Paudie raised his pint and nodded to his niece. “For Tess,” he said. “There never was a dearer girl, or a kinder heart.”
“Sláinte,” said Leo, and tipped his glass.
The old men soon fell into conversation between themselves. “I don’t know what to talk about,” I said to Tess. “I know it’s been really hard for you, and I don’t want to say anything to upset you.”
“You’re all right,” she said. “We can talk about the vigil, if you want to.”
“I only wanted to say that I think you did an amazing job.”
She deflected my compliment with half a smile. “What did you think of Owen’s sister, Ciara?”
“She’s very talented. And remarkably self-possessed for any age, but to be that young, and able to write and speak that way after what’s happened to her?” I shook my head.
“And she’s only fourteen. He made a poet out of her, didn’t he?” She sighed. “They do say that’s the way it happens. You turn your grief into something bigger than yourself.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. “Did you mind being an only child?”
“Only in that it pained my mother not to have the brood she’d always imagined for herself. I felt it, growing up, you know?” I nodded, and she continued. “She became very ill while she was expecting me, and the birth was difficult. There was never any question of her having another child.”
“I’ve been wanting to ask you about that.”
She waited for me to go on, but I let her finish my thought. “The healing, is it?” I nodded. “She was cured of the diabetes, thank Heaven, but even so, she’s never been in the best of health. It wouldn’t do her any good to speak of it now.” Tess looked me in the eye once she’d gotten that out. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I gave her half a shrug and half a smile. “That’s all right. I understand,” I replied, though I was already mulling over how I might change her mind. Maybe part of me was still hoping I could write this story and publish it somewhere else. “How did your parents take it when you told them you were becoming a nun?”
“They were more or less expecting it.”
“So they didn’t give you a hard time?”
“How do you mean?”
“Parents can get pretty ornery when they find out you’re not giving them any grandkids.”
She looked at me wryly. “Speaking from experience, are you?” Then she softened. “I’m so sorry. It must have been hard for you, being there tonight.”
Yet again I didn’t know what to say, and Tess gazed at me with her clear gray eyes. If Mallory were here, they’d be talking about medieval mystics and the Celtic stone carvings at Newgrange. They’d forget I was even here.
“After it happened,” I said, “when I’d meet someone for the first time and they’d ask if I had any brothers or sisters, I didn’t know what to say. Even now, I don’t know how to answer.”
“I don’t suppose you ever will.” Tess let her hand rest near mine on the table. “I pray for Mallory. I always have, since they told me what happened to her.”
I felt her name twitching beneath my shirt, begging for a good hard scratch, as if I’d gotten the tattoo only yesterday. Maybe Tess kept a notebook of her own. “Forgive me,” I said, “but I don’t see what good that does her now.”
“It does,” she said. “However far away they are from us now, it still matters.”
Who is it who gets to decide what matters and what’s pointless? It was all so preposterously arbitrary. “Can I ask you something?”
Tess regarded me warmly. “Of course.”
“How do you know where someone’s gone to? After they’ve died?”
“Well, you don’t,” she sighed. “But oftentimes they’ll ask for prayers, and that’s how you know they’re waiting. Perhaps you can hear them, if you sit quietly for a while.”
I suppressed a shiver. Was it something in the water here, or what? “You really believe in Purgatory?” I asked.
“It isn’t a matter of my believing in it,” she replied, and I knew then that there were more than four of us in the booth. Leo and Paudie were busy arguing about something involving a postal truck and a series of road signs pointing the wrong way. The crow twitching on the highway, the relentless rain, the white of her eye. Tess was looking at me, earnest and maybe a little concerned. This had nothing to do with religion, hers or anyone else’s.
Finally I said, “To me, it is a matter of belief. I want to know what you really think about this stuff.”
Tess smiled at my reducing her entire worldview into this stuff. “You already know what I believe.”
“You believe all of it, though? You don’t take issue with anything the Church teaches?”
“Let me answer you this way. What is it you take issue with?”
I gave her all the usual arguments—the sex abuse scandals, the Church’s stance on abortion and contraception, that women should be allowed to be priests, that homosexuality isn’t a sin. “Most of all, though,” I said, “I can hardly ever find anything with real-life relevance in the readings. If it’s there, they’ve done too good a job of hiding it.”
Tess cast me a tolerant smile. “Are you finished?”
I chuckled. “For now, anyway.”
“Right, then. When I have this sort of conversation, I certainly don’t expect anyone to fall into line with my own way of looking at the world and what lies beyond it,” she said. “But I do take exception when people try to argue there’s nothing a’tall behind any of it. It’s easy for a person to scoff at something when they haven’t taken the time to understand it.” She read my face and rushed to add, “Oh, I’m not saying anything about yourself, necessarily, I’m only trying to make the point that there’s nothing simple about theology. Some things, the big questions, they’re much too important to be distilled any further, and there’s something essential that’s lost whenever you try.”
“Can I just ask you one more thing about this?” I asked, and Tess answered with a nod and half a smile. “Do you hear them? The souls in Purgatory?”
“Not their voices, as such,” she conceded. “It’s more of a feeling. A knowing.”
“But how is that different from ordinary grief?” I knew I was pressing too hard, but this had nothing to do with either writing the story or scoring a point for rational thought. “How can you tell the difference?”
“It’s easy to tell when you hardly knew the person.” She was staring through the table again, and part of me wanted to grab her hand and hold it tight. “You know you wouldn’t be thinking so much of them otherwise. But when it’s someone you loved…” Tess swallowed before she continued. “There’s a sort of steadiness to your thoughts about them. It’s like they’re waiting in the hall, there whether or not you’ll allow yourself to think of them. That’s how you know it’s not only the grief.” She glanced up at me. “Or the regret.”
Waiting in the hall, I thought. Or the backseat. “Thank you,” I said. “That helps.” She gave me another half smile as she ran a Kleenex under her eyes.
True to form, Leo headed for “the jacks” as soon as someone mentioned getting the next round. Paudie rose heavily out of the booth, his hand rough and red on the polished wood. “Will you have another, Tess?”
“I won’t, thanks, Paudie.”
“I’ll bring you a glass of water, so,” he said, and shuffled away.
“You’re a cheap date,” I said, and she laughed, or tried to. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be making jokes on a night like this.”
Tess shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. None of it feels real to me anyway.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Not yet.”
She slid me a quiet smile of understanding.
“Is there anything I can do?”
Tess patted my hand, and the gesture felt almost sisterly. “You’ve already done it.” But when she took her hand away, I felt something else. “You know, I keep thinking about our conversation the other day. It was
hard for me, speaking round it like that. Not because I didn’t want to talk, but because I wanted to tell you everything. That was what frightened me.”
“You can talk to me now, if you want.” I tried to smile reassuringly. “You’ll notice I left the recorder at home.”
Tess glanced over my shoulder toward her uncle waiting at the bar. “We’ll save it for another time,” she said. “Sometime when it’s just the two of us.”
“Of course,” I said. “What would you like to talk about now?”
“Oh, anything. Anything but the week I’ve had.” She sighed. “Tell me about yourself, for once. What your life in New York is like.”
I didn’t want to talk about my life in New York. “It’s a good life,” I said. “Not many people get to write for a living, you know? I have good friends, a nice apartment in Brooklyn. Have you ever been to the U.S.?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“But you’ve traveled quite a bit, haven’t you? You said you volunteered.”
“At children’s homes, mainly,” she replied.
“I read an article once about a Romanian orphanage during the revolution,” I said. “They interviewed a volunteer there who said there were babies traded for television sets.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t an exaggeration,” she said darkly.
“Remind me where you were?”
“Kenya and Nepal. Kenya first. An orphanage in Nairobi.”
“How long did you volunteer there?”
“Only eight months, that time. I was meant to stay at least a year, but…”
“Did you get burnt out? I know I would have.”
She gave me a haunted look. “I didn’t want to see it that way at the time, but I was. I’m sure I was. You need to feel that you’re making a difference, and if you can’t see it—and in my experience, you rarely can—then it wears on you very quickly.”
“We can talk about something else, if you want.”
“I don’t want there to be this many things I shouldn’t speak of,” she said, more to herself than to me. “No. It’s fine. I’ll be glad to speak of it.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Tell me what it was like. How big was it, and how many children were there, and were they really orphans, or…?”
“Most of the children in the home still had living parents, or at least we could assume that to be the case. You know that scene at the beginning of a fillum, where a desperate woman leaves a baby in a basket on the front steps of an orphanage in the middle of the night? That happened more often than not.”
“That is what they say about clichés,” I murmured into my pint glass as Paudie and Leo came back to the booth.
“Go on, then,” Paudie said. “Tell us about that place in Kenya.”
Tess sighed. “You’ve heard all this before, Paw.”
Paudie jabbed his thumb in my direction. “Ah, but he hasn’t.”
“How old were the kids there?” I asked. “What were they like?”
“Oh, all ages. Young teens to the tiniest babbies, only weeks old.” She stared into her toddy glass, shaking the wilted lemon slice. “There were so many children and so few people to mind them that sometimes the babbies would be sittin’ in their dirty nappies for hours before anybody could notice. There were never enough hands to bathe or feed them as often as they should’ve been, and what toys they had to play with were even filthier than the linens. I tried to wash them, but I could never seem to get them clean enough.” She sighed. “What do you do when you arrive into a situation like that? What can you do, apart from your best?” Tess glanced at me, and I nodded for her to go on. “But my best wasn’t good enough. Not by half. It didn’t matter how I held them or what I said to them, they’d lie slack in my arms like a bundle of curtains—as if I weren’t holding them a’tall.” She leaned back against the old red upholstery. Just talking about it had exhausted her. “They’d been left, and they knew they’d been left.”
“Even the really little ones knew?”
She looked at me and nodded. “You could see it. They always knew.”
“What did you do?” I asked. “I mean … how did you cope?”
Tess took a long drink of water before she answered me. “I suppose I had to pretend I didn’t see it—didn’t see what would happen to each of them in the future, what their lives would become. You can’t grow into a loving and purposeful member of society in a place like that. You just can’t. Nobody could.
“There was one wee lad,” she said softly. “Daniel. He was the only child I found on the front steps—it was usually the housekeeper who found them first thing in the morning. I couldn’t sleep that night, the night Daniel came to us. I was sitting by the window just looking down over the street as the moon went down. I saw a woman hurrying up with something in her arms, and I knew what she was about. She was gone before I got to the door, and there was Daniel tucked inside a shipping crate. They let me name him.”
“Didn’t it get cold at night?” I asked. “Even in Africa. I mean, didn’t the mothers ever knock?”
Tess shook her head. “I imagine most of them waited until just before sunrise, the way Daniel’s mother did that night. They’d be bundled up tight and out there no more than an hour. They were warm enough to live.
“Something happened to me that morning, as I took Daniel into my arms. He looked up at me with these dark, fathomless eyes, and it felt like how, in a dream, you might meet a loved one with a stranger’s face but all along you know who it is underneath. I don’t know, maybe that was why I thought I could reach him. It tore at my heart every time I saw him in the crib with the others.” She laid a pale hand on her chest, as if she meant it literally. “It always tore at me, but with Daniel it was even harder. I made sure I was always the one to feed him, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to lie down with him to sleep—to soothe him the way I’d been soothed as a baby—but there wasn’t room apart from my own bed in the volunteers’ dormitory. I suppose I knew by that point that I wouldn’t be a mother myself, but I felt that instinct all the same, the instinct to nurture.”
“Ah, Tess,” Paudie said softly, so as not to interrupt her. “You’ve a heart of gold.”
She did cut herself off, though, giving him that look I was beginning to know all too well—the look that said I’m not who you think. “One afternoon,” she continued, “I brought him into the dorm and when the director came in and found us, she was very angry with me. She didn’t see what I was trying to do, she didn’t care enough to see it, and it drove me mad.” Tess closed her eyes as if to protect herself from the memory. “She’d a thankless job all right, but she treated it like a license to drink.” She opened her eyes and sighed as she reached for her water glass. “But they weren’t all like that, in fairness.”
“Is that when you left?”
“Aye,” she said. “Only it wasn’t by choice. They asked me to leave.” She cast a glance at Paudie, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Not many people know about that.”
“Just because of what happened with Daniel?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m not ashamed of it, mind. I’d do it again if I could. It’s just easier not to explain the whole thing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Everything’s for the best,” Leo said, and excused himself for a cigarette.
“Aye,” Paudie sighed as he inched his way out of the booth. “It’s only we can’t see it, for all our hopes.”
“Paudie, wait.” I drew out a twenty-euro bill, and he accepted it with a smile of thanks.
Tess picked something up off the table and looked it over before handing it to me. Save a dozen souls in the time it takes to boil an egg. “Looks like you knew about the holy souls after all,” she said.
I looked at the text on the card as if I’d never seen it before. “I didn’t realize that’s what it meant.”
“Let me guess. You bought it from Mag O’Grady, just for novelty’s sake?”
It’s easy
for a person to scoff at something when they haven’t taken the time to understand it. “Touché,” I replied, and tucked the card back in my wallet.
“If you say that prayer sometimes … whenever you think of it…”
“Yeah?”
“It will help,” she said.
She meant Mallory, but I couldn’t think or talk about Mallory any more tonight. We looked at our hands, the table, the crowd at the bar. Neither of us wanted to go back to talking about dirty forgotten children. What happened when you went up to the hill on your own? I wanted to ask her. Do you know some people think the apparition wasn’t Mary at all?
Then Tess turned to me and said, “Has anyone told you about the fairies?”
This swerve in the conversation left me stumped. “Fairies? Like folklore, you mean?”
Tess gave me a radiant smile, even more remarkable given what she’d been through over the past forty-eight hours. Her eyes glittered, and for a second she reminded me of Síle. “You can call it folklore, if you like,” she said.
I was going to say something about a belief in fairies maybe being incompatible with Catholicism, but I thought better of it. If I’d learned anything over the past week, it was that the Irish had their own brand of logic.
“You never heard any of the old rules?” she was asking. “That you should never speak to them, or eat their food or drink their wine, or you’d be lost to our world forever?”
“Nope.”
“None of the old stories? Not even from your gran?”
“My grandmother isn’t much of a storyteller,” I said. “Not like Leo. She’s very practical.”
“I wasn’t aware of the impracticality of storytelling,” she replied dryly.
“You know what I mean.” I finished my pint and sat back with a sigh. “So what made you think of the fairies?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose there’s been a certain feeling of unreality to life lately. It’s strange to be here with you like this.” She traced a finger around the condensation left on the table by my pint glass, and I hoped she wasn’t thinking of Streedagh. “I couldn’t tell you the last time I was inside Napper Tandy’s. I may have been a teenager.”
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