The Element of Fire

Ellen delivered them on Louisa’s first day, both girls bursting with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Ellen herself was every bit on edge as they were, the day being for her not without its tinge of sadness, too.

‘The last leaving the nest,’ she said to Lavelle when he called to see her that evening.

He perked her up, telling of his escapades as a young scholar, and asking about her own schooldays.

‘They were spent in timeless wonder with my teacher – my father,’ she told him, falling into ‘remembering’ for once.

Mostly though, she was ‘forgetting’. She read with an appetite Lavelle found hard to understand. Newspapers, periodicals, handbills, anything from which she could glean more information for herself and her children about Boston and ‘America-life’.

Though he could still raise a smile, even a laugh from her, Lavelle thought she had gone into herself a bit since returning to Boston. It was to be expected, he supposed, added to by the preoccupation with getting the children settled into their new environs.

At times, she teased him about Boston’s belles, and while there were many among them who Hashed their eyes at the handsome Mr Lavelle, none caught his in return, as he expected she knew.

Lavelle, since she had left, had been busy in more ways than one. His geniality and easy manner had led him to form acquaintances with some of Boston’s more go-ahead Irish community. He prevailed upon her to visit the gathering places with him, thinking she had ‘rarefied herself from all things Irish’. This she had agreed to on occasion but only for his company. She couldn’t say she enjoyed hearing the endless stories of ‘Old Ireland’ – and in the old language. Steadfastly she refused to sing the times when song and dancing broke out, even when Lavelle himself, armed with his fiddle, hurtled the bow across its strings. At the first of such gatherings, he had introduced her as ‘Ellen Rua’. Afterwards, she had corrected him.

‘It’s just “Ellen”, Lavelle, plain “Ellen”!’

‘Why?’ he challenged.

‘It just is. “Ellen Rua” is in the past,’ she answered.

‘I understand your wish to forget the past,’ he said, ‘but this is something more than that.’

‘What is it then, Lavelle?’

‘It’s a denial of who you are,’ he stated matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve been known since a child as “Ellen Rua”, your parents … Michael … your neighbours …’

‘Well, they are all of them gone now and so is “Ellen Rua”,’ she insisted. But he would not be put off.

‘You’re also denying your Irishness, the language, everything … Since the moment you set foot back here, you don’t want any part of it.’ he accused.

‘Would you blame me?’ she retorted. ‘And you, Lavelle, what do you want?’ she challenged in return. ‘Only your notion of a red-haired Irish colleen – a Kathleen Ní Houlihan – who you can hold on to as your dream of Ireland?’

‘An Ireland that’s dead and gone …’ she continued, the blue-green eyes firing up. He watched, saw the furrow between her lips and nostrils rise and fall like he remembered. Deepening its well, swelling its narrow ridges. ‘… and in the Famine grave. An Ireland that all of you are trying to hang on to, filled with mist and grog and dewy-eyed comeallyes. Living for the day when you’ll all rise up and send an army home to rout “the auld enemy”!’

‘And why shouldn’t we?’ he answered calmly, taking no small delight at seeing her in such an impassioned state. ‘Isn’t it the English that have us the way we are?’ he added, giving as good as he got.

10

With the children now settled in their respective schools, she had, as she had hoped for, more time to devote to the business of the New England Wine Company, so taking some of the load from Lavelle’s shoulders.

Coming up to Christmas was their busiest time; Peabody was demanding and irritable, wanting stocks early, pressing for replacement stock immediately, arguing that with the large volumes he was now taking for two stores, rather than one, she should be ‘beating down the French with their high prices’. Lavelle made extra shelving to try and appease him. He looked after all activities related to shipping, warehousing and deliveries. She saw to the ordering, the banking and the documentation, being, as Lavelle put it, ‘better able to hurl the pen’ than he was.

Twice weekly she called on Peabody at Quincy Market, soothing his irascibility, he wanting to hold her hand at every turn, still referring to Lavelle as ‘that young helper of yours, not much between the ears’. Mockingly he asked her to ‘make an old man happy this Christmas and marry me, Ellen!’

She, in turn, telling him, ‘Don’t be exciting yourself, Jacob, with all that talk or you’ll get a heart attack and never see the Christmas. I’ll be neither an old man’s sweetheart, nor a young man’s slave.’

Jacob feigned hurt, ‘rejected again’… then laughter … ‘Ah Ellen, what would I do without you to brighten the day?’

What was it about men, she wondered, that they were distracted so easily? If they had a few children to bear and rear, it would soon soften their coughs. Always thinking about their ‘scythe-stones’! She’d heard the valley women, when they huddled to talk, often laugh that – ‘It’s the last thing to die in a man – the scythe-stone – if it was ever any good for anything but sharpening a blade in the first place!’

She loved the way that in the Gaelic you could talk ‘round’ a thing, with everybody still knowing what you meant. Say it without saying it. The Americans never talked in the ‘roundabout talk’ – she missed that, much and all as she tried to distance herself from her previous life.

Despite everything, getting the children settled, easing once again into the business, she hadn’t really fitted back into Boston life as she would have hoped. She didn’t know what it was. She still grieved for Katie, guilt always suffusing the grief. Once started her thoughts would then run to Annie and Michael, until she would have to go and hide in the dark of Holy Cross Cathedral, or slip away to sit in the cold of the Common under the Great Elm. No matter how busy she was, how she was furthering their lives, there was always the void, the big aching void, always waiting to claim her.

Lavelle had been her one constant, steadfast in everything. He laughed and poked fun at how she worried over things, her single-mindedness. Kept at her, forcing her not to take herself too seriously. At first this irritated her, but he didn’t stand for that either, and she found it hard to sustain any measure of annoyance with him, such was his enthusiasm for ‘life to be lived’. And the children liked him. Even Patrick, though he’d never say it, had softened towards Lavelle.

They had all gone on 5 November – ‘Pope’s Night’ – to see the Orange Parades, with their Kick-the-Pope bands. Patrick was agog at the display of anti-Catholic paraphernalia and the aggressive clatter-thump of the lambeg drums, the manic drummers facing each other ‘hoop to hoop’, malacca canes banging out deafening military tattoos.

‘But … they’re Irish too!’ Patrick protested, as Lavelle tried to explain the sashes, hard hats and anti-Irish slogans.

‘They are and they aren’t, Patrick!’ Lavelle responded. ‘Their feet are on the same island as us at home,’ and he laughed, ‘they’ve even stolen some of our jigs and reels and fifed them into marches, though they’ll never admit to that. But their hearts are for ever in England.’

That was the moment, Ellen knew, when Patrick had begun to change towards her ‘fancy man’, as he once called Lavelle. The boy identified with Lavelle’s antipathy towards the Orangemen and their bitter, threatening music. To his credit, Lavelle did not encourage Patrick, make a thing of it, as he could have done. And she noticed it had gone on like that, in little fits and starts that bonded them, without any great scheme being behind it.

Without any great scheme, either – certainly on her part – things had settled into a comfortable pattern between herself and Lavelle. He was as much a part of the neighbourhood of her new life as the Old South Meeting House, spiking the sky across from where she lived, or the Long Wharf, spiking the sea. Like these boundaries of heaven and ocean, always there, securing this exciting New World of hers, so too was Lavelle. Not that she was unaware of his physical attractiveness, the way he sometimes collided with her, would catch her arm, steady her up, and give that grin of his, causing her a momentary embarrassment. Once or twice he held her longer than necessary, startled her by his nearness, said something like ‘Boston life hasn’t softened you yet, you’re still a fine woman,’ then laughed and let go of her just as suddenly again.

At Christmas, after he had dined with them, tramped in the snow, laden with presents for the children and her, she wasn’t totally unprepared when he asked her.

She had gone down the flights of stairs ahead of him, held the door, looking out into the abandoned stillness of Washington Street. No hawkers’ cries, no noise of commerce, the Old South Meeting House cribbed in white. No sound at the Hub of the Universe, only his voice, clear and as impudent as you please, passing her, going out into the dampening snows.

‘You know, Ellen, we should get married after Lent!’

She never answered him at first. Giddy in the moment, she drew back, waited until he was outside, half-turned for home.

‘You know, Lavelle,’ she said, mocking his impudence and laughing, ‘I had the same notion myself!’ And, despite all of her previous resolve, it was out before she knew it.

She watched after him, his boots crunching the snow, the flakes haloed on his head, whistling his way down Washington Street – some old jig-time tune she half-remembered.

In the New Year, little doubts had begun to raise themselves about whether or not she was doing the right thing. She hadn’t remained steadfast for long. Getting married again was against everything she once held; against ‘being true to the grave’. But that was just it – that was part of the old ways. Here in Boston, it was different. After a suitable period of mourning a man and, to a lesser degree, a woman might marry again. Still, it was only three years.

Not that she ever forgot Michael. Not for one single day, nor would she, ever. But she had great ease with Lavelle. He had no fixed notions like some of the other men about where women fitted – mostly in front of a baking oven. Maybe it was his time in Australia, where women tamed the harsh bush as much as the men did. Whatever, there was ease and comfort between them, and she liked his off-the-cuff manner. He granted her respect, but not too much. Even the way he had asked her – going out the door – as if not caring if she had said ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Herself and Lavelle would be a good match.

She had told the children on the following day, St Stephen’s, when she herself was more composed. Mary, she thought, took it well. Patrick less so, but without the level of opposition from him, which she had expected. The excitement somehow catching her, Louisa too joined in, running to kiss her as Mary had done.

By early Lent, she had cast her doubts aside. She had made her bed, now she must lie in it. At times, even, the thought of lying in Lavelle’s bed caused her a shiver of expectation.

Spring saw her preparing for the rites of marriage as precepted by the ever-expanding Archdiocese of Boston. Purity in thought and action,

The Inviolata to the Blessed Virgin …

Inviolata, integra et casta es, Maria … Stainless, inviolate, and chaste art thou, O Mary … Nostra ut pura pectora sint et corpora … That pure our minds and hearts may be …

Nobody ‘forbade the banns’ – read out on three consecutive Sundays at Holy Cross. Each week she sat through their reading, mortified lest somebody would shout out objecting to her intended marriage. Worse still that without her knowing it, some prudish biddy would slink around to the sacristy after Mass and coat the ear of the priest with poisoned whisperings about her. Then she would be quietly summoned, the reading of the banns suspended, she and her children shamed.

When the day finally came, the wedding was grander than anything she could have had back home. Much grander – and in a hotel too. While she was against wasting too much money on frippery, there was a sense of statement, as Lavelle had put it, ‘That we’re not paupers any more. That we’re no longer the Famine Irish!’

So she had relented, rigging the children in new outfits, had cut for herself a dress from a foulard of silk, thin and soft and cream in colour. Lavelle too, hatted, cravatted, looked every inch the fine Boston gentleman. The day itself was a great success and seemed to spin out for ever. As indeed it did – into the next morning. ‘It’s in danger of turning into a wake …’ she whispered to Lavelle, in a private moment, ‘… if it goes on any longer!’

And she had sung, especially for him, ‘Úna Bhán – ‘Fair-haired Úna’, one of the great love songs, not as she should have, she felt. She hadn’t spoken a syllable of Irish for eight months. Now the words felt clumsy in her mouth so she trimmed the song from its forty-odd verses down to a dozen or so.

Peabody, whom they’d invited but didn’t think would attend, to her delight, if not wholly to Lavelle’s, presented himself for the after-wedding festivities.

‘I might as well close up shop completely if I was observed entering a Roman church,’ he confided to her jokingly. ‘It reminds me, Ellen – it reminds me …’ He started to tell her something after she’d sung, then changed course. ‘That song – what does it say?’ he instead asked.

‘It’s a song from Connemara, two hundred years old,’ she explained, ‘composed for the woman Úna, whose father would not let her marry beneath herself. Being kept from her beloved, she died. He seeing her laid out, remembers her beauty – like the music of the harp always on the road before him. His love for her so great that it had come between him and God. There, that’s all forty verses of it in Irish, in one in English!’ she laughed.

Peabody, after he had thought for a moment, remarked, ‘Isn’t it a strange song to sing on your wedding-day, Ellen – a song about death?’

‘Oh no, Jacob! That’s the beauty of the song – it’s not of death, it’s of great love. He would lose God for her,’ she answered, impassioned.

Peabody looked away from her into the revelry beyond. ‘I suppose a life without great love is like that – a losing of God,’ he said. He was speaking of his own life; she waited, silent. ‘The tenacity of true passion is terrible; it will stand against the hosts of Heaven, rather than surrender its aim, and must be crushed, sent to the lowest pit, before it will ever succumb – something I heard once,’ he mumbled, by way of explanation.

‘Jacob – were you ever …?’ she started, wanting to ask him.

‘It’s something I have observed, Ellen,’ he interrupted, deflecting her, ‘about the Irish. How at once happiness and sadness can co-exist. Your wakes are laced with merriment, your weddings with lament. It is a peculiar twist of character. Little wonder the English find you a disconcerting race to govern.’ Peabody laughed a little.

‘We’re no different from any other peoples,’ she said gently, thinking of him, rather than the Irish or the English.

‘Oh, but you are, Ellen!’ he said, rising to the argument. ‘There’s a blackness within your race, a perversity. Nothing is allowed to be as it is. Love must be death. Death must be love. Everything turned on itself.’

‘Jacob, come along. This is most unlike you to be so dark, on such a day.’

He apologized, and she was drawn back into the merriment, sorry she had started it all by explaining the song to him.

She had some difficulty pulling the children away from all the excitement and settling them down across the hall from where she and Lavelle would spend their wedding-night. Later, as she undressed, thinking about the day, waiting for Lavelle, the song came back to her. ‘Úna, wasn’t it you that went between me and God?’ What a thing for a person to live with! It was unimaginable to her – throwing over God for love.

She hiked up her nightdress, knelt by the bedside. She’d shorten the prayers a bit tonight, didn’t want to be still out of bed when Lavelle came up.

Besides, Boston in springtime had yet quite a nip to it.

11

The very next day they moved into the new quarters Lavelle had found for them in Pleasant Street. They had decided they should rent, until they were better fitted to buy a place of their own. The fear always being with them both, that if overstretched with borrowings, things took a turn, the banks would then tumble them out of the house, evict them. She and the children already carried that scar. It was something she’d never put them through again. With the rent it was less of a risk. They’d still have a bit aside to tide them over, if a reversal of fortune came about.

She had hated leaving Washington Street, thinking how in the end it was marriage, not commerce snapping up every parcel of space which had forced them out.

The Pleasant Street house was in a neat terrace, with its own hall-door and a shiny letterbox low down – while Washington Street was never her own hall-door. A slab of granite stone stepped up to this one, which Mary thought ‘very grand’. Louisa meanwhile was fascinated by the brass lettering, running her finger around the welcoming curvature of the number that would be her new home, 29.

Inside there was a short hallway, a kitchen, a parlour and a ‘good room’, as Ellen regarded it. Upstairs three bedrooms, two commodious, one less so. ‘That one’s for you, Patrick,’ Mary couldn’t resist teasing. Out back was a small yard and a cabbage patch. It was all perfectly adequate. She could do a lot with it, and at least they wouldn’t be crowded in on top of each other.

They were hardly in the door, solid and black apart from the two light-giving panels of frosted glass, when it resounded to a vigorous knocking. On the step outside, Mrs Harriet Brophy fixed the tilt of her snug hat, pushed back an unbiddable wisp of hair and waited to present herself to her new neighbours. A trim dart of a woman from the Donegal-Derry border, she had already espied them.

‘Newlyweds,’ she had heard, ‘with three grown-up children,’ she had exclaimed to ‘himself’, hand to her mouth. ‘What’s the Christian world coming to at all, Hector?’ ‘Himself’ wasn’t much interested. ‘Bringing down the neighbourhood, that’s what. What have we got to leave our children, if not a decent neighbourhood?’

‘I’d just like to welcome you all.’ Harriet Brophy beamed as Ellen opened the door. ‘I’m your neighbour – a few doors up.’ Ellen bade in the woman, who sparrow-hopped over the threshold. She had a paper with her, something wrapped inside. ‘For luck,’ she said, ‘for the house.’ Ellen opened it. ‘A piece of anthracite to keep winters warm,’ the woman said. ‘A handful of salt, to keep the table laden.’ And in a small bluish bottle, ‘A sup of holy water to sanctify the home.’

Ellen thanked her, moved by the woman’s thought-fulness, but Harriet Brophy wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Och, for nothing at all – I think the custom came from Scotland first, except it was a sod of turf then, instead of the anthracite, and probably whiskey instead of the water!’

She had thin bony hands, Ellen noticed, which she fluttered like wings when she spoke, and a waist like a wasp. The smallest bitteen of a woman, Ellen thought, that she had ever seen. But she insisted they come with her to her house for tea.

‘Himself is out and won’t bother us!’

Ellen looked at Lavelle.

‘You and the children go, I’ll take care of things here,’ he smiled.

At tea, Mrs Brophy, as Ellen knew she would, filled her in on Pleasant Street life. ‘Nice neighbourhood, Americans and the likes of you and me,’ she confided, ‘hardworking people, none of the other Irish, you know what I mean … from the ships.’ Then, stretching her thin scrogall of a neck and leaning forward. ‘And no blacks, Mrs Lavelle.’ Harriet Brophy pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes and gave a knowing nod to Ellen. ‘You’ll be all right here, Mrs Lavelle, nice neighbours to look out for you here!’

And so it was, with Ellen settling into an ordered continuum of life with her new husband, two children and ‘the fosterling’, as Mrs Brophy referred to Louisa.

By the summer of 1849, the number of Irish in Boston had swollen to a quarter of the population, the weight by which they were arriving almost suffocating the city. Each one bringing his or her own story of the distressful state of Ireland.

Half of all the city’s paupers were Irish. Many having left the workhouses of Connacht, found only in Massachusetts the State Lunatic Asylum – alcohol and the tug of home combining to make sanity elusive. Half of the male Irish who did manage to find work were labourers. Of the females, two-thirds of all cooks, housekeepers and laundresses in Boston were Irish. Ellen marvelled at the resoluteness of her people. There was no going back and the Irish would work at anything. Boston bosses welcomed the increasing supply of green-hand drudge horses, who would work for next to nothing, $1.25 a day or less. How they kept body and soul together for this – labouring a twelve-or thirteen-hour day – she didn’t know, except it was an everyday miracle.

The Pilot carried regular letters detailing the trials and tribulations of the new arrivals:

For the promise of $2.00 a day, I was carted halfway across America. When we got there, they said it was a mistake, the most they could give was a dollar a day, with 5 cents a day gone for the first month for the cost of getting us here.

A couple of Tipperary lads and me started complaining about what they had promised first when the ganger from Clare says, ‘Well Paddy, start walking!’, and he pointed his finger to the east. ‘You should get there by Christmas!’

It was only June then, so we stayed.

She used it with the children. ‘Life in America is not all honey and gold. Keep to your books, it’s the only way for us Irish to “up” ourselves!’

She herself didn’t come much into contact with the masses of Irish who polluted the neighbourhoods of the North End and Fort Hill, though it was hard to avoid them, the way they spilled over like treacle into the areas around the docks. New vessels, holds bursting with more Irish peasantry, arrived with worrying regularity.

‘The city is swamped with them!’ she said to Lavelle.

‘We’ll all be over-run by the Famine, as much here as at home,’ was his comment. ‘It would never have been let happen in Devon or Cornwall, only in John Bull’s Irish province,’ he added caustically.

She was still careful of the children, and kept them in as much as possible lest they came into contact with the other Irish from the ships, be diseased by these new arrivals. Things had gone well for them and she wanted nothing to go wrong now.

The French wines and brandies supplied to them by Frontignac, Père et Fils, Montréal, found their way steadily off the shelves of Peabody’s two stores – and likewise from the shelves of their newest customer, Higgins of West Roxbury – and on to the finer tables of Boston. There to be frequently served by the swelling number of ‘Bridgets’, who arrived almost daily to inhabit the plush parlours of Roxbury and Beacon Hill.

Once, when visiting Peabody, the merchant had introduced her to one such of his customers. This gentleman, having disposed of the normal courtesies, confided in her: ‘We have one of your countrywomen amongst us – “Bridget” – excellent girl, clean and no trouble; the children adore her.’ Ellen was pleased for him. The gentleman sallied on. ‘She’s the very best “Bridget” in all of Chestnut Street, my wife assures me!’ he said, smiling at her.

‘Really?’ she smiled back.

He, mistaking this for interest, continued. ‘Every home in Boston should have a “Bridget”. They require some training, but are so genial by nature. We hear so much of the turbulence of the Irish character. Perhaps geniality is more particular to Irish womanhood?’ he said, thinking he complimented her.