The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (128 page)

Rachel read how John Ryan now had poems published by two newspapers, to a total of seven published works, and there was the distinct possibility of an anthology. The history of Fernscourt and its surroundings was proving long and complicated, but there were no pleas to hasten it from the man who had commissioned it, so it was taking its time.

There was the story of John and the man trying to sell him an insurance policy: John had refused it and the man had turned ugly. He had said that John must be expecting to come into a big windfall from the Fernscourt insurance people. John had been icy in his dismissal, but the man had retorted that he was only saying what half of Mountfern was saying behind his back. Kate had been upset but John had shrugged and said that a village had to have something to talk about, and since they hadn’t had a two-headed calf born recently, nor a cure at the may bush, nor even a visit from a politician, they had to fill in the long winter evenings somehow.

Kate read about art galleries that Rachel had visited, and a course of ten lectures that she had been attending. She heard of trips taken by train to cities in the United States which were further apart than the whole width of Ireland.

She knew that Rachel had seen a lot of movies and heard too little from Patrick, and that she was now considered a world authority on Ireland by the people in her circle.

Without Rachel having to write it, Kate knew there were a lot of empty nights.

Without Kate having to put it down on paper, Rachel knew that Kate sometimes found the imprisonment in her chair almost more than she could bear. The frustration seeped across the Atlantic in spite of herself. The days when it seemed to rain and rain and her lovely side garden with all the plants that she was meant to admire from her green room had turned into a mire of mud.

There were the times when it was obvious that Kate Ryan might in fact explode if she hadn’t this safety valve, this marvelous friend she could write to and explain everything as it was.

Like how irritating Dara could be, how downright maddening her own lovely daughter had become.

Dara had lost her unruly look, Kate said in these letters, she had become graceful in a way that was very hard to describe. She had also become almost impossible again. Everything was a shrug, a sulk and a sigh.

The record player that had been a gift from Grace played high and loud in her room, then the sounds of that dreadful Radio Luxembourg and its awful music replaced the record player.

Kate wrote in a matter-of-fact way about Patrick. She told how he was working night and day, and had little time for socializing. She knew this would please Rachel on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was also totally true.

Judy Byrne, who came twice a week to do the exercises that were meant to strengthen Kate’s arms, and improve the muscles that would pull her from chair to bed to bath and back, often let slip how she had invited Mr. O’Neill to this concert, or that exhibit, but never had he been able to accept. Judy shook her head sadly as she pummeled Kate, and made her repeat again and again the tiresome and stressful movements, saying that there hardly seemed to be any point in having all that money and power if you were never able to enjoy yourself.

Marian Johnson had said more or less the same thing: How sad it was that Patrick O’Neill didn’t get more cooperation from everyone so that he would have some leisure time, poor man. Marian would tinkle in that
unwise
little-girl laugh and say that he had been simply desolate not to have been able to go to the hunt ball, or the charity dinner or whatever social ruse she had tried yet again in vain.

Life went on as before in the lodge, Kate wrote, or so she thought. Grace was utterly charming, and the more loathsome Dara became the more sweet and endearing did Grace appear to be. She would sit for any length of time talking to Kate, asking her advice, begging to hear stories about Kate’s own teenage years. Dara couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her mother these days.

Kate had heard some disturbing things about Kerry. That he had been in a game of poker up in Foley’s bar, that he had been playing for high stakes with men who should have known better than to play cards with the son of the man who was going to change the face of the town and make their fortunes for them. She didn’t tell that to Rachel, since it was only a rumor, no point in worrying her over something that might not be at all likely.

Several times she apologized for the trivia and small-town gossip, and she said she was sure Rachel thought of her as a poor country cousin who was to be pitied for the narrowness of her life.

But as the months went on Kate apologized less. She realized that Rachel did indeed love to hear of the small town where she had felt so much at home. Rachel wrote about how she had glorified Mountfern in her memory now. She had forgotten that there was any rain, any mud or any bad temper. She had begun to think of the terrible Slieve Sunset as a place of worth. As she spent Christmas in the Catskills the notion of her ever sitting down at a table and having turkey with the Ryans seemed so remote that she wondered how she could ever have considered it as part of her lifestyle.

   John realized that without the trade from the site they would be in a poor way. The foremen, the surveyors, the visiting experts of one sort or another came for drinks at all hours of the day. They didn’t necessarily drink a great deal but they sat and discussed plans … opened out big grey bits of paper, argued over lists of supplies.

It was all much more comfortable for them than the prefab site offices that Brian Doyle had put beside the actual Fernscourt, which was rising very slowly from its foundations. It was Mary who noticed that they bought packets of chips and this was often their only lunch.

“Do you think there’d be a future in sandwiches at all?” she asked Kate.

Kate was annoyed she hadn’t thought of it first. Grudgingly she agreed that there might be a small profit in providing something to eat. She arranged to make a dozen sandwiches a day—ham and salad, cheese and home-made chutney. Anything that wasn’t eaten would be devoured by the family in the evening.

John was against them at first. Turning the place into some kind of café, he sniffed, not what ordinary men wanted. But when he saw Brian Doyle and the two engineers eating two rounds each the very second day, he changed his tune.

Kate and Mary smiled their first genuine smile of friendship. And Kate said that they might even think of serving soup later on if there seemed to be any demand for it.

Mary nodded her head approvingly. “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “I think you should get the soup going as soon as possible. Better do something before the Yank takes all the business off you with a smile.”

“That’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?” Kate said.

“Unless we try to fight back,” said Mary gruffly. “And we’ll have to fight the way he does. Like a man, of all things. Like a dirty, rotten man.”

   In fact there seemed to be delay after delay in building the hotel. Patrick O’Neill said that if he were a superstitious man he would think that he wasn’t really
meant
to build it.

First there was an earth subsidence, not too serious, but serious enough to mean a rethink. And then, expensively, a redoing of a whole wall.

There was the time that all the cattle had gotten in through a hole in a fence and done unimaginable damage to wood that had been stored in an open shed. The hole in the fence was never explained, but was said to be the work of a crowd of kids after school one day. Patrick tried to find out if it had been malicious but Brian Doyle told him that children were the devil incarnate. There was no use looking for malice or virtue in them, they were just bestial by nature.

There was the time that no vehicle seemed able to start or move on the site, and it was discovered that those which didn’t have bags of sugar poured into them had water mixed with the petrol. Jack Coyne couldn’t be blamed because he was away at Shannon Airport on the day it was all discovered. But there were definitely tales that he had been telling youngsters how to immobilize cars should they ever need to know, and further tales that he had said it would be a real laugh if none of the cars up on the site could move. Nothing could be proved. Those who were most protective of Patrick were those who most wanted to ensure that he stayed. They would never confirm any of his suspicions that there was vandalism and that much of it was directed at him.

Then there was a problem about a farmer who had said he would sell his acre of land and it turned out when the title was investigated that he didn’t own the land at all, it had been signed over to his son years ago. The son being a cunning man realized there was capital to be gained and the deliberations delayed the work that should have been underway long back in that particular area.

Patrick wondered whether the bad-tempered attorney Fergus Slattery had anything to do with it, but was reliably informed by Sheila Whelan that the reverse was true. Fergus had refused to act for the mean-minded son on the ground that opportunism was something best left to wily Americans, and that since a fair price had been offered, the normal man should accept a fair price.

Each time Patrick visited Kate Ryan he felt better in his heart. The frailty, the wan look seemed to be less. Or maybe he was only telling himself this.

He liked to sit in her airy green room and talk. Here he was far from the problems that seemed to beset him everywhere else. It was a peaceful room even though it was only yards from a noisy bar. It reminded him of Rachel’s apartment, an oasis of calm right in the middle of the mad Manhattan noise. Then he remembered suddenly that it was the same woman who had created both places. He never discussed Rachel although he knew how friendly the two women had become; he spoke no words of his increasing despair over ever finishing his project, his life’s dream. Nor of the anonymous letters he had gotten telling him that Irish businessmen could well have developed that site, or even more upsettingly that he was responsible before God and man for Mrs. Ryan being in a wheelchair.

He smiled as he talked. The crinkly lines were still there around his eyes, but Kate thought they had etched a little deeper and there were other lines too. His voice was still cheery and his laugh hearty but some of the evenings they sat and talked she wondered was he forcing his humor and begging his laugh to echo a little more.

Kate suspected that he was a man who had a lot of doubts about the way his life had taken him. She never brought the subject up.

He had accepted her paralysis when she was in the hospital. But it seemed totally out of place in Ryan’s pub. He kept looking up expecting her to swing in as she used to behind the counter. It seemed to come as a repeated shock each time he heard the high slow whine the wheelchair made on its approach.

Sometimes she did serve there, if there were friends in. A ramp had been made to a corner wing of the bar where Kate could position herself.

But usually it was that appalling virago Mary Donnelly who looked at him as if he were the devil made into flesh each time he appeared. He had been told that she felt some similar distaste for all men, but he felt singled out for her particular dislike.

   Leopold had a new collar. Mary had been at a carnival where they made dog collars with names on them. In a fit of generosity she had bought one with the words Leopold Ryan. The dog had been suitably grateful and seemed pleased with it. He would approach people and arch his neck pathetically, looking like a whipped hound showing off his wounds, but in fact wanting his collar admired.

“We have to have you looking well for Princess Grace,” Mary whispered to him.

Dara heard her. “Why don’t you like Grace?” she had asked straight out.

“I couldn’t like the seed or breed of anyone who would do such harm to your poor mother.”

“But it wasn’t their fault … the accident,” Dara cried.

“I don’t just mean the accident. I mean the living, taking the living away from her.”

“But Mam has a very good life,” Dara said, not understanding. “She always says that she hates us not to think of it as a real way of living.”

Mary had opened her mouth and closed it again. “That’s a fact,” she said unexpectedly. “She’s a great deal happier than most.”

   In the hope that it might soothe some of Dara’s outbursts Kate suggested that she invite Grace to spend the night with them. They might enjoy chatting together and it would save Grace the long journey back to the Grange.

“Oh, so I
am
allowed to have her to stay now. There was a time when it wasn’t suitable.”

“I never said that,” Kate said.

“No, but Daddy did when you went to the hospital first. It wasn’t suitable, he said, because of … oh, I don’t know why.”

Kate sighed. “That was a long time ago, Dara, all those kinds of worries are long behind us now.”

“I don’t think she’d really want to stay here anyway.”

“Whyever not? She always seems happy when she comes to visit.”

“Oh, that’s just being polite.” Dara was lofty.

“The offer is there, if she’d like to come.” Kate kept her temper with difficulty.

“She might come, of course,” Dara said as if it were all a favor to her mother.

Rachel had written that although she didn’t know from personal experience, every other mother of every other thirteen-and fourteen-year-old girl in the entire world told her the same story. And the story had a happy ending. They grew out of it. Kate hoped with all of her heart that Rachel was right.

   It’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime, and when Deirdre Dunne came across the two young Ryan boys as part of a gang that wrote silly things on the walls of Fernscourt, she said nothing. She just walked past with her eyes ahead of her as if she were slightly wandering in her mind.

The kids, who had hidden when they saw her, breathed with relief and told each other that Deirdre Dunne was as mad as Papers Flynn and Miss Barry and would be no threat to them. Happily they carved out “Yank Go Home” and “This is Ireland not America” with big nails, scratching away.