Brendan Graham - The Element of Fire

Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn’t miss any chance to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she’d ask him about that and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins, Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street. It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill, the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston’s rising middle class. Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything in between, pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, ‘Peabody’s’ did a thriving business.

When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle to ‘build railroads to build America’, they would invest in some business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia – being all that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in Grosse Ile, with the idea that she could import French wine from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of the Catholic Church in Québec’s province, Father McGauran had found them Frontignac, Père et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers of vin supérieur de France.

Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean-on-the-palate whites, from the châteaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of Champagne. Darker – liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques ; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their quality guaranteed with the red waxen seal of the French cockerel. At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants of Boston – the Pendletons and Endecotts. Politely but firmly they had turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only ‘jumped-up Irish and selling French wines!’

Finally, she had happened upon Peabody’s place. Although at the time uncertain of his motives – the way he had taken her hand, lingered over it – Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one else would.

She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an ‘at cost’ agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further, she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked and Jacob had opened a second such store.

As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody again held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part, but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont, but of which she took little notice. Now, he comforted her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.

It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston – a city as zealous in attitude to Jews as it was towards ‘papist Celts’ – but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.

Peabody waited before speaking. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit. Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was angry now at the ‘Old Country’ and all it had inflicted on her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.

At last he spoke. ‘Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,’ he said tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. ‘A new life in the New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It works, Ellen, believe me, it works.’

‘Thank you, Jacob … for listening … for everything.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek. How wise he was. What he had told her was like something her father – the Máistir – would have said. ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less.’ It was good advice.

She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her insides, eat up her capacity for life.

They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob and things had gone well between him and Lavelle – ‘her young helper’, as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn’t correct him this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would be back within the week to talk about ‘clarets for Christmas and champagnes for the New Year’.

As she walked back from Peabody’s, Boston, with its busy streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came there with Lavelle, crowded in on top of her, taking patches out of the sky, now signified something else – progress, getting ahead. Looking upwards instead of downwards.

She wanted to be part of all that now, instead of on her hands and knees clawing at lazy beds for the odd lumper missed by the harvesters, up to her eyes in muck. What good were grand mountains and sparkling lakes, when you had to crawl, belly to the ground, in order to fill it? An empty craw sees no beauty.

Faneuil Hall, the spiralling Old South Meeting House, the Grecian pilasters of the State Street buildings, Beacon Hill – these would be her new mountains. The harbour with its wharves and docks, its busy commerce – her new lakes. It was all here. Everything Ireland wasn’t, this place was.

‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less,’ she repeated to herself.

In her efforts to ‘remember less’, Ellen in the following weeks threw herself with abandon into her new life in Boston. Lavelle had indeed done well while she was away. He had kept Jacob’s two stores fully stocked and the merchant reasonably happy, despite Peabody’s frequent mutterings about it not being the same ‘since Mrs O’Malley deserted me and sailed for Ireland’.

Lavelle had also secured a new outlet for the New England Wine Company, in the developing suburb of West Roxbury, far enough away not to damage Peabody’s business.

‘What he doesn’t know won’t bother him!’ was Lavelle’s dictum. Ellen wasn’t so sure.

‘It’s a bit underhand – Jacob’s been a good friend to us and our business,’ she said to Lavelle, resolving to tell Peabody herself at the right moment.

The children seemed to take up so much of her time, but she was happy ‘doing for them’, busying herself more with domestic matters than business. In this she was forced to rely, to a greater degree than she thought fair, on Lavelle. If during the daylight hours she did not manage to get to the warehouse, then at evening Lavelle would call on her to discuss matters of business, bringing various documentation of invoices and receipts. Because of the nature of their arrangement with Peabody, resources had to be prudently managed – something to which she had always applied herself vigorously. She looked forward to these evening visits, finding some time for titivating herself in advance of them – between household chores and the children. This total reliance on Lavelle would, she knew, be but a temporary measure, until she had settled them into suitable schools.

Situated in the ‘Little Britain of Boston’ – the non-Irish end, of the North End – the Eliot School was one of Boston’s better public schools for boys. Nominally non-denominational, pupils nevertheless sang from the same hymn sheet – the Protestant one. Too, the official school bible was the King James version. However, Eliot School had the best spoken English in Boston, fashioned no doubt from that bible of the city’s non-chattering classes, Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.