But no.
I’ve spent too many hours pondering what I wouldn’t do to go back in time to Gram’s kitchen, what I’d be willing to give up. What I’d be willing to give. I open my eyes to behold again the nearness of the San Francisco docks.
Backward glances are of no use to me now.
I move away from the railing to the shelter of an overhang and tuck loose strands of hair back into place. I don’t want to step off the ferry looking like a street urchin. Not today.
I look down at my skirt to see how bad the wrinkles are. Not too noticeable in the day’s diminishing light. My journey from New York to California took place on a second-class seat, not in a private sleeping car, hence the creases. I’d not expected anything different, as Martin Hocking had written that he is in good financial standing, not that he is rich. That he has means of any amount is miracle enough. I would have ridden in the baggage car all the way to get out of the umbrella factory and the tenement, and especially away from young Irishwomen just like me who reminded me too frequently of what I left back home.
If my mother could see me now, she’d no doubt put me on the first train back to New York. But then, Mam doesn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t want to worry her, so she doesn’t know that the room I was subletting with four flatmates was no bigger than a kitchen pantry and that a single spigot in the back alley provided the only water to drink, bathe, and cook with for the entire building. She doesn’t know everyone dumped their chamber pots out their windows because there were no indoor toilets—despite city ordinances requiring them—and that the stink of human waste hung on the air like a drape. The tenement wasn’t a place to come home to at the end of the workday. It was just a shared room with sagging mattresses, a place where dreams for a better life could unravel faster than your threadbare clothes, and where girls like me from Belfast and Armagh and Derry and other Irish towns laid their heads at night.
“I had a neighbor lady in Chicago when I was growing up who was from Ireland,” a woman seated across from me said hours earlier, as our train chuffed through the Nevada desert. “She came to America as a young girl during that terrible time when there was nothing to eat in Ireland and nothing would grow. That was years ago. I wasn’t even born yet, so that was long before you were alive. She told me it was something awful, that time. Whole families starved to death.” The woman shook her head in pity.
There isn’t a soul back home who hasn’t heard of those long years of scarcity. Everyone in County Down called that time the Great Famine. Gram, who defiantly spoke Gaelic until her dying breath, called it An Gorta Mór. The Great Hunger, as if to say it wasn’t the lack of food that is remembered but how that stretch of years made people feel. Ravenous and empty and wanting.
“Yes. I’ve been told ’twas a terrible time,” I replied.
The woman then asked if I’d immigrated to America with my whole family.
I thought of Mason, my brother who came to America first and sponsored me, and who is now living somewhere in Canada with a woman he fell in love with. “No. Just me.”
“You came all by yourself?” the woman said. “I think that’s very brave. And you’re so young!”
I smiled at this because some days I feel as though I’ve already lived several lifetimes and others as though I haven’t lived any kind of life at all, that I’m still waiting for it to start. Or waiting for it to start over.
I answered I was twenty, nearly twenty-one.
“What lovely cheekbones you have, and such beautiful black hair,” the woman continued. “I didn’t know Irish had black hair. I thought you were all redheads and blonds and auburns.”
And then the woman asked what was bringing me all the way from New York to San Francisco.
So many reasons. I gave her the easy one. “I’m getting married.”
The woman offered me her congratulations and asked what my future husband’s name was. As she did so, I realized I was itching to have someone older and wiser tell me I was making a sensible choice, an understandable one, considering how hard and complicated the world is.
“His name is Mr. Martin Hocking. Would you like to see his picture?”
The woman smiled and nodded.
I reached into my handbag and pulled out the photograph Martin had mailed to me. He was dressed in a vested pinstripe suit, his wavy hair gelled into place and his trimmed mustache partly covering his lips. He wore a fixed, charismatic gaze that I’d gotten lost in every time I looked at it. I’d had the photograph for less than two weeks but I knew its every inch.
“My, oh my! But he is handsome,” the woman said. “Such striking eyes. He looks like he could see into your very soul.”
“He’s . . . he’s a widower, newly arrived to San Francisco from Los Angeles. He has a little girl named Katharine. He calls her Kat. She’s only five. Her mother died of consumption and the child has had a rough time of it.”
“Oh, how sad! Aren’t you a dear to take on the role of mother and wife all at once.” The woman reached for my arm and laid her hand gently across it in astonishment, empathy, and maybe even admiration. And then she wished upon me every happiness and excused herself to find a porter to get a cup of tea.
I wanted the woman to ask how I met Martin so that I could gauge her response, but even after she came back with her cup, she didn’t ask. While she was off to look for the porter, I imagined how I would’ve replied. I withdraw the photograph now from my handbag and remind myself of that answer as the pier grows ever nearer.
I’ve not met him yet, I would’ve said to the woman. I answered his newspaper advertisement. He was looking for a new wife for himself and a new mother for his little girl. He didn’t want a woman from San Francisco. He wanted someone from the East, where he is from. Someone who doesn’t need coddling. Someone who is ready to step into his late wife’s role without fanfare. I wrote to him and told him I didn’t need coddling. I wanted what he could offer me—a nice and cozy home, someone to care for, a child to love.
The woman, surely wide-eyed, might’ve replied, But . . . but what if you are unhappy with him? What if he is unkind to you?
And I would’ve told her that this is what I’d contemplated the longest in my tenement room before I left it, while rats scurried back and forth in the hall, while babies cried and men drank their sorrows and women wailed theirs, while the couple in the room above banged the walls while they fought and the couple in the room below banged the walls while they pleasured each other, and while my stomach clenched in hunger and I shivered in the damp.
It can’t be worse than what I’ve already known, I would’ve said. Besides. He doesn’t look like someone who would hurt people, does he?
I look at the portrait now, at this visage of a man who looks as near to perfection as a man could.