Of Irish Blood (16 page)

“I’m not thinking of
giving
my virtue away,” Ursula, the most spirited of the seamstresses, said to me after one of Madame’s sermons. “I expect to get a good price.”

The French call the seamstresses “milliners” and other women artisans “grisettes”—girls from poor families who made their own way, a hard old life, low wages and no security. Lots of chatter when one of the grisettes, Louise, met a rich man and moved into his apartment on the rue de la Paix. Madame Simone fired her immediately.

“Madame is very moral now,” Ursula told me. “She is established, but at the beginning…”

It seems Madame Simone once had a patron. A rich man who invested in her shop and in her.

“She thought they would marry,” Ursula said. “But when the time came, he wanted to wed a virgin.” And then she explained “the rules” to me. “You see, Nora, in Paris the demimonde is its own world, a separate place. Gabrielle Chanel is a grand courtesan, but is not received in society. She’s called an
irrégulier
, the mistress of a man who supports her but will never marry her. Such women can fly high but as Madame knows they can crash. At least Madame kept her business. My sister,” she shook her head, “fell in love, she called it, with a married man. Ten years of meeting him at odd times, in cheap hotels. Betrayed our family, and when she finally tried to leave, he beat her. She denied it, but I saw the bruises.”

“Terrible,” I said. “Poor girl.” Acting shocked. I know I’m a hypocrite, but I will not—cannot—remember Tim McShane.

And now Madame is unmasking Coco Chanel to Cornelia Wilson.

“What is she saying?” Cornelia finally asks me.

“Well, Madame says Chanel’s—uhm, personal life is…”

“A kept wo-man. She is,” Madame says in clear enough English. “Her clients prostitutes!!”

“Goodness gracious,” Cornelia says as we start our tour. “In South Bend a woman like Chanel could never open a shop. No respectable women would buy from her. Too bad. I wouldn’t mind letting go of all this whalebone. Still a woman who loses her good name might as well be dead. A dear schoolmate of mine got involved with a married man. He told her his wife had a dread disease, he couldn’t leave her, but that she’d die soon enough. Never happened, of course. The friend had to leave town. South Bend’s still talking about her. I’m not judging her, but I do wonder how someone so smart—she got all A’s in school—could be so dumb.”

I say nothing.

Cornelia’s not a Catholic but she’s lived under the shadow of Notre Dame University’s Golden Dome and insists on seeing the inside of what she calls “the other Notre Dame.” She asks about the coincidence of the names.

“Why two Notre Dames?”

“Well, only one Mary the mother of Jesus, but she has hundreds of titles. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of churches and schools dedicated to her,” I start.

“Oh,” she says, not too interested.

But I continue. “Our Lady, Notre Dame, the Virgin Mary, the Blessed Mother of Jesus…” I say as we walk into the cathedral.

So. I’ve managed not enter a church for six months. Now I’m back in spite of myself. The great space seems oddly familiar. I mean, I’m not comparing St. Bridget’s of Bridgeport to the grandeur of this medieval masterpiece and yet, and yet—the votive candles lighting the half darkness, the lingering scent of incense, the feeling of sanctuary.

Altars and statues stuck in every alcove and archway. And there she is, the Lady herself, just to the right of the main altar, not portrayed as a sorrowful mother or remote virgin, but as a young woman with a baby on her hip, head tilted, looking at Him. A crown on her head all right, but more medieval princess than queen of the universe. Mother of God nonetheless.

In front of the statue stands a bouquet of red gladiolus and tall white chrysanthemums, as slender and graceful as she is. Not a particularly compassionate face, I’d say. No easy sentiment. This Our Lady wouldn’t tell me, “Ah, dear, you meant no harm. All is forgiven.” Couldn’t get around her.

I tell the story of the desecration of this cathedral during the Revolution to Cornelia. How a prostitute was installed on the high altar. The cathedral symbolized kings and queens and repression. Smash it. Stefan’s interpretation.

No comment from Cornelia. “Which bells did the Hunchback of Notre-Dame ring?” she asks.

“In the tower. You can see it from outside,” I say. I start to tell her that the author, Victor Hugo, lived right near me on place des Vosges. Cornelia’s not listening. Hadn’t read the book. But saw the French movie. Talking about the gypsy girl Esmeralda as she walks toward the door of the catheral. But I can’t move. Gabrielle Chanel, the
irréguliers
, prostitutes, and wild gypsy women rise up around me. “You’re one of us,” they seem to say. But I was a pure young girl once. My body belonged only to me, separate and apart. I had been good. I giggled when Sister Ruth Eileen told us our bodies were the temples of the Holy Spirit, somehow imagining a dove taking up residence inside my chest. But now, standing in this place, looking up at the statue of Mary, I understand what Sister meant. I let Tim McShane have the run of me. Sacrificed my own will to please him. “Take your pleasure like a man,” he said. And I traded my very spirit for those sensations. Then so misjudged Tim McShane, I almost let him kill me. And now, Our Lady, so cool and certain, confronts me, judging me by her very remoteness.

“Let’s go,” Cornelia says.

“I’m staying,” I say. “Go on.”

“On my own?”

“There’s a taxi stand around the corner.”

She huffs, but she’s already paid my fee. I’ll miss the tip that would come over tea at the Ritz, but I can’t leave.

Movement on the altar now. Getting ready for Mass. I sit on one of the rush chairs lined up in front of the main altar. No pews in this church, only these flimsy seats, each with a kneeler attached for the person behind.

“Introibo ad altare Dei,”
the priest says.

The familiar Latin words. The ritual I’ve known since childhood. The short, thin priest moves briskly along. He gets to the washing of hands in no time. The young altar boy holds up a gold bowl for the priest to dunk his fingers into. I know the English of the prayer. “Cleanse me of my iniquities, wash me of all my sins.” If only water and a scrap of linen could purify me, I think. I fully intend to receive Communion as I had in Chicago. I’d given myself permission, reasoning that the hedge of rules around the sacrament were only so much bureaucratic nonsense.

Only now, this time, I can’t seem to stand. My feet won’t move me forward. Admit it, Honora Bridget Kelly. You gave Tim McShane complete power over you, cooperated in your own degradation.

The Fairy Woman, whom I’d managed to ignore for six months, starts laughing and screeching at me. “I have won! You’ll never escape me. Never be a decent woman. No different from the prostitute who lay sprawled out on this high altar. You can’t hide from the truth, behind another language, another country, these monuments, this history. No protection against me. You betrayed your faith, your family, and yourself. Shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame.”

Now I have to get out. I stumble over the feet of the woman next to me. She draws back and lets me out. But the lines of communicants moving slowly toward the altar stop me. I step in front of a man.

“Malade,”
I say.
“Malade,”
and launch myself into the space between those coming up to receive and those returning to their places.

I weave my way through the slow procession, murmuring,
“Pardon, pardon,”
and coughing. I have learned how much the French fear sickness and dread contamination, so even the most pious, with guarded eyes and folded hands, let me through.

Finally I am out into the square in front of the cathedral. Raining now. A gray drizzle veils Paris. Shame. Shame. Shame.

I mean to cross the bridge toward the Right Bank and head for home, but I turn to the left and in few minutes find myself on the boulevard Saint-Michel. Suddenly this isn’t just a street name, but more judgment. “Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection from the wickedness and snares of the Devil who roams the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Not a prayer. A condemnation.

The Devil. I thought I’d outrun the Devil. But he was in league with the Fairy Woman all along. I gave in. I traded my soul for afternoons in bed with Tim McShane. St. Michael is not about to defend me in battle. I’d run into the snares of the devil willingly. I’m doomed. All my praying and bargaining with our Lady, the saints, even Jesus himself, delusions. I’ll never be forgiven.

A glass of wine, nice red wine, to warm you. In a café out of the rain where you can dry off and … No! That’s her again, the Fairy Woman, the Devil’s consort. I keep walking.

Black umbrellas spring up all around me. I can see no faces. Dusk now, and the drizzle turns into a lashing rain. At the top of rue Saint-Jacques the Panthéon rises above me. A place to wait out the storm.

I’ve taken some of my ladies who wanted an expanded tour here, and read up on the place so I could explain that the structure was first built as a church to honor St. Genevieve, patron of Paris. But after the Revolution the building became a resting place for secular heroes. The street names—Clovis, Clotilde—I say, speak of an earlier Paris and of the rulers St. Genevieve had welcomed into the city after her prayers defeated the Huns. She’d been buried here with the king and queen only to have the revolutionaries sack her tomb and burn her bones in a bonfire. Had they danced around it, I often wondered, celebrating? Heartily sick of virtue and virginity, and a Church that was so rich when they were poor? Such anger. And what had France gotten? More big-shot rulers, an emperor even—a bloody history portrayed on the walls of the Panthéon.

I let the devil take me over just as he’d infected the mob in the streets during the reign of terror. Destroy. Destroy. Only I brought the temple of my body down myself.

Inside I find a place behind a pillar and lean against the stone walls. No crowds of tourists, thank God. Only a group of young students staring up at the dome while an older man speaks to them.

“The burial of St. Genevieve,” he says, and the words catch at me. English but not British English, or American either. He speaks with the lilt I know so well—the way Granny Honora spoke and Mam. The sound of the older generation of Bridgeport. Accents I had mimicked and mocked. He must be Irish. One of the students asks a question. Irish, too.

During my six months in Paris, I’ve met no tourists from Ireland. Americans, yes, and lots of English, and Germans. Russians too, running around the place. But nobody from Ireland.

One of the boys, in his twenties, I’d say, notices me listening and nods toward me. Red-haired. Looks like Ed when he was young. In fact, I could match many of the students’ faces to the faces of members of my family or to those of our Bridgeport neighbors. Would I ever see any of them again? No news from home of course. Nobody has my address. One letter from Dolly telling me to stay away.

The speaker, their professor, I guess, is a tall man with a close-cropped beard and a head of tight black curls. The great dome is an engineering marvel, he’s saying, the culmination of all the French had learned since the days when the Crusaders had discovered the secrets of the Arab builders.

“Their mosques,” he says, “were much bigger than any church built in the West. Open spaces, no forest of pillars. Domes that seemed to float above the interiors, letting in the light. The cathedrals are evidence of those lessons at work. But here in this structure, the architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, surpassed his masters. This dome has three cupolas, one fitted into the next, and see the fresco of St. Genevieve. King Louis XV promised her this church if she cured his illness, and of course she did.”

“Sounds like my granny,” says the boy who nodded to me. “Always bargaining with St. Bridget for something or another.”

“Very human that,” the professor says. “And who knows, maybe negotiating brings its own rewards.”

“What do you mean?” a girl asks.

“Well, King Louis thinks St. Genevieve would love a new church so surely she’ll hear his prayers. He begins to believe in his own recovery. Sleeps better, eats better, and there you go. He gets better. Didn’t Our Lord himself tell the blind man that his faith had saved him? Don’t underestimate what confidence can do. Something we Irish must remember. We are a noble people. Didn’t our monks save the old classics of Greece and Rome? Working away in stone huts tucked tight into hills all over Ireland, copying the manuscripts and sharing them with a Europe that was only stumbling out of the Dark Ages?”

“Hard to be confident with England’s boot on your neck for eight hundred years,” the red-haired boy replies.

I see some of the other students nod. I’m right back in our parlor hearing Great-Uncle Patrick going on about the Fenian Brotherhood and singing, “‘A nation once again, a nation once again, and Ireland long a province be a nation once again.’”

Without meaning to, I say the words aloud, “A nation once again.”

And the boy hears me. “Listen to that, Professor Keeley. The American woman has the right idea.”

The class laughs.

“Good afternoon, madame,” the professor says.

Now, if I could design a man the complete opposite of Tim McShane, there he stands. While Tim was all beef and bluster, this man is slim and wiry with a kind of stillness about him. Very blue eyes. Clear. No drinker. When I bring my ladies to the Panthéon I tell them how Foucault set up his famous pendulum here, and the professor reminds me of that straight, thin line. He even seems to sway a bit in my direction.

“Join us,” the boy says.

I can’t, I want to say. I’m miserable and probably on my way to hell and not interested in Irish monks or any man at all. The professor seems taken aback by the young fellow’s boldness and begins apologizing for the intrusion. Embarrassed. One of those shy men, happier with his books.

“Thank you,” I say, “but I don’t want to interfere.”

“You are most welcome,” the professor says. “Not that I have any great knowledge to impart. But it is raining, and we would welcome an American perspective since yours was one of the world’s more peaceful revolutions.”