The Elephant of Belfast

by S. Kirk Walsh

  “You’re the lucky one, you know, being the only female zookeeper,” Eliza continued. “I’m stuck washing dishes in the canteen. At least I can still say that I work at the zoo. Men like that, don’t you think?”

  “It’s not something I’ve considered,” Hettie said loftily, even though she had, on more than one occasion since being hired part-time by Mr. Wright. Her fictional conversations with young men always went better when she mentioned her responsibilities for and care of her animal charges. The young man would pepper her with questions and compliments, marveling at how unusual it was for a woman to be a zookeeper, how most girls worked in offices as secretaries or typists, longing to get married, or didn’t work at all. In her mind, her future boyfriend frequently visited her at the zoo, told his friends about her, and around Belfast, she would become known as the zookeeper at Bellevue rather than merely Anna Quin’s younger sister.

  “If I were you, I’d go on a date with dear Ferris,” Eliza said. “If you let him touch your private place, I bet he could get you the job of taking care of that elephant.”

  Hettie spluttered and coughed. Gray spots flickered along the margins of her vision. The ground tipped slightly and then snapped back.

  “I’m just telling you how it is,” Eliza said. “You need to apply your ambition in the right way. That’s the only way you’re going to get ahead.”

  Hettie took the pear drop out of her mouth, holding it between her finger and thumb. Suddenly it no longer tasted sweet.

  “I’ll take that if you don’t want it.”

  Wordlessly, Hettie handed the sweet to Eliza.

  “Thank you very much,” Eliza said, popping it into her own mouth.

  As Eliza walked away, Hettie clenched her damp fists. What did Eliza know about Ferris? And what did she know about Mr. Wright? Hettie noticed that her shoulders were scrunched up and tried to release them. The pain in her thigh pulsed again. Violet paced across the yard.

  “Is there something I can help you with, Miss Quin?” Mr. Wright asked, offering a fistful of hay to Violet.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, then, attend to your morning assignments, please.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m going, sir.”

  Hettie headed toward the aviary where she would fill the assorted feeders with seed and refresh the water troughs for the finches, thrushes, parrots, and macaws. Before she turned onto the pathway, she glanced back at Violet one more time: The elephant was now lying down, her gray legs folded underneath the furrows of her body. Mr. Wright carried a bucket of water in one hand and a leafy bundle of celery in the other. Violet lifted her head as Mr. Wright walked toward her. He broke off a stalk of celery and the elephant raised her trunk, gingerly curling it around the pale green stick. Mr. Wright looked up again.

  “Miss Quin,” he said. “Have you suddenly become deaf? Return to your work.”

  Two

  THAT EVENING, AS SHE OFTEN DID, HETTIE DECIDED TO TAKE the long way home—through the Throne Wood to the Crazy Path down to the Antrim Road. If she took the grand staircase to the zoo’s front entrance, it was only a ten-minute walk to her mother’s house on the Whitewell Road, but Hettie preferred this way, even if it took a half hour longer.

  The twilight threw shifting, thin shadows on the pathways of the zoo. Helen McAlister closed up the ticket kiosk, shuttering its accordion face and securing its padlock.

  “‘Night, Hettie Quin,” Helen said, nodding. “Be good.”

  “‘Night.”

  Alice and Henry, the pair of black bears, wandered across their enclosure. Henry found his way into a puddle and settled his rear in the muddy water. Hettie smiled to herself. Even though the bears were only five and six years old, she thought of Alice and Henry as an elderly couple, like her grandparents on her mother’s side, who often bickered but loved each other fiercely. More than once, she had witnessed the bears grunting at each other and batting each other’s shiny snouts before they moved into a routine of sniffing and licking each other. Ferris had mentioned how Mr. Wright was hoping that Henry would impregnate Alice soon, and that she would give birth to at least two cubs by summer, and how this event would generate attention in the city, and the public would want to come and see the babies. Hettie couldn’t wait.

  Off to the right, several of the black-footed penguins warbled as they scampered across the pavement before plunging, one at a time, into their blue-green pool. There were six penguins altogether: Oscar, Clementine, Franklin, Gerald, Marie, and Joy. Hettie was always enchanted and impressed by the penguins’ readiness to fling their bodies effortlessly into the pool of water, like fearless children hurling themselves off a high dive. Around the corner, Sammy the sea lion sat on one of the highest boulders, his large eyes dark, lustrous moons.

  “‘Night, Sammy,” Hettie said. “Cheers.”

  He yapped and growled, baring his jaundice-stained teeth. Up ahead, the shadowy silhouette of the Cavehill emerged over the Floral Hall, the popular dance venue that was also a part of Mr. Christie’s Bellevue Zoo & Gardens. During the evenings, the lampposts that bordered the walkways were no longer illuminated due to the citywide regulations that had begun over a year ago because of the war. As she made her way down the path, Hettie passed one of the public clocks standing erect on a patina-green column. The wrought-iron hands read six o’clock. She knew that her mother was likely waiting for her.

  Hettie passed through the rear gate and headed toward the Throne Wood and the Crazy Path. Beyond the Cavehill, a strip of pinkish light settled across the western horizon. Hettie followed the looping curves of the path, the graveled dirt giving beneath her worn boots. Stands of beech, sycamore, and pine blanketed the countryside. A gray rabbit hopped through the open meadow before disappearing behind a copse of Scots pines. Above, in the diminishing light, a kestrel cut wide, smooth circles.

  On the Crazy Path, Hettie felt transported to another place and time—where it was just Hettie, the wild birds and raptors, the old trees, and the distant calls of the zoo animals. They were calling for her, she felt certain. That an abiding appreciation existed between Hettie and many of the animals, that she was just as important to the animals as they were to her. In the meadow, the bending tips of grasses whistled, and the birds scattered in the open sky. Eventually the winding path met the boundary of her uncle Edgar’s farm, where Hettie had spent so much time during her youth. He was her mother’s only brother and oversaw the family’s twenty-five-acre property. Uncle Edgar was the one who introduced Hettie’s mother, Rose, to Thomas when she was eighteen, at Thomas’s birthday celebration at the Duke of York Pub. At the time, Rose was working as a nurse in the tuberculosis ward at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, but she left her job soon after their wedding and becoming pregnant with Anna, in the same way that Anna left her secretarial position at the solicitors’ office, across the street from the city hall, when she became pregnant with Maeve. The men had been on the same club football team, with Thomas playing wing and Uncle Edgar in the goal. This was when Thomas had worked with Harland & Wolff, before he enlisted with the Merchant Navy and left Belfast for months at time. Nowadays, Uncle Edgar stopped by the house to deliver checks to Rose for her modest share of the revenue generated from the farm as well as eggs, milk, and potatoes.

  Hettie approached the top of the Antrim Road, where strangers collected at the tram stop. She crossed over to the Whitewell Road and then passed her aunt’s grocery store. Aunt Sylvia, a second cousin on her mother’s side, lived in an unassuming home directly behind the shop. Four years ago, her husband had left her and their fourteen-year-old son, Charlie. There was no note, no telegram, no nothing. Later, a rumor circulated that Uncle Robert had taken passage on a transatlantic ship bound for New York City, found a job as a locksmith on the Lower East Side, and started a new family who didn’t know anything about Aunt Sylvia, the corner store, or Charlie.

  Hettie continued down the incline of the Whitewell Road. Redbrick, two-story homes, with slate-gray ro
ofs, bordered the street. Her house, with a hunter-green-painted door and a brass door knocker, sat on the left side. A small apron of brown grass fronted the row house, and evergreen hedges huddled below the kitchen and sitting room windows. This was the house where Hettie, now twenty years old, had lived her entire life. For a majority of this time, the four of them—Thomas, Rose, Anna, and Hettie—had lived together in this house. Now, within the mere space of a year, the size of her family had dwindled to two.

  During recent years, Thomas had come and gone to the UK and Europe at least a half dozen times due to his rotating assignments with the Merchant Navy. Inevitably, he always returned home—whether it was a month or six months later—and Rose would accept him with little argument or resistance. This time, things were different. Two weeks ago, Hettie had overheard Rose saying to one of her church friends, Edith Curry, that Thomas had up and left with a young woman who had worked as a stenographer in the dockyards. A tart with no God in her soul, Edith had said. Imagine living such a sinful life! Hettie understood the velocity at which this sort of gossip would have traveled through their neighborhood and the Upper Antrim Road, and imagined that by now most people knew about Thomas and the reasons for his protracted absence. She hated her father for his infidelities, but at the same time she missed his kindness and companionship and longed for his return home.

  As she walked along, Hettie watched several neighborhood boys playing a game of rounders. Makeshift bases were arranged in the street, forming a lopsided circle. Johnny Gibson pitched a hard ball to Albert O’Brien. At least a half dozen boys manned the bases and anxiously looked on as Albert swung and missed the ball and started to run. Hettie recognized all the boys as she remembered when each one had been brought home from the hospital, and then later their christenings and confirmations. Only a few young people around Hettie’s age still lived in the neighborhood. Across the street, Eleanor Harte took care of her bed-bound grandmother, and Oliver Finney still lived with his parents, like Hettie, and worked as a message boy for a local engineering firm. Everyone else had moved on.

  The boys’ eager cheers and laughter brightened the evening. Albert was tagged out at first base. Hettie felt the impulse to drop her leather satchel, join the game, and demonstrate for the boys how to give a ball a proper whack. She glanced over to the window of the kitchen. There her mother stood, peering out the window, and Hettie sighed.

  “Johnny, send another one over, will you,” yelled Albert. “I’m gonna knock this one all the way to Scotland. You’ll see.”

  Johnny pushed his black-framed glasses up and then stared down at the pavement, as if a good pitch might materialize out of the ground. Eventually he looked up and pitched again. This time Albert managed to make solid contact with the ball and it arced down the middle of the street. He started to run as the other boys scrambled after the soaring ball.

  As Hettie stepped inside the house, she heard the clang of metal against metal, and then her mother’s reedy sigh.

  “Where on earth have you been?” Rose asked from the kitchen. “Your supper’s cold.”

  “Sorry, Mum. Mr. Wright asked me to stay late,” Hettie lied.

  The smell of vegetable stew drifted from the warm stovetop. Like she often did, Hettie had to resist the urge to slip back into the evening air, away from the suffocating sadness of her mother. Rose clicked on the wireless that sat in the far corner of the kitchen. The rotating hum of airplane propellers filled the room, followed by a commentator reporting the news.

  Rose was still wearing her robe and nightdress, just as Hettie had left her that morning. She wondered if her mother had changed and gone outside, then changed back, or if it had been another day of shuffling from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom to kitchen and back again. The staccato voice on the wireless reported on the Battle of Britain and the Luftwaffe’s relentless attacks on British convoys, ports, and aircraft factories. Rose wiped her hands on a dish towel and returned the dried dishes to their cupboards.

  Things hadn’t always been this way: Rose used to carry a measure of levity within her, a kind of expectancy. Despite the rationing, Hettie’s mother had put considerable effort into making delicious stews and soups, and the four of them would eat in the dining room, often with the candles lit, bowing their heads together and saying a prayer of gratitude before their conversation turned to the day’s events. There was never a shortage of topics. Rose used to become animated when asking questions about their studies and later about Anna’s responsibilities at the solicitors’ office, about their respective friends from school and church, and about her sister’s recent wins and losses on the tennis court. But now the house was largely silent.

  “You can go to bed, Mum,” Hettie finally said. “I’ll clean up.”

  “All right,” Rose said, wiping off her hands one more time. “‘Night.”

  Hettie folded her scarf and placed it on the top shelf of the hallway closet. When she returned to the kitchen, Rose had already disappeared behind her bedroom door. Hettie turned off the wireless. The overhead light shone down on a porcelain bowl of pea-green stew with knobs of carrots and potatoes floating on its watery surface. She could hear the voices of the neighborhood boys in the street. Hettie felt an ache in her chest, a longing to be another daughter to another mother, to be a part of another kind of family altogether, one that wasn’t indelibly shaped by grief, betrayal, and abandonment. Hettie had assumed these yearnings would subside over time, but instead, with each week, the absences of her sister and father only grew more tender and sharp.

  She heard a crash outside. The ball had shattered a window somewhere. There was silence, and then Mr. Brown’s voice rang out in the night. “I know it was one of you naughty boys. I’m going to get you!”

  The following morning, Hettie touched her toes to the cold wooden floor of her bedroom. A shiver passed up the length of her calf and deep into the crook of her knee. Her thigh still ached where Violet had kicked her the day before. Hettie lifted the edge of her nightdress and inspected the contusion in the dim light: A faint reef of lavender and yellow stained her skin. It wasn’t a pleasant sight, but at least it showed that yesterday hadn’t been a figment of her imagination.

  In the hallway, Hettie heard the soft padding of slippered feet. There was the click of a light switch and the hiss of the stove being lit. Hettie dressed in her gray wool skirt, white blouse, and beige cardigan, and then grabbed her father’s old watch from the top of her dresser and encircled the worn leather band around her wrist.

  The kettle whistled. There was the sizzle and snap of bacon in a frying pan. Hettie glanced at the cracked face of her father’s wristwatch: It was half past seven. She knew that her mother would expect her to eat breakfast at home, particularly since Rose served bacon only twice a month now, but Hettie was determined to speak with Mr. Wright about Violet this morning and his rounds started promptly at eight o’clock.

  Hettie retrieved her navy peacoat and tartan scarf from the hallway closet. She noticed, like she did every morning, two of Anna’s old tennis rackets, with the wooden trapezoid frames screwed tightly against their stringed heads, gathering dust in the darkened corner. In the kitchen, Rose stood at the counter, in her robe and slippers, the bony knuckles of her spine visible through the worn fabric of her robe.

  “Morning,” Hettie said.

  “You’re up early.” Rose didn’t turn around from the stove. The bacon popped.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Wright this morning.”

  “Surely you can eat something before you leave?”

  Rose placed a plate of toast with two strips of bacon on the table. Hettie took a fast swallow of hot tea, grimacing as she burned her tongue. She folded a piece of bacon into her mouth and wiped her fingers on a cotton napkin.

  “Here.” Rose wrapped two more pieces of bacon in a napkin, slipped it inside Hettie’s satchel, and handed her a roll. “We can’t let the bacon go to waste.”

  “Thanks,” Hettie said. “Thanks, Mum.”r />
  Rose turned her back to Hettie and then ran the kitchen faucet. “There’s another opening at the Wichell Legal offices on Linenhall Street. I heard about it from Mrs. Moffit yesterday,” Rose said. “Mrs. Lyttle’s daughter works there. She says it pays well, better than the zoo, and the other girls are nice and respectable. You know, with your father gone, it would be helpful if you could contribute a bit more to the household.”

  The kitchen felt small. There was suddenly less air. Despite everything, Hettie missed her father again. If he were still around, he would have been supportive of her new position despite the low salary and meager hours. He would have been optimistic that she would soon be employed full-time and that a higher wage would come with this advancement. Thomas had always encouraged Hettie to pursue sciences and math, and didn’t mind when she brought home abandoned animals—cats and dogs and the occasional ferret—while her mother forbade it. Her father had often served as the referee, striking a compromise that the animal could stay in their courtyard, enclosed by its tall walls, until Hettie could find the animal a better home.

  “I’m going to be late. Bye, Mum.”

  Hettie closed the front door behind her. The freshness of the morning air lifted her spirits. The tension in her shoulders loosened. When Hettie reached their street, Rose waved from the front window. Hettie waved back, noticing a trail of suds slipping down the length of her mother’s pale, freckled forearm and disappearing into the sleeve of her robe. Hettie glanced at her father’s wristwatch again. It was a quarter to eight; there was no time for the scenic route along the Crazy Path this morning. Instead, she hurried up the rise of the Whitewell Road, across the Hazelwood Road, and then across the Antrim Road, entered the zoo’s front entrance, and made her way up the grand staircase, skipping the steps two at a time.

  When she arrived at the front gate, Hettie nodded to Mr. Clarke, who stood in his usual spot in the security booth at the top of the stairs. Even after six months of part-time employment, Hettie had to show her identification every day when she arrived at the zoo. Mr. Clarke took her identity card and inspected her name and photograph, glancing between the black-and-white image and Hettie more than once. His breath smelled of stale smoke and ale, and his bulbous nose was cross-hatched with tiny branches of broken capillaries. The rumor around the zoo was that Mr. Clarke—a man in his late thirties but who could have passed for decades older—was rarely sober and the only reason he was kept on as an inept security guard was due to the fact that he was a distant cousin of Mr. Christie’s. Hettie’s face hardened as the seconds ticked by.