Every weekday, as the breakfast table was being cleared, your mother arrived at the manor house in Rathmines, her wings folded and tucked away so that I alone could see them. Mrs. Brenane and I had saved our questions for each other, and your mother would patiently ask and answer them on our behalf. Mrs. Brenane then left for the midday prayers. That was when the truth was spoken in her manor house.
The Hearn family, like her own husband’s family, are Anglo-Irish, your mother began. The Anglo-Irish worship in the Church of Ireland. They are few in numbers but hold most of the island’s land and wealth. Like the Lazaretti, Venieri, and Cassimati of Cerigo Island, I understood at once. The Anglo-Irish speak English, the language of the island’s conquerors, your mother said. This was also a familiar story to me. The nobilities of Cerigo, as my father had taught my brothers, spoke Venetian because the Republic of Venice had centuries ago conquered and bestowed upon us their bloodline and their language.
The other inhabitants of Ireland, your mother explained, are known as the Irish. They worship in the Catholic Church and speak a language of their own, which was thought to be a lesser language by those who owned the land. Same as Romaic, I understood at once.
Your mother, at Mrs. Brenane’s request, then told me about the disease known as “famine” that had afflicted the Irish and about the desperate years of hunger, prior to Patricio’s and my arrival on their island. She told me how the Anglo-Irish had continued to feast on butter and beef while the Irish became walking skeletons, which death then mercifully took.
“Why does Mrs. Brenane want me to know this?” I asked.
“She wants Patricio to be raised a Catholic,” your mother replied, looking quickly over her shoulder, forgetting for a moment that no one else in that household could understand Venetian.
“Patricio already has a God,” I said.
“Mrs. Brenane wants your son to have her God, and if I were you I would consider it carefully before denying her,” your mother advised.
“Because the Catholic God is a better God?” I asked.
“No, Sióra,” your mother answered, crossing herself three times. “Mrs. Brenane,” she said, “wants an heir. Why do you think that she has welcomed you and Patricio into this house?”
“To spite her sister,” I answered.
“What better way to spite the family than to graft another Catholic onto the family tree?” she said.
“Patricio has a God,” I repeated.
“Sióra, your son and you will need more than one God, if your husband does not return from Crimea.”
Elesa, your mother was right, but she did not know that I was not to be a branch of the tree.
Only you, Patricio.
After Charles departed for Crimea and it became clear that I would have a blessed third, Mrs. Brenane made her offer to me: Leave Ireland and leave Patrick. Mrs. Brenane needed an heir but had no need for me. She offered me first-class fare back to Santa Maura, as she thought that it was my island of birth. She even offered to find a traveling companion for me in case I gave birth during the journey. Your mother was deeply angered by Mrs. Brenane’s demands, but I was not.
The Angels told me that it was for the best, Patricio.
If your grandaunt is still alive, do not allow her to read this, Patricio. But if she has gone to her Catholic God, then you, my blessed second, are the heir to a great fortune, as she promised me you would be.
When Mrs. Brenane called you “Patrick” or “Little Man,” I had squeezed your hand tightly in my own, but, Patricio, you would squirm until I let you go. You would then toddle toward your grandaunt in recognition of your other names. When I was alone with you, I would slap you whenever you tried to form your new words with me. Your eyes would open wide, and there was a startled moment of silence before you began to cry.
It is that silence that rings now in my ears. Forgive me, Patricio. I know you did not understand, but I had to make you remember that Venetian and Romaic were our languages, and English was theirs.
I know that Charles, upon learning of my departure from Dublin, will fold up the letter from his aunt and let out a sigh of relief. He may even slap his knees and let out a whoop of joy. Mrs. Brenane would have written that Patrick was safe in Dublin and under her guardianship. She promised me that she would not write to Charles about my condition. I promised her that once my blessed third is born I would find someone to write to her, especially if the baby was a boy.
Elesa, thank God, your father was wise enough to make your travel to Santa Maura Island known to Mrs. Brenane before typhus took him. He joined your mother so soon after her passing. That is love, I remembered thinking when I saw their shared gravestone.
Dublin has taken your family from you, Elesa, but Lefkada town will give you one again. Though I wish the reasons for it were different, I am pleased that Mrs. Brenane has arranged for your company on this journey, my dear girl. My blessed third will be grateful for your company as well, if God wills a birth upon these waters.
Our own arrangement pleases me too, Elesa. It is a practical one, as all arrangements should be. You will have something in addition to your youth to contribute to your mother’s family in Lefkada town, and I will have a story for Patricio to read one day. He will want to know who brought him into this world and who took him from his island of birth. These pages will tell him, and he will come and find me, unless I am already with God.
It is my hope, Patricio, that you will forgive me. I will not say for my sins. To love is not a sin. Remember this, my son. The Catholic Church that you now worship within and the Orthodox Church that is my own will tell you differently. I, your mother, cannot love you more, my blessed second. I cannot love you more than to leave you.
God takes, and God gives.
When Old Iota understands the reasons for my return to Lefkada town, her practical nature will take over, and she will hurry off to find the butcher. He will locate a house for me and my blessed third. I will pay for it from the sum that Mrs. Brenane gave me, once I had placed my X on the paper that promised you to her, Patricio.
God willing, I will give birth to another boy, in a house in Lefkada town with Old Iota by my side, as I had done twice before. I will then ask you, Elesa, to write to Mrs. Brenane, who will call Patricio to her side.
She will say, “Patrick, your mother, who loves you, is safe, and she has given you a brother.” Your grandaunt, Patricio, will say this to you in English, the language that had already separated you, my blessed second, from me long before the waters of this Irish Sea.
ELIZABETH BISLAND
(1861–1929)
. . . .
NEW YORK, 1906
A strange mingling of events and of race-forces had brought the boy into being.
It was in the late ’40’s, when England still held the Ionian Isles, that the 76th Foot was ordered to Greece, and Surgeon-Major [Charles Bush] Hearn accompanied his regiment to do garrison duty on the island of Cerigo. Apparently not long after his arrival he made the acquaintance of Rosa Cerigote, whose family is said to have been of old and honourable Greek descent. Photographs of the young surgeon represent him as a handsome man, with the flowing side-whiskers so valued at that period, and with a bold profile and delicate waist. A passionate love affair ensued . . . , but the connection was violently opposed by the girl’s brothers, the native bitterness toward the English garrison being as intense as was the sentiment in the South against the Northern army of occupation immediately after the American Civil War. The legend goes that the Cerigote men—there was hot blood in the family veins—waylaid and stabbed the Irishman, leaving him for dead. The girl, it is said, with the aid of a servant, concealed him in a barn and nursed him back to life, and after his recovery eloped with her grateful lover and married him by the Greek rites in Santa Maura. The first child died immediately after birth, and the boy, Lafcadio, was the second child; taking his name from
the Greek name of the island, Lefcada. Another son, James, . . . was [also] the fruit of this marriage, so romantically begun and destined to end so tragically. . . .
It was inevitable, no doubt, that the young wife, who had never mastered the English tongue, though she spoke . . . Italian and Romaic, should have regretted the change from her sunlit island to the dripping Irish skies and grey streets of Dublin, nor can it be wondered at that, an exile among aliens in race, speech, and faith, there should have soon grown up misunderstandings and disputes. The unhappy details have died into silence with the passage of time, but the wife seems to have believed herself repudiated and betrayed, and the marriage being eventually annulled. . . .
A boy of less sensitive fibre might in time have forgotten these shocks, but the eldest son of Charles Hearn and Rosa Cerigote was destined to suffer always because of the violent rending of their ties. From this period seems to have dated his strange distrusts, his unconquerable terror of the potentialities which he suspected as lurking beneath the frankest exterior, and his constant, morbid dread of betrayal and abandonment by even his closest friends.
Whatever of fault there may have been on his mother’s part, his vague memories of her were always tender and full of yearning affection.
To [James] the brother he never saw he wrote, when he was a man, “And you do not remember that dark and beautiful face—with large, brown eyes like a wild deer’s—that used to bend above your cradle? You do not remember the voice which told you each night to cross your fingers after the old Greek orthodox fashion, and utter the words— . . . ‘In the names of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’? She made, or had made, three little wounds upon you when a baby—to place you, according to her childish faith, under the protection of those three powers, but especially that of Him. . . . We were all very dark as children, very passionate, very odd-looking, and wore gold rings in our ears. . . .
“Whatever there is of good in me came from that dark race-soul of which we know so little. My love of right, my hate of wrong;—my admiration for what is beautiful or true;—my capacity for faith in man or woman;—my sensitiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever little success I have,—even that language-power whose physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us,—came from Her. . . . [ellipsis in the original] It is the mother who makes us,—makes at least all that makes the nobler man: not his strength or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to love. And I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”
Mrs. Brenane, into whose hands the child [Lafcadio Hearn] thus passed, was the widow of a wealthy Irishman, by whom she had been converted to Romanism, and like all converts she was “more loyal than the King.” The divorce and remarriage of her nephew [Charles Hearn] incurred her bitterest resentment; she not only insisted upon a complete separation from the child, but did not hesitate to speak her mind fully to the boy, who always retained the impressions thus early instilled. . . .
Of the next twelve years of Lafcadio Hearn’s life there exists but meagre record. The little dark-eyed, dark-faced, passionate boy with the wound in his heart and the gold rings in his ears—speaking English but stammeringly, mingled with Italian and Romaic—seems to have been removed at about his seventh year to Wales, and from this time to have visited Ireland but occasionally. Of his surroundings during the most impressionable period of his life it is impossible to reconstruct other than shadowy outlines. Mrs. Brenane was old; was wealthy; and lived surrounded by eager priests and passionate converts.
* * *
. . . .
Of the course and character of his education but little is known. He is said to have spent two years in a Jesuit college in the north of France, where he probably acquired his intimate and accurate knowledge of the French tongue. He was also for a time at Ushaw, the Roman Catholic college at Durham, and here occurred one of the greatest misfortunes of his life. In playing the game known as “The Giant’s Stride” he was accidentally blinded in one eye by the knotted end of a rope suddenly released from the hand of one of his companions. In consequence of this the work thrown upon the other eye by the enormous labours of his later years kept him in constant terror of complete loss of sight. In writing and reading he used a glass so large and heavy as to oblige him to have it mounted in a handle and hold it to his eye like a lorgnette, and for distant observation he carried a small folding telescope.
The slight disfigurement, too,—it was never great,—was a source of perpetual distress. He imagined that others, more particularly women, found him disgusting and repugnant in consequence of the film that clouded the iris.
This accident seems to have ended his career at Ushaw. . . . [Later in life] in a letter written . . . to one of his pupils . . . , he says:— . . .
“When I was a boy of sixteen, although my blood relations were—some of them—very rich, no one would pay anything to help me finish my education. I had to become what you never have had to become—a servant. I partly lost my sight. I had two years of sickness in bed. I had no one to help me. And I had to educate myself in spite of all difficulties. Yet I was brought up in a rich home, surrounded with every luxury of Western life. . . .”
The rupture with his grand-aunt was complete. . . . Her property, which he had been encouraged to look upon as his inheritance, was dribbling away in the hands of those whose only claim to business ability was their religious convictions, and a few years after their separation her death put an end to any efforts at reconciliation. . . . Some provision was made for him in her will, but he put forward no claims, and the property was found practically to have vanished.
To what straits the boy was driven at this time in his friendlessness there is no means of knowing.
* * *
. . . .
Sometime during the year 1869—the exact date cannot be ascertained—Lafcadio Hearn, nineteen years old, penniless, delicate, half-blind, and without a friend, found himself in the streets of New York.
* * *
. . . .
What drove him . . . to endeavour to reach Cincinnati, Ohio, is not clear. . . . [H]e made the journey in an emigrant train and had not money for food upon the way.
~Elizabeth Bisland’s The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Volumes 1 and 2 (1906)
ALETHEA FOLEY
(1853–1913)
* * *
. . . .
CINCINNATI, 1906
Pat wasn’t from here.
That was my first thought when I saw him at Mrs. Haslam’s boardinghouse. I didn’t know his name right then, but that hunch would prove to be more than true.
While I was in the kitchen, Mrs. Haslam’s was always full. If you were the kind who were only passing through, you might not give much thought to the supper table, but if you were a stayer—the spinsters and the widowers—then a fruit pie every other night and a roast on Sunday were sought-after fare.
Faces like Pat’s were the ones that I’d learned not to get attached to. I didn’t even bother with their names. Same as horses on a farm, the color of their hair was enough to identify them. Chestnut, bay, blond, or black as coal in Pat’s case. If they were male and young, they were soon headed elsewhere. Out West, down South, back East, wherever the trains and steamboats could take them.
Before the Civil War, when we heard “Cincinnati,” we thought of the Promised Land, the Ohio our River Jordan. Who knew that the Promised Land would be full of young white men itching to go elsewhere?
Mr. Bean, the printing-house man with the gray hair and gray fingernails, was introducing Pat to the other boarders seated at the table, and I was placing a tureen down on the sideboard. It was the middle of summer, but Mrs. Haslam always had me prepare a soup because she said it filled people up, and they would eat less of the pies and the roasts, which were more costly for her to provide. Mr. Bean liked a nip of gin before and after supper, so I thought that he was alre
ady slurring his words when he said, “This young fellow is named Laf-ca-di-o Hearn.”
My ears couldn’t recognize “Lafcadio” as a man’s name back then. I’d never met another.
Miss Caroline, who was hard of hearing when it suited her to be, asked Mr. Bean to repeat the new one’s name. Mr. Bean stood up again, cleared his throat, and said it twice in full. Pat kept his eyes on the tablecloth the entire time.
I took a moment from serving to study the new boarder’s profile. I liked it. His nose cut a strong, sharp line with a slight bump near the bridge, and he had a mustache but a clean-shaven chin. He looked like he had spent time out in the sun though. His coloring was almost the same as mine. I must have been looking at the right side of his face because I didn’t see anything else out of place.
Then Pat himself stood up and offered the table his name. I could hear from his lilt that he was an Irishman, but not a Cincinnati one. He was soft-spoken, and his words weren’t half-swallowed.
Miss Caroline was again the first to say something. She commanded him to speak up. I was setting her soup down in front of her—I’d made green pea with egg dumplings that night—and I almost spilled it because her voice was so demanding and loud.
Pat looked over at her. He covered his left eye with his left hand, and looked at her some more.
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