Of Irish Blood (72 page)

“Everyone was once,” Cyril says. “But McCarthy’s a Corkman. His family and the Collinses were neighbors. All those boys went a bit crazy when Mick was killed. And then Griffith drops dead. No restraining voice. The executions. And the IRA up to high do. Burning the houses of Free State senators. This fellow McCarthy hears about the camp. Goes to Carna. Starts asking around. Telling people he was a student of the professor’s in Paris and wants to continue his studies. Way of saying he wants to join up. John O’Connor questions him. But this McCarthy’s full of stories about the Irish College and even mentions you, Nora, which convinces John.”

“Used me?” I say.

“He did,” Cyril says. “He’s taken to the camp. A bunch of caves. Hard to find. After a few weeks McCarthy is sent down to get supplies. He goes to the Free State army barracks in Galway. They raid the camp. They only meant to arrest the professor but somebody started shooting. Not even sure which side. And the professor…”

Cyril stops.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” I say. “In a fight like that there must have been a lot of confusion. Maybe he got away. Maybe he was arrested. Maybe…”

“Ah Nora. I saw him die.”

“No. No,” I say.

“I went in with the army, Nora.”

And now I stand up.

“You what?”

“The killing’s got to stop, Nora. Dev will never give up. Peter Keeley shouldn’t have died. None of them should. But the government of Ireland can’t be destroyed.”

“Go,” I say. “Leave now. Get out. I can’t listen to you.” I push him out the door.

I take Peter’s photograph from my bedside table.

“Peter, I hardly knew you,” I say. So little time together. Days scattered across years. Memories I’d woven into a great love. Gentle Peter. A man who was the opposite of Tim McShane in every way. We could have been so happy together. I want to weep. To sob. But I can only sit in silence staring at the picture.

*   *   *

“He died for Ireland,” May says when she finds me the next morning still sitting up. The fire out. The room freezing. She piles up coals and bits of paper, strikes a match. Talking about honor and bravery and Ireland as the fire catches.

“Damn Ireland,” I say. “Not a country. A fantasy. I hate Ireland.”

“Oh no, Nora,” May says. “Don’t say that.”

“This all has to stop, May,” I say.

“Stop, how?” she says. “We can’t surrender to an unjust government.”

“That the Irish people elected,” I say.

“The people didn’t understand. The professor would tell you that,” she says.

“But he can’t, May. He can’t tell me anything.”

Yeats warned us. The blood-dimmed tide. The monster who was, what was his word? Slouching. Yes, slouching toward Bethlehem. Yeats is right. Some evil thing has been loosed.

“Don’t you see, May? A divided Ireland is what the British want. Now they can say the Irish got their pathetic country only to tear it apart. Wilson’s somewhere laughing at Irishmen killing one another.”

“For now,” May says. “But not forever. You must believe that, Nora. Peter died to make the dream come true and it will. It will,” she says.

We don’t notice Cyril, who’s let himself in. Holds up a bottle of whiskey.

“How dare you…” I start.

“We’ll have a truce, girls. And a wake for Peter Keeley.”

“‘Down by the salley gardens,’” he sings as he finds glasses, pours us each a whiskey, and stands in front of the fire.

“‘But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears,’” he finishes. And I find that I’m crying at last.

“Slaint
ē
,” Cyril says and drinks down the whiskey. May and I do the same.

We sit talking about Peter till nightfall. And then I sleep.

FEBRUARY 1923

“A plague on both their houses,” I say to Madame Simone.

“Is there some equivalent French phrase?” I ask her as we eat dinner at L’Impasse.

“Many,” she says.

Two months now since Peter’s death and still the fighting goes on in Ireland. Not a war really, but a kind of tit-for-tat violence, hard to support either side. What was Peter thinking when he realized his student, this young man he’d inspired to love Ireland, had betrayed him? When he saw Cyril with the army? To die because of politics. Horrible. I’m so angry I can’t even mourn Peter properly. I say all this to Madame Simone, who makes the kind of “ptt” sound only a French woman can. A stream of French follows.

“Lentement s’il vous plaît,”
I beg her.

And then slowly and deliberately Madame Simone gives me a history lesson. Don’t I realize that every time I walk through la place de la Concorde I pass the site of the guillotine?

“A popular entertainment, the executions, not just of the king and queen and aristocrats,” she says, “but of the revolutionaries themselves. Comrades who had become enemies. Robespierre decapitated his former friends until eventually his head fell.
O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!
”

“Liberty,” I translate aloud. “What crimes are committed in your name. Why, that’s profound, Madam Simone.”

She exhales expressively. Did I think those words were hers?
Non,
no. Hadn’t I ever heard of Madame Roland? Jeanne-Marie Phlipon?

Madame Roland had a salon, Madame Simone tells me, where the French revolutionaries met to conspire. Americans came too.

“Benjamin Franklin?” I ask. “Thomas Jefferson?”

“I suppose,” she says.

All of them grateful for the good food and drink. Hard going for revolutionaries who didn’t come from wealthy families, she tells me.

And then after all Madame Roland did for the revolution, doesn’t she get marched up to the guillotine and beheaded.

“Oh, no,” I say. “That’s terrible. I can’t believe…”

“Pttt,” says Madame Simone. “Only an American would be so surprised.” She shakes her head. “A kind of strength in such naïveté, perhaps.”

“Laughing like an ignorant fighter laughs who’s never lost a battle,” I say.

“Well put, Nora,” Madame Simone says.

“It’s a poem,” I tell her, “Called ‘Chicago.’ About my city. Young and tough and optimistic.” Eddie Stiechen had sent it to me, written by his brother-in-law. Power in the fellow Carl Sandburg’s words.

Now I quote the last of Sandburg’s lines: “Proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.’”

Madame Simone hasn’t understood half of what I’ve said.

“My cousin Ed would hate that poem,” I say to her. “He wants Chicago to be beautiful, more like Paris.”

“Perhaps your city can be both beautiful and strong,” Madame Simone says. “This war ended not in peace but in smothered enmity. I’m leaving Paris. I will live with my nephew and his family in Bordeaux. Make dresses for my grandnieces. I am not Gabrielle Chanel. I wish to be with my family. Go home, Nora. Back to your Chicago.”

“But my family doesn’t want me,” I say to her.

“You don’t know that,” she says.

“I wrote to my brother,” I say. “Though I wonder if he got the letter.”

“Write again,” she says. “So many have been lost. Wonderful to have someone return alive.”

“But it was my sister Henrietta who killed me,” I say.

“She may be sorry,” Madame Simone says.

“I doubt it.”

“Find out. Ask her.”

“Me speak to her? Never. I loathe her. I…”

Jesus, I sound like Macready or Wilson. Maybe it would be a relief to stop hating Henrietta. And after all I have one or two things to apologize for myself.

“But how can I leave Paris?” I say. “I’m not the same Nora who arrived here. I don’t know if I can live in Chicago.”

“Find out. You have been in a play, Nora. A spectacle. You’ve spoken lines in a language you don’t really know. Imagined yourself in love with a man you never saw, and joined a revolution you didn’t understand.”

“That’s not fair. I did love Peter and I am of Irish blood just like they are and…”

“But you’re also an American, Nora. Americans always go home in the end.”

“But Tim McShane,” I start.

“You survived a war, Nora. You fear a bully?” she says.

Late that night in my room at the place des Vosges I pick up the framed photograph I took of Peter at Lough Inagh. A wild man with that beard and those runaway curls. Still the shy scholar though. The slight smile, and I’d gotten his eyes—that seeing-beyond expression in them.

I’ve placed Peter at the Center of my Altar of Remembrance. A collection of pictures of the living and the dead. The photographs I’d taken of my soldier patients, one of Louis DuBois, Lieutenant Cholet, a nice shot of Maud and Constance, Molly Childers and the Alices, Margaret Kirk, Madame Simone, James Joyce and Nora.

I’d propped up the memorial card from the duchess’s funeral against the wall. On the front Notre-Dame de Paris, Our Lady as a medieval princess, her baby on her hip.

I pick up the card, turn it over.

St. Patrick’s Prayer on the back. I read:

I arise today through the light of the sun

The radiance of the moon

The swiftness of the wind

The depth of the sea …

Christ before me

Christ behind me

Christ in me

Madame Simone is right and wrong. Maybe my imagination did create my relationship with Peter but then so much of what I believe I can’t see.

Like Holy Communion. The body and blood of Jesus in the host, on my tongue. Faith.

And all those Irish songs and stories that propelled the Rising.

Invisible.

I remember Maura O’Connor at St. Enda’s well. We can enter the otherworld through a lake, a well, a sudden insight.

Yet on the shores of Galway Bay the real and imagined Ireland met and mingled for me.

Funny, one reason I do want to go home is to tell the family I found Granny Honora’s birthplace, stood on the actual piece of Irish earth that’s uniquely ours. I would show them the hearth stones from the burned cottages.

I set Peter’s picture down. He’d told me to go back to America. Work for Ireland from Chicago.

I wonder if the Irish Fellowship Club would do something to end Ireland’s civil war. Tell both sides no more money from America until they stop killing each other.

I have two small bottles of holy water on my altar—one from Lourdes and the other from the Devil Dog fountain. I sprinkle myself with both, then write a letter to Rose, put a few drops on the envelope, and address it to the grocery at Larney’s Corner.

I tell Rose I’ll come home in the spring. Need that long to save my fare.

Two weeks later a telegram is delivered to the room on the place des Vosges. It’s from Rose:

Mame dying. We need you. We love you. Come home.

Mame dying? Can’t wait six months. I have to go now. Money, I need money. I look up at the framed Matisse sketch. Here’s a work of imagination with a price tag.

That day I wire John Quinn. He advances me enough for passage on the next ship. I will give him the sketch in New York. Meet the fellow at last.

I pack my clothes, my photos, my Seneca, and the stones from the hearth at Bearna.

The first morning out at sea I come up on the deck. Land to the west of us.

Ireland.

So long, Ireland, I think. I’m leaving you as my ancestors did. Making the same journey.

“Slán abhaile.”
I hear Peter’s voice.

“Safe home.”

OTHER BOOKS BY MARY PAT KELLY

FICTION

Special Intentions

Galway Bay

NONFICTION

Martin Scorsese: The First Debacle

Martin Scorsese: A Journey

Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland

Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS
Mason

Good to Go: The Rescue of Scott O’Grady from Bosnia

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Pat Kelly worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Paramount and Columbia Pictures and in New York City as an associate producer with
Good Morning America
and
Saturday Night Live
. She also wrote the book and lyrics for the musical
Abby’s Song
. Kelly received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York. Born and raised in Chicago, she lives in Manhattan with her husband, web designer Martin Sheerin.