“And a young Scottish girl in the next bunk sat up all night and knitted me a blanket out of her own good wool,” Mrs. Kincaid said, and the whole room leaned toward her wheelchair. Her voice was thin but clear, and she held the yellowed blanket against her chest like a living thing. “My mother was a Polish girl of nineteen, traveling alone, with a husband she had never met waiting in Pittsburgh. She had no English and no money. She went into labor three days out of Glasgow, in the cold, in a bunk, with a storm at the portholes. When I came, she had nothing at all to wrap me in. Nothing but her own coat.”
Eleanor Kincaid stopped and wiped her eyes with a tissue that Megan quickly pressed into her hand. She looked at me. “That girl was Margaret Fraser. She was sixteen years old. She took her only good cardigan, the one she wore to leave Scotland, and she unraveled it. All night. By lantern light, with two bent needles and a bone crochet hook she found in the ship kitchen. By morning she had finished this.” The old woman touched the thistle border with one finger. “The shell stitch. The thistles. And that little shamrock in the corner. She told my mother, This is for luck. This is for the road.”
I could not breathe. I had not known any of it. My mother never told me that story, not once in all her years. She had been a modest woman who did not like to talk about what she had given, only what she had received. But I knew that cardigan. I remembered a gray photograph of her at the ship rail, a thin girl with a long braid, wearing no sweater at all. “She told me she lost it at sea,” I whispered. Mrs. Kincaid laughed through her tears. “She lost it all right. She gave it to a stranger who spoke no English, and she never asked for a thing back.”
Two small blankets, knit eighty years apart by the same pair of hands, were finally laid side by side.
The room was so quiet that I could hear the ice melting in the pitchers. Mrs. Kincaid said that her mother had begged the girl for her address, but Margaret only had a cousin in Wheeling who was moving, and in the crowd at Ellis Island they were separated within an hour. They never saw each other again. For eighty years, Eleanor had kept that blanket in a cedar box. She had wrapped her three children in it and her five grandchildren. She told them all the story, every Christmas Eve. Each one of them had been told to find a Scottish woman with a shamrock, if they ever could, to say thank you. “And in all that time,” she said, “nobody found you. Until today.”
She turned her wheelchair toward her granddaughter in law. It was one of the quietest movements I have ever seen. Christine was standing at the head of the table with her hand over her mouth, the color of her own tablecloth. “Christine,” Mrs. Kincaid said, not unkindly, “you called this a rummage sale blanket. I want you to know that this is the most valuable thing in my family.” Christine began to speak, and then she could not. Mascara was running down her cheeks. She walked slowly around the table, past the cupcakes and the strollers, and she knelt in front of me in her linen dress.
“Mrs. McAllister,” she said. “I am so ashamed.” Her voice was a whisper. “I have been rude to you since the day we met. I thought you were poor. I thought you did not belong. I did not know that you were carrying something so much finer than anything I have in my store.” I looked at this woman with her diamonds and her careful hair. I thought of everything I could say. But what came out of me was only what my mother would have said. “Honey, stand up. The blanket is not for the one who gives it. It is for the baby.” She put her head in my lap, and I stroked her hair, and half the room was crying.
Megan came next, with her round belly and her red eyes, and wrapped both of her arms around my neck. “Grandma, I am so sorry I did not say something,” she said. I told her she had nothing to be sorry about. She had only been a girl standing in a room full of people, and I had been one many times myself. Then, very carefully, Mrs. Kincaid unfolded the old blanket and my new blanket together on the table in the middle of the country club. They were the same cream wool, nearly the same pattern, the same shell and thistle and shamrock. Eighty years apart. Anyone who looked at them could see one was the daughter of the other.
The shower did not end that afternoon with the cupcakes. It ended when Mrs. Kincaid asked me to bring my needles. I had them in my purse. Of course I did. She asked me to teach Christine a single row of the shell stitch, there at the table, in front of everyone. Christine took the needles in her manicured fingers like a woman holding a snake. Her first row was crooked. The second was worse. By the fifth, the women near us were whispering encouragement, and Christine was laughing out loud, with yarn on her sleeve, and I said, “Now you are knitting.”
Little Margaret Eleanor was born on a cold morning in March, eight pounds and two ounces, with a full head of black hair. She was wrapped in both blankets, one on top of the other. Her great great grandmother held her in the hospital room, in her wheelchair, and sang her a Gaelic lullaby that nobody else in the family could translate. I watched from the doorway. Mrs. Kincaid looked up at me with her blue eyes, and said, in a voice just above a whisper, “Agnes, your mother would be proud.” I said, “I think she already knows.”
Christine comes to Wheeling every Thursday now, driving herself, in an ordinary sedan, and we knit on my porch with the lilac blooming behind us. She is making a blanket for her next grandchild. The stitches are still a little crooked, and she tells everyone so, proudly. She no longer wears quite so many rings. In the corner of her blanket, when she finishes, there will be a small green shamrock. I will teach her that last part myself, the way my mother taught me, with my hands over hers. Some things you cannot buy in any boutique. They have to be handed down, one stitch at a time.