The Original Short Story: Helen
When I decided I was going to write about my great-grandmother Helen Galvin Rush, I had just finished my freshman year at Stanford University. I intended to apply for a Chappell Lougee grant, a prestigious $7,000 grant given to a select number of sophomores in the humanities to pursue a passion project the summer after their sophomore year. I wanted to write a book of short stories, one story centering on each of the twelve Galvin siblings.
As expected, I began by writing a story about Helen, the person who I knew best. While The Galvin Girls takes place in 1929, this short story takes place more than a decade later after she gets married to my great-grandfather Bill Rush and has two children, my great-uncle Billy and grandfather Eddie. The root of this story and the novel are the same: Helen doesn’t feel at home in America and longs for her family in Listowel.
I wrote this story over a period of three months with my creative writing instructor, Chris Drangle during the winter of my sophomore year. It went through about seven drafts before I was satisfied with the ending. Until a couple of days ago, I had not looked at this story in more than two years, even while writing The Galvin Girls. I hope you enjoy reading it for the first time as much as I did.
Helen peeked through the mail slot in the front door.
“If ye come into this house with a face full of whiskers like a rovin’ pedlar without a means of shavin’,” she said in a singsong voice, “I’m goin’ to change the locks while ye’re workin’ in the days comin’.”
Bill knocked as if he were an encyclopedia salesman but was met with obstinate silence. He then cupped his hands around his mouth like a makeshift megaphone and said, “Honey, I forgot to shave this morning. I was tired from being up with Eddie last night.”
Helen hadn’t even heard the baby cry. She always woke up, even to the softest of his sniffles. Pangs of guilt struck like a clock at midnight. How could she have left her Bill to take care of their son all night? He already rose so early every morning. What luck she had many years ago meeting a decent fella on Bonsall Street.
“Are you going to let me in?”
Helen stood up straight and looked at the splotchy brass doorknob.
“It’s awful cold out here.”
She suppressed the guilt and fluffed the russet curls around the nape of her neck.
“I heard pneumonia is making its way through Germantown now. ”
She held out her right hand and examined her filed fingernails.
“I visited my mother on the way home from work.”
Her cuticles needed to be trimmed.
“She insists on coming over for supper tomorrow evening and that you mustn’t make that awful beef stew again.”
Helen drew in a sharp breath. What nerve that woman had to criticize a family recipe she had so excessively praised during past visits!
She unlocked the heavy door and swung it open to reveal her husband hugging a box of caramel candies and a bouquet of pink roses. Her birthday. It was her birthday. She’d forgotten to purposely forget her birthday. Bill certainly hadn’t. The broken clock in her stomach struck twelve again.
“Bill, I wasn’t expectin’ nothin’ from ye,” Helen said, her eyes darting from the gifts to his whiskers but never meeting his curious gaze. “I didn’t think ye’d remember. I barely remembered meself.”
Her grinning husband stepped over the door frame and into the warm foyer. He placed the candy and flowers on the nearby slat back chair, then planted himself squarely in front of his wife.
“I’ve one more present for you,” Bill said, winking like a mischievous child. “Close your eyes, and don’t even think about peeking like you usually do.”
Helen didn’t know what to expect, but she suspected it was some type of jewelry. While window shopping downtown with her sisters a few Sundays before, she learned Bill had been paying them friendly afternoon visits without her knowledge. She tried to pry the secret out of them, but they were as tight-lipped as churchgoers at mass during Holy Hour.
“Put out your hands.”
She heard paper rustling, something being pulled from Bill’s coat pocket. The rustling stopped as her husband placed an almost weightless object onto her flat palms.
“You can open your eyes now.”
Helen peered down at the birthday present. It was an envelope, weathered and stained like it had been dirtied then put through the ringer. Her vision hadn’t fully focused until she spotted the faded red stamp in the right corner. Eire, it read.
The envelope was addressed to her sister, Anna, in a script she knew anywhere.
“Bill, what is…” she asked, the end of her question disintegrating like paper in water.
Helen looked up at her husband’s bright eyes. They were the powder blue of Eddie’s clothing she’d received at the baby shower the year before.
“It’s a letter from your mother.”
“A letter.”
Bill turned around and shut the door, then leaned forward and kissed Helen’s forehead. He glanced down at the letter in her hands.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he asked, gesturing to the birthday gift. The excitement in his voice metamorphosed into impatient anticipation visible in the well-creased lines between his wide-set eyes. Helen knew he yearned for her approval. And that’s why she lied to him.
“Of course! I just can’t think of openin’ such a thing when I’ve got to be startin’ on that stew for tomorrow evenin’,” she said, her speech as abrupt as her mother-in-law’s last visit.
She pecked Bill on the lips and put the letter in her apron pocket for safekeeping. If the baby or even their four-year-old son, Billy, got his hands on it, Bill would be devastated. When Helen accidentally burned a hole in the dress she’d received for Christmas last year, Bill walked three miles in a foot of snow to replace it. She didn’t deserve him.
“Honey, my mother isn’t coming for dinner. She doesn’t hate the stew,” Bill said, sporting a slight smirk. The worry lines disappeared.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What am I to do with ye?” Helen asked, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Ye’re a lyin’ ragamuffin who thinks a bit of sweets will keep his wife happy on the day she’s a gettin’ more wrinkles. Just lovely.”
“You grow more beautiful and wise every day, my dear,” Bill said, reaching up to stroke her cheek with the back of his hand.
Helen caught his hand and held it tight. She remembered gripping the handrail on the open deck even tighter as her ship left Cobh harbor some years ago.
“Don’t try me with that flattery. I can’t thank ye enough for the letter, but I must get supper started whether that woman shows up at our doorstep or not.”
She dropped Bill’s hand and spun around in the direction of the boys’ room. As she passed the slat back chair, Helen scooped up the candies and roses and put them on the kitchen counter before entering the bedroom. Her sons were fast asleep where she had left them. Billy lay curled up on the floor, sucking his thumb. Since falling off his bed a few months before, he only slept on the beige hand-hooked rug next to the footboard. The blue crocheted afghan she’d made him for Christmas this year covered only his feet.
“How much longer do you think he’ll need?” Bill had asked, standing in the doorframe of the boys’ room.
Helen sat on the floor, legs splayed out in front. She knew it wasn’t very ladylike, but she’d been half-heartedly trying to coax Billy to sleep in his bed for almost two hours. It was past midnight, and she could barely keep her eyes open.
“I don’t think he’ll be sleepin’ in his own bed for a while. We should just let him sleep on the floor until he’s ready,” Helen said, rubbing Billy’s back. She looked down at him and realized he’d dozed off, a small drool stain already present on his sleepshirt.
“Honey, it’s already been a week. We can’t let his sleeping on the floor become a habit, or he’ll never go back to his bed. He’s got to learn to toughen up.”
Helen removed her hand from Billy’s back and scratched the back of her neck, irritated by Bill’s assertion. For goodness sake, their son was only four years old. Facing a fear at any age is difficult, no matter how small or silly it may seem to others. Bill didn’t understand the magnitude of falling two feet from the bed to the ground in the middle of the night. The situation was startling and unfamiliar. One moment Billy was safe and warm in his own bed, and the next he was on the ground with a lump forming on the back of his head.
“I don’t think we should push him. He’s only just turnin’ four years old and needs a bit of nurturin’ every now and then, don’t ye think?”
Bill was silent for a minute, then said, “Helen, you’re coddling him too much. He’s not a baby anymore. If he can make his own decisions, he can face his own fears, no matter how silly they are. He shouldn’t be afraid of falling off the bed, especially since this is the first time it happened. I think — ”
“Ye can believe what ye want,” Helen said, turning her head to look her husband in the eyes.
She didn’t want to disrespect his opinion, but he had never understood what fear meant to her. He didn’t realize what it was like for her to wake up knowing she wouldn’t see her parents again or the land she grew to love as a child. He didn’t know the uncertainty that came with fear, the kind that Billy felt.
“And this is why we’re husband and wife,” Bill said.
“Don’t ye start gettin’ all sentimental. Ye’re goin’ to wake Billy.”
“We both have such different ways of living, and sometimes I don’t know how you convinced yourself to marry me.”
“Bill, there’s no need to start ramblin’ like old neighbor Seamus when he’s trapped Mrs. Toner on her way to de grocer’s.”
“I know we’ve never seen eye to eye. We’re not going to agree on what to do with Billy, but we’ll work it out somehow. We always do.”
“Ye’re soundin’ like one of those Jane Austen fellas, professin’ all the love and emotion they can muster up.”
“You know I’ll always do what pleases you most.”
Helen stood up and walked forward a few feet. She wrapped her arms around Bill’s neck and kissed his rough cheek.
“Don’t ye forget I much I love ye.”
“I won’t.”
Helen glanced back at Billy and smiled softly. There he was: calm and safe and asleep. The Lord must’ve looked down from Heaven and smiled the first night she spent in America with Anna and Mary in their house on North Bonsall Street. There she was: calm and safe and asleep.
Eddie stood up in his crib when Helen closed the door behind her. She walked over and lifted him onto her hip, then swayed back and forth until he put his head on her shoulder and fell asleep again.
Helen sat down in the creaky wooden rocking chair next to the crib. Shifting Eddie to the left side of her lap, she reached into her apron pocket and pulled out the letter. Why there was suddenly a letter for her, she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Bill never understood her refusal to write to her parents or siblings back in Listowel. When they were first married, he sometimes jokingly accused her of having a strange family, the kind that drives away its normal members. Helen would smile and nod to mask her despair and prevent her new husband from prying. She chose to come to America for a better life. Bill was her new family, so she filled the void in her heart with him and eventually with her two little boys.
Helen couldn’t open the letter and have every memory of home flood her already preoccupied mind. She didn’t have the money nor the strength to make a trip across the Atlantic by herself. And once she arrived, there was a chance she’d never come back. If she left again, her mother would die of a broken heart. Helen also couldn’t abandon Bill or her boys. Her sisters had even saved their money to pay her passage to America. She’d betray them all if she opened the letter. She’d betray the Lord for blessing her with a life only worth dreaming about. It would be a mortal sin.
She put the letter back into her pocket, then stood up and placed a sleeping Eddie back into his crib. Billy was still fast asleep on the floor, only he’d shifted positions so that both hands were above his head like a criminal under arrest. She left silently and closed the door quickly to minimize the ear-splitting squeak. Walking toward the living room, Helen looked around for Bill. He must’ve been changing out of his work uniform for she heard the water running upstairs.
Helen entered the living room and placed herself in front of the fireplace. She had forgotten to add more firewood this afternoon; the embers grew dimmer as she felt the letter in her apron. She had to get rid of it. Satan was tempting her. Would it be a sin to open and then get rid of it? The Lord would make an exception for a woman who prayed the rosary every day. He must.
Bill walked down the stairs to find his wife staring into the fireplace with a ripped, empty envelope in hand. He stopped on the bottom step and leaned against the banister. Bill stood there for a moment, waiting for Helen to acknowledge his presence. She never did.
The last embers famished.
He stepped onto the cold floor and passed by Helen, only stopping to squeeze her shoulder gently. Opening the door to the boys’ room, Bill couldn’t believe what he saw. His older son lay on top of the covers of his own bed, his arms and legs every which way. Bill sighed. He knew his wife would be relieved to know of Billy’s long-awaited progress, but now was not the time. He’d tell her tomorrow.
When he re-entered the living room, he expected his wife to be sitting on the loveseat or still standing in front of the fireplace. But he didn’t see her. She didn’t want to be seen.
Bill walked up the stairs, trying his best to avoid the creaking of the third and seventh steps. After closing the bedroom door, he undressed and put on his worn-out nightclothes, then pulled back each of the five blankets tucked well between the mattress and the cedar bed frame. He got into bed and laid his head on the pillow. Listening for any movements downstairs, he promised himself that he’d stay awake until Helen came up to join him.
And so he waited.
