The Banished Children of Eve (52 page)

In the end,
famine or not, they had all come to America for the same reason: There was nothing else. At home the prospects were not so much bleak as nonexistent. Servant or shopgirl, the whole of life would be determined by your accent and religion. If it could be arranged, a match with some farmer; if not, celibacy. Ireland was a country haunted by the memory of hunger, by the ghosts of its starved children, by a final and terrible humiliation.

Some rebelled—that was part of the country, too, hands raised against the English, or against custom and tradition—and tried to act out their own romances. But Ireland was more comfortable with tragedy. Margaret's parents had tried for romance. Her father, Augustine O'Driscoll, had come to Cork City as a small boy, the year after his parents had been swept away in one of the local potato-crop failures that drew little notice outside the affected area. He and his two sisters had been divided among their relatives around Baltimore, a fishing village on the coast of Cork. The uncle he was sent to was scraping by as it was, and could barely feed him. In the mornings, Augustine ran down to the fishing boats and begged for what they could spare him. He roasted the scraps they threw him on the end of a stick held above the pitch fire that served as a beacon for the boats. Afterward, he washed his face and hands in the seawater so that his uncle would not smell the fish.

In the last years of his life, when he had abandoned politics and come back to the Church, as ferocious in his devotion as any man in Cork, there was hardly any spark that could light the old fires that had blazoned his reputation as “Pagan” O'Driscoll, nor any that could rekindle the burning oratory of his Irish Confederation days, except when he wandered into the subject of his childhood, the ache of hunger that never went away, the one-room cabin with the farm animals living beside the family, the constant fear of eviction.

When
he was ten, he set out on the road for Cork City, alone, with nothing. He got a job in a linen mill as a glider, and ran across the wooden frames in his bare feet and reached into the clattering apparatus to stop the cloth from bunching or tangling. Some gliders lost a limb, a few their lives, but Augustine O'Dris-' coll, save for the loss of a toe, escaped unharmed. At fourteen, he was made a full-fledged hand, and at eighteen, a foreman in charge of several looms. That was the year he met Catherine Murphy, from Macroom, who had been sent by her father to work in the shop of some distant relatives. It was her father's hope that since he couldn't give her a dowry of any worth, she would become skilled in the ways of the townspeople, and make a suitable candidate for marriage to some shopkeeper in Macroom. But it was in Cork City that she met Augustine O'Driscoll, fell in love, and eloped, a girl of seventeen, and was disowned by her father.

Margaret always liked to imagine them in their first days together, her mother young and beautiful, so in love with the tall, lithe foreman that she was willing to defy custom and her father, to be turned away by her family in order to marry him. Self-educated and so well spoken that he was looked upon by many as a representative of the Cork City's laboring class, Augustine O'Driscoll achieved a stature no workingman had ever held before. He voiced the anger of his peers against the conditions under which they worked, and insisted that even if relatively few in number, they suffered as much as anyone from Ireland's colonial status.

Although he consented to marry in church, Augustine O'Driscoll had already earned the nickname of “Pagan” from his alehouse denunciations of Christianity, and his political radicalism. Eventually, alehouses and politics would prove to be his undoing, but all that was as yet unknown to the two lovers who took up residence in a crowded, noisy lane. Catherine sometimes wondered if she had done the right thing, but seeing her husband come through the door assured her that marrying him was the only thing that her heart could have let her do.

In the end, after years of estrangement, Catherine's father had relented. Old and sick, he had sent for his daughter, and she went to him in his last illness. Seeing her for the first time in all those years, he had stood back, both hands clutching the knob of his thorn stick, and said, “Sure, Catherine, you've become an old woman.”

Small
wonder. First came the babies, six in eight years, Margaret the eldest. They were good years at the mill, and Pagan O'Driscoll had rented a cottage in a newly constructed row of workers' residences on the outskirts of Cork City. More and more, however, Pagan was caught up in the political agitation that was sweeping across Ireland. A local organizer in Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, and a fervent advocate for untying the knot of union with Great Britain, he was less enthusiastic in his devotion to O'Connell himself, “The Liberator,” the man who had pushed through Catholic emancipation. At a rally outside Blarney Castle, Pagan proclaimed, “You can repeal a union, but you can't a rape, and the truth be told, that's what has been done to Ireland and to her people. And even though England can be forced to recognize that it can continue its depredation only at the cost of continually multiplying the size of its garrison in this country, even though it accepts the inevitability of Ireland's intention to regain its honor in the eyes of the world, an equally important question shall remain for us: What to do with the landlords? These are the servants of injustice, who held the robe of our ravager, and who to this day collect the spoils of criminal accomplice. What justice shall be meted to them?” His words were widely quoted in the loyalist newspapers, and that embarrassed the Association. Pagan was reprimanded by its leadership in Cork City. In private he said, “O'Connell is a landlord himself, and their fate will be his.”

In 1847, with the Famine raging in the countryside, Pagan joined the Irish Confederation, the militant embodiment of the Young Irelanders' desire to deal with the catastrophe of hunger by forcing an immediate restoration of Irish self-government. Margaret would remember him in the green uniform he wore to the Confederation meetings, a heroic sight in her eyes, but all the while her mother busied herself with the children, never seeming to notice the uniform or rhetoric of her husband, yet praying in her heart that the condition of the country could rectify itself before any harm could come to her husband.

In March
of 1848, when John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, two of the most fervid of the Young Irelander firebrands, were arrested for treason along with William Smith O'Brien, the organization's leader, there were speeches and torchlight parades. Later, Margaret remembered being at an outdoor meeting when her father spoke. She had no recollection of what he said, only an image of her mother with her head bowed, her hand raised to her forehead, as if praying or in pain. Whatever he said, he was subsequently dismissed from his job. That summer, habeas corpus was suspended, and the country proclaimed. Her father and a handful of others in Cork were arrested. In Tipperary, O'Brien, acquitted of the charges on which Mitchel had been convicted, led the remnants of the Irish Confederation in a “rising” that left two dead. Some of O'Brien's followers escaped to France or to America. O'Brien, Meagher, and several others were tried for treason, this time convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. The sentence was commuted to transportation.

The trials of O'Brien and the others were a sensation. They were men of wealth and substance, landowners with university degrees, and yet their words and deeds were redolent of the age-old excesses of the “wild Irish.” Where the grim, inexorable depopulation of the island through three years of starvation, disease, eviction, and emigration had failed to rivet the attention of the British reading public, the courtroom performance of the Young Irelanders did.

Pagan O'Driscoll didn't share in their fate. He languished in jail in Cork, but was never brought to trial. Margaret accompanied her mother to the jail each afternoon. It was a looming, featureless building not unlike the mill where her father had worked. Margaret and her mother stood behind one set of bars, Pagan behind another, and a jailer paced up and down the space between them. Her parents argued. Once, her father pointed at her and said to Catherine, “You'll upset the child if you talk like that.” Catherine became subdued. “If you gave a ha'penny for your children, you'd have not allowed yourself the words that put you behind those bars,” she said.

Her
father's friends helped pay the rent. After three months in custody, he was finally released. They moved to the cellar of a drapery store owned by a former member of the Confederation, and although the Famine receded and the country adjusted to the calm that followed in its wake, Pagan remained a committed revolutionary. He ate and drank politics and, as time passed, drank it more than ate it, an admired figure in the pubs of Cork, not allowed to pay for his own drinks, yet without any offer of work. While Margaret cared for the other children, Catherine went to work cleaning the homes of young clerks, Protestant newlyweds, mostly, who in the interests of domestic economy were willing to spend the early period of their careers without live-in help.

In 1853, when Margaret was twelve, Catherine became pregnant for the seventh time. By this time, Pagan shook so badly in the mornings that Margaret shaved him. She sat across from him, drew the razor across cheeks, chin, and throat. He held the chair with both hands, his eyes closed, grimacing when she nicked him. Sometimes she did it deliberately, out of anger at his drinking, at his stumbling home in the middle of the night, waking the children, making her mother cry. They lived on bread and tea. Finally, Catherine wrote to her father and explained their plight. He sent back an envelope containing no letter, only some pound notes. Pagan was furious when he found out.

That morning, Margaret finished shaving him and put the blade into the bowl of soapy water. A thin spume of blood trailed off. There was more blood on Pagan's chin. He had his hands shoved into his pockets so that they wouldn't shake, and he was shouting, demanding to know where the money had come from to fill the house with food.

“Not from you, that's for sure,” Catherine said.

He grabbed
her by the collar of her dress, and a button at her throat flew off and ran in a wide circle around the floor. He twisted the dress in his hand and lifted her to her toes. “You bloody whore,” he said, “don't you ever talk to me like that.”

Margaret retrieved the razor from the bowl and held it tightly, open, in a fold of her dress. She moved toward her father, her hand trembling.

“Let go,” Margaret said.

He took his hands off Catherine, turned, and went out the door. He didn't come back that night, nor in the days that followed, and Margaret was glad for it. They heard reports that he was drinking heavily, sleeping in alleyways, but he was never mentioned except when they said their prayers and her mother put his name in the litany of those she asked God's mercy for.

When he came back, he stood in the stairwell that led down from the street to their door. The shadows hid his unwashed, unshaven face. Holding the door open a crack, Margaret thought he was just another beggar.

“It's me,” he said, “your father.”

Margaret put her shoulder against the door and braced it with her knee. Her mother came from behind her. She gently pushed Margaret out of the way and stepped outside.

Neither Catherine nor Pagan ever made mention of what was said, but when they came back inside, he sat on their bed and wept. He got a job as a porter in a bakery. It required him to work nights. He slept most of the day, and to the children became little more than a curled, sheeted figure behind the curtain that served as the wall of their parents' bedroom.

When the second O'Driscoll daughter was old enough to look after the younger children, Margaret joined her mother cleaning houses. In January of 1858, Catherine went to Macroom for the first time since her father had died, and she took Margaret with her. Catherine grew excited at the prospect of the trip, chattering away about her girlhood, the dances at the crossroads, the pilgrimages to the holy well, the boys who risked her father's wrath by flirting with her. They stayed with Catherine's brother, Jeremiah Murphy, a big, bearded, taciturn tenant farmer who lived alone in the whitewashed cabin where he and Catherine had been born. Catherine and Margaret did their best to bring some sort of order to the place, and to get rid of the barnyard odors that pervaded it. Catherine had brought sheets from Cork City to cover the straw mattresses.

Approaching
fifty, and in the process of bargaining for a wife, Jeremiah seemed pleased. He invited his neighbors to come see his sister, and after Mass on Sunday they came, some to see the prodigal daughter returned, to mark the changes in her since she was a girl among them, and others to set their own daughters on display, eager for a match that would join their fortunes to Jeremiah's. In the old days, before the Famine, it was only a handful of prosperous tenants with the biggest holdings who would postpone marriage so long, but now such procrastination was increasingly the fashion among all levels, save the Irish-speaking and the poorest of the poor, which were usually the same thing. On the way back from Mass, Catherine pointed out to Margaret a field where a cluster of cabins had once stood. “The people there were all musicians and singers. Laborers by day, at night they filled the air with their melodies. But it's a different country now. The life is gone out of the land. Half the people I knew as a girl are gone, God knows where.”

The men entered Jeremiah's cabin first, the nails in their big leather shoes scraping loudly on the floor. They held their hats in their large, red hands. Their wives followed. To Margaret, the women resembled nothing so much as the dwellings they inhabited—squat, thick-walled, the shawls over their heads as bulky and rough as thatch. Last came the daughters, girls with none of their mothers' girth, but wrapped beneath the same kind of shawls, and as shy as calves. Moving around the room in a store-bought dress from Cork City that was bordered at the cuffs and neck with lace and drawn in at the waist, Catherine seemed from a different world. It was hard for Margaret to believe that her mother had lived her youth as one of these timid girls, or that if she had stayed she would have turned into one of these solid, stocky peasant wives. Catherine glided about the room with lovely grace, serving tea. It was also difficult for Margaret to think of her mother as a clerk's skivvy.