1949 (43 page)

Elections were in the air. On the sixteenth of June Seán T. O'Kelly was elected as president of Éire. Seán Lemass succeeded him as
tánaiste
^*

“I disapprove of Lemass on principle,” Ursula complained to Ned. “He used to have nothing but contempt for the wireless. He called it ‘the hurdy-gurdy.'”
²

Ned laughed. “You have to have a better reason than that for disliking someone, Precious.”

“No, I don't. But the next time we have an election, I'll wager Lemass will be more than happy to campaign for office on the hurdy-gurdy!”

 

July saw the Labour Party win a landslide election in Britain. Churchill was out; the new prime minister was Clement Attlee. It was he who led the British delegation to the conference of the victorious Allies at Potsdam.

By the end of the month the unity of the Allies was shattered. Far from charting a safe course for postwar Europe, the Potsdam Conference, attended by Attlee, Stalin, and Truman, had seen the Soviet Union make a power grab of unprecedented proportions.

“An Iron Curtain has slammed down,” Winston Churchill observed.

6 August 1945
UNITED STATES DROPS ATOMIC BOMB ON HIROSHIMA

Two days later Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.

On August 14 Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Americans.

VJ Day marked the end of a war that had cost at least 55 million lives and redrawn the map of the world yet again.

 

War's end did not immediately make life easier in Ireland. The primary objective of the government was to restore the economy and avoid inflation. Wages were fixed; shortages and restrictions would continue for a number of months.

But great changes were literally in the air.

On the twenty-fourth of October Ursula shouted up the stairs, “Come down here quick, Papa, and listen to the wireless!”

Ned no longer hurtled down the stairs as he had done in his youth. By the time he reached the parlor the news broadcast was over, but Ursula was eager to tell him, “American Export Airlines just completed the first transatlantic passenger flight to Ireland! Do you know what this means?”

“I do,” said Ned. “It means the Yanks are coming.”

 

In December Louise Hamilton wrote to Ursula, “It feels like all our Christmases have come at once. Oranges are on sale in Moore Street for the first time since the Emergency began. They cost thruppence ha'penny, but the pavements are already awash with orange peels and purple tissue paper.”

“Soon you'll be able to have marmalade again,” Ursula told Ned. “Provided that Eileen's willing to make it for you.”

“And me with a clather of children to run after and a whole big house to keep?” Eileen interjected. “Chance would be a fine thing!”

That same evening she took Norah's old “receipt” book from its place on the dresser shelf and looked up the instructions for making marmalade.

Eileen Halloran Mulvaney considered herself very fortunate. By the end of the war half of Ireland's households were still cooking their meals on the hearth. The black iron range epitomized unimaginable luxury to women who spent their days bending, lifting, stirring over an open fire; wiping ash from their eyes and soot from their faces. Women who did the family washing and kept their children clean without running water in the house; women who endured the discomfort of an outdoor toilet in all weathers; women whose lives had narrowed to an endless round of exhaustive physical labor that was never acknowledged. It was what was expected of “the woman of the house,” just as a baby a year was expected, no matter what her health.

But Eileen Mulvaney had been liberated.

 

On the first of January, 1946, William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, was hanged in the Tower of London. He had been arrested by the British near the Dutch border the preceding May, tried and found guilty of treason. The British placed great stress on his Irish connections.

 

By summer Eileen's oldest boy had turned into a gangling, acne-ridden adolescent who could no longer be persuaded to study. He much preferred to work outdoors; any sort of farmwork suited him. Had it not been for Barry, none of the Mulvaney brood would have continued to attend Ned's kitchen-table classes.

“Teaching those children is just about all Ned has left,” Eileen said one day as she was clearing the table for the evening meal. “I'm amazed he can still cope.”

“He's so maddeningly secretive!” Ursula complained. “He won't admit to being blind, so I'm not sure if he can still see anything or not. It's like everything else connected with him; we'll never know the whole of it.”
At least, not while he's alive
, she thought to herself.

She had never told Eileen about the locked box in the bottom of Ned's army pack.

The mysteries of Ned Halloran's life did not end with that box. He had occasional visitors who knocked at the door, then waited in the lane until he made his careful way out to them. Ursula drew the curtains aside just enough to watch them out the window in the parlor. They talked while Ned listened. Or listened while he appeared to give instructions.

Ursula continued to read the newspapers aloud to him. He was avid for any story that involved the north. There were very few in any of the southern papers. “Éire forgets that those are our people too,” Ned complained.

“How active is the IRA across the border, Papa?”

“What makes you think they're active at all?”

“Oh Papa. Do you really believe I don't know who those men are, the ones who call on you from time to time?”

“A man's entitled to have a few friends.”

“Friends come into the parlor and talk and smoke and have a glass of whiskey. Those men never step inside the door.”

He pretended not to hear.

 

In July the Dáil agreed to apply for membership in the United Nations. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics vetoed the application. Part of the price for Irish neutrality would be the exclusion of Ireland from the United Nations for ten years following the war.

 

The winter of 1946 was one of the coldest in living memory. Fuel shortages caused business shutdowns; homeowners were urged to conserve paraffin oil. Ursula used candlelight and the long, bitter nights to write to her friends in Europe. In many cases she realized they were no longer at the addresses she had for them, but she posted the letters just the same.

The Irish men who had volunteered to fight with the Allies had returned home—except for those who were still in hospital, either in England or Northern Ireland. President Roosevelt had once dismissed the Irish army as “seven-hundred men armed with shotguns” but more men had joined up in the first days after the outbreak of war, than had joined the American forces immediately following Pearl Harbor.
¹

The twenty-year-old son of Ursula's nearest neighbor had seen action as a member of the Irish Guards. He had gone ashore with the first wave that landed at Anzio and been badly wounded. After more than two years in hospital he finally returned to Clare. His family gave a party and invited everyone within a five-mile radius to welcome the boy home.

Ned declined the invitation, but Ursula and Eileen went to the party. Whiskey flowed freely and there was enough food to use up a whole stack of coupon books. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves except the war hero. He kept his head down most of the time. When pressed, he answered questions about his experiences with a few mumbled phrases.

The horror of it was still in his eyes; the horror of floundering ashore through a sea of red mush and body parts.

When Ursula asked how it felt to be home, the young man replied, “It feels like I've never been away. I don't mean that in a good way. Has nothing changed in Ireland? Nothing at all? I thought everything would be different, somehow.”

“So did we all,” Ursula said bitterly.

 

When they returned from the party Ned was waiting for them. “May I talk to you?” he whispered to Ursula.

“Of course. What is it?”

“Not here. Come upstairs with me.”

Intrigued, she accompanied him to his room. He closed the door firmly behind her. “I have a message,” he said, taking a folded piece of paper from his pocket.

“Do you want me to read it for you, Papa?”

“You don't understand,” he replied. “This is for you. It was delivered this evening, while you were away.”

Ursula eyed the folded paper with suspicion. “Delivered by whom?”

“Just read it.”

Printed in block letters was a name and address. “That's Isabella Mooney,” Ned explained. “She's married to Michael Kavanagh and they're living in upstate New York.”

“Where did you get this?”

“From someone who knows someone who knows them. They're all right, the pair of them. Kavanagh's not a bad sort, I'm told. A bit hotheaded, but the Boys have promised to keep an eye on him to see that he gets into no trouble. And they always keep their promises.”

“I…I hardly know what to say.”

“Then don't say anything,” Ned advised. “Just get word to her parents, will you? Tell them she'll contact them in her own time. I suspect she still has a bit of growing up to do.” He laughed. “Takes a lifetime, that does.”

Ursula wrote to Henry that same night.

His reply came by return post.

Time on the farm was measured by the seasons. Like the rituals of religion, they gave life a shape. Lent and Easter and Christmas. Summer and winter and spring. More colts on the ground, more customers for butter and milk, the children growing up, the adults growing older.

Determined to make the most of a bad situation, Ned accepted his blindness stoically. He had never had enough time for contemplation before; now he did. What did Henry call it? “Taking a walk around the inside of my head.”

Henry.

The lost friend.

Looking back across his life, Ned examined its landscape. The moments of high emotionalism stood out like signposts. Loving Síle. The adventure of the Rising. The savagery of the Civil War.

Síle and Henry and the jealousy that had raged through him, making him mistake Henry for his enemy. What was that all about? he wondered now. Proving my manhood?

Retracing his steps, he began to see the pattern he unconsciously had followed all his days.

 

Dubliners had long been accustomed to electricity, yet in spite of the fact that airplanes were now crossing the Atlantic, people in the west of Ireland had continued to live as they had done for thousands of years. Everything was arranged around the availability of light. On the farms and in the villages, people went to bed with the sun. Before they retired they made certain everything was put away so there was nothing to stumble over in the night. Even a paraffin lamp made only a small pool of light.

Beyond that was the Dark.

Then in May of 1947, considerably after W.T. Cosgrave had once predicted, the Dark was pushed back in rural Ireland.

Ursula wrote to Louise, “Our lights have come on at last! A man came around weeks ago and installed a lot of fiddly equipment, then went away again. Yesterday an inspector called to the farm to announce, ‘You're switched on, missus.' How lovely to have light whenever one needs it! Eileen is in ecstasy. She goes around the house turning on light bulbs just for the novelty of it. I thought nothing would ever change in this country, but this gives me hope.”

That same month rubber hot water bottles, American lipstick, and nylon toothbrushes went on sale in Dublin. The stores were sold out in a matter of hours. “My girls were too late out of the starting blocks to get anything nice,” Elsie Lester lamented in a letter to Ursula.

Some elements of Irish life were returning to normal. The Royal Dublin Horse Show had been canceled only once during the war years and was now predicted to be bigger than ever. Held on its traditional dates in August, it included an international show-jumping competition.

“That's our market—our future market,” Ursula told Ned. “I'm going up to Dublin for the show this year and see what's on offer. Perhaps make a few connections for the future, when our horses are ready for sale.”

“Is that so important?”

“Oh Papa! In Ireland it's not what you know, it's who you know. I've learned that much.”

Leaving Barry at the farm, Ursula took the train to Dublin, where she stayed once again with Louise Hamilton. For several days she feasted her eyes on the glorious animals at the RDS grounds in Ballsbridge. In the evenings she paid long-overdue calls on old friends, some of whom, she was startled to see,
were
old.

At sixty-two, Helena Moloney was a matronly woman with gray hair and a sweet but sagging face. She could almost have been Ursula's grandmother. Kathleen Clarke, several years older, was as peppery as ever, her eyes still a piercing blue, but even Tom Clarke's indomitable widow could not hold back time. Her voice had taken on a querulous tone as if she were hard of hearing.

Louise Hamilton had become a frail old lady.

Ursula searched her own face in the mirror in her room. Thirty-seven or so; if she had been born in 1910 as people believed. Looked younger except for permanent windburn. Strong-featured, arresting but certainly not pretty. So familiar she never really saw it. Combed the hair, rubbed a bit of cold cream into the skin in a hopeless attempt to counter the effects of being out in all weathers, and occasionally applied a touch of lip rouge. That was all.

Looking at it now, she thought it might have been the face of a stranger. A stranger with lines around her eyes and threads of silver hair glinting through the rich brown.

Who are you that sneaked into me and took over my body when I wasn't looking?

Ireland might be unchanging, frozen in time, but its human inhabitants were not.

 

That autumn Irish bishops publicly condoned the boycotting of a divorced Protestant who was elected joint master of the Galway Hunt.

 

In his blindness Ned could see Síle. She stood out brightly against the encroaching dark. His one and only love as she was when he first met her in a miserable hovel overpopulated with Duffys of every age.

A tall girl with creamy, freckled skin. Eyebrows and eyelashes of purest copper, rust-colored hair like raveled rope. Eyes slanted like a cat's. Those beloved eyes smiled at him. Those sensuous lips shaped his name.