Of Irish Blood (20 page)

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Grace flows; it doesn’t drip-and-drop.”

And I do feel an ease, as if I’d been keeping my body clenched and could now let go. I start laughing and can’t stop. Father Kevin joins me. When Peter comes up, he looks at us as if we’d lost our minds.

“Sit down, lad,” Father Kevin says. “This friend of yours from Chicago has a fair way of listening to a yarn.”

“Is that right?” Peter says. “I didn’t know.”

“And a great benefactor of the college,” Father Kevin says. “She wondered would you help her out with a bit of guiding and I said of course you would. Not putting words in your mouth, I hope.”

“Peter,” I say, “I would so appreciate your help.”

“Ah, the Lord loves a cheerful giver,” Father Kevin says. “Now, let me tell you the one about the Cavan man borrowed a bull to service his cows. Weeks went by. Finally the owner went looking for his animal only to find the bull pulling a plow through the field and the Cavan man urging him on with a whip. ‘I’ll teach you there’s more to life than romance!’” Father Kevin is laughing before he’s finished the joke.

Peter looks at me, shrugs, and laughs too. So do I. Couldn’t resist the joy Father Kevin took in his own humor.

My spirit lightens.
Ego te absolvo.
Words offered by this cheerful little priest. As he said, “We’re Catholic to our bones.” I am restored. A good woman again. Not an
irrégulier
.

Father Kevin and Peter are talking about Arthur Capel and Gabrielle Chanel.

“Capel told me she was brought up in an orphanage. Kind enough women, the nuns, but I’m sure the life in an institution’s not easy for a child,” Father Kevin says.

“Not easy for anyone,” I say, and then realize that the Irish College itself is an institution. All right for Father Kevin and the other priests, I think. But doesn’t Peter want a real home?

“And I doubt if Capel will ever marry Mademoiselle,” Father Kevin says. “When the time comes, he’ll choose the daughter of an English nobleman, put his Irish heritage aside once and for all.”

“Who would ever choose not to be Irish?” I say. “In Chicago we brag about our Irish roots. I’m one hundred percent.”

Suddenly I want to assert my claim to all of this heritage.

“England’s a long way from Chicago,” Father Kevin says.

Peter nods. “And this fantasy about a noble ancestor fighting with King James in Ireland. He got hold of the story of Fitzgerald, who was with James and did save
The Great Book of Lecan
when the library at Trinity College was attacked. He brought it here. Capel has turned the incident into a family history.”

“Sounds like Monsignor Thomas,” Father Kevin says.

“I suppose we all make up identities for ourselves, one way or another,” Peter says.

Do I imagine it, or is he looking at me? Well, I know now who I am going to be—a virtuous Catholic woman earning my own way. Chaste and a bit of an intellectual.

“Still, the manuscripts in our library have proved the pedigree of many of our Gaelic nobles,” Father Kevin says. “Allowed them to receive French titles. Look at Patrice de Mac-Mahon, once president of France. Because his grandfather was a chieftain of the O’Brien clan Louis XV named him a marquis. His son fought in your American Revolution, Nora.”

“I’d like to see those manuscripts,” I say to Father Kevin.

“I’m sure Peter would be glad to show them to you. As a Kelly,
The Great Book of Lecan
would have interested you.”

“Why?” I ask Peter.

“It contains the genealogy of the Kellys going back to your earliest recorded ancestor, Máine Mor,” he says. “The manuscript was returned to Dublin but we have John O’Donovan’s 1843 translation of the Kelly material published under the title
The Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many
. The O’Kellys. Hy-Many is the English version of uí Máine—the descendants of Máine.”

“We are in an ancient manuscript?!”

“You are indeed,” he says.

Well. I think of Gabrielle Chanel—Coco—and Arthur Capel manufacturing themselves. I don’t have to do that. I am a Kelly. How could I have forgotten? I’ve stumbled into a place with people who could help me understand that.

Oh, Granny Honora, I’m so sorry I didn’t listen harder to your stories, didn’t pay attention when you tried to teach me the Irish language. Busy. I’ve always been so busy. But here in this sunlit space I have another chance. The woman who gave her body away in that room on North State Street could never have turned the pages of manuscripts that celebrated her ancestors. But I will.

What a relief to step away from the tangle of attraction and humiliation I’d experienced with Tim McShane. What was sex anyway but a quick surge of sensation? Couldn’t a beautiful sunrise, a bit of learning, a delicious beef bourguignonne give me the same satisfaction?

And here I have the perfect companion on my explorations—Peter Keeley, a man of high purpose, not tempted by the things of the flesh. I’ll live the way he does. A simple existence. I’ll be nunlike in my devotion to my studies. An example to young women like May, Antoinette, and Sheila. I’ll show them that women do not have to marry to be happy. Or become an
irrégulier
like Mademoiselle Chanel, dependent on a man for her success. I will create a clean, chaste life for myself—the place des Vosges, rue de Rivoli, and the Irish College the three edges of my triangle.

I smile at Father Kevin. He grins back.

I am Honora Bridget Kelly, a businesswoman and a patron of the arts and a self-deluding fool, I know. But on that summer afternoon I think I am calling the piper’s tune.

Kellys
abú
!

8

DECEMBER 12, 1912

“Of course I bought all
my
Christmas cards in London,” Mrs. Adams, my client, says to me. “So clever of the English to design a way to contact friends without having to write to them.”

She’s rejecting the cards on offer at a stall tended by a women in the native costume of Alsace. Part of the Christmas market spread across four blocks of the Champs-Élysées. Mrs. Adams spent the last month in London, which is very like her native Boston, she’s told me, and vastly superior to Paris. Not impressed with the French is Mrs. Adams. But how can she resist this magic space decorated with pine boughs, red berries, mistletoe? Candles prick the darkness of the December afternoon. An accordion player squeezes out an unusually cheerful “The First Noel.” The crowds alone should enchant—ladies and gentlemen of fashion, families with their red-cheeked, big-eyed children all bundled up staying close to their mothers, the fathers walking slightly ahead. Some of the men wear heavy overcoats and tall hats, the uniform of the bourgeoisie (as I have learned to call them), others have on short jackets and soft caps—workingmen. More distinctions are made here than exist in Chicago. But Christmas pulls everyone together.

“Wonderful isn’t it,” I say to her now.

“I find all this cheap and showy,” Mrs. Adams says. “It’s Thursday. These people should be at work. And that smell. Terrible.”

I sniff. “But that’s mulled wine,” I say.

“Exactly! I oppose all forms of alcohol!” she says. “Drink destroys the lower classes. Why the drunken Irish are ruining Boston!”

Oh, Lord. Here we go again. I’ll ignore her.

Mrs. Adams actually shuddered when Madame Simone introduced me to her in the studio a few hours before.

“Nora
Kelly
? But you’re Irish!” she said, and immediately asked Madame Simone to find her another guide. Comical to watch Mrs. Adams try to explain in her clumsy French why an Irish woman could not possibly show her the cultural sights of Paris.

Madame Simone had no idea what Mrs. Adams was going on about and looked to me to explain. Was I going to tell her that Mrs. Adams thought the Irish were ignorant savages bound to superstition and whiskey? Not me. I only smiled as Mrs. Adams sputtered into silence. She had one afternoon to shop and see Paris while her husband finished some business meeting at the Bourse. Madame Simone told her, “Nora, très good.”

“And you speak French, real French?” she asked me. Incredulous.

“I do,” I’d said, and reeled off a spiel about Mrs. Adams that started Georgette giggling.

Then I quoted twice my usual fee to Mrs. Adams. But what choice had she? She’d spent the afternoon slagging the French
and
the Irish. Annoying.

“It’s twelve-twelve-twelve,” I say to distract her. December 12, 1912—one year, one month, and one day since Mike and Mame’s wedding started me running from Tim McShane and Chicago. Though I wonder now wasn’t I on my way out much earlier?

But Mrs. Adams waves a card at me. “This card is in German.” Indignant.

“That’s Alsatian—a dialect,” I say. “It’s like German but the people are French. Lots of Christmas customs in France come from Alsace.”

“But didn’t France let Germany take it away from them in one of those wars not too long ago?” she asks.

I clear my throat. “The Franco-Prussian War, 1870 to 1871,” I say, trying to imitate Peter Keeley. He’s been joining my tours every Friday throughout the fall, ladling out French history to my ladies though not staying for the glass of wine at Fouquet’s as I pictured. Wouldn’t take money from me directly. Had to give the envelope with ten francs in it to Father Kevin on Sundays.

“Very nice-looking, your professor,” Mrs. Barrington from New Jersey said to me one Friday in October, “and what’s your connection to him?”

“His student,” I said. Peter’s always very formal with the ladies and me though he’ll often slip in a comment that makes us laugh.

“Louis began wearing a wig to cover his baldness,” he’d said. “His courtiers followed suit. For two hundred years men cut off their own healthy hair to cover their head with heavy, unhygienic imitations. What men will suffer for fashion.”

No joking around with Mrs. Adams. “Madame Simone was born in Alsace, in Strasbourg,” I tell her.

She pays no attention, rattling on to the Alsatian women in English. Madame Simone told me her family left when the Germans took over, and she still fears Germany.

“The Boche have the biggest army in Europe and one of these days they’ll use it,” she’s said to me many times. Always showing me articles in the French newspapers about reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine. Kick out the Boche.

That’s Europe. Can’t buy a Christmas card without tripping over history. The Alsatian woman backs away from Mrs. Adams, then looks at me. I take out a franc and buy a small wooden nativity set. The Alsatian woman smiles.

“Danke,”
she says.

“Those Germans,” Mrs. Adams fumes as we move through the fair. “They want to push England out of world markets. They’d love to get their hands on the English colonies in Africa,” repeating what her husband says, I think.

All probably true, but I feel I should speak up for Germans if only because of Milwaukee and beer and my cousin Ed’s mother, Aunt Nelly and her sister Aunt Kate and their German father. As a little girl I’d listen to him play “Silent Night” on his violin when we gathered at Aunt Nelly’s and Uncle Steve’s for Christmas Day. The whole clan of us, dozens of Kellys, dancing in their parlor under a huge tree—a pine from the North Woods of Wisconsin covered with the ropes of popcorn and cranberries that I’d helped string. Candles on the branches and Henrietta fussing about the dangers of fire. Can’t think about home now. Too sad.

So I tell Mrs. Adams that Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, a German, brought Christmas trees to England and surely she knew some Germans in Boston who weren’t dying to wreak havoc.

But she doesn’t hear me. Looking at two bundled up little Parisiennes. “Do these children have some kind of disease? Their cheeks are so red.”

Geeze Louise.

The next stall displays hand-painted Joyeux Noël greetings. I stop.

Still afraid to write home. Tim McShane could be haunting Rose and Mame. Best if they can honestly say they hadn’t heard from me. Still I buy five cards.

Mrs. Adams watches me as, over tea at the Ritz, I scribble a message on each. Glad I remember the addresses. Mame and Mike, Rose and John, Ed and his family, Mary and the family in Bridgeport. On the last I write “Agnella Kelly, care of The Motherhouse, Sisters of Charity BVM Dubuque, Iowa,” though Ag’s probably got a religious name by now.

I ask Mrs. Adams to post my cards from Boston. Safer. No Paris postmark. No return address.

“All right,” she says, flipping through the envelopes. “Oh,” she says.

She stops. “My goodness,” she says, “this one’s going to a convent! Well, I suppose I can take them to the main post office.”

“Where no one knows you?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Adams gets very chummy now, telling me about her maid, Bridey, not typical Irish oh, my, no. Very clean. A hard worker! Bought a house at Whiskey Point in Brookline for her family, but still lives in. “Has a load of children, I think, but understands her duty to me comes first. I let her visit them on Sundays,” Mrs. Adams says.

Very glad to finally get away from Mrs. Adams at five o’clock. Full dark now. Too late to go back to Madame Simone’s studio and give her a share of the twenty francs I got from Mrs. Adams. Then I remember Father Kevin’s cold. Sneezing and coughing something terrible at Mass last Sunday. I’ll bring him a little treat, and if I do happen to run into Peter Keeley, well …

“Thank you, Nora,” Father Kevin says to me as we sit in the formal parlor off the entrance eating the madeleines I brought and drinking Barry’s tea, sent over from Ireland. Definitely better than Lipton’s. Peter promised me a tin but it was May who gave me the tea. Peter was so much friendlier those first days and now … I wonder can I talk to Father Kevin about Peter?

“Good stuff,” Father Kevin says. “The Lord may want us to forgo wives, but he couldn’t expect a man to give up a decent cup of tea.”

He pokes at the small coal fire. “Doesn’t really heat the place. These stone walls,” he says. “Makes me wonder. Jesus, Abraham, and Muhammad were all desert fellows from sunny climates. Think it’s easier to be spiritual if you’re warm?” he asks.