Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan Read Free Book Online

because there was no John and there was no escape—not even to my parents’ house. I didn’t want to go to prison after all. I reached for my father’s hand and he took it with no verbal acknowledgment, but a firm squeeze. I wanted to cry.
    He walked me up the steps toward the door. It was made of very dark wood and had scenes from the crucifixion carved into it: violent, bloody images. “It’s always good to remind us of Christ’s suffering,” my father said, although I knew he meant to comfort me. As we reached the top of the steps the enormous door opened and out stepped the tallest nun, the tallest person , I had ever seen. She was a full foot taller than my father and he looked up at her and said, “Reverend Mother, what a pleasure to see you again.”
    “Aloysius Flaherty? God bless you! How is the Monsignor?”
    “Very well, Reverend Mother. This is my daughter, Eileen.”
    I wished he hadn’t drawn her attention to me right at that moment, because I was struggling not to laugh. I could feel the stream of giggles bubbling up inside my chest. She was so tall that she made my father look small and silly. She wasn’t a bit frightening, as one might imagine a very tall nun would be. Her head, with the wimple and everything, seemed as big as my own body, and yet her face was sweet. She looked as amused as I was by her gargantuan size. “Eileen, I am so pleased to meet you.” She smiled (her teeth were the size of duck eggs!) and I felt she meant it. Then she leaned down and looked me in the eyes. “You’re a good holy child, Ellie, I can see that.” Now I was sure I would laugh, but then to my surprise I found that I didn’t want to anymore. She said to my father, “We’ll take very good care of her, Aloysius.”
    “Thank you, Reverend Mother.” My father gave my hand to the nun, and as my fingers disappeared entirely into her enormous fist, he patted me briefly on the head and went back to the car without turning round.
    Standing on the top steps, the Reverend Mother called the crowd to order. The parents said their last good-byes in a matter of seconds, and the girls were ordered into a silent line. All this time she was holding my hand, and I was mortified, having to stand there beside her with every girl in the school looking up at me. I think she had forgotten I was there. As the last of the girls filed into the building, she absentmindedly let go of me and prodded me gently into the line.
    The girl in front of me had a bold face and a shock of unruly, curly red hair on which her bonnet was obviously straining to keep itself from falling off. Just before we got to the refectory, she turned round to me and said in a thick Mayo accent, “I’m sticking with you—you’re in with the Mother.”
    Silence was a feature of life in the convent school, but it wasn’t the cloying, dead silence of my home. It was the silence of reverence and respect, and it sat like a light veil over the joyful, excited babbling of busy girlhood.
    My first friend was Sheila, the redhead from Mayo. That first day, she stayed with me all the way into the main hall, where we were instructed to gather for assembly. In the time it took us to shuffle in line through the gray, unfamiliar corridors, and despite the calls for “Silence in the corridor! Silence in line!,” she told me her name, that she was a “townie,” that her father was a “prominent tailor” in Westport, that she had three older brothers and that her mother suffered from “nerves,” which is why she had been sent away to school.
    “I don’t mind,” she whispered, as we sat down together in the hall. “It gets me out from under my brothers’ stinking feet in the bed. You’re a townie too—I can tell by the cut of you. We’ll stick together, you and me, against all the dirty aul culchies.”
    “Poor people live in towns because they’ve no land,” interrupted another girl, leaning across me to admonish my new friend. “All hunched together