The Dead Republic (11 page)

—I hate that boat, she said.—I’m not a natural sailor at all.

—I saw you in
The Black Swan
, I said.—You looked alright.

—That was all done in the studio, she said.—Nowhere near the sea. The water in the tank is only two feet deep. Did you like
The Black Swan
?

—No.

—Why not?

She stared at me.

—You were good in it, I said.

—Thank you.

The stare became something softer.

—He actually does like to write his scripts on the
Araner
, she said.—Away from everything. And he really was hoping to get working on your script. And—

—What?

—Well, she said.—He drinks. Very heavily. It’s disgusting, as a matter of fact. But he only does it between pictures.

—With you?

—No, she said.—How dare you.

Her anger was quick and impressive, and she had it back in her bag before it got properly out.

—He has his cronies, she said.—You’ll meet them.

—I’ve met some.

—Grand.

—I’m not one of them.

—No, she said.—No. He keeps you well away. He has too much respect for you. He wouldn’t want you involved.

She didn’t look like an actress reciting the lines she’d been told to learn and deliver.

—So anyway, she said.—He sails off for a few days, clears the head after all the shenanigans, and comes back ready for work. He’s home tomorrow. Then we’re off.
Rio Grande
is the name of the new one. I’m in it.

—I know.

—Good for you.

She wasn’t at the end of Ford’s hook. There was something about her that made that obvious. It wasn’t the beauty, although it was that too. It was the thing that made her so completely beautiful, and familiar - her independence, the strength in her eyes.

—Oh, she said.—There was me saying Mister Ford was rude and I didn’t even tell you who I am yet.

—I know who you are.

—You don’t, she said.—You know nothing about me. I’m Maureen FitzSimons.

—Grand.

—I’m Maureen FitzSimons of Churchtown Road and you’re Henry Smart of all over.

—That’s it.

—But we’re both from Dublin and that’s the main thing.

—Ah now, I said.—You’re just being sentimental.

—And that’s another thing I want to warn you about, she said.—I left before the war, twelve years ago now, and I’m desperately sentimental about the place. But no one—

She leaned forward, just a bit.

—No one is as sentimental as the Irishman who was never there in the first place.

—Ford.

—Mister Ford, she said.—Yes.

—Why is that a warning? I asked her.

—Well, she said.—He told me you won’t read the story.

—
The Quiet Man
.

—Yes, she said.—You should.

—Why should I?

—I think you should know what’s happening. I love the story. Mister Ford loves the story. Duke loves it.

No mention of Henry Fonda. I said nothing.

—We all love it, she said.—It’s a love story, you know.

I nodded.

—And he wants to make it yours, she said.—And that’s fine. It’s easily done. He told me there was a lady in your life.

I nodded.

—Mary Kate, she said.

And I nodded.

—Was she lovely?

—Yeah, I said.—She was.

—And you know I’m going to play her?

—So he said.

—And how’s that?

—Grand.

—I’m a tough Irishwoman.

—You’re starting to sound like him, I told her.

She laughed. I could feel it flow past me.

—But, she said, and the laugh left her face,—he’ll give in, you know.

—What?

—He’ll give in to the sentimentality.

—What d’you mean?

—He wants to blend the two stories.
The Quiet Man
and yours. But
The Quiet Man
will win.

—How do you know this?

—I just do, she said.—I’ve been in this town long enough to know a thing or two. He’s desperate to make it. He has been desperate, oh God - for ever. He asked me years ago. To play her. Long before he ever laid eyes on you.

Something heavy dropped through me. I waited a second before I spoke.

—What’s going on?

—Nothing, she said.—Nothing sinister at all. It’s just—She looked away, for the first time.

—I wanted to warn you.

She looked at me again.

—I met a few of those quiet men, she said.—At home. Some of Daddy’s friends. Never a word out of them about the things they did and saw.

I said nothing now myself.

—I’ve been away a long time, she said.—But I love Ireland all the more because of that. I admire the men who did what they had to do. And you were one of them. You and Mary Kate.

Her face was so big then, so enormous and bright - I thought she was going to fall back on the bed.

—That woman, she said.—I really want to play her.
Be
her. I want to fight for Ireland.

She stayed on her feet and looked at me - right into me.

—That’s why I’m here, she said.—You have to fight for Mary Kate.

—Why?

—
Your
Mary Kate isn’t in
The Quiet Man
, she said.—There’s a good woman in it but she’s no Mary Kate.

She moved to the window. She stood against the blind.

—Mister Ford is a genius, she said.—And he wants to do right by you. Don’t doubt that, please. He’ll bring the two stories together. But he’ll come under the pressure to drop your side of it. Too violent, too real, too blessed tragic. But I want to be the woman in
your
story. A woman who fights. The love of your life. And that uniform - holy God.

She laughed.

—There’s never been a woman like her, she said.—Never, ever. We’d be making bloody history.

—Grand.

—He’s on our side, Mister Smart. But you’ll have to fight.

She walked to the door.

—Is there any more fight in you, Mister Smart?

The answer came quickly.

—Fuckin’ sure.

—That’s the spirit.

 

 

 

—That story, I said to Meta Sterne.—In the magazine.

I was standing in Ford’s new office, at Republic. I’d changed my mind about waiting for him to come after me, right after I’d watched Maureen FitzSimons’s arse walk out my door. I’d walked to Republic, all the way. I was going to march straight in to Ford, flatten the cunt - I’d make him sit down and we’d write the script in one big go.

I’d thought of stopping a cab but I didn’t know how it was done. I used to - I knew that; I remembered being in cabs. But I watched the taxis pass and both hands stayed deep in my pockets. I pursed my lips but I’d lost my whistling teeth; they weren’t in my head any more. I knew how to get there, the boulevards and corners. But the journey took all day. Shadows were hard to read in this city but I could tell it was late afternoon. The sweat had crusted on my back; the pain was solid in both my legs. But I still meant business. I wiped the dirt from my crocodile boots before I marched up to Ford’s door.

—
Saturday Evening Post
? she asked.

—I must have it put it down somewhere, I said.—I never got the chance to finish it.

She slid open a drawer and lifted out the clean-shaven coastguard and his iceberg. She held it out, across the desk.

I took it.

—Thanks.

I pointed at the closed door to Ford’s inner office.

—Is he in?

—No, she said.—He isn’t.

She smiled. Then she looked back down at her desk.

Other men had crossed him and been shunned for years; stars and stuntmen, any men or women who’d needed his work and love. Maureen FitzSimons had said it: turn down Mister Ford and he was a demon.

Fuck him.

I didn’t wait.

 

 

 

I sat on the bed and I read it.

It was right; I had been twenty. But what did fuckin’
blithe
mean?

My arse.

That was true. I did carry one shoulder higher than the other. But only after I’d been shot a few times and I’d fallen off a train. He’d got the eyes right too, although he could have made more of them. The dates were way off, and the geography. I’d never returned, to Dublin or Kerry, or anywhere else.

But I couldn’t be sure. There were holes in my life, holes that I still fell into. I’d been twenty when I left. I remembered leaving, standing on the deck of the night boat to Liverpool. I remembered myself exactly then. I stood in the wind and felt the rise and drop of the boat as it tried to cut across the waves. I’d left, but I’d never gone back.

But I had to keep reading. I couldn’t be certain I wasn’t in there.
The Quiet Man
was nearly twenty years old; it had been published in 1933. I’d had brothers, sisters I couldn’t name. I’d done things I couldn’t properly recall. I’d met people I didn’t know. Was one of them this man, Maurice Walsh, the chap who’d written the story? Had I spilled my guts to him one night in Chicago or St Louis, or anywhere? I could say No, but only because I couldn’t remember.

That wasn’t too far from Miss O’Shea. She’d been out of her young years when I’d accidentally caught up with her, at her mother’s house in Roscommon. She’d been sick but she’d been beautiful, out there in the field, when -
Two and two?
- I’d turned and found her, much older than me but still a young one.

I kept reading, but the more I read the less I had to care.

I could laugh at the thought of moulding Miss O’Shea. She’d have boxed the fuckin’ head off me. I could relax now. I read, because it was a story. And I finished it. I took the pages away from my face. It was dark.

I’d been worried. I’d been terrified that I’d be in there, with Miss O’Shea, my life already told. It was the fear that I wouldn’t know it, that I’d read it and not know myself, no matter how often I read, or coaxed and battered my memory.

But it wasn’t about me at all. I felt that certainty, and I stretched. I hadn’t stretched like that since I was a young fella. The enjoyment of it, the pride - the sheer length of this fine man - I did it and heard no cracks. I could relax; I could rest. I was still intact.

Then there was the fury.

Your man in the story, Shawn Kelvin, a steel-worker and a boxer, came home to Ireland from Pittsburgh. He set up house and married Ellen O’Grady, a fine-looking bird with a tongue and a temper. Her brother, Big Liam - for fuck sake - wanted her out of the house, so he could bring another woman into it, a widow with a few quid. There was a dowry too - the fuckin’ dowry that Ford had tried to shove into my life. Kelvin wasn’t fussed about the dowry; he was happy enough with the woman. But Ellen was having none of it. She wanted what was hers. There’d have to be a scrap, because Big Liam wouldn’t cough up. But Kelvin wouldn’t fight Big Liam. Ellen was ashamed of him, and that was the start of the lockout; the legs stayed shut. So Kelvin demanded the money, in front of the wife and Big Liam’s farmhands. He told him he could have the sister back; all deals were off. He more or less threw her into the muck in front of Big Liam. So Liam stormed off, and came back with the money. Kelvin took the cash without even looking at it, and made straight for the thresher - whatever the fuck that was, some farming machine with a coal-burning engine. Ellen went ahead of him. She opened the door of the firebox and stepped back to let Kelvin throw the readies into the fire. Big Liam came charging at Kelvin but, no surprises, Kelvin decked him with a few good thumps. Kelvin shook the sweat off his neck, turned to the missis, and they all lived happily ever after.

And John Ford thought he could force my life into that. That the life and even partially remembered times of Henry Smart could be reduced to a fight across a fuckin’ farmyard, for a couple of quid and the right to ride a good-looking culchie.

I’d kill him. I’d give him his final scene. I’d batter him through the floorboards.

I went back out to Republic. I walked into a new, hot day.

But Ford wasn’t there.

He was never there. And then there was no
there
. He’d moved again, to a different studio. There was a different director in Ford’s Republic bungalow. A younger man, with a younger secretary. She’d never heard of Mister Ford, she said. She was a hard girl behind the gorgeousness, or because of it. The message was clear: I’d be found when I was wanted. I could fight when he was ready.

I walked to every studio; there was one at the end of every day-long avenue. Fox, Universal, MGM. I waited at the guarded gates. I climbed high fences after dark. I clubbed a German shepherd to death with the leg and its boot before I could get the thing off properly. I didn’t have time, and neither did the dog. I fell on him as his last bark licked my face.