The Leaving Of Liverpool by Maureen Lee Page B

market on the Lower East Side where there was a stall that sold Italian lace. The minute they got off the bus, they’d come across a man savagely whipping an old, ailing horse that was attempting to pull a cart heaped with sacks. Anne had been so distressed that they had returned straight home. That afternoon, she’d drawn the face of a black-eyed man with heavy eyebrows and lips twisted in a sneer. ‘She even drew horns on his head,’ Tamara had told Levon, shocked. ‘At the bottom, she wrote “The Doctor”.’
    ‘Where is the picture?’ Levon had asked.
    ‘She ripped it to pieces, very slowly and deliberately, then threw it in the trash. Something bad has happened to her, Lev. I’m convinced of it.’
     
    The meal over, Tamara and Anne cleared the table and went into the sitting room to play records on the phonograph, while Levon stayed at the table to study for the Bar exam. He would be relieved when he was able to practise law in America and no longer had to drive a taxi, something he did more to pass the time than for the money. He was already a moderately wealthy man, and had managed to bring his small fortune with him, if not the rich contents of his house in Armenia. Not that things , however beautiful and finely crafted, mattered after they’d lost their beloved Larisa.
    The strains of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite drifted into the room. He bent his head over his work until, a few minutes later, Tamara came in and sat at the table with him. He laid down his pen, remembering she had something to tell him.
    ‘Anne is dancing,’ she said. ‘She makes up the steps as she goes along. She gets quite lost in it.’
    ‘Perhaps we should send her to a stage school,’ Levon suggested, ‘where she can learn to sing and dance professionally?’
    ‘That’s a good idea, Lev, but not just yet.’ She played with the earring in her left ear, a sign she had something important to say. ‘I took Anne to the doctor’s this morning,’ she said in her mother tongue. ‘She needed more drops for her heart.’ It was Tamara who’d noticed the girl’s heart beat unevenly on occasions. The doctor had prescribed a drug called digitalis. ‘It’s nothing serious, but it’s best to be safe than sorry. Just give her five drops a day on her tongue,’ he’d said.
    ‘Is she all right?’ Levon asked now, alarmed.
    ‘Fine, Lev, but there’s just one thing: I thought Anne had yet to start having periods, but that’s not the case at all. She doesn’t have them because she’s pregnant.’ She laid her hand on his arm. ‘Lev, darling, Anne is expecting a child.’
     
    There’d been poor people in Duneathly, farm workers mostly, who lived in shacks on the farmers’ land. They weren’t seen all that often in the village. They had no need of solicitors, banks, or dress shops. Occasionally, they might call out the doctor, but doctors didn’t work for free and it had to be a real emergency. The women sometimes went to the butcher’s just before it closed to buy bones for a stew that would last all week, and the men packed into O’Reilly’s pub on Friday night after they’d been paid. Mollie had been woken from her sleep many times by the sound of a desperate row going on outside. A woman would be dragging her husband out of the pub screaming, ‘Before you spend every penny of your wages on the ale and leave your kids to starve, you flamin’ eejit!’
    In Liverpool, there was Mrs Brophy, in her fine four-bedroom house with a big garden, struggling to keep her head above water until she and all her girls were at work and the money would come pouring in. At least Mrs Brophy was in a position to have dreams. For some people, life was truly hopeless.
    Mollie realized this for the first time when Tom Ryan took her home to meet his mother. Irene Ryan’s house was spotless, the windows shone, the step was scrubbed, and there was food in the larder. The house stood out from its dreary, filthy neighbours in Turnpike