November 1889 Chicago, Illinois

“‘Irish Courting,’ they call it,” Aunt Margaret says. “Meeting a man and walking down the aisle before the year is out.” The train had to be mended in two places where moths had made a bed, but other than that, Aunt Margaret’s black wedding gown fits Mary Agnes like a glove. She wears pearl earrings and pearl hairpins Tom gave her just last night and adjusts the black veil.

Her aunt circles her and clucks. “The dress will bring you luck. It has, me.”

Of all the times Mary Agnes has been in her aunt’s—dare she say, excessive—bedroom, all the chintz and frou-frous, pillows and throws, dressing table filled with every new potion, this is by far the happiest occasion. She puts out of her mind any resentment she felt for her aunt and uncle sending her into service and juts her chin and gazes in the full-length looking glass. It is as if her mother is staring back at her, but her mother is thousands of miles away and doesn’t even know her daughter is marrying today. It isn’t right, Mary Agnes acknowledges, but, in truth, she doesn’t want her mother here to spoil her perfect day.

“I believe in luck,” she says. “Don’t we all?” No, there couldn’t be a nicer dress. And I’m the lucky one today. Marrying Tom Halligan.

“Mark my words, by this time next year, you’ll have a babe to call your own,” Aunt Margaret says.

“Mother!” Helen laughs. “Not what Mary A. is thinking of today, a houseful of young ones. She’s only sixteen.”

“Seventeen next week,” Mary Agnes says. She thinks then of all the Donnelly children in New York, her own brothers, Irish families in Dawros, and on the ship, and here in Chicago. That Helen is an only child is unusual for an Irish family. It raises questions.

“Maybe, in time, we’ll have a houseful,” she says.

“Always wishing for what you don’t yet have,” Helen says.

No, Mary Agnes has never been known for patience, and it was tried heartily last weekend. While the O’Sullivans were out at another one of Chicago’s posh parties, and Cook gone home for the night, Mary Agnes stole down the backstairs and unlocked the kitchen door. She rooted in the pantry for tea and a biscuit and watched for Tom’s shadow at the door. When he rapped on the window, she let him in and ushered him up to her garret room.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I am. As sure as anything.”

They lay together in her narrow bed on the top floor of the grand house, but nothing more. It had been fraught enough to talk Tom into coming to the O’Sullivan’s in the first place, but she had already given notice, so what if she were to be found out? She’d had insinuations before about her character, all of them false, first her mother’s bitterness over Fiach’s attack and then Doria’s false charge that she had had a gentlemen caller at the Rutherford house. This time their insinuations would hold, and she didn’t care. She will never work in a big house again.

But Tom was insistent. They would wait until their wedding night. He left her in the still, dark hours of night, with a kiss so fervent she thought she might melt. In the peachy dust of dawn, Mary Agnes wept, but not because of sadness. How was it that she could be so lucky? With such a good man? And how soon could the wedding day come? Like Mrs. Donnelly said when Mary Agnes first arrived in New York, love changes everything, although there will be one secret—she will never tell Tom about Fiach violating her.

Today, she can’t wait to be in Tom’s arms again, but first, the ceremony and the lunch afterward, and the cake Helen spent all day yesterday perfecting. The afternoon will go on forever!

For November in Chicago, they have surely lucked out: Sunny and chilly, and no rain. It is a small affair in a side chapel at St. Mel’s with her aunt, uncle, and Helen in attendance.

But who is not here today? Her grandparents, long gone now. Her parents, still not arrived from Ireland. Her brothers. Jonesy. As she approaches the altar, Mary Agnes trains her eyes on Tom. Gone is everything before today, she looks now to a bright future ahead.

The way the sun glints into the chapel reminds her distinctly of the day the Blessed Virgin first spoke to her in the chapel at Ballynakill. Come, take my hand, the Purple Mary said.

Thank you for leading me here, Mary Agnes whispers.

AFTER GENTLE COUPLING IN THE LARGE feather bed at the Union Hotel, an expense Mary Agnes thought much too dear, she turns to Tom. “You know, I said I’d never marry.”

He looks at her quizzedly. “To whom did you say that to?”

“My tutor.” Mary Agnes remembers saying it like it was yesterday. And now I’m a married woman.

“And I’m finding this out just now?” he says playfully, twirling her hair.

Married. The realization hits her. Married women don’t work outside the home. Tom can work as a dispatcher, or at any job he chooses. What am I to do all the day? She wonders if she rushed into this. But no, she chides herself. I love this man, I do. She turns and kisses him deeply. As for the rest of the night, Mary Agnes’s patience proves well worth the wait.

They leave the hotel reluctantly the next morning and take the streetcar to their lodgings on Monroe Street. As they walk over the threshold, Tom turns to kiss her. “New beginnings,” he says. “I hope we have sixty more years of new beginnings.”

Their narrow apartment shares the first and second floor of a three-level brick building in a predominantly Irish neighborhood not far from the Laffeys. The entire block looks the same; Mary Agnes checks as she’s mounting her steps by glancing at the number above the door: 4314. The adjacent apartment is occupied by an elderly Irish couple who keep to themselves, Barry and Anne McSweeney their names. The third-floor apartment above the McSweeney’s is to let. The apartment above Mary Agnes and Tom’s rooms is rented by a young bachelor who works nights as a janitor at a meat-packing plant. They hear him descend the back stairs just as they get into bed at night and see him trudge back up the stairs as they take breakfast in the kitchen.

“What a horrid place to work,” Mary Agnes says. “A meat-packing plant.”

“It’s work,” Tom replies. “Irish can’t be too picky.”

Tom and Mary Agnes learn a contented, steady rhythm of getting to know one another more intimately. That Mary Agnes would enjoy congress so much, especially after her horrid assault from Fiach, shocks her. She thought she would cringe at the act of coupling, but no, Tom is gentle and kind and brings her pleasure. She colors thinking about it. Fiach fades from memory every day. New beginnings.

Why she wondered what she would do all day makes her laugh now. She is busy morning to night. Breakfast has never been an issue; Mary Agnes has been making breakfast since she was a young girl. She packs Tom’s dinner pail he takes to the railroad office every day, in it, tinned meats, bread, and fruit. Then there is laundry, done by hand in the kitchen sink and hung to dry in the back alley, or, if it’s too cold, strung across the small kitchen. And ironing, warming the iron on the wood stove and pressing shirts and trousers and drawers. The biggest decision is what to make each night on a meager budget. In Ireland, it was potatoes every night with mutton once a month. Surely, Tom expects more than potatoes.

After burning a piece of fish the first Friday after their marriage, Mary Agnes purchases Mrs. F. L. Gillette’s The American Cookbook, published just this fall in Chicago. I have to learn to cook. Really cook.

Flipping through the pages, Mary Agnes can’t imagine ever making Tenderloin of Beef (To dress it whole, proceed as follows: Washing the piece well, put it in an oven; add about a pint of water, and chop up a good handful of each of the following vegetables as an ingredient in the dish, viz., Irish potatoes, carrots, turnips, and large bunch of celery . . .) or Stewed Steak with Oysters (Two pounds of rump steak, one pint of oysters, one tablespoon of lemon juice, three of butter, one of flour, salt, pepper, one cupful of water . . .).

On Tom’s wages, it is all they can afford to get fish on Fridays. She best not burn it next time. She pages to the fish section and peruses recipes for sole and cod.

A loud call outside her back door interrupts her reading.

“Fresh vegetables today! Carrots, onions, potatoes!”

Mary Agnes takes a few coins from her purse and opens the door into the alley.

“Festus!” She always thinks of her granddad, Festus Laffey, when the vegetable peddler comes around. In addition to Festus—a striking lad from Donegal, always cheery, like her granddad was, before he went mad, that is, a thought Mary Agnes has never been able to reconcile—the alley is filled with an array of other cart merchants. Voices cling and clang, the deep-throated voice of the knife sharpener, the shrill call of the ice man.

“Wait! Festus!” How I love that name. “I’ll take two onions and a handful of carrots,” Mary Agnes says. Maybe we’ll name a wee one Festus . . .

“No potatoes today, Mrs. Halligan?”

It’s a joke between them.

“I’ve had my fill of potatoes to last a thousand lifetimes, Festus.” She returns to the kitchen and the cookbook. At four, after a sponge bath and a rest, Mary Agnes takes to the kitchen. Tom will be home in an hour and a half, a blessed Friday. I will not burn supper tonight. And then she thinks of the old story her granddad used to tell her about the boy and the magic salmon. When he burned the fish, he got all the knowledge in the world. All I got was a burnt thumb and a burnt pan.

Tom comes up the back stoop whistling. “How’s my missus today?” he asks, as he kisses Mary Agnes’s cheek. She’s in her green apron with her hair piled on top of her head as she bends over the stove, where onions sizzle in a cast iron pan and carrots come to a boil. Soon, the pan will be hot enough for the fish. She turns her head and kisses him on the mouth, dropping her wooden spoon into the pan.

“I’m guessing not every lad at the yard will get a greeting half as nice as this,” he says. He turns to the stove. “And what have we here?” He didn’t even complain when she burned the fish last week. “Ah,” he says, as he sees the small filet. “My favorite. Cod.”

Mary Agnes increases her repertoire week by week, filling in the weekdays with soups and stews and homemade bread. Now she’s experimenting with pies, not that she’ll ever hope to best the pies made by Cook at the Rutherford’s. Not that she ever got any. She thinks how curious it is that she lives in the same city as her former employer and never once has seen them or any of the help. She thinks briefly of Claire and wonders if she’s happy in her marriage, and then of Theresa and her books. She doesn’t dwell on Doria. She called me a liar. She was the liar, and she knows it. She’ll have to live with that.

On Mary Agnes’s birthday, she spends the day making an ice box cake.

ICE BOX CAKE

1 c. butter, warmed to room temperature

2 c. sugar

3 c. flour

4 eggs

Cream butter and sugar. In separate bowl, whisk eggs. Add to butter/sugar mixture. Add the flour one-half cup at a time. Batter will be thick. Spoon into greased cake pan and bake until golden. Top with white icing and store in ice box.

When Tom arrives home, he sweeps Mary Agnes into his arms. “How is the birthday queen today?”

Mary Agnes wears a new red and tan striped dress with a high neckline trimmed with lace. It has taken her all week to finish it by hand. “Better now that you are home.”

“Well, will you look at you. The best-looking woman in all of Chicago.”

She smiles.

“What are we having to celebrate your seventeenth?” Tom asks.

“An ice box cake.”

Neither of them comments there is no supper. The four eggs that Mary Agnes used in the cake would have made a nice omelet. But some days are for celebrating.

On the first Friday in December, just a week after her birthday, Tom comes home looking peaked.

“What’s wrong, love?” Mary Agnes asks. She ushers him to the kitchen table and takes his hat. His handkerchief is stained with blood.

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Must be the change in weather.”

“Here, let me take your coat,” she says. “And take off those wet shoes. You’ll catch your death of cold.” Please Jesus Mary and Joseph, not like Granda.

“Shall I fetch a doctor?” Mary Agnes knows the answer before he speaks. How would they pay for one? Tom rests all weekend, rousing himself only for Mass on Sunday. They decline their weekly dinner at the Laffeys and he sleeps all Sunday afternoon. That night, despite his weakness, he takes Mary Agnes in his arms and snuggles his head in her breasts.

“How am I so lucky?” he says.

Mary Agnes strokes his head. “I’m the lucky one, Mr. Halligan. You’ll never know how lucky.”