Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “But then she did have a hard time when she was growing up,” I said, remembering the young girl with the flower face who had to pretend she was Maud’s cousin.

  “I suppose I should have acknowledged her. But if I’d admitted that I had an illegitimate child it would have destroyed my reputation.”

  “And then Iseult’s own baby daughter died,” I said.

  “As my poor little George did. I suppose that’s one thing she and I have in common. But, Nora, my grandchildren are bringing me nothing but joy. I feel the best of me, of John MacBride, of Millevoy, is being passed down through the generations. And all of them thriving in a free Ireland. They have never lived under English oppression. Think of it. Where we are right now is no longer Kingstown. No longer carries the brand of imperialism. This is Dun Laoghaire. Named for our own Irish hero. And my grandchildren take liberty for granted.”

  “You’re a lucky woman,” I said. “I wish…” I stopped. Maud reached over and patted my hand.

  “It is too bad you and Peter Keeley never had a child. All his intelligence lost to the world. Though there was some talk that he and an Italian woman…”

  I stood up. “What?”

  Maud looked up at me.

  “When he was in Rome. Isn’t that why you’ve come? To hear that part of the story?” She stood up. “Kid should have lunch ready now. Let’s eat and then—”

  “Stop,” I said. “You lied to me. You all said Peter was dead and he was alive!”

  “What’s happening? Are you alright, Madam? Who is this woman?”

  “I’m fine, Kid,” Maud said. I hardly registered the woman who had come into the room. Short, sturdy. Seán’s wife, I supposed. In her forties. Two younger women stood behind her, next to them a girl of about thirteen. Maud’s granddaughter? Seán’s wife came up to me and took me by the shoulders.

  “You cannot upset Madam. She is not strong and she has eaten nothing today,” she said.

  She let go of me, crossed over to Maud, and took her arm. “Come,” she said. “Your favorite dish, Boeuf Bourguignon, is ready.” She looked back at me. “I think it’s time for you to leave. I’ll have no shouting in this house. Show her out, Hannah,” she said.

  Still another woman dressed in a black dress with a white apron came in. The cook, I supposed. Odd to ask a servant to do the actual throwing out in a house of revolutionaries. She stepped away from the group and said to me, “Better if you went quietly, Miss.”

  “I am not leaving,” I said.

  Not shouting but loud and firm. Women who should be my sisters-in-arms were pushing me away. Why? What secret were they hiding?

  “Enough,” Maud said. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Peter Keeley but we must eat first.”

  I let myself be led into the dining room. The food did smell good and the scones I’d had were many hours away. I remembered Maud’s cook Josie from my visits to the Paris apartment and Maud’s villa in Normandy.

  Look at them, I thought, as we sat ourselves around the table. Six women connected to each other by one man. Spokes of a wheel with him at the center. Hannah filled our plates. More like Irish stew than Boeuf Bourguignon, but delicious. I might as well listen to Maud’s news on a full stomach.

  “I don’t know why you can’t forget about the professor. After all you’ve escaped the usual fate of women. Your life doesn’t depend upon a man. Look at us,” Maud said, pointing around the circle. “Each one of us talented and intelligent and yet Seán…”

  She stopped.

  “I must say I was thinking the same thing,” I said. “You’re his mother, Kid is his wife, Anna is his daughter, and two secretaries? A lot of support for one man.”

  “But that’s what men expect,” Maud said. “Willie Yeats’s love for me didn’t stop him from marrying a woman who would take care of him. He continued to have other women in his life all the way up to the day of his death. His wife and mistress were at his bedside.” Maud laughed. “I guess we just have to accept that the male essence is different than the female. No wonder it takes so many of us to nurture them.”

  But Kid was not smiling. Nor was her daughter Anna. Maud leaned forward, her forearms on the table, speaking in the same voice she used to lecture crowds.

  “You have to understand, Nora. Dev betrayed us. After all we women did to win Ireland’s independence, when the constitution was written we were ordered out of public life. We could vote alright. Even hold office but by law our life was to be in the home. We were wives and mothers full stop. Our identity depended upon the man we married, or the son we bore. Surely you heard about the infamous Article 41.2,” she said. “The one that restricted women to the home.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I was always proud that the 1916 Declaration was addressed to Irishmen and Irishwomen and that universal suffrage was granted in Ireland years before America agreed that women could vote.”

  But Kid said, “Once a government was established they forgot all about us.”

  “Kid was a fierce warrior,” Maud said. “She spent time in jail just as Seán and I did. But now…”

  “It was the priests,” Kid said. “Archbishop McQuaid and that Jesuit. They were obsessed with ‘woman’s role.’ Always quoting the encyclical the pope wrote about women. They were terrified of us. What can you expect? They live in their own world where all authority is male. Not even a wife to make them catch themselves on, only nuns and housekeepers hanging on their every word.” Kid shook her head.

  “It was even worse than that,” Maud said. “Do you remember in Paris there were two kinds of priests at the Irish College? Some were inspired by equality and fraternity but the others were reliving the reign of terror. Ultra conservative, wishing that France had a king again.”

  “I do. I know that Father Kevin got in trouble for working with the poor and befriending women like you and me,” I said.

  “He was a good friend. And there are still some priests like him in Ireland but something happens to men when they get power. The Church is no longer beleaguered. The bishops have become as arrogant as the landlords were. And our constitution is based in that kind of reactionary religion. It’s against the law for a married woman to teach, work in the civil service, or do any job a man would fancy. Oh we can still be charwomen and cooks and nannies but if you graduate from university and get a well-paying job, when you marry you must give up your post.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “And that’s the law?”

  “It is,” Maud said. “Which is why I’m telling you that you’re lucky to be free of entanglements. Look at us. The money we live on comes from my mother’s inheritance and yet I can’t spend a penny without Seán’s approval.” She shrugged.

  “And it’s not as if the State helps women and children. They should make some kind of payment to the mothers if they value them so highly, but they don’t,” Kid said.

  “Do you know,” Maud said, “a bishop actually wrote a letter to the women in his diocese, forbidding them to wear mannish clothes. No trousers. When I think of Queen Maeve and Grace O’Malley and all the other women we celebrated in those early days. It was a way to hearten the Irish people and it worked. You saw it, Nora. My Dublin slum children doing Irish dancing, playing the bodhrán and telling the ancient stories of warrior queens and now…”

  She leaned across the table and took my hand. “You live on your own, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Earn your own living.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go where you want, when you want.”

  “Right.”

  “Then why would you want to tie yourself to an old man who wants nothing to do with you now?”

  Tie myself? Now!

  “So Peter Keeley is alive,” I said. “And you know where he is.”

  “I didn’t when I saw you with Dev. Cyril lied to me too. I found out Peter was in the Vatican only last year from an Irish diplomat. But he left Rome and has buried himself in a monastery
in Donegal.”

  “He became a priest?”

  “He never was ordained. Probably too old, but a member of a monastic community, Nora, living out the last days of his life. Go home. Leave him alone. Be glad you live in a country with someone like Eleanor Roosevelt where women don’t have to quit their jobs when they get married.”

  “Ah well, Maud, now that the men have come back they’re taking back their old jobs. Maybe there are no laws but, believe me, many in America would prefer that women stay in the kitchen too. I must see Peter. Even if he rejects me. I’ll risk it.”

  Alive, I thought. Alive! We could go back to Paris. Begin again.

  * * *

  It took me all day to get from Dublin to this part of Donegal on a bus that followed the border between the North of Ireland and the South. Not taking a direct route but going all the way west to Sligo and then up through Donegal Town, Letterkenny, and out here on the Inishowen Peninsula only five miles from the city of Derry but isolated and rural. Córas Iompair Eireann (CIE), the government-run bus company, did not travel through occupied Ulster, I’d been told at the bus station in Dublin.

  I’d wanted to start out as soon as Maud told me where Peter Keeley was living, but no buses left until the next morning. So I’d stayed the night at Roebuck House.

  I’d given up being mad at Maud. The more I found out about the family the more I realized how chaotic her life had been. Both of her adult children had been jailed not only during the Civil War but also in the years after. Seán came to dinner and told me that Dev had ordered the execution of some of their old IRA comrades.

  “And yet you want to serve in the Dáil,” I’d said.

  “I do,” he’d answered me. “We have to stop killing each other.”

  We’d sat up until well after midnight.

  “At least there’ll be no raids tonight,” Maud had said, as she led me up to what had been a maid’s room on the top floor of the house. When I’d stayed the night with Maud at the St. Stephen’s Green house twenty-five years before, the British Army had forced their way in and wrecked the place entirely. At least they weren’t going to batter down the door again, I thought, as Maud tried to explain to me the twists and turns Irish politics had taken since 1923. I began to understand why Peter might have chosen to hide away in the monastery. But why not be honest? Why not write and tell me what life he had chosen? Why let me believe he was dead for all these years?

  It wasn’t quite four when I arrived at the monastery. Getting dark but the abbot received me. He was a youngish man, under fifty I’d say, sandy hair, slight, wearing the Benedictine monk’s habit. The monk who’d answered the door and led me to the abbot had told me this foundation had connections with the nuns at Kylemore Abbey. Their order, too, had been driven out of Ireland, but the community had built their new home in modern style. No gothic arches. No vaulted ceilings. The building was round, built to echo the ruins of the ancient fort above, the Grianán Aileach. I remembered the Benedictine priest who had been chaplain to the Marines.

  “Is Father Matthew here?” I’d asked the young monk.

  “In America now,” he’d said.

  “I would like to see Peter Keeley. Now,” I said to the abbot. We were seated in the reception room. Very spare, wooden floors and benches. No armchair or turf fire.

  “I’m not sure if he should be disturbed,” the abbot said. “He only arrived a few months ago. I don’t know how the professor managed to get here from Italy but he was at our door one morning, unannounced, much like yourself. He had a letter from a Vatican official, an Irishman, and so—”

  “I don’t care how he got here or when he got here. I insist that you take me to him right now.”

  I walked past the abbot and stood at the door that I assumed led to the cloister. “Do you want me to go up and down the halls shouting Peter Keeley’s name?”

  “He doesn’t live in this building. We have a small cottage on the hill next to the Grianán that we use as a kind of hermitage. Professor Keeley asked to live there and, well Miss Kelly, as he said himself he wouldn’t be needing it for very long.”

  “What do you mean? Is he sick?”

  “Well,” Father Abbot started, and stopped.

  “I don’t care. He’s alive now. I’m going to see him right this minute.”

  “But it’s nearly dark and the climb up the hill can be dangerous.”

  “Give me a flashlight, Father, and get out of my way,” I said.

  He finally handed me a metal lantern with glass sides and a candle at the center. The abbot offered to come with me if I was willing to wait until after Vespers, which I was not. The sun had fallen into the sea at the western horizon but still lit the stone wall of the ancient fort above us. There was a light in the cottage window next to it. I forget sometimes that I’m sixty-five years old but my legs remember, and after ten minutes of walking up that steep hill I almost turned around.

  There must have been a window open in the monastery chapel because I could hear the monks chanting. Go back, I thought to myself. Wait for the abbot. That would be the sensible thing to do. Peter’s alive, I answered myself. He’s alive and there’s a light in his window. I persisted. Right foot, left foot, as the sun’s light disappeared and the narrow path became more difficult to see.

  By the time I reached the top, the fort itself was only a hulking shape in the dark. But as I approached the cottage, I saw that the door was open and a man was standing there.

  “I’ve been watching you climb. You walk like a young woman, Nora.” Peter Keeley. Dear God, it was Peter Keeley!

  “Come in,” he said, just like that. As if I were his neighbor stopping by for a cup of tea. “Come in,” he said again.

  I reached out, to what? Not embrace him but at least touch his arm. He was leaning on a gnarled stick—a blackthorn shillelagh. He gestured me into the small front room of the cottage. A turf fire burned in the hearth with chairs in front of it and a small table piled with papers.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Peter said. Lines in his face. He’d aged, no question, but not coughing or obviously ill. Old, but then so was I. A spurt of anger went through me.

  “A cup of tea? No, I don’t want a cup of tea. I want an explanation.”

  He limped into the room. I followed him. I saw a sink with a pump and next to it a kind of camp stove with a kettle on one of the burners.

  Peter leaned against the sink, picked up the kettle, and filled it with water from the pump. Still some strength in those arms.

  “There’s part of a loaf of brown bread wrapped up in that tin. I’ve got butter on the windowsill and a few bits of cheese. The knife is there,” he said.

  “You want me to slice the loaf? Butter the bread? Me?” I started to laugh. Maud was right. Even a hermit would cede housekeeping duties to the first woman to appear.

  “That’s better, Nora,” he said. “You always had a great laugh and a sense of the absurd.”

  “Oh Peter, Peter, where have you been?”

  “Lost, my dear, lost.”

  And suddenly, there he was, the Peter I had known all those years ago. The shy scholar I had … say it, Nora. Seduced. Surely there was a better word for what had happened between us. Maybe some Irish phrase that means “leading your partner into sensual pleasure to which he happily responds”? I opened my arms, stepped forward, embraced him. “You’re found now, Peter,” I said.

  Peter stood very still, patted my shoulder, leaning on his shillelagh. He moved away from me.

  Easy, Nonie, I thought. Give him time.

  Peter gestured again toward the tin and the knife.

  While he brewed the tea, I served up supper. We carried our plates over to the chairs by the fire. The wheaten bread was good. Moist and dense and the cheese was delicious.

  “All made here by the monks,” Peter said.

  “And are you one too? A monk?” Maud had said he’d never been ordained but maybe he was some kind of a lay brother.

 
“I’m not. Father Abbot calls me a sojourner. Very kind of him to let me stay here. I wanted to come home. ‘Better to die ’neath an Irish sky.’”

  “What is it? Cancer? TB? Should you be in a hospital? You don’t look like a dying man.”

  “But then we’re all of us dying.”

  “No philosophy, Peter. I want answers. Straight-from-the-shoulder answers.”

  Now he laughed. “Always the American, Nora. I’ve had two heart attacks and the doctor tells me another one could happen at any time. And there’s the gimpy leg.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Drink your tea, Nora. I’ve already lived longer than my father or any of my uncles.”

  “Your brother seemed healthy enough to me. And don’t tell me he doesn’t know you’re up here.”

  “He doesn’t, Nora. Simpler that way.”

  “Very selfish of you, Peter Keeley. To turn your back on those who love you.”

  “Oh Nora, how can I explain?”

  “You’d better start.”

  “Where can I begin?”

  “Alright … I know about McCarthy’s attack on you and, well…”

  “I killed him, Nora. Shot a nineteen-year-old boy. My own student.”

  “Because he…?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I lived and he died. At the time I wished it was reversed but Mother Columba said God had spared me for a reason. At first I couldn’t listen to her. But she kept telling me that such a miraculous survival meant that I had a purpose.”

  “How did you survive?” I asked.

  “He aimed at my heart. Stood only a few feet away but the closeness saved me. The velocity of the bullet carried it right through my chest. It missed any vital organ. I didn’t feel anything. I grabbed for the gun and then … I must have fainted because I came to in Kylemore Abbey. Mother Columba said I would have drowned in my own blood if someone, Cyril I suppose, hadn’t plugged up the wound. I felt what had happened to me was happening to Ireland. We were drowning in our own blood. I wanted to somehow atone.”