Habit of Fear (18 page)

“I think I have, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”

As they moved away, the gray man turned to watch them again.

“Shall we pack it in?” Irwin asked.

As soon as they left the floor, the band switched back to rock. Julie went on to the ladies’ room. When she came out, Sean was waiting for her a polite distance from the door. The gray man was not in sight. Julie asked Sean if he had noticed him.

“I think he cut out,” Sean said. “Is he a friend or foe? He asked my chum if he knew who the man with the black beard was, the one dancing with you. That’s what made me think.”

“And what did your chum tell him?”

“He asked around. Somebody said he worked for a newspaper—maybe from Belfast or Derry. From the north anyway.”

Which was more than Julie knew of Irwin. She had noticed a difference in his accent from those with which she was becoming slightly more familiar. “How about the man who asked? Did any of you know him?”

“Wouldn’t seem like. When he left, everybody gawked and shrugged—you know, ‘Who’s he?’”

I
T WAS AFTER TWELVE
when Julie got back to the hotel. A different clerk was on duty. No one had inquired after her to his knowledge. She and Irwin had decided that the “gray man” had not gone to the bar. He’d gone outdoors and waited in a car and, after the Irwins picked her up, had followed them to the dance. There was still a question between them about its being the same man, and as soon as Julie told Irwin that the gray one had asked the boys about him, Irwin was sure it was he, not Julie, the man was interested in. “You’re not just saying that, Roy?” She’d been much relieved. “You’d better believe I’m not. I’m no bleeding knight in armor.”

The hotel was quiet, and the night clerk took her upstairs in the elevator, leaving the lobby unattended. Security was not a strong point with the Greer Hotel. Julie asked him to wait until she had opened her room door. The man blocked the elevator gate and went to her door with her. “You Americans are a careful sort these days. I don’t wonder with what’s going on in the world, but I wouldn’t like to live that way myself, being fearful all the time.”

“It’s a bad habit,” Julie said.

J
ULIE WAS THE ONLY
passenger to leave the bus at the first Wicklow stop. A woman boarded there, first handing up a basket with the yellow claw of a dead chicken poking out from under the lid. “It’s a soft morning, by the grace of God,” she said, stepping up as Julie stepped down.

The bus driver revved his motor and took off into the town. Julie waited until the lone car on the road behind him passed and then crossed over and lingered briefly in the arcade over the entrance to the Grand Hotel. She could see no sign of guests within the hotel or, for that matter, of service personnel. The softness of the day was owing to a fine mist and perhaps to the Sunday stillness everywhere except at the corner pub. She could hear the rumble of voices when she passed, but the heavy three-quarter curtains cut off any interior view she might have had. Farm trucks were among the few cars in the courtyard behind the pub, and she caught a smell familiar to her only from the bridle path in Central Park. A road sign in both English and Gaelic told her she had a half-mile walk up the hill to Saint Patrick’s church. The pub voices fell away as she started up the hill, and the quiet that then prevailed seemed to isolate her. Her sleep had been troubled, and the noise of the disco pounded in her head. She had resolved long before dawn not to watch for the Gray Man, but she found herself watching for him all the same.

At an abrupt turn in the road she saw the towering neo-Gothic church high on the hill and stark against a changing sky. The air cleared as if by magic, and by the time she reached the church gates, there was not a trace of moisture on the flagstone walk. The view from the steps when she looked back was a vast panorama of tawny hills and green wooded slopes dotted with white cottages and sheep, and with silver splashes of lakes and forking rivers; at the land’s edge a far-stretching gold crescent of sand bordered the dark waters of the Irish Sea. The clouds were breaking apart and casting great shadows. Within the church a thin chorus of voices tried to hold the melody of an old hymn against the tumult of the pipe organ. She had made it before the end of noon Mass.

Miss Redmond, an ample woman of fifty or thereabouts, the parish bookkeeper as well as the clerk of records, finished her accounting of the Sunday collections and took Julie into an office in the parish house. With remarkable good cheer, considering the hour and the smell of roast beef permeating the whole rectory, she got out the registry of baptisms that included the year 1934. She told Julie while paging through it of all the people who consulted her for information of this one and that one, most of them long dead and forgotten. Julie observed among the popes and prelates on the office walls an autographed picture of President John F. Kennedy.

“Ah, now here he is,” the woman said, “Thomas Francis Mooney. Born October ten, christened October twenty …” Her voice faded out as she read ahead. Then she explained, “I was trying to remember, that’s all.” She read aloud the names of parents and sponsors, the officiating cleric and the certifying officer, pausing to let Julie write them down. The mother’s maiden name was Crowley. Something in the bare-bones record had given Miss Redmond pause, Julie thought. It almost had to be a name.

She asked outright: “Do you know any of these people, Miss Redmond?”

“There’s a Crowley in town, and that’s it. He lives with his daughter-in-law and her child. The house is on Strand Street near the quay. You’ll know it by its green shutters and a geranium in the window. There’s been a lot of dying in the family, but I’m sure you’ll be welcome by them that’s left.” She flashed Julie a smile that seemed to belie the welcome she promised on behalf of the Crowleys.

Daughter-in-law and child, Julie thought, going down the hill into the town. Another fatherless child like myself?

T
HE OLD MAN SAT DOWN
carefully beside her, his hands on his knees. She paid attention to the hands, thinking she might be able to judge his age by them or to learn whether he worked with them or with his head. They were clean and scant of hair, the backs speckled with brown; the fingers, while not stubby, were almost square at the tips. The nails fascinated her; they seemed—the whole hands seemed—familiar, and suddenly she knew why. They were aging replicas of her own. The squared fingertips, the proportion of the nails to the length of the fingers, their shapes at the crest of cuticle, even the difference in the size of their little fingernails, that of the left hand smaller, could be attributed, she felt sure, to a common lineage.

“Look,” Julie said and put out her hands alongside his. She was not wearing polish; she rarely did.

He leaned forward to see better and caught on at once, looking from her hands to his and back to her own. He touched the little finger of her left hand, then looked at his and said in amazement, “What do you know about that?” To the chubby woman on her knees in front of them trying to quicken the turf fire, he said, “Emily, get up and look at this miracle of reproduction.” He smiled at Julie, a smile that sent the lines scurrying between his bright gray eyes and the corners of his mouth. “We must be kin truly, wouldn’t you say?”

She agreed, aware of her heartbeat and feeling ridiculously and unexpectedly happy.

“I said to myself when she opened the door to you,” he went on, “‘There stands a woman I’d love to see come into the house.’”

Emily looked around at him as though surprised. Or hurt. A burst of flame caught at the turf. She turned back and fanned it vigorously. Whereupon it vanished.

“Will you let the fire be? It’ll come sooner without your ministrations.”

He had been very handsome once, Julie thought; he was handsome still, a fine, long nose that had kept its shape and a large, sensual mouth. A wisp of his thin gray hair hung rakishly over his forehead.

Emily’s bones cracked as she got to her feet. She was less agile than her father-in-law. “What is it you’re looking at?”

“Our hands, our hands,” the old man said. He and Julie, side by side, held them out before her.

She looked puzzled, “What about them?”

“They’re out of the same cast. Have you no eyes in your head?”

Emily looked at her own plump hands, turning them over and back. They were quite different from theirs and showed the stains of cooking and scrub work. She hid them away under her apron and said, “I’d best put on the water for tea.” She was round of face as well as body, her blue eyes more wondering than intelligent—a sweet, placid face that Julie would not have thought Irish at all. Flemish, perhaps, to be painted by a van Eyck—resignation with just the trace of puzzlement at how she had become pregnant without ever having felt the presence in her of the Holy Ghost. Julie would have liked to stretch out her hand to her, but she feared the familiarity might put the woman off.

“Now who was your mother?” the old man asked Julie. “An American, of course.”

“Her name was Katherine Richards.”

“And Hayes: where does that come in?”

“My married name.”

His eyes darted to her bare ring finger.

“We are separated.”

He made a sound that suggested he had thought as much. “My son went off and left this one to me, an act of generosity I don’t think was in his calculations. We always called your father Frank, by the way. There was another Tom in the family then, my oldest son. Frank was back, you know, years ago. But only the once to my knowledge.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

The old man shook his head. “It was a while before his mother died that he was here. …” He looked to where his daughter-in-law was now building up the fire of coals in the kitchen range. “Emily, come and sit with us. We can wait our tea. You’ll cook us a meal later, love.” He explained to Julie, “She’ll be the one to remember him. She was greatly taken.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Emily protested. She filled the kettle from the single tap in the sink and put it on the stove and then brought a chair from the side of the table. Julie, moving to make room for her, caught sight of a child sitting at the top of the stairs that rose steeply opposite the cottage door. Her mother saw her too. “Go back to your lessons, Mary, if you want Papa-John to go over them.”

“Let her come down and meet Julie.”

“She won’t go back up if you let her down, and she’ll make a nuisance of herself, butting in.” But then to the child, who was bound to have heard what went before, “Papa-John says you can come down.”

But the child chose to stay upstairs. She was not in sight when Julie glanced that way again. There were two rooms downstairs, a small bedroom with a commode off it on the far side of the staircase, and one room upstairs, she presumed, with a very low ceiling. The light was good; Emily had gone from lamp to lamp turning them on when Julie came into the house.

“Isn’t she contrary?” her mother said of the child.

“As a cow’s hind leg. Let her be,” the old man said. “It was before the mill closed that Frank was here, and that was eleven years next spring. I remember I stopped by my sister Mary’s house—the child’s named after her—I’d come home those days covered with flour like a wafting ghost, and the woman with him burst out laughing at me. Do you remember her name, Emily?”

Emily shook her head. “Only her face.”

“She was Irish. I know that. Or was she a Brit? A fine-looking woman. They were going to marry, I think. Or were they already married? They were, sure, for Mary came over here and stayed with us, leaving them her bed and the key to the cottage. She’d let out the other rooms after all her men were gone, you see.”

Julie learned that she had two uncles, one of whom was in Australia and one who’d been killed on duty with the Irish Army on a United Nations mission. “My father went to Australia when he left New York,” she said.

“I heard about that, but nothing I remember about you or your mother. Isn’t that strange?”

“Not so strange. It was all a mistake. The marriage was annulled.”

The old man thought about that for a moment. He reached over and laid his hand on hers. “You can’t annul blood. The Crowley line is as strong in you as it is in me. We’re workers and have the hands for it. The Mooneys lived by the sea, fisherman and sailors, all of them dreamers. And the military went a long way back with them. There were Mooneys in Napoleon’s army, and some that came home with the French to be hanged like dogs in 1798.”

“Wild Geese,” Julie said. “My father wrote a poem about them.”

“He was a great reader as a boy, I remember—as we are ourselves in this house.” An exchange of glances between him and Emily puzzled Julie. It was both shy and intimate, and yet it did not exclude her. “We read a book a week from the lending library, taking turns aloud. Little Mary says it’s better than the telly, but that’s because she’s our principal performer. Would you like a walk on the ramparts where Frank played as a lad? I’ll give you the true history. The kids never got it straight, pretending to fight off an English invasion. The Brits were already there, mounting a vigil for the French in three directions and for the Irish at their backs.”

Frank hadn’t gotten it straight in the poem either, Julie thought, but she didn’t say so.

T
HEY WALKED ALONG
the strand and then climbed up to the castle ruins, where three ancient cannon still pointed out to sea. The old man was nimble and sometimes took her hand more to have it in his than to help her over the rough terrain. He made up family history when he wasn’t able to remember it, she thought. It didn’t matter: she had grown up on lies, but with enough of the truth to have brought her to where she was now.

They stopped at a pub on Market Street near the 1798 memorial, where he introduced her as Frank Mooney’s daughter. It sounded strange to her and perhaps to the old man’s familiars also, for it set them sorting among the Mooneys they could remember; the one firm in their minds was the soldier killed in Palestine. And they were shy of her, the only woman in the lounge. They smelled of the farm and stayed close to the bar except when the old man called one or another of them to come over and meet his grandniece. They shuffled forward when invited and scuttled back as soon as possible.