Chapter 1 #2
Briefly, Maggie recalled what she’d left behind—her clothes, her dead mother’s few treasures, and most painfully, the fifty-five dollars she’d painstakingly saved for her own future.
All of it was gone, and everything in that suitcase that was hers had been bought by Brendan—another act of his kind generosity she struggled not to resent.
She’d come to New York to forge her own future, to be an independent woman with her own business, her own life, and now she had neither. She had nothing.
Maggie swallowed hard, forcing down the bitter thoughts that she knew only hurt herself.
She was incredibly grateful they had all survived, and so grateful for Brendan’s willingness to sacrifice his own livelihood to protect and provide for both her and Danny.
She could find her dreams again in Chicago. She would make sure of it.
As they stepped outside the station, the noise and stench of the city assaulted all her senses.
She thought she’d become used to the bustle and smell of New York, with its heaving streets and clattering wagons and El trains, the competing smells of manure, coal smoke, and unwashed humanity, but everything about Chicago felt even more overwhelming.
Bridges arched over the streets, and cable cars clattered over the cobbles, along with horse-drawn wagons and carts.
Buildings of brick and stone soared upwards, blocking out the light, taller even than the ones back in New York.
Mr. Eastman had proudly told them that Chicago was the birthplace of the world’s first skyscraper—a building so named because its height made it seem as if it touched the sky.
He’d been boasting, but now, looking up at the buildings that seemed to loom menacingly over her, Maggie was more overwhelmed than impressed. She wanted to see the sun.
As for the smell… Mrs. Eastman had been right, Maggie realized, as she fumbled for her handkerchief and pressed it to her nose.
The smoke-singed air held a variety of unappealing aromas—manure and soot, which was to be expected in any great city, but also the iron-tinged scent of blood and the sicklier one of animal guts, from the huge stockyards just south of the downtown area.
Mixed in with that was the fetid swamp smell of the wet, sandy soil the whole city was built on, and the wild garlic or ramps that lined the Chicago River and added to the unpleasantly pungent odor.
Known as Shikaakwa by the local tribes, it was what the city had been named for, and as she breathed into her handkerchief, Maggie could understand why.
There clearly had to be a great deal of them.
Brendan kept hold of her hand as they walked toward heaving Canal Street, and then helped her into a cable car. It was not so different from the elevated trains Maggie had traveled on back in New York, and she took comfort from this small sense of familiarity as they headed south.
As they left the crowd of buildings around the station, Maggie glimpsed the broad, slate-blue sweep of Lake Michigan, looking as wide as the ocean as it stretched toward a smoke-filled sky.
They’d traveled nearly a thousand miles, and yet here they were, seemingly still by the sea.
She wanted to draw comfort from that too, from the familiarity of the ruffled, blue-gray waters, so similar to the Irish Sea back in Ulster, as well as the Atlantic Ocean in New York, but somehow she couldn’t.
Everything felt too strange, the future far too unknown and empty.
Somehow, Maggie thought, she had to take control of what was happening and begin to guide the events that she’d allowed to push her inexorably and unwillingly forward.
Instinctively, she twisted the ring on her fourth finger, the feel of it still so heavy and unfamiliar.
When they arrived in Englewood, she decided, she would tell Brendan that they no longer needed to masquerade as husband and wife.
Surely, so far from New York, her identity would be safe?
There had to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Irishwomen like herself in this great city.
There was no reason for anyone to be suspicious…
and no reason for her and Brendan to continue to act as if they were married.
The thought brought a sense of comfort as well as purpose, and she tried to enjoy the sight of the buildings blurring by as the cable car continued south to Englewood, while Danny kept up a steady stream of interested chatter that Brendan nodded and murmured replies to.
By the time they reached the neighborhood where Brendan had proposed they begin their new lives, the tall buildings had all fallen away, replaced by those only a few stories high and pleasantly spaced along wide thoroughfares, flanked by flat prairie on one side, and the wide lake on the other.
The sense of space was appealing, Maggie acknowledged, and so different from the crowded tenements of Orchard Street, where she and Danny had started their life in New York.
Once more, as Danny raced ahead, Brendan reached for her hand to help her from the cable car, but this time Maggie did not let him take it.
She gave him a tight-lipped smile instead and remarked as pleasantly as she could, “Now that we are here, we should discuss our living arrangements.” She nodded toward a modest house, similar to the brownstones back east, across the street.
A placard had been placed in the front window advertising vacant rooms. “If we are to find rooms, perhaps we could do so as brother and sister?” She lifted her chin a little to let him know how much she meant it.
She would not play at being his wife any longer, with all the small yet telling liberties that role required.
Brendan’s eyes narrowed, his lips compressing. “If we do so, we will need additional rooms,” he told her. “A landlady will not rent a single room to a brother and sister the way she would to a husband and wife. It would be unseemly.”
Maggie thought of the tenements back on the Lower East Side that had a dozen or more people crammed into a few small, dark rooms. There had been nothing unseemly about that, but in this new life of theirs, Brendan seemed to have taken on a cloak of somewhat priggish respectability, almost as if he believed they were really married and had to act accordingly.
“And what of Danny?” she asked, unable to hide her exasperation. “He is my brother, and he will have to share a room with me.”
“He’s only fifteen,” Brendan replied evenly.
“Don’t you see the difference?” Before she could reply, he continued in a decidedly cool tone, “However, far be it from me to put you in the obviously odious position of having to act as my wife. If you wish for us to present ourselves as brother and sister, then so be it.”
And without waiting for her reply, he headed across the street to the boarding house Maggie had pointed out, leaving her no choice but to follow him, wishing she could celebrate this minor victory, but feeling only as if she’d lost something instead.