Maureen Coghlan Long
MOTHER
“Give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to be free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these the homeless tempest-tossed to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” --Emma Lazarus
It was 1924. A short brown-haired-hazel-eyed 18 year old Irish girl, all dressed up in her best Irish dress, stood alongside her 19 year old brother, Donagh, who was wearing his tweed jacket and Irish cap. They wereon the deck of the great steamship. The boat rocked, the salt water splashed. The sea-air delighted their nostrils. Beside them were as many passengers as could fit. The family had taken the ferry out to the big ship as the water was not deep enough anywhere in Ireland for a large ship to dock. The parting was a sad one, as it was for so many Irish for so many generations before, the potato famine, the British, poverty. Irish history. So many who were leaving the green and misty isle would never see their home again. So sad for the mother especially. So many songs written “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen Mavourneen. Come back again to the land of thy birth.” Or DANNY BOY… “and when you come and all the flowers are dying and I am dead is dead I well may be.” So many songs so many songs for that long or often permanent separation.
“Did ye see her yet.” “No no notyet no.” The men called out to each other as the ship sailed towards the magnificent Manhattan skyline and into the New York Harbor. “She’ll be on the right I’d say.” The crowd shifted towards the right. “No, no she won’t, I’m telling yeh. She’ll be on the left.” The crowd moved to the left. Then right then left again. All eyes on deck were twirling. “There now! There she is!” They waved, they cheered, they cried. There she was indeed, just like they’d seen in photos, her strong arm lifted high holding that lamp to greet them with strength and a future of hope after their long Atlantic journey from Cobh Harbor, Cork City, County Cork Ireland. A tall man stood in silence as tears welled up in his blue Irish eyes. He whispered. “Sure there she is indeed, God bless her. The Statue of Liberty.” The little girl, Maureen Coghlan, was happy too. She was in the New World and she had a new life before her. She was to be my Mother.
“There’s nothing here for you, Maureen” her Aunt Nora had told her on her visit back from New York. They were sitting together by the fire in the ancestral home called Kilclousha. Irish for the Church of the Earsan old Irish myth. It was a beautiful historic Georgian Mansion with glorious ivy falling down it’s stone walls. Two hundred acres of rich green grass and Irish soil and stone with racing horses to be raised and then sold. Kilclousha had been in the family since 1840. It had a ghost too! But what good would that do Maureen. She was the first born girl of a family of six, butprimogenitor was the law of the land. That meant that everything went to the firstborn son and everyone else was left to fend for themselves. Aunt Nora knew that Maureen was bright. “Maureen, sure your mad for the city of Cork you’re sure to love New York and you won’t be seein’ the dastardly Black and Tans shooting over your head when you’re going back and forth to school. Never mind that they’re not shootin’ to kill you, but they’reshootin’ to terrorize you.”
So she sailed to America, but not quite right into freedom as thought but into the home of some very strict Irish aunts who watched her every move especially when it came to men. But, when she could she moved to Greenwich Village and there she did live free. Firstto Hunter College to get a BA in English. “Who knows the poem written on the Statue of Liberty?”asked the teacher. An arm shot right up. Maureen Coghlan’s arm“Give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” She was the only one who could recite it. She lived 13 years in Manhattan free and single. She worked for a publisher who loved her. She wanted to be a writer. She had boyfriends too. She said everything always came in twos for her. She would be without a boyfriend and then she would have two. And then when she was pregnant she got two again. Twins. She loved America and she taught her daughters to love America too.
She read Shakespeare and classics and handed literature down to us. She showed us art. She brought us to concerts. FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBE “Listen. Closely. Can you hear it? Can you hear the bumblebee?” It was Magic! “Yes! Yes we can!” She brought her own sister, Ellen, over. Many immigrants did. She was the first woman to graduate in science at the University of County Cork. Mother let us run around the neighborhood with torn off jeans using our imaginations pretending to be Tom and Huck or wear no shirts and try to be Indians. At one point Ellen told Mother that it was time for us to put on shirts. We didn’t understand why at first. We were starting to develop what? We didn’t like that. She told us on St. Patrick’s Day that the Irish werenot phony like they were being depicted on TV. “That is not Ireland. Ireland is deep and green and true.” We saw what she meant when we first stepped foot on Ireland.
In the 50s, when we were then teenagers she saw John Kennedy at the Democratic Convention. “First it was no Irish need apply and now an Irishman can become President.” She loved Groucho Marx on the“You Bet Your Life!” show. But, you can bet your life that whenever a woman contestant came on and Groucho asked her what she did and she replied "Oh, I'm just a house wife" Mother cringed. “Just a housewife? Being a housewife is a very important job.”
Philomene’s first boyfriend was Jan Bossart a first generation American himself. Belgian. His father was Karel Bossart. He was “The Father of the Atlas”. The Atlas Rocket would later send America’s first astronaut, John Glenn, into orbit. Jan used to grab my 5ft 2in. Mother and swing her around and around and around and how she laughed when around and around she’d go. And when it stopped, I saw that my Mother was thrilled like a child. Her Irish eyes twinkled as she looked up at me. The son of the man who would put the first American astronaut into orbit put my Mother into orbit too, if only a very low orbit and in our living room AND my Mother was liking it. That was the joy of freedom she passed on to us, that speciallove and appreciation for the freedom in America which those who came from another country so appreciate and never ever not take for granted like so many natural born Americans do.
She died. She died too young. We were only teenagers. I could have learned so much more from her. But, still for those brief years and to this day, she lit the light beside my golden door.
--Pegarty Long
Maureen Coghlan Long