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From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: "My Great-Aunt Mary Jane BYRNE" (Donegal>>NY) - Peggy NOONAN
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 12:32:09 -0700


SNIPPET: NJ writer, Peggy NOONAN, was special assistant to President Ronald REAGAN. Her story, with a lovely photo of her maternal great-aunts with a friend "Bridie" taken probably in Brooklyn, where Mary Jane and Etta BYRNE lived, or Manhattan, where they worked, can be found in "The Irish in America," eds. Coffey & Golway (1997).

Patrick BYRNE (Mary Jane and Etta's brother) was a young man of ambition who apparently didn't want to be a farmer in sleepy town of Glenties in County Donegal, as his people had always been, but a teacher. He went to the local schools, and then to Scotland for more studies but when he came back to Donegal he couldn't find a teaching job. Bitterly disappointed, he decided, just before 1910, to go to America and said good-bye to the best friend of his boyhood, P. J. KENNEDY. Etta and Mary Jane were to follow him to America, leaving behind a brother, Jimbo, and their sister Ellen.

Briefly, the small BRYNE clan was to settle in Brooklyn one by one. Peggy's capabe and "sturdy" Great-Aunt Etta went into Manhattan and became a cook in the great houses of Park Avenue and Fifth. Great-Aunt Mary Jane, in her late teens or early 20s when she emigrated, became a lady's maid , again in the great houses of Park, and Fifth. Their brother, Patrick, got a job with Brooklyn's electric utility company, the Edison Company that required him to wear a suit - which had been a dream of his, to have a job that required a suit. An eligible Brooklyn bachelor until his 40s, he met and married Mary DORIAN, a poor, sweet and modest, big-boned mmigrant from Clare.

Per Ms. NOONAN - "Great Aunt Mary Jane BYRNE was pretty, delicate featured, willowy, and loved handsome hats and dresses. Now she would be surrounded by all the material things of the rich, furs and stylish clothes and the best perfume and makeup. None of it would be hers but she'd be close to it and learn, by observing, How The Rich Do It... She loved what she would have called the finer things of the world but didn't aim for them, didn't seem to think they were her fate. When I knew her she gave away all her money in birthday checks and Christmas gifts and twenties shoved in your pocket as you left. But she loved beautiful things and liked being near them. She was suited to domestic work, in the eyes of society, for she was an Irish immigrant woman and it was the sort of job such women could get: the scut work of the affluent, the cleaning and cooking and shining. Her friends were domestics, too. It was a good, solid job and she considered it an honorable one ...!
She spent her days in elegant surroundings with a wealthy mistress with whom she had a warm relationship, and on her days off she went to the movies - often Fred-and-Ginger musicals.

... When I was a little girl in the fifties and Mary Jane would visit our house on Long Island, I thought she was the most glamorous woman in the world. She didn't dress like everyone else: she wore a fine gray suit with high Joan Crawford shoulders and white gloves and shiny black walking shoes .... But Mary Jane was not suited for her job in that she was highly sensitive, highly intelligent, and had the soul of a poet. She should have been a teacher or writer. For years Etta and Mary Jane worked hard, long days, 6-7 days a week ... saved their money ... and after 15 or so years in America they bought a little brownstone on a cobblestone street near what would become the Brooklyn Navy Yards. It was to this house that, in the 1930s, Patrick and his family moved when, after many years of successful employment he lost his job at Edison ... drank heavily and never worked steadily again. And so when he and his family, including my young mother, hit hard times, it was the!
cook and the lady's maid who kept the family together. Years passed, Etta married, in her 40s, a widower named John CONLON, a carpenter. Patrick's children grew up, my mother married my father, a Brooklyn boy named Jimmy NOONAN, who, just back from WWII, joined the merchant marine ... later moved and raised their large family in Massapequa, Long Island. Mary Jane, now in the 1950s, went to work for a family in Darien, CT. ... In the early 1960s, she retired. She would come and stay for months at a time, helping my mother and father, making dinner, doing the shopping. She would stay up with us at night and tell us stories about Ireland and share her views of history ...."

Per Peggy - "It was at this time that I, aged eight and ten and twelve, realized Mary Jane was not only interesting and kindhearted but artistic and also deeply eccentric. She loved poetry and loved to recite it, walking around the house declaiming in a lilting and dramatic voice the popular poems of her young womanhood -- during the day -- but she also did it at night, at 2 a.m., and 4 a.m., which brought a certain Eugene O'Neill-Tennessee Willaims quality to it. I would be sound asleep in my room in the dark and suddenly I would be jerked awake to the sound of 'In Flanders Fields' being recited in the doorway by a woman in a long white nightgown, her long gray hair loosed from her bun and tumbling round her shoulders ... she looked like a ghost, or an angel. She was so dreamy and strange, and now I know she must have been lonely. For her brother had married and was surrounded by children and grandchildren, and Etta had married and, with her husband, bought a little !
house in Selden, Long Island ... but Mary Jane was alone. She had never married though she often told us of her many suitors, which was believable because she was so pretty. But she never said why she'd never chosen one. Perhaps it was like affluence and attainment; perhaps she didn't think it was her fate. And so in the 1960s, when she was in her seventies, she had only us and, of course God, for she was religious in the old-fashioned Irish way of worshipping, loving Him, incorporating Him into her life, and showing that incorporation through the symbols with which she decorated wherever she was - the mass cards tucked in the bedroom mirror, the rosary beads on the headboard of the bed, the crucifix on the wall. So us and God and her poems, that' s what she had. And when she died, living in Selden with the widowed Etta, in 1969, I found that she had something else. In her room in the little house, under the bed, behind boxes and bags, I found a book, a big brown b!
ook, a thousand-page ledger with imitation leather covers and a binding worn down to the cardboard. I opened it and showed it to my sisters, and we saw that for a decade of her life she had written down all the poems that she loved, and hoarded newspaper and magazine articles that caught her eye, as well as pictures from the supplements and old letters. But mostly the book contained poetry, written in her hand, page after page, most of it copied from popular poems of the day but some of it, perhaps, original ... There are poems about longing for home: 'I am Going back to Glenties/Where the harvest fields are brown/And the autumn sunlight lingers/On my little Irish town./'Tis far I am beyond the seas/And the yearning voices call/Will you not come back to Glenties/And your wave washed Donegal.'

By the end of the book, the poems and clippings changed. They are just as sentimental in style, they are written in the same florid hand ... but now they are no longer about Ireland. Now they are about America ... A newspaper photo of the Saint Patrick's day parade being reviewed by Cardinal FARLEY ... in front of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. A picture from the 'New York Times,' April 3, 1921, of Pope Benedict XV 'bestowing upon Archbishop Dennis DOUGHERTY of Philadelphia the Red Hat of the Cardinalate.' A poem about an American holiday called 'Thanksgiving.' ... She was becoming American ... and I realized she had recorded her transit from Irish girl to American girl .... "


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