The Light of Evening (5 page)

“You kilt it.”

“She kilt it.”

“I had no milk for it,” she answered back.

“Even a pelican tears its own flesh to feed its young.”

“I would have taken it … I would have reared it,” one woman said, throwing herself down in a swoon and others did likewise as they recited the litany: “Mother of Divine Grace, Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled, Mother most amiable, Mother of good counsel, Mother of Our Creator, Mother of Our Savior.”

Droves of birds had come, squalling and squealing, seagulls and other birds with scrawny necks, the beat of their wings furious as they strove to fend each other off, to get down there, fathoms deep, down to where our minds could not go, so hideous was it.

Two of the crew arrived with sticks and began beating the crowd back to make way for Captain DeVere. He was a big rough man who struck fear into us just by standing there. He wore a leather jerkin and leather breeches and had a mustache that curved halfway round his cheeks. Through a monocle he looked at her, her demeanor.

“Little Irish hussy,” he said.

“Your honor,” she said, but she was trembling.

“Where’s your porker?” he asked.

“Fintan … the creature … he died … the milk gave out on

me.

“You mean you got shot of it,” he said, and then she threw herself at his mercy and begged not to be sent back down to the hole as the men would crucify her, and looking from her to them he simply said, “Yonder.” We watched her go, watched her slim back, beholden, as she trotted after him.

“Its little bones, its little bones,” Sheila kept saying, as if by delivering it she had some claim on it and leaning over the railings she stared and spoke down into the curdling water, into the deep, as if she could fish it out, the ship slewing and bouncing on its way, the birds maddened with hunger.

A preacher came that night to read aloud to us and possibly to quell any unrest. He read from a leather-bound book in a very somber voice.

The basin of the Atlantic Ocean is a long trough, separating the old world from the new. This ocean furrow was probably scored into the solid crust of our planet by the almighty hand
—
that there be waters which he calls seas might be gathered together so as to let dry land appear. Could the waters of the North Atlantic be drawn off so as to expose to view this great sea gash, which separates continents and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene most rugged, grand, and imposing, the very ribs of the solid earth with the foundations of the sea would be brought to light and we should have at one view in the empty cradle of the ocean, a thousand fearful wrecks, with that fearful army of dead men’s skulls, great anchors, heaps of pearls, and inestimable stores, which in the poet’s eye lay scattered at the bottom of the sea, making it hideous with the sights of ugly death.

Ellis Island

in the big hall under a roof that leaked, we were herded into different groups, our names and our numbers tagged onto our chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness, every flaw, every deformity, brutes at sending people back.

I had never known, never thought, that God had created so many different races
—
different attires, different hairstyles and headgears, men with ringlets and small skullcaps, women the size of tubs because of the clothes, the bundles they had wrapped around themselves, and their children roped to them in case they got lost. When children cried parents gave them their dolls and demanded medicines for them, which they fed them off spoons as if they were little gods. Suspicion in all eyes. Exiled from where we came and exiled now from each other, the waiting as dreadful as the journey on the ship.

To have caught sight of New York, the tops of the tall buildings pink in the dawn haze, was to wish more than ever to be set down in it. It seemed so idyllic, barges and boats moored in the harbor, the water calm and glassy, and the birds not at all like the venomous ones that had gone down after the little corpse.

On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, our tongues pressed, our eyelids lifted with a buttonhook, our hearts listened to, our hair examined for lice, then our bodies hosed down by foreign ladies who had not a shred of modesty.

Then came the test for our reading and writing skills. People stammering and hesitating as they stumbled over the words of the Psalms:

This our bread we took hot for our provisions out of our

houses on the day we came forth unto you. Behold thy time was the time of love and I spread my skirt

over thee and covered thy nakedness.

All around there were tears and pleadings, people sent back to wait, others dispatched into nearby rooms, and one lady in a scraggy fur coat down on her knees, holding her husband’s ankles, clinging to him, “Aoran, Aoran,” his tag a different color from hers, signifying that he was being sent back, forever. The whole hall was looking at her and though she spoke in a foreign tongue, it was clear that she would not be parted from him. He tried reasoning with her but to no avail, then all of a sudden she spat onto her fingers, wiped them on his eyelids, and then ran her damp fingers across her own, to contract the eye disease that she guessed he had. The guards were on her like dogs. She whirled and struck out, they grappling but unable to hold her and her husband looking at her with a coldness, such a coldness, as if he did not love her, had never loved her, as that was the only way to make her go on.

The inspector, scrutinizing my passbook where my mother had made me copy out household hints, called a second inspector over and I thought it meant refusal. They read it together and then told me to read it aloud and I realized that I was being made a laughingstock, a greenhorn with her household tips.

Rules for Management of Family Wash:

Rub line with a cloth to ensure cleanliness.

Economize on space and pegs.

Hang all garments the wrong side out.

Place all garments with their openings to the wind.

Put pegs in thickest part of garment folding.

Hang tablecloths bag shaped.

Hang flannels in shade.

Hang stockings within one inch of toe, wrong side out.

When my papers were stamped, I smarted at seeing the words
domestic servant,
but I had passed and I was trooping out into a world that seemed both strange and carnival-like, people bustling around, youngsters tugging and grabbing at my luggage, hawkers with baskets of fruits, apples and peaches, a blush on their soft skins as if they had been randomly rouged.

The Great Hall

what had those white-tiled walls and black pillars not witnessed?

People so overjoyed at being united that they wept with relief, others with despair in their eyes, fearing the worst, and Mary Angela in a blue knitted suit, like a mermaid, molded into it, walking up and down, gauging her chances. Before long she caught the attentions of a man who had hurried in, a well-dressed man with a mustache. They hadn’t even exchanged a word, only gestures, and yet she knew, knew by the black armband on his sleeve, by his gaze, that he was a husband in mourning. All she did was put one hand under her breasts like she was weighing them and he came across to her, and soon after they went upstairs to an office, where it seemed he got her papers sanctioned to leave with him. She told us that she was going to be a wet nurse to his little son. We hadn’t seen her since the evening of the drowning, but we’d heard that she had made herself very popular in the upper quarters and milked Captain DeVere’s goats, morning and night.

My cousin had not come.

A sign above Madam Aisha’s beauty parlor offered to curl women’s hair and paint their faces for a reasonable sum. Many availed of it before having their photographs taken at the kissing station. Couples gazing into each other’s eyes. A lady kept begging of me, “Do something for me, my most beloved sister,” except that I couldn’t. My cousin had not come. Boats came on

the hour, people left, and the brown puddly water kept plashing on the shore, endlessly, and it was as if I were imprisoned there forever.

If my cousin did not come I would be put in one of the brick buildings with flags flying from the turrets, put there and be kept until my parents had sent the money for my passage home. Even Sheila had gone. “Call up some Sunday if you’re passing,” she said as she left with three friends. She lived on 22nd Street, wherever that was. A tall man kept pestering me, kept saying, “You must be Mary Mountjoy,” and I pretended that I didn’t understand him, in case I was kidnapped. That was the word, Sheila had dinned into us on the voyage, not to be kidnapped and not to have cheeky youngsters run off with our luggage, pretending that we were bound for Baltimore or Connecticut, or places unknown to us.

When my cousin came it was not the reunion I expected. She said why the tears, why the sulking. Did I not know she would come? She was not in the least bit like the tinted picture of herself that her mother had shown my mother; she was much stouter and her clothes were drab.

Where we docked it was bitter cold, the remains of snow on a swerve of dirty grass, a black man with long tapering fingers played a fiddle, played the different tunes to appeal to the emigrants, jog memories of their homelands. “Enjoying yourself, honey … going to marry the man you dreamed of,” he said to me and started to dance a jig. Mary Kate was furious and lugged me away. He laughed and called after her, “It’s not a funeral, baby,” and dragging me she said, “You stay near me now, you stay near me now,” vexed because he had made fun of her.

Everything then so hurried, getting the ticket, getting on the train, going through tunnels, then ugly sooted buildings, depots, rundown houses, and not a word exchanged between us. I could feel she was angry with me because of my gawkiness, because of my accent and my oilskin bag, bound with twine. She talked to herself, mumbled, as the train rumbled along. Then all of a

sudden her mood changed and she kissed me and hugged me and said my mother and her mother were first cousins and that meant that she and I were second cousins and would be buddies. We were going to the borough, the borough being much nicer than the city, leafier and closer to nature.

The boarding house was in a street of houses that were all identical and in the dusk they looked mud-colored, but afterward in daylight I saw that they were more the color of rhubarb. We had to tiptoe. There were umbrellas and a walking stick in a china holder in the hall. She said he was a blackamoor. He had a brown face, his red eyes rimmed with silver ore. The kitchen was shared with many others, their foodstuffs on different trays with their names and a very old icebox that grunted and had odd things in it, like soft cheese in muslin and a bowl of beetroot soup. She made me stick my head inside it to feel how cold it was. Ice was precious. In the hospital where she worked packs of ice were put over the heads of the lunatics so that they could rant and rave without being heard. She had kept me some eats
—
bread with meat paste and a cold rice pudding. A lady came to fetch something out of the icebox but didn’t throw us a word. After she left Mary Kate stuck her tongue out, said she didn’t like her, she was foreign, all the other lodgers were foreign except us. We didn’t stay long in the kitchen, it being communal, whereas her bedroom was private. We had to go through another bedroom with a couple and a baby and my heavy laced boots creaked awful.

It was topsy-turvy in her quarters, clothes, shoes, dishes, and coat hangers skewed about. A red quilt with herringbone stitch was pulled up over her bed, by way of making it. She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ’s handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere. Because it was a special occasion she would allow herself a little toddy. She wanted me to know that she was not a drinker but

now and then had a drink as a pick-me-up. From a small bottle she poured some into a mug, kicked her shoes off, then threw off her glasses, and her eyes without them looked dopey and sheepish. Tears gushed out of her when I gave her the porter cake my mother sent and she hugged me. After that it was all “gee whiz.” Gee whiz, I was out of the bogs now, I was in the beautiful borough, starting a new life. We would go to Coney in the summer. I didn’t know what Coney was but imagined it a place full of rabbits. She laughed at that. Coney was the last word in thrills, roller-skating, love rides, stunts such as being sucked into the mouth of a giant tobacco pipe and slid out through the bowl at the other end. She’d gone there in the summer with a beau, a beau that worked in construction but announced one day he had to move on. That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could. She recalled the day, the petting, dancing cheek to cheek in the open air with the ocean breezes drifting in and she believing that she was hitched up.

The bathroom was on the other side of the bedroom where the couple with the baby slept. It meant disturbing them. The first two times she came with me and showed me a knack of pulling the chain so that it made the least amount of noise. By the third time she was furious. What was wrong with me. Did I have a tapeworm or what. She raised the sash of the window as far up as it would go and lifted me out onto the stone ledge, then pulled the window down to teach me a lesson. I could hear the rumble of cars in the street beyond. Perched there, terrified and certain that I would fall or jump, she laughing at the joke, I saw again the sign in the examination hall that had said cripples not wanted and began to batter on the window.