Preview of The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

Preview of The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

Chapter One

March 1905

The sun is dissolving like an enchantment as I stand at the ferry railing and look out on the San Francisco horizon. The day will end jubilant. Jubilant. This is the word I chose this morning from Da’s book of words, and I’ve been keen to use it since breakfast. My father wrote that jubilant means you feel as though you finally possess everything you’ve always wanted, you are that happy. I like the way the word rolls off my tongue when I say it. I want to believe the day will end on a jubilant note. I am counting on it.

Most of the ferry’s passengers aren’t on the deck watching the golden sun fold itself into the western rim of the sky. They are seated inside, out of the bracing wind, but I don’t want to be tucked indoors after six long days on a train.

I close my eyes as the heady fragrance of the ocean transports me as if in a dream to Gram’s cottage in Donaghadee above the slate Irish Sea. I can see the house in my mind’s eye just as it was when I was young, back when life was simple. I can see Gram making me a cup of sugar tea in her kitchen while a harbor breeze tickles the lace curtains she made from her wedding dress. On the kitchen table are shortbread cookies arranged on the daisy plate, and still warm from the oven. She is humming an old Gaelic tune. . . .

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.

Would the woman have tried to talk me out of what I am about to do? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Half of my flatmates thought I was crazy, and the other half were jealous I’d found the adver­tisement and they hadn’t. Mam does not know what I will do when I get off this boat, and I’m not writing her of it until it’s already done.

Even after I finally tell her how miserable the tenement was, Mam will still want to know what possessed me to marry a man I don’t know. This was not the plan when I left Ireland to come to America. This was not what she’d wanted for me when she helped me pack my one travel bag. I had pondered what answer to give to that question, too. I’d already started the letter I would send to my mother.

I want a home, I’d written in broad terms, so that if another reads the letter—perhaps one of my two older brothers still in Ireland—they, too, will understand. I want what I had when I was a little girl. A warm house and clean clothes and food in the pantry. I want to sing lullabies and mend torn rompers and make jam and cakes and hot cocoa, like you did. And I want to have someone to share it all with. I just want what you had, back when you had it.

But what above love? my mother will want to know, because even though Da has been gone for too many years, Mam still loves him. She still feels like she is married to him.

What about love?

What about it?

The ferry is closing in on its slip, easing its way to the dock and the men who stand ready to tie up its moorings. Beyond the ferry building, the spread of the city beyond looks like an aspiring snip of Manhattan, with towers and multistoried structures lifting themselves skyward. The sun is beginning to dip below the build­ings, casting a rosy glow that tinges everything with haloed light. The passengers in the main cabin behind me are already making their way downstairs to queue up to disembark.

I slip Martin’s photograph back inside my handbag and straighten my hat. It was Mam’s years ago, and made from the prettiest blue velvet and satin trim, both of which still hint at their original luster. Even slightly out of style, the hat pairs nicely with my dove gray shirtwaist, the only good dress I own, and I’d written Martin that I’d be wearing it. I reach for the travel bag resting at my feet.

Every step toward the ramp to the pier is taking me farther away from who I am and closer to who I am going to be. As I step off the ship and join the throngs moving toward the ferry build­ing, I look to see if Martin Hocking is outside it studying the crowd of passengers, searching for me. Is his little girl with him? Is Kat wearing a pretty little frock to meet her new mother?

I don’t see him in the sea of faces awaiting the arrival of pas­sengers. Maybe he is waiting inside.

Dusk is descending like a veil and the electric lamps surround­ing the ferry building are hissing as they come to life. The crowd starts to thin.

And then I see him. Martin Hocking is standing just outside the entrance, in a pool of amber light cast by a lamp above him. His gaze is beyond me and to the right of where I stand. Even from many feet away I can see he is as stunning as his portrait. Not merely handsome, but beautiful. He wears a coffee brown suit and polished black shoes. His hair, as golden brown as toast, is perfectly in place. He’s tall, nearly six feet, I’d wager. He is not overly muscular and yet he has strength in his arms and torso, I can see that. He looks like royalty, like a Greek god.

And those eyes.

My seatmate was right. Martin Hocking’s eyes look like they could peer into my very soul.

Time seems to stand still as niggling questions that I’ve ig­nored for days again needle me. Why does such a man want a mail-order bride the likes of me? This man could probably court any woman in San Francisco looking the way he does. He wrote to me that his desire to secure a new wife was for practical purposes—he needs a mother for his daughter—but also because he needs to be viewed as a fortunate businessman rather than a pathetic widower and father. Appearances matter when you work for a life insurance company and interact with their wealthy cli­ents. And yet why send away to the East for someone, a stranger no less, and why choose a bride as uncultured as myself? And why doesn’t he want the intrigue of romance? I know why I’m not keen to wait for it, but why isn’t he?

Unless he is so grieved over the loss of his first wife that he can’t imagine ever loving another. Unless he wants companion­ship and hot meals and a clean house but not romance. Not love.

Perhaps Martin Hocking wants—more than anything else—a Cinderella of a girl precisely like me, with no family, no back­ground, and the simplest of desires. After all, what do I bring to this arrangement except my willingness? My emptiness? My gorta mór—my great hunger for everything Martin already has and which for me has been so elusive— a secure home, a child to love, food and clothes and a bed that doesn’t smell of poverty.

If this is true, I am practically perfect for him.

And then he turns his head in my direction. Our eyes meet. Martin’s closed mouth curves into a relieved, welcoming smile, and it’s almost as if he’d indeed read my thoughts.

Yes, that half smile seems to say. You are exactly what I wanted.

I step forward.

Preview of The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner