Previously: My Grandmother, Part I—Belfast https://www.constancegemmett.com/grandmother-part-belfast/
My Grandmother, Part II—Belfast Still https://www.constancegemmett.com/grandmother-part-ii-belfast-still/
My grandmother sat on one end of a couch in her youngest son’s family room. Little kids ran through and around the room, adults stood in the other rooms, drinking, eating, and chatting. It was the collation after my grandfather’s funeral. Pale in her black dress, tears ran down her cheeks. I’d like to write that I comforted her, but I can’t be sure. The sixteen-year-old me was more apt to leave the room.
Miles and Years Away
My grandfather’s life ended, as my grandmother’s would, in Maryland—miles and years from Belfast. Miles from Brooklyn, where they lived for more than 30 years. My grandfather died suddenly at home one evening after dinner. My grandmother told us that they’d had a nice evening, reminiscing about Belfast, telling the old stories, laughing together—not sniping and barking as they often did.
A few months later, my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia. She died within eighteen months of him. They are buried in Maryland, where they’d moved to be close to their youngest son and his wife, and children. My parents and I lived just south of Nyack on the Hudson River, little more than an hour from my grandparents’s longtime Bay Ridge, Brooklyn home. I was a teenager and on another planet, one where there was less time for my grandparents—still, when they moved to Maryland, I felt abandoned—I was bereft.
The 1920s
My grandmother enjoyed living in her new house at 34 St. Ives Gardens, Belfast, given to the newlyweds by her mother-in-law, after the eldest son John—the former occupant—died. Her married sister Lizzie lived close by on Great Northern Avenue. Her other sisters, Peg and Jinny, probably still lived on Moore’s Place, also not far—but then Belfast is an easily walked city. In 1926 my grandmother gave birth to their first child in that house, and although the birth was breech and the doctor drunk, all was well for mother and child—my mother, named Elizabeth after her maternal grandmother.
From their convenient address, my grandmother had all the shops in the world a few blocks away in one direction (and the money to shop), and the Botanic Gardens and the Lagan River in the other. Her husband’s business—a turf accountancy— was still successful, even though he’d lost his brother and business partner John to consumption in 1922.
Their lives progressed peacefully—Eddie and Aggie had good fortune. The Troubles were quelled, although sectarian violence flared. It flared in a personal direction in early 1930. My grandfather’s business was burned to the ground. Whether it was a business rival or an act of sectarian violence, my grandfather was finished with Belfast. He nearly had been murdered during The Troubles by members of the vicious quasi-police force known as The Black and Tans. Backed up against a wall, rifles in his face, he’d been saved by a passing Protestant minister, who’d lied for him and told the drunken thugs that Eddie was his own parishioner—not a Catholic. After that, he hadn’t much stomach left for any of the violence. After losing the business, he’d had none. He wanted to emigrate.
1930
Talked out of going to Australia by some pal of his at the ticket office, he chose New York (or possibly, the pal did) as their destination. Why he didn’t consider the Free State of Ireland, England or Scotland is unknown. He wanted to go far away—was he threatened by someone, some group? The SS Caledonia manifest lists the family as passengers on the April 19, 1930 sailing. The ship called at Londonderry before making for the open water of the North Atlantic and the long crossing to New York. Eddie was 37, Agnes 30, and Elizabeth—wee Betty—3. He’d purchased their tickets on the 3rd of February. Peg, still working at the Harland and Wolff shipyard (builder of RMS Titanic) as the manageress of the executive dining room, and her older sister Jinny, moved into 34 St. Ives Gardens.
Agnes must have cried as the tender cut across the lough to the anchored Caledonia. The sight of the beautiful hills burned into her memory as the city disappeared into the mist. She took her last gulps of Belfast air, or so she thought.
Not Quite The End Of Belfast
Settled in an apartment in the Bay Ridge, Eddie managed to get a job with Consolidated Edison in Manhattan—a feat for a foreigner during the Great Depression. My grandmother became pregnant again and planned a return to Belfast for the birth. Whether she hatched this plan on her own or they both agreed at the start is unknown. Eddie still had the money for the passage, and after a difficult birth the first time, she may have been nervous about American hospitals. It is true that she had nobody in America to help her with an infant and a toddler, and three sisters in Belfast. However it was argued, negotiated or agreed, it happened. Less than a year after their arrival in New York, my grandmother and my mother sailed back to Belfast. Eddie stayed in Brooklyn and worked.
Back to 34 St. Ives Gardens
My grandmother and my 4 year old mother moved back into their house, one occupied by her sisters. Close to her due date, my grandmother checked into a maternity nursing home for the birth of her son, Denis, in June 1931.
The trio returned to New York Harbor on May 29, 1932, nearly a year after his birth. What went on during those 11 months? My mother went to the St. Bride’s Primary and Nursery School a few blocks from the house. The school was attached to the church—St. Brigid’s—where both she and Denis were baptized (versions of both exist today). Was Agnes so fearful of an ocean voyage with a baby under 11 months? Or was she writing Eddie and begging him to come home instead? Playing a waiting game? It didn’t work. She brought his children back to him and stayed with him for the rest of her life, in a country she didn’t like. Never to see her sisters or her brothers again.
Settled In Brooklyn
Bay Ridge is a little like Belfast: some high ridges, lots of shops and parks (one the length of the place), and right on the water, The Narrows, where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic. A heavily Norwegian, Italian, and Irish neighborhood, my grandmother never befriended the Irish people, since they tended to be from the south, and so foreign to her. Agnes loved the Scots she met—the family socialized with them, and celebrated Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) with them.
Whatever her feelings about being in America, her life took up its own rhythm. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked in order to support their three children (the youngest, Michael, was born in Brooklyn in 1933). Eddie worked at night, but he and she also worked as their apartment building’s superintendents—he shovelled coal into the giant furnace and made repairs, while she collected the rents and dealt with the complaints of the tenants. Agnes also took a job as housekeeper to a couple who had their own very popular radio show, broadcast from their Manhattan apartment, Tex and Jinx.
Meanwhile, my grandmother was an expert housekeeper for her own family. She cleaned—scoured—cooked, baked, knit and sewed for them. Decorating and regularly redecorating their apartment, she had good taste imitating a formal, British style: striped wallpaper, black and white tiles in the foyer, large framed mirrors, and heavy, old-fashioned furniture.
As the children grew older, Agnes also settled into keeping secret the fact that she’d converted to Catholicism from her native Protestantism in order to marry their father (he kept the secret too). A secret she kept to the end of her life. The boys served as altar boys, all three attended Catholic schools, and all three attended Mass on Sunday. Agnes never set foot in a church for an ordinary Mass. The occasion had to be special—a wedding, funeral or christening—such as the day the two of us went on a shopping trip in Manhattan and she had me secretly christened in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. I kept that secret from my atheist parents until her funeral.
Butter and Tea
My grandmother complained about American butter, called it “tacky,” and thought the quality of the tea here poor. I never understood until I went to Ireland and enjoyed their butter. To the end of her life, her days were punctuated with the firing up of the tea kettle (my job when I visited). Toward the end of her life, the knitting and redecorating fell by the wayside. Agnes even found that she liked foods like pizza.
Aside from this litany of facts, what was this woman like? Complicated. Agnes had a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed a wheezing, breathless laugh. Bad-tempered and shy, she’d become very heavy in early adulthood and remained so, which increased her self-consciousness. She ate little in front of anyone and suffered the torture of heavy corsets. Her hair was beautiful, as was her skin, even in her late 60s. She liked the sappy TV shows of the day, like The Lawrence Welk Show, and The Andy Griffith Show. My grandmother could be very mean, but also kind, and always generous.
Agnes was a wonderful grandmother to me. Very loving and kind, very generous—she purchased my clothes at Best and Co. Little leather slippers, woolen bathrobes, tartan skirt suits for school—I was a regular Little Lady Fauntleroy. After shopping, we’d stop for lunch at Schrafft’s. Sliced chicken sandwiches, a pot of tea for her and a malted for me—served by waitresses right off the boat from Ireland. Those women had lovely, lilting accents. Not iron hard Belfast accents like she and Eddie had.
As a child, I circled around her as though she were the sun. I loved all the Irish stories, the laughs at the expense of the looney tenants, counting the rents at the kitchen table, watching her cook and bake. Basking in her exorbitant praise. “Mother of God!” she’d say, when I said something with the least bit of intelligence behind it.
It’s difficult to believe that I haven’t seen her in 50 years. I last spoke to her on the phone. Calling from her hospital bed, she told me that she was afraid. “Don’t be afraid, Grandma,” I said. I didn’t say it, so I hope that she knew how much I loved her.