Yankee Doodle Read online

  LORETTA WELCH

  Yankee Doodle

  After studying in Trinity College, Dublin, and working in publishing in San Francisco, Loretta Welch landed in Boston’s North End, steps away from the shore on which her immigrant ancestors first set foot, five generations ago. Yankee Doodle is Welch’s first book.

  First published by GemmaMedia in 2011.

  GemmaMedia

  230 Commercial Street

  Boston, MA 02109 USA

  www.gemmamedia.com

  © 2011 by Loretta Welch

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles of reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

  978-1-934848-53-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cover by Night & Day Design

  Inspired by the Irish series of books designed for adult literacy, Gemma Open Door Foundation provides fresh stories, new ideas and resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

  For Kathleen

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Memory

  ONE

  Stella Comes To Town

  TWO

  Red Line, Or Stella Goes To Work

  THREE

  Neighbors

  FOUR

  Mrs F

  FIVE

  Red Line, Or Stella Hears Music

  SIX

  Lost

  SEVEN

  Roots

  EIGHT

  Found

  INTRODUCTION

  Memory

  “Oh my god, oh my god, ohmygod!”

  “He is, like, the weirdest teacher, and he actually, like, made a joke!”

  “English is, like, so dull and then he goes, he goes, he goes . . .”

  “ ‘Class bewitched!’ ” squawked the shortest.

  “ . . . and I looked at Hai and we were like, ohmygod!”

  The brace of teenagers burst on to the car, a second or two before the doors closed. Three flew into seats, and the others grabbed at holding rails, looking like they were about to do chin-ups over their lucky friends, or maybe drool on their heads. iPod cords and other wires dangled like ornaments on jeans, backpacks, and out of a couple of ears.

  “I thought maybe he came from, I don’t know, like Idaho or Duluth or something. So lame.” These kids talked fast, really fast.

  “Those shoes, man. I’m, like, my GRANDdad wouldn’t wear them.”

  “Yeah, but you can hear him coming, Thuy. Handy on Fridays!”

  “More like Mars. Landed in the corn and became, like, a zombie.”

  “You see Lien’s neck? She says the Revere Vampire’s still ‘at large.’ ” Fingers making quotation marks.

  “Bet it was Bao. They hit the mall during world history. Some vampire. So gross.”

  “And then, did you die? At lunch, Minh was telling Sean, and he, like, laughed so hard milk came out of his nose.”

  “So weird, I never drink milk at my house.”

  “Me neither . . . get off! . . . but I always drink it at school.”

  “So we were, like, ‘whatever.’ Central Square is always, like, SO FULL. Oh wait, there’s room up there. Run!”

  And the whole group squealed and lurched to the end of the car and kept up the review of their school day. The skinny boy with a pink streak on the very peak of his hair landed almost on top of Stella. She had been watching and dodged the backpack . . . just.

  “So, Mr Kavanagh is like, sort of, funny!”

  “Oh, come ON! He’s human. Well, sort of. I’m sure he, like, just made a mistake.”

  Coming home on the Red Line, as the train came out of the ground and up over the Charles River, Stella leaned her head back against the ad for night school and closed her eyes. She felt the late afternoon sun flicker over her face as the car passed the towers on what locals call the Salt and Pepper Bridge. She was tired, and it felt good to rest and let the light play on her eyelids. Rocking back and forth with the motion, she got a little closer to sleep and remembered another time, another overheard conversation, another trip on this train. She smiled.

  ONE

  Stella Comes To Town

  From Ashmont to Mattapan, the subway changes to an old trolley car, the kind they built when the oldest underground railway in the country was brand new. Like a brave little toy train, a single car picks up riders who get out of the “real” train, and then it takes them to their final stop. Passing the back yards and shuttered windows of houses lining the track, people look out on triple-deckers and an old mill over the river that used to bring power to a brick factory along its banks. Left empty long ago, the plant is hung with signs offering fixed-up lofts for sale to young people looking for new homes. The trolley car passes by an antique cemetery, so old nobody can be buried there anymore. The glass in the train windows is aged, and a good bit dirty, and it casts the view outside in sepia, that yellow tint that makes movies look old.

  Stella took her place each day between the mothers with strollers and the tall kids with big sneakers, always untied. Many kinds of people joined her, leaving their houses to get to someplace else: maybe work, maybe school, maybe family in another part of town. Wherever they were going, the riders on this little train woke and opened their eyes as the train took them closer to their destination and farther from home.

  Home. That was a funny word for Stella. She wasn’t born here, but out in the vast, flat Midwest. Her dad moved the family around quite a bit, looking for work. Labor, mostly. They called hard work labor, and her dad was good at hard work. Work for hard men. But he had the habit of quick anger followed by fast punches, and that often meant jobs didn’t last too long. Still, although she had lived in many cities and towns, there was something the same about places in the middle of the country. Just as there was something very different about this city in the east. Boston. Sometimes she pinched the inside of her arm to remind herself she really did live here.

  Comparing the two places, she often thought about her childhood. She remembered a lot of things, some good and some bad, but all were parts of her. That she knew for certain, just as she felt this new home would make a mark on her, too.

  If she had one favorite memory, it was that big old tree with the hammock hung from its lowest branches on one side and the shed roof on the other. It was Cindy’s house, and they were fourteen. Cindy’s mom was pretty casual about what they did at nighttime, so they slept out in the hammock, swinging in the dark shadow of the sweet tree. They could hear the clatter of the nightly trains coming a good mile away before they would roar past Cindy’s lawn, not two blocks from the siding. For hours, they talked about moving away as the summer stars spun in the sky above them. Stella supposed she was happiest there, comparing notes on the kids that were rotten to them in school, smelling the warm breeze as it washed over the cornfield and planning grown-up lives in the Big City—Minneapolis or maybe Chicago.

  Then her dad lit out for yet another new job, in Kansas, promising to send for Stella and her mom when he was settled. “Might as well go and stay with your cousin, Gerty. Save a little for the trip.” She had said a fast goodbye to Cindy after algebra and made her promise to remember. That was the last she saw of her father, and it took her a year to miss him.

  “I’m pretty new here,” she would say to people who asked her questions or wanted directions. “Just getting my sea legs.” She thought she was funny and sounded like a sailor. The ocean startled her. She had seen huge fields of wheat and corn in Illinois and Iowa, and sometimes they seemed endless.
On the hottest summer days, with the sun burning in the middle of the sky, the open spaces were almost too much to bear.

  But nothing prepared her for how wide and how deep the sea was, spread in front of her. She thought of those old-fashioned people who came from places far away over that ocean to the New World. She expected some were happy, excited by the trip, and some were just plain scared. On rainy days, she thought of the ships that crashed against the rocks before they made it to America and wondered whether anybody knew the names of their passengers. When she could, she took the T to Wonderland to walk the beach at Revere. She loved spotting the sea between buildings on the Red Line between UMass Boston and Andrew Station.

  She looked at boats in the harbor and imagined how far each one could go. The small boats could get you to Cape Cod, where tourists ate lobster and wore bright green pants with whales on them. Bigger ships, the ones with puffy sails, could get you as far as Maine, maybe even Canada, as long as you stayed close to the shore. It was the big ships that docked in South Boston that could go far. Braver than all of them, they could turn away from the land and head right out onto the ocean, straight across that deep blue sea with never a look back at the shore for days on end. Those were ships, Stella nodded. Still, a little boat with two small sails could take a girl to coves and sandy beaches, and that would be just fine with her. There are lots of ways to get people where they are going, she reckoned, and many places to end up, too.

  When she first came east, she thought about “home” a lot.

  TWO

  Red Line, Or Stella Goes To Work

  The Red Line travels up from the south of the city along the shore and into downtown Boston. It stops at South Station where passengers mix with commuters coming in from the suburbs, heading to their jobs in the big banks and high-storied buildings. Park Street, the historical and tourist center of the town, is the next stop. Here you find government offices and more banks. Every quarter hour, the old church bells sing out over the park below, Stella’s favorite spot. Then the train heads to Mass General, up out of the ground and above the river, crossing into Cambridge over the Longfellow Bridge. Riders spot the sailing clubs beneath the science museum, as students sail up the Charles and along the lip of the Back Bay. Beacon Hill snuggles close to the sky in back.

  The Red Line goes for miles and miles, over land and through tunnels, under the brains of MIT, the cultural mix of Central Square, and the tony blocks of Harvard. Then it goes down-market to upcoming Porter Square and the hope of urban middle classes. Finally it heads out past Somerville and its pasty statues to Alewife, known for commuter parking, the backside of Fresh Pond and the high-rise apartments that remind Stella of grain silos. And though she took the Red Line just about every day to one cleaning job or another, on trains as full as cattle cars, she swore she never saw the same person twice. Not once.

  As Stella made her progress each day, she grew brave enough to look into the faces of her fellow riders. Once, she found herself looking into a sweet face that reminded her of her mother when she was older. Some of the ladies she cleaned for reminded her of her mother, too. There was a smell in their apartments, a little bit of hairspray, something a little sweet and something a little sour, like laundry.

  She still missed her mom, and it made her sad to see her slippers, tucked into her suitcase all those years ago when she left Kansas. There was something in the way her mother tipped her head and a comical pitch to her laugh, although she couldn’t really remember the sound any more. Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember much. But the lady in the birdbath hat across from her drew her in. Stella started to smile and then remembered to avoid eye contact. Eye contact was supposed to be rude. Or dangerous. Or both. In any case, she turned away and stared out of the window that threw her own reflection back at her in the tunnel. She saw her mom’s face in her own, and watched the mirrored lady fall asleep.

  Stella discovered so very many mysteries on the Red Line.

  She wondered if anybody else thought that putting kids on those leashes mothers use makes them look like pets. A baby-faced boy with a suitcase got off for the Silver Line, and she couldn’t understand how someone that young could possibly be wearing a wedding ring. More and more people looked younger to her these days, as though grown-up jobs and adult lives were being handed to children fresh out of school, and she was still stuck in homeroom.

  And what about all those wires and earpieces people wear? How many people could be listening to the same thing? The man who turned his cap from front to back and back to front twice going under South Station was a puzzle. Was it a mile marker? For good luck?

  Hats, now there was a curiosity. Peaked, floppy, feathered, veiled. Beanies, berets, bowlers and fedoras of all colors, on men and on women. She didn’t see as many cowboy hats as she grew up with, but they were fairly well represented, all right. Of course, every variety of baseball cap under the sun was worn in every which way. Stella figured there was some code, but she couldn’t make it out. Young, fierce, red-faced men curled their visors until they were almost tubes sticking out from the middles of their heads. An especially round Yankees fan looked so squeezed into his hat that rhinos came to mind.

  She got used to seeing caps, front to back or back to front, on top of snow hats, which looked goofy to her, but it got funnier. Out past Porter Square, in the middle of winter, the man down the car sported a knit hat, a scarf, a baseball cap (she recognized the Cubs; where did he get that?) earmuffs and a floppy thing like you’d wear in the jungle. In that order. She couldn’t make out his face, but figured he was from someplace very far away and a whole lot warmer.

  A baby’s eyes peered out of her chubby face, swallowed in a pink hat, at a young man with his head hidden in a parka hood. At the end of the day, the subway was peppered with caps and scarves and single gloves left behind. A tiny blue mitten lay on the seat, long separated from its little boy. Did they miss them when they were home? Is there a Lost and Found for abandoned pork pies?

  Mysteries. Most of all, she wanted to know where they all came from, these fellow riders, these commuters, these travelers in a tube underground. She knew there were Haitians and Russians and people from Vermont. There were people on vacation, going to a game, going to walk the Freedom Trail, working in a shop, selling from a case, watching for a theft. All kinds of people riding the subway looked perfectly at home, well, at least like they belonged there. And all the time she felt like there was a great big sign over her head that said “misfit.”

  Whole communities sprang up in the subway and then drifted apart. The crush of people between three in the afternoon and six in the evening, especially in the downtown switching stations, had an energy all their own. They were eager to get home, taking off coats, putting on earphones, huddling next to the yellow lines that kept you at a safe distance from the train. Did they see me?

  When Stella rode the subway, she thought about these mysteries a lot.

  THREE

  Neighbors

  “You have to stop working so much, Stella, and don’t be riding that train so late!”

  Mrs Washington was always giving out about Stella’s hours, but mostly she just liked to talk to the girl. It took her three months to start when Stella moved into the building. Mrs W was leery of a girl from out of town with little luggage and no furniture. But one day, Stella let the cable guy in for her, and Mrs W warmed up. She was due to go to the foot doctor, and “hell or high water” she was going to make that appointment. Mrs W dearly loved her sports channels, though, so her conflict was profound when the cable company gave her Tuesday, 8 am to 1 pm; be there or forget about the playoffs. Stella watched over the installation and signed her own name to the forms. Mrs W definitely warmed up.

  They never, ever stepped into each other’s apartments, except that rare day when the television made them friends. Mrs W chatted to Stella on the stoop or in the hall on subjects ranging from the weather (“passable” or “dreadful”) to the Red Sox (“mostly break your
heart”) to landlords (“all money and no soul”) to today’s news (“good thing Mr W is not here to see this”) to her grandson (“love that boy, but he’s a fool”).

  Mrs W got the short version of Stella’s arrival in Boston, Stella seeing no reason for darker details. What passed for her story: parents gone (“enough said”) and taken in by an aunt (“bless her heart”). One topic that always brought out the protector in Mrs W was Stella’s plan for night courses when she could raise enough money to pay the fees. Mrs W couldn’t imagine it would take that long to get a degree and find a job as a medical assistant or an x-ray technician or a whatever and “bug on out of here,” as Stella teased. Secretly, Mrs W hoped it would take longer.

  “Statistics? You study statistics? What in the world would statistics have to do with a busted arm? I swear they make things up to charge people for learning. I was a girl, numbers were done in your head. None of this calculator business. In your head. My grandson couldn’t recite the multiplication tables on a bet.

  “But you have a head for it, Stella. I can tell just looking at you.”

  And Stella? She just didn’t talk much. Her mother said the cat had got her tongue. But then her father had said, just wait ‘til she starts, they won’t be able to put a lid on her.

  When she first moved east, Stella went months without talking to anyone outside of her aunt, and that was brief. Stella had heard so many stories about how cold people were in places like Boston and New York that she was terrified to open her mouth, lest someone, who knew, yelled at her or threw something at her head. And it was a little true, Mrs W had to admit; people could be downright rude when they were in a hurry to get here or there. “But people are good, if you give them a chance, and it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the postman once in a while, for goodness sake.” Stella now made it a point to comment on the weather to every clerk in the corner store.