City of Hope (8 page)

“Do you need me to do anything?” she asked.

The question was so genuine that it begged consideration.

“Come in,” I said.

I commissioned her to take a hackney car to my cottage, calling in to Heffernan's on the way, giving him a brief note confirming the funeral arrangements. She was to take Maidy aside and let her know that I would be staying in town, and not coming back to the house to wake my husband. I would see her the following day for the formalities.

“The house will be filled with people,” I said, justifying myself. “She won't be alone for one single moment—she'll understand.”

Katherine nodded and took my request on board without question.

As she was leaving I saw her eyes pass over the trunk that was sitting just inside the bedroom door.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

The coffin was removed from Heffernan's funeral home at 6 p.m. the following evening.

I had sent a request to Maidy to have John's coffin closed and taken up to Heffernan's a few hours before the church service, so that his funeral procession could take place directly from there. They had never, to my knowledge, seen anybody's removal from the funeral home before. Bodies were always taken straight from the home to the church, and usually left there overnight with the keening widow and her family watching over the closed coffin. There was usually a removal service the night before and a funeral Mass before the burial. The official mourning period was one month. This ended with a Month's Mind Mass, to signal that it was time for the family to return to “normal” life. These rituals were, I knew, important landmarks for the bereaved, but God and Church held no comfort for me and I had lost what little sense I had of holding with convention. I wanted the whole thing to be over and done with as quickly as possible. I had let Maidy wake John in our home, and now she had to respect my small break with protocol.

At half past five I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the apartment, dressed and ready. Fully made up, I wore a moss-green silk scarf and gloves as a tribute to John, the black trilby hat pinned neatly to my bun, the veil pulled down fully and tied at the back of my neck.

I could not move.

I knew I had to go, but the thought of it had filled me with such an unnameable fear that I was paralyzed.

I sat looking over at the clock at my bedside. One minute passed, two, three minutes. I had to get across to Heffernan's and take my place alongside Maidy in the funeral home, while people came to pay their respects and look at the coffin. Not at John. Not at my dear John, but a box. A wooden box. I tried to persuade myself that's all it was, but still, I could not move.

Five minutes. It was twenty-five minutes until the funeral, and I should have been there twenty minutes ago. The curtains throughout the apartment were closed, but I could hear people gathering in the street outside. Waiting. The longer I sat here, the more of an “entrance” I would have to make. The grieving widow in black, with her fancy getup and her airs and graces, keeping everyone waiting. Still I could not move.

There was a knock on the door. I started, then heard the gentle turn of a key.

“Ellie?” I heard Katherine call through from the hall. “I have Maidy here.”

Maidy stood in the bedroom door. Her face was bloated from the tears of the past twenty-four hours, and she looked tired, but stoic.

“Come on, Ellie dear,” she said, “it's time.”

We walked out of the building, and the main street of Kilmoy was lined with people as far as my eye could see. Everybody knew John. Everybody loved him. I kept my head down and gripped Maidy's arm. A path cleared for us into Heffernan's. Everyone fell silent; a cloud of solemn respect hung in the air. The funeral home had cleared its small back room to accommodate my unusual request. The little window was open and there was incense burning in a pot by the door, but it barely masked the acrid smell of dead bodies and the chemicals they used to preserve and prepare them.

I retched and swallowed. Soon this would be over. An hour at most, I told myself. The coffin sat on a makeshift table and there were two large church candles, on stands borrowed from the church, burning at either end. A slim spray of prepared flowers sat on the lid. I had filled our house with flowers all through our married life. In the early days in jars and bottles, latterly in cut-glass vases. I felt a stab of regret that, despite Heffernan's efforts, the place looked shabby and makeshift. What a chapel I might have prepared here, with my good lace tablecloth and arrangements of wild flowers from our own garden. It was spring after all, and the world was coming to life.

Heffernan, with his grim, apologetic face, sat us on two wooden chairs facing the coffin.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I nodded, although I did not feel ready. I did not feel ready at all.

I don't know how long we sat there and took condolences, but it was certainly hours. People shook our hands and embraced us and offered their sympathy: “I am sorry for your trouble,” in an interminable line that went on, and on, and on. Most I recognized, some I did not. Every one of them stopped and spoke to us in turn. “John was a wonderful neighbor,” “I fought with him in the GPO—a hero,” “How shall you live without him?,” “We'll miss him.”

I shut down. I did not have room to absorb all their grief, when I could not even accommodate my own. Maidy was strengthened by their friendship, their goodwill. I could see her all but swell with gratitude at their kind words. I felt diminished by them. As the line went on, I felt such an exhaustion wash over me that I thought I might fall asleep in the hard chair. The room was hot, and by the time the last mourners came, it was all I could do to hold out my limp hand and nod politely.

The crowd moved on to the church, but there were enough besides to line the streets four deep as Maidy and I, the most meager funeral party Kilmoy had ever seen, walked behind the coffin up the road. Padraig Phelan and five other uniformed men from John's old IRA unit carried it. They were all big men, but had grunted as they lifted the ornate mahogany box from its stand up onto their wide shoulders. John was in there. John was in the box. I swallowed hard. How much longer would this take? An hour, two? I thought of my black shoes pinching the corners of my feet, of the gravel on the road beneath their thin leather soles, of the fresh air, breathing in deeply—at last!—and each breath glued my spirit together, tightening the screws on my dignity and decorum, girding me against the pity and the curiosity of the crowd. All eyes were on us.

“No children,” I heard somebody say.

“A double tragedy.”

The men struggled up the steep hill toward the church. People, more people. I had become used to them now. Talk rustled through them gently, like wind through foliage. They were as inescapable as the hedgerows that lined our fields keeping the cattle in, delineating what belonged to whom. John belonged to Maidy and me alone, they were meaningless to me. I gripped Maidy's arm and felt her weight against me as she struggled up the hill. The crowds outside the church moved aside for us, and inside it was packed to capacity. One empty pew at the front was clear, for “the family,” our privileged sanctuary from the jostling elbows of the shuffling, coughing congregation, an empty stage on which to display our howling grief or maintain our stoic dignity. How could I do anything other than act, with so many people watching me? How could I believe that this drama and pomp were really happening—that John was really dead?

The service was short. Padraig spoke briefly about John's great bravery during the war, and Maidy and I followed the coffin again out of the church to the graveyard. Maidy sobbed and I held her firmly, as I had after Paud's funeral. I imagined that it was Paud in the box and that John was walking solemnly behind us.

The crowds receded again as we stood by the grave and said the Sorrowful Mysteries, Hail Marys rising up from the crowd toward heaven as the men balanced the coffin on its rope hoist. I looked into the hole beneath it. Dry earth. Mud.

Liam, the smallest, youngest man among them, struggled to hold the rope steady. There were beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. He had called me out to the scene of John's shooting when he was no more than a boy. With a flash of clarity, it hit me. It was John in the box. He was locked in the coffin and they were going to bury him in the ground. John was alive! I had seen him breathing! As they lowered the box, I let out an almighty howl.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
The priest threw a handful of earth down on the coffin. With its dull thump, I threw myself forward and shouted, “No, no—you can't do this! He's alive—John's still alive!”

I ran to the very edge of the grave and would have climbed in, except that Padraig and Liam held me back.

“Come on now, Ellie.”

I screamed. Rage and fear consumed me.

“Open the coffin. I want to see him! Open it, now. He's still alive, I know it. John's not dead—not John, not my John!”

Padraig put his arms around me and held me together. The broad chest of a man, the scratch of his wool coat against my face—John, but not John. John was gone. He was dead. It was the truth. At last, it was out.

Maidy stood behind him, and held her hands up to her face in shock.

“Oh, Ellie,” she said, “oh, Ellie, Ellie, Ellie.”

She held her arms out to me, but I did not want to go to her. I did not want to give in to this truth. I would not look at John going into the ground. I would not look on him.

I broke away from Padraig and ran through the crowd. Out of the graveyard, past the church, beyond the foliage of faces—their judgments, their shock, their pity.

I scrabbled in my good clothes down the hill of the main street, past the shops—closed in my dead husband's honor—and I ran and ran until I was at the door of my building, and then I ran up the stairs. Once inside the apartment, I ran straight to the bedroom and, without thinking, flung open the dusty trunk. I emptied all the drawers of dresses, skirts, undergarments, a hairbrush, mirror, cosmetics, throwing everything into it, then I banged the lid shut.

I would run, and leave John behind. As I had done before. Then he would be here waiting for me, and I would be away, making things right. Making things better for both of us.

All of my papers were kept in a bureau upstairs. I praised my luck in having an organized mind as I pulled out my passport and all my American papers. There was a small lead safe under the desk, where I kept an amount of cash, away from the prying eyes of the local bank and Irish taxman. I opened it hurriedly and counted out almost two thousand pounds, which I crammed into the purse-belt that I used to keep my money safe on my travels to Dublin, placing it under the waistband of my skirt.

I took the pen from its holder and a sheet of writing paper from the bureau and hesitated as I began to compose a note to Maidy.

In the end I forced the words onto the page in a hurried scrawl:
“Sorry, Maidy, I have to go away. I will be in touch soon. With love, Ellie.”

It was disgracefully brief, but all I could manage. I folded the paper in two and put it into my coat pocket.

I dragged the trunk as far as the top of the stairs, and met Katherine coming up.

“Jesus, Ellie—are you all right?”

I didn't stop to talk. If I stopped, she might persuade me to stay. Or rather I might realize I was being foolish and want to stay myself.

“Help me with this,” I said, all but throwing it at her.

The two of us maneuvered the heavy trunk down the narrow stairs and lifted it into the back seat of the car.

“Where are you going? How long will you be gone?”

I answered her quickly, before she asked me all the other questions I didn't dare ask myself:
What will I say to people? What will I tell Maidy? Why won't you stay for a few days and sort things
out?

“I don't know, Katherine, but I shall write to you when I get there and give you instructions.”

It was a lie, for I knew exactly where I was going, but as for how long? Time was meaningless now. Death had made a cursed trick of it. It seemed an age since I had left the apartment that afternoon, and yet, in that moment, it was as if the past twenty-four hours hadn't happened at all and John was still waiting for me back at the cottage.

As I turned the key in the engine I said, “Look after things for me here, Katherine.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

I handed her the note for Maidy, my fingers clutching it, reluctant somehow to let it go. I was frightened by the speed and ferocity with which I was running, guilty at leaving Maidy behind, yet knowing that I had to go, and knowing that I could not take her with me.

I looked into Katherine's face, filled with sensible concern. If she had pleaded with me to stay, I might have been persuaded in that moment, but it wasn't her place to interfere with my plans. In any case she understood how willful I could be.

“I'll leave the car keys with the stationmaster in Ballyhaunis,” I said. Then, letting go of the note, I continued, “Look after Maidy,” and sped off before I had the chance to change my mind.

From Ballyhaunis I would take the next train to Cobh in County Cork, where I would purchase myself a first-class passage to New York. Leaving John and all else behind me, once again.

New York, May
1934

C
HAPTER
N
INE

I was woken from a fitful night's sleep by the gentle tap of room service at the door. I must have ordered breakfast the night before. I remembered now.

I had checked into The Plaza in the early afternoon. The first-class porter assigned to me on the boat had telegrammed through my room booking and had then ordered a car to drive me from the quayside straight here. I had alighted from the stark sunshine of New York City into the marbled, mirrored luxury of The Plaza lobby and come straight up to this room.