Of Irish Blood (61 page)

“Yes, I remember,” I say. “Your family took land belonging to the Catholic Church and the priest said no Gonne woman would ever be happy in her marriage,” I say.

“It’s true,” Maud says. “Miserable, all of us. Even my sister Kathleen. But Iseult. Breaks my heart.”

A curse, I think, or a girl raised to pretend her own mother was her cousin. Maud left Iseult in boarding schools and with maids and governesses and was ready to marry her to a man thirty years older than she was. Poor Iseult.

“I suppose Stuart apologizes after every incident, sends flowers, blames the drink. Promises never ever to hurt her again?” I say.

“Exactly! How did you know?”

“I know, Maud and so do you,” I say. “Shall I talk to Iseult tomorrow?”

“Please. She doesn’t listen to me. He’s turning her against me. And we were always so close. She’s only here now because of the baby.”

I ease further down into the bed, actually warm now, and take the hot water bottle between my feet.

“You must be tired, Nora,” Maud says.

“I am and I’ve got to be up early and get back to the hotel,” I say.

“But you’ll talk to Iseult. You won’t forget.”

“I won’t,” I say.

Maud hands me a bundle. “I like your bob and your short skirt, but I think a tweed suit might be better for travel.”

What can I say?

“These are Charlotte’s,” Maud tells me. So I’ll be touring Ireland dressed as a ride-to-the-hounds Protestant.

*   *   *

Morning already? I wonder when I hear the pounding and shouts but the small round window in the attic room frames only darkness.

“Get up, Nora! Get up!” Maud’s shouting from the hallway. Fire? I throw the covers back, wrap the blanket around me, gather Barry’s nightgown, and run for the stairs. I get down the first flight. Iseult’s ahead of me. We both reach the landing above the first floor at the same time.

“The Tans,” Iseult says. “A raid.”

A squad of a dozen or so men are standing around Maud in the hall below us.

“Army,” Iseult says. “Not the Black and Tans. Thank God.”

She reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown and pulls out a pack of Gauloises Bleues cigarettes and matches. A steady hand as she lights her cigarette.

“Can I have one?” I ask. I rarely smoke but I’m shaking. She takes a Gauloises and puts the tip to hers and hands it to me. Maud‘s talking to an officer below us but looks up when she smells the smoke. “Go back to bed, Iseult,” she says.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the officer says. “All occupants must go to the parlor while we search.”

“Search for what?” Maud says.

And his tone changes. “Don’t play the fool with me. Get into the parlor now.” He looks up at us. “Come along, you two.”

A captain I’d say. Twenty-five at the most. Did he fight at the Front? Doubt it. Takes himself too seriously for someone who’s been in combat.

Iseult puffs on the cigarette, inhales, blows the smoke out, and descends the stairs holding on to the railing. She slumps a bit at the last step and I grab for her arm, but she waves her hand at me and recovers. Stands for a moment breathing heavily. Maud comes across to her.

“If she goes into labor, it’s on your head!” she says to the officer.

Josephine lights the fire and Barry, Maud, Charlotte Despard, and I draw our chairs close to it. But Iseult sits apart, smoking cigarette after cigarette, making the parlor smell like a Paris café. I throw my half-finished cigarette into the fire.

“Thank God Seán dined with friends tonight and stayed with them. These soldiers will arrest any young man of military age and they hate university students,” Maud says.

I hear a crash. Josephine stands up and starts for the door. “It’s all right, Josephine,” Maud says, and then to me, “I put the good china and the silver in the bank after the last raid.” She turns to Isuelt. “Stop smoking. Please. I can’t take it.” But Iseult only smiles and lights another cigarette.

The officer and four soldiers came in. The officer’s waving a pamphlet. “Seditious literature!”

Charlotte Despard walks over and takes it from his hands. “‘An Appeal to the Women Workers of Ireland and England,’” she reads aloud. “And you consider this treasonous?” she says to the officer.

I see him react to her very upper-class English accent.

“I am doing my duty,” he says.

“This literature is mine, sir,” she says.

“And you are?”

“Charlotte Despard. You may have heard of my brother General Sir John French.”

“Oh yes, ma’am, we know your connection. And Sir John would thank us for detaching you from—” He stops. “—your friends.”

He takes out a small notebook.

“Nora Kelly?” he says, pointing at me.

“I am.” I stand up. Such a puffy face and bits of dark hair showing under his hat.

“The British soldiers I nursed in France had better manners,” I say. “They would have taken off their hats!”

One of the soldiers lets out a snort. The officer turns to him.

“Go. Continue your search.”

Then he looks at me. “That was the Great War, when we knew who the enemy was. Here.” And he gestures at Maud, Barry, and Josephine. “Terrorists take many forms. Some are even disguised as middle-aged American do-gooders,” he says.

“Then arrest me please. Wonderful publicity. Headlines in all the American newspapers,” I say.

A soldier comes to the door.

“Nobody else in the house.”

“Watch yourself, Miss Kelly,” the officer says. “A traitor is a traitor no matter where they come from. Tell that to the rest of your committee!”

After they leave Barry gets Iseult back to bed. I sit up with Charlotte, don’t think of her as Mrs. Despard now, and Maud drinking sherry and smoking Iseult’s cigarettes.

“The nerve of them!” I say. “How dare they?”

“Oh, they dare all right. Actually, that was a very civilized raid. If they were Black and Tans … But they’d not send the Black and Tans with you here,” Maud says. “The British government wants to show the Americans how restrained they are. Only doing their duty. A sovereign government protecting itself against traitors and terrorists.”

“He knew me, Maud. Knew my name.”

“Of course. That’s the worst of it—the sense of being watched; the heavy hand descending at any moment, the powerlessness,” Maud says.

“As I said before, they hate you,” Charlotte says. “Just as they hated us suffragists. I didn’t understand when we began. All we were doing was asking that women be able to vote. Women—their own wives and mothers and sisters, not some alien tribe. Women. And they rode us down on horses, beat us, jailed us.”

Hated her? I think. Even in her nightgown Charlotte looks exactly like the well-mannered conventional upper-class woman she was born to be. None of Maud’s drama, and yet she herself had been hated and abused.

“Because we don’t obey,” I say. “Women and the Irish. Maud, I understand Iseult’s relationship with Stuart because I was with a man who almost killed me when I revolted. Men want us under their control completely. If we do as they say, we can have lovely lives. But if not…”

“And England’s the bullying husband of Cathleen ni Houlihan?” Maud says. “Something in that. The relationship between the two countries is so intimate.”

Charlotte speaks up. “Do you know how many wives are murdered by their husbands?” she says. “Or beaten regularly? The numbers will astound you.” She looks at me. “Or maybe not.”

“No, I wouldn’t be surprised,” I say.

Charlotte sips her sherry. “I would never had known,” she says. “I married Max Despard when I was twenty-six. A decent fellow from the same kind of background and family as I was.”

“Charlotte’s a French of Frenchpark, one of the old families of Ireland,” Maud says.

“Oh? I’d say the Kellys were here when the Frenches arrived,” I tell her.

Charlotte sighs. “Yes, there’s that. Interlopers all of us but at least some of us have seen the light. Max did. A fierce crusader for Home Rule. Gave loads of money to Parnell.”

But then, I think, Parnell was another member of their club, an Anglo-Irish Protestant. Though when he visited Chicago, Parnell talked about his American mother at every stop. “Max got richer and richer,” Charlotte was saying. “Have you ever heard of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank?” she asks me. “He started that.”

I must have smiled.

“I know, I know,” she says. “Strange for a Communist like me to be proud of my capitalist husband. My dear friend Eleanor Marx often remarks on it but when Max was lost at sea, his money let me find my mission, helping the poor and oppressed.”

“And do your children approve how you spent their money?” I ask.

“I have no children, Nora.”

“Oh, sorry. I…”

“Don’t apologize. I couldn’t have done the work I do if I had children.” She looks over at Maud. “I do admire you, Maud, for managing to have a family.”

Maud takes the cigarette from her mouth, looks at it, and then grinds it out in the ashtray. “Managed? I’m not so sure. Iseult is tied up with a lunatic and Seán’s been at war since he was sixteen.…”

“But…” I start.

“I know. It’s a war I urged on him but sometimes I wonder…”

Charlotte stands up.

“No time for wondering when you get to my age.” She turns to me. “I am seventy-six years old, Nora. I’ve come to realize regretting the past is useless. I’m going to bed.”

“Amazing woman,” I say to Maud after she leaves.

“She is. Kind and generous and committed. She lived a whole life with Max, traveled in the Far East. A happy marriage. A life of privilege and she put it all behind her.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why does she do it? Why do you?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Nora. For Ireland of course!”

Ireland. This drawing room with its marble fireplace and ancestral portraits is very far from the Ireland Granny Honora and Mam remembered.

Maud seems to know what I’m thinking.

“Tomorrow, Nora, you will see the land of your ancestors. You’ll find out what formed them and you. Don’t deny us the right to love our country even if we do come from the Big Houses,” she says.

She suddenly looks so old standing there in her bright kimono. The actress without her makeup. The kindly diffused amber spots gone. The harsh dawn sending cold sunlight through the windows.

My Ireland. Out there.

24

We board the train at Heuston Station in Dublin. Exciting to see that sign
GALWAY
over the platform.

A half hour into our journey. Cyril calls me into the corridor outside of the compartment where Jenson and the others sit, half dozing as the train pulls us further and further into the West.

“I heard about the raid,” he says. “Watch yourself. My job is to make this lot look neutral, above the fray, and I’ll thank you to behave.”

A man’s walking toward us, swinging with the movement of the train. He looks like every Irish fellow I’ve seen, tweed jacket and a soft cap. But Cyril stops talking and gestures for me to be quiet. The small nondescript man passes. Cyril waits until the he’s through the door into the next car.

“Did you see his shoes?” he said. “Much too good for any decent man in this country.”

“You think he’s a British agent?”

“I think you should be careful. Don’t be planning any side trips in the mountains.”

“What?”

”Forget about the professor. Nothing you can do but bring him harm if he’s hiding out somewhere which I’m not saying. Just keep your mind on your work. Documenting,” he says, stretching out his syllables, “the atrocities, taking some photographs.”

We check into a very Anglo-Irish-looking hotel called the Great Southern next to the train station, facing the square. We could be in any city, I think. Especially with fog hanging low over Galway. Hard to tell if there even is a bay, let alone what it looks like.

We eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner.

“West Brit food,” Cyril whispers to me.

Still foggy the next morning when Cyril takes us on his own tour of Galway City.

Galway wasn’t shelled as Dublin was but plenty of shops along the main street were burnt out. Half standing, the roofs collapsed, windows broken.

We follow Cyril and a local priest, Father O’Flaherty, past the shops down into an open area packed with women dressed in long skirts with shawls around them, barefoot most of them. I hear them shouting. “Cockles and mussels. Alive, alive O.”

“The fish market,” Cyril says.

“Is this the Spanish Arch?” I ask.

“It is,” he says.

“I think my own grandmother sold fish here,” I say. A memory from somewhere stirring.

He looks at me. “Tough women these. I’d say you might have had an ancestor like them.” We get into a very big black touring car and head west to a little town called Bearna, which the Tans had raided. I aim my Seneca at the burned thatched roofs, the white walls of the cottages striped black by the flames.

Cyril sets up a kind of parley with Bearna’s parish priest, a few shopkeepers, and two fishermen in a pub. Mr. Jenson and the rest of the committee look puzzled as one of the fishermen speaks in what I recognize as Irish. The priest translates. Even the way he speaks English reminds me of Granny Honora.

Still murky outside. The pub’s lit by kerosene lamps and we need a fire.

“Lorryloads of Black and Tans invade our peaceful town,” Father says. “Looting, burning, driving out our young men. When our people take in their homeless neighbors, the Black and Tans come back and burn their houses down for sheltering their friends. They destroy the creameries so milk can’t be processed. No income for the farmers. Their families starve. The British intend to annihilate the Irish as a people. Stop us being who we are. Trying to make us beg to be part of their empire, shameful.”

I think of that General Wilson pushing Britain into a world war rather than make the least concessions to Ireland. Why can’t the British allow the Irish to govern themselves? All that talk about the rights of small nations so much poppycock.

Sandwiches of brown bread and thick butter and white-meat chicken with pots of tea are brought out for us. I notice the fishermen and shopkeepers don’t eat. “Please,” I say, and pass half of my sandwich across to the fisherman nearest me.