Of Irish Blood (58 page)

“You’re ahead of the Kellys,” I said. “We haven’t managed college yet. Though my cousin Ed became an engineer by going to the Atheneum at night.”

Oh, God, why did I say that? And give my real name. Harder and harder to pretend I’m dead. Wrong somehow. But he won’t know Ed. Then Dawson says. “Ed? Ed Kelly? From Brighton Park. Worked on the canal, tall redheaded fellow?”

“That’s him,” I say.

“A boxer?”

“Right.”

“Mine enemy,” he says.

“Pardon me?”

He laughs. “Politically. I’m a Republican, Miss Kelly, and your cousin’s as good a weapon as the Democratic Party has. I’ve seen him march his Brighton Park boys to the polls and every Republican knows the story of how he wrapped his arms around the ballot box and wouldn’t let go until the police came to escort him to the count.”

“Had to keep you Republicans from stuffing the box!” I say. “How can you let the party of Lincoln be taken over by crooks like Big Bill Thompson?”

“But it
is
the party of Lincoln,” Graham speaks up, “and in the South it’s the Democrats trying to keep us from voting. They’re the ones behind the Jim Crow laws.”

Margaret says, “I’m from Kansas City. It’s the Democrats who care about the working people.”

“Now, are we going to ruin this lovely afternoon by arguing about politics?” Lieutenant Dawson says. “Look how the French are staring at us. Think we’re really fighting.”

And indeed, the four tables closest to us have stopped talking entirely and are watching us and listening to the tone of our conversation despite not understanding the words. Imagining who knows what. Trouble with not really knowing a language.

I smile at the people at the nearest table.
“Pas problème,”
I say.
“Nous sommes amis.”
They look at me blankly.
“Comprendez vous?”
I ask.

One young woman in a cloche hat says,
“Oui, je comprends, mais vous parlez un français bizarre.”

The Negro soldiers understand and we spent the next half hour laughing as Lieutenant Dawson and the others repeat “bizarre” in their best French accents, with Graham adding a Southern cadence. Then Lieutenant Dawson says the phrase using a very lawyerly diction in which he underlines each syllable of
“bizarre
.
”

“Américains,”
the man sitting next to the young woman says, shrugging away all nuance.

I’ve been living for seven years with people who don’t really understand me or my country, I think. Even Peter looked at me sometimes as if I were an alien. These last years of war and shared fears made all Parisians one. But now I realize I am an American, a Chicagoan—and on the run. I love Paris, but it’s not home. Am I losing myself?
“Je parle un français bizarre.”
Not one thing or another. Oh Peter, could we go home together? You’d be so happy as an Irish American. But then I remember I’m dead.

Lieutenant Dawson orders another bottle of champagne and I let the wine ease me back into the here and now.

“I was real sorry to hear about Ed’s wife,” Lieutenant Dawson says.

“What?”

“Mary. Died during the flu epidemic.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “When?”

“Last spring,” he says, “so sad to lose the child too.”

“Ed’s son died?”

“No it’s just—well I heard that his wife was eight months pregnant.”

Poor Ed, I think, poor Ed, and not a word of comfort from me, the other redhead. Poor Mary. So kind to me the morning I left Chicago. She’s really gone while I only pretend to be dead.

A cruel hoax. I want to write to Ed, console him. Tell him about Peter. My life here. The war. But I can’t of course. A terrible time to get a letter from me when he’s mourning Mary. But how Margaret and I would rejoice if John Noll walked in right now or John Feeney, Paul O’Toole even. “A mistake,” they’d say. We’re alive.” A great celebration would follow. Isn’t that how my family would feel if I came back from the dead? I don’t know.

Maybe I shouldn’t write to Ed but I can send a letter to Mame and Mike explaining everything. Let them tell Ed.

And I do, writing pages and pages. I tell them that I’m married to a man I love who loves me. He’s fighting for Irish freedom. But if—no, when—things are better in Ireland, we will come to Chicago for a visit. I still remember the address of the house in Argo. Hope they still live there.

I wait for a reply. One month. The mail’s still slow. Two, three, four months. No answer. They don’t care. I am dead to them. What can I do?

On my fortieth birthday, April 18, 1919, a here-comes-spring day in Paris, I bob my hair. Or rather Monsieur Leon does it for me. A barber because ladies’ coiffeurs do not mutilate a woman’s crowning glory, as I was told by one. Leon’s Russian and reminds me of Stefan, although Leon ran from the revolution instead of toward it. As he goes on about the murder of the czar and his family, I feel the scissors nicking the back of my neck. I look into the mirror when he finishes.

“Too shocking?” I ask Leon. I look so bare and the color of my hair is a deeper auburn. My eyes seem bigger framed by the bangs across my forehead.

“Not at all. Soon this style will be
la mode
,” Leon says as he sweeps up my red hair and tosses the pile into the bin. “Not worth saving,” he says. “The wig market kaput. No more disguises. The face, the figure—exposed. The new woman.”

Is that a good thing for me at forty, I wonder. The image in the mirror smiles at me. You’re a lot younger in Paris than you would be in Chicago, she seems to say.

True enough. There I’d be a spinster. Sliding into old age. Here, well, I’m years younger than Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. And both of them still big wheels in Paris. And Edith Wharton, at fifty-eight, has written what I think is her best novel. She had Sylvia Beach and me read the manuscript of the
The Age of Innocence
.

“Does Ellen, the countess, ring true to you?” Edith asked me.

“Absolutely,” I said, and thought that New York in the 1870s was probably not all that different than Bridgeport is today. Tough on a woman with a past. Is that why Mike and Mame didn’t answer my letter?

Easier to hold my head up with all that hair gone, I think. Peter will like this style, I tell myself. Still no word from him.

Poor Ireland.

The English are determined to crush the rebels.

The British army had marched from Flanders Field to Tipperary. Not a long enough way to go after all, I’d thought, when reports started coming in of the atrocities committed by members of the British force the Irish called Black and Tans because of their makeshift uniforms—khaki army pants and a policeman’s dark blue jacket.

“Criminals, many recruited from English prisons,” Maud says in one of her letters to Father Kevin. “Glad when they fire a house. Murderers attacking women and children. Most of our men have been arrested or are on the run. Ireland’s a battlefield.”

And my poor Peter in the middle of it all. Is he even alive?

Madame Simone only nods at my haircut.

“C’est la vie,”
she says.

We no longer copy from the old masters or other designers. Now we’re stealing from the movies. I go to see
The Flapper
, starring Olive Thomas, about fifteen times.

Madame Simone’s new collection is called Costumes du Cinéma.

The Seneca and I keep busy too. The Peace Conference has brought loads of Americans to Paris. Floyd Gibbons and I take pictures like crazy. Floyd gets an interview with Woodrow Wilson. To please me he asks the president about Ireland. The Irish people have voted for independence from Britain. Will the U.S. support them? After all, wasn’t the war fought to protect the rights of small nations?

“We will not interfere in the internal affairs of our closest ally Great Britain,” Wilson says.

So.

JULY 1919

I sit in the parlor of the Irish College listening to the members of the American Commission on Irish Independence report on their efforts to have Ireland’s independence recognized in the Treaty of Versailles. About five priests, six or seven students, Father Kevin, and I are gathered. The leader of the commission, former governor Edward Dunne of Illinois, is speaking. I hide behind the priest in front of me. Dunne had been at Mike and Mame’s wedding. He would know Nora Kelly.

“Woodrow Wilson presents himself as an idealist,” Dunne is saying. “But I fear he’s a victim of his own deep prejudices. He’s an Ulsterman and a Southerner whose father served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army. He sees anyone who isn’t a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as inferior. He has implemented full segregation in federal jobs and praised the Ku Klux Klan. He disdains Irish-American Democrats. Sees them as corrupt creatures of big-city bosses. He promised during the election to support independence for Ireland. He has broken that promise. As for the treaty, itself, I understand why France wants to weaken Germany but I fear the reparations being imposed will cause such resentment among the German people that good relations with other European powers will be difficult if not impossible. And, as for Britain, she’s acquired more colonies and will continue with her policy of divide and conquer. Doing to these countries what she’s done to Ireland for centuries. Until they, too, will have to rebel.”

Oh, dear God, I think. What a gloomy picture. But then Dunne becomes very emotional.

“Ireland should not despair,” he tells the audience. “We Americans of Irish blood pledge our lives and our fortunes to the country that claims our hearts.”

Afterward Father Kevin introduces me to Edward Dunne. No recognition at all. I guess the woman with the helmet of auburn hair and short skirt is not the Nora Kelly he knew.

Father Kevin asks Dunne about the address he gave to Ireland’s Rebel Parliament, the Dáil. In the recent British parliamentary election the Irish people voted in representatives who favored independence. These representatives did not go to Westminster but set up their own parliament in Dublin. Democratically elected, though the British did not recognize its authority. But Dunne says the Irish Declaration of War on Britain is legitimate because the Dáil was elected by the people. “The Catholic Church will recognize Ireland’s fight as a just war,” he says.

The only just war is one that’s over, I think. Not fair somehow that the whole world’s celebrating peace and Ireland’s still a battlefield.

Father Kevin asks Dunne if he’s been to Galway. Looking for some news of Peter I’m sure. But Dunne did not go to Galway. So still no information about Peter.

I find myself confiding in, of all people, Leon the barber. I am seeing a lot of him. A bob needs frequent trims.

“Not even a letter from my—” Say it, Nora. “—husband in years.”

But Leon gets mad at me. Don’t I understand what it is to be under siege? Ireland. Russia. Armies and fighting. My husband, his mother, all struggling to survive. We must be faithful. Wait and hope.

Leon and I communicate in a mix of bad French and worse English—me speaking a kind of pidgin language that makes the customer waiting his turn with Leon ask me where I come from.

“America,” I say. “Chicago.”

“Then speak properly,” he says.

A very dapper fellow who comes to Leon for a shave. I find myself lingering to watch Leon cover the man’s face with white lather, sharpen a straight-edge razor on a strap, and begin to maneuver it.
Le coupe-chou,
the cabbage cutter, I think to myself, and laugh. The two are chatting away in Russian as Leon wraps a hot towel from chin to forehead around the fellow he calls Serge. He takes down a bottle of scent from the shelf, unwraps Serge, and splashes his face with a perfume that smells of lavender. Such a precise mustache, under plump cheeks, and dark eyes. The fellow sees me watching.

“I suppose you are waiting because you think I will give you a ticket. I am very sorry, mademoiselle. I cannot afford such gestures.”

A ticket. What’s he talking about?

“Nora is a photographer, Serge. Her pictures are published in the newspapers in the United States,” Leon says.

“Are you a good photographer?” Serge asks me.

“I am,” I say. I’ve learned something from Floyd Gibbons. Though he would have said, “Good? I’m the greatest.”

“Chicago,” Serge says. “We will play Chicago. All right, mademoiselle. You may photograph the company.”

The company?

“And, of course,” Leon says, “you will invite Nora to a premier. A new ballet is news.”

A ballet, of course. Serge must be Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Famous. But I’ve never been able to afford a ticket for a performance.

Diaghilev takes a small leather notebook and a gold pen from his pocket. He writes a note and hands it to me.

“Here, mademoiselle. Bring this to the stage door. You may attend a rehearsal. Set up your equipment and…”

“But sir,” I interrupt him. “My camera is small. It would be much better if I attended a performance. Stood in the wings, took photographs of the dancers from different angles.” I think of Eddie Steichen praising the relaxed poses of my women clients, and Floyd, who liked my casual Marines. Perhaps I can get similar shots of the ballet dancers.

So. Christmas Eve I am in the wings as the curtain rises on
La Boutique Fantasque
. On the stage this story of a magic toy shop full of dancing dolls unfolds like a dream. The set is by Gertrude’s friend Picasso. The costumes glitter. The music’s enthralling. I watch the two can-can dolls, the man in evening dress and the woman in the frilly skirt of the Moulin Rouge, dance their love for each other. The dancers are Léonide Massine, the program says, and Lydia Lopokova. They move so freely through the glides, jumps, lifts. Effortless. I shoot continuously, hoping to catch some of the action. The two float into the wings only ten feet from me. But then Lydia bends over, taking great gulps of air. I see patches of perspiration on her costume. Massine is out and out sweating. A male and female attendant run up to them, patting their faces with towels and offering glasses of water. They don’t notice me as I take the photographs. On stage the ballet continues. The male attendant kneels down, takes off one of Lydia’s shoes, and massages her foot. I hear her groan. He replaces the shoe. The dancers move back onto the stage.