Read Online Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online

servants’ floor was dark, lighted only with tiny windows, and a maid’s room was barely big enough to hold a single bed and perhaps a dresser, with splintery flooring and, sometimes, a single electric lamp. Plumbing and heating seldom ascended to this level of the house, and each room was provided with a chamber pot. But these girls had other advantages that they were quick to see. They were able to spend their daily lives among gentle, cultivated people, and they were able to observe at first hand the ways not only of the wealthy but of the polite and well-bred. They learned the touch of fine silver and porcelain and furniture, the feel of good linen and real lace. They also learned, from their mistresses, good manners. These were advantages that these girls would do their best to see that their children would have in the next generation.
    The Irish, however, never had the security of feeling that they had a friend in court, at the top level of American society. In Boston, they felt particularly abandoned and left to their own poor resources, with only their faith and their Church for comfort. They could draw on no reservoir of automatic sympathy as, paradoxically, could blacks and Jews. This situation, once established, would continue.
    Woodrow Wilson, who was President while Ireland was fighting for its independence from England, had no sympathy whatever for the Irish cause. On the contrary, Wilson was an “Orangeman,” a Scotch Presbyterian, and was both anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Wilson, on the other hand, had great admiration for the Jews, and it was he who appointed the first Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Some thirty years later in the mid-1940’s, when Israel was in similar throes of the fight for independence, both President and Mrs. Roosevelt were hugely sympathetic to Israel’sposition, as was Harry Truman, who pushed the motion of independence through the United Nations. But from the beginning of their history in America, the Irish were required to make their way upward aided only by each other.
    Why was this? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the thorny Irish “personality,” the Irish orneriness and stubbornness, and unwillingness to bow, scrape, and court favor. The Irish, it might be said, were not “rewarding” victims as were, by contrast, the Negro and the Jew. The masses of Irish immigrants from the famine were clearly poor, but it was difficult to think of them as “deserving” or worthy beneficiaries of care and charity. The Irish might suffer, but they refused to show it, and even the Irish beggars begged aggressively, not obsequiously. It is difficult, perhaps, to want to rescue a porcupine from a trap, or even from an oven, nor is it easy to pity a caged rattlesnake.
    All these various and subtle social forces conspired to cause new-rich Irishmen like Judge Morgan O’Brien to congregate at a summer resort in Southampton. Judge O’Brien was quickly followed by his friend Thomas E. Murray, who had been summering in various places such as Far Rockaway and Allenhurst, New Jersey, and who bought himself a large piece of property on the ocean front and started to build an appropriately large house which was to have, among other amenities, two swimming pools—a larger one for the adults and a smaller one for the children. Since the pools were to be filled with salt water from the Atlantic, it was necessary to figure out some way to keep sand from the ocean floor from flowing into the pool with the water, and so, with his stylus on a copperplate, Grandpa Murray invented a filtering system that would do just that. Grandpa Murray also installed a huge telescope on his lawn through which to survey his neighbors, and another chapel.
    Not long after Grandpa Murray’s Southampton place was finished, his son-in-law, James Francis McDonnell, who had begunsummering with his family in Westchester County, in Rye, New York, waded out