Of Irish Blood (53 page)

“This is O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Look, rubble. How could they attack civilians? At least now the world can see the true face of the British government. For centuries they’ve claimed Ireland was a back door for the French invasion of England. That’s how they justified their brutality. We were a security risk, a pawn for kings, the game being played for hundreds of years. You saw the Bayeux tapestry. Those same ships invaded us. I hate them, the English, and yet I’m one of them. Oh, I wish I were a peasant in Mayo and male, Celtic to the core, in Ireland for thousands of years.”

“Like me?” I say. “My people were rooted in Galway for generations.”

“And yet you’re an American.”

“Oh, Maud,” I say. “Let’s go to bed.”

What a nice beach, I think the next morning, as I follow Maud and Yeats out onto the long stretch of sand bordering the sea. The English Channel, really. Formidable enough with loud waves hitting the shore and water as wide as any ocean though I know the coast of England’s not that far away. Never could imagine Lake Michigan had a farther shore—endless to me. If only Chicago had an unbroken expanse of sand like this. And the color.

“Gold,” I say to Maud.

“The sand is very fine here and that color is unusual. Not like the gray gritty stuff on so many French beaches,” she says.

“No garbage either,” I say, thinking about how Chicago turned its finest shoreline into a refuse dump. Wonder if Ed’s still working to clear it up.

My old life seems a long way from here. A lovely fall day. Maud says Normandy is almost as bad as Ireland for the rain so good weather is especially treasured. I have the Seneca and stop to photograph the waves breaking on the shore as Maud tells me the history of this expanse of beach.

“We’re lucky here,” Maud says. “Colleville-sur-Mer, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, all these coastal towns have no real harbors. Impossible for an army to invade along the beaches of Normandy. All the historic battles took place farther away. Even the Plantagenets couldn’t find men who could scale Pointe du Hoc,” she says, pointing at the high cliffs a few miles away.

Yeats is far ahead of us now, not speaking to Maud this morning or me either.

“I refused his proposal again last night,” Maud tells me. “Why does he keep asking? I told him years ago that ours is a spiritual marriage, much more powerful than conventional unions. We already have our children—his poems,” Maud says.

“So you’ve never, well, umm, had carnal knowledge?”

“Once,” she says. “A disaster. As I told you and Margaret, I find no pleasure in the act and I don’t see why I should endure it to satisfy a man’s need.”

“But you do have actual children: Seán and Iseult too.”

“Yes,” she says. “You might think I’m wrong to pretend Iseult is my cousin, but my work would suffer if I acknowledge I have an illegitimate daughter. And Millevoye insisted on the charade. Better to say nothing. I do believe the creation of children makes an unpleasant task bearable. But unfortunately, Willie has more carnal passion than is obvious.”

Yeats is almost out of sight.

“Willie! Willie!” she shouts. “Wait for us!”

He stops, turns.

“He’s been writing some poem all month,” Maud says. “Once he gets stuck into something, you can’t budge him. Willie does need a wife. Someone younger who can keep house, tend to his needs, have children.”

“Wouldn’t you find his marriage to someone else hard to accept?” I ask her.

“Do you think I’d be jealous? Dear Nora, my connection to Willie transcends time and space. Someone else tidying up his drawing room would bother me not at all. Especially not now when Ireland needs me more than ever. I can’t consider warming Willie’s slippers by the fire when all I want to do is join the other widows of 1916 in the struggle,” she says, lifting the skirt of her black dress above the sand and striding toward Yeats.

She can’t help it, I think. She’s an actress after all, and she’s truly mourning the martyred leaders, her friends. She wept this morning speaking of Patrick Pearse’s mother. Both sons executed.

“They were heroes, Nora, our soldier poets. Maybe their military strategy was wanting but their nobility is unquestioned. They won a moral victory,” she says.

Moral victories don’t figure in the rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics and Bridgeport, I think. Ed and Mike fight to win.

Still, for all Maud’s posturing and posing, she is a brave and determined woman. The nursing she and Iseult did …

We’ve caught up to Yeats now. He holds a rolled-up scroll of paper.

“Oh, Willie. You’ve finished.”

“A decent draft,” he says.

“Read it to us,” Maud says.

“I wouldn’t want to impose on you,” I say. “I’ll go back.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “We rarely have a witness to the birth of our children. You will be the godmother of the poem, Nora.” She smiles at Yeats.

“Now, I hope it’s not another one about me,” she says to him.

“It’s about Ireland. Though you do make an appearance.”

“When Willie evokes Ireland as a woman, Erin or Scotia, he sometimes uses me as a kind of metaphor,” she tells me.

Yeats is standing with the channel behind him. Great light.

“Could I take a photograph of you and Maud?” I ask him.

“Not now,” he says. “Later perhaps.”

He tells us to sit down on one of the large boulders.

“The title is ‘Easter, 1916,’” he says.

“Very good, Willie. I was hoping you would write a poem about the heroes,” Maud says.

Yeats lifts the scroll and begins:

“I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.”

“‘Vivid faces,’” Maud repeats. “Yes, that’s how they did look after the meetings or the demonstrations. I remember…”

“Please Maud,” he says.

“Go on, Mr. Yeats,” I say.

He nods at me, and continues:

“I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words…”

Easy to imagine those kinds of exchanges, I think. Yeats protecting himself with good manners, detached. He goes on:

“And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn…”

Well, I think, he’s drawing back the curtain now. The club. I can imagine his Anglo-Irish pals sitting around that fire mocking these earnest dreamers, these middle-class Catholic boys who intend to take down the mighty British Empire. “Motley” in that last line upsets Maud.

“Wearing motley?” she says. “So they’re fools? Is that how you see these men? These patriots?”

Yeats only gazes at her. Not taking in her words. I hush her. Now Yeats’s voice booms out accompanied somehow by the waves.

“All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.”

Each word of that line seems to stand alone. A long pause. His tone becomes conversational. He looks up at us as he reads.

“That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?”

“That’s Constance,” Maud says. “Oh, Willie, you can’t say her work is only ignorant goodwill. My God, she served food with us when the workers were locked out. The Fianna, her Boy Scouts, learned to be proud of themselves, of their country. They fought when…”

Oh Maud, I think. Surely you realize Yeats prefers the young Ascendancy beauty jumping the hedges in County Sligo to the armed countess in her uniform.

“‘This man,’” Yeats continues, “‘had kept a school.’”

“Pearse,” Maud says to me.

“And rode our wingèd horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.”

“MacDonagh,” Maud says. “True. He would have been a great poet and our ‘wingèd horse.’ Yes, that’s good.”

What other insurrectionists in history had been described as having sensitive natures, daring and sweet thoughts, I wonder. Maud smiles at me, nodding.

Then Yeats’s voice becomes disdainful, angry.

“This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart…”

“MacBride,” Maud says to me. “He means John. Willie, you can’t attack him now. Not when he’s…”

Yeats reaches out and takes her hand, saying the next words looking at her.

“Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.”

Almost whispers those last two lines.

Now Yeats seems to be trying to explain something to Maud, to himself.

“Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.”

“Hearts with one purpose alone.” Maud, Constance, Peter too and Uncle Patrick, I suppose. Does their obsession divert the flow of life? Except without that kind of conviction, would tyrants ever be overthrown?

The sun, low over the ocean, is going down. The clouds catch fire. Yeats reads the next words slowly.

“The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.”

Hard to follow these images. Is Yeats invoking some place? Remembering Sligo? Seeing the countryside, everything transformed except for the stone, which remains hard, unmoving.

Yeats raises his voice:

“Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.”

“Too long a sacrifice”? Clear enough. The Irish people. Eight hundred years of occupation. So many uprisings put down. The Flight of the Earls. My own family running for their lives. How many dead from the Great Starvation? More than a million. Granny Honora used to say that Ireland’s a small place to hold so much suffering.

But had their hearts turned to stone? Not the Irish in Chicago, I want to say, but of course I don’t.

Yeats takes Maud’s other hand, looking down at her.

“O when may it suffice?”

Maud starts to speak as if answering his question. But Yeats stops her.

“That is Heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death…”

Maud lowers her head, crying now. I pat her shoulder and think Yeats has stopped. But he continues.

“Was it needless death after all?”

Maud looks up. “Needless?” she says. “Don’t say needless,” she begins.

But Yeats interrupts her.

“For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.”

“Never,” Maud says. “They will make promises only to divert and delay us.”

Yeats nods, not agreeing exactly, just going on.

“We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?”

“Excess of love.” I can hear voices shouting out the songs at the Clan na Gael picnics. “A nation once again, a nation once again, and Ireland long a province be a nation once again.”

Yeats drops Maud’s hands, spreads his arms.

“I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse…”

Beating the names in a rhythm that sends them marching across the beach. Maud’s friends, her comrades in arms.

The sun eases into the sea as Yeats finishes.

“Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.”

“Wherever green is worn.” All of us of Irish blood mourning these men but inspired by them, determined.

“Changed, changed utterly,” the poem says. “A terrible beauty is born.”

I sit still. Held in the spell of the words.

But Maud stands up, shakes her head, throws up her hands.

“Terrible beauty! It’s awful, Willie,” she says. “Awful, awful!” She pushes Yeats. “How dare you use their deaths to make this thing! How dare you! How dare you! Sacrifice doesn’t turn a heart to stone. Through it alone can mankind rise to God! Oh, Willie.”

She runs from the beach.

Yeats looks at me.

“Thank you.” All I can think to say. “Thank you. It’s beautiful. She…”