Twins

[postmark]
New York, NY
July 8, 1917

[addressee]
Mrs.Chas. Blackburn
134 Cherry St.
Asheville, North Carolina

[postcard text]
This is Island I We are on Island III in pavillion bldgs tan - red tiled roofs - ours is the island just to the right of Liberty - we watch her light up every night. A letter is in the process of writing to you

Bridget

There is another of me. I always assumed she and I would live and die together, side by side. How could I think otherwise, even as late as last night as the sun went away and the electrical lights of New York City flared up and we waited for the rest of our life to begin. Identical we are. Twins that surprised nearly to death our mother and our father, as they tell it. And so it is always Bridget and Caitlin then. I look into my own face every day. And sometimes - as she sleeps and I am awake - I feel I am a ghost, I feel there was ever only one of me and now I am after dying and stepping out of my body and I am looking back to see what it is I am leaving.

I love her. But she is like myself and so I love her not, as well, for I know my own shortcomings, which I long to make right. Sufficiently for a good Catholic girl I do not honor my mother and my father. I despise my place of birth and all it would make of me. I despise it though I cannot but be its daughter, and I despise that, as well. I despise its cringing submissiveness to the English, and what good is its resistance? Parnell torpedoing his country by sleeping with another man's wife. Those fools going to war without even possessing their guns on Easter last year. Not that there won't be more bloodshed. After the Germans are done with and Home Rule starts up again, there'll be plenty, and make no mistake. But even beyond the violence there's merely and only a life of potatoes and turnips and turf fires. And the baking of soda bread, which is all I ever seem to be doing. And a life surrounded by Irish boys with brains of sod who won't even marry when they at least still have their good looks for fear of another famine, this many decades later. Sure and it's the life of an Irish farmer and his family, after all, but for Bridget and Caitlin there's not even the coal mines to get away to, like our oldest brother did. So I persuaded Caitlin first and then our father and our mother to let us go away to America. Our aunt in Asheville in the county of North Carolina was only too happy to rescue us as she was after rescuing herself. To my father's credit he let us go. With ten American dollars in each of the shoes on our feet and with our clothes in wicker cases we boarded the Celtic and made off for New York.

Caitlin took some persuading. A myth it is that identical twins have always the same thought. In some ways Caitlin is more the girl I am supposed to be. Closer, sure, to my mother. And more accepting of the farm and of Ireland itself. But she is also my twin, and so she came to see how we should start anew. She even left a sod-brain behind, which her own fine brain knew was the right thing to be doing, but her heart was soft and she cried for a long while. I can see now how this fool of a boy brought about all our present trouble.

Steerage on the Celtic was crowded, and though what I heard of the Atlantic passage before the war was far worse, things were bad enough for us. When we boarded in Queenstown there were already hundreds crowded below decks, and they weren't even English, many of them, but were people from all over the continent fleeing...