Had a Good Time, page 19
And a knock come. A soft, muffled knock of her gloved hand. I don’t stop to consider what to do. My body just stand up now and I cross the room. My body know so many things to do that it learn from this life I done led. I feel my body moving like it always do and my voice fixing to say what it always say. I cross to the door and I open it and she is standing there back a ways with her face all sweet smiles and she is holding the tin of ham with gloves buttoned all the way up to her elbows.These are her good gloves and I will get no handshake this time, I know.
“Uncle Andrew ...” she begin to say.
And I shut the door in her face.
I stand trembling inside the cabin, like I suppose she is doing outside. But she say nothing more. I think she is moving away pretty fast. I can barely stand up from my body not knowing what to do next, now that it has done a new thing. But I gather up and I put one foot in front of the other like a little child walking, and I sit down at my table and I lay one hand upon it. And into my head come a vision of heaven. The bell ring and I rise up in the kitchen and I look at the tray with the whiskey and the water and the cigars. I am dressed like a gentleman. I am dressed in evening clothes and collar and tie, and I have on a pair of white kid gloves. And I leave the tray where it is and I go into the parlor and Old Master see me and he rise up from his chair. I go to him and stand before him and his eyes narrow at me. But before he can speak, I take off my gloves, first one and then the other, and I lay them together, and then I lift those gloves and I strike him across the face.
* * *
BROTHER NAILED HIM IN ATTIC
Boy Hungry Four Days-Story of a Princely Ancestor
MILWAUKEE, AUG. 6—Huddled on a heap of rags in the attic of a cottage, where he had been nailed in by his brother and forced to remain four days and nights without a morsel of food, George Glaser, nineteen years old, was found yesterday by patrolmen who had been sent to serve a vagrancy warrant on him and his brother Henry, sixteen years old. The boys will not work, it is said, because they say they are descendants of a German prince.
from page 3 of the New-York Tribune Sunday, August?, 1910
* * *
TWINS
New York, NY Mrs. Chas. Blackburn
July 8, 1917 134 Cherry St.
Asheville, North Carolina
This is Island I. We are on Island III in pavillion bldgs tan—red tiled roofs—ours is the island just to the right of Liberty—we watch her light up every night. A letter is in the process of writing to you
Bridget
There is another of me. I always assumed she and I would live and die together, side by side. How could I think otherwise, even as late as last night as the sun went away and the electrical lights of New York City flared up and we waited for the rest of our life to begin. Identical we are. Twins that surprised nearly to death our mother and our father, as they tell it. And so it is always Bridget and Caitlin then. I look into my own face every day. And sometimes—as she sleeps and I am awake—I feel I am a ghost, I feel there was ever only one of me and now I am after dying and stepping out of my body and I am looking back to see what it is I am leaving.
I love her. But she is like myself and so I love her not, as well, for I know my own shortcomings, which I long to make right. Sufficiently for a good Catholic girl I do not honor my mother and my father. I despise my place of birth and all it would make of me. I despise it though I cannot but be its daughter, and I despise that as well. I despise its cringing submissive-ness to the English, and what good is its resistance? Parnell torpedoing his country by sleeping with another man’s wife. Those fools going to war without even possessing their guns on Easter last year. Not that there won’t be more bloodshed. After the Germans are done with and Home Rule starts up again, there’ll be plenty, and make no mistake. But even beyond the violence there’s merely and only a life of potatoes and turnips and turf fires. And the baking of soda bread, which is all I ever seem to be doing. And a life surrounded by Irish boys with brains of sod who won’t even marry when they at least still have their good looks for fear of another famine, this many decades later. Sure and it’s the life of an Irish farmer and his family, after all, but for Bridget and Caitlin there’s not even the coal mines to get away to, like our oldest brother did. So I persuaded Caitlin first and then our father and our mother to let us go away to America. Our aunt in Asheville in the county of North Carolina was only too happy to rescue us as she was after rescuing herself. To my father’s credit he let us go. With ten American dollars in each of the shoes on our feet and with our clothes in wicker cases we boarded the Celtic and made off for New York.
Caitlin took some persuading. A myth it is that identical twins have always the same thought. In some ways Caitlin is more the girl I am supposed to be. Closer, sure, to my mother. And more accepting of the farm and of Ireland itself. But she is also my twin, and so she came to see how we should start anew. She even left a sod-brain behind, which her own fine brain knew was the right thing to be doing, but her heart was soft and she cried for a long while. I can see now how this fool of a boy brought about all our present trouble.
Steerage on the Celtic was crowded, and though what I heard of the Atlantic passage before the war was far worse, things were bad enough for us. When we boarded in Queenstown there were already hundreds crowded belowdecks, and they weren’t even English, many of them, but were people from all over the continent fleeing the war, and they were after passing through a thing or two. We slept on bunks with straw mattresses among foreign tongues and ragged children, and also among much wailing and vomiting once we started rolling in the waves of the North Atlantic.
Caitlin and I suffered only a brief day of queasiness, and after that we stayed on deck as much as possible, for most of the others remained sick and in hiding and we could find a place on the rail a bit away from the others and surrounded by the sea. We would talk.
“It’s afraid I am,” Caitlin said on our third day out.
“Only from the strangeness of it,” I said.
“You feel it too,” she said, which was no bit of a question at all. She knew well enough I did.
“It’s finished I am with the familiar,” I said.
She looked away from the sea and straight into my eyes. “Familiar is too pale a thing to call it.”
“True enough.”
“Our family, our land.”
“Your lad,” I said.
She did not begin to cry until I mentioned him, which is why it’s him I blame. We cried together over family and country at Queenstown, before we were thrown so intimately together with all these others, and I didn’t even mention him in all that. If I could but go back to the deck of that ship and stay her hands. She began to cry and she turned her face to the sea and then she was rubbing at her eyes.
“He isn’t worth it,” I said.
“And don’t I understand that?” she said and she wiped first one eye and then the other with her fingertips. I feel sure and certain this was the moment.
Which brought us to last night and beyond. How long was it already our custom-—our fate?—Caitlin and I, to fall asleep at the same moment. Last night she left me to go in and I lingered for time. She feared there was nothing for her across the harbor. Those great and mightily bestarred buildings. Liberty herself, nearer at hand. She was lighting up, too. Her torch was aflame. Though ‘tis true she had her back to us now. We knew we must find our way to one more boat and across this last bit of water to see her face again, as we did so full of hope on the morning of July the Fourth. All of us from steerage crowded up onto the deck and we all cheered together at the sight of her. Catholics necklaced in rosaries and Jews draped in prayer shawls and even a few Mohammedans nearby doffing their fezzes. That very first night, anchored in the harbor and awaiting the ferries to Ellis Island, we watched the sky over New York fill with exploding stars and pinwheels, and at the tip of the island was a vast blinking sign urging us to drink Lipton Tea. America calling out to us in a very loud voice.
Last night, looking across the harbor, she took up my hand and she whispered to me, “I’m sorry.”
This is not something we are accustomed to say to each other. When it is called for, we know it already.
Sitting wrapped in blankets at the fumigation center in Queenstown, for an example. Wet and shivering we were, from the cold showers, from standing naked together among dozens of other naked women in the rush of icy water from pipes in the wall. Who could imagine ever being in such a situation? Well then, Caitlin and I were sitting there, each inside her own tightly held blanket—clinging to our separate bodies but reading each other’s minds—and she said, “All of this torture so that we might drown.”
“The end of June it is,” I said.
“He told father there was more to it,” she said.
“Whiskey and more whiskey,” I said.
“You would have us die,” she said, leaning close and hissing at me like the thin spikes of cold water that came from the walls.
Then she blinked at me and pulled back. She did not have to say aloud that she was sorry, for we always knew so much more than anyone could hear. In this instance she was speaking of the Titanic and I of the vanished icebergs and she of our father’s uncle who worked upon the ship in Glasgow and who felt this ship never was unsinkable and I of the everyday foolish drunkenness of this uncle and she of the wrenching fear she had from the thought that any ship might be holding rivets fastened by a drunken fool, a fear such that Caitlin blamed me in advance for anything terrible that might happen out at sea when in fact she was just miserably cold and wet inside her blanket and oddly unsettled—as I was—at having been naked with all these strange women.
Last night she said she was sorry. She began to pull away to lead us inside. I touched her arm and I said to her, “Sure and we’ll be fine. Caitlin and Bridget in this new land.”
But she made no reply and went on. I did not. I stood for a time alone on the edge of America. If he was to blame in the usual manner, if he put a swimmer in her belly, that would be one thing. We could have the wee one over here and go on. But it was her eyes. The fear was her eyes. We arrived at Ellis Island and they drove us down the gangplank from the ferry and into the Frenchy palace on Island One and they took away our possessions and stripped us and showered us and dressed us again, having wadded our clothes into wrinkles, and we were after passing under the gaze of many an official, blue-clad in round hats or done up in white to give them leave with our bodies. One of these latter it was who used a buttonhook to flip our eyelids. And they drew Caitlin aside and were going to send me on in another direction, but they took a second look at me and at her and I said, “I must be with her,” and the man in white nodded, a man with a flushed round face who himself once fled our green isle, I suspected, and sure he had a familiar lilt in his voice when he said to me, low, “Not to worry then. It might be nothing,” and he nodded me along after Caitlin.
Trachoma was what we feared. Trachoma that you can get from somebody else. Picking up something from somebody else and not knowing it’s upon you and then touching your eyes to wipe away the useless tears shed for a useless fool of a boy. Trachoma, for the contagion of which they will send you away from America and make no mistake. Send you back home to rooting up potatoes and cutting up peat and waiting for the bombs and gunfire and the stupid aging bachelors finally to get up the nerve to have a life. Because your eyes were violated by strangers from other lands carrying this curse along with them. They say there’s no cure and you can someday lose your sight. They put us both on Island Three, the Isle of Contagion, with the tuberculosis and the scarlet fever and the other suspect eyes. When they knew for certain, they sent you away. The very uncertainty about Caitlin told me it was that moment on deck with the tears when it happened.
There’s hardly a blade of grass on this island. This struck me shortly after she pulled away and vanished inside. I was growing critical of America, I suppose. For the present, though, it didn’t matter about the grass, as the night was coming on. The water went dark and electrical light was all there was in the world. You can look up at the stars in the sky, but pale and pathetic they are, compared with the things Americans make with their own hands, what they raise up and light up for themselves. But still and all, the first look of a morning, there was not a bit of green anywhere to be seen. And ‘tis true Ireland is drunken lush with green, and twice now I was stripped naked in a room of stone and drenched with water and it made me to think what I missed, how the part of me that drove me out to sea and toward a new land, how good and sweet it would be if, before I left, that very same part of me was after driving me alone in high summer to the far rolling field in a fine mist of a rain and I strip me naked for my own self and lie down in the thick grass. Would Caitlin do such a thing as that along with me? How could she not? How could I see myself naked in the grass alone?
I looked to the near end of this other island now, the one we were waiting to reach. The sky was dark behind it, blocked by all the light. I’ll hold you, nothing is green over there either, I thought. Lipton cried out to be brewed and drunk down, cup after tasty cup. I strained to hear the city, but only the faint murmurings of the sick people about me were filling my head. IjL would be different in North Carolina, of course, which was alleged to be as green as mother Ireland. On board we went up on the steerage deck at the rear of the ship at night and you could hear the orchestra from first class, faint over the sound of our wake, faint from the privileged sanctums of our ship where those who already were after getting ahead danced to music of the salon. Breathless is what I became. The music took away my breath and I turned to my other self, my twin, and distracted she was in her own way, looking out into the dark. I did not know what it was she was thinking, which frightened me a little. But I did not ask.
I drew away last night from New York. Turned from the light and faced the sleeping pavilion of our Island Three. A few years ago there was gunfire down the road. We could hear it from our kitchen. Some of our boys had it out with a squad of English soldiers, and lads we knew died and were hauled off in a donkey cart, though we realized none of this at the time. We fell asleep that night, my sister and I, telling each other how it was hunters, how the rumors of something else was all fairy sneezes. And so it was that I went in last night with a final thought that my sister’s eyes were simply tired, that they were irritated from saltwater baths on the ship, that some lesser thing was happening to her, which is why we were here now and not on a ship home already.With this final puff of fairy breath, I went in. I lay down sweating in the hot July night with Caitlin on her side in the next bunk. Her back was turned to me, like Miss Liberty outside. We had nothing to do but to sleep and to wait.
And with the morning came the news. Caitlin has trachoma. The nurses cried. We liked the nurses and they liked us. They made over us being the wonder I suppose side-by-side we are. They regretted their country’s decision to deport us. Though strictly speaking, it was only Caitlin the country was intending to deport. The doctor sat us at his desk and finally he made that point clear. Caitlin was infectious and had to return to Ireland. Bridget was checked carefully and was free to enter America if she wished. He glanced from her to me and back again and shrugged his shoulders. Then he said to Caitlin, “The White Star Line is responsible for returning you at no charge to yourself.” He looked at me. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I’m certain passage can be arranged for you as well.”
“Can she be cured?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
Caitlin was beginning to cry. Her face was bowed. And my only thought was that it was upon me now to take my own hands and touch the contagion in my sister and bring it into myself, for as we sat there on Ellis Island, her eyes and mine were suddenly different.
The doctor said, “You’ll need to decide in a few hours. The Britannic has space for you departing this afternoon.”
Well then, we stood beside each other, Caitlin and I, out on the veranda among the deck chairs where the tuberculosis patients lounged like first-class passengers crossing the sea. We put our backs to Ellis Island and looked across the harbor. My twin sister surprised me. She knew the names of all the big buildings we were seeing. The Whitehall and the Washington. The Bowling Green and the Manhattan Life and the World. The Singer, which was particularly beautiful, even from this distance, with red stripes running up each corner to a dome and spire. The Woolworth, a little further north, the tallest building in the world. Her doctor taught her all these. When she was off being looked at, she was flirting with her doctor, my twin sister. And she spoke these names to me as the names of objects of wonder.
I said, “I began to think somewhere along the way that I wanted this more than you.”
“No,” she said. “How could we not be the same?”
She knew I clenched up tight inside at this. It surprised the both of us. I began to weep, though I took no notice of it, letting the tears fall without wiping at them, without letting them summon forth a single sound from me, without acknowledging them whatsoever. I never did this before and I never saw Caitlin do this before. She was crying too, now, noisily. I looked at her and she did the usual thing. She lowered her face and covered her eyes, her afflicted eyes.
“You should go ahead,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said, very low, trying out this obvious notion.
She nodded once at this, accepting it without a fuss. I seized up again, with a little bit of anger this time. The matter was done. So it seemed. I turned away from my sister and toward the island of Manhattan. Scarcely could I see the big buildings now for my tears. I felt compelled to wipe the tears away.I did not know what was on my hands. It was only a short time ago I was ready to take on this affliction with my sister. My hand began to rise. But I stopped it. I held it back. And then I began to tremble terribly.
