Michael Malone - Weebly

to her sister in a two-family rowhouse across the
Rampage from the Dingley Optical Instruments factory,
where Orchid's husband had worked until his death.
After the widow's own children had fled Madder for a
better life in California, her squabbling young
MacDermott nephews kept her empty apartment filled
with the sounds of the past. They gave her somebody to
love, just as the people on Elizabeth Circle gave her
"somebody to do for." To clean for someone had been
her life's work, and she was quite proud that she did it
so well.
Sarah, however, took offense at her sister's
profession. The time had been, a century ago, when
everybody kept an Irish girl indentured in the kitchen,
offering her in exchange for her service a drafty attic
room and time off to rush to early Mass. Sarah
maintained that the Irish had served America long
enough and, having risen even to the presidency,
deserved servants themselves hired from among the less
tenured minorities. "Well, I guess Francis O'Reilly
clambered and climbed out of a peat bog to sail to New
England and open his own liquor store so his