The job in the Dáil tearoom was a lot more difficult than my mother had anticipated and, perhaps appropriately considering the setting, each girl had to learn to be diplomatic in her dealings with the elected members. All day long, the TDs marched in and out in a fug of body odor and cigarette smoke, demanding a cream cake or an éclair to go with their cup of coffee and rarely displaying any familiarity with manners. Some flirted with the girls but didn’t intend their teasing to lead anywhere; others hoped that it would and could become aggressive if they were thwarted. There were stories of girls who’d been seduced and then fired when the man grew weary of her; stories of others who’d turned down an indecent proposal and been fired for that too. Once you caught the eye of a TD, it seemed that it could only lead in one direction and that was toward the dole queue. There were just four women elected to the Dáil at the time and my mother referred to them as the MayBes—Mary Reynolds from Sligo-Leitrim and Mary Ryan from Tipperary, Bridget Redmond from Waterford and Bridget Rice from Monaghan—and they were the worst of all, she said, for they didn’t want to be seen speaking to the working girls in case one of the men came over and asked them to warm their pot or help to sew a button back on to their shirt sleeve.
Mr. de Valera didn’t come in very often, she told me, as the tea was generally brought to him in his office by Mrs. Hennessy herself, but from time to time he might pop his head in the door if he was looking for someone and take a seat with some of the backbenchers, gauging the mood of the party. Tall and skinny, a bit gormless looking, she said he was never anything but polite and once reprimanded one of his own junior ministers for clicking his fingers at her, an action that earned him her eternal gratitude.
The girls she worked alongside were full of concern for my mother’s situation. Seventeen years old by now, with a fictitious husband dead in a war that had finally come to an end and an all too real child ready to push its way out into the world, they regarded her with a mixture of fascination and pity.
“And your poor mammy died too, I heard?” asked an older girl, Lizzie, as they stood by the sink one afternoon washing dishes.
“She did,” said my mother. “A terrible accident.”
“I heard it was the cancer.”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “I meant a terrible misfortune. That she got the cancer at all.”
“They say it carries down the family line,” said Lizzie, who must have been the life and soul of any party. “Would you not worry that you’d get it yourself one day?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought about it before,” said my mother, stopping what she was doing and considering it. “But I’ll think of nothing else now that you’ve said it.” For a moment, she told me, she wondered whether she might, in fact, be in danger of developing the disease until she remembered that her mother, my grandmother, was alive and well and living with her husband and six straw-brained sons two hundred and thirty miles away in Goleen, West Cork. She relaxed again after that.
The Great Plan
In mid August, Mrs. Hennessy called her into her office and said that she thought the time had come for my mother to leave the job.
“Is it because I was late this morning?” asked my mother. “It’s the first time that’s ever happened. But there was a man standing outside my front door as I was leaving and he had a look on his face that said he wanted to murder me. I didn’t want to go out alone while he was still there. I went upstairs and looked out the window and it was another twenty minutes before he turned on his heel and disappeared down Grafton Street.”
“It’s not because you were late,” said Mrs. Hennessy, shaking her head. “You’ve always been punctual, Catherine, unlike some of them. No, I just think the time has come, that’s all.”
“But I still need the money,” she protested. “I have my rent to think of and the child and—”
“I know, and I feel for you, but would you take a look at yourself, you’re as big as a house. You can’t have more than a couple of days to go. Is there nothing stirring, no?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
“The thing is,” said Mrs. Hennessy. “I’ve had…would you sit down, Catherine, for God’s sake, and take the weight off. You shouldn’t be standing in your condition anyway. The thing is, I’ve had complaints from some of the TDs.”
“About me?”
“About you.”
“But sure I’m never anything other than polite. Other than to that gombeen-man from Donegal who presses against me every time he passes and calls me his cushion.”
“Oh I know that well enough,” said Mrs. Hennessy. “Haven’t I been watching you myself over these last three months? You’d have a job for life here if it wasn’t for, you know, the fact that you will have other responsibilities soon. You’re everything I look for in a tea girl. You were born to the role.”
My mother smiled, deciding to take this as a compliment even though she wasn’t entirely sure that it was one.
“No, it’s not your manners they’re complaining about. It’s your condition. They say that seeing a woman so far along in her pregnancy puts them off their custard slices.”
“Are you having me on?”
“This is what they’ve told me.”
My mother laughed and shook her head. “Who said these things?” she asked. “Will you name names, Mrs. Hennessy?”
“I won’t, no.”
“Was it one of the MayBes?”
“I won’t say, Catherine.”
“Party affiliation then?”
“A little bit of both. A few more of the Fianna Fáil crowd, though, if I’m honest. But you know what they’re like. The Blueshirts don’t seem so bothered.”
“Is it that little weasel that calls himself a Minister for—”
“Catherine, I’m not going to get into specifics with you,” insisted Mrs. Hennessy, holding a hand in the air to silence her. “The fact is that you’ve only got days left anyway, a week at most, and it’s in your best interests to stay off your feet. Would you not just do me the favor of calling it a day without any trouble about it? You’ve been wonderful, you have, and—”
“Of course,” said my mother, realizing that she would be better off not begging for more time. “You’ve been very kind to me, Mrs. Hennessy. You gave me a job when I needed one and I know it wasn’t the easiest decision to make. I’ll see out the day and leave with a special place in my heart for you.”
Mrs. Hennessy breathed a sigh of relief and sat back in her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a good girl, Catherine. You’ll make a wonderful mother, you know. And if you ever need anything—”
“Well, there is something, actually,” she replied. “After the baby’s born, could I come back, do you think?”