The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

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       8

      Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall’s domed cupola, its weathervane – a copper grasshopper – spun from side to side, busily welcoming her back.

      Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grass-hopped from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him wear. ‘Ellen! Ellen Rua!’ he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height, her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan. In its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.

      ‘Jacob, I’m going to reek of pork and spices just like you,’ she laughed. ‘Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your beliefs to sell certain things,’ she added, unable to resist poking fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.

      ‘Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels, I can tell …?’ He paused. ‘And beyond that a certain sorrow …’ He had never changed, could tell everything and then never hesitated in its saying. ‘But underneath,’ he went on, ‘your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the first minute you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It’s good to have you back – back home in Boston,’ he beamed. And he clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.

      It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.

      He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his door against the world and bade her sit. ‘I want to hear every word, Ellen,’ he emphasized. ‘I’ve missed the music of your voice – the Boston drawl has little music to it – as flat and as cold as the Quincy marble that built the place!’

      Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn’t miss any chance to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she’d ask him about that and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins, Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street. It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill, the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston’s rising middle class. Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything in between, pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, ‘Peabody’s’ did a thriving business.

      When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle to ‘build railroads to build America’, they would invest in some business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia – being all that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in Grosse Ile, with the idea that she could import French wine from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of the Catholic Church in Québec’s province, Father McGauran had found them Frontignac, Père et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers of vin supérieur de France.

      Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean-on-the-palate whites, from the châteaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of Champagne. Darker – liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their quality guaranteed with the red waxen seal of the French cockerel. At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants of Boston – the Pendletons and Endecotts. Politely but firmly they had turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only ‘jumped-up Irish and selling French wines!’

      Finally, she had happened upon Peabody’s place. Although at the time uncertain of his motives – the way he had taken her hand, lingered over it – Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one else would.

      She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an ‘at cost’ agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further, she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked and Jacob had opened a second such store.

      As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody again held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part, but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont, but of which she took little notice. Now, he comforted her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.

      It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston – a city as zealous in attitude to Jews as it was towards ‘papist Celts’ – but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.

      Peabody waited before speaking. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit. Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was angry now at the ‘Old Country’ and all it had inflicted on her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.

      At last he spoke. ‘Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,’ he said tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. ‘A new life in the New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It works, Ellen, believe me, it works.’

      ‘Thank you, Jacob … for listening … for everything.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek. How wise he was. What he had told her was like something her father – the Máistir – would have said. ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less.’ It was good advice.

      She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her insides, eat up her capacity for life.

      They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob and things had gone well between him and Lavelle – ‘her young helper’, as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn’t correct him this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would be back within the week to talk about ‘clarets for Christmas and champagnes for the New Year’.

      As she walked back from Peabody’s, Boston, with its busy streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came there with СКАЧАТЬ