The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
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.
‘So, they have become nameless?’ she replied brusquely.
He looked at her, surprised at her obvious lack of geniality.
‘If they are all to be called “Bridget”, then they are all without identity,’ she stated, with little patience.
‘Oh, not all, madam!’ the gentleman from Chestnut Street assured her. ‘Our “Bridget” is a Mary, and next door’s is an Ellen; they are all named with their own names, eh, before becoming “Bridgets”,’ he explained, wondering at her slowness, and why on earth Peabody had ever introduced them in the first place.
Whatever about the turmoils Boston was experiencing with Bridgets or otherwise, she and Lavelle settled into a happy and tranquil state. ‘A pool of contentment’, was how Mrs Brophy (‘Wasp-waist’ to Lavelle) described it. Harriet Brophy had an opinion on most things in life – and most people. Furthermore she was not one bit backward about coming forward with these opinions – in whatever company she might find herself.
‘He, Mr Lavelle, is such a dashing man, always good-humoured. It was made in Heaven … made in Heaven, Mrs Lavelle, as my own and …’ she added quickly, ‘… all good marriages most surely are,’ she informed Ellen.
Ellen, was careful not to reveal too much of anything to Harriet Brophy, for by the following Sunday after Mass the whole parish would have it. But ‘Wasp-waist’ was right about her and Lavelle. They were ‘a pool of contentment’. Lavelle was everything the woman described him as and more, being as well an industrious worker and a good father to her children and ‘the fosterling’. Ellen knew he would have liked a child of his own and she was full in her desire to grant him that wish. But so far they had not been blessed.
Lavelle never asked, but every month or so he would look at her. When she said nothing, she would see the hope dashed from his eyes. But it never lasted with him, nor did he ever attach any blame to her, saying only she was the ‘plenty of all happiness’ in his life.
Once she had told him that for the six years before Annie was born, she had been barren.
‘She must have been born hard,’ was all he said, ‘taken a lot out of you.’
Sometimes of an evening he spoke of Australia, its vast bushland, its sounds, its redness. She neither naysayed nor encouraged him in this. Australia had been a dark experience for both of them. But it had, after all, been where she had first met him.
‘You miss it,’ she stated, during one such reminiscing.
‘I suppose I do, Ellen,’ he told her. ‘I grew up on an island, wild as winter. Australia always reminded me of that wildness, though it was hot and red instead of wet and green. I miss the wide-open spaces, the smell of the gum trees – the silence. This Boston’s a noisy place.’
‘It is that,’ she replied.
‘Would you ever return?’ he asked, turning the question on her.
‘No …’ she said, ‘… to neither. Australia is a far country and Ireland even farther in my mind. I’ll do with being buried in America.’