Some ill had befallen her, Lavelle knew. Although he did not share this presentiment with Patrick.
She had gone but not returned.
Perhaps he himself had been at fault. Allowed too much responsibility to rest on her shoulders. There was no doubt she was capable but she had stepped far beyond where most of her gender had gone. Far beyond the domestic threshold into the public domain.
Too far … perhaps.
Gradually, they widened their search. Traipsed the Common where she had loved to bring the children; the Long Wharf; up along Washington Street, between Milk and Water, with its patchwork of buildings, to the Old South Meeting House. Across from here, Lavelle had asked her to marry him. She had laughed at his impudence … and immediately agreed. Quincy Market – she loved to stand in its midst, watch the copper grasshopper spin from side to side atop the domed cupola of Faneuil Hall. Reverently, Lavelle even entered The Old Corner Bookstore, her favourite haunt of all. A discreet enquiry. Mr Proprietor remembered her: ‘passionate about the written word’, but had not seen Mrs Lavelle for some time … believing she had ‘exorcised the city from her life and moved to the suburbs – for the inner life. From reading Donne,’ Mr Proprietor supposed.
Eventually, they tracked down Harriet Brophy, their one-time neighbour from Pleasant Street and Ellen’s companion at those Daughters of the Commonwealth meetings.
The woman flapped and flitted about them. ‘My, young Patrick! My, look at you! Still at Eliot School after the commotion you caused over the Protestant prayers. But this news of Mrs Lavelle. Oh, I am frantic to learn about your poor mother! Let me see, I think the last time I saw Mrs Lavelle was at our meeting where that Mr Joyce spoke. Renaissance or Revolution: the Future for Ireland? Such a gallant man, Mr Joyce!’
Lavelle tried to track down Stephen Joyce. Last heard of, the poet-revolutionary had returned to Ireland to keep the agitation with England alive. Others said he had since gone South to align himself with the brewing restlessness there. It was the man’s wont to traverse continents seeking causes. Lavelle even began to wonder if Ellen herself had taken up some cause? While she seemed to have stripped herself of her old Irish republican ideals, she had put on the new clothes of Bloomerism – the rising women’s movement. Whatever cause Ellen might have championed it was, Lavelle concluded, one not clearly visible. No trace of her was anywhere to be seen.
With increasing dismay, Lavelle put a notice in the ‘Missing Friends’ columns of Boston’s Pilot newspaper. The Pilot was widely read among the city’s Irish community. His dismay was yet further increased at the hundreds of similar postings from people wanting to trace female relatives who had come in their thousands ahead of them out of Ireland. Many of those sought, it seemed, meriting a similar description of ‘red-haired Irish woman, attractive to the eye’.
As time drifted, first into weeks, then months, Lavelle began to despair of ever seeing Ellen again.
Patrick was more and more filled, not with despair at ever finding Ellen, but with anger. Anger at the growing conviction that his mother had once more deserted him, as she had in Ireland nine years previously. Patrick knew she’d had little choice then, but the weight of her leaving, the cruelty of that separation, had never left him. True, she had returned but he had still resented her coming to reclaim them, clad, in the gorgeous finery of Boston – and with a man, Lavelle, awaiting her return there. A man to replace his father. She had, Patrick reckoned, on this more recent escapade probably found some new ‘fancy man’.
His mother was alive all right.
Alive – and out there. Somewhere.
Of that Patrick was convinced.