Cashelmara (69 page)

I was staying on in her father’s house in those days when she had such a good opinion of me. Old Lord de Salis had arranged for me to be lodged with the family of one of the masters because he knew it would at first be strange for me to live in a city, and he thought Eileen’s father would look after me well.

But Eileen looked after me better. We had a happy marriage for a long time, although of course she wouldn’t remember that now. I know it was a shock for her when she first saw the farm, but she got over that, I swear she did despite all she said later during our first terrible quarrel.

We never quarreled until the day I first set eyes on Sarah de Salis. I’d had to fetch Eileen from her charity work at the dispensary because there had been an accident at home. I remember I was angry because I felt she should have been at home instead of playing nurse in Clonareen, and then I found out she was angry too because I’d been rude to her in front of Lady de Salis. “You might at least have been civil,” she said bitterly, and I yelled at her, “And you might at least have been home!” so she said why shouldn’t she do some charity work, and besides it was a relief to talk occasionally to a cultured, refined lady like Miss Madeleine de Salis. “And since when has your family not been good enough for you?” I shouted at her, angrier than ever, and I told her it was time she stayed at home to pay her husband and children some attention.

“I do pay you attention!” she snapped.

“Not enough!” says I. “The only attention I ever get from you nowadays is ten minutes in the dark once a week—if I’m lucky and often I’m not!”

Jesus, we had the father and mother of a quarrel then. She let loose a whole stream of complaint, saying I was a fine one to talk, for when did I ever pay any attention to her? I was always getting drunk with the O’Malleys or making an exhibition of myself in political meetings, so when might she expect the time of day from me, might she be so bold as to inquire, or was she to be satisfied with acting as a substitute for Rosie Costelloe whenever the fancy took me? So I said Rosie Costelloe did at least give me value for money, and then—dear God, the quarrel got worse and worse and there was nothing we didn’t say to each other. She called me names and I said that if I’d been unfaithful once or twice it meant nothing because I had only done it to spare her. She said how dared I say such a thing and when had she ever asked to be spared, and I said of course she’d never ask, she was too dutiful for that, but I could put two and two together as well as the next man, couldn’t I?

That infuriated her. She called me more names. She said I was gross and coarse and she’d always regretted marrying beneath her.

“Always?” I said. That cut very deep.

“Always!” she said. “Do you think I wouldn’t rather be living like a lady in a decent house in Dublin than like a peasant in this smoky little hovel?”

“This is a fine farmhouse,” I said, “and we don’t live like peasants.”

She laughed. I never forgave her for that. We patched up the quarrel somehow, but we were a long way from the boy and girl who had run off to the altar in Dublin, and both of us knew it. If I was the rogue Eileen said I was, I’d blame her for the estrangement that existed between us long before the final separation came, but I won’t do that. I want to be honest, and so I’ve no choice but to say the fault lay not in Eileen but in me. I was the one to blame because I couldn’t forgive her for betraying she rated me no better than a peasant and because I knew that Lady de Salis would yield to me if ever I had the chance to spend more than five minutes with her alone.

Maybe Eileen was right during our worst quarrel when she called me a cheating son of a tinker’s bitch, but I can hardly believe there’s a man alive who wouldn’t have wanted Sarah de Salis from the first moment he set eyes on her.

She was very, very beautiful.

It was an unusual beauty. She didn’t look like anyone else I’d ever seen. She had narrow eyes that seemed dark and light at the same time because they were golden brown, and high cheekbones like the ladies on the Chinese screen in her bedroom at Cashelmara. Her skin was soft and pale, untouched by wind or rain or sun, and she had full lips, which she kept clamped together as if she was scared she’d look too luscious. It was only when she laughed that you saw what a lovely mouth she had, and when I first knew her she didn’t laugh often. Her long thick hair reached to her waist when it was uncoiled, and when she was naked it was hard to believe she had had as many as four children, for she didn’t have that droopy overripe look common in Irish girls past twenty-five. She had a tiny waist, magnificent hips which managed to be well curved without being over-padded, perfect breasts and long, lissome, lovely legs.

I always knew I wanted her, but I never believed we were exactly right for each other until she sold her wedding ring to buy me out of jail. After all—and you’ll pardon my cynicism—it’s easy to lust after a beautiful woman but not nearly so easy to know what to do with her after you’ve had what you wanted. So I used to daydream about Sarah as I milked the cows and threshed with my flail, but I never imagined more than finding myself by some miracle in a fourposter bed with her and relieving my feelings against a luxurious background of exquisite linen sheets and soft white pillows. It seemed like such an impossible daydream that it never occurred to me to wonder what would happen afterward. But I wondered when she bought me out of jail. My first thought was: What a woman! And when I remembered how months before I had sat with her in the library at Cashelmara and drunk to MacGowan’s damnation, I marveled to myself: What a partner!

I saw her only once between my escape from jail and my voyage to America, and there was no fourposter bed, no fine sheets and no soft pillows. But I took my jacket and her cloak and laid them on the hard damp floor of a ruined cabin, and I never gave a thought to my old daydreams. For she was no longer just a beautiful woman I wanted. She was Sarah, brave yet terrified, full of hope yet teetering on the brink of despair, laughing for joy yet weeping because we had so little time together and neither of us knew how long it would be before I could see her again. In my daydreams I had imagined her to be willing yet self-possessed, while I’d be my usual self, taking what I wanted and enjoying the scenery as I went along—“masterful” was the word I chose when thinking about this sort of pastime, but suddenly I found out that this was no pastime and I was no master. Sarah wasn’t self-possessed, nor was she even willing, for that drunken pervert of a husband of hers had given her such a low opinion of herself that she was scared to death of yielding to me, and when I saw she was scared I was scared too. I thought: Holy Mary, if I hurt her everything’ll be finished. Please, God, don’t let me hurt her, and so it was a terrible state I was in because Sarah was such a lady, so delicate and fragile, and I felt as rough and clumsy as if I truly were no better than the poorest peasant in the valley.

Then she put it all right. She said, “I love you. I’ll never want anyone else,” and when I looked at her I no longer saw a fragile lady because I knew she no longer looked at me and saw a peasant. There was no disdain, no contempt. Her consuming worry was not whether I was good enough for her but whether she was good enough for me, and after that gentleness came easy and tenderness too and it was all very different from any experience I’d had before.

Long afterward when we could speak again she said, “I feel quite a different person,” and I said I did too. I felt as if I’d stepped out of one world into another, and as I looked at her again I thought, With this woman there’d be nothing I couldn’t achieve. That was when I stopped thinking of a future without her.

“Come with me now,” I said to her. “We’ll go together to America.” But she shook her head stubbornly and said she had to wait until she could arrange for the children to come with her. She had a plan, she said, and she must stick to the plan or all would be lost. She’d been working toward it for such a long time and she couldn’t give it up now. “But I want more than anything to go with you,” she said, crying, and that was when I made love to her again, not quite so gently this time, and when she answered me I had a tantalizing glimpse of what our nights were going to be like when she was living with me as my wife.

But that time was far off. It was nearly a year before I saw her again, eleven months of homesickness, misery and despair for me and for Sarah eleven months of endless machinations, plotting and intrigue.

The Greeks had a word for it. Nemesis. My master at the hedge school said it meant evil and bad luck and a malignant fate all rolled into one, and I never forgot that, because when I first clashed with Hugh MacGowan that was the first word that flashed into my head.

MacGowan was a small man with big ideas. I don’t mean he was physically small. He was no dwarf, but he had a small, tight-fisted mind with a bunch of small, stunted passions to match. Only his ambition and greed were on a grand scale, and since they were continually gratified by his employer they were continually growing. But I stood in his way. It was a time of awakening in Ireland, the dawn of a day that belonged to Charles Stewart Parnell, and we’d all of us had more than enough of Black Protestant agents like Hugh MacGowan. Offer your landlord only as much rent as you consider fair and just, said Parnell, and if he refuses that give him nothing. Well, we offered and were refused, so whose fault was it that trouble came to the valley? We were only being fair and reasonable. It was MacGowan and his greed who were to blame for his near lynching, and I blamed none other than MacGowan when I was falsely arrested, tried before a packed Saxon jury and tossed into jail.

Of course Eileen thought I was a fool for bringing so much trouble on us. “You have your leasehold,” she said. “You’re secure here on this land till nineteen hundred, and all you have to pay is the ground rent. Why must you mix yourself up in these fights and bring us all to ruin?” Well, there was a time in jail when my spirits were at their lowest ebb and I thought she might have been right, but she wasn’t, I can see that now. It wasn’t just that I had a moral duty to stand beside my O’Malley kinsmen, who were all in trouble, though that was part of it. It was because Parnell was talking to all Irishmen everywhere, the secure ones like myself and the insecure ones like my cousins who were dependent entirely on the good will of the landlord. “Stand up and unite!” said Parnell, and what sort of an Irishman would I have been if I had stood by and never lifted a finger to help my kin when MacGowan was extorting every penny they possessed and pulling down their cabins until they were homeless as well as destitute?

MacGowan said there was a new act of Parliament that allowed us to go to court and protest if we didn’t like his rents—but what use were courts to us? The courts were run by Saxons, any fool knew that, and the Saxons would be sure to side with Lord de Salis and his agent. Besides, when you’re desperate and the agent’s on your doorstep with the wreckers, there’s no time to go begging to fancy lawyers and their fancy courts of law. Parnell knew that. That was why he threatened to test the act by bringing some sample cases before the courts; he knew the act was just a piece of Saxon deception. Parnell was a great man, even in those days back in the early Eighties. Get out of our land, he said to the Saxons, and let us govern ourselves by a Parliament of our own in Dublin, for we’ll get no justice while we’re subjected to your rule of tyranny from Westminster.

You’d think MacGowan, a Scot, would know all about the tyranny of the English, but he was the type who has given the Scots a bad name in Ireland. He’d have sold his grandmother if there was profit in it. All he thought about was money, even if he had to spend his life fawning at Saxon feet to get it.

MacGowan, my enemy, my nemesis—and Sarah’s nemesis too, the man who ruled Cashelmara and kept her from me for all those months after I had escaped to America. I didn’t know then how far he had terrorized her since he had begun to rule the roost; if I’d known I would never have let her go back to that house.

But she went back and I went to America, days and days at sea on a boat as crowded as Noah’s Ark. Being a fugitive, I couldn’t afford to call attention to myself by traveling as a steerage passenger on a decent boat, and when I returned to Galway after seeing Sarah my friends in the Claddagh had arranged for me to be taken to Queenstown and smuggled on board a terrible old tub. Jesus, after only a week at sea I felt so dirty and starved and sick to my stomach that I was afraid I’d die before I saw land again! But I didn’t die, and when I was on dry land at last at Castle Garden and they threatened me with the immigrant hospital, I at once felt miraculously better. I knew all about hospitals. Hospitals were where you caught fever and died. So I wheedled my way out of Castle Garden, fobbed off all the tricksters who gathered to fleece the newcomers, shoved aside the bummers shrieking for charity and somehow found a flophouse where I could lie down until I felt better.

Three times I nearly had my money stolen while I slept. I’ve never known such a place as New York for thievery and wickedness; it was worse even than Dublin. But I held onto my money (and there wasn’t much of it left), and when I felt recovered I bought some new clothes and a bar of soap and some powder for the vermin and headed for the nearest bath. My money was nearly gone, but there was just enough afterward for a visit to the barber. It was either that or a square meal, but I’d been hungry so long I thought I could stay hungry a little longer, and I knew how important it was that I shouldn’t turn up at Sarah’s old home looking like any other poor Irish immigrant just off the boat from the Old World.

Sarah had given me a letter for her brother, and as soon as I had made myself presentable I walked up Manhattan Island to Fifth Avenue to pay him a call.

Uptown New York! I could feel my eyes getting wider and wider because it was all so grand—not as grand as Dublin, of course; I wouldn’t want to exaggerate. But everything was so big. Why, the race-track field at Letterturk would have fitted three times into Washington Square! And the houses! Jesus, what palaces! All the way up, side by side, were these magnificent mansions, all of them as big as Cashelmara and some even bigger. It was such a state I was in that I didn’t even feel my wallet being lifted—but that didn’t matter anyway since the wallet was empty. I walked on and on, staring so hard I swear I forgot to blink, and everywhere there were enormous carriages and beautiful horses and even the sidewalks looked as though they were fit for ladies in gold slippers. Now, I never liked New York, but Holy Mother of God, if I’d had the chance to live uptown maybe I’d be thinking it was a fine place after all. I’m sure Charles Marriott thought so when he returned each day from Wall Street to his fairy-tale home on Fifth Avenue.