Before the Fall

by Orna Ross

  Diary, 13th November.

  Sunday Mass this morning. Norah didn't want to go, and who could blame her? I had explained all to her last night, that we have to face them down from the first — that if we stayed away today, it would be even harder next week and then we'd never be able to go at all, but when I went in to call her, she made as if she didn't know I was there.

  I had a jug of hot water with me and I poured it into the basin and then spoke firmly to her, so there could be no mistake.

  "Norah," I said, "I'm only going to say this once and after that you can make up your own mind. I think you should go to Mass and not be hiding up here like a criminal. We need God on our side, Norah. If we can't even face a trip to Mass, what will He think of us? I'm going to leave you now. If you come down dressed, I'll know you're coming, and if you stay up here, that's grand. Nobody will say a cross word to you, I promise. I'll just go ahead with Mammy and we'll see you when we get back."

  I went down, praying she'd find it in herself to do the right thing. And she did. I was finishing off the drying when she came in, hat and coat on, ready to go. It was hard for her walking down that road, hard for myself too, but she just closed herself off the way she does and greeted nobody. Mammy and I did as we'd planned, smiled and said hello to the staring face of whoever we met along the way, the same smile and hello we'd give if Norah was not with us, then moved on quickly before they had time to act on their curiosity. It was easier than it would have been one time. Between those who won't talk to us because of the war just gone, and those who are afraid to approach us because of Mammy's illness, we don't have so many wanting to chat.

  We made it into the chapel without any scene arising and took our seats in the usual place. The O'Donovans were not yet there and we were waiting for them, knowing well that everybody else around us was doing the same. With only a minute to go, they came. I knew without turning round in the pew that they'd arrived by the change of atmosphere in the crowd. The attention of everybody in that chapel was flying between us to them and back again. Mrs O'Donovan and the family sat into the same spot as usual, three seats behind us. The father stayed at the back, with the old boys, the way he always does.

  Then Father John came out onto the altar, eyes flickering about the place, on the hunt. When they alighted on Norah, he gave her —and me and Mammy as well — such a look. He held it on us for ages and I have to say I didn't think it was very Christian behaviour, standing up there like that with his eyes going through us like two bullets for all to see.

  Somehow we got through it and, after it was over, we got out as fast as we could without seeming to rush. In the yard, we were headed off by Lil Hayes who came over, and in front of everyone stopped us. "I'm glad to see you back home among friends, Norah," she said, in a big, loud voice.

  I was so embarrassed, though of course it was a generous gesture. Lil walked back home with us, giving everybody we passed a look of defiance as if daring them to say a word. The walk from the chapel never felt as long and once we got back inside our front door, we all fell apart.

  Lil started us off, doing an imitation of Mrs Sinnott's face. "What's this I see before me, a piece of dirt?" she said, wrinkling up her nose. "My old fella has an eye for every woman, young or old, this side of Waterford, so it's grand for me to have someone else to criticise."

  She made us laugh and we all relaxed and started saying, "Did you see the face of this one," or "What about the go-on of that one," and nothing seemed so bad any more.

  Norah didn't join in, just sat quiet among us, but her forehead was clear and though I can't say I saw her smile, it felt to me like she felt a bit better too.

  Diary 14th November.

  I got up early so I could tend to Norah before setting out for school. When I went into her room I found her awake, sitting up in bed with her coat around her shoulders, writing in the notebook again. She looked up as I came in, closed the book over.

  "I've told you, Norah," I said. "Nobody will read what you write. You don't have to worry about that."

  She held the pen in her hand like an arrow, so tight that the skin of her knuckles stretched white.

  "Did you sleep all right?"

  No answer.

  "Norah, I have to go to school this morning. You'll have to mind yourself until I get home. Mammy's not getting up today, but Tess will be here in a while. She'll get you anything you need."

  She lowered her pen onto the cover of her book, drew a small open circle that spiralled into another slightly bigger. Round and round her pen went until the ink ran dry and the nib was scraping the paper.

  I said, "Come down for your breakfast whenever you want. There will be tea on the brew. Tess will get the dinner around one. I'll see if I can get a chance to run up during the day but I might not. I take the Feis singers for a practice on a Monday."

  The scratching of the pen was annoying me. I took it out of her hand, put it down on the bedside table beside the candle. Her finger and thumb stayed open around the air where it had been.

  "You'll be all right, Norah, won't you?"

  "I was always a respectable girl,' she said, out of nowhere, and I nearly fell out of my stand to hear her speak. Her eyes were properly on me for the first time since she came home, open wide, the same look in them as I once saw in a little tinker child who plucked hold of my sleeve one day in town outside the Mechanics' Institute and pleaded with me. "Please, miss," he'd said, over and over. "Please." I gave him a copper.

  What Norah wanted from me now was not so easy to work out.

  "We know that, Norah. Don't be troubling yourself about things like that."

  "A sin is a sin, says the Lord."

  "Don't be torturing yourself about what's done and gone."

  "The sin was not mine alone but I was left alone to face it."

  I felt hot and ashamed when she said that, I who had encouraged Barney to keep on fighting when he'd wanted to stop and get married and settle down with her. How had I never thought of that from Nora's point of view before? Of course that's how it must feel to her.

  "Oh, Norah, that wasn't his intention, I promise. He was going to give up the fight, so he could go and find you and set up with you. I have a letter, sent to me the day before he died. I'll find it for you when I come home from school, show you what he said."

  She was blanking off her face again.

  "I'd find it for you now only I have to go," I said. "There'll be a roomful of children wild as chimpanzees in a garden if I don't get into school quick. First thing this evening, all right?"

  She was pulling back, way back.

  "All right then, I'll see if I can put off the singers and try and get home at lunchtime. Would that be better?"

  Her fists were clenched and on her face, a film of sweat had appeared. For the first time, I saw what an effort it costs her to keep her shell of stillness intact. I couldn't go and leave her like that, I just couldn't.

  "All right so, Norah, I'll get it for you now. You're right, it's more important than anything else. Just wait till you see what he said. He was going to give it all up for you, Norah. To get married to you was all he wanted, all he cared about. Wait a second till I get it from my room."

  I found the letter and gave it to her and stayed with her another half hour, making me twenty minutes late leaving the house. As I raced down the road, planning my excuses, I met Jem Fortune, who said the priest was looking for me.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "What I'm saying. Father John is standing at the school gate, asking everyone if they've seen you."

  That put the heart crossways in me and, as I rounded the turn in the road, I could see him, his face as black as his clerical robes.

  "This is a grand time to be strolling into school, Miss Parle."

  "I'm sorry, Father. We had a bit of situation at home this morning..."

  "Did you indeed? And did your 'situation' have anything to do with Norah O'Donovan by any chance?"

  I just nodded.


  "I thought as much. I would have been up to your house on this matter yesterday," he said, "only I had to talk to the O'Donovan family. They are broken-hearted, as you can imagine, by what you have done to them." He left a gap for me to answer but I gave it the Norah treatment.

  "I'm beginning to believe you're a bit unhinged yourself. Is it trying to punish them you are? The O'Donovans?"

  I couldn't hold my tongue on that one. "Of course not, Father. I..."

  "She has to go back, Peg. The asylum is the place for such cases."

  "It may be the right place for some, Father, but it wasn't for her. I saw how it was. No one was caring for her."

  He softened a bit then, told me that he understood my intentions were charitable, but that I was misguided. Then he asked me about the baby, said outright that Mrs O'Donovan had told him we intended to bring it to the village and asked if that was so.

  I nearly died of embarrassment to hear a priest talk of such things, but I had to get on with it and tell him he was right, which made him shake his head so hard I thought it was going to come off its neck.

  "Don't do this, Peg," he said.

  "It's done, Father. We've been told we can have her."

  "I never heard the like of this in all my born days. I'm very sorry to see you behaving so out of character. All I can think is that the upheavals of the country over the past years have turned your head."

  He had to get that dig in, of course.

  "What I have to tell you now, young lady, is that if you insist on doing this, we won't be able to keep you at the school."

  It was stupid of me but I hadn't expected that.

  "We'll have to look for a new mistress."

  "If that's how you feel, Father."

  He let a small laugh out of him.

  "Don't give me that tone, miss. You couldn't seriously think that you could stay on after bringing the evidence of immorality to grow up in your house? You are the mistress in a Catholic school, in case you have forgotten."

  I bowed my head. "When do you want me to leave?"

  "We might as well make it now."

  No chance even to say goodbye to the children.

  "Very well." I turned to go.

  "Stop," he said. "I have another question for you. Is there a pair of you in it?"

  "I don't know what you mean, Father."

  "I'm referring to your wedding."

  I looked at him, still not understanding.

  "The unseemly haste of it."

  My face started to flame when I realised what he was insinuating. Even the roots of my hair were blushing.

  "No, Father," I said, meek as anything, running off before it was out of my mouth what I thought of him and his small and nasty mind.

  As soon as I was out of his sight, I diverted down the strand, while I turned over in my head what I should say to them at home. The thoughts of telling Mammy especially...It had been her own dream as a girl to teach, only her father had matched her in marriage instead. The day I got my teaching certificate was nearly as proud a day for her as the day Barney joined the IRA Volunteers.

  Now she has no Barney and I'm no longer a teacher. No other school will hire me after being let go like this. As it all goes from bad to worse then even worse again, it's hard not to feel that we are being punished by God. If we are, whatever it's for, it's not for having brought Norah back. That much I'm sure of, if nothing else.

  1988

  "So I like fucking strangers. Call me old-fashioned."

  I've heard Richard use this quip before. He still wants to be Mr Entertainment, but he hasn't the energy to think up new lines. He hasn't the energy to do anything much, which is why he is lying here in a hospital bed. George, one of his nurses, is holding his wrist and Frank, another patient, sits on the bed beside his. It's for them that he has delivered his line, though it's addressed to me, and they respond with the requisite laughter. In the AIDS ward, good humour is an imperative.

  I put his GQ and Esquire onto his bedside locker and lean low to kiss his forehead. His rash is inflamed, red blazing up his neck and face from beneath his white linen pyjama top.

  "You're wearing that look again, Squirrel," he says. "You really must try to be more tactful."

  George releases his wrist, makes a mark on his chart and hangs it back on the bed. "Make him rest," he says to me, on his way out.

  The nurses know me well. I spend long hours here: because of my schedule I can visit at odd times, when Gary and other friends are at work. I bring in soups and salads, the ones I know he likes. I coax him to sleep, chide him out of self-pity, ensure he takes his medication. Often, I sit silently beside him while he sleeps: more like a mother than a friend.

  Today he doesn't want to rest: he has something to tell me. "Marcus was in yesterday after you left."

  Marcus is a friend and another PWA, as they are coming to be called. Person. With. AIDS. "How's he doing?" I ask.

  "He brought me a present. I kept it to show you. It's in the top drawer."

  I open the bedside locker, take it out. It's a book. A Bible.

  "Oh-oh," I say.

  "I know."

  "He meant well, I suppose."

  "Meant well, shit."

  "Come on, Richard, it's not like you to be so tetchy."

  "Tetchy." He giggles. "Tetchy." It's been a long while since my vocabulary tickled him. "I'm tetchy, my dear, because I was looking forward to a real conversation with somebody who knows what this damn thing feels like. Instead, he brings me this born-again booby present and an evening of sermons."

  He's not joking, he's offended. Deeply.

  "What did you say to him?"

  "I sent him packing."

  "Poor Marcus."

  "He deserved it."

  "But, Richard, if it gives him comfort..."

  "Comfort? Hasn't he registered that the Bible-brigade has us all down as damned, whether we believe their hooey or not?"

  I don't respond.

  "Do me a favour," he says, with fury. "Put it in the bin."

  I'm surprised at his vehemence. Marcus isn't even that close a friend. "Don't be silly," I say.

  "I mean it."

  I put it in my backpack, go across to sit beside him.

  "He actually asked me to repent. Can you believe it? This guy used to be queen of the pleasure dome and now he's turned into one of those freaks who hawk God from door to door, trying to sell Him." He shudders. "I mean, how insulting is that? Do they really think they're going to curry favour with a God who created this foul and fabulous world by marketing him like a household gizmo?"

  "Come on, cut the guy a break. Whatever gets him through the night, and all that?"

  He lies back, feeling better for his outburst, closes his eyes. Under the rash, his skin is colourless as water. We've seen two close friends go already, Joe and Lucien, and others we loved a little less. Richard knows what this disease's cocktail of assaults can do.

  Will do.

  He has faced what's ahead and has no patience with those who console themselves with what he believes to be fantasies.

  "The Afterlife..." He shudders. "Ugh."

  "Come on, I don't believe in it either, but I can see the attraction."

  He opens one eye. "Honey, you'd be miserable there. We both would. With the God Squad in charge of the guest list? And the entertainment? Can you imagine? We'd hate every minute of it, believe me."

  Thanks to a US visa amnesty for the Irish, I am no longer an "alien". Instead of teaching aerobics to the public for cash, I now franchise my routines to teams of instructors. Thousands of people now do a Rí Rá workout each week, in gyms and halls and studios across the Bay Area and beyond. I even have a small slice of fame through my exercise video and the fitness features I contribute to newspapers and magazines. The Chronicle has approached me about doing a regular column.

  I make a good living now: I have an agent and an assistant, a bank account and health insurance, a down-payment on a two-bedroom apa
rtment in the Haight. I eat at Mani's, buy my clothes at Mary Coles, drive a European car, a Saab. All things that might catch me occasionally with pride if I were free to think, if my friend did not have this disease that is going to kill him. Instead, I find I'm going about like an aged English lady who lost her beau in the Great War, or an American who was a flapper in the 1920s and hungered in the Depression, forever looking back in awe. Oh, that younger me! The way I went about my youthful business, all unknowing! The way I had nothing to worry me but my mind's mindless worries!

  It was two years now since the night I called to his apartment to hear the results of his test. As soon as he opened the door, there was my answer, in his eyes, in his face, in the stoop of his shoulders: positive. It was what we had been waiting for; we did not expect good news — how could we, with his night sweats and his weight loss and his history? — but still I looked at him and said those stupid words we always seem to say at moments of crisis: "No. I don't believe it."

  As if he were not a promiscuous gay man.

  As if we knew nothing about AIDS and its predilections.

  I held him hard there in the doorway, held him for far too long, like I'd never be able to let him go. Then we went inside and waited together for Gary, who came home steely, well prepared. I made dinner in the little white kitchen while they had their words and, when the meal was prepared, they made me stay and eat with them. Over the food, we talked ourselves out of disbelief so that by the time coffee came round, Richard was able to look at the man he loved — for once not joking — and say with true, discerning knowledge: "We're all going to die."

  AIDS punched a hole in our liberation theories. No wonder some thought initially it was a CIA conspiracy to obliterate the community. Who could believe in a disease that targeted only gay men? Those were the days before we realised it was practices, not populations, that nurtured the virus. Now we knew, and now the front rank of our sexual avant-garde was floundering around the Castro, open-eyed with horror. You bump into somebody you haven't seen for a while and feel a flood of relief that he is still alive, followed by a wave of dread that he might tell you he has it. So many are afflicted that those still testing negative are beginning to suffer survivor's guilt.