by Amy Harmon
“She’s convinced that you are the woman in the painting,” Deirdre rushed to explain. “She’s been asking me to bring her here ever since word spread that you were living at Garvagh Glebe. You must understand . . . the whole village was abuzz when it was believed that another woman drowned in the lough. A woman with the same name! You can’t imagine what a stir it caused.”
“Kevin told me your name is Anne Smith,” Maeve interjected.
“You are Kevin’s great-great—” I paused to calculate how many greats. “He’s your nephew?” I asked.
“Yes. And he’s worried about you. He also says you are expecting a child. Where is the child’s father? He seems to think there isn’t one.”
“Maeve!” Deirdre gasped. “That is none of your business.”
“I don’t care if she’s married, Deirdre,” Maeve snapped. “I just want to hear the story. I’m tired of gossip. I want to know the truth.”
“What happened to Thomas Smith, Maeve?” I asked, deciding I would ask a few questions of my own. “You and I never talked about him.”
“Who was Thomas Smith?” Deirdre said between sips.
“The man who painted that picture,” Maeve said. “The doctor who owned Garvagh Glebe when I was a girl. I left when I was seventeen, after passing all my accounting examinations. I went to London to work at the Kensington Savings and Loan. It was a grand time. The doctor paid for my schooling and my first year’s room and board. He paid for all our schooling. Every O’Toole held him in the highest regard.”
“What happened to him, Maeve? Is he in Ballinagar too?” I asked, bracing myself. My cup rattled against the saucer, and I set both down abruptly.
“No. When Eoin left Garvagh Glebe in 1933, the doctor left too. Neither of them ever came back, as far as I know.”
“Now, who was Eoin again?” Poor Deirdre was trying to keep up.
“My grandfather, Eoin Gallagher,” I supplied. “He was raised here, at Garvagh Glebe.”
“So you’re related to the woman in the picture!” Deirdre crowed, mystery solved.
“Yes,” I said, nodding. Closely related.
Maeve was having none of it. “But you told Kevin that Anne Smith is your name,” she insisted again.
“She’s a famous author, Maeve! Of course she has aliases.” Deirdre laughed. “I must say, though, Anne Smith isn’t terribly original.” She laughed again. When Maeve and I didn’t laugh with her, she finished her tea in a gulp, her cheeks scarlet. “I brought something for you, Anne,” she rushed. “Remember the books I mentioned to you? About the author with the same name? I thought you might like your own copies, with a little one on the way.” She flushed again. “They’re delightful, really.” She opened the big bag beside her chair.
She drew out a stack of brand-new children’s books, shiny black rectangles, each one with a little red sailboat drifting across a moonlit lake on the cover. The Adventures of Eoin Gallagher was written across the top in Thomas’s bold hand. Along the bottom, each title was printed in white.
“My favorite is the adventure with Michael Collins,” Deirdre said, browsing through the stack to find it. I must have moaned in distress because her eyes shot to my face, and Maeve cursed on a sigh.
“You are a ninny, Deirdre,” Maeve groused. “Those books were written by Anne Gallagher Smith.” Maeve pointed up at my portrait. “The woman in the picture, the woman who drowned in the lough, Thomas Smith’s wife, and the woman who wrote those children’s books are all the same person.”
“B-but . . . these were published last spring and donated to commemorate the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising. Every library in Ireland received a box of them. I had no idea.”
“May I see them?” I whispered. Deirdre set them reverently on my lap and watched as I looked through them with shaking hands. There were eight of them, just like I remembered.
“Written by Anne Gallagher Smith. Illustrated by Dr. Thomas Smith,” I read, running my thumb across our names. That part was new. I opened the cover on the first book and read the dedication: In loving memory of a magical time. Beneath the dedication it said, “Donated by Eoin Gallagher.”
They’d been professionally reproduced on thick glossy paper and machine bound. But each picture and each page, from the cover to the last line, was identical to the original.
“My grandfather did this. These were his books. He didn’t tell me . . . didn’t show me. I knew nothing about this,” I marveled, my voice hushed in tearful wonder.
“Those copies are yours, Anne,” Deirdre pressed. “A gift. I hope I haven’t upset you.”
“No,” I choked. “No. I’m just . . . surprised. They are wonderful. Forgive me.”
Maeve looked as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Her vinegar was gone; her questions quieted. I had a feeling she knew exactly who I was but had decided it served no purpose to make me admit it.
“We loved Anne,” she muttered. Her lips began to tremble. “Some people talked. Some people said terrible things after she . . . died. But the O’Tooles loved her. Robbie loved her. I loved her. We all missed her dreadfully when she was gone.”
I used my napkin to blot my eyes, unable to speak, and noted that Deirdre was wiping her eyes as well.
Maeve stood, leaning heavily on her cane, and headed for the door. The visit was apparently over. Deirdre rushed to rise as well, sniffling and apologizing for leaving mascara on my cloth napkin. I placed the books carefully on a shelf and followed them out, feeling overwrought and weak-kneed.
Maeve hesitated at the door and let Deirdre exit first.
“If his journals are still on that top shelf, they will tell you all you need to know, Anne,” Maeve said. “Thomas Smith was a remarkable man. You should write a book about him. And don’t be afraid to go back to Ballinagar. The dead have a great deal to teach us. I’ve got my own plot picked out.”
I nodded, emotional once more. I longed for the day when my pain and my tears weren’t so close to the surface.
“Come visit me, will you?” Maeve grumbled. “All my other friends are dead. I can’t drive anymore, and I can’t speak freely with Deirdre listening. She’d have me committed, and I don’t want to spend my last years in the loony bin.”
“I’ll visit you, Maeve,” I said, giggling through my tears, and I meant it.
I couldn’t face the top shelf. Not right away. I waited several days, hovering in the library only to retreat again, arms wrapped around myself and barely holding on. I’d been standing on a ledge since leaving 1922. I couldn’t move forward or back. Couldn’t move to the left or the right. I couldn’t sleep or breathe too deeply for fear of falling. So I held perfectly still on my ledge, making no sudden moves, and in that stillness I existed. I coped.
Kevin found me in the library, clinging to the ladder, not climbing, not moving, my eyes glued to the top shelf.
“Can I help you, Anne?” he asked. He still wasn’t comfortable calling me Anne, and his hesitation to say my name made me feel as old as Maeve and separated from him by six decades instead of six years.
I moved away from the ladder gingerly, still firmly on my ledge. “Will you see if there are some journals on the top shelf?” I pointed. “Maybe you could hand them down to me.” In my mind, I could hear a rush of smattering pebbles; I was standing too close to the edge. I closed my eyes and sipped the air, willing myself to be calm.
I heard Kevin climbing the ladder, the rungs protesting each step.
“There are journals, all right. Looks like six or seven of them.”
“Will you just open one and read the date at the top of the page . . . please?” I panted.
“All right,” he said, and I heard the reservation in his voice. Pages ruffled. “This one says 4 February 1928 . . . um, it looks like it starts in ’28 and ends”—the pages ruffled again—“in June of 1933.”
“Will you read me something? It doesn’t matter which page. Just read whatever it says.”
“This page sa
ys 27 September 1930,” Kevin reported.
Eoin’s grown so tall, and his feet and hands are as big as mine. I caught him trying to shave last week and ended up giving him a lesson, the two of us standing in front of the mirror, bare-chested, our faces lathered, razors in hand. It’ll be a while yet—a long while—before he needs to remove his beard with any regularity, but now he knows the basics. I told him how his mother used to steal my razor to shave her legs. It embarrassed him and embarrassed me. It was too intimate a detail for a boy of fifteen. I forgot myself for a moment, remembering her. It’s been more than eight years, but I can still feel Anne’s smooth skin, still see it when I close my eyes.
Kevin stopped reading.
“Read something else,” I whispered.
He turned the pages and began again.
Our child would have been ten years old now had Anne stayed. Eoin and I don’t talk about Anne as much as we used to. But I’m convinced we think about her even more. Eoin is planning to go to medical school in the States; he’s got Brooklyn in his head. Brooklyn and baseball and Coney Island. When he goes, I’ll go too. I’ve fallen out of love with the view from my window. If I’m to be alone for the rest of my life, I’d just as soon see the world as sit here watching the lough, waiting for Anne to come home.
“Can you hand it down?” I interrupted, needing to hold the book in my arms, to hold what was left of my Thomas.
Kevin bent down, the book dangling from his fingers, and I took it from him, drawing it to my nose and inhaling desperately, trying to find the smell of Thomas lingering in the pages. I sneezed violently, and Kevin laughed, surprising me.
“I need to tell Jemma she isn’t doing a very bang-up job of dusting,” he said. His laughter eased the tight knot in my chest, and I made myself set the book aside for later.
“Will you open another one, please?” I asked.
“All right. Let’s see . . . this journal is from, eh, 1922 to 1928. It looks like they’re in order up here.”
My lungs bellowed, and my hands grew numb.
“Want to hear something from this one?”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. But I nodded, playing Russian roulette with my heart.
Kevin opened the book and flipped through the first section. His fingers whispered past the pages of Thomas’s life.
“Here’s a shorter one, 16 August 1922.” Kevin began to read, his Irish brogue the perfect narration for the heartbreaking entry.
Conditions in the country have disintegrated to the point where Mick and other members of the provisional government are at constant threat of being picked off by a sniper or shot in the street. Nobody goes on the roof to take a smoke anymore. When they’re in Dublin, nobody goes home. They are all living—all eight members of the provisional government—in government buildings surrounded by the Free State Army. They are young men constantly on the knife’s edge. The only senior member among them, Arthur Griffith, suffered a brain haemorrhage on 12 August. He’s gone. We’ve lost him. He’d been confined to his bed but kept trying to carry out his duties. He’s found the only rest available to him.
Mick was in Kerry when the news reached him about Arthur’s death, and he cut his southern inspections short to attend the service. I met him in Dublin today and watched as he walked at the front of the funeral procession, the Free State Army marching behind him, every face bleak with sorrow. I stood with him for some time at the graveside, staring down into the hole which held the body of his friend, each of us lost in our own thoughts.
“Do you think I will live through this, Tommy?” he asked me.
“I’ll never forgive you if you don’t,” I answered. I am terrified. It is August. Brigid remembers August from Anne’s pages. August and Cork and flowers.
“Ye will. Just like ye forgave Annie.”
I’ve asked him not to say her name. I can’t bear it. It makes her absence too real. And it makes a mockery of my secret hope that someday I will see her again. But Mick forgets. He has too many things to remember. Stress is eating a hole in his gut, and he lies to me when I press him about it. He’s moving slower, and his eyes are dimmer, but maybe it is my own pain and fear I’m seeing.
He is insisting on resuming his southern tour and continuing on to Cork. He has meetings scheduled with the key players causing havoc in the region. He says he’s going to end the bloody conflict once and for all. “For Arthur and Annie and every feckin’ lad that’s hung on the end of a rope or faced a firing squad trying to do my bidding.” But Cork has become a hotbed for the republican resistance. Railroads have been destroyed, trees are downed all over the roads to prevent safe passage, and mines have been set throughout the countryside.
I begged him not to go.
“These are my people, Tommy,” he snarled at me. “I’ve been all over Ireland, and no one’s tried to stop me. I want to go home, for God’s sake. I want to go to Clonakilty and sit on a stool at the Four Alls and have a drink with my friends.”
I’ve told him if he goes, I’m going with him.
For a moment the library rang with those words, and Kevin and I were silent, wrapped in the memory of men who were larger than life until life rose up and snuffed them out.
“These are incredible,” Kevin marveled. “I know a little about Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. But not as much as I should. Do ya want me to read more, Anne?”
“No,” I whispered, heartsick. “I know what happens next.”
He handed the book down, and I set it aside.
“This journal is a lot older. It’s in bad shape,” Kevin mused over another volume. “No . . . it’s the next one,” he reported, turning the pages. “It starts in 1916, May, and ends—” He flipped the page. “It ends with a poem, it looks like. But the last entry is 16 April 1922.”
“Read the poem,” I demanded, breathless.
“Um. All right.” He cleared his throat awkwardly.
I pulled you from the water, and kept you in my bed, a lost, forsaken daughter of a past that isn’t dead.
When I stared at him in stunned silence, he continued, his face as red as Eoin’s hair. With each word, I felt the wind roaring in my head and the lough gathering beneath my skin.
Don’t go near the water, love. Stay away from strand or sea. You cannot walk on water, love; the lough will take you far from me.
There was no ledge beneath my feet, and I sat down on Thomas’s desk, dizzy with disbelief.
“Anne?” Kevin asked. “Do you want this one too?”
I nodded woodenly, and he climbed down, the book still clutched in his right hand.
“Can I see it, please?” I whispered.
Kevin placed it in my hands, hovering and clearly rattled by my shock.
“I thought this journal was lost . . . in the lough,” I breathed, running my hands over it. “I . . . I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it’s a different one,” Kevin supplied hopefully.
“It’s not. I know this book . . . the dates . . . I know that poem.” I gave it back to him. “I can’t look at it. I know you don’t understand, but can you read the first entry to me, please?”
He took it back, and as he thumbed through the pages, several pictures fluttered to the ground. He stooped, scooping them up and glancing at them curiously.
“That’s Garvagh Glebe,” he said. “This picture looks like it’s a hundred years old, but she hasn’t changed much.” He handed the picture to me. It was the picture I’d shown Deirdre that day in the library. The picture I’d tucked into the pages of the journal before rowing out into the middle of the lake to say goodbye to Eoin. It was the same picture, but it had aged another eighty years.
“This one is something else,” Kevin breathed, his gaze captured by the next picture in his hand. His eyes widened and narrowed before lifting to meet mine. “That woman looks just like you, Anne.”
It was the picture of Thomas and me at the Gresham, not touching but so aware of each other. His face was turned toward me—the line of hi
s jaw, the slice of his cheekbone, the softness of his lips beneath the blade of his nose.
My pictures had survived the lough. The journal too. But I had not. We had not.
28 August 1922
We left for Cork early on the twenty-first. Mick tripped going down the stairs and dropped his gun. It went off, waking the entire house and increasing my sense of foreboding. I saw Joe O’Reilly framed by the window, watching us depart. He, like all the rest of us, had begged Mick to stay out of Cork. I know he felt better because I was with Mick, though my value in a fight has always been when it’s over. My war stories are all the surgical kind.
It started well enough. We stopped at Curragh barracks, and Mick carried out an inspection. We stopped in Limerick and in Mallow, and Mick wanted to swing by an army dance, where a priest called him a traitor to his face, and I had a pint poured down my back. Mick didn’t even flinch at the insult, and I finished my whiskey with a wet arse. Mick showed a little more outrage when the lookouts at the hotel in Cork were fast asleep in the lobby when we arrived. He grabbed each boy by his hair and knocked their heads together. If it had been Vaughan’s Hotel in Dublin a year ago, he would have left immediately, certain that his safety had been compromised. He didn’t seem especially concerned and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. I dozed sitting in a chair in front of the door, Mick’s revolver in my lap.
Maybe it was my weariness, or the fog of grief I’ve been walking in since Anne disappeared, but the next day unfolded like a motion picture, jerky and dreamlike, with no colour or context to my own life. Mick had meetings with family and friends in the early part of the day, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that we left for Macroom Castle. I didn’t accompany him inside but waited in the courtyard with the small convoy—Sean O’Connell and Joe Dolan from Mick’s squad and a dozen soldiers and extra hands to clear any barricades—assigned to escort Mick safely through Cork.
We ran into problems near Bandon when the touring car overheated twice and the armoured car stalled on a hill. One debacle fed into another. Trees were cleared, only to discover trenches had been dug behind them. We took a detour, got lost, got separated from the rest of the convoy, asked for directions, and eventually reunited for the last appointment of the day, heading towards Crookstown through a little valley called Béal na mBláth. The mouth of flowers.