WHILE THERE had been no American wake to send Angela off to America, the tradition was maintained by the steerage passengers of watching the steeples of the church disappear over the horizon the next morning. “The last time any of us will see poor Ole Ireland,” Pete Scanlan intoned the required ritual.
“I’ll be back,” Angela said. “I promised my friend Eileen Gaughan that I’d come back to visit her.”
“Detroit will be my Ireland,” Annie Scanlan said bitterly. “Ireland has already killed most of my family.”
“English Imperialism killed them,” Angela said firmly, her Fenian convictions unchanged by the disappearing steeples.
She was already feeling woozy from the motion of the bay. The previous night she was shocked by the steerage quarters, raw and rough and noisy and smelly, but at least clean and no sickness. The English authorities, troubled by the stories of “coffin ships” maintained a cursory sanitary inspection at dockside.
Angela had presented her documentation from Dr. Gaughan, certifying that she had been inoculated against smallpox and diphtheria. The English doctor regarded her dubiously.
“You’re a very tiny little one, aren’t you, child?”
“We grow slowly in West Galway, but only because you Brits are after starving us to death.”
He smiled and applied his stethoscope to her chest.
“But you have strong lungs, all the better to denounce us with, I suppose.”
The doctor was a kind man.
“You’re not Mr. Peel or Mr. Gladstone, Doctor, it’s not your fault that me brothers and sisters and me ma and pa are dead and buried in Galway and our family home burned to the ground. I’m sorry I was rude to you.”
“I don’t say you’re wrong in your judgments, child. But you are young and strong and you’ll do well in the land beyond the sea. God bless you and protect you.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said, feeling very guilty, as she often did when her quick and biting voice made trouble.
Despite the promising beginning and the promise in the sea air, the passage was, according to the crew who checked on steerage periodically, terribly rough altogether. For Angie, as everyone called her, seasickness began while still in the bay at Kinsale and continued intermittently all the way to New York Harbor. Often she was afraid she might die of the continuing waves of nausea. Sometimes she was afraid that she wouldn’t die.
She tried to weave her way out into the steerage deck, where she could vomit into the Atlantic, which richly deserved her wrath. Sometimes she considered throwing herself over the side of the boat. She would be so thin, if she finally made it to Chicago, that they would discard her at first sight. She would have to become a street beggar. God didn’t approve of suicide, but the teacher had told them that God forgave suicides because they were mad with pain.
“God forgive you, Angie, for such terrible thoughts,” a voice behind her on the deck warned.
“Ma!” she exclaimed. “Is it yourself?”
“Who else would it be, child?”
Angie whirled around. The woman was covered in a long, dark shawl. But her shape was Ma’s shape. And her face was radiant as ma’s had been when Angie was young.
“Do you still live, Ma?”
“We all do, child, and ourselves happy. We haven’t collected our bodies yet, but we are still ourselves and all of us terrible proud of you altogether. Only don’t go jumping into the sea. You’ll be all right, and there’s still many great things for you to do.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“And that’s not meself who comes in the dreams. That’s your own memories of what I was like. I come to tell you I’m sorry for what I did to spoil so much of your young life. I was envious because you had everything I had, only you would have a chance I would never have. It was wrong of me . . . I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Ma, I love you and I forgive. It wasn’t your fault.”
“You were always the generous one, Angela Agnes.”
Ma was crying. Did the holy ones in heaven really cry? Why not?
“Will I see you again, Ma?”
“You know what I’m like, Angie Agnes. Now that I have permission to haunt you, I might just be back on the odd occasion.”
The figure in the dark faded away gradually, her radiant face the last part to disappear.
Did ma have to make things right with me to get out of purgatory, she wondered. Didn’t she do it gracefully, still?
For a few moments her nausea ebbed. She staggered back to the streerage, wobbling on uncertain legs. A huge, mean boy waited inside the door for her.
“Looks like you need a little help,” he said, seizing her right hand.
“Not from an overgrown lout like you, Tommy Fitzpatrick!” She shook her arm free.
Pete Scanlan glared at the Fitzpatrick lout, took her hand, and led her back to her little refuge in the far corner of steerage.
“The sea air help a little, small one?”
“Made me sleepy,” she admitted and slipped into the little bed she had created with her tweed blanket.
And she did sleep peacefully for the first time on the terrible voyage, happy that ma and the others were still alive somewhere, even if they hadn’t picked up their bodies yet, and that she and ma were friends again, like they’d been so many years before.
She awoke next morning to cheers! They had sighted New York at last. Immigrants would land at Castle Garden at noon. They should have their papers ready for examination and remember that not everyone who had crossed on the Duke of Kent would be admitted to Amerikay. Angela had heard that ten percent were rejected even if they had a letter guaranteeing that there was a job waiting for them. Why would this strange new country want to take a sickly little waif like her?
They were herded onto a ferry which was rocking in the surly waters of Upper New York Bay. Unsteady on her feet and feeling woozy, Angela found herself tilting toward the side of the ferry. A big New York policeman seemed perfectly willing to let her go over the side. She grabbed his thick uniform and hung on till Pete Scanlan steadied her.
“You almost lost this immigrant, Officer,” Pete said.
“There are so many, what difference does one make more or less? What good will this sick little child bring to America anyway, especially since she’s Irish?”
Pete controlled his Irish temper. Annie Scanlan hugged her.
“Someday you’ll show them how wrong they are!”
Angela believed that, if she were given half a chance, she would indeed show them. Yet she knew they wouldn’t let her in and if they did she wouldn’t find the train to Chicago and the people in Chicago wouldn’t want such a sick little child.
Castle Garden was a big gloomy fort which once had been a site for a battery of guns to fend off English invasion. Now it was nothing but a vast hall in which straggling lines of immigrant families, poor, disconsolate, beaten down, waited passively for America’s decision whether to admit them or to send them back to countries that didn’t want them either.
“Why are they letting us in?” she asked Pete Scanlan.
“Because they need us. They have more jobs than they have people. Your Yanks are no better than your Brits. They’re not hiring us out of the goodness of their hearts.”
“How long before we become Yanks?”
“The moment we leave this building, Angie,” Ann Scanlan told her, “won’t you be complaining about all the furriners coming into our country?”
It was a cold December day in New York City. Angela hated the city already. The city immigration officials were snobs who hated the Irish. She was convinced that they deliberately kept the process slow so that some of the immigrants would have to spend the night shivering in Castle Garden. She was still wobbly from seasickness, hungry and sleepy. But she reserved a little of her energy to hate the New York cops.
Finally, late in the afternoon as it was growing dark, they finally arrived at the head of their line.
“Is this older child yours?” the cop, a man with a thin face, long nose, and suspicious eyes.
“No, she’s only holding one of our children.”
“Carry your own children, please.”
So Angela handed over poor little Chiara, who immediately began to scream.
“Are you waiting for admission?” he barked crossly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me see your papers.”
Now is the time I fail.
She gave him the correspondence from Chicago and her medical papers. He read them very carefully.
“Inoculated against smallpox and diphtheria? Isn’t that unusual in Ireland?”
“I lived with the family of a physician.”
“You don’t look particularly healthy . . . skinny, undernourished.”
“I suffered from seasickness on the way over and haven’t eaten much in the last two weeks.”
“Indeed . . . well, I’ll have to call for a doctor for a physical exam.”
The Scanlans were permitted to enter. They waved good-bye as they were ushered out.
“I’ll write you,” Angela shouted. “Thank you very much. God bless you!”
Then they were gone. Angela was alone again, as lost as she was at the railroad station in Cork. It was darker now in Castle Garden. The light was failing inside and outside. The immigration officers were folding up their tables, some of them donning thick overcoats. The lines remained in place, hopeful families assuming, wrongly Angela suspected, that they would have earned the place they had when the regular day of work had ended. They were worse than the Brits.
She started the rosary again.
“Are you waiting for someone, young woman?” a silver-haired policeman with gold stripes suggesting authority asked her.
“I am waiting for a medical examiner, sir. Since three o’clock, begging your pardon.”
“I see . . . Might I look at your papers?”
Angela handed over her stack of papers. He glanced at them.
“Nothing incriminating . . . Why did the inspectors want a medical examiner?”
“They thought I looked unhealthy, weak, and skinny. I told them that I had seasickness through the whole voyage from Kinsale.”
“Well, you’re tiny all right . . . Let me look at your eyes . . . Bright enough, I’d say . . . now open your mouth and let me see your tongue . . . healthy enough . . . No fever . . .”
He placed his hand on her forehead.
“No, sir.”
“Regular flow of blood?”
“Not for a long time, sir.”
“Would you mind if I listened to your chest?”
He produced a stethoscope and listened very carefully, moving the instrument back and forth and then around the back of her neck.
“Good strong heart, good strong lungs, good strong young woman . . . Hard worker, I’d wager.”
“I try, sir.”
He removed an ink pad and a stamp from his overcoat pocket and briskly stamped all her documents.
“Angela Agnes Tierney,” he read the name off the top document. “Welcome to the United States of America! May it be as generous to you as you are willing to be to it.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “And may the good Lord in heaven be as generous to you as you have been to me.”
Ma would be proud of that response.
“Is someone waiting for you outside?” He tightened his white silk scarf.
“I don’t know, sir.”
The street was cold and dark, the gaslights cast strange shadows—ghostly, Angela thought. The clatter of horses and the spin of wheels on the pavement grated on her skin. She clutched her rosary more strongly.
“Anyone waiting here for Angela Agnes Tierney? Bound for Chicago on the New York Central? Mrs. Sheehan, why did I have to ask?”
“Thank you, Colonel. Her friends in Chicago asked me to wait for her and transfer her to the New York Central. I think we can get her on the eight o’clock train.”
“Angela, may I introduce you to Mrs. Cordelia Sheehan. She heads a group of women who take care of immigrants that might be lost when they come out of Castle Garden.”
“How do you do, ma’am.” Angela curstied.
She shook hands with the Colonel and entered Mrs. Sheehan’s private carriage.
“Are you hungry, Angie?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well let’s see if we can get you a bite to eat.”
“Yes, ma’am. What was the Colonel’s name?”
“Harry Flannery. He’s in there to make sure that Irish immigrants are not persecuted. It still happens, as much as it might surprise you.”
So with her first good meal in three weeks warming her whole body—beef, mashed potatoes, and chocolate—Angela was delivered to Grand Central Station and Train 111 to Chicago. Mrs. Sheehan, who seemed to know everyone, introduced Angela to the conductor, who promised he would deliver her safely to Central Depot in Chicago, for which Mrs. Sheehan rewarded him with a bill of American currency. Then she gave Angela three one-dollar bills.
“A boy will come around offering food for sale. You give him these three bills and tell him that Mrs. Sheehan said that you could have any food that you want.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“And my love to your friends in Chicago. We’ll meet again, I’m sure, Angela Agnes. God bless. Oh, there are few passengers today, so you’ll have that seat all to yourself.”
She kissed Angela firmly on the forehead and dashed off the train, whose engine was already beginning to huff and puff.
“This is the water-level route, Miss Tierney,” the conductor informed her. “No big mountains. Just up the Hudson River to Albany and the Erie Canal to Buffalo and around the Great Lakes to Lake Michigan and right into Chicago. By now they’ll have the tracks plowed from the snowstorm last night. More snow and ice than you’ll ever see in the Old Country.”
Angela watched the Hudson River go by under frozen moonlight, then curled up in her blanket. She was very tired and, though frightened about what might await her in Chicago, she slept while she still could. There would doubtless be many things for her to do as soon as she arrived at the house on Union Square. Before she permitted herself to sleep she finished the final decade of her rosary and prayed for the good people that had rescued her so far on her journey. “I’m sure you sent them,” she murmured to the Lord.
She slept soundly enough because she was exhausted, but fears of the Gaughans haunted her dreams. There were five of them, Paddy and Mae, the parents, Timothy, a son, perhaps fifteen, Rosina, a daughter about her own age, and Vincent, perhaps nine or ten. They were wonderful folks according to Agatha, but none of them were likely to welcome a dirty, smelly, skinny little serving girl that they probably didn’t need into their family. From the books she had read about life in the Big Houses of Ireland she knew that the poor serving girls were especially likely to be at the mercy of the young men of the family. She was already fashioning in both her dreams and waking moments how she would deal with this Timothy Gaughan should he become forward. Rosina, she decided, would be a spoiled brat, and Vincent an obnoxious brat. Dr. Paddy Gaughan would be an overweight and pompous fraud and his wife Mae a nervous perfectionist. Well, she could deal with them one way or another. They would be better than a crowd of nasty nuns. All she owed them was the cost of her journey. They would specify what that was and what her wages were and she would establish when she would feel free to leave. It should be possible to obtain another position where she would be treated justly.
It had not been generosity and concern for her to have sent the remarkable Mrs. Sheehan to meet her at the gate of Castle Garden. They were protecting their investment, that’s all.
When she awoke in the morning and reviewed the decisions she had made during her hate-filled sleep, she felt a little guilty. She had tried them and found them guilty without giving them a chance to testify in their own defense. She would do her best to be fair to them. She would certainly work hard to earn her salary. No employer of hers could ever claim that she was a lazy worker. Maybe they were lonely people who needed an extra amount of love. She doubted that. Rich people were never lonely. “You should always judge new people gently,” ma used to say. “They’re entitled to that.”
It was before those years when poor ma hated everyone.
“I think you should hate strangers,” she had argued. “Then, when they’re nice, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“Aren’t you’re a terrible woman altogether, Angie Agnes, and yourself fixing to have an unhappy life.”
Poor ma. Yet her life had not been unhappy, not at first anyway. If you have to die young, maybe it’s good to die with the man you love and with the children you love.
Could ma read her dreams?
That thought troubled her. She’d better be careful.
She was awakened by bright sunlight. Snow-covered fields stretched in all directions and reflected a huge sun in a cloudless sky. Was this what Amerikay was like all the time in winter—snow, ice, and a sun without mercy?
“Good morning, Miss Angela,” said the conductor. “I hope you slept well? The porter will be along shortly with your tea. Isn’t it lovely outside? That’s Lake Erie over there where the fields end. It is a shallow lake, so it often freezes over in the winter. Lake Michigan tends to be open, though they have icebreakers to let the ore ships get to port. We should be in Detroit in another hour and then in Chicago by five thirty in the afternoon. No more snow is foreseen in the immediate future.”
“Thank you very much.”
“There are soap and towels and water in the restroom at the head of the car. It’s not like the Pullman cars, but we try to keep our restrooms clean.”
“Thank you very much,” she said again.
She was sure that she would always hate America with its drab and dull scenery, its endless distances, its gigantic lakes and its strange names—what was a Detroit? What was a Chicago? What was an Erie? How could people live in such horrid places?
Yet the people in the train car with her were not horrid. They were sympathetic and friendly, delighted by her youth and her quick tongue. They assured her that she would love America, and especially Chicago, which had burned down two years ago and restored itself like a phoenix from its own ashes.
“It’s a dirty, noisy, smelly place, with too many people and not enough homes. Still, honey, it is alive, and we love it.”
They all knew of Union Square, where she would live and work. It was a beautiful neighborhood with a lovely park and striking stone homes, one of the nicest places in the city. Very salubrious. She would certainly love it.
Well, she didn’t want to live in a salubrious place with striking stone homes. She wanted to be back in West Galway where she belonged.
No, she admonished herself, not anymore. Now you belong in Union Square with its lovely park and its striking stone homes. These Chicagoans are a little crazy but Brits they are not.
“There’s Lake Michigan,” a woman cried out. “We’re almost home!”
From what she could see of Lake Michigan it was the ugliest place in the world—a huge sea, surrounded by ice-covered trees, Galway without the bays and the little harbors and the farm houses.
“Great summer resort area,” a man said proudly to her. “Wonderful weather, big beaches, lots of kids. Wonderful relaxation.”
Angela flat out didn’t believe him.
Eventually the train seemed to curve around the south end of the lake and turn into Chicago, mercifully perhaps covered by snow to protect its tawdry ugliness. The last run up to Central Depot was along the edge of the lake. The sun was setting behind a thick curtain of smoke and bathing the dark waters in an evil rusty gold. Hell, Angela thought, could not be more ugly.
“Central Depot,” the conductor announced.
Home.
The train eased its way into the depot. The lake had frozen near the shore.
“Back there was a place called Camp Douglas,” a young man told her. “Confederate prisoners during the war. A lot of them died of disease.”
“War?” she said.
“Our Civil War. North and South fought over freeing slaves. North won. A lot of young men died, millions, more from disease than from bullets.
“The University of Chicago is down there too. It’s very famous.”
Angela shivered. What a strange, deadly, mysterious country. With such nice people.
She glanced out the window, wondering if she would be able to pick out the Gaughans in the light of the gas lamps. In the crowd of people waiting for passengers, they were easy to see—five very well-dressed, attractive people and, Lord save us all, they had brought their wolfhound!
Angela gulped and sat down.
She was dirty, smelly, messy, and tattered. Give her a wheel barrow and she was Molly Malone, disgusting, repulsive, an untouchable. She was going to invade their clean, beautiful home with her terrible smells. Once they saw her and smelled her, they would loathe her. Dear God, take me now. Let the lake come up and carry me away.
The car was empty. The crowd was thinning out on the platform. The Gaughans were growing uneasy.
“Help you with your luggage, Miss?” the porter asked.
“No, thank you. It’s not all that much.”
And, like me, it has the smell of steerage and of the sea and of human waste.
Darkness settling over the depot. The sun had given up its battle with this little section of Hades.
“Well, now, isn’t it time to get out and face your new owners?”
A woman in a shawl at the back of the car.
“ ’Tis yourself,” she said softly.
“ ’Tis.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll face them.”
“You’ve always been a brave one, first child of my womb.”
She lifted her blanket and stumbled toward the door of the car. She almost tripped as she climbed down the stairs to the wooden platform. The Gaughans circled around her.
“I’m Angela,” she said in a voice from another world.
And the wolfhound barked his approval.