Land of Dreams: A Novel (8 page)

“Besides, Anne lords it over me something terrible—I swear that is the only reason she is friendly with me, because she can brag about her big life in Chicago. I want you to tell me what you think of her house; whether it’s as magnificent as she says it is. For me, Ellie? Meet her for me?”

She was pretending to ask me a favor. It was our currency, our secret Irish way of doing things—the way we looked after each other.

“Oh! I wish I was coming with you,” she suddenly said.

In that moment, so did I. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she asked finally.

No, I was not sure. I dreaded having to endure this long journey to find Leo, and was terrified he might be gone when I got there. He was out of my sight, outside of my jurisdiction. I felt completely powerless and out of control.

“Of course,” I said smiling, “I’ll be grand.”

The
Broadway Limited
had been sitting like a giant metal slug next to the platform. It was reassuringly large and solid, more like a boat than a train.

Its engines suddenly screamed into life and both Maureen and I jumped, each letting out a half-laugh that ended with a smile. It felt like a relief.

“I’ll be fine, Maureen—really. I’ll call as soon as I get to Los Angeles.”

I had booked a single sleeper car. Sleeping was unlikely, but I wanted to travel alone. I could not bear the idea of attracting company, no matter how convivial, but the moment I was settled in my seat and the train started moving, I regretted the decision.

The light was gone from the day, but New York City was never dark and, as the train thundered along the tracks above the streets and shops, the sky above me glowed a dull, misty orange. I closed my eyes and finally allowed myself to sink into my thoughts.

Although I had never sought Charles’s advice when he was there to give it, now I had an urgent longing for my second husband. He was Leo’s father, after all—he would have known what to do. In those early New York days Charles’s friendship had given me confidence and comfort. Later, when I started the community in Yonkers, he had protected us from the interests of gangs and criminals. Charles was a man’s man, a union man—handsome, self-assured and principled. Most men were happy to let him into their midst and negotiate with their bosses; most women would happily have allowed him to sweep them completely off their feet. Perhaps, if I had been a different sort of woman—the sort of woman who could give herself over entirely to the better capabilities of a man—I would not be alone here in this situation. Perhaps if I had not been so selfish in pursuing my own needs as an artist, perhaps if I had been less pigheaded in my everyday dealings with Charles, if I had been more respectful of his household foibles, had bowed to his wishes more—perhaps if I had been less enthralled with my sons, and more loving toward him—Charles would still be here with me now?

Yet, I reminded myself, while he had been an affectionate beau, and then a persistent and passionate lover, once we were married, I had felt Charles move away from me.

There was no defining moment, no specific incident that made it clear that Charles’s love for me was waning, just a gradual ebbing of passion and respect, on both our parts, if truth be told. The love that began our marriage started falling like sand through a sieve; shaken by small cruelties—a sarcastic remark, a turned shoulder, a joke fallen flat—until our marriage was emptied of affection and kindness, but running simply on the mutuality of a shared roof and children.

I believed it was because Charles had craved having me for so long that, once he got me to marry him, I lost the cachet of the unavailable. As his wife, I became humdrum to him, and Charles loved drama; he hated things to be ordinary. That was, I came to believe, where much of his motivation as a political agitator and activist came from—the drama of rhetoric. The plight of the downtrodden. While I became cynical about his activities, he became dismissive of my work as an artist. Our love was not strong enough to humor our differences, although, looking back, it should have been. It certainly should have been. Anger and bitterness and grief—war wounds from our previous marriages—destroyed us. Life and experience are supposed to make you strong, but sometimes life itself can batter and weaken love. Love needs nurturing and protecting, especially marital love, which is so easily muted by disagreement and the dullness of the everyday. We took our love for granted. Perhaps I did more than he did.

Charles believed that our marriage had died because I still loved my first husband. “I can’t compete with a dead hero,” he said to me late one night, after he had been drinking and I had refused his attempt to make love.

I had left Charles and returned to Ireland and my husband John. Charles, as dashing and as handsome a charmer as he was to this young, heady housemaid, had not succeeded in keeping me in America. John’s love was my lifeblood. Charles was a bonus—his attention flattered and pleased me, but he had never held the same claim on my heart.

We spent more and more time apart from each other. At first because we were busy; I worked in the studio during the day, and when I could I attended functions and openings with Hilla in the evenings—leaving the children to stay over with the Sweeneys rather than inconvenience Charles. Charles stopped expecting me to cook him meals in the evening—I did not ask him to help me with the children. By not asking anything of the other, or allowing the other the satisfaction of giving, we were disallowing each other’s love.

He began to travel more and more with his union work. The war raging in Europe had brought talk of it to America. That aside, we were in recovery from the Great Depression and everywhere there were pockets of political activity brewing—male sap would rise with the promise of empowerment, and Charles Irvington, the great charmer, would be called in to set up a new union or negotiate a failing one into better terms.

The previous November, less than twelve months ago, Charles had announced that he had to go to Hawaii.

“You’ll be back for Christmas?” I said, more as an accusation than a question.

In truth, I was growing tired of the coldness between us. I did not ask Charles any details of his business in Hawaii, but some part of me resolved that, when he did return, I would take some time away from my own work and make the effort to be a good wife to him that Christmas.

The evening he left I had planned to cook for us all, but at the last minute Hilla had begged me to join her at dinner with a visiting collector from Los Angeles. “The Arensbergs are important collectors, Ellie, but Walter can be a frightful bore—he’s obsessed with the idea that William Shakespeare was really somebody else and goes on and on about it until I think I’m going to scream—please, Ellie.” So Maureen took the boys out to Yonkers, and I left a note for Charles telling him there was a hot plate of food in the oven and that we looked forward to seeing him again in a couple of weeks’ time. When I returned late that night the oven was switched off, but the plate of food was still inside, cold and congealed. The note was where I had left it, with no comment from him. His travel case was gone from above the wardrobe, his shaving kit from the bathroom.

I never saw Charles again.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

My friends from Yonkers had shared Thanksgiving with us the weekend after Charles left. There were ten of us sitting around the table in the apartment and, like most homes in America even in the thinnest of times, it was groaning with the best food we could muster. In addition to the turkey, Bridie had roasted a ham and made a corned beef, Irish-style. Despite myself, I had felt Charles’ absence. As we sat holding hands to give thanks, I saw how petty and pointless many of our small cruelties were. For my part, at least, it seemed unfair that I would prepare such a lavish feast for friends, yet resent doing the same for him as an act of female servitude. Many of our problems stemmed, I knew, from the fact that I had married Charles despite being uncertain if I wanted to be married at all. He picked up on my reticence and it frightened and hurt him, so he turned against me. Yet with my friends all smiling around the table, the warmth of the fire and the food, the candlelight glow of Maureen’s Thanksgiving centerpiece and Patrick carving the turkey, being married didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.

During the Depression, Patrick and Maureen had lost each other. He had gone looking for work and she had become evicted from their temporary shack. They were reunited by virtue of their refusal to give up hope of finding each other, and a dose of God’s good luck. Fate refused to part them, and they gave thanks for that every day. Fate had played its part with Charles and me, too—reuniting us over oceans and continents and decades—and yet I took his love for me for granted and, at times, reviled it as a curtailment of my freedom. Perhaps a happy marriage was not caused so much by fate, I thought, as by our response to it. I held the hands of both my sons and outwardly gave thanks for them and “for the love of my absent husband,” inwardly making a secret pact with myself to be a better wife on Charles’s return.

On Sunday, December 7th, I had given the boys a pot-roast chicken lunch straight after Mass and told them to occupy themselves, as I was going to dive into cleaning the apartment. Leo was reading in the drawing room and Tom was in his room playing with his building blocks, having turned the entire room into a tent using the bedsheets I had just stripped. Both my sons were happily occupied and I was free to clean.

I had decided to prepare early for Christmas and give the apartment a good purge before putting up the decorations. I wanted this Christmas to be a special one. Leo was fifteen and Tom six. Charles had called each Saturday night while he was away and had promised he would be back by mid-December.

“I’m taking the full month of December off from work,” I said.

He paused on the other end and I felt he was happy about my decision, but before he could make a comment to that effect, I could not help but add the proviso: “Hilla says I have too much work stockpiled, and I should take a break and come back with fresh ideas in the New Year.”

“Well, bully for Hilla!” he said.

“And I want to spend some more time with the boys . . .”
And you.
I meant to say it, I should have said it, but I just couldn’t.

“I’m almost finished up here anyway,” he said. “I’ve done as much as I can for them for the time being, but I’ll probably need to spend a good bit more time out here next year.”

Was he tapping another nail into the lid of the coffin of our marriage? Or inviting me to beg him not to go? It was not a conversation to have on the phone, but it was a conversation that I was determined to have. One way or another, I could not continue living in this no-man’s-land of a marriage. We would have to move forward or end it. Christmas and the new year would be time enough to tell what would be for the best.

I was up on a chair, dusting. The ceilings in the apartment were high and their dust-filled edges easy to ignore; dead insects and other debris clumped in the corners, unseen and ignored—I didn’t dare think when I had last given the apartment a thorough going-over. I had spent the best part of my youth and my twenties scrubbing and cleaning—for myself, because I had been reared to believe that cleanliness was next to godliness; and then for other people, to earn money, before I was sure that I knew how to do anything else. By the time I was in my late twenties I had enough sense and money to pay other women to do it for me. Yet here I was, in an old dress, with a scarf wrapped around my hair, choosing to dust and quite enjoying myself!

I turned the radio up high on
Sammy Kaye’s Sunday Serenade
; Jimmy Durante was singing “Inka Dinka Doo,” and Tom danced into the room so delighted with himself that I was afraid he would knock me off the chair. The song finished and just as Tom was begging for more music there was an announcement: “From the NBC Newsroom in New York. President Roosevelt has said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.”

The statement was repeated twice, to let us know this was not simply devastating news, but had the gravitas and consequence of history.

Charles was in Hawaii. I didn’t know anything about why he had gone there or what he was doing. I just knew that he was in Hawaii. Although I could not imagine any reason why he should be near the naval base, I still felt sick.

I immediately switched off the radio so that the boys could not hear the news, then ran to the bureau in the hall where Charles had left his contact details for Hawaii. It was for the offices of the Communist Party of the United States of America in Honolulu. The CPUSA was by no means in charge of all of the unions in America, but was usually involved, officially or unofficially, in much of the work that Charles did, particularly in setting up new unions or agitating workers to rise up against the unjust and exploitative methods of ruthless corporations—many of which, far from merely surviving, had actively used people’s desperation to enable their own businesses to thrive during the Depression.

I reached frantically for the phone. It was a Sunday, so of course there was no reply.

I had to wait. He would telephone. Charles would call as soon as he heard the news, to let us know he was all right. He would know I would be worried. As soon as he could get to a phone, he would call. An hour passed. Two hours. I cleaned. What else could I do? The radio was full of news, although I could not leave it on in case the boys heard what had happened, so I just sneaked into the kitchen and put my ear to the wireless while they were occupied. I would not have them see me looking uncertain or frightened. There was no mention of civilian deaths, and it was the naval base that had been attacked. Charles would most certainly have no business with the Navy. Perhaps it was not as bad as it sounded—although one of the bulletins mentioned that Burma had been bombed, and there was quickly talk of America going to war, but I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted my husband to call and let me know he was safe, so that I could reassure myself and, more important, the boys. Cars had come to a standstill outside our window—Leo called me over to look at a small gathering of our neighbors on the corner of West 27th and Tenth talking excitedly, shaking their heads, a woman crying.