John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The girls accompany her down the five dark flights and watch from the stoop as she starts down 38th toward the river in her borrowed shoes. Father stood that way, watching them when Maeve went to make her First Communion, chuffed with pride but firm in his promise never to set foot in a priest-house again after the way they’d banjaxed the great Parnell. A trio of cadets lounging at the corner make their kissing noises at her but stay where they are. After the one incident when Grania was little, words mostly, but words a young girl shouldn’t be hearing, Father had asked a few of the lads from the Clan na Gael to come by and remind the gang they weren’t the only Hibernians in the city with some clout behind them. Since then it’s been the occasional dirty-mouthed pleasantry, but never a hand laid on any one of them.

Harry offered to come for her, of course, gentleman that he is, but if the sight of her wreck of a tenement on Battle Row didn’t chase him the Gopher boys surely would. He’d have given her trolley fare too, if she’d asked, but the boldness of it, asking a man for coins in the hand, made her blush at the thought. American girls could manage such things — Grania was full of stories how’d they’d get this one or that one to treat them, how they did the town and never parted with a cent. Brigid turns left on Ninth, weaving through the crowds and pushcarts of Paddy’s Market, trolley cars rushing overhead, each shopkeeper with a barker in the doorway shouting out wares and prices, scullery maids searching for bargains for their mistresses, dray wagons empty and full rattling up and down the Avenue. The shoes aren’t as bad as she thought, only a matter of leaning forward on her toes, but the corset is a mortification. It is a warm day, and even in the shade under the shop awnings or the Elevated tracks Brigid is soon damp all over, sweat running down her forehead, and begins to feel resentful. This is it, she thinks. Our only adventure, our great single drama in life over in a flash, and then motherhood and the labor of home until the grave. Mr. Manigault is stepping into a hack about now, she imagines, comfortable in his clothing and not a worry on his brow. No wonder the men in Bunbeg were known to wait till their first gray whisker before they married, no wonder the silver-haired gents in the offices she cleans are full of laughter and boasting. Even Rivka’s own intended, a Second Avenue sport Brigid has never liked the look of, nipping off to this new war as if it is a weekend excursion. Her collar is choking her.

Brigid pauses a moment at the corner of 24th Street. Father died here. Scraping horse-pies off the stones, the job his cousin Jack Brennan high in the Twentieth Ward Democrats had secured him, and a pair of university boys racing their phaetons, Father able only to stand and face them and hope they’d pass on either side. The Brotherhood had paid for the funeral, so the eulogies quickly turned to calls for Home Rule and the expulsion of Tory landlords.

“Saint Patrick drove the first nest of serpents from Ireland,” said Jack Brennan, mourning band on his arm and golden harp pinned to his lapel, “and it’s our lot to finish the job!”

Brigid has gone to a few of the IRB dances and thrilled to hear Maud Gonne, tall and elegant, scold the British in her triumph at the Grand Opera Hall, but the blighted nation’s problems are not hers anymore. If she woke tomorrow with Mount Errigal itself looming outside the cottage window she’d throw the blanket back over her head and pray for the nightmare to end.

“ The most beautiful spot in the world ,” Mother would sigh. “ But beauty never filled a stomach .”

He’d been trampled into the stones, Father, first the hooves and then the carriage wheels. Brigid had been called away from work to identify his remains.

She turns west, breathing through her mouth as the stench from the slaughterhouses thickens the air, hurrying now, afraid he’ll be there early and give up on her, looking out for the Tenth Avenue cowboys, young lads who ride up and down ringing their bells to warn of an approaching freight train, then high-stepping over the tracks and there are others now, the girls all putting on style in bright colors and gaudy hats, American girls by the ease of their movement, people joining in streams from north and south, a human flood driving shoulder to shoulder toward the pier, crowded like the flocks of sheep that follow their belled Judas to be butchered at 42nd. Grania was right, she thinks, among this lot I look like a grieving widow and an old one at that. There are some couples, but more groups of girls and groups of young men, pairs, trios, quartets of them, laughing and shouting from group to group and now the smell of the river and thousands on the pier, it must be thousands.

“I’m an eejit,” Brigid says out loud, too late now to turn and fight the current of bodies. She can tell that every eye that falls on her sees nothing but a poor Irish scrubwoman from Hell’s Kitchen itself, an ignorant country cailín tarted up like a spud in a silk handkerchief.

“An eejit,” says Brigid McCool out loud. “And when he sees me he’ll know it for sure.”

It is more people in one place that he’s seen in his life. Harry is not a small man, but his view is blocked by any number of young giants with bowlers tilted high on their heads, and the hot, indecent human crush of them all, men and women together, has him anxious and wet-browed, struggling to keep his feet. This is not his crowd. Many, if not most, are younger, loudly dressed and raucous in their speech, a half-dozen foreign tongues as well as the grating New Yorkese shouted past him as he pushes through with his uneven gait and tries to locate her in the multitude. I’m the freak attraction they’ve come to see, he thinks, or merely an annoyance to be trodden underfoot in their rush for the pleasure boat.

And then there she is, striking in satiny black among the garish stripes and dots of the shouting girls, her glorious red hair pulled up on her head, a calm watcher amid the frenzy. Her smile when she sees him seems reserved and he feels his knees go watery with uncertainty. What can a woman like this see in hapless Harry Manigault?

“I’d almost given up on you,” she says when he reaches her.

“Next time I’ll come for you in a carriage,” he says, stomach tightening at his own boldness. As if he assumes there will be a next time.

“We’d better get on board.”

Harry holds up the tickets he’s bought, limp from the wet of his hands. “They said there’s another in twenty minutes.”

“It won’t be any less of a mob then.”

They walk side by side toward the gangplank, ropes narrowing into a chute, the crowd pressing in on them and Harry takes her arm, trying mightily to even his step and be the leader. The bored-looking ferryman yanks the tickets from his hand—

“Step to the rear, keep moving, step to the rear—”

They push their way to a spot on the starboard rail, bodies and noise all around them, and Harry is twisted with a sudden shyness.

“And how was your week?” he asks finally.

She gives him a sideways glance. “Thursday we polish the glassware,” she says, “and ye can stand or sit. I do look forward to a Thursday.”

He feels chastened by her tone. A cheer goes up, then, as the ferry horn blasts and the boat begins to churn the water, backing out of the slip.

“And yerself?” she asks.

“We made a story. Little boys fool their grandfather with a garden hose.”

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“That would be the French version.”

“Ah,” says Brigid, nodding her head. “If I had any French I would have known.”

She is mocking him, he knows, but in a gentle way.