Ashes of Fiery Weather (13 page)

When she first started at the school, Delia wanted to spend her lunch hours reading, but Claire insisted on chatting. Before long, Delia found herself closing her book. She was not particularly interested in the lives of movie stars, but there was something about the way Claire smiled when she told her stories, as if she knew none of it mattered much, that made Delia listen to her. Also there was the frankness with which she spoke of her parents. Her father, she said, lifting her shoulders, was a mean drunk, and her mother was just plain mean.

Delia imagined doing the same:
My mother never got over losing her sons, and my father's entire life is the fire department
and the bar.

What also drew her to Claire were the snide remarks from the one other lay teacher. During Delia's first week, Miss Geoghan whispered to Delia in the teachers' break room that when the O'Hagans moved to Holy Rosary parish two years ago, they claimed to have eleven children. But the youngest O'Hagan had a different look than the rest of the family, with that dark hair when all the rest were blond or redheaded. Claire was
sixteen
when the boy was born. Delia fixed Miss Geoghan with a falsely puzzled stare, trying to goad the old bitch into saying it straight out.

Delia expected the note to be about this weekend. The principal would be furious if she knew Claire was using students to send personal notes, but Claire shrugged and said she'd only yell, and what was yelling?

Probably it would be about the weekend. Claire's boyfriend always had a buddy who needed a date.

But the messenger at the classroom door was Claire herself. She leaned over and whispered in Delia's ear, “Sister Francis wants to see you. I'll watch the class.”

Delia pulled back. “Why?” she said without whispering.

The children stopped their perpetual rustling. Claire shrugged but avoided Delia's eyes. Delia was suddenly alert, interested in her day. Sister Francis was certainly sharp enough to sense her apathy. Maybe she was about to be fired. As they changed places, Claire seized her hand and squeezed it.

Delia stepped into the principal's neat office, vowing not to argue for her job or cry. Such was her focus on the nun, who was sitting at her desk with her hands folded, that she didn't at first notice the priest or the fireman, until the fireman spoke.

“Delia.”

Delia knew, of course, that there was only one reason for Chief Taulty to be at her school in full dress uniform. He had his white cap under his arm.

Beside the chief stood Petey Halloran, who'd been ordained last year and assigned as a curate to Holy Rosary, so everybody said, because his uncle the bishop pulled strings. What new priest gets assigned to his home parish? He and Delia had been in grammar school together. She still wasn't able to address him as
Father
Halloran. His eyes were wide and frightened.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We caught a job at a typewriter store. Your dad said he wasn't feeling good. We wanted to take him to the hospital but he said he'd go back to the firehouse, get cleaned up—”

“He had a heart attack,” Delia said.

“Looks like.” Chief Taulty's jaw moved.

Delia inhaled deeply, and when she exhaled, it was as if she were leaving her body.

Sister Francis spoke up. “Miss Keegan, you are of course dismissed for the day, and as long as you need to make the arrangements. We'll have the students pray for him.”

“Thank you, Sister,” Delia said with effort. As for the “arrangements,” she thought, with relief, her father would get a full departmental funeral. She would not need to make many decisions.

“Oh, goddamn it,” Delia said. She ignored the nun's reflexive frown. “Where's my mother?”

“The fire department chaplain's with her, and Lieutenant McAleer,” Chief Taulty said. “A couple of the wives were heading to your house too.”

That part was good. The wives wouldn't be telling her that Captain Keegan had been the best fireman they'd ever known. They'd make coffee and start cleaning the house. Joannie McAleer would slip Annie-Rose a drink, understanding that this was not the time to demand anything new of a person.

“Did he die at the scene or in the hospital?” Delia asked.

“At the scene,” Chief Taulty said.

“That's better,” Delia said.

June 1941

Without her father, it seemed to Delia that the brownstone grew, the hallways widening, the rooms multiplying then hiding themselves in the daylight. She and her mother were shadows slipping through the space, their feet barely making a sound on the carpeted stairs or the hardwood floors.

Delia wasn't sure what made her get out of bed after midnight. Her mother had always walked the house at night. But in three months of widowhood, there'd been a change in the sound of her steps. Delia imagined Annie-Rose not aimless, but instead purposefully picking up pieces of herself that were scattered through the rooms. Here, beneath the couch. Here, behind the mirror in the hallway. Here, beside the clock with Connemara marble trim that was set to the time in Ireland, an old custom Annie-Rose insisted on following. Midnight in Brooklyn. Six in the morning over there.

Annie-Rose was attending morning Mass every day, something she used to do only intermittently. Delia went down one flight of stairs, pausing on the parlor floor. Through the open pocket door, she peered into the living room, half expecting to see her father in his chair beside the radio, where he'd spent so much of the last year listening to the news about the war in Europe.

When Delia opened the front door and saw her mother sitting on the bottom step of the stoop, her mother turned around.

“It's late,” Annie-Rose said, as though she'd come outside and found Delia there. “But I'm glad you're up.” She met Delia's eyes.

Delia took a step back.

“Sit for a minute. It's so hot in the house.”

Delia obediently stepped outside and chose a step above her mother. Her father would not have been happy to see them both out in their nightgowns.

Delia spied the ring around her mother's thumb, which meant that hidden in the closed palm of her hand was the penal rosary. The penal rosary used to fascinate Delia. When she was very small, her mother had told her how they were invented in Ireland during a time when Catholics could be arrested or even killed for practicing their religion. The penal rosary had only ten beads rather than five decades, plus an Our Father bead and a cross. You slipped the ring over your finger or thumb and tucked the beads up your sleeve, concealing them. To pray the penal rosary, you slipped a bead from your sleeve and into your palm.

“I was supposed to be a nun. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.” Delia curled her toes against the cool step.

“I wanted to go into the cloister but I waited for both my parents to be gone before I entered, because whichever went first, the other would be left alone. My mother said once she thought all the babies had been starved out of her when she was a child.”

“Starved—
what?
” Delia said.

“My father said Jack Keegan was fearless in a fire. I saw Jack Keegan and I wanted to marry him. And here we are,” Annie-Rose said.

She opened her palm and ran her fingers over the rosary. “You're like him. That's good. I've waited to give you some time. I didn't want to go right away.”

“Go
where?
What are you talking about?”

Annie-Rose smiled. “I'm going into the convent.”

“The convent?” Delia repeated, as though her mother had said the moon.

“On Cross Hill.” She reached over and squeezed Delia's hand.

“For a—retreat?”

Annie-Rose said, “I haven't had a drink since your father died.”

Delia snatched her hand back.

“I got a letter from the mother superior today. I wrote to them explaining, and then I went to see them a month ago, and now Mother's written to me. The order will accept me as a novice.”

Delia stood up. “I'm going back to bed.”

Annie-Rose held up a hand. “Delia, I've been praying for guidance ever since your father died.”

“You can't become a nun!”

Annie-Rose only gazed at her, her expression calm, her hands trembling.

“You're married. You had children!”

“You can become a nun if you're a widow. Elizabeth Ann Seton had five children.”

“So for years now, you've been waiting for Dad to die?”

Annie-Rose shook her head. “Never! Never. I didn't think Jack would die first. Even with his job, I never once thought he'd be killed.”

Delia understood that. She'd never thought so either.

“I've been trying to make sure everything is in order. One of your father's men has a nephew who's a lawyer, and he's been helping me. The house is yours now. I'll leave you the lawyer's name and phone number. Call him if you need help, or any of the firemen. I'm going day after tomorrow.”

“The day after—
Mother!
You can't be serious.”

“I've been trying to think of a way to tell you. But if you need to get word to me, go to the convent on Cross Hill Avenue. I don't know for sure if I'll be there or upstate. There's another order there, you know. You go where they send you.”

“Word to you about what?” Delia said. “If you go in there, you can't leave. Why not find an order that will let you come and go?”

Annie-Rose fingered the rosary. “God has called me to know Him better. To do that, I have to live away from the world. All these years, I thought the boys died to punish me for ignoring the call but now I understand. Mary had to show me a little of her own pain.”

Delia stood up.

“Delia, please,” Annie-Rose said. “I want to tell you that you should go to college, the one you wanted to go to. Jack was wrong about that. I told him but he didn't listen to me. He never did. Sell the house for the tuition money. You shouldn't be tied to this place.”

“The only place I'm going is back to bed.” Delia went inside, waiting for her mother to call her back, but she didn't.

In the time remaining, Delia refused to discuss her mother's purported vocation.

Annie-Rose gave up trying to start conversations about it, finally saying that she hoped Delia would understand, in time.

On Saturday night, Annie-Rose insisted on saying goodbye. Delia accepted her mother's tight hug and ignored her tears.

On Sunday morning, Delia woke to find her mother gone, as promised. The penal rosary sat on the kitchen table with a note.

For you, to give to your firstborn daughter.

Delia crumpled the note and tossed it in the garbage. Beside the phone, there was a nail in the wall where a picture had once hung. She took the penal rosary and hung it on the nail.

Then she got ready for ten o'clock Mass, putting on the new blue dress she'd been saving for an occasion that did not seem to be presenting itself. Since she was early, she sat in her father's chair and listened to the silence of the house, the story above her and the story below. At the time she should have left for Mass, Delia slipped off one shoe and then the other.

Eventually, she went to change, but paused at the family pictures that lined the hallway of the parlor floor. She looked at the studio portrait of herself, taken for her confirmation. She'd chosen the name Rose, for Saint Rose of Lima. Brigid Mary Rose Keegan. Never called anything but Delia. She wore a white dress with a blue sash and stood with one hand resting on the back of a chair. She'd looked often at the picture that hung beside it, a studio portrait of the two boys, taken in 1917, the younger one perched on a stool with the older one standing beside him, his hand on his little brother's shoulder. So often had she looked that it took a moment for her to realize the picture was gone.

Delia gazed at the white space for a few minutes and then went upstairs to her bedroom, where she stepped out of her church dress and left it on the floor. After she changed, she brought her book downstairs and resettled in her father's chair. She left her veil pinned in her hair.

October 1941

When the doorbell rang at nearly eleven o'clock at night, Delia was sure her mother had come back. She had been reading in bed, and she dropped her book and flew down the stairs, nearly tripping at the bottom. When she yanked open the door to see Claire and the child she called her little brother standing on the stoop, Delia was so confused that she actually peered around Claire's shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” Claire said.

Claire wasn't wearing a jacket, and the boy had on only a sweater that was too big for him. Delia ushered them inside. Claire came into the hallway shivering, clutching Flynn's hand. Flynn, who Delia suspected was named after Errol Flynn, held a stuffed dog that was missing seams from his smile.

“I had a fight with my mother. She told me to get the f—to get out. I didn't know where else to go. And I brought Flynn because”—Claire stopped—“he's the youngest. The rest of them can take care of themselves.”

Flynn was six. The next-oldest O'Hagan was eight. Delia closed the door.

Briskly, she offered her parents' room. It had a double bed. Delia glanced at Flynn, who stared solemnly back at her as though he was delivered to a stranger's house every night when he should have been long asleep.

“Or—there's another bedroom. He can sleep there if you think he won't be scared by himself. It's got a view of the back of the firehouse.”

There was a full-size bed that her brothers had shared and a bureau, but no other furniture. Plenty of nights, her mother had slept there.

Claire shook her head. “He's never been alone.”

“Okay. But he can always move in there later, if you change your mind.”

“Later?”

“You can stay for however long.”