The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  She pauses and looks at him. ‘This happened, Luke, this really happened to me. Then, a short while before it was due to go to trial, I got a letter from him out of the blue. Offering to marry me! Can you imagine? It was a ploy. He wanted to avoid costs – that was his only motive, because at that stage he knew well he’d lose the case … What kind of man would …? What kind of marriage would that have been?’

  She looks into his eyes, pleading. Must he answer her? Is she waiting?

  ‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘In court? Was he found guilty?’

  ‘We settled out of court on the morning. So there was no verdict, no guilty verdict. I often regret settling, I wish I’d had my day in court, but at the time I was terrified … and the pressure, the fear. It was horrendous! He was forced to admit he was wrong – that was the word that was used, wrong. He had to issue a formal apology for the charges and imputations he had made against me and my character. The apology was published in all the newspapers in the following days. And he had to pay me damages and pay my costs. So in the end, my reputation and good name were restored. But the lengths I had to go to – to prove …’ She stops and looks away.

  ‘It was a bittersweet victory, Luke, because the damage was done. And then, to top it all, the judge made a comment afterwards that took the good out of it. He said that the person who wrote the anonymous letters was responsible for a lot of the hurt and damage caused. That comment made Mossie look like a victim too. And that angered me, and still angers me, because he was no victim, I can tell you, and those letters were not anonymous. He set the whole thing up, I’m certain of it. I regret not hiring a handwriting expert to examine them – my solicitors slipped up there. But this was 1965 and I don’t know if such a person even existed in Ireland at the time …’

  She pauses. ‘That’s it, really. And then every summer after that – during all those years when I’d be home, I’d have to watch him parading up the aisle at Mass every Sunday with his wife and kids.’

  Her voice is breaking. ‘It was like a knife going through me. After Mamma died, I stopped going to Mass. Of course he went outside the parish – outside the county, in fact – for the new wife. A hard, swarthy little woman with a thin mouth. He didn’t delay either – he was married within the year. I often wondered if she knew. But you’d have to know a thing like that. You’d sense it – you’d feel it off someone that close to you, wouldn’t you Luke? … Marching up to Communion every single Sunday. Not a bother on him. Neck to burn!’

  A wife. Children. Three daughters. Ellen watching them. Watching Ruth.

  ‘How come I never knew this, Ellen?’ His voice is weak. He clears his throat. ‘I don’t understand. All these years, how come I never knew? How is that possible? … I knew you were engaged once but not this. I never knew anything about a court case. I can’t believe Mam never told me, or I never heard rumours.’

  ‘It was a long time ago and it was a great scandal. It happened years before your father and mother even met – ten years or more. It had all died down by the time your mother arrived here. And your mother was never one to pry or gossip. No one wanted to talk about it, Luke. We all wanted to put it behind us. It was a very painful chapter in our lives. And the neighbours were very kind and considerate … It all felt like, I don’t know – a derailment – certainly in my life, but for the whole family too, and maybe even for the town. Poor Mamma, it almost killed her. Can you imagine how I felt bringing all this trouble down on top of the family? Your father was wonderful. I couldn’t have gone to court without his support. It was tough on him, very tough on him in the years after that too, meeting Mossie around the town and at the mart.’

  ‘But why? I don’t understand. Why did he do it? It makes no sense.’

  ‘I don’t know, Luke. I’ll never know. It could simply be that he got cold feet, that he lost his nerve and wanted to back out of the engagement but didn’t have the courage to say it and, I don’t know, maybe he panicked. That’s the kindest way of looking at it. Or maybe he didn’t feel he was good enough for me. Maybe I was at fault. I’ve had years to think about all this, Luke. Maybe I made him feel small somehow – with all my talk of America and the Clarks and the Governor of Vermont, the high life I appeared to be living. But the truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know what got into him. He went from being warm and kind in his letters, telling me every little thing he was doing on the farm, to being cold and distant, a different man. I quizzed him, thinking maybe he’d met someone else – another woman – but I don’t think that was it … In the end, maybe it was for the best. Maybe I had a lucky escape. But do you know what kills me now? When I look back, he wasn’t even that great a catch. Oh, he thought he was, like so many men at the time, thinking they were God’s gift to women – and we women should be grateful. Grateful! When I think of the Clarks and all the cultured people I met in America – refined people, educated people! What was he but a small uneducated farmer?’

  As she talks, a strange bodily sensation surfaces in him; a tingling, like a mild electric current, shoots down his left arm from his neck and spine. He inhales slowly, exhales, moves his eyes to the fireplace and lets them rest on the companion set. Tongs, shovel, brush, poker. The current is stronger now, more intense, the tingle spreading into his left hand, strengthening. Throbbing painfully through the fingers, rendering the whole hand numb and weak and inert, but thronged with current. He focuses on his left hand, lifts it slowly and leaves it gently in the palm of his right hand. Calmer now. Hand on hand. What a weak and pitiful thing a hand is.

  ‘Last night, after your visit with … her, I was all up in a terrible state, thinking it couldn’t be her, that I must be mistaken, this couldn’t be happening! Of all the girls in the county, in the country …’ She shakes her head. ‘When I went to bed, I tossed and turned for ages. Then I got up and took down all the boxes of stuff I have down there in the spare room – his letters, all the solicitors’ letters and documents – and I sorted through them. I was up all night.’ She points to a plastic bag on the floor near the door. ‘They’re all there in that bag, the letters and the legal files. I want you to have them.’

  He looks at the bag. He feels ill. ‘Why? Why would I want them?’

  ‘In case you ever doubt me.’

  They stare at each other. He turns away and rubs his face. Ruth is at work now. Monday morning, at her desk, in her office on the North Strand. Or in Oberstown, visiting that boy.

  ‘Why are you telling me this now, Ellen? What good will it do?’

  ‘You are family, Luke. You are blood.’ She looks at him, imploring. ‘You need to know who you’re associating with.’

  ‘Who I’m associating with …? Who I’m associating with, Ellen! What kind of language is that? Are you an O’Brien at all, using that kind of language?’

  She gives him a cold look. ‘She’s bad news, Luke. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You have to give her up.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Ellen! Ruth has nothing to do with what happened – Ruth did nothing.’

  ‘Don’t say her name again. I don’t ever want to hear that name.’

  He stares hard at her. ‘You know what? Mam was right.’ His voice starts to crack. ‘You’re just a meddler, Ellen, you’re just a jealous old woman who cannot bear to see others happy.’

  ‘Say what you like. But the truth is, I wanted you to be happy. When I saw you out and about and realised you’d met someone, I was looking forward to meeting her. I imagined having ye here for Sunday lunch. I want to see you settled down, and the house alive again.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Do you know what I went through, Luke? You have no idea, do you? … I had to be examined!’

  He closes his eyes. He cannot bear much more.

  ‘I will die soon enough, Luke,’ she says, leaning towards him, ‘but you … you have your whole life before you. This – this woman – there’s bad blood there, Luke, bad blood. You might not see it now but, believe me, bad blood w
ill show itself, it’s the nature of the beast. Nature always wins out in the end.’

  ‘Stop … Please.’

  She turns towards the window. He follows her gaze to a robin hopping along the windowsill in tender little hops. The bird pauses, then turns and hops back the way he came.

  ‘Luke, how long do you know this woman? A month? Two months?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A month.’

  ‘A month … Thirty days. And how well do you know her? Really know her? What is she like when she gets upset, or angry? Think about that. Thirty days. Walk away now, Luke, while it’s still easy. You won’t regret it.’

  He shakes his head, tears stinging his eyes.

  ‘Oh, I know it’s hard. I know it is. And I hate to see you cry. But you’ll shed a lot more tears if you continue with her. Give her up … If you won’t do it for my sake, then do it for your father’s, a man who never put a foot wrong or spoke an ill word about anyone in his life. And for your mother’s too – for all our differences she was family to me.’

  ‘You can’t just drag something up from fifty years ago, Ellen, and hit me with it, dump it on me! Just when I’m happy … You can’t do this, you can’t.’

  ‘I didn’t drag anything up, Luke. I didn’t ask for this, any more than you did. Do you think I want the past – and all that pain – erupting in my life again?’

  ‘It’s not Ruth’s fault, Ellen. Why should she be punished? Why should I be punished?’

  ‘If you keep with that lady, Luke, you’ll regret it. Mark my words, you’ll rue the day you ever met her.’

  ‘I can’t believe what you’re saying, Ellen. You’re acting as judge and jury over an innocent woman, condemning her. Shame on you!’

  ‘Fine. Please yourself. Make your bed. Lie on it. But I’ll lay it out fair and square for you now.’ She looks him in the eye. ‘If you bring that woman into Ardboe, if you bring her into that house and parade her around here and humiliate me – deliberately humiliate me – that’s it, I won’t leave you a penny. Lucy will get everything – this house and the money too. You won’t get a red cent. I’ll get the hackney into Cork in the morning and change my will.’

  ‘Keep your money, Ellen. I don’t care about your fucking money.’ He stands up.

  ‘Oh, you care!’

  She struggles to rise.

  He makes for the door, savage in his stride.

  ‘Go on, off with you!’ she says, reaching for the plastic bag on the floor. ‘And take these with you.’

  He stops, dazed, in the doorway. She shoves the bag into his arms and he does not resist.

  ‘They’re all there,’ she says, ‘the letters, the files, everything. You might even find the receipt for the wedding dress. She might get the wear out of it yet – that’d be a nice how-do-you-do for this family!’

  HE SEES HIMSELF, as if from above, moving slowly down the drive. He feels himself, as if from above; his heart pounding, his head throbbing, his mouth dry. His stomach in spasm. His ears thronged with the pick-pack-pock-puck of his boots on the tarmac. The sky above – above the above – ready to cleave asunder. Coffined thoughts surround him. No more aunt. No more Ellen. His molecules shuttle to and fro. The hole in his right sock releases the big-toe lady at last. Gibberish thoughts, fatuous images. Ride a cockhorse to Curraboy Cross. Oh, but you’ll rue the day, mark my words, my rue, rue, ruthless ruth … Thirty days! My ver, ver, virgin aunt. Up we go, hup-hup, good girl, open wide.

  Something moves. Where? On the road. Keep in, keep in. What now? No more Ruth. What now? Discern. Let the mind discern. Let the feet walk. Let the heart becalm itself … Tharump, tharump, tharump.

  What happened?

  The worst thing.

  What now?

  Unable to say.

  Unable to say what?

  Unable to say I … No more I.

  AS HE TURNS in the avenue what images, prompted by the licking of hot salty tears, come to mind?

  Pillars. Lot’s wife. His brain in disarray. His brain on the verge of a cataplectic fit caused by the autoimmune destruction of neurons as he tries to fathom the concepts of good and evil, virtue and vice, the warp and woof of consciousness and the mercurial nature of Man. More pillars. The glorious drive back from Kinsale with Ruth at his side, coming up over the Vee and down into the Sullane valley with the sun setting and their thoughts coalescing and between them a silent understanding that, having earlier experienced in the act of lovemaking the transmutation of lowly instincts into godly essence and accepting that moment as being so sublimely beautiful it could not be surpassed, death now was the only reply, the only fitting end to such ecstasy. Up ahead loomed a large overhead bridge under which stood a gigantic pillar of stone and, as they approached the bridge, he thought he heard a whispered Yes and that in that Yes she was willing him to turn the steering wheel a fraction of a revolution to the left and accelerate towards the pillar, thus transporting them to an exquisite bliss never before encountered. Such a desire to die in her company was, however, eclipsed by a greater desire to live in it.

  What vivid, apocalyptic dream does he now recall?

  The dream of Judgment Day that terrified him in the early hours of 5 February 2006, alone in the bedroom of the first-floor flat of 303 Harold’s Cross Road, Dublin. In the dream he is standing at his bedroom window in Ardboe looking down on the lawn, which is a sea of white: men in white robes as far as the eye can see, men bowing down in prayer at the Hajj in Mecca. And there among them is his father, dressed from head to toe in white Muslim garb. A bell tolls and his mother and Lucy enter the room, pale and frightened. Suddenly it is clear: soon the trumpet will sound and the mountains will fold and the oceans will spill and the sky will split asunder. The hour is drawing near. Frantic with fear – he gives no thought to his mother or his sister nor they to him – he is running out of the city, heading west on the old Galway road. Beyond Kinnegad, Vinnie Molloy from the chicken factory approaches on a bike, then veers suddenly into a field and cycles in a wide arc to avoid Luke. Such a sinner is he, Luke, that Vinnie Molloy – the vilest of men – will not deign to pass him. When Luke woke up, the room was dark and the sky outside had a strange ominous hue. He lay in bed, petrified, certain it was the Last Day and there was no time left to right his wrongs, because Death will not wait. He ran to the window expecting to find the city in chaos and people hysterical. But the traffic crawled by as usual, car drivers staring calmly ahead. He turned on the radio. What was wrong with everyone, had they not heard? He dressed quickly, hands trembling, darting from window to door and back again, like a headless chicken. Frightened, heartsick, he left the house and walked down Harold’s Cross Road, his legs like jelly. Hours later, standing in his classroom in Belvedere as the bell tolled for each new class, he finally accepted that the last ding-dong of doom had not yet sounded.

  What action does he take on his arrival at the house?

  He drops the plastic bag inside the front door, runs down the hall to the bathroom, evacuates his bowels in an urgent diarrhoeic splurge, then remains – in a weakened state – on the toilet bowl until he is confident that the last dregs are discharged from his bowels. Afterwards, bringing a higher than normal level of consciousness to bear on each task, he cleans himself, flushes the toilet and washes his hands. He exits the bathroom, collects the plastic bag, walks along the back hall to the kitchen and tumbles its contents onto the table.

  What does he find?

  Two bundles of personal correspondence comprising eighteen letters written by Ellen to Mossie Mulvey and nine photocopied letters written by Mulvey to Ellen, each neatly tied with string. A large brown envelope containing legal correspondence between Ellen’s solicitors, Mahon and Keane, The Mall, Cork, and Mulvey’s solicitors, Arnold & Whelan, South Parade, Waterford; a red document wallet containing legal documents that include a notice of motion, a statement of claim, orders for discovery, pleadings, affidavits, a notice for particulars, etc. In a se
parate envelope: a newspaper report and miscellaneous items of evidence including doctors’ receipts, airfare receipts, character references, a medical report, and two photocopied letters labelled ‘anonymous texts’.

  After examination of the anonymous texts, does Luke concur with Ellen’s belief that they were written by Mossie Mulvey?

  As the texts appear to be written in a deliberately shaky hand and, considering the poor grammatical structure, misspellings, similarities of letter formation (e.g. the particular wobble on the upward stroke of the lower case b and the lower case f, the slant on the capital T ) and how closely it resembles the handwriting in Mossie Mulvey’s letters to Ellen should feeble attempts be made to disguise it, it is difficult not to conclude that those letters were written by Mulvey.

  What specific claims and allegations were made in the anonymous letters?

  The first letter stated that Ellen gave birth to a child in an unnamed New York hospital three years prior – which would have been 1960. The writer supplied the names of two people who could verify (and swear under oath, if necessary) this fact, and claimed that these people could show ‘on a map of America’ where exactly the child was being raised. The second letter urged Mossie Mulvey to stop making a fool of himself and to give up ‘the old girl’. Ellen is later described as ‘an old maid’ who comes running home from America every summer, ‘man-mad’. This letter claims that, prior to Mossie, two other ‘decent men’ from the town gave up Ellen after the letter writer intervened and ‘put them right’ about the kind of woman she was. The decent men are named but are unknown to Luke.

  What new information is revealed in the personal letters?

  That Mossie Mulvey was in no hurry to get married and would have been happy to stay single for the rest of his life but for the pressure he was under – from whom is not stated. That he accused Ellen of being ‘forceful’ and ‘bossy’. That he consulted a mission priest who advised him not to marry until the woman’s virtue was beyond question. That Ellen regularly sent him gifts – shirts, pants, razors. That Ellen was heartbreakingly earnest, entirely honest, often desperate and occasionally pushy. That Mossie Mulvey was wary, cagey, secretive and was, in all likelihood, whoring around the whole time he knew Ellen.