The food she makes, familiar to me from Ireland, evokes a flood of memories: sausages roasting with potatoes in the oven, the tea leaves in Gram’s morning cuppa, laundry flapping on the line behind her house, the faint clang of the church bell in the distance. Gram saying, “Now, that was the goat’s toe,” after a satisfying supper. And other things: quarrels between Mam and Gram, my da passed out drunk on the floor. Mam’s cry: “You spoiled him rotten, and now he’ll never be a man”—and Gram’s retort: “You keep pecking at him and soon he won’t come home at all.” Sometimes when I stayed overnight at Gram’s, I’d overhear my grandparents whispering at the kitchen table. What are we to do about it, then? Will we have to feed that family forever? I knew they were exasperated with Da, but they had little patience for Mam, either, whose people were from Limerick and never lifted a finger to help.
The day Gram gave me the claddagh I was sitting on her bed, tracing the nubby white bedspread like Braille under my fingers, watching her get ready for church. She sat at a small vanity table with an oval mirror, fluffing her hair lightly with a brush she prized—the finest whalebone and horsehair, she said, letting me touch the smooth off-white handle, the stiff bristles—and kept in a casketlike case. She’d saved for the brush by mending clothes; it took four months, she told me, to earn the money.
After replacing the brush in its case, Gram opened her jewelry box, an off-white faux-leather one with gilt trim and a gold clasp, plush red velvet inside, revealing a trove of treasures—sparkling earrings, heavy necklaces in onyx and pearl, gold bracelets. (My mam later said spitefully that these were cheap costume jewelry from a Galway five-and-dime, but at the time they seemed impossibly luxurious to me.) She picked out a pair of clustered pearl earrings with padded back clasps, clipping first one and then the other to her low-hanging lobes.
In the bottom of the box was the claddagh cross. I’d never seen her wear it. She told me that her da, now long dead, had given it to her for her First Holy Communion when she was thirteen. She’d planned to give it to her daughter, my auntie Brigid, but Brigid wanted a gold birthstone ring instead.
“You are my only granddaughter, and I want you to have it,” Gram declared, fastening the chain around my neck. “See the interlaced strands?” She touched the raised pattern with a knobby finger. “These trace a never-ending path, leading away from home and circling back. When you wear this, you’ll never be far from the place you started.”
Several weeks after Gram gave me the claddagh, she and Mam got into one of their arguments. As their voices rose I took the twins into a bedroom down the hall.
“You tricked him into it; he wasn’t ready,” I heard Gram shout. And then Mam’s retort, as clear as day: “A man whose mother won’t let him lift a finger is ruined for a wife.”
The front door banged; it was Granddad, I knew, stomping out in disgust. And then I heard a crash, a shriek, a cry, and I ran to the parlor to find Gram’s whalebone brush shattered in pieces against the hearth, and Mam with a look of triumph on her face.
Not a month later, we found ourselves bound for Ellis Island on the Agnes Pauline.
MRS. MURPHY’S HUSBAND DIED A DECADE AGO, I LEARN, LEAVING her with this big old house and little money. Making the most of the situation, she began to take in boarders. The women have a schedule that rotates once a week: cooking, laundry, cleaning, washing the floors. Soon enough I am helping too: I set the table for breakfast, clear the plates, sweep the hall, wash the dishes after dinner. Mrs. Murphy is the hardest working of all, up early to make scones and biscuits and porridge, last to bed when she shuts off the lights.
At night, in the living room, the women gather to talk about the stockings they wear, whether the best ones have a seam up the back or are smooth, which brands last longest, which are scratchy; the most desirable shade of lipstick (by consensus, Ritz Bonfire Red); and their favorite brands of face powder. I sit silently by the fireplace, listening. Miss Larsen rarely participates; she is busy in the evenings creating lesson plans and studying. She wears small gold glasses when she reads, which seems to be whenever she isn’t doing chores. She always has a book or a dishrag in her hand, and sometimes both.
I am beginning to feel at home here. But as much as I hope that Mrs. Murphy has forgotten I don’t belong, of course she hasn’t. One afternoon, when I come in from the car with Miss Larsen after school, Mr. Sorenson is standing in the foyer, holding his black felt hat in his hands like a steering wheel. My stomach flops.