When I get better, I ride to school with Miss Larsen in the black car. Mrs. Murphy gives me something new nearly every day—a skirt she says she found in a closet, a woolen hat, a camel-colored coat, a periwinkle scarf and matching mittens. Some of the clothes have missing buttons or small rips and tears, and others need hemming or taking in. When Mrs. Murphy finds me mending a dress with the needle and thread Fanny gave me, she exclaims, “Why, you’re as handy as a pocket in a shirt.”
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.
“Ah, here she is!” Mrs. Murphy exclaims. “Come, Niamh, into the parlor. Join us, please, Miss Larsen. Shut that door, we’ll catch our death of cold. Tea, Mr. Sorenson?”
“That would be lovely, Mrs. Murphy,” Mr. Sorenson says, lumbering after her through the double doors.
Mrs. Murphy gestures toward the rose velvet sofa and he sits down heavily, like an elephant I once saw in a picture book, his large stomach protruding from rounded thighs. Miss Larsen and I sit in the wingback chairs. When Mrs. Murphy disappears into the kitchen, he leans forward and smirks. “Niamh again, are you?”
“I don’t know.” I glance out the window at the street dusted with snow and Mr. Sorenson’s dark green truck that I somehow hadn’t noticed earlier parked in front of the house. The vehicle, more than his presence, makes me shudder. It’s the same one I rode in to the Grotes’, with Mr. Sorenson gabbing cheerfully the whole way.
“Let’s go back to Dorothy, shall we?” he says. “Easier.”
Miss Larsen looks as me, and I shrug. “All right.”
He clears his throat. “Why don’t we get to it.” He pulls his small glasses out of his breast pocket, puts them on, and holds a paper out at arm’s length. “There have been two failed attempts at placing out. The Byrnes and the Grotes. Trouble with the woman of the house in both places.” He looks at me over the top of his silver rims. “I must tell you, Dorothy, it’s beginning to appear that there’s some kind of . . . problem with you.”
“But I didn’t—”
He waves his sausage fingers at me. “The predicament, you must understand, is that you are an orphan, and that whatever the reality, it looks as if there may be an issue with . . . insubordination. Now, there are several ways to proceed. First, of course, we can send you back to New York. Or we can attempt to find another home.” He sighs heavily. “Which, to be frank, may prove difficult.”
Mrs. Murphy, who has been in and out of the room with her cabbage-rose tea service and is now pouring tea into delicate, thin-rimmed cups, sets the teapot on a trivet in the middle of the polished coffee table. She hands Mr. Sorenson a cup and offers him the sugar bowl. “Marvelous, Mrs. Murphy,” he says, and dumps four spoons of sugar into his cup. He adds milk, stirs it noisily, rests the small silver spoon on the rim of his saucer, and takes a long slurp.
“Mr. Sorenson,” Mrs. Murphy says when his cup is back in its resting place. “A thought occurs. May I speak with you in the foyer?”
“Why certainly.” He wipes his mouth with a pink napkin and gets up to follow her into the hall.
When the door closes behind them, Miss Larsen takes a sip of tea and places her cup back on its saucer with a little rattle. The brass lamp on the round table between us emits an amber glow. “I’m sorry you have to go through this. But I’m sure you understand that Mrs. Murphy, generous hearted as she is, can’t take you in indefinitely. You do understand, don’t you?”
“Yes.” There’s a lump in my throat. I don’t trust myself to say more.
When Mrs. Murphy and Mr. Sorenson come back into the room, she fixes her steady gaze on him and smiles.
“You are quite a fortunate girl,” he tells me. “This extraordinary woman!” He beams at Mrs. Murphy, and she lowers her eyes. “Mrs. Murphy has brought to my attention that a couple named the Nielsens, friends of hers, own the general store on Center Street. Five years ago they lost their only child.”
“Diphtheria, I believe it was, poor thing,” Mrs. Murphy adds.
“Yes, yes, tragedy,” Mr. Sorenson says. “Well, apparently they’ve been looking for help with the shop. Mrs. Nielsen contacted Mrs. Murphy several weeks ago, asking whether any young woman in residence was seeking employment. And then, when you washed up on her doorstep . . .” Perhaps sensing that this characterization of how I got here might be perceived as insensitive, he chuckles. “Forgive me, Mrs. Murphy! A figure of speech!”
“Quite all right, Mr. Sorenson, we understand you meant no harm by it.” Mrs. Murphy pours more tea into his cup and hands it to him, then turns to me. “After speaking with Miss Larsen about your situation, I told Mrs. Nielsen about you. I said that you are a sober-minded and mature almost-eleven-year-old girl, that you have impressed me with your ability to sew and clean, and that I have no doubt you could be of use to her. I explained that while adoption may be the most desirous eventual result, it is not expected.” She clasps her hands together. “And so Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen have agreed to meet with you.”
I know I am expected to respond, to express gratitude, but it takes a conscious effort to smile, and several moments to form the words. I am not grateful; I am bitterly disappointed. I don’t understand why I need to leave, why Mrs. Murphy can’t keep me if she thinks I am so well mannered. I don’t want to go into another home where I’m treated like a servant, tolerated only for the labor I can provide.
“How kind of you, Mrs. Murphy!” Miss Larsen exclaims, plunging into the silence. “That’s wonderful news, isn’t it, Dorothy?”
“Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Murphy,” I say, choking out the words.
“You’re quite welcome, child. Quite welcome.” She beams proudly. “Now, Mr. Sorenson. Perhaps you and I should attend this meeting as well?”
Mr. Sorenson drains his teacup and sets it in its saucer. “Indeed, Mrs. Murphy. I am also thinking that the two of us should meet separately to discuss the . . . finer points of this transaction. What would you say to that?”
Mrs. Murphy blushes and blinks; she shifts in her chair, picks up her teacup, and then puts it down without taking a sip. “Yes, that’s probably wise,” she says, and Miss Larsen looks over and gives me a smile.