Ashes of Fiery Weather (12 page)

Fionnula continued, “
I wish I was in some lonesome valley, where womankind could not be found
 . . . Wouldn't that be a shame for the likes of you and me.”

Delia flinched. Fionnula noticed. She leaned over and put a hand on Delia's cheek, turning Delia to face her. She kissed her.

When they broke apart, Delia asked, “Would you really move to America?”

Fionnula sat back. “And give up my place as the only lesbian in Ireland?”

Delia wondered, as she often did, who had come before, how many, for Fionnula. But such questions, if asked, would then be put to her. She looked up to see Fionnula studying her.

“I miss you when I leave,” Fionnula said. “I don't know that you miss me.”

Delia leaned over and returned the kiss. “I do.”

She felt Fionnula smile and pulled back.

Fionnula touched Delia's cheek. “Well, love, if that's all you have, I'll take it.”

Delia covered Fionnula's hand with her own.

April 1941

Delia pressed her hands flat against her desk to keep from drumming her fingers as her students took turns reading aloud from a short story called “The Quiet Witness,” a retelling of Our Lady of Fatima from the point of view of a sheep named Argyle. Argyle? Delia thought. In Portugal? The visions had more veracity. Veracity. She loved that word.

She knew that if Blackie Noonan had been in class, before she even said “Begin reading,” he would have raised his hand and asked, “What's ‘witness'?” She'd explained over and over about learning a word's meaning from the sentence, and still the kid punched the air in a panic. But today nine seats were empty, Blackie's among them.

The Dodgers were playing their season opener against the Giants at two-thirty. The fathers who could afford tickets had brought their sons to Ebbets Field. A few boys had been in class this morning but disappeared after lunch, no doubt to take up positions outside the ballpark, hoping for a homer to sail over the fence. Even in April, the talk was of October and Brooklyn taking the Series after last year's second-place finish.

At lunch, Claire O'Hagan, the school secretary, had said there were more opening day absences than usual this year. It was because of the draft, the first ever in peacetime, instituted by Roosevelt last October. Delia knew her father believed they'd be in the war. Since Hitler invaded Poland in '39, Jack Keegan had been saying that it was only a matter of time. Mayor La Guardia was trying to get a bill passed that would grant firemen exemptions from military service.

Edie Brennan, another student, stuttered over the name “Francisco,” and Delia glanced at the clock. It was almost two-twenty. Tomorrow was Holy Thursday, a half day. And then Good Friday, school was closed, of course. Delia didn't care if Jesus never rose again. It was enough that He had died, and on a Friday, so she had three full days off.

When the principal, Sister Francis, asked Delia in her interview why she chose the teaching profession, Delia spoke of a desire to influence children's lives. She was lying. It was her own mind she wanted to shape.

When she was sixteen, she'd discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not in school. They'd never read her in English class. She'd been searching for Robert Frost in the public library, because she had a paper due on him, but instead came across a copy of
A Few Figs from Thistles,
misshelved under its title. She spent much of the next year writing poems, but not one was good enough to let out of her notebook, much less win her a scholarship to college. Vassar was the dream, though she knew she had no chance of talking her father into that. She knew she couldn't demand, because he would dig in. She couldn't cry, because that would be showing weakness. She needed to present the issue practically.

She and her father were at the kitchen table eating the meatloaf and potatoes she'd made for dinner. Her mother was in bed with a headache, she'd said. A covered plate sat in the refrigerator, where it would remain until tomorrow, when Delia would throw it away. As soon as dinner was over, her father would take off for the bar. So Delia waited until they were almost done, because he would be impatient to leave.

While they ate, he read the
Brooklyn Daily
Eagle
and she propped her book up behind her plate. This night, she set the book aside and cleared her throat, and he looked up warily.

“College,” she said. “I'd like to go.”

“College?” her father said. “You're going to that place.”

“That place,” secretarial school, was his idea, voiced two months ago at the beginning of her senior year of high school. Delia had never agreed to go.

“I'd prefer college.” She set down her fork.

“You don't need more school. You need to be able to support yourself.”

“I know that. I want to teach.”

“Teach? What, kids?”

No, puppies. Delia caught an exasperated sigh in her throat.

“I would like to become an elementary school teacher.”

Her father glanced toward the kitchen door, as if hoping her mother might come in and take his side. Though if she were to appear, she would most likely agree with both of them. College might be good. Getting a good job might also be good.

“All three of Bud Mackey's girls went to the secretarial place and they all got decent jobs in the city. You wouldn't believe the money they make. One's with a lawyer, the other's with some big doctor. I forget where the third one is, but Bud says she's going out with a guy who works there. One of the bosses. Bud says he'll retire early and let them support him for a change.”

Bud's daughters had been ahead of Delia in school, but she'd known them. All three were pretty and dumb. “Going out with” almost certainly meant “going to bed with.” She imagined explaining that to her father, who in spite of his talk of her future after high school believed she knew no more than a twelve-year-old. But derailing the conversation wouldn't help.

“Josephine is going to college upstate. Josephine Cullen, Teddy's daughter. Do you remember her?”

Her father was silent for several minutes, frowning and staring down at his plate. Delia was beginning to think he might not answer.

“Josephine. Little thing. Barely said two words. You in touch with her?” he asked.

Delia shrugged. “She sends me a Christmas card. A letter every now and then.”

Her father picked up his fork, then set it down and pointed at her. “Right there, that's the reason. These girls, their husbands get killed and they got nothing. You need to be able to support yourself, kid.”

She could have pointed out that fire widows who became fire matrons, like Josephine's mother, were supporting themselves by doing housework at the firehouses. That was their job.

“Well, I'm not about to marry a fireman,” she said.

He laughed. “That's right, over my dead body you'll marry a fireman. But you could marry some guy who walks in front of a bus. Same deal.”

“So I'll cross blind men off the list too.”

He laughed again.

Delia wanted to stomp her foot in frustration. He would tell this story at the bar tonight.
So I tell her, Over my dead body you'll marry a fireman.
The guys would all laugh and agree. No way they'd let their daughters marry firemen. None of them would mean it.

Jack Keegan possibly did.

It had not occurred to Delia before. Maybe he was not just giving a good line. Maybe secretarial school was also about getting her out of Brooklyn and into an office in the city, where she might snag a husband who was on his way up, if not already there.

Delia tried to absorb this idea as he waited expectantly for her next move.

“If the Depression does come back, an office girl has more of a chance of losing her job than a teacher,” she said, trying to steady her voice as she used her trump card, which she'd been saving for when he explicitly refused to pay a penny of college tuition.

He sat back, stroking his mustache.

“You've got a school in mind? And don't tell me the place Josephine is going. You're not living away from home.”

There was no hint of amusement in his blue eyes.

But Delia had expected that. She explained that Marymount was opening a satellite campus in Manhattan next year. It would be run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart and would be all girls, of course. It was a two-year school. Sister Peter John at school had told her about it and suggested she apply.

Two years was not enough, not nearly, but she would take it. Her father nodded and then glanced at the clock. Delia knew she had reached the limit of his attention.

“We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

He stood up and so did she, to begin clearing the table.

At the kitchen door, he turned back. “Teaching? You'd like that?”

Delia was too startled to speak. She wouldn't have guessed he knew anything about her. Sometimes she thought they might have been boarders in the same rooming house.

“I'll like it fine,” she'd said, and after a moment in which she thought he might say something else, but didn't, he left to go drink.

What she liked was the idea of being free every July and August, and her workday being done by three every afternoon.

How could she have known that planning lessons for eight-year-olds would require so much thought? Her mind buzzed with children's querulous voices, and her throat ached from suppressed yawns and from repeating “Sit still!” a dozen times an hour.

Delia had not actually believed she would have to teach. She'd believed Marymount would be like boarding a train without knowing where it was headed. But as it turned out, the final destination was the one advertised. No detour. No transfer. No rescue.

Decades from now, what if she was still in front of the classroom, hemmed in by the thumping of the eighth grade above and the yellow floors beneath her, polished in September and scuffed to ruins by December? Turning down guys from the neighborhood who asked her out on dates, waiting for someone better. Constantly reminded of her own years in grammar school, recalling the hostile faces of her own classmates.

When she was in the third grade herself, the mornings her father was home, her mother pulled herself out of bed and made coffee. She might stir oatmeal into boiling water. But if Jack had worked a night tour, he didn't get home until nine o'clock and Annie-Rose stayed asleep. Delia would leave the cold kitchen with her hair combed but loose, moored only by her ears.

Then there was the whole week when Annie-Rose didn't get out of bed at all, and then she was gone. Jack said that she needed a rest.

Sister Regina picked that week to take a stand. “Tell your mother to tie your hair back.”

But her classmates knew the gossip the nun had missed.

Your mother's crazy. Your mother's in the nuthouse.

Delia said nothing. She only agreed to give Annie-Rose the nun's message.

Bess Callahan, the matron for her father's firehouse, came over to help with the cooking and the laundry in Annie-Rose's absence. Bess had been widowed two years ago.

Bess laundered Delia's clothes along with the firemen's things, though of course that was not part of her job, leaving Delia to imagine that her school uniforms and nightgowns smelled faintly of smoke. Bess talked about her dead husband as she did the dishes and cleaned the house. George Callahan took her out to Coney Island. The day after the Great Blizzard of '88 was her birthday, and he walked over fifty-foot snowdrifts to see her. George Callahan was the one who started calling her by the nickname Bess.

“You poor thing,” she said to Delia once as she settled a clean sheet on the bed.

Delia said, “It's my mother who's sick.”

Bess's face went from rabbit to fox. “Self-pity is a sin.”

“The boys died,” Delia said, repeating what she knew to be the cause, the deaths of her two brothers from the Spanish flu in 1918.

Bess said, “George Callahan jumped out of a building, and he was on fire when he jumped. He fell two stories, but it was the burns that killed him and it took five days. This was on the third day.”

She pulled back her white sleeve to reveal a thick scar on her wrist.

“I was at the church lighting a candle for him, and I had to feel a little of what George Callahan was feeling. There isn't anything in the world that hurts like a burn.”

Delia thought then, and still did, that Bess was the crazy one. For a long time after Annie-Rose returned, the image came to Delia late at night as she lay in bed listening to her mother pacing the house: Bess Callahan, stoic over a votive, mouth and arm taut as the bright flame licked her white skin.

Delia hadn't thought of Bess much until she began teaching. Bess had remarried, another fireman, of course, and moved out to Queens. Being in the classroom brought back that month Annie-Rose was gone, and the years Delia was tormented over it, saying nothing because there was no defense. It stopped only when her beauty began to outweigh her silence. As young as thirteen years old, she understood why the boys at least began to stammer their taunts when she turned her eyes on them to stare them down.

Delia barely stopped herself from sighing.

Edie Brennan sat huddled at her desk. Henry Carroll stood to take his turn.

“The—”

Henry stared at Delia hopefully. A good teacher would make him sound it out.

“
Vision,
” she said.

“—vision was gone,” Henry said. “We left the—”

He looked up.

Delia wanted to scream,
Mountain.
Jesus Christ!

When they heard a knock on the classroom door, the children raised their eyes from their books, grateful for the distraction. As she nodded at Jimmy Valenini to open the door, Delia expected to see a student with a note for her that the children would think was scholarly. It would be from Claire, though. Claire O'Hagan, the school secretary, who was twenty-two, the same age as Delia.