Page 7

Chicago

Ten years earlier

“Rent is due Thursdays. The front door is locked at eleven sharp every night. Garbage is collected Mondays, if you’re lucky.

” The landlady, a Mrs.Feeney, spoke with a thick northside Dublin accent and a cigarette that clung bravely to her bottom lip.

Emily watched the cigarette bounce up and down, spilling ash over the linoleum floor as instructions and rules tumbled with it.

“Bathroom’s across the hall. The rats are free.

Any questions, ask one of the other tenants.

And no visitors. Get your kicks elsewhere, ladies.

This is a boardinghouse, not a knocking shop.

” She slammed the door behind her as she left.

“Let’s hope we don’t see her too often,” Annie said as she took off her hat and walked to the window of the damp and drafty room. “Dear Lord. It really is awful.”

Emily looked at the patches of damp on the walls, the cracked pane of glass in the window, the bare bulb suspended from a dubious-looking wire on the ceiling.

“We’ve seen worse. Just.” She pushed the cigarette ash beneath the threadbare rug with the toe of her shoe and joined Annie at the window.

“But, as Mammy would say—God rest her—it’s ours now, even the rats. ”

Annie smiled at the memory as she crossed herself. “God rest her.”

“And God rest Daddy. And baby Joseph.”

The pain of losing their parents was still raw, despite the second anniversary that had just passed. Their infant brother was always remembered in their prayers, his fleeting existence marked by the little grave beside their Connemara cottage and the love he had returned to their hearts.

Emily wrapped her arm around Annie’s waist and held her close, seeking reassurance in her presence, just as she had as a little girl, cowering beneath the blankets during a thunderstorm. “Welcome to our new home. I hope we’ll be very happy here.”

“ I hope we don’t get murdered here.”

Emily laughed. “It’s not that bad.”

“It’s terrible, Em, but I guess we’ll make the best of it.” Annie turned to Emily and grabbed her hands. “We must plan our first soiree, darling!” She spoke in a faux high-society accent. “A string quartet beside the wonky table, perhaps. Canapés on the broken fire stairs.”

Emily matched Annie’s voice. “And we’ll simply have to move the moth-eaten chair to make room for the cocktail trolley.” She put her hands on her hips and let out a long sigh as she took it all in. “It just needs a bit of love and…”

“Knocking down?”

“I was going to say, care.” Emily took off her coat and pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. “Coffee? Or would madam prefer a soda to toast her new abode?”

“Madam would love a stiff gin, but coffee will have to do I suppose. Strong coffee.”

Emily rummaged in one of the boxes they’d hauled up the three flights of stairs. “Do you remember which box we put the cups in?”

It was a familiar scene. Emily had lost count of the different towns and cities they’d called home since they’d arrived in America.

She only had paper-thin memories of those early places—the damp chill of a sagging mattress, the piercing wail of a baby’s cry, the scratch and scrabble of rats in the boards—but no matter how dire a place was, she’d always felt loved and safe.

Through all the departures and arrivals that had punctuated two decades of her life in America, the one reassuring constant was family.

Now, like a stick whittled down from a great spreading branch, it was just her and Annie.

First, Nell, the oldest of the three sisters, had moved to California with her rancher husband, Bill Hugson, then their dear father had succumbed to the deadly influenza epidemic after the war, and their brokenhearted mother, having lost all sense of purpose without him, had slipped away in her sleep only a month later.

“Do you remember Da’s map of America?” Emily said as she opened another box.

“And the stories we made up about the places we found?” She could still remember the powdery feel of the paper beneath her fingertips as she’d traced imaginary journeys across state lines, sounding out the curious names: San Diego, Los Angeles, Pasadena.

That map had felt as magical to her as any fairy tale.

Annie smiled. “We always tried to guess where we might go next.”

“And we were always wrong!”

A drafty tenement in Boston had been home for the first two years, the three sisters squashed into a lumpy bed, Emily sandwiched between Annie and Nell like a rasher of bacon in a sandwich.

They’d spent a miserable winter in Pennsylvania, breezed through a hopeful spring in Ohio, and wilted beneath the heat of an Indiana summer.

Eventually, the Union Pacific railroad had delivered Joe and Frances Kelly and their three young daughters to Chicago, Illinois, where home became a scruffy boardinghouse in the Irish community on the South Shore.

“It’s a start,” their mother had said when they’d looked at the dismal room.

“And a start is all anyone needs. And what’s more, it’s ours. Even the rats.”

The words had imprinted themselves on Emily.

She missed her mother’s pragmatism and guidance.

Frances Kelly was a woman forged from the Connemara earth, as solid and unyielding as the weathered stones of the Burren.

Emily felt adrift without her, like a ship with a broken anchor, blown here and there by the fickle tides of life.

“Oh, Annie. Look. It’s Mam’s Bible.” Emily turned to the front page and took out the pamphlet her mother had kept there.

She carefully unfolded it and read the large text on the front.

“?‘THE STATE OF KANSAS AND IRISH IMMIGRATION by Reverend Thomas Ambrose Butler.’?” The Irish priest had worked as a missionary on the Kansas prairies in the last century.

His words had captured their mother’s heart.

Emily turned to the most well-thumbed page and read the words aloud.

“?‘Hesitate not, if you have health and strength, and money enough to bring you out; come to the great free country, where you may soon grow rich and independent as a farmer , with yellow corn waving upon the breasts of the prairies, and cattle grazing upon the hills…’?” The words were so familiar.

She’d lost count of how many times she’d heard her mother read them to her father over the years.

“It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it. All that clean air and big skies.

No wonder she was charmed by the idea of settling there. ”

“Poor Mammy. I wish she’d seen it,” Annie said. She kicked off her shoes and sank into a threadbare armchair until she was almost encased in it, the cushions having lost their spring long ago.

“I think she did, in a way.” Emily returned the pamphlet to the Bible and the Bible to the box.

“She read that pamphlet so many times, I’m sure she could touch the wheat and feel the rain.

” She turned to the view of the city’s endless gray buildings beyond the grubby window.

“We should go there one day. See if the Reverend Thomas Ambrose Butler was right.”

“To Kansas?”

“Yes, Annie! To Kansas.”

“I’ll stick to the city, thank you very much. A life of cherry pie homesteading isn’t for me. And I’d also like to stay somewhere for more than five minutes before thinking about moving again. You’re as bad as Da.”

“I wonder how Nell’s getting on,” Emily said as she tried one more box for the coffee cups. “California seems so far away. I wish she’d married a nice man from Chicago instead of falling for a cowboy.”

Annie laughed. “Don’t let her hear you calling Bill Hugson that! Size of that ranch he owns, he’s no hired cowboy. Our big sister landed on her feet. No doubt she’s getting on just fine.”

“We should write to her anyway. Send our new address. I hate to think of us losing touch.”

Emily missed her sister’s gentle wisdom.

Nell was the smartest of the three, always clever beyond her years and with the sweetest disposition.

Annie was a hopeless romantic with a big heart, while Emily had always been considered the brave one, standing up to bullies who called them names, catching the spiders that crept into their beds, and climbing the tallest trees.

She didn’t always feel brave but had learned that it was a sure way to please her family and entertain them, because what she craved most of all was their love and affection.

With that, she felt strong enough, brave enough, and powerful enough to face anything.

Annie reached for Emily’s hand. “We’ll be all right, Em. We’ll muddle through together, like we always do.”

Emily gave up looking for the coffee cups. “To hell with coffee! Let’s unpack the gramophone. And I’m sure there’s half a bottle of hooch in here somewhere.”

They set up the gramophone and put on a Benny Goodman record. Emily laughed as Annie attempted the new Charleston dance, swiveling her feet and circling her hands with her palms facing out.

“You look like you’re having a seizure, Annie!

You’re doing it all wrong!” While Emily’s natural curls weren’t suited to the sleek hairstyles worn by Louise Brooks and Clara Bow and the flappers she and Annie admired, the one thing she managed to emulate was the new dance.

“Try it this way. Click your heels together, then step to the front with one foot. Click your heels, step behind with the other foot, click your heels, step in front, click, step behind.” She added the hand movements, but Annie still couldn’t get it.

“It’s a silly dance anyway,” Annie declared as she gave up and started to hang her dresses in the wardrobe of the tiny bedroom they would share.

“You can’t buy the silver shoes until you’ve mastered it,” Emily teased as she joined her sister, the two of them jostling for hanging space. “They’re much too pretty to waste on feet that can’t even dance properly.”

They’d both admired the silver dance shoes in Marshall Field’s window since Annie had added them to the Thanksgiving display a week ago.

She’d promised to treat herself if they were still there on Christmas Eve.

Emily had already asked for them to be put by on approval so she could buy them for Annie as a Christmas gift.

When she’d unpacked her clothes, Emily took up her father’s fiddle and bow.

She loved the feel of it in her hands, the sensation of the smooth wood resting against her cheek, the familiar scent of rosin to keep the strings supple, a trace of her father’s tobacco.

She played their favorite ballads and reels, the simple melodies infusing the sparse room with warmth and happy memories as Annie took a miniature hourglass from a box lined with tissue paper and set it carefully down on the dressing table.

She turned the glass, watching silently as the sand slipped through while Emily’s bow danced across the fiddle and time turned its face to the past, and the night of Annie’s sixteenth birthday.

They were at Ringling’s circus. All around them, the crowd gasped in amazement as the Amazing Aerialist performed his daring act, filling his balloon with gas before ascending to a terrifying height from where he performed a trapeze act, suspended beneath the basket, high above their heads.

Leonardo Stregone, the scrappy Italian American boy who’d started his life as a circus performer by bravely climbing to the top of the human pyramid formed by his brothers and uncles, had matured into an enigmatic and powerful showman, and Annie was enchanted.

Later that night, when they returned home, she showed Emily and Nell a miniature hourglass Leonardo had given to her when they’d snatched a moment alone while the others were absorbed by another act and their mother hadn’t noticed her absence.

“He said it’s to count the hours until he returns.

He says he’ll marry me one day!” Nell laughed and said that’s what all the boys say.

Emily was too shocked by Annie’s behavior to say anything at all.

She remembered it still, so vividly. Something about Annie had changed that night, as if she’d been given some great power that she didn’t know how to control.

Emily put the fiddle down and reached for her sister’s hand. “You still think about him, don’t you, Annie.”

“Every day.” Annie turned the glass again. “Every minute. Every hour.”

For several years, he’d returned to Chicago with the circus as promised, the passionate liaison between them intensifying each time until war summoned him back to Italy. Annie hadn’t heard from him since, but she refused to believe he was dead, refused to let go entirely.

“You only get one true love of your life, Em. When you find yours, hold tight and never let him go.”

Emily smiled. “I’ve already found the love of my life, and I’m not letting you go anywhere, Annie Kelly! You’re stuck with me. For better or worse, ’til…”

They looked at each other, happy to leave the remaining words unspoken as the present and the past trickled hypnotically through the hourglass, carrying them toward a future where nothing was certain but everything was thrillingly possible.