The Dress Read Online Free PDF Page A

tiles, at the side of the public baths in Tara Street, and he told himself he would not stop, he would do whatever it took, to get as far away from his past as he could.
    In the changing rooms, he brushed down his dusty trousers and polished John’s shoes which, although a size too small, gave him a respectable enough demeanour to secure him an apprenticeship, as a carpenter in a workshop, on the Northside.
    When the boss asked him his name, Francis said ‘Frank’. It made him sound older and came out so naturally that it didn’t feel like a lie. He was somebody else now, somebody new.
    Frank worked hard, he was single-minded and diligent, he barely drank, or socialized with the other apprentices. He got the cheapest digs he could find and saved all of his money, so that after five long years, he had his passage to America.
    Standing at the front of the ship, the young man watched the Dublin mountains recede. Beyond them were the hills and boglands of Mayo and he was waving goodbye to the whole damn lot of them. With the wind whipping across his face, blowing up under the new coat he’d bought to carry him across the world in style, Frank Fitzpatrick felt free.
    As soon as he arrived in Manhattan, Frank went straight to an Irish bar near the docks, which he’d been told about in Dublin. He ordered a whisky and asked the barman, straight out, did he know a Donal Hegarty? From Bangor?
    The man behind the bar opened his mouth to laugh, then seeing the serious expression on the young man’s face, decided against it. The kid looked like he meant business. Young Francis Fitzpatrick was on a mission now. These were going to be difficult times for him and he would need all the help he could get from his only remaining relative, his mother’s brother.
    â€˜Would that be Bangor, County Mayo?’
    Frank nodded. New York was a big place, but it had the same number of Irishmen in it as Dublin, where everyone seemed to know each other, and if they didn’t know where to find a man, they knew a man who would.
    â€˜I know a man called Donal from Bangor, all right. You won’t find him in any bar in New York, though. He’s been banned from all of them.’
    Frank found his uncle queuing for soup in the Bronx. A broken man, a useless drunk, he tried to tap his nephew for what he had left of his savings. Frank gave him the price of a meal, then left him where he found him and determined to go it alone.
    If Dublin was hard, New York was harder, but Frank came to thrive on the challenge of survival. Already running from the failure of his childhood, he became even more driven by what he did not want to be. All around him, Frank saw disillusioned Irishmen, men who had followed the American dream only to be plunged into the Depression, many of them despairing and turning to drink. Francis was determined that would not happen to him and vowed to be the very opposite. He pushed himself to the top of every employment queue. He saved every penny of the small wages he earned, sleeping rough through the spring, summer and fall, and in homeless hostels during the harsh winters. He foraged food from the garbage bins of the wealthier houses he worked in and stuffed all of his cash in a cushion which he kept next to his face. Frank never feared thieves.
    One night a heavy-set, dangerous bum tried to steal his money. Frank had invested so much in his dream of being a success in America that he knew he could kill any man who tried to take it away from him. Enraged, Frank threatened to see him off with a beating like the one he had given his own father. The bum recognized determination and desperation when he saw them, knew the danger they spelt and ran off.
    Frank’s hard work and talent, as a casual carpenter, eventually got him noticed by a landlord, who put him to work as a building superintendent in a rambling, shabby brownstone in the Bronx. The landlord was a drinker and when he complained to Frank