Read The Death of an Irish Lass Online
Authors: Bartholomew Gill
The Death of an Irish Lass (16 page)
“And the pitchfork you mentioned.” She was rubbing her upper chest. “That would be his way, it would. He wouldn’t have the knowledge of a gun.”
McGarr opened a drawer of the filing cabinet and replaced the thick I.R.A. folder. Most of the information in it was general, cuttings from her own and other newspapers, notes taken from her reading and research in the United States.
McGarr then moved to the files on the other side of the desk. Here he found the classification People. He discovered a file marked “O’Connor, Rory,” and another, “Fleming, Dr. John.” He removed these. He was unable to find listings for Max Schwerr or Paddy Sugrue.
In O’Connor’s file were the two
Daily News
articles Sugrue had mentioned earlier. With them were photographs that hadn’t been used in the paper and the notes and rough drafts she had made in working up the stories, which were in no way flattering.
O’Connor, she intimated, had been prodigal of his talents. He had squandered his time on literary dreck, catering to the current tastes of New York critics. He had created a sort of pop novel filled with fantastical scenes and cardboard people when, in fact, he had shown in his earlier books that he was capable of creating real people and placing them in situations relevant to the lives of present-day Americans.
The second article was a virulent attack upon O’Connor. It had been issued only six months before, either on or about the date of the release of O’Connor’s game, Potlatch. She called it “The Game an Artist
Would Never Play.” The photograph showed O’Connor reclining in the deep plush of a fur-covered couch, his hand to his brow as if he were slightly ill, the game board and pieces on a coffee table in front of him.
The piece ended with a cutting remark, “The big game O’Connor has always had in him is the charade he’s currently playing with both the moguls of the trade book industry and critics and, most lamentably, the gullible reading public—that of ‘being an artist.’
“Have you played Potlatch?” the article asked. “The game is well named. O’Connor calls it a fun game. His giggle comes when you throw your money away on it.”
The file also contained reviews of O’Connor’s books, letters he had written her over the years, photos, and other memorabilia like a rose pressed in a thin volume of Lorca’s poems, a snake skin he’d sent her from Arizona, a menu from their first big celebration in New York, the one they had following the acceptance of his first novel.
“Rory,” said Nora Cleary fondly. Again she was looking over McGarr’s shoulder. “The apple of me eye. A fine big man and so successful.” She began tsking. “But, alas—it wasn’t to be.”
“Why not?”
She sighed. “I suppose it’s all right to tell about it, now that she’s dead. The truth of it is he broke her heart. Big and successful and handsome, there wasn’t a woman in the world who wasn’t after thinking him a great catch. And when he got to drinking, he’d grow wild. It was during one of his toots that May returned suddenly to town here and found him down in his studio in bed with some mutual friend’s wife. It was only
a fling, don’t you know. But May was just a country type at heart, like my poor brother Jamie, and never forgave him.
“Then she went a bit off the deep end with men. For a few months she hardly spent a night home here in this bed. And—” She stopped speaking.
McGarr said, “She had to have an abortion.”
“How did you know?”
“Just guessing.”
“An abortion,” the old woman said with awe. “Just think of that. May Quirk having to abort some bastard’s spawn. The shame of it! She never recovered from that, I don’t think. I mean, in her mind. And she blamed Rory O’Connor as the source of her miseries. If she had had any real city savvy, she would have turned a blind eye to the transgression. He’s the sort of fellow who needs a whore now and then.”
“What about his game, Potlatch?”
“Sure it’s not as bad as she paints it. A gambling game it is. Sporting people think it’s a gas. They say he dreamed it up on one of his escapades. In spite of what she said, some people think he’s a genius—for business and writing and games.”
“And women, it would seem,” said McGarr.
“Maybe the truth is he was too much for her, or for any woman. Maybe she was spared the travail and heartache of being a wife to a man who can’t help being a bounder.
“Who knows, maybe she’s better off dead. Some of us, like May, do big things and die young, while others like me and my brother Jamie do nothing and live long.”
“How do you know Jamie does nothing?” She had told McGarr she hadn’t been home in forty years.
Her eyes didn’t waver. “I could tell as much from the way he wrote and what you said.”
McGarr doubted that and reached for the teacup.
“Could you use something a bit stronger?”
McGarr nodded. “Please. That’d be lovely.” He closed O’Connor’s file and turned to Fleming’s.
Nora Cleary shuffled out of the room.
The article on Fleming had been sold for national syndication in the color magazine sections of American Sunday newspapers. The first paragraph read:
While the trend among young doctors is to specialize and pursue private practice in big cities, Dr. John Xavier Fleming, whom his colleagues call “brilliant, gifted…a doctor in a million,” has decided to abandon his budding career in New York for the rocks of County Clare, Ireland.
The article went on to explain the details of Fleming’s career—First Honors, chemistry, U.C.D., Columbia Medical School, Roosevelt Hospital, his area of specialization, which was internal medicine and surgery—and then described an interview with him in which he was portrayed as a taciturn, dour young man. The implication was that some character flaw or innate morbidity was driving him away from an international reputation to a sort of purgatory in a dying country society. She kept asking him why. He kept mentioning how he felt a duty to his people.
Nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath is a doctor enjoined from accepting any case but one which will advance his skills and enhance his reputation. That’s what I find myself doing over here. In fact, right from
the start of my practice, my advisors have counseled me to husband my energies, to concentrate on the new, difficult operations, to research new methods. The idea is that I might develop techniques which will aid hundreds of other doctors and thousands of patients. Indirectly.
Well, I’ve searched my soul. What they say may be true. But that approach is not for me. For too many years now I’ve been studying and learning and putting off my involvement with those whom my training should be helping. I’ll leave the research and new methods to other minds and hands.
Quirk:
But I’m told nobody’s mind or hands are quite like yours.
Fleming:
That’s flattery, but far from the truth. This country has dozens of doctors who can replace me. Right here at Columbia and Roosevelt Hospital I know three. One is a woman.
Quirk:
But why Clare? Couldn’t you satisfy this other desire to have a general practice by taking on a small number of patients from a private office here in New York?
Fleming:
No. First, I couldn’t do justice to both posts. Each is a full-time commitment. Too many doctors have large practices. That’s unfair to the patients.
Second, New York is a dead end. The economic system it represents is at its last gasp. All over the world people are realizing this—in Portugal, Spain, Italy, England. It’s dying. One reason has to be because it’s wasteful. On one hand you have unlimited personal expectations, which are expressed in material goods, and on the other hand rapidly diminishing resources. Future generations will judge the twentieth century as a potlatch of the earth’s irreplaceable natural wealth.
There was that word again, thought McGarr. He wondered how close Fleming and O’Connor really were. After all, it had been Fleming who had told O’Connor where Schwerr was camping on Black Head.
Fleming had continued.
How many people who own electric pencil sharpeners, plug-in waffle irons, or power toothbrushes really need them? This isn’t just another depression we’re in. We have inflation
and
unemployment, rising prices along with economic stagnation. I don’t doubt for a moment that this country won’t stage an economic recovery, but the handwriting is on the wall. The capitalist way of doing things, which I define as having each person out to get absolutely as much of everything that he can, is no longer practicable, if indeed it ever might have been. There simply has to be a new order. I think the seeds of a new order are not to be found here in this moribund giant of a metropolis but in a place like County Clare. Each of us should make an adjustment to accommodate himself to a more human, familiar, cooperative way of doing things. My adjustment is to return to Clare.
Quirk:
But
why
Clare? The emigration statistics for that barren land are still shocking. The young no longer even return for Christmas or the summer to get the hay in. The place has fewer people than it did in the fifteenth century when Europe’s population was less than 10 percent what it is today, and most of them are old men and women.
Fleming:
It’s curious that you should mention the fifteenth century. It’s precisely because the Renaissance never touched Ireland that piques my interest right now. Up until—let’s see—say, the middle of this
century it was possible to talk to old men and women who had had few dealings with a money economy in their lives. My belief is that the kind of sharing and mutual support that obtained in those old Celtic communities might still be there in a residual way. Perhaps some of us can revive those ideals.
Quirk:
You sound like a dreamer, not a doctor. And one who wishes to return to the land of the saints and scholars, which never really existed. It would seem to me that you’re trying to deny the actuality of having been born a twentieth-century man and having found your place in this city.
Fleming:
You could be right. But the actuality of 125,000 heroin addicts, more persons than that treated yearly for serious mental illness, the deathly grinding pace of this town and society in which few if any human needs are cherished—that’s a twentieth-century actuality that can’t be denied either.
You ask if I am a doctor. Yes indeed, I am a doctor, but I am also a human being who cares enough about the continuance of the human race in a form which is bearable that I’m choosing to try to make an area that might hold some hope for us habitable again. County Clare needs a doctor with my training. I don’t wish to stay here and become one of the wealthy who will preside over the demise of a civilization and the deaths-in-life of tens of millions of people. The way I see it, I’m opting
for
life.
Quirk:
You mean you think New York is already dead.
Fleming:
Dying. From a terminal condition. Greed.
Quirk:
And you’re fleeing the ship.
Fleming:
Rats are survivors. There’s another sail in sight.
Thus the article ended.
But McGarr got a surprise. There was a second article on Dr. John Fleming. This one had been filed only two weeks before and was a follow-up to the first.
In it, May Quirk asked Fleming if he had found the seeds of his new economic order in Clare. He said she had mistaken him. His intent in coming back was to contribute his skills as a doctor and thereby make the place more desirable. He wasn’t a social architect or historian. His tone was sharp.
“But perhaps you’re a politician,” she said. “You’re involved with the Provisional wing of the I.R.A., are you not?”
“Only insofar as every Irishman should identify with the cause of a United Ireland. If Attila the Hun showed up on my doorstep with a hole in his belly, I’d help him out.”
May then asked Fleming if he had expected to have to pinch-hit for the local veterinarian. “They tell me you delivered a litter of piglets last week. The farmer claims you’re miles more talented than your competitor. He says he wouldn’t have anybody else for man or beast.”
“I’m flattered. Out here that’s a compliment. I only hope your reporting this won’t drive the vet from the country. Who knows, he may have to stand in for me.”
“What’s the most common malady that you treat in Clare?” she asked.
“Depression.”
“Of what sort?”
“Mental depression.”
“What causes it?”
“Most of it comes from the breakdown of the nu
clear family. When nearly all of the children get to be about eighteen or twenty, they leave. They don’t want a family life for themselves. There’s little cash in it and still less glamor.”
“Then capitalism is alive and well in Clare?”
“If you define capitalism as the pursuit of cash and glamor. That’ll change.”
“When? When the gunmen whom you support take over?”
Fleming sidestepped that slash. “When the real truth is known about city life. When the glamor fades and other values are chosen.”
“For instance.”
“Cooperation, self-sufficiency. Perhaps the implementation of some of the tenets of living put forth by your countryman Henry Thoreau. Had he come to this country before
Walden
, he would never have needed to write the book.”
“But Thoreau was a nineteenth-century philosopher espousing ideals which were current in the twelfth century. My countrymen, as you call them, considered him an interesting crank.”
“Look around you here or in New York. Surely twentieth-century ideals aren’t achieving very much in human terms, are they?”
The article closed with a description of Fleming standing on a barren rock overlooking a leaden sea. May Quirk assumed that he was looking off over the Atlantic and perhaps thinking about his former possibilities and the choice he had made.
McGarr skimmed the other material in the Fleming file. It seemed that Fleming’s hobby was literature and that he was a Joyce aficionado, having contributed
several scholarly articles on facets of
Finnegans Wake
. He also had a private collection of Joyce memorabilia: a signed copy of
The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies
, and many of Joyce’s daughter’s prints and paintings.