Country Girl: A Memoir (16 page)

Joyce was constantly spoken of in these circles, and not always favorably. Granted he had his epiphanies, but his work was full of smut and he had looked through a “gloss” darkly. Moreover, a lot of his stuff was shamelessly cogged from
Thom’s Street Directory.
Myles, when asked if he resembled Joyce, would say “that nothing could be further from Detroit,” and that
Finnegans Wake
was a “wallet of literary underwear.” That book, along with
Gone with the Wind,
were the two that he started five times and couldn’t finish. His harshest gibes, however, were for the Prairie professors, Americans, talking through their “caubs” and descending on Dublin to write their theses on Herr Joyce, comparing the key motif in the Ithaca section with the door lock at No. 7 Eccles Street, in homage to Mr. and Mrs. Bloom.

I went for the first time to the Abbey Theatre with Paschal, the retired guard, and stood in the lobby, giddy at the thought that Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge had once stood in that same place. The play was
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
by Yeats, and Siobhán
McKenna played Cathleen, the lamenting woman, the embodiment of Ireland, who was recruiting young men to fight for her cause. It was mesmerizing. I decided, there and then, to forsake the path of writing for that of the stage and remembered my wan attempt to join the Travelling Company, which had played
Dracula.
But now I was more determined.

Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir ran the Gate Theatre and were two of the most scandalous figures in Dublin. I had not seen them onstage, but I had the good luck to be at a bus stop once, where, to everyone’s amazement, Michael joined the queue. He was like a demigod, in a voluminous cloak, fully made up, and wearing an auburn wig, exuding an air of theatricality and replying in a velvety voice to a woman who was showering him with compliments. By what devious means I got his home address, I cannot recall, but I still have the postcard telling me that I may come to No. 4 Harcourt Terrace at 11:30 a.m. on a particular Sunday.

Theirs would be the first theatrical house I ever set foot in. It was exotic. A red chaise longue, the dark violet wallpaper with a tracery of plumage, framed posters and photographs of the two actors in their various costumes, their eyes evil and dark as molasses, their eyebrows roguish. No matter where I walked in that room, Michael MacLiammoir’s eyes followed me from every conceivable corner. I was jittery. In he swept, again fully made up and wearing a flowered silk kimono, which went just below his knees, the serge of the trousers prosaic by contrast.

The lines I had chosen were that of the old woman in
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
who went from house to house, recruiting young men to die for Ireland, lines that Siobhán McKenna had spoken with such conviction and such feeling:

Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent
to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name.

I murdered those lines. It would not have been surprising, what with my untoward and reckless gesturing, to see pictures slide off the walls or decanters wobble on the silver trays on which they stood. He endured most of it and then, with a staying hand and a surprising gentleness, said that he believed I was descended from one of the great, ancient Galway tribes and, excusing himself, hoped that I would be able to find my way out.

Coming out into the daylight, I felt crushed, believing that life was a gray road, an unending literary limbo, where I would never reach the Parnassian heights that, in daftness, I had aspired to.

Because of spouting bits of poetry, I came to be named “The Literary Bessie Bunter.” It was a journalist at the radio station, whose pet name was Bunny, who christened me so. I had met him the day I did my first-ever broadcast. It was on Saint Bridget, patron of country women and of butter, whose feast day fell on February 2. “The Literary Bessie Bunter.” It is how I would have been described to the man I would marry, although marriage did not feature in my ruminations.

After Peter Abelard I had taken a vow of chastity, but nevertheless I had a few lackluster dates, one with a man who delivered bread and cakes down the country and who would walk me the three miles from the Crystal Ballroom in South Anne Street to the digs in North Circular Road, just by Phoenix Park. There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps. Another time, in a hotel in Kilkenny, a gamey, curly-haired rogue who had plied me with champagne took me upstairs and into the one bedroom that was unlocked, where providentially a housekeeper stormed in, arms akimbo, and shouted, “A bishop slept in this room last night and ye want to defile it,” at which he scooted.

It was December when our landlady called me to the pay phone in the hall. It was Bunny ringing to invite me to have a drink with an author who had had a film made of his book
The Plymouth Adventure,
starring Spencer Tracy. Would I join them? To smarten my appearance, I took a red muff, which my sister had borrowed from a wealthy woman, knowing it would liven
the drabness of my black coat (the tweed one long since discarded). This black coat was going green and had moth holes.

In Lake Park, County Wicklow, 1952.

When I came into the crowded pub in Henry Street, Bunny greeted me effusively, as if I were an old flame. There was Ernest Gébler, handsome beyond words, sallow-faced, with dark brown eyes and granite features. I had seen a picture of a German actor, Conrad Veidt, and saw a resemblance in this man, whose voice was so hypnotic that others deferred to him, as did I. He spoke of his trips to Hollywood, of which he was scathing, and a play that he was meant to have had produced in New York, starring Sam Wanamaker, except that producers and producers’ wives had argued interminably over it and the project was scrapped. He was so cosmopolitan and so cultured. He spoke of James Joyce with familiarity and referred to Leopold Bloom as Poldy. I was elated. By chance we discovered we
had something in common. I mixed two stomach medicines each week for a German man, in long black overcoat and black Homburg hat, who spoke with a European accent. It happened that it was Adolf, his father.

Next day was my birthday, which he must have overheard me mentioning to one of the group. To my astonishment, after I had shut the shop for the lunch hour, I found him tapping on the window for me to come outside. In his sports car we drove to a shop in Grafton Street, and there I acquired a coat that surpassed anything my mother or her friends, the beautiful Gavin girls, or the doctor’s wife, had ever worn. It was gray astrakhan, with a red velvet collar, and it fitted like a glove. Already I was saying adieu to The Literary Bessie Bunter.

On that spring day when I first visited his house in County Wicklow, the gorse was just coming into bloom with the daffodil flowers, buds in tapers of folded green under the trees, up along a winding avenue. He drove slowly, for me to be able to see everything, and he was proud at showing me these things, and even in those early days, though half in jest, he referred to me as his “child bride.” The house, a shooting lodge, was not so very imposing, painted white and set down in a hollow with youngish woodland behind it; he told me there was a lady’s garden and a rose garden. It was called Lake Park, though it did not overlook the lake, which was about a mile down a twisted track. In the fields all around I could hear the bleating of sheep, and standing on the front steps, I saw a second valley where he said a bohemian poet, who had poisoned one of his many wives, also lived. They had not yet met, and I got the feeling that he kept mostly to himself.

His housekeeper, Nancy, opened the hall door, sleeves rolled up, her arms strong and pink. She scolded him for not having
come the two days previous as he said he would and, taking one look at me, believed that I was the reason for it. As a peace offering, he handed her a brown glazed coffeepot that he had bought in Bewley’s in Grafton Street and the choice things from a delicatessen, for our supper, which she looked at and then snorted.

As I waited alone in the sitting room, I looked at the portrait of him hanging on the wall. It was in green, his skin a sickly greenish hue and his eyes with a livid light in them, as if the painter had not liked him. It was a darkish room, the walls painted oxblood red, and the half-drawn brown shutters obscured most of the daylight.

How could I have known that in six weeks, I, the future “child bride,” would be living there, wandering through those unfamiliar rooms, yet not mistress of the house, because he was still married to a wife who had returned to America with their son? I would be living there, going from room to room, a little lost and out of my depth, and curious about the life and the love that happened in it before I came.

It had all been so precipitate, too precipitate, and I thought that it would take months, if not years, for us to come to know one another. I missed the life in Dublin, the customers, the Saturday evenings, tearing to get to a shop to buy something, to buy anything, because ironically, two months before I met him, I had qualified as a pharmacist and was promoted to a salary of three pounds ten shillings per week. I missed hearing the latest from Rory about the literati and the woman, a dazzling American, who had breached their poetic circle and who, because of the color of her hair, was called Marmalade. Although he was a writer, Ernest was an outsider in these circles, his one friend being J. P. Donleavy, who had written a novel of bohemian Dublin, not yet published, but rumored to be a sizzler.

It so happened that I had run from the chemist’s shop, still in
my white coat, run from the family who were coming to bring me back home and, as I had overheard in the conversation between my boss and his wife, if necessary, to put me away. The “putting away” meant nothing other than the lunatic asylum, and I had a momentary image of Mad Mabel. They had learned of my transgressions, my sinful life with this evil stranger, and the two weekends alone with him in his country seat. It was an anonymous letter, left on the saddle of my mother’s bicycle as she came out of morning Mass. Someone who knew me well had betrayed me, and that someone had carved the future path of my life.

There was consternation in the chemist’s shop the morning the news came, what with the boss ringing around to find a locum to replace me, and his wife in high dudgeon because my mother had telephoned him and not her. I resolved to do the only thing I could do, which was to bolt. The chance came when they repaired upstairs to have their lunch and I, as usual, passed in and out through the kitchen and down the back garden to the shed, where the stocks of medicine were kept in Winchesters, to fill the smaller eight-ounce medicine bottles. Making my escape into a back alley, I ran the length of the parade and then came out onto the main road much farther up, and so as not to be too noticeable, I took off the white coat and carried it on my arm. A bus for County Wicklow left St. Stephen’s Green each evening at seven, and I waited under cover of trees, not knowing what the welcome might be when I arrived at the shooting lodge.