The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [95]
Their only child was Shamus and at the time she had thanked God because more would have only meant more mouths to feed, but when she had realized that she was likely to become a young widow, she had wished she’d had more sons to look after her when her husband was gone.
In his typical cussed fashion Mick O’Hara took his time about dying, and Shamus was already seventeen when he finally went. After the funeral Mary Kathleen had walked with her son to the top of the Liscannor cliffs and they had stood there arm in arm, letting the fierce Atlantic winds sweep over them. It had felt like a cleansing to her, blowing away the tedious years when she had been confined to the three dark, mean rooms behind the bar with the constant sound of coughing and the smell of ale and death.
“Son,” she had said, gripping his arm tightly, “across that ocean is a new world, a place where a man can make a fortune. I’m selling up the alehouse and giving you the money. I want you to go to America and make a new life for us, and when you are ready you will send for me.”
Shamus still remembered looking down at her face, so proud and serene and sure; she had trusted him to take all she had in the world and multiply it, certain he would take care of her. He had vowed not to let her down.
When he first came to America, he traveled the country from coast to coast; he was big and muscular, and it was easy for him to get a job as a laborer, carrying bricks in Chicago, hauling crates on the docks in San Francisco and stoking furnaces at the steel plants in Pittsburgh, but he knew it was not going to make him a fortune. A year passed and though he still had the money his mother had given him, he was no closer to bringing her over and looking after her than he was before. He thought of her back home, waiting uncomplainingly for him to do what was right, and he knew he would have to find something.
He drifted back to New York, wandering the streets aimlessly, staring at the mansions on Gramercy Park and Washington Square and Fifth Avenue, wondering bitterly how people had made enough money to build such places, and he told himself that one day he would own one just like that. Meanwhile, he took a room over a saloon on Delancey Street and worked by day as a bricklayer on a construction site. He liked the building trade and he would have liked to learn more about it, maybe make his way up to foreman or even a manager, but there was not time; he always carried the dread in back of his mind that his mother would die before he was successful and he would be too late to keep his promise.
He enjoyed living over the saloon. The smell of whiskey and beer and the nightly noise were familiar and reminded him of home, and he offered to give the proprietor a hand of an evening, pulling pints of ale and slinging mounds of corned beef hash. He was a sociable young man who liked the masculine camaraderie of the saloon, and after six months, when the proprietor told him he was thinking of selling up and going back to St. Paul, Minnesota, on an impulse Shamus offered to buy it. Within two weeks the transaction was completed and he wrote his mother, enclosing her fare and telling her to come as soon as possible. It was only afterward that he reflected on the irony of the fact that he was bringing her to the brave new world to live exactly the way she had before, in three rooms behind an alehouse.
Nevertheless, Mary Kathleen had considered it a great step up in the world; she arrived