“I THINK that Nora Joyce Fitzpatrick was a shameless hussy,” I said to my wife.
At least once every day, Nuala Anne moved her hand back and forth over Socra Marie’s eyes. Sometimes, just to be stubborn I suspect, the little wench ignored her. However, this morning in a good mood perhaps, she followed the movement of her mother’s hand with careful interest.
Then my wife clicked her fingers a couple of feet way from the child’s right ear. Displeased with the noise, our little wisp of humanity glared in that direction. Nuala Anne repeated the performance on the other side. Socra Marie frowned as though she didn’t like the show. Still she turned her head that way.
“Nuala,” I said, “the doctors told us there was nothing wrong with her hearing or her sight.”
“I just wanted to make sure that awful pneumonia thing hadn’t hurt her and herself looking so grand and beautiful this morning.”
“Her mother looks beautiful after a decent sleep last night.”
“It was super, Dermot Michael, just super… Now, as to that Nora woman, I think she knew how to deal with her man, poor dear thing, and herself coming into his office more than half-naked.”
“I didn’t know women did that sort of thing then,” I said truthfully enough.
“Give over, Dermot Michael. Sure they did. Not all of them maybe, not most of them, just like today. But some of them and himself being a bit of a gobshite, so stiff and formal.”
“I don’t think he was so stiff and formal that night in his study.”
“He wouldn’t have dared to be, and didn’t he know it?”
“And you think he wrote it down for those of us who would read his manuscript a hundred years later?”
“He wrote it down because he was proud of herself and himself and didn’t give a good fuck who knew it.”
“Fair play to you Nuala Anne. And to them!”
“What do you think really happened that night in the Haymarket?”
“Desplaines Street,” she corrected me, “and am I not calling the doctor fella now to ask if I can take the child with me on a bit of an excursion. I want to see this friggin’ place.”
Nuala dressed for the excursion like she was attending an afternoon tea—pale blue summer suit, nylons, shoes with modest heels, hair combed back and then piled on her head. She was now the fashionable young matron and no longer the distraught mother.
Our first stop then was in the pediatrician’s office at the hospital. The young woman put Socra Marie on a scale. Nuala forgot her persona and fretted nervously. She thought our daughter had lost weight, but she had been afraid to weigh her at home because she didn’t want to know.
“Well, you fat little girl!” the doctor exclaimed. “You’ve put on seven and three-quarters ounces!
“That isn’t much,” Nuala said, resisting good news just as she had resisted the teacher’s report on Nelliecoyne.
“But it is, Mrs. Coyne, it’s a surprise. Usually it takes a couple of more weeks before these little ones gain any weight at all. She has a good appetite.”
“Screams for food all the time, doesn’t she?”
Gently and cautiously the doctor explored our daughter, marveling at how strong and healthy she was. Nuala wasn’t buying any of it.
“And herself down with pneumonia only last week.”
“That happens to many babies, Mrs. Coyne…”
“That’s Dermot’s mother. I’m Nuala Anne.”
“Maybe because she’s a little small and a little young, she’d be a bit prone to it because her immunities haven’t built up yet. She could be ten pounds and still come down with pneumonia. Unless parents neglect the symptoms—which you certainly would not—we pull them through.”
“They made us take oxygen home,” me wife insisted.
“Purely precautionary, Nuala Anne. I won’t try to kid you. There are more dangers for a premature baby than for full-term babies. It’s a cliché that you should take one day, one week at a time. I know that doesn’t console parents at all. However, you have one very healthy little girl here.” She poked at Socra Marie’s tummy and the wisp squirmed in delight. “My hunch is that she’ll be just fine.”
Nuala was unimpressed.
“I stew about her all the time.”
“I do about my kids too… Would you sing that beautiful Connemara lullaby for her while I’m wrapping her up?”
Of course she would. First in Irish. Then
On the wings of the wind, o’er the dark, rolling deep
Angels are coming to watch o’er your sleep
Angels are coming to watch over you
So list to the wind coming over the sea
Hear the wind blow, hear the wind blow
Lean your head over, hear the wind blow.
The daughter closed her eyes and went to sleep.
“Thank you very much, Doctor.” My wife went back to the poised young matron. “You’ve been very patient with us and this little one. I knew you liked that song, so didn’t I bring along a disk on which I sing lullabies.”
She pulled the CD out of her purse and graciously autographed it.
“You sing all these songs for her?”
“A couple of times every day.”
“Now I know she’ll be all right!”
“Nice show, Nuala Anne,” I said as we entered my old Benz in the hospital garage.
“The poor dear thing, having to put up with a bitchy mother like me… And yourself getting fat on us, Socra Marie.”
We had rigged up a tiny car seat for Socra Marie in the back of the car, with Nuala in attendance. When the child demanded food or a clean diaper we had to stop the car because Nuala would not remove the child from the safety of her seat for those delicate operations while the car was moving.
We then drove down Dearborn Parkway and identified the Victorian home we figured was the one where Ned and Nora and their clan lived.
Imitating their piety we stopped to say a decade of the Rosary. Socra Marie continued to sleep.
Then we drove over the Grand Avenue bridge to Desplaines Street and under the Lake Street L track, which did not exist in the days of the riot.
“That’s the old Washington Street tunnel,” I said. “All boarded up now. Most of the people who came to the protest rally, including Gus Spies and the Parsons, walked or rode through it.
“Any vibrations or whatever?”
“Very faint.”
“The child?”
“Haven’t I been after telling you that she’s not fey at all, at all, thank the good Lord.”
“If we had Nellie here…”
“Wouldn’t she be going ballistic, the poor dear!”
We found a parking place at Desplaines and Randolph. The three of us sallied out of the car into the soft spring sunlight.
We crossed the street to the Catholic Charities building at 126 Desplaines to read the plaque which had been torn off several times:
On May 4, 1886, hundreds of workers gathered here to protest police action of the previous day against strikers engaged in a nationwide campaign for an eight-hour day. Radicals addressed the crowed. When police attempted to disperse the rally, someone threw a bomb. The bomb and ensuing pistol shots killed seven policemen and four others persons. Although no evidence linked any radical to the bomb, eight of them were convicted and four were hanged. Three were pardoned. The strike collapsed after the tragedy.
“Count on your friggin’ Catholic Church to speak the dangerous idea cautiously,” Nuala laughed.
We waited for the traffic and then walked back across the street.
“I think this is where Ned was,” I said, pointing to a small alley which had no name now, “and the speaker’s stand was about here. And this parking lot was the Crane’s factory.”
“Why is he so close?”
“Probably because he is trying to hear what they’re saying.”
“Then the police came down the street toward us from just a block away with drawn guns … and the steeple of Old St. Patrick’s down there overlooking it all.”
“Right. They demanded that the tiny crowd disperse. The speakers climbed down off the wagon they were using as a stand. The police, who came up behind the crowd, herded them back of the wagon, then the man came out of the alley and threw the bomb.”
“A pack of friggin’ gobshites!” Nuala exploded.
The sound of her mother’s voice awakened Socra Marie. She look around at the dull industrial street under the transparent blue sky and considered it very carefully.
“They were indeed, Nuala Anne.”
“That’s not what I mean. Who knew the police would be coming down the street?”
“Well, certainly not Mayor Carter Harrison. He told them not to.”
“I don’t imagine he would throw the bomb … Who else?”
“Captain Bonfield and Captain Ward and I imagine most of the men whom they’d gathered together from the outlying police precincts and marched out into Waldo Place.”
I pointed to the map I had put together.
“So how could an Anarchist bomb thrower know exactly when they would appear, light his bomb, and run down the alley to throw it at them.”
“Someone at the police station might have sneaked out and told him.”
“Och, Dermot Michael, be sensible. It was dark and there were only gaslights. Your man would have had only a minute or two to run down the street, duck into the alley, tell the man with the bomb to light it, and then throw it.”
“I suppose so…”
“The bomber didn’t even know the police were there! Why didn’t all those people know it was an accident and even Neddie himself acting like a friggin’ eejit!”
“So the bomb was aimed at the protesters?”
“As far as the bomber knew they were the only ones there!”
“Could be…”
“Hush now, little dear,” she murmured to the child who was twisting and turning and trying see what was going on, “your ma’s playing detective.”
“Couldn’t someone from the police station have slipped out on to Waldo Court here, dashed over to Jefferson Street here, cut through these driveways or alleys and either tell the bomber or throw the bomb himself. Might not one of the cops been a closet Anarchist?”
“Give over, Dermot Michael Coyne! Why would a cop want to risk killing other cops?”
“Unless Captain Bonfield wanted to provoke an incident!”
“If he knew the bomb was coming, he could have provoked an incident without killing his own men. All he had to do was to hold them back fifty meters or so and yourself missing the point.”
“Which is?”
In dialogues like these Nuala abandons her loving wife role and becomes the stern taskmaster. I used to resent it. Then I suppressed my resentment. Now I laugh, albeit inwardly.
“The bomber had no idea the police were there.”
“He just heaved it into the dark, brushed Ned Fitzpatrick aside and ran back down the alley to Jefferson Street.”
“And over to that Washington Street tunnel and himself not knowing at all, at all whom he might have hit.”
“If anyone.”
“Take the child, Dermot Michael.”
I did.
Socra Marie did not seem upset by the switch. She cuddled against my chest.
Nuala leaned against the wall of the building south of the alley, her eyes closed, her face pale. She was having one of her “interludes,” as I called them.
“Guns and screams and pain and terror,” she murmured.
It was 1886 again.
“Poor Ned is paralyzed. He wants to do something to stop it but he can’t.”
Could my wife have really tuned into Ned Fitzpatrick’s emotional vibrations from a hundred and fourteen years ago?
Don’t be silly. Of course she could not have!
Right?
She opened her eyes.
“It’s fading away, Dermot. I’ll be all right. Hold me please.”
So I had the child in one arm and the mother in the other.
Nuala shivered.
“ ’Tis over now. Maybe just my hyperactive imagination. I don’t know … Socra Marie child, your ma is just a little crazy sometimes. You mustn’t mind.”
The child would have none of this. She began to wail.
“Giver her back to me, Dermot Michael. I’ll sing her a lullaby.”
We walked back to the car.
“Sure, maybe she’s just hungry? You want something to eat, little one? It’ll be a milk shake this morning I’m afraid.”
Whether she was hungry or not, Socra Marie was only too happy to be offered food.
I sat in the front seat of the Benz, waiting for a cop car to appear. Then it occurred to me that I could put some quarters in the traffic meter.
When I returned to the car, Nuala was changing a diaper.
“Didn’t she dump a load of shite in her pants, the little brat. That’ll serve me right and proper for upsetting her.”
“Nuala…”
“What is it, Dermot Michael, and yourself sounding so mysterious?”
“You remember the day we brought this one home from the hospital?”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“You thought you heard thunder.”
“I did.”
“And Nelliecoyne told us that some men had set off a bomb down at the Haymarket.”
“She did.”
“But that was three o’clock in the afternoon…”
“And the bomb went off at 10:30… Angels and Saints preserve us!”
“What could that mean!”
Nuala strapped Socra Marie back in her car seat. The child promptly went back to sleep.
“I don’t know…”
“Shall we go home?”
“Hmn? … Oh, no. Herself will sleep for a couple of hours now. I want to see that cemetery place you were talking about. It isn’t far, is it?”
“Not at this hour in the morning.”
I drove over to the Kennedy and then turned onto the Congress to drive west to Forest Park.
“Dermot Michael…”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve been around me long enough to know that these experiences are not logical…”
“Metaphorical, poetic, imaginative.”
“Maybe something like a dream in which one thing stands for something else.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why we would hear the bomb seven hours before it went off…”
“If you had been alive in 1886.”
“ ’Tis true, I wasn’t and neither was Nellie… Maybe memories were sort of floating around in the atmosphere because people were planning on making the bomb then or on throwing it.”
“Could be … I wonder if it matters.”
“It would to Ned…”
“Ned and Nora are in heaven, Nuala Anne.”
“And themselves watching everything we do now.”
The Irish believe that the dead are very near to us, especially when they’re interested in what we’re doing. In the World-to-Come, Ned and Nora Joyce Fitzpatrick presumably have better things to do than to watch us. I might ask my wife whether she actually was aware of their presence or just presumed they’d be lurking around. She would doubtless reply that she didn’t see the difference.
“If the bomb was made that late in the afternoon of May 4, then it’s unlikely that either the police or the Anarchists were responsible.”
“ ’Tis true, Dermot Michael, you have the right of it.”
We left the Congress at Harlem and headed south to Harrison and then turned right to Des Plaines Avenue, a different street than the Desplaines Street which intersected with Randolph at the old Haymarket.
“ ’Tis near your neighborhood, is it?”
“ ’Tis. Forest Park is just south of River Forest, though we try to pretend that it isn’t.”
At Des Plaines Avenue we entered the gate of Forest Home Cemetery or Waldheim as it was called for many years (the German for Forest Home).
“If I remember correctly what my mother told me, this was once burial grounds for the Potawatomi Indians on the high ground along the Des Plaines River which is over there on the left. When the Northwestern Railroad built a line out in this direction, the Germans, Jewish and Gentile both, built cemeteries here because they were barred from burial in the city. The mourners would ride out on the trains and carriages would pick them up at the stations. There were thirty extra cars when they buried the five men who were condemned to death after the trial.”
Behind me, Nuala Anne sighed loudly.
“And them all innocent.”
“It certainly seems that way.”
We stopped in front of the Martyrs Monument, a fierce woman standing guard over a dead man, a kind of Anarchist Pieta.
“Ugh,” Nuala murmured.
“A monument to the police who were killed stood at Randolph and Desplaines for many years. It was blown up twice in the nineteen sixties. A third version is now safe in central police headquarters.”
“Who blew it up?”
“Your radicals, who else?”
“Cheap grace… Well, we should pray for all of them, shouldn’t we, Dermot Michael Coyne?
She shifted the child to her left arm and fingered her Rosaries with her right hand. I joined in. I feared all five decades, but Nuala was content with one.
“They’re all buried here?”
“All but Fielden, the English Evangelical who was giving the final talk at the protest meeting. When he was pardoned, he distanced himself from the Anarchists. Most of the wives are here too: Lucy Parsons; both of Oscar Nebbe’s wives, the first of which, Metta, died from the strain while he was in prison; Nina VanZandt Spies, though there was never money for a monument for her.”
“I thought she was rich.”
“She spent all her money on the Anarchist cause. She died in terrible poverty, in a messy house, surrounded by cats. She left three thousand dollars that she had somehow hidden away from Lucy Parsons to a cat shelter. No money for a tombstone but at least she’s here in the same graveyard with her husband.”
“She must have been an incorrigible romantic.”
“That’s never a good idea, is it now?”
“Well, they’re together not only here but in the world to come.”
“ ’Tis true… Let’s go home, Dermot Michael. This place is so sad.”
Out on the expressway, however, she changed her mind.
“Let’s see this Ogden place that your man was trying to build.”
“You sure?”
“I am.”
I left the Congress at Kedzie and drove south into Lawndale, an area thoroughly devastated by crime. Most of the people on the streets were either drug dealers or their clients. At Cermak Road I turned onto Ogden. In a couple of blocks, we came upon a large area that had been cleared. Gigante had laid down a few new streets and some foundations and built a boarded-up and forlorn model town house. Even in the spring sunlight with wild grass growing up in the ruins and skinny trees turning green, the site had all the appeal of a radioactive dump.
“This is supposed to have been for yuppies?” my wife asked sceptically.
“Eventually it will be. The Burlington Railroad and the Douglas Park L both are nearby. It’s close to three expressways. Eventually the Boulevard system will be rehabbed. Yuppies are as far west as Ashland and even Western in some places. Kedzie is still a little far. Ten years, maybe even five. Jimmy Gigante’s vision was a little premature.”
“What will Seamus do with it?”
“Probably sell it to someone with capital and patience. No tag days for Seamus.”
“Tomorrow you must talk to the O’Leary woman.”
“Whatever you say, my love.”
By the time I pulled up to our house on Southport, both the women in the back of my car were sound asleep.
Neither Nellie nor the Mick, who were playing in front of the house, seemed remotely interested in the return of their little sister from her first outdoor venture.
“I’ll carry herself upstairs,” I said, lifting the baby out of her car seat.
“Then come back and carry me upstairs.”