Of Irish Blood (46 page)

Margaret’s said nothing all afternoon.

Maud turns to her now. “Kirk. There were Kirks at Castle Caulfield. But perhaps your husband’s family immigrated directly from Scotland.”

“I really don’t know,” Margaret says. “Benjamin and I were only married a few years when he died.”

“I’m sorry,” I say to her.

“Thank you,” Margaret says. She looks at Maud. “No priest cursed our family but neither my mother nor I were very lucky in our marriages. My first marriage was annulled,” she says.

“You must have been very young,” Maud says.

“I married my first husband because he had a house,” Margaret says.

I take a drink of sherry.

“My mother, Lizzie Burke, was twenty years younger than my father.”

“Burke,” I say. “So you’re Irish?”

“Yes.”

“And Catholic?”

“I am.”

“Then why don’t you…” I stop.

Never saw Margaret go to Communion at Father Kevin’s Masses.

“Go on, Margaret,” Maud says.

“My father only lived long enough to give my mother three children. Dead at forty. We lived in St. Joe, Missouri, about fifty miles from Kansas City. Mam got a job as a laundress at the World’s Hotel. Quite a place in those days.

“Then we went to Kansas City. My mother was a good seamstress and thought she’d find work in a Big House. But there were loads of Irish women with those skills. She got some piecework, sewing dresses for a neighbor who lived on the block named Nelly Donnelly. Not much money. Though now Nelly’s doing well. I wanted to help, but Mam wanted me to stay in school. We’d known a family in St. Joe, who were big in politics in Kansas City. They helped people. Without them we wouldn’t have survived. And we had no votes in our house, a widow and her children. My mother said she’d be a suffragist two times over, could she mark the ballot for Jim Pendergast.”

I nod. “Chicago’s the same,” I say. “Precinct captain knows when a family needs food or a job, or has a boy in trouble. My brother and cousin are part of all that. We always had an inside track.”

“Lucky,” Margaret says. “But even with help we were slipping further down, living in one room in a boardinghouse, months behind in our rent. My mother finally let me go to work. I found a job in the stockroom at Sheehan’s Dry Goods. I was only sixteen.

“One day who should come in but this fellow Ralph Danenberg. He was twenty-five but seemed like a man to me. Rough-enough-looking, worked in the stockyards and had a bit of money. A loner from Iowa or some farm place, he’d saved up and bought himself a tidy house on Summit—1616 Summit. I remember the number. Irish Hill, they called it. A big step up from The Bottoms where we lived. The other houses on the block had windows hung with lace curtains. Pianos, even, in many a parlor. That’s how he proposed—invited Mam and me to see the house. Said there’d be room for my brother and sister, the whole kit and caboodle of us.”

Margaret sips her sherry. Her words slip into each other. Not her usual clipped speech. Here is the young Irish girl within the woman I thought I knew.

“So we went up to the cathedral and talked to Father Ross. Now, I was only sixteen but my mother had married at sixteen,” she says.

“Mine too,” I say.

“And mine,” says Maud.

“But I … Well, I remember looking up at this fellow whom I’d said not three words to and wondering what will we talk about? Though that wasn’t Father Ross’s concern. He kept asking if I was ready to be a mother. Now I’ve been taking care of my brother and sister since I was four years old, so I knew I could handle a baby, though I had no notion of how I would get this baby. Something to do with kissing, I thought.”

Maud refills her glass.

“Something,” I say. “When I was a child I thought a golden shaft of light came down from heaven and turned into a baby, like in the pictures of Baby Jesus in the manger.”

Margaret smiles. “Ralph had no golden shaft, I’ll tell you that. I tried, I did, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

And Maud is nodding. “I’ve never enjoyed the physical side of love either,” she says.

Margaret’s deep in her memories. “He was patient at first but then, well, one day he just forced himself on me.”

“Raped you?” I ask.

“A man can’t rape his wife. I found that out when I went running to Father Ross. Not against the law for a man to have relations with his wife no matter how he does it. Not even a matter for confession, Father said. Go back to your husband. I think Ralph was sorry when he saw how terrified I was. He stopped trying. Didn’t throw us out either. But then, well, he met a girl, a normal girl, he said, and he had our marriage annulled. Went before a judge and swore I’d never been a wife to him. So I was single again. Mam said she didn’t blame me but where to go? I wonder how many young girls were just like me. Then they somehow have a child and…” She stops.

“As I did,” Maud says.

I wonder will Maud tell Margaret about the death of her first child and Iseult. But Maud seems content to listen.

“I met Benjamin Kirk, and he was much older. Really just wanted a cook and a housekeeper, I think,” Margaret says.

“As does Willie,” Maud says.

“I did tell him I was shy about marital relations and he said it didn’t matter. Except he was a Protestant. Father Ross told me I’d be excommunicated if I married Benjamin Kirk unless he signed papers saying our children would be raised Catholic. Benjamin refused. Wouldn’t be told what to do by a priest,” Margaret says.

“But if he loved you,” I say.

And Margaret smiles. “Don’t think love came into it. More a business deal for Benjamin. We married and moved to Denver. He traveled a lot. I had a good job buying for the local department store and a nice apartment near the courthouse and I could send money to my mother. I could see the mountains, so clean and pure, holding their own against the prairie and the sky. I thought I’d be happy if I could just look at them every day. Then Benjamin died. He was working out West for the railroad. They didn’t even send the body back. Hard to be alone in a place where you don’t know many people. The Red Cross came to Denver. Nurses’ aides were needed. I thought I could be of use.”

“And you are, Margaret. The hospital couldn’t run without you,” I say. “Are you ever homesick?”

“I do miss the mountains. Something about seeing them rising up against the sky puts things in perspective,” Margaret says. “I’d leave the department store and walk over to Murray’s to shop. Great coffee. And you’ll never guess who worked there—Douglas Fairbanks!”

“No!” I say.

“Yes, he did. Gorgeous-looking. I’d sometimes wonder if I’d met a man looked like that … But I’d walk out of the store and the sun would be setting behind the mountains, the clouds all shades of red and purple, and I’d think, if I had a little cabin up there and could sit and watch that show every night, I’d be completely happy.”

“Only you in that cabin?”

She nods.

“No room for Douglas Fairbanks even?” Maud asks.

Margaret laughs. “Only me,” she says. “And an eagle, maybe.”

“Usually a pair of eagles,” I say. “At least in Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin? Didn’t know Wisconsin had eagles,” Margaret says.

“My cousin Ed has a place in a town called Eagle River.”

“Eagle River—that’s a nice name,” Maud says.

“I miss those weeks up there with the family,” I say.

“I’d have a cabin too—but in the Wicklow Mountains. Let’s make a pledge, girls. When the war is over each of us will find a place of rest,” Maud says.

“You’ll need room for Iseult and Seán and all your animals and half the revolutionaries in Ireland,” I say.

“Well then I’ll visit you and Margaret,” Maud says.

“I have a cabin in mind, too,” I say. “Except I’m not alone.”

And I blurt it all out—Peter Keeley, the ceremony with Father Kevin.

“Oh, a spiritual marriage! Like Willie and I have,” Maud says.

“Well not only spiritual, but I never thought I’d meet a man I would really love. You will too, Margaret. Someday. And you, Maud.”

“Love,” Maud says. “Willie says he’s loved me for thirty years. Wants to help me get a real divorce so we can marry, but I wouldn’t make him happy. A poet needs unrequited love.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever really been in love,” Margaret says.

“And will you go back to Kansas City?” Maud asks Margaret.

“I don’t know. Hard to be that woman, slumped down in the last pew, not going to Communion. Hard enough here when I stand in the back at the hospital during Mass.”

“You don’t go to Communion?”

“How can I? I married Benjamin Kirk. Father Ross said I was excommunicated.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Margaret, you need a good dose of Father Kevin,” I say.

Whatever Father Kevin says to Margaret, that Sunday she goes to Communion.

18

MARCH 21, 1915

“Fecking spring,” Paul O’Toole says as he hands a wet bedsheet from the laundry basket up to me. I drape the heavy linen over the line then clothespin it down against the first warm breeze of the season.

“I hate it, too,” I say.

“‘A great day for drying,’ me mam back home in Naas would have said. Now, it’s a day for dying,” he says.

Paul passes another dripping load up to me.

“The spring offensive, they call it. The time when good weather lets them force the fellows out of the trenches with some bollocking battle plan that’ll turn out to be fecking useless. Take a few yards one day, lose them the next, and thousands of dead measuring every inch,” he says.

“But you won’t be fighting, Paul,” I say.

“And glad I am Nora, my heart,” he says. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I say. Impossible anyway.

Paul’s still with us, coughing strategically when Dr. Gros is about.

“How O’Toole got himself assigned to the hospital I’ll never fathom,” Dr. Gros had said to me. “His father a general something?”

“Something,” I said.

British Army Liaison to the American Hospital is Paul O’Toole’s very grand title, though he’s willing enough to lend a hand around the place.

“A champion chancer,” Father Kevin calls him, “and an informer to boot. But better the devil you know,” he’d added.

At least no one else is following me now that I’m Paul’s assignment.

“I’ve arranged for a kind of tea today when your friend Mrs. MacBride and that American reporter call around,” he says as we hang the last sheet on the line behind the American hospital.

“Thanks,” I say, though I can’t remember mentioning the meeting to him.

I’ve stopped asking how Paul rustles up these treats—tarts, madeleines, and napoleon slices he makes appear along with fresh milk and even sugar.

“There’ll be five of us—Father Kevin, Margaret, Maud, Carolyn Wilson, and me.”

“And what newspaper does this Wilson woman write for?” Paul asks.

“The Chicago
Tribune
,” I say as we walk past budding trees and daffodils. Once welcome signs of life renewed, now they’re omens of disaster.

Plenty of casualties through the winter, from shells fired into the trenches, and soldiers beyond counting are made sick from living dug into the earth, standing in icy water up to their knees. All weak from dysentery. Paul only laughed at me when I asked how they managed sanitation.

“Shite manages us,” he said. “Mixes with the mud and flows through the trenches. That’s the Western Front, Nora.”

But spring starts the real killing.

“Carolyn Wilson’s a fine reporter,” I say to Paul. “Been right in the midst of the fighting.”

“Better her than me,” Paul says.

He puts about as much energy into spying as he did into soldiering, I think. I’m safe enough. The rugby man’s at the front, I suppose. Hope he’s in an especially wet trench.

Very warm that afternoon and Paul sets a table for us in the backyard of the hospital.

Carolyn Wilson’s younger than I expect, just five years out of college, she tells me.

“Wellesley,” she says, then asks where I went to school.

“St. Xavier’s High School,” I say. “Chicago.”

Maud and Father Kevin haven’t arrived and Margaret’s had an emergency, so Carolyn and I are alone. Paul, imitating a French waiter, pours out the tea and presents us with a plate of madeleines.

“Of course I know your city,” she says to me. “I had to spend some time there until the Chicago
Tribune
assigned me to Paris just in time for the start of the war. A lucky break.”

“Lucky,” I repeat.

“Yes, it was,” she says, and then picking up on the tone of my voice, adds that of course she’d prefer there was no war.

“Of course,” I say. Silence. Why am I being so hard on her? Only doing her job.

“I liked your piece on French women knitting,” I finally say.

“Such intensity in those clicking needles,” she says. “As if the sweaters, scarves, and socks they make won’t just keep their
p’tit plouplou
warm but somehow protect him from bullets and mortar fire.”

A bit too poetic, I think, but then she is a college graduate.

“But,” she says, “I also want to emphasize how women have taken over men’s jobs—managing shops and restaurants, driving ambulances, and even those stuck in more traditional female roles like you nurses have tremendous authority.”

Thanks a lot, I think.

Carolyn showed up at the St. Patrick’s Day Mass at Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Ambassador Herrick introduced me to her as a fellow Chicagoan.

Carolyn went on about the American hospital and how she’d like to interview the American nurses but gave herself away when she saw Maud.

“That’s her, isn’t it, Maud Gonne,” she said. “Do you know her?”

“I do.”

“Any chance of an introduction? My editors would be very interested in her views on how the war has affected Ireland. Would she be willing to talk to me?” she asked. Maud was delighted. Lots to say always.

Maud suggested the hospital as our meeting place and wanted to do the interview right away. No flies on Madame MacBride, but where is she? Visiting the Irish soldiers in the wards, I suppose, but I wish she’d get here. I don’t want Carolyn Wilson to start asking me questions about myself.