The Family Way (Molly Murphy, #12)

So things were finally moving along. All I had to do was to come up with a person in New York who might possibly be a friend of Mrs. Wainwaring. Not Sid or Gus. They were frowned upon by polite society and tried to steer clear of it. I thought of other young women of good family I might know. I had become acquainted with several of Sid and Gus’s Vassar classmates and I remembered Fanny Poindexter, who had died so tragically a year ago. Dead women tell no tales, I thought. She’d be perfect. Now all I had to do was to wait patiently.

The next day brought no letter from Sid and Gus, which meant that they still hadn’t found Liam. Also no letter from Daniel, but he was not good about writing. Men aren’t. They only resort to letters if there is something important to say that can’t wait. But at least I took it to imply that he hadn’t caught Liam either. Mrs. Sullivan showed no intention of making the trip to Irvington and I began to wonder if she had forgotten. I couldn’t think of a way to remind her about it without seeming overeager and rude. So I had to lounge around the house and garden, trying to fill the hours with my sad attempts at knitting, or with writing letters while Mrs. Sullivan busied herself with household matters, pausing to give me the occasional lecture on the correct cleaning of silver or the right way to mend a scorch mark on a tablecloth. To my annoyance she decided that the plums were ready for bottling and took Bridie and me with her to the shed while she hunted for suitable jars. I had a horrid feeling that this might be a process taking several days and wondered if she’d possibly let me go to Irvington alone.

Indeed the next morning we were rounded up after breakfast to pick plums. By afternoon she had great pots of plums bubbling on the stove and by nightfall there were jars sitting on the kitchen window ledge to cool.

“I hope you made a note of everything I did, Molly,” she said. “I know you live in the city now, but there will come a time when you’ll have to preserve your own fruit.”

As we sat down to a late cold supper she looked at us in satisfaction. “A job well done,” she said. “I think we deserve a day off, don’t you? Why don’t we take that trip to the river tomorrow. Are you feeling up to it, Molly?”

I managed to suppress any emotion when I replied, “What a good idea. Yes, I think I might be up to it.”





Eleven

We set off for Irvington after breakfast, the picnic basket at our feet and Bridie sitting up beside the driver. It was pleasantly cool as we passed along leafy lanes, with no sound except the gentle clip-clop of the pony’s hooves and the cooing of pigeons in the trees above. After an area of thick woods we came to a point where the road started to descend to the river below us, sparkling in the morning sunlight. A paddle steamer was making its way upstream and the sound of music floated across the water from its deck. Bridie gave a squeal of delight.

“Sit still, or you’ll fall off,” Mrs. Sullivan warned, yanking on the back of her pinafore. The pony descended the hill slowly until we were riding down the main street with its clapboard stores and old brick taverns. It had as old a feel to it as any town at home in Ireland, like stepping back in time.

“Should I inquire where the Mainwarings live?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager.

“We’ll leave that for later,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “One does not pay a social call before noon.”

I glanced across at her and thought how interesting it was that she started life as the child of Irish immigrants who fled from the potato famine, yet now behaved as if she’d been born with that proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. Perhaps that was why she wasn’t too keen on me—I reminded her of her own past, which she had chosen to forget. Jonah assisted us down from the cart, my back now stiff from sitting on the hard bench, and we went for a walk along the water front, with Bridie commenting excitedly about the river traffic that passed us. “Do you think the ship my father and brother went on was bigger than this one?” she asked as a cargo steamship came down carrying bricks and stone.

“Much bigger,” I said. Her father and brother had gone off to Panama to help build the new canal and she hadn’t heard from them for months. I knew Seamus was not much of a writer, being barely schooled, but I wondered if they were all right. A few stories about the conditions at the canal had trickled through to New York and they didn’t sound good. Strangely enough, her father’s decision to go to Panama had been Bridie’s good fortune. Instead of living precariously in slums wherever Seamus could pick up laboring work, Bridie was now on her way to becoming a young lady and would no doubt end up as snobbish as Mrs. Sullivan if my mother-in-law had anything to do with it.

When the sun became too hot we retreated to a riverside park and spread out our picnic cloth in the shade of a big elm tree. Then followed my absolutely favorite kind of meal: ham sandwiches, cold meat pie and pickles, tomatoes and radishes fresh from the garden, peaches and plums and currant bread, washed down with homemade ginger beer. We lay replete in the shade watching the boats on the river glide past us.