Ashes of Fiery Weather (11 page)

“You don't need to fight a war to prove something to your so-called father,” she'd snapped. “The war he fought had to be fought. This . . . Sean, no.
No.
”

Sean had stalked out of the kitchen.

“Yes, Dad was a fireman. My maternal grandfather too,” Delia said, to get away from her thoughts. “My father was at the Windsor Hotel fire. It happened on St. Patrick's Day in 1899.”

“I've never heard of that.” Tomás moved closer.

Delia paused for a moment to gather the facts. As though she were lecturing her students, she began, “March 17, 1899. The last St. Patrick's Day of the century. The Windsor Hotel was somewhere along the parade route, I forget exactly where. The Forties, the Fifties, maybe. It caught fire during the parade. These were the horse-and-wagon days, and with the parade blocking the whole street, I can only imagine how long it took for the rigs to get close enough. Anyway, the firemen who were marching in the parade ran in, dress uniforms and all. My father was one of them. He was young then, in his early twenties.”

Tomás laughed. “Firefighters are our best madmen.”

Eileen half smiled. Delia could see her memorizing the remark to include in her next letter to Sean. Would she say “our grandfather” or “your grandfather”? Eileen had never known either of Delia's parents, with Jack Keegan dead and Annie-Rose gone long before Sean was born. Did adopted people consider themselves related to family members they'd never met, the way blood relatives had to? Delia was ashamed to ask. She shouldn't think about Eileen as outside their family. She wasn't. She was
not.

Delia continued, “A lot of the hotel guests had been watching the parade from the windows, and when it got too bad inside they started jumping. Of course, this was all right in front of the crowd who were watching the parade. The jumpers landed right in front of them.”

“How tall was the building?” Eileen asked. “Where did the fire start, on an upper floor or lower down?”

It occurred to Delia that she was asking the questions that Sean would have.

“My father always said that New York grew
up
too fast. The building was only seven, eight stories. But the ladders the fire department had didn't reach even that high,” Delia said. “I forget the total number killed, but the hotel burned to the ground. Birds flying overhead suffocated from the smoke.”

“Really?” Eileen said. “Why didn't they just fly higher?”

Tomás laughed. “A practical girl.”

“It happened too fast, I guess,” Delia said.

Her mother had told her that part. Annie-Rose had been fourteen years old in 1899 and among the spectators. Even with the jumpers and the screaming of those who couldn't bring themselves to jump, with the firemen and the cops fistfighting each other for control of the scene (God, nothing changed, ever) and the chaos caused by a panicked crowd, how like her mother, Delia couldn't help but think, to remember best the suffocated sparrows, falling dead onto Fifth Avenue.

“The monkey was there,” Delia said. “One of the companies had a monkey as a mascot, and she rode on the truck. My father used to say the whole company probably had fleas. He didn't like firehouses with exotic pets. Snakes. Parrots. Lizards. He was a dogs-only fireman. I think he said that was a rule at some point in time. Firehouses could have a dog, two cats and birds. No number of birds specified.”

“But you just said the company had a monkey,” Tomás said.

Delia laughed. “Well, firemen aren't the best at following rules,” she said. “At least rules they disagree with.”

Tomás shook his head. “Madmen.”

“My brother's going to be a fireman,” Eileen said, “when he gets back.”

Delia knew he'd taken the test, and that by law he wouldn't lose his place on the list because of military service. She could only hope the city's money troubles would keep him off the job until he was safely settled elsewhere.

A group of four came in off the balcony, exclaiming about the cold. Eileen dashed out. Coatless, of course. Delia didn't call her back.

“And where
is
your son today? Sean, is it?” Tomás asked.

“Vietnam,” Delia said. The very word was bitter in her mouth. “He enlisted.”

Tomás shook his head. “Good God, he shouldn't have done that.”

Delia nodded. “He was in college. I asked him to go for two years. I thought he might study history. He was always interested in the Civil War. And Irish history.”

Yet even as she spoke, Delia knew this alternate Sean, a professor at some small, prestigious college, or even a high school history teacher who also coached baseball, existed only in her daydreams. (Would she wish teaching on him anyway?) Possibly, it was her fault for trying to counter his fatherlessness by raising him on stories of his great-grandfather and grandfather, and in doing so, teaching him that firemen were the best kind of men. Hardly an untruth. But there were other professions, less exciting, perhaps, yet honorable. Sean didn't know.

Living right behind the damn firehouse hardly helped. Often over the years, as the neighborhood got worse, she'd thought of selling the house and moving someplace where Sean would have met a better class of boys instead of a crowd whose interests, as far as Delia could tell, were beer, baseball and girls. Upstate, maybe? Long Island? She'd have to buy a car. Nathaniel had offered to teach her how to drive. But she wasn't sure what she'd get for their house, and if it would be enough to buy a three-bedroom. She wondered sometimes if she should have adopted a brother for Sean instead. Nathaniel often told her to at least investigate a move. Yet Delia had never brought herself to go out and look for some small house, somewhere, whose windows had never trembled at the sound of fire trucks heading out on a run.

Eileen came back inside and rushed over to them. Her cheeks were red.

“Galway's coming. I'm going to jump in.”

“Jump in?” Delia repeated.

“The parade,” Eileen said impatiently.

Tomás laughed. “Atta girl.”

“I won't be home for dinner. I'll head back to Brooklyn after, to hook up with the girls.”

She was backing away.

“Eileen, I don't want you wandering the city for hours by yourself. Not without Sean.”

“Mom, come on. It's St.
Patrick's
Day. There's people everywhere.”

“Yes,
Irish
people. And we are notoriously well behaved, on this day in particular,” Tomás said with a grin.

Eileen returned it. “Yeah, exactly! Bye, Ma.”

“Be careful,” Delia called after her. She shook her head. “Seventeen. What can I say?”

It was then that Fionnula joined them. “Sorry to break this up, but you should mingle a bit with the masses, Tom.”

Tomás sighed. “I may have been happier when I was a has-been.”

Fionnula turned a stern look on him. She and her brother had the same face, adjusted for the masculine and feminine. The cheekbones, the chin, the high forehead and dark brows framing their bold eyes.

“If you're happier waking up covered in piss every morning and never writing a word, go right ahead. I won't stop you anymore.”

“I didn't wake up in piss
every
morning,” he said to Delia.

“I'd believe Fionnula over you any day,” Delia said.

Fionnula gestured to a man standing nearby. “You were wondering what the next novel is about? Here, sir, ask him yourself.”

Delia shifted, both to make room for the young man who she guessed wanted to be a writer himself, and so she could stand next to Fionnula.

Later, at the hotel, Fionnula was sitting up in the rumpled bed, a pillow behind her, her ankles crossed. She'd put on the bathrobe supplied by the hotel. They were too old, she told Delia, to sit around stark naked.

Fionnula poured herself a fresh glass of wine from the bottle of white they'd bought at the little shop across the street and said, “Your daughter doesn't look a thing like you.”

Delia pulled on the other robe. She would have preferred to gather her clothes from the floor, disappear into the bathroom and emerge put back together. But it seemed too prudish. Still, she kept her back to Fionnula as she quickly pulled her underwear on. She was often told that she looked “amazing for her age,” which was typically put at younger than forty-eight. It was true enough, she supposed. Nevertheless, her body was soft in a way she couldn't quite get used to.

“Maybe she looks like her father,” Delia said.

“There should still be something of you in her. Don't tell me your erstwhile husband had a child with another woman and you raised her.”

“Have you started watching soap operas?” Delia sat on the edge of the bed near Fionnula's feet.

“No,” Fionnula said. “She's adopted, then?”

“She is, yes.” Delia stood and went to the wine.

“Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“I didn't?”

“You know you didn't.”

Delia sighed. “We adopted her from Ireland in 1952.”

“From Ireland?” Fionnula's voice went up. “Why Ireland?”

“Why not Ireland? Luke was Irish. Born there, I mean. My grandparents were. And the whole process was much quicker.”

“I remember the uproar and fuss about the American actress adopting an Irish baby and the Irish embassy issuing a passport for him in a day. The papers—not, mind, the Irish papers—all started asking were Irish children for sale?”

“Joan Russell. That was right
after
I got Eileen.” She sipped.

The first time, they'd poured red wine into the plastic hotel cups—like, as Fionnula put it, a couple of aging whores. After that, whenever they met, they bought a set of wine glasses, overpriced in wine shops, of course, but how often did they see each other? Only when Tomás had business in New York. After, they left the washed glasses on the hotel bureaus. Delia liked imagining the array of housekeepers who found them.

Delia sat beside Fionnula and rested her head against the headboard. “I sent the nuns in Ireland a check, and they sent me a toddler.”

Fionnula was clearly not surprised. “How do you know your daughter's birth mother is from Galway? Did they tell you that, or—”

“No, no. The home where Eileen was born was in Galway. I thought there was a good chance a pregnant girl might stay fairly nearby. And it made her happy to be from the same county as her brother.”

“So she could easily have been from Clare or Roscommon, or—”

“She could be from Donegal. Maybe she's your niece.”

Fionnula laughed. “Tomás was never well behaved, but God knows he didn't go 'round Ireland taking advantage of culchie girls.”

“Culchie?”

“In America, it might be hick or country bumpkin—”

“I know what culchie means! Why would you say she was one?”

Though Delia tried not to think about the unknown mother, and for the most part had kept too busy to do so, at quiet moments the other woman came into her mind. She'd be taking down a bowl to make oatmeal for breakfast, or laying her book on the nightstand at midnight and reaching to turn out the light, or sitting in her office doing ridiculous paperwork that came with running a school, and she'd pause to consider her daughter's plain face and her teeth before braces and wonder about the girl who'd bequeathed them. How had she stirred the boy to passion? What had made them take the risk? Love, or daring, or boredom? Where had they gone to be together? A car? One of those lush green fields you saw in pictures of Ireland, so undisturbed that you might believe the country was deserted? Or was the girl grabbed off a street and pulled into an alley? Was it an uncle or a cousin? An even closer relative?

“She might not have been,” Fionnula said. “Even sophisticates, such as they are by Irish standards, don't have much choice but to go to the nuns.” She reached for her cigarettes.

Delia said, “Tomás thinks you don't smoke.”

Fionnula smiled as she lit up. “Silly man. Now, I know Sean, you had. He looks like you. Why did you adopt?”

“There were a lot of reasons,” Delia said. “I won't bore you with them.”

“
Delia,
a lot of questions are asked that have as a matter of course boring answers. Like how was your day? Does this bus go downtown? Are your bunions better? But why did you adopt a child isn't one of them.”

“There were complications, with Sean. I didn't want him to be left alone, the way I was.”

“I don't know you as well as I should,” Fionnula said.

“Oh?” Delia said. “Your twin brother thinks you've devoted your life to him because of your mother calling you his guardian angel.”

Fionnula laughed heartily. “My mother was a dozen eggs, all of them cracked.”

Delia laughed too, relieved that the conversation had turned away from herself.

“Tomás is talking about moving to New York. Did he tell you that?”

Delia lowered her glass. “No, he didn't.”

“He likes it here. Americans fawn over him way more than the Irish.”

“Would you come with him?” Delia asked.

“Don't worry. I won't show up at your doorstep in Brooklyn with a suitcase and a sign around my neck saying
Delia's Lover.
”

Delia closed her eyes. A lover had soft blond hair and a smile that trembled at the corners.

“What are you thinking?” Fionnula asked. “What are you thinking right now?”

Delia looked into Fionnula's strong, handsome face. “‘Peggy Gordon.'”

“The song?” Fionnula asked.

“It's St. Patrick's Day.”

“It's Scottish.”

Delia smiled. “I know. But you hear it today.”

“What line were you thinking of?”

She had a good voice. Her father could sing. Delia sang softly, “
For when I'm drinking, I'm always thinking, and wishing Peggy Gordon was here
. . .”