statue of Liberty, even though it had no place in her past. It had been erected only a few years ago, just as Ellis Island with its new immigration department was a recent development. Yet goose bumps came up all over her as she gazed on it, staggered by not only its vast proportions, but the sheer beauty of it. She hoped it would give all those poor huddled masses arriving in America the comfort and inspiration that were intended.

Giuseppe slowed right down as they approached Ellis Island. The huge new immigration building was impressive with its domes and spires, yet it was already dubbed the ‘Isle of Tears’. A German steamer had just docked and a thick stream of passengers was pouring down each of the gangways. Although she knew their voyage across the Atlantic had taken less than half the time her own had, as the tug drew nearer she could see from their pale, drawn faces and the stoop of their shoulders that for most of them the journey had been an unspeakable nightmare of overcrowding, rotten food and sickness.

She began to cry as she thought about what was in store for them. While the rich got swept straight into New York, with no thought that they might be undesirable in some way, the poor had first to pass through ‘assessment’. How many of those black-coated men with long whiskers who looked hardly capable of carrying their own baggage would make it through the stringent medical? Then there were the literacy and competence tests for others to stumble on. In her time all were welcome. Maybe that
welcome didn’t run to decent homes or well-paid work, but at least they didn’t face the humiliation of being turned around and sent home because they didn’t fit the bill of what the American Government perceived as ideal immigrants.

Even above the sound of the sea, wind, seagulls and the tug’s engine, she could hear the pitiful cries of hungry and sick children. Women with frightened eyes clutched babies to their breasts, scanning the sky-line on the other side of the bay in hope that the relatives who urged them to come would be there to greet them.

Sadly Matilda knew they had more misery and shocks in store for them. New York might be prosperous but a great deal of that wealth had been made out of people just like these. She knew the evils of those appalling East Side tenements built by unscrupulous speculators, their only thought to wring as many dollars a square foot out of them as they could. If she had her way she’d force those men to live there too. She wondered how long it would take to break the new arrivals, living in tiny dark rooms, one tap between four families and a privy shared by the whole block.

Yet today these immigrants would be lucky if they even got one of those hell-holes. Most would end up tonight sleeping in some squalid flop-house in conditions even more crowded and unsanitary than on that ship. Unless they were very smart they’d be robbed of their money and possessions too. There were infectious diseases to contend with, many of their children wouldn’t survive a year, let alone to adulthood. If they thought they were starting a new life where racial, social and religious prejudice didn’t exist, they were sadly mistaken. America was for the brave. It took a strong body, a stout heart and determination to make it.

Matilda shook herself out of such pessimistic thoughts. For those who had the will it really was a country where dreams could come true. Just a few miles outside the busy cities was a land of incredible beauty. She hoped that every poor immigrant trudging into that building today would get to see its sparkling rivers, its mountains, forests and endless prairies. They had arrived too late to see real wilderness as she had – the vast herds of buffalo were gone now, the Red Indians who had survived had been robbed of their hunting grounds and pushed into
reservations. Trains sped people from coast to coast and the paths that had been taken by the early pioneers in their covered wagons had all but disappeared. But there was still so much to thrill, so much opportunity for those with the nerve to grasp it.

An hour or so later as the tug chugged back towards the piers in East River, Matilda wiped away the last of her emotional tears and turned her mind to her future.

She had experienced so much in this land – joy and sorrow, poverty and riches, great love and passion too. So many of those she’d loved were dead, their graves marking places she could never forget. Yet on balance the good memories outweighed the bad. She had had so many dear, good friends, lovers who had filled her heart with bliss, and she’d seen and done things few women of her generation could even imagine. Even the immense evil she’d encountered, the terrible anguish and pain, was in soft focus now, only the happiness, humour and sweetness remained important to her.

She was ready now for what lay ahead. Tomorrow she would book a passage home to England, a first-class cabin where a steward would wait on her, imagining she’d been born to such luxury, and she’d spend the voyage polishing up her role as a grand lady.

It pleased her to think that the stories of London Lil would remain in American folklore for all time, but she must leave her here, kiss Lil goodbye and forget her.

Up in the wheel-house Giuseppe was at the helm, and Fanny was silently watching Matilda. Several times during the last hour she had seen the woman crying and her heart went out to her. She wished she knew her full story. Was she a widow? Did she have children and grandchildren? Or was that Irishman she’d spoken of the only real love in her life?