Pearl (18 page)

Breeda would have liked to say, Well, a sense of humor is a great thing, in the same way that she would liked to have said that what Maria had done was a great thing. But she knew she mustn’t, because she didn’t understand Pearl and her mother, not the first thing. Why had Pearl gone so far away from Maria, to study? This seemed unthinkable to Breeda, who would never have left Belfast if her mother had still been alive. Her mother, who loved her but was disappointed in her, though she tried not to show it, her mother a staunch Republican, never afraid, embarrassed, almost, by her fearful daughter, whom she tried to shelter. Breeda, the youngest of the family, the only one young after the Troubles began: small, nearsighted, asthmatic. Her mother wanting to protect her but afraid for her, so sometimes she would be harsh, her fear turned to impatience. “You’ll have to learn to be a bit tougher, Breeda pet. This is a war we’re living through.” So that Breeda knew her mother was a bit ashamed of having a daughter who needed to be sheltered; she would have liked Breeda to be like her sisters, her cousins, a warrior, hardening her eyes and tightening her lips when she passed a Protestant on the street, singing along at family parties instead of sitting silent, as she did when the family sang the song, laughing themselves silly, to the tune of “Catch a Falling Star,” a Perry Como song from the fifties.

Catch a falling bomb and put it in your pocket,

Never let it fade away.

Catch a falling bomb and put it in your pocket,

Keep it for the IRA.

For a peeler may come and tap you on the shoulder

Some starry night,

And just in case he’s getting any bolder,

You’ll have a pocket full of gelignite.

Pearl said it was amazing, she never talked to anyone about being frightened of songs as a child; no one she’d ever known before Breeda would have understood. Breeda was thrilled with this distinction. Pearl told Breeda about the song that had scared
her
. It was on a record her mother liked to sing to, her voice higher than usual, strange, as if she thought no one was listening to her or didn’t care. “Mary Hamilton” was the name of the song. Pearl told Breeda it was about a servant girl who’d had a baby by the king and killed it; she sang the words that had scared her:

I put her in a tiny boat

And set her out to sea,

That she might sink

Or she might swim

But she’d never return to me.

And Breeda confessed (it did seem like a confession) that she was scared by a song the girls would sing on the street:

Wallflower, wallflower, growing up so high,

All the little children are all going to die.

All except for Breeda Donegan, for she’s the only one,

She can dance, she can sing,

She can show her wedding ring.

Breeda said it made her scared either way. When it was her name put in, that she was the one who could dance and sing and show her wedding ring and live, she was afraid she’d be the only one left alive; when her name was not put in she was afraid of dying when still a child. And they both remembered they’d been terrified by the end of “Molly Malone,” when she dies of a fever and no one can save her, and her ghost wheels her barrow through streets broad and narrow.

Breeda never told Pearl the relief she felt at being able to speak just as she liked, to tell stories the way she wanted to, not strung together by events but by the look of a thing, a smell, snatches of a song. She knew that sort of thing wouldn’t be admired among the people who raised her. Until she met Pearl, Breeda had never felt admired. Perhaps we forget that admiration is something large numbers of people never feel but yearn for without being able to name. Admiration is a luxury, a big-ticket item. And yet it can’t be bought or even asked for. It must be bestowed. Pearl bestowed admiration on Breeda, and Breeda felt its richness; suddenly she was, to herself, a person of wealth.

Breeda knew her mother loved her but did not admire her. She was pretty sure no one she had ever known admired her, except for her body: slender, high-breasted. Mick Winthrop had admired her body and wanted it, for itself but also, as it was the body of the sister of a hero, so he could engender a hero son upon it. To his disappointment, Stevie was not a hero. Stevie was a tender boy.

Breeda was often afraid, ashamed; she felt herself inadequate. Who do we blame for that? Do we say she was just born at the wrong time and place for someone of her nature? But can’t eggs be laid in the wrong nest? Breeda, brought up in a family devoted to violence, was appalled by violence, frightened by it. Shouldn’t someone have seen that, shouldn’t someone have been looking out for her? It simply wasn’t possible, among those people, at that time, at that place. She had an older brother who might have done this, but he thought of himself as a soldier, on active duty in a time of war. How could he look out for his little sister when he was placing bombs in railway stations? And her mother? Her mother thought of herself as the mother of a soldier in a time of war, and in times of war, sacrifices had to be made. So the offering of Breeda’s young, desirable body to a rich American who could pay for Reg’s legal defense—it seemed like the kind of thing the mother of a soldier son should go along with. Shouldn’t Breeda have been glad to offer herself as a sacrificial victim for the ancient cause? But I will not call her a victim. There is more to Breeda than that: she has her ways of getting through; she can surprise us. Simply, I will say: I wish there had been someone to look out for her.

At least her mother stood by her when Stevie was born. But her mother had also stood by when they gave her to Mick, as payment for the American dollars he raised for Reg’s legal fund. Breeda didn’t like to think of that. She loved her mother. If you loved someone, you didn’t think anything bad about them. She didn’t understand Pearl, criticizing her mother all the time: My mother’s a control freak; my mother thinks she wants people to make up their own minds, but really she wants everyone to agree with her. Breeda didn’t understand why Pearl was so angry. Maria had seemed very good, bringing Pearl up on her own as she did, which couldn’t have been easy. So there were, between Breeda and Pearl, areas of silence, tactfully observed, as if they were two diplomats creating a new state. A state where men were excluded, except for Stevie. And Pearl’s mother was excluded. As long as these exclusions were honored, it was a livable state, a state that nurtured its people.

They didn’t talk about Finbar or Mick. Pearl knew she had never before met a woman whose life had been so critically shaped by doing what men wanted without saying “This is what I want” or “I don’t want that.” Breeda had been made pregnant by Mick Winthrop when she was sixteen. Pearl knew that, but she didn’t know what Breeda really considered her greatest shame: that she was given to Mick Winthrop, sold by her family, for her brother’s sake. She tried not to think of that. She told herself that she’d been flattered by Mick’s attentions, proud that such a man, handsome, well educated, from America, would want someone like her. And he’d been a good father to Stevie. Many people say that; that I don’t quite believe it, and that Pearl didn’t—I suppose we are in a minority. Breeda wouldn’t allow herself, for a very long time, to question whether or not Mick was a very good father, in the same way she didn’t allow herself to understand how cleverly she’d seen to his doing what he did for Stevie: keeping Mick in touch with the people in her family whose politics would excite him, so that there was that ring of violent men behind her, exciting to Mick, who he was just enough afraid of that if he reneged on his obligations to their nephew he might be worried for himself, or at least worried about losing their regard. Like Pearl, I admire Breeda. She was reared in difficult circumstances, but she saw to it that she had some things of her own: her son, her own flat where they could live in peace, free from fear and violence. That she lost nearly everything is another matter. The point is, she made some things happen. There are many who cannot do this, not once in a whole life.

Pearl may not have understood how Breeda got herself and her son out of a place where she was frightened and ashamed to a place where she felt proud and on her own. Pearl only knows that Breeda came to Dublin because some man brought her and then went away. She doesn’t know that Breeda attached herself to Dan Callahan partly because she knew he had plans to move south and she couldn’t bear the northern life, the violence, the danger. And then, when he left, because he didn’t like living with Stevie—Dan felt Breeda wasn’t giving him enough attention, and Stevie was an embarrassment to him—Breeda didn’t really mind. She wouldn’t have been able to make the move south herself, but now the move had been made. So I think you’ll see it’s possible to say she got what she wanted. But Breeda suspected Pearl wouldn’t like the way she went about it, so she was careful not to put Pearl’s admiration in danger. She knew how elusive it was, how fragile, how precious, how easily lost.

Occasionally, Pearl was taken up short, almost shocked, by the things Breeda didn’t know. When she told Breeda that her friend Jessica had had to go home because of encephalitis, but that they were lucky because it was viral rather than bacterial, she understood that Breeda didn’t know there was a difference between a virus and a bacterium. When she got a postcard from a friend taking a year in Brazil, speaking of the oddness that in February she was tormented by the heat, she came to see that Breeda didn’t know that in the southern hemisphere the seasons were the reverse of those in the north. And once, when they rented
The English Patient
to watch together, a film chosen by Pearl (she wouldn’t make that mistake again, forgetting Stevie and Breeda in her desire to see a film interesting to her), she was shocked that Breeda didn’t understand that the invalid in the bandages was the dashing pilot who had tried to find his lover in the cave. She was careful after that to choose only films that they could easily all like: older films, musicals,
My Fair Lady. Oklahoma!
They would sing along. They would talk about how much they liked the songs. Favorite lines: “I have often walked down this street before/but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.”

Slowly, in snatches of stories, Breeda began to reveal the true terror of her childhood: her street set on fire; her family forced to move three times, at gunpoint, in the middle of the night. Their neighbor Mrs. Fitzpatrick running away in a melee caused by who knows which side, blinded by plastic bullets from the guns of British soldiers, bullets that were called humane in Northern Ireland but forbidden in England as inhumane. Breeda had been afraid of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, afraid of the look in her new glass eyes and ashamed of her own fear, ashamed that she’d walk around the block to avoid seeing her, that she’d look away when her mother made her take Mrs. Fitzpatrick a plate of biscuits, a freshly baked cake. She was afraid of their soldiers in their camouflage and berets, their faces charcoaled with black stripes, afraid of the Loyalists who would grab her arm and twist it behind her back—she was a teenager; it was just after her brother was taken to jail—and say to her, “We can kill you anytime we like. We can do anything we want with you anytime we like.” And then they would laugh and push her away. “We weren’t people to them, we were things,” she said to Pearl. So that Pearl, who hadn’t understood the taste for violence, could taste it now, the appeal of it: to defend people like Breeda from people who did things to her
because they could
. She understood for the first time the desire to raise your voice, your hand, to defend the innocent, to protect the weak. Breeda and Stevie were innocents; they were weak. Pearl could imagine herself bringing an iron bar down on the head, the body, of someone who would try to hurt them.

Gradually, Breeda told Pearl her secret: she was in favor of the peace process. She would vote for it, among other things, because it was possible that if the peace agreement went through, the British would set her brother free. There’d be an amnesty for all Republican prisoners, he would come back home, she would see him again, and he would have his life back. Her father said, Don’t fall for that, don’t be so stupid, so she didn’t talk about it anymore. No one knew she was in favor of the peace agreement and would vote for it—no one except Pearl, who told no one. Breeda trusted her, and in that, at least, Pearl knows she has been worthy of trust.

You might find it hard to believe that a thirty-one-year-old woman, from a family of ten, brought up in the same streets her family had lived in for a century, had never said to a human soul what she really felt. It took her until she was thirty-one to say what she believed: that nothing was worth all that death. She said it to Pearl. She told Pearl to keep her secret. She hated the violence, she wanted peace, but she knew everyone who loved her would see that as a betrayal.

How did it come to her, this frightened woman, this woman whose ideas of the world came from images and stories and songs, who could not follow an argument or even a complicated narrative, whose ignorance of the physical world was monumental? How did she come to believe she knew better than the people whom she loved; that they were wrong? She came to this idea in shame, because she knew what they would say: that she was thinking like a child; only a child would say what she said, believe what she believed. What are you, they would have said, if you’re not willing to give your life for a great idea, the idea of a united Ireland? She would have liked to say: Peace is a great idea; forgiveness is a great idea. And they would say: What did the dead die for, what has your brother given his youth for? She would have said, “Nothing is worth all that death.” They would, perhaps, have spat on the ground in their contempt for her. She would never have done anything like that, spat on the ground, slammed the door of a room. Yet she believed that they were wrong: that nothing was worth all that death.

Yet it didn’t make her love them less. It made her doubt herself, of course, but gradually, tentatively, she began to believe she could be right. She told Pearl things she had heard, things she was afraid to have said before: that her own side had done terrible things too. Like what they’d done to the man who worked in the British army commissary. They kidnapped him with his family, the family was tied to a tree, and the man was told they would be killed unless he made himself a human bomb, walked into the army commissary with explosives strapped to his body, and blew himself up. He died, five British soldiers were killed, and then the family was killed anyway, so they wouldn’t tell. And as soon as she said that, horrors from the other side: the Unionists who broke in on a Halloween dance and said
Trick or treat
before they threw a bomb into the middle of the dance floor, killing thirty-five, running away, laughing, it was said. Horror upon horror; all she could see was endless horror unless someone stopped it. It must be a good thing simply to say,
Stop, stop for a moment.
The word
stop
seemed to her a blessed word. If you went back far enough, back through blood, through centuries of killing, Breeda’s family was right; they were fighting for justice, the English should not have taken over their land, the Protestants should not have denied the Catholics jobs and civil rights. But you could not go back, and if there was any other way to live rather than tying a family to a tree or throwing a bomb and saying
Trick or treat,
wasn’t that better? Wasn’t it better to stop living in a way that allowed people to believe it was right to do such things, in the name of justice, or of goodness, or of history or ancient right?