The New York Post e-Edition

HOME AGAIN AMERICA!

My great-aunt Jane Jane was passionate about history, politics — and her newly adopted country

PEGGY NOONAN Originally published by the Wall Street Journal.

Last month, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan gave a speech at the Al Smith Dinner at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Her themes of gratitude, patriotism, respect for the past, and hope for the future remind us of what matters most during this season of giving . . .

WORDS of thanks to someone I knew well as a child:

I had an old great-aunt. She was my grandfather’s sister. Her name was Mary Jane Byrne but we called her Jane Jane. When I first encountered her, in the 1950s, I was a little child and she was ancient — about 60.

She lived in New York and went to a local parish, St. Vincent Ferrer. When I was little she told me it was the pennies of immigrants that made that great church. I asked why they did that. She said, “To show love for God. And to show the Protestants we’re here, and we have real estate too.”

She came to America about 1915, an Irish immigrant girl of around 20 from a rocky little patch in the west of Ireland. She came by herself, landed at Ellis Island and went to Brooklyn like everyone else. She settled in a neighborhood near the old Navy Yard, where relatives put her up on the couch.

She dropped her bags and went straight to Manhattan, where the jobs were, and became a maid for a family on Park Avenue. She lived in a little room on the side. In time she became a ladies’ maid, learning to care for a wardrobe and jewelry and brush the lady’s hair. She respected her work and came to love the finer things. When they got thrown away she’d bring them home and we’d have them. I remember a cracked hairbrush, made from real tortoiseshell, with beige bristles.

On days off she’d visit us in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, in Massapequa, where my family moved and I went to public school. She’d sleep on the couch in our living room. As is often true with immigrant families, ours was somewhat turbulent, but Jane Jane was peaceful and orderly. If we were together on a Sunday, she took me to Mass. I loved it. They had bells and candles and smoke and shadows and they sang.

The church changed that a bit over the years, but we lost a lot when we lost the show biz. Because, of course, it wasn’t only show biz. To a child’s eyes, my eyes, it looked as if either you go to church because you’re nice or you go and it makes you nice but either way it’s good.

Jane Jane carried Mass cards and rosary beads — the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, the saints. She’d put the cards on a mirror, hang the rosary beads on a bedstead. I look back and think, wherever she went she was creating an altar. To this day when I am in the home of newcomers to America, when I see cards, statues and Jesus candles, I think: I’m home.

She didn’t think life was plain and flat and material, she thought it had dimensions we don’t see, that there were souls and spirits and mysteries.

She came from rough people but she had a natural love for poetry, history, and politics. She wasn’t ideological — ardent Catholics don’t need an ideology, they’ve already got the essential facts. But she was, like all the Irish and Italian Catholics and European Jews of Brooklyn, a Democrat. I don’t think they ever met a Republican. I think they thought Republicans were like Englishmen with monocles.

But the poetry — she’d walk around day and night declaiming, with a rich Irish accent, popular poems she’d read in the newspapers. The one I remember best was a poem written in 1909 called “America for Me.” It’s about seeing the great cities of the world but knowing where you really belong. Its refrain: “So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!”

She loved Franklin D. Roosevelt, but most of all she loved Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points, his principles for the world after the Great War. She would walk around reciting them: “Freedom of the seas! An end to armaments! Sovereign nations living in peace!”

I’ve never known anyone like her. Sometimes life overwhelmed her. She’d disappear for a while, I’d hear she’d been hospitalized, she’d come back joking about doctors. There’s a lot of turbulence in any life, in all families, but for recent immigrants I think it can be hard in ways we don’t see. Because they let go of a lot when they left, and there was no one to keep them there, which can make it harder to gain purchase in the new place.

She passed away when I was a teenager, unchanged, the same mystical force. But what she did for me — she gave me a sense of the romance of life, the romance of politics and history, the sense that history’s a big thing and has glory in it. Great causes, acts of valor. And she was in love with America because it could be the stage of the love and the valor. America reminds you: Life is dynamic, not static, it moves, and there’s something magical in this.

Years later, when I was grown and a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, the president was coming back from a foreign trip and had to give brief remarks on returning to US soil at an air base in Alaska. I got the assignment. I was new and nervous, but as I worked an old memory tugged at my mind, and I knew what Reagan would say. He’d say “And it’s home again and home again, America for me.”

And so he did. And that was my tip of the hat to Mary Jane Byrne of County Donegal and Park Avenue.

She would have loved being here tonight, loved being with you. She would have looked at the dais — the men in white tie and tails, the women in flowing gowns. She’d want to brush your hair with a tortoiseshell brush. She would have been awed to be in the same room with a prince of the church, and awed when I said, “Jane Jane, this is my friend Cardinal Tim.”

We’ve all got great stories, everyone in this room, and it’s good to keep in mind the romance of it. All of you here have responsibilities in a world very far from Jane Jane’s. A lot of what you carry is a great burden. Whatever your pressures — whether it’s trying to safeguard the investments that people have made with you, or to maintain the trust of those who voted for you, or to raise the funds for the charity that depends on you, or to keep the faith of those who have prayed with you — whatever the pressure, I think she’d hope that you not become jaded, that you maintain a sense of the mystery of it all, the unseen things, the feats of love and valor.

A few weeks ago Aaron Judge hits 61 and stands on the field to make eye contact with Roger Maris’ family, and my son texts me: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Jane Jane steals into me for a moment and I think: How can you not be romantic about life?

POST SCRIPT

en-us

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://nypost.pressreader.com/article/282282439311990

New York Post