Legacy of Secrets (60 page)

“Sure and it was. That and the fact that I promised to fight for better working conditions and shorter hours and higher wages, and because I helped people out with their problems and their kids. You’ve not heard of the Dan O’Keeffe Summer Camp then? It gives poor children who live in the slums, the way I did myself, a couple of weeks of fresh country air and good food. I support it mostly myself and I raise the extra from other Irishmen who have been lucky enough to come to America and make their fortunes. In a way,” he said, leveling a glance at her that left no doubt he considered himself her equal, “in a way, I have a lot to thank you for.”

She remembered Finn saying the same thing and she said, flustered, “It sounds like a very worthy cause.”

“Sure and now you have a son of your own you’ll know what it means to be a mother, to be able to bring him up properly, and to give him the good things in life.”

Her chin shot up and she glared at him, waiting for him
to say it. To say that he had come here because Finn wanted forgiveness, and he wanted his son.

Dan hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “The other child, Lady Lily,” he said delicately, “was it … ?”

“Dead,” she lied quickly, turning her face away and blushing.

“I’m sorry, though I daresay you were not. And of course it was no child of my brother’s.”

“No,” she said bitterly. “It was not.” He still had not gotten to the point of his visit and she said abruptly, “Why are you here, Dan? What do you want from me?”

“The truth is, I wanted to see you again. I’ve never forgotten you, and I forgave you years ago for any injustice you did to me. After all, look at me now.” He laughed a big, booming, jolly laugh that filled the room and she laughed, too, in relief.

“But I won’t be keeping you now, Lady Lily, for I can see I’m interrupting your peaceful evening. And it’s so soon after … afterward. Only tell me that I can come and visit you again, and I shall leave a happy man.” He took her hands in his big paws again and beamed at her, and despite herself Lily found herself smiling back at him. She wasn’t sure whether she was inviting trouble in by the door, but she found herself saying yes, of course she would like to see him again. She thought of Finn and added quickly, “But as I’m in mourning and not really supposed to be receiving visitors, it must be our little secret. Promise you won’t tell a soul.”

“Not a single soul,” he said, putting his finger to his lips to seal them, and she smiled.

When he had gone she sat in front of the fire again, wondering whether she had finally gone out of her mind. She had agreed to see Dan O’Keeffe. She, his brother’s ex-mistress with his brother’s son asleep in the crib upstairs in the nursery. She stared into the flames, a dozen different thoughts and ideas flying through her mind about Finn and Dan, but none of them made any sense and she went tiredly to feed her son, and then to her lonely bed.

D
AN WENT HOME TO HIS TWO ROOMS
over the shop that night a happy man. He looked around him at the cheap, garish rugs and the ugly secondhand bits of furniture, amazed that somehow he had never noticed before how small and shabby it was. And how poor, compared with Lily’s grandeur, and his own brother’s. He told himself it was no place for a man in his position to be living, and it was certainly no place for a man like him to entertain a lady.

Early the next morning he went out to buy himself a home. He wanted it immediately and he wanted it complete with furniture and staffed with servants, to whom, of course, he would pay more than the minimum wage and who, he would make sure, worked only the hours prescribed by the new laws he himself had helped legislate.

It was more difficult than he thought: Irishmen, and especially nouveau riche Irishmen, were looked upon with disfavor by the upper-crust residents of the smarter areas of Boston, and even more so when they were also politicians. And Democrats. Lily had married into Beacon Hill and Finn had inherited his way in, but there was no way Dan could buy his way into it.

Back Bay was a possibility, they told him, and by the end of the day he had purchased a newly built redbrick house on a pleasant tree-shaded street. It had six bedrooms and he thought that would be plenty to accommodate his future children. He paid the large amount demanded in cash and hired someone to fix it up with the proper sort of curtains and antiques. “And make sure it’s in good taste,” he told them, though he wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. He just knew he wanted it.

He went to see Lily again that evening and he told her about his new purchase and his instructions to the decorator, and she eagerly offered to help him. “That’ll be just grand,” he said, pleased. “And it’ll maybe get you out of the house a bit. There’s too much sadness in here, too many memories.” And besides, he told himself happily, it
meant now he had an excuse to call on her whenever he was in Boston.

Dan had never allowed himself to think there was ever the smallest chance with Lily, first because she was unattainable, and second, she had always belonged to Finn. Now he was a rich man. Now he was “somebody,” and she was a widow with a child who badly needed a father. She was alone and vulnerable, and he was head over heels in love with her. He always had been.

He thought, happily, they were a long way from Ardnavarna. Lily had come down in the world and he had come up and now they were equals. And one day, strange as it seemed, he intended to ask Lady Lily to become Mrs. Daniel O’Keeffe.

W
E WERE SITTING HALFWAY UP
a hill looking out over the flat brown peat bogs to the Atlantic Ocean. An icy stream fell from some unseen point far above, tumbling past us down the hill, carving its way through piled-up rocks to join a confluence of similar baby streams in a rushing peaty-brown little river that ran parallel with the road below.

Shannon was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, gazing at the sky—blue today and dotted with puffs of cotton-wool clouds, tinged with gray at the edges, promising showers later. Eddie was lying next to her, propped on one arm, watching her, and I daresay he could see as many fleeting expressions on her pretty young face as she could see cloud changes in the sky. The dogs were circling around, enjoying the sunshine and sniffing exciting rabbit scents, and they were the only ones of us who did not appear sad.

I felt sad today, thinking of Mammie and Lily and what was to come, and I told myself briskly it was only a touch of the melancholy, a disease we Irish are prone to. George Bernard Shaw understood it, and I quoted from his play
John Bull’s Other Island
to them.

I said, “Ciel often used to come to this place after William died, when she was left to look after Pa. And years later she brought me here to tell me about it. She said that she would come here to be alone. There would be nothing but the sky and the wind, and the occasional cry of the gulls in the distance and the flutter of a hawk overhead, and she would know she was trapped. Trapped by Pa, trapped by Ardnavarna and all its memories, and trapped by her own melancholy.

“She would gaze at the peaty bogs, the white springy roads, the misty rushes, dreaming and dreaming, just the way Shaw said. Of escape.

“And; as if to emphasize her solitude, Lily’s letters were so exciting. First they had been full of Finn, how she had met him by chance, how he had come up in the world and that now he was her neighbor. And after that the baby and the terrible news that John was dead. And then Dan O’Keeffe, who was ‘as handsome and charming as can be,’ had come calling.”

The next thing Ciel knew Lily had married him. She said she had closed up the house on Mount Vernon Street, “with all its sad memories,” and she and the baby had moved into Dan’s new home in Back Bay.

After that, she said little about Dan in her letters; they were all about her son, Liam. She said he was a beautiful boy with hair as black as her own, but that he was delicate and she worried about him in Boston’s icy winters.

But Ciel didn’t have much time to contemplate her sister’s strange marriage, because Pa was becoming increasingly fragile. He hated to let her out of his sight even for a minute. “Where are you going?” he would demand loudly whenever she got up to fetch a book, or to walk the dogs, or to exercise the horses. “Make sure you hurry,” he would call anxiously after her.

He depended on her completely: it was her shoulder he leaned on now instead of his stick; her eyes he used to read the
Times
to him every morning; her young legs that raced to fetch his forgotten spectacles, or his book, or his lemonade to be sipped in the shade of a tree on a fine hot afternoon. He had dismissed the butler, saying there was no need for the man because he did not intend to do any more entertaining, and so now it was Ciel who decanted his port and placed it on the little round Italian marquetry table by his chair in front of the study fire of a cold, dark evening, and afterward she would read to him.

She was twenty-one years old. She had many friends, but she never invited them to Ardnavarna now, with Pa the way he was. She was held fast at her father’s side by invisible bonds of love and loyalty, and his fears and selfishness.

But despite his fragility Lord Molyneux had no intention of dying. One spring day he got up from his chair and said firmly, “I’m tired of Ardnavarna. I need a change. Have our bags packed, Ciel. We are going to London.”

The long-neglected but still-sumptuous town house in Belgrave Square was swept and dusted and refurbished for their return, and then Pa took off for his club. He ordered new spectacles and began to read his own newspapers again; he ate lunch at the club promptly at one and then he played bridge all afternoon. He would have drinks there with his old cronies before dinner, which he always ate alone at his own special table at the club, by the window overlooking Green Park, and then, leaning on his blackthorn cane, he would hobble around the corner to a private gaming house where he would lose consistently at cards.

While Pa gambled away a great deal of his money, Ciel spent it. She threw parties and gave dinners, spending lavish amounts in the true Molyneux tradition of giving their guests only the best. Of course, it was a scandal that she was never chaperoned, but with Lily’s disgrace embedded in her memory she always behaved herself, even though she was as bad a flirt as her notorious sister.

She was what the French call
jolie-laide,
a girl who was not pretty but who nevertheless was attractive. She had spirit and a joyfulness about her that attracted people to her. She had a good figure and dressed extravagantly, if not exactly in good taste. She had style; she was witty and amusing and fun to be with. She was never short of suitors, but she still hadn’t met one she could think of spending the rest of her life with. Whenever Pa asked about them, looking hopefully at her and thinking of a grandson to carry on his name, she would complain that one was “too bookish,” another “too horsey;” or one would be “too old,” another “too young.”