On an Irish Island (29 page)

Mary Kearney, at right, a month or two after landing in America. Her sister Cáit sits second from the left.
(
Illustration Credit ill.19
)

She’d landed in America at the end of the
Roaring Twenties, around the time of the stock-market crash. But the
Depression seeped through the country only gradually, and Mary soon got a job in an adjacent town, working for a mixed Catholic-Protestant family with five boys. At one point, she heard the parents talking about possibly placing the last of the boys, still an infant, in an orphanage. “
Over my dead body he’s going to an orphanage,” Mary remembered herself saying, as she marched into the room and plucked the baby from its mother’s arms; he’d be safe in
her
care.

But was there something wrong with this picture? During her first weeks and months in America, she would join her sister and friends for a dance or the movies, and “
this thing would be in my head all the time, you know, that I shouldn’t be there, that there was a place for me”—a place not in the world, but in the church. Anything she did, it was the same, “
going around like a record” in her head.

She’d never met a nun on the Blasket, yet the idea had taken hold in her that she wanted to become one. Had she conceived it only in the wake of her relationship with George, in response to some inner storm of confused feeling? Or did it start earlier? Maybe even before she’d met him, quashing chances for any real romance from the outset? “
I knew he was sweet on me, but I knew I had a vocation.” That, at least, is what she’d say years later, after a lifetime in the church.

She didn’t want to take the fateful step right away, but, rather, to get a job, make money, send some of it home to her parents. But it
was
right away. One night, a couple of months after arriving in America, she burst into tears. When Cáit asked why, she told her she wanted to join the convent. “Who’s keeping you?” she remembered Cáit saying. “You shouldn’t be crying over that. You should be very happy.”

It was arranged that she meet Springfield Bishop Thomas O’Leary. She wanted to become a nun, said Miss
Mary Kearney, twenty-one years old, late of the Blasket Islands, and virtually just off the boat. She wanted to be a missionary. In China, maybe, or Africa.

Well, she could be a missionary in Springfield, she recalled Bishop O’Leary telling her.

Oh, but how could that be, with her friends and family right there in Springfield? What kind of a missionary was that?

“But you’d still be a missionary—from Ireland. The
Sisters of Providence have a lot of work for you to do.”

Sisters of Providence went back to 1873 in America, operating a network of hospitals in the Springfield-Holyoke area. They were a relatively well-off order and heavily Irish; of foreign-born nuns joining the order over the years, one came from Poland, one from Italy, ten from England, and 172 from Ireland. Among those with whom Mary entered the novitiate in January 1930, five were Irish girls, but
she alone could actually speak Irish.

Six months later, the engraved invitations went out:

In a ceremony a year and a half later, on January 6, 1932, Mary took her temporary vows and became Sister Mary Clemens.

In the late 1960s, with the liberalization accompanying the
Second Vatican Council, Mary gave up her nun’s habit. Before that, all anyone could see of her was a pinched remnant of face that included the eyes and mouth. All the rest of her face and figure were lost in a voluminous sea of cloth, a spotless oval of white around her head. So remembers her niece Kathleen Arduini, daughter of Mary’s sister Cáit. On the rare occasions when Mary was allowed to visit her family, she was delivered by limousine, escorted by another nun, who would come into the house with her, sit quietly, and wait.

Her aunt was not overly demonstrative when she came to visit, Arduini remembers, never one for hugging and kissing. She had a “
great, great smile,” but sometimes seemed too holy to touch.

In the spring of 1934, just before George left Galway, a twenty-eight-year-old musician named
Katharine Stewart was visiting Greece with her mother. Six years before, while in her final year at
Girton, one of
Cambridge University’s three women’s colleges, she’d been urged to sit in on a lecture by George Thomson devoted to
Greek lyric meter. She found the subject, with all its links to music, fascinating, the lecturer no less so. That, however,
was that. But now, while she was visiting Greece, a Scottish couple with whom she and her mother were traveling recommended to her a recently published book, written by a peasant fisherman from the far west of Ireland, and translated into English by this same George Thomson.

Later that summer, Katharine had just returned to Cambridge when she learned that Thomson was back, too; by her own account, she sought the chance to see him again. “The opportunity came in July,” she remembered. She was playing a Beethoven piano concerto at King’s, and during the intermission George approached her. They talked. Soon after, on July 23—the invitation came less than three weeks after Maurice O’Sullivan was married in Connemara—he sent her a note: “
Could you come to tea on Friday (4:15), so that we may continue the conversation which was interrupted—very sweetly, I admit—by Handel?”

“That,” she wrote later, “was the beginning of our short courtship.”

In the months that followed, George told her of his efforts to nurture the
Irish language and teach classics in Galway. “George spoke eloquently and passionately,” Katharine recalled. Both of them were interested in the classics, both in music. She’d play for him on her new harpsichord, captivating him with her reading of “
Callino Casturame,” a lilting little Elizabethan air. Sometimes they’d meet in his rooms. Or he’d come to tea at her parents’ house,
Girton Gate.

Katharine Stewart—“Katten” to her friends, and soon to George—came from a large family prominent in the academic and musical life of the old university town. Her father,
Hugh Stewart, dean of Trinity College and a lecturer in
French, was an ardent Francophile; the family often spoke French at the dinner table. Her mother,
Jessie Stewart, was a first-generation woman classics scholar at Newnham College; she and George liked to talk about
Walter Headlam, the King’s classicist who’d inspired George’s earliest work on Greek lyric meter. Katharine, who would herself contribute to Mozart scholarship and maintain a lifetime’s devotion to the keyboard, had three sisters and a brother. All cared for music. All were caught up in the surging political currents of the day;
Katharine’s sister Frida would drive an ambulance in
Spain during the
civil war there. They enjoyed their privileges, yet, as Katharine recounted in notes intended to form the basis for a biography of her husband, they all found ways to escape what they experienced as Cambridge’s elitist grip. As for Katten and George, it is hard to see them as anything but superbly matched. “
We did feel this instant sympathy,” she’d say.

By mid-August, three weeks after Katharine’s piano recital at King’s, they were engaged. “What thrilling, wonderful, lovely news!” Frida, closest to Katharine among her siblings, wrote her. George, it seemed to her, “
hits you in the eye as a person of beauty and sincerity and sensitiveness, and I thought him charming but,” she went on, “didn’t know he was so wise!”

George took Katharine to Dulwich to meet his mother, who welcomed her warmly. She met his brothers and sisters, too, all but one of whom still lived at home on Lovelace Road. Lorlie, the musician of the family, played the cello; she and Katharine tried some sonatas together. The elder sister, Maisie, who’d lost her fiancé in the war, had taken over the family accountancy business when their father died; it had been George’s for the asking, had he wanted it. Brother Hugh had served in the merchant marine but was just then unemployed, and discouraged. George’s much younger brother, Oscar, just sixteen, was at school.

On October 4, 1934, George and Katharine were married in Girton Church; they might have preferred a civil wedding, Katharine would later explain, but dispensed with it in deference to her father and his mother, who had grown increasingly religious. They honeymooned in Ringstead Mill, north of Cambridge, in Norfolk, where they stayed in the house of a family friend. They walked by the sea, read Shakespeare in the evenings.

Their marriage lasted more than half a century, until George’s death in 1987, and was marked by tenderness, honesty, and a profound communion of values. They shared much, felt for each other great respect and love. “
I am thinking of you constantly, but after 8 p.m. even more so,” he wrote to her from Cambridge one day about a year after their marriage, when she had to leave town for the day. “Outwardly I shall be listening to the high-table chatter, but inwardly I shall be trying to catch strains of your music, and I am saving up for you a kiss for every note. Good night, my sweet love, take care of yourself, and goodbye, my darling, till tomorrow.”

Four years later, as addendum to an otherwise chatty note, George wrote her that he’d learned there were thirty-nine
ways of saying “darling” in Irish: “So far, I’m ashamed to say, I have only been able to think of about 12, but here they are, all for you: My heart, my bright heart, [illegible], [illegible], my love, my bright love, my thousand loves, love of my heart, my darling, child of my heart, vein of my heart, my heart’s secret.”

After their honeymoon, the young couple returned to Cambridge and
moved into the house her parents had given them as a wedding present. It was called
Lavender Cottage.

The following summer, George took his bride to Ireland.

They went first to Dublin, where they stayed in
Raheny as guests of Moya and
Crompton Llewelyn Davies. “
George had told me much about Moya and her romantic history,” Katharine would recall, including “her involve
ment in the 1916 rebellion and her attachment to
Michael Collins.… She was very fond of George, though she probably disapproved of his marrying an Englishwoman with so little knowledge of Ireland.”

Then it was on to
Galway. They stayed at George’s old digs at
Corrib Lodge, overlooking the river, “
whence we could watch the leaping salmon.”

“I appreciated the warmth and humor of the Irish, who seemed so different from Cambridge academics,” she’d write. “But it was only when we reached Kerry and spent two days on the Blasket Island” that she began to appreciate something of what Ireland really meant to her husband.

They were rowed to the island in a
naomhóg
on Sunday, August 4; she was too seasick to enjoy the scenery. A few days later, back on the mainland, in Ballyferriter, she wrote to her mother about what she had seen of the Blasket, and of her new husband in its glow:

The summer before, in the wake of the publication of
Twenty Years A-Growing,
George had made a triumphant return to the Blaskets with Maurice. Now, with his new wife, he was back. Twelve years before, on his first visit, a foreigner’s arrival still counted as an event. Now it verged on commonplace. All through the 1930s, there were times when the island seemed to swarm with visitors.

At the time of his first visit to the Blasket,
George Chambers lived in a house on a fine greenery-softened crescent set back from
Temple Fortune Lane in
London, not far from a Jewish cemetery. He was a man of commerce and industry–- he owned, or managed, a good-sized toy factory—but he had a literary streak, too; he later wrote a book of poetry showing evidence of real feeling and considerable craft. He was born in 1873, and married, with three children; one went on to become an artist, another to immigrate to Australia, marry, and become a farmer. In old age, at least, Chambers was remembered as a quiet and gentle man. He had thin, straight hair, a high forehead, and in later years a beard.

Sometime before the summer of 1931, Chambers decided he wanted to see the lighthouse on the
Tiaracht, one of the
Lesser Blaskets, three miles west of the big island. He was advised that it was difficult to get to the craggy little outcropping, that he ought to make the Great Blasket his base and, as he wrote later, “
get the fisherfolk to take me out to the lighthouse.”

Having never heard of the Blaskets, he pulled out a map, found the
school that served the village, and wrote to its schoolmaster. A reply soon came from Nóra Ní Shéaghdha, its schoolmistress since 1927. “Nora O’Shea,” as he’d call her in his own acount, arranged island lodgings for
him in the home of
Peats Tom Kearney. In late June 1931, he made the usual trip—by rail to
Tralee, the narrow-gauge over the mountain to
Dingle, and a car ride via Slea Head to
Dún Chaoin—which he would describe as “
a bleak, impoverished and scattered village lying under a bare mountain side.” The sea was too rough for them to reach the island just then, so he stayed overnight at the post office, whose proprietress—“red-headed and unmarried,” Chambers described her—put him up and fed him. The next morning, a Saturday, he was rowed to the island in a
naomhóg.