1949 (25 page)

“I'm writing a novel,” he explained if anyone asked, though very little actual writing took place. His energy was either used up in skirmishes or, more commonly, sapped by boredom. On March seventeenth he had spent an exhilarating day in the Free State on special assignment, but that was the exception. He had been ordered to come straight back to the north…and wait. Wait for weapons, wait for instructions, just wait.

Young lads who thought joining the IRA was a guarantee of excitement were sadly mistaken, he told new recruits.

Months could pass without Ned consciously thinking of “the Irish Republic” at all. When one of the new recruits in his unit, a boy called Séamus Burke, asked Ned how long he had been in the IRA, he had to stop and count back. “I joined in 1914, I was one of the early ones. And this is what—'36? So I've spent twenty-two years in the army.”

They were sheltering in a ramshackle lean-to behind a row of tenements in the nationalist area of Belfast. Rain beat on the roof with an insistent rhythm, like the fists of the enemy demanding admittance. The floor of the shed was littered with pellets of goat's dung. To Ned they looked like lead shot.

The day's rations consisted of a quarter loaf of bread smuggled out to them by the woman of the house, with many a fearful glance over her shoulder. “I'm that grateful to you lads,” she had said. “But would you be off in the morning? Otherwise it will go hard with us and I've a sick husband in the bed and five babbies to think about.”

“Twenty-two years in the army. That's longer than I've been alive,” Burke told Ned as they divided the bread between them. “Has it been worth it, would you say?”

Ned shrugged. It was a question he no longer knew how to answer. 1921 had been victory. Everything that came after had been a slow slide downward. If he let himself think about it, it would break his heart.

The persecution of Catholics in Northern Ireland went on; a random, unthinking violence so ingrained in the culture that Ned could not imagine the Six Counties without their sectarian undertone. Sometimes rifles and other weapons came north, via various circuitous routes, from supporters in the Free State. More often than not the IRA found itself defending northern Catholics with fists and clubs. Deaths on both sides mounted up. Nothing got better. Incised in blood, the hatred grew deeper.

People on either side claimed they could tell a person's religion simply by their appearance.

“He has a Prod face on him, so he does.”

“She's a Papist, I'd know that mouth among hundreds.”

Amazingly, more often than not they were right. Ned was confident he could recognize a Volunteer anywhere by the look in his eyes.

The sense of comradeship in the IRA was intense. Even more than the Republican philosophy, their shared experience of war instilled the Volunteers with a deep, unspoken love for one another. Trust was the cement that bound them together.

Any who betrayed that trust were dealt with severely.

“If peace broke out tomorrow,” Séamus wondered aloud as he dug in one of his pockets and produced a sodden half-cigarette to conclude their meal, “what would you do?”

Ned shook his head at the cigarette. “Never got the habit,” he said. “You mean what would I do if they dissolved the border and everything was sweetness and light?”

The boy grinned. “Something like that.”

Ned stared off into space. “I honestly don't know. I don't even know who I would be, in a situation like that. I'd lose myself.”

 

On the thirtieth of September Seán Lester was appointed to be deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations. Finbar Cassidy telephoned Ursula with the news, and she sent a personal letter of congratulations to Lester.

He responded, “As a result of my determined resistance to anti-Semitism in Danzig, some say I am now the most hated man in the Reich. I consider that a compliment. The Nazis have been eager to get me out of Danzig, and are crowing about my new appointment as if it were a defeat for me and a victory for them.

“I must confess that Elsie and I were looking forward to returning to Dublin when my Danzig posting was over. But that is not to be, not yet. I shall continue to do my best here until I take up my new post in Geneva next February. Elsie joins me in inviting you to visit us there once we're settled in again.”

 

In October the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco attempted to surround Madrid. Although the Republican government had already moved to Valencia, Franco ordered air strikes on Madrid.

The bombers belonged to the German air force. They were sent to Franco by Adolf Hitler.

 

On the twentieth of November Eoin O'Duffy led several hundred men—the majority of them Blueshirts—to Spain to support Franco in his right-wing rebellion.

The news was broadcast on 2RN but Ned Halloran did not hear it. Together with a score of others, he had set up operations in a wooded area near Derry—or Londonderry as the British persisted in calling the ancient Irish town. Séamus Burke had been captured by the RUC and reportedly beaten to death during “interrogation” in Derry Jail. Ned and his companions were lying in wait for the killers.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected as president of the United States by a landslide, and Mussolini and Hitler proclaimed a Rome-Berlin Axis. As 1936 wound down, Finbar Cassidy was kept busy in the Department of External Affairs. Although Ireland was playing no role on the world stage, protocol demanded that such events be acknowledged.

From time to time Finbar paused in his work and swiveled around in his chair to gaze out the window. Daydreaming.

Aside from telephone calls with news items, his contact with Ursula remained limited to an occasional glimpse in the street. Or in dreams.

Dreams which sent him, red-faced and embarrassed, into the confessional box every Friday. Finbar was a devout Catholic thoroughly indoctrinated with the tenet of chastity until marriage. But oh, the years were passing and the little sum of money he was able to put aside never seemed to grow the way it ought! Ailing family members at home, unexpected expenses…he began to fear he might spend his life unmarried.

The prospect of permanent celibacy depressed him. Yet so strong was the influence of the Church, he would accept it if he must. “That is your cross to bear,” his late mother would have said.

So why must his body insist upon rebelling in his dreams?

And why must his heart leap when he glimpsed Ursula walking down the quays with her long free stride and her head held high?

Every day he scanned the dispatches that crossed his desk, watching for choice nuggets of information he could pass to her like a gift.

On the tenth of December King Edward VIII of England abdicated to marry the woman he loved.

Eamon de Valera summoned the Dáil for the next day. At his direction the government introduced an amending act removing all references to the king and his appointed governor-general from the Free State constitution. The bill passed at once.

 

As usual, Ursula went to Clare for Christmas. At the farm a letter was waiting for her. “I haven't opened it,” Lucy was quick to point out. As she grew older Lucy imagined herself the subject of endless criticism, all of it undeserved. Her lips were permanently pursed as though she tasted something sour.

The envelope was addressed in the exquisite copperplate handwriting Ned Halloran had mastered at St. Enda's. Ursula felt her heart lurch.
Something must be wrong, or he would not have written
. She ran an impatient thumb under the flap, tearing the envelope.

The postmark was dated the fifteenth of December.

He could be anywhere by now
.

“Well?” Lucy said sharply. “Is he coming home for Christmas or not?”

“Not,” said Ursula.

Lucy curled her lip. “If that isn't just like the man. Putting the army ahead of his own family.”

Norah Daly whispered, “Leave it be, child.” Norah was very frail. Her bones showed through skin worn translucent by the years. The house had an unpleasant odor Ursula had never noticed before: chill, dusty, with a bitter undertone like the smell of moldy leaves at the bottom of a pile. The smell of old women.

As soon as she could, Ursula fled to the barn and Saoirse.

The deep hollows over the gray horse's eyes reminded her that he too was old. He had been foaled in the spring of 1917, long before independence. She had named him Freedom.

“You're a good age for a horse,” Ursula whispered to him, stroking the soft nose that insistently nudged her arm, “but please God there are years left to you yet. I need you to be here for me.” Throwing her arms around his neck, she buried her face in his mane.

King George's gray horse following the coffin….

 

Christmas was a muted affair. After the three women attended Mass Lucy cooked an indifferent dinner. Then they sat in the parlor struggling to make conversation. Ursula had so little in common with the other two anymore that she found it almost impossible.

At last she inquired, “Have you heard from Kathleen in America?”

Lucy's pursed lips drew tighter.

“Kathleen wrote us a while back,” said Norah in a voice as faded as the parlor wallpaper. “She's thinking of remarrying.”

“So we're all that's left,” Lucy added. “The Halloran dynasty. End of the line.”

Ursula cleared her throat. “You can't forget Ned.”

“Can I not? He forgets us easy enough!”

“I have to go out and feed Saoirse,” Ursula said abruptly. She jumped to her feet and fled again.

In the barn the shadows were soft as velvet and the air was fragrant with hay. Saoirse, chomping his oats, provided a rhythmic counterpoint to her troubled thoughts.

How could Papa leave Ireland to fight for a different republic? If the IRA's suppressed, could he not just come home? Surely he's earned a little peace
.

Saoirse raised his head and glanced over at her, then gave a contented sigh and returned to his oats. “Food, shelter, and companionship. That's all your nature requires, isn't it?” Ursula remarked fondly.

All your nature requires
.

Perhaps that was the answer.

Perhaps it was not the fight for a republic that drew Ned to war. He was a man in conflict with the two sides of his own nature, the tender and the brutal, and he sought to ease his pain by fighting in the physical world. The war in Spain looked more capable of resolution than the one in Ireland. So, worn and weary, Ned had set off in hopes of winning at last.

Ursula felt a wrenching pity for him.

Long ago Precious had observed to Henry Mooney, “I'm lots of different people and so are you. You're a little boy who used to ride in a pony cart, and a grown-up who talks to me like a grown-up too, and my papa's best friend who laughs a lot, and a lonely man who looks sad sometimes when he thinks no one is watching.”

“Be thankful you're a horse,” Ursula said aloud to Saoirse. “At least you know for certain who you are.”

He flicked an ear in her direction and went on eating.

 

The day after Christmas was St. Stephen's Day. The Wren Boys would be out. Following an ancient tradition still observed in many parts of Ireland, local boys would scour every hedgerow until they captured and killed a wren. They would tie the tiny body to a bush and carry it in triumph from house to house while they chanted, “The wran, the wran, the king of all birds, on Saint Stephen's day was caught in the furze.” Every household they visited was expected to pay them a sum of money in tribute.

Ursula hated the custom. But it was tradition and in Ireland one did not speak out against tradition. That would be heresy second only to denying Christ.

Norah did not come down for breakfast on St. Stephen's morning. “Christmas probably tired her out,” Lucy said without any show of concern. “Go up and ask her if she has some pennies put aside for the Wren Boys when they come.”

Ursula knocked once, twice, on Norah's bedroom door. There was no answer. She eased the door open. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light in the room, for the curtains were still closed.

The old woman lay on her back in bed with the covers pulled up under her whiskery chin. Her eyes were open. Staring past Here and Now. When Ursula pressed her fingers against Norah's throat, she already knew there would be no pulse.

She dropped to her knees beside the bed and said a long, heartfelt prayer, then went to the head of the stairs and called down to Lucy.

 

Ursula rode Saoirse to Clarecastle to use the telephone at the post office. Although the journey was short the old horse stumbled several times, he who had been so surefooted in his youth.
I should have spent whatever it took—even borrowed the money; Geraldine Dillon would have loaned it to me—in order to bring him up to Dublin. But it's too late for that now
.

With a heavy heart, Ursula admitted to herself that the two of them were sharing their last ride. Saoirse was slowly failing. To subject him to a jolting train ride or lorry journey at his age would kill him.

When her telephone call to John MacDonagh was put through, she told him, “My great-aunt has died and I'll be needed here until after the funeral.”

“Stay as long as you must, we'll manage,” he assured her.

 

To Lucy and Ursula fell the task of sorting Norah's things. It had never occurred to the old woman to write a will, nor was there any need for one. She had possessed so little of her own. However to Ursula it seemed that each apron, every handkerchief, embodied some fragment of Norah Daly that had escaped the grave.

“Isn't it strange,” she remarked to Lucy as the two women sat in the kitchen going through them, “the way things outlive people? And have the power to hurt us for that reason?”

Lucy gave her an uncomprehending look. “I'm glad things do last. I'm after needing more handkerchiefs.”

The paper records of Norah's life consisted of her baptismal and confirmation certificates and a thin bundle of letters tied with the same twine Frank had used to bind up raspberry canes. Glancing at them without bothering to read, Lucy said, “We can just toss these in the fire.”

“Wait a minute.” Ursula reached out and selected one letter at random. When she unfolded the paper it was soft with age.
Like Norah's cheek
, she thought. The ink was very faded. The handwriting was Norah's, though not the crabbed hand of an old woman. The letter had been written at some time in Norah's youth and apparently never sent—or retrieved afterward and secreted away.

Ursula swallowed. Hard. “Do you know what this says?” she asked Lucy.

“How can I? You're the one reading it.”

“Norah—Aunt Norah—was in love with Patrick Halloran. Your father. All these years, since before your parents were married.”

Lucy snatched at the letter. “I don't believe it!”

“It's true all right. And she…” Ursula struggled to comprehend. “…she must have agreed to live with them and help her sister look after the children as they came. His children.”

Lucy was staring at the letter in disbelief. “None of us knew. She never gave any sign. Our parents were devoted to one another and she was always just Aunt Norah. Cooking, cleaning, mending his clothes.” Lucy raised her eyes to Ursula's. “Mending his clothes.”

 

On the train going back to Dublin Ursula sat hugging herself. The train carriage was warm enough because it was packed with people returning to the city after Christmas, but a chill had entered Ursula's bones.

When she returned to work a stack of news reports was waiting for her. Hitler had agreed to support a nonintervention pact on Spain if the other great powers would do the same. Mussolini's government had banned interracial marriages in its colonies in Africa. And Franklin Roosevelt, in his inaugural speech in America, had spoken of his nation as being ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.
¹

“Things have to get better,” Ursula remarked out loud, “because there's no way they can get worse.”

“I couldn't agree more,” said an English voice.

She looked up in astonishment.

Lewis had entered the studio without her noticing, so intense was her concentration. Now he stood smiling down at her. “I couldn't leave things as they were. Whatever I've done that upset you, I want to apologize and make it up to you if I can.”

A seismic shift rattled her emotions like windows during an earthquake. “Hello, Lewis,” she said, rather more warmly than she had intended.

“I wasn't certain you'd be glad to see me.”

“Why?”

“Please have dinner with me later,” he urged, “so we can talk.”

She meant to say no. She said yes.

When he left the broadcasting station, the eyes of the other women followed him while Ursula pretended to concentrate on her work.

In actuality she was giving herself a stern lecture on how to behave when he called for her that evening. She would show him, once and for all, just what sort of woman she was.

 

Lewis brought roses for her—out of season and prohibitively expensive—and took her to Jamets. The Ursula Halloran who sat across the table from him, ramrod straight and coolly polite, was as dignified as a duchess.