WHO CAN SAY why some are born inside the circles that some consider of such importance and why others are placed in less advantageous positions. I cannot, but I wanted to give a special prominence to one memorable personality who loomed large in my early years, despite her being neither actual family or of shared background. You see, no one—in society or in any of the grand, monied places I have seen—is more etched in memory than Maggie Kane. She came to us fresh from a poverty-stricken Ireland. I believe my parents were her first and perhaps her last employers—but she never showed the attachment or homesickness for the old country that our other Irish maids did. She was very young when she left and perhaps it was not a happy home that she chose to forsake.
At any rate she never referred to it. Nor did she ever really adopt America or American ways. The world that she accepted with seeming totality was simply the world that we as a family offered her: our household of family and servants in a New York brownstone, a country house on Long Island, and a sea side villa in Maine. In these she spent a whole lifetime until the day she left us—or disappeared rather, for we never found her—perhaps in her sixties. The detective we hired to locate her thought she had returned to Ireland, but I never thought so. Years later we received a package containing photographs of me and my siblings that I knew she had had. It had been mailed in the New York area. It may have come from people with her when she died. We never knew. She felt, poor soul, that she had survived her function in our lives: the children she had lovingly nursed were all grown and had their own independent existences; the parents were old and well looked after; her position in the household was a kind of charity. She knew she was loved and was welcome to remain as a kind of pensioner, but her pride required her to remove herself.
The life of those poor Irish immigrant girls in the 1920s and '30s was not an enviable one. They frequently came alone, leaving families glad enough not to have to support them further, and went into domestic service here for which there was a constant demand but which was badly paid and futureless. They were apt to be relegated to tiny rooms at the top of big houses to which the heat sometimes didn't reach and share a bathroom with four or five other housemaids. They had a day off each week, but what could they do with it? They knew nobody and had no means of meeting people, and if they were lucky enough to have a boyfriend (a "follower" as they were somewhat contemptuously referred to by employers) he was certainly not welcome in the house where they served. When the family in summer moved to a country place it was apt to be near some village where the locals were totally uninterested in the visitors' Irish help.
When we went to Maine my mother was actually heard to say that the maids should be happy in the beauty of Mount Desert Island, but what did they care about that? The sea by our house was really too cold for any but the hardy to bathe in, and anyway the poor maids were scared of sharks. Their sole diversion was on Saturday afternoons when the chauffeur might drive them to the village of Bar Harbor where they could see a movie as racy as Pola Negri in DuBarry, Woman of Passion.
Maggie's official position with us was as a nurse to my sister and me. My elder brother didn't need a nurse, and my younger one had his own, a huge Swedish woman who looked after Priscilla and me on Maggie's day off. We never had a governess who would have been addressed as "Miss" and taken her meals with our parents. Maggie ate with the other maids in the servants' dining room. But she soon developed the entire trust of both my parents and assumed the undisputed position of a general family adviser. She had a wonderfully deep and realistic common sense that was badly needed at times to moderate Mother's occasional volatile and nervous thinking where her offspring were concerned. When we heard Maggie's impassioned but always respectful cry to a bizarre suggestion of Mother's—"Woman, dear, are you mad?"—we knew that plans were going to be changed.
Yet Maggie never encroached on her favored position in the household to lord it over the other maids or even to obtain some special privilege for herself. She was utterly content with the status quo and never wanted to change it by an iota. She loved us children as if we had been her own, but I don't think she ever caused my mother a moment of maternal jealousy. She comforted her in her sadness at sending us to boarding school. "Your poor mother is so upset at sending you off," she told me. "In this country you have to be rich to afford the unhappiness of parting with your children."
Maggie gave physical proof of her devotion to her wards. One afternoon when Priscilla and I were little and coming back from the park, each holding on to one of Maggie's hands as we crossed a street under a green light, a taxi that had failed to stop completely at the red lurched toward us, and Maggie instantly hurled us both onto the safety of the sidewalk, receiving herself the blow of the impact. Fortunately she soon recovered.
Maggie made friends easily enough with other Irish nurses at the Bar Harbor Swimming Club and sometimes for our amusement and sometimes perhaps for our improvement let us know what was said about us. My parents had an argument as to which came out on top in this assessment of Maggie's acquaintance. "The nurses say that Mrs. Auchincloss seems so cross, and Mr. Auchincloss is so pleasant spoken, but I tell them if they knew them better they'd find it is just the other way round." It was true that Mother, when occupied with her own thoughts, had a preoccupied look that could be interpreted as bad humor, and Father's social manners were always charming, but it was also true that in the home Mother's nature was almost invariably equable and Father could be sharply impatient.
Maggie's conversation was full of odd quotations that she would insert into the general discourse when she deemed relevant, which seemed to have come from some unrecognizable body of folklore, like "'I see,' said the blind man, when he couldn't see at all," but they were vivid and made us laugh. Mother and Father didn't believe in corporal discipline, and we were never spanked, but this didn't stop Maggie in what she regarded as a necessary means of correction. But she was never violent, and we would have died rather than betray her to Mother. We always adored her, and my sister's ultimate decision not to have her as a nurse for her own children, the relationship being too close, I always resented. It would have been the ideal solution for the problem of Maggie's later years.
These were not easy. As we grew up Maggie's function as a nurse disappeared. There was never any idea of letting Maggie go; she had become too much a part of our lives, and in a large household there were always tasks that she could perform: cleaning, mending, darning, tending anyone who was sick, walking the dogs, and so forth. But the time came when the children were all gone and Mother and Father moved to smaller quarters and really there was nothing to fill Maggie's time. Most painful of all as I recall it was Maggie's desire to keep up with all our doings and new interests, which she was unable to share. The truth was that there was really nothing for Maggie and us children to have a serious talk about. Hugging is not enough. But even now, many years later, after I have lived more than ninety years, Maggie remains someone to recall, not a subject for a writer of my ilk, as it happens. Rather, a genuine and lasting comfort.