35. Suaimhneas

My family settled in

A few years ago, my son William was slinging bales and dodging the swinging cranes at the Brooklyn dockyards, one of the many jobs he’s tried in this life. He heard that they needed help in the shipping office, and that’s how his sister Mary got her job as a typist. Not at first, as she was cleaning up and running errands, but after a month the company sent her to a business school to learn QWERTY. Once in awhile I met her there and she would take me to lunch, and myself always happy for an excuse to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge it were a grand outing for me. One day after we’d eaten hot dogs and sauerkraut from a waterfront street vendor, she took me back into the office before her boss returned from lunch, as he was a grouchy sort of bloke whom I’d learned to steer clear of, and she proceeded to show me the typewriter and how it worked, and putting in a fresh sheet of her boss’s paper, those keys flew rattly-tat across the paper faster than I could see, each letter clear as day, and as I watched she snapped out the picture-perfect words: DEAR MAAM, YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE AND WILL BE MY LOVE TO THE END OF TIME. THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU’VE DONE FOR ME! NOW BE OFF WITH YOU BEFORE MR. HIGGINS GETS BACK FROM LUNCH!! She pulled the page from the machine zzzureeech, folded it twice and handed it to me tenderly and I tucked it into my bosom before I walked out. I carried that precious page with me back across the great bridge and and right past our old place on Pearl Street to a trolley stop, boarded and found a seat at the back, happy for my little prize which I folded into a tidy little square as the people and horses and automobiles slid by me all the way home to Clarkson St.

Or Mary and William left in the morning for work sometimes I’d tag along with them a half block to the waterfront to see them off, my two blue eyed brunettes, him 41 in sag overalls and a workman’s flat cap, she 25 pretty as could be in a blue store dress and a tall folded felt hat. They walked away hand in hand and the ferry horns was sounding and the gulls was all about the tables, Italian and Portuguese women stood about cleaning the fish their men unloaded fresh off the boats. Watching them be off I felt something we call suaimhneas. There’s no good word for it in English. It is like a feeling of rest, a peaceful contented feeling. Who’d think one could feel that way on the Hudson River waterfront? But there it was, the racket of of life all about, just the sight of my to wains on their way off to work. It was for this sight that I had pitched and heaved across the Atlantic with Dá and Maam, endured the sight of draft rioters with swords and torches burning building and chasing innocent Africans through the streets, why we’d crammed our 9 children into two rooms on Pearl Street over 15 years, and here now, 50 years later, my wains with decent work, settled, and we had a place in this busy American world.

John’s tailor shop has done well. His skills are in demand, and the textile industry is moving uptown as most of the piecework once done in the old dumbell tenements was taken over by big factories along 5th Avenue. John had always worked in the sewing shops and they promoted him to manager, and he could take his brother Patrick to work with him even with Patrick’s strange ways, and while Patrick was busy at trimming he himself ran the shop. That’s been John’s good fortune. After that gruesome business at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory all kinds of laws were passed to protect the garment workers. When the workers struck for higher wages John had to sit it out until it was settled. The big-shots downtown now want to get the immigrant workers away from downtown, to have 5th Avenue for themselves, so they are pushing the textile shops further north. So now the Tenderloin district streets are now crowded with the dressmakers who are paid to make the clothing and the streetwalkers who are paid to take it off!

I must say I worry about John’s drinking. He said he can’t help it after the death of his dear wife Elizabeth. But it’s pretty steadily that he joins the beer with the whiskey at home in the evening. Though he takes good care of his daughter Dorothy, his brother Patrick, and he provides us with a nice flat, so I what cause have I for complaint? I keep my worries to myself. I am happy to have his Dorothy’s company in the afternoons when school lets out, to give her the attention a teenage girl needs. I help her with her homework and she helps me get supper, though sometimes lately I’ve been so tired she must manage it by herself. We have our own little jokes and words and if it’s a rainy afternoon we cut up the vegetables for vichyssoise and settle down to play cards while it simmers.. I found the soup recipe in a magazine…. it has a fancy name but it’s just cream and potatoes and leaks. John and William are crazy for it so we make it often.

A couple of years ago Katie and Nellie found themselves work at Davis Machine Parts. With a war brewing in Europe they are making a lot of spare parts for the English. I tell you my girls got their clothes every bit as dirty as the blokes working the stamping presses. I washed some of our laundry on the washboard, but those overalls went to the laundress along with a few cents of their wages. They all got up in time to be in the shop by 7:00, and it were a sight to see my two girls eating porridge and eggs in their oil-stained overalls. After a month Nellie went and sewed herself some prettier woman’s overall from a pattern in the Butterick catalogue, no way she’d let the men’s overalls be her look. Katie didn’t bother. I think she knew she’d be leaving the shop when she had the chance. And if one of the guys got bossy or fresh with either of them he’d feel the bite of the Katie Walsh tongue and that’d usually be the end of it. Now that Katie’s has moved on they still leave Nellie at peace to this day, I don’t think they want to see Katie at their jobsite ever again! The girls were most cheerful about the work, making money to help with rent and put some aside for the Emigrant’s Savings Bank, to buy a stylish dress or two a for weekends or Sunday Mass.

Suaimhneas comes and goes. With my heart feeling so shaky I appreciate all the more each passing day and the events it may bring, good or bad. Often I feel it at dinner with my family all around. And recent events have given me hope of more family to come.

After Katie left the machine works to clerk for Macy’s, she told the family over lamb chops and potatoes one evening that she likes working a cash register and tallying the clothing stock. So Nellie then made a big wink and said “more likely she’s tallying the menfolk that wander by Women’s Wear”! And Katie did turn as pink as the salmon Dá once sneaked for us from the Blackwater River near Cappoquin when the Duke’s men weren’t around. Though her red cheeks were now red Katie did say, “and you ought to know, Nell, yourself the pretty sunflower basking in the attention of the guys at Davis Machine!” And Nel came back, “that fellow Roy Noble, he seems like a nice sort, how many times have you tallied him Kate?” I almost split my sides watching the two of them go at it. There it was again, the suaimhneas, and I knew we all felt it, and we all began to laugh.

¹ In this photo my mother identified her mother and two aunts. I suspect that the guys are their brother John, William and Patrick but have not been able to confirm. The other women are not identified as of now.

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