Planning for Escape

by Sara Dillon

  And somehow I arrived in dark old Dublin, as it was then, where the dominant sound was of seagulls crying. And in turn, I took my last train, the one to Galway, moving out across the Irish midlands which were exactly as I had known they would be.

  Calvin—This was your email address a few years ago—still the case?

  Am writing from Greensboro, the Vermont one. Have quit law, not that you will care. Finally parted company, was about to die.

  Have brought the kids, of course. Did I tell you about the second one, a little boy, also from Kazakhstan.

  Hope you are well. Do you hear anything of John Merrill? It seems I am back in his state.

  Am working in a bookshop—do we now have this in common? Believe it or not—also working on a screenplay called Once Upon a Time in Vermont. You will not like the title—you disapprove of all titles. Am also writing some poems—will send them to you. Wondered if you would have any ideas about me showing the screenplay around when I am done with it.

  It’s about the Viking—or sort of about him.

  As ever (unchanging—don’t you ever miss me?), Catherine

  I logged off the public library’s computer, checked my name off the list and left the library. It had begun to drizzle several days before. The famed foliage season had turned into an endless light rain, but I loved it.

  I remembered coming to the public library, the Greensboro Free, for a children’s pajama party several years back, before Emmet. Madina had been so small, so naïve.

  Fog hung over the Grange Hall and Willey’s, over the Miller’s Thumb and over the hills in the distance, over Wheelock, over Sheffield. Sheffield made me think of Galway Kinnell and my long ago poem about how he looked like he had been cutting his hair in the dark.

  I didn’t know if Calvin Pini was still running his antiquarian bookshop and art gallery in Rhode Island. Probably, it so suited him. He and his wife had split up, or so it seemed. But he hadn’t stayed in touch. He had no mercy for me now, seemed to enjoy whatever misfortune I might describe. The last I saw of him was in a sheltered garden at the MFA in Boston, on a hot June day. Madina had been scolded by the museum staff for putting her hands in the fountain, out of fear of liability for germs, they really said that.

  We’d had a drink in the museum café, then parted indecisively.

  You look like your father, I called out when I first saw him.

  And you look like your mother, he rejoined carelessly.

  Did you hear that, Mommy? Madina had said to me excitedly. He said you look like your mother, Gramma, right? She put her hand over her mouth, laughing in delight.

  But you see, what I really wanted to write to Calvin was actually something like:

  Calvin—

  Despite the magnificent stars we saw when we went outside the guesthouse on the Aran Islands back in the 1970s sometime, when they still swam horses and cattle out to the boats, despite all that you just let me be kidnapped later. I will never forgive you, it was your fault, all your poems meant nothing when it came right down to it. Everything that happened after was your fault, and Una’s fault. You did not defend me, you did not rescue me.

  I was just used by everyone for a little inspiration, everyone was quite content to see me do a bit of suffering. You could have rescued me so easily, you who cared so much about my dog Roger who died.

  But of course I did not write that; it would take being truly in extremis to write such things. And Calvin would not really reply even to that, or would reply at cross purposes, a cryptic poem about the fields, the birds, the navy blue sea.

  On her grumpy days, Madina missed life in Cambridge; she moped and complained, and lamented her lost friends. There were no Asian kids in Greensboro, few adopted kids, no stores. I counted it a success when I put something on the table they liked and, with a small lamp burning, saw their faces light up with even a temporary joy, as the early dark set in.

  Emmet had too much day care. Sometimes he acted as if he didn’t know me, or he laughed at me when I got annoyed at him. He could laugh without any good reason for what felt like hours at a time. That is orphanage stuff, I told myself, as I marveled at his little blond duck tail of hair and his face the very map of south central Russia, where Europe melted into an endless steppe.

  Snow comes early here, Madina.

  Oh—oooh. I knew I would hate it.

  I thought of the snow that fell each night in the Kazakh city where Madina came from. It always fell during the night, so that each morning the ground was covered with deeper drifts than the day before. The tree branches glittered and crosshatched like the brown and white pattern of a rug. Madina put her chin in her hand and thumbed through an American Girl magazine. She said she remembered nothing of her home town, except that glisteny brightness after snow. Whenever she saw the shimmer off new snow, she would say, It’s Kazakh light, I think.

  Una phoned every week or so. Sven told me that, as the law school saw it, I’d had a breakdown, and the administration was still afraid that I would blame it on the working conditions or the atmosphere. They were ready to settle with me and call it a day. So that would be it. I would never have to go back, never. I’d never even be allowed back in; they only grant you one breakdown. Locks changed, traces expunged from the student handbook. No more faculty meetings or sitting through the excruciating question-answer period that followed the talks of visiting scholars, no more receptions for judges. No more trade and the environment, product/process distinction or debates on the validity of the notion of comparative advantage in an age of capital mobility. Instead, I could see in the distance a door open, and there at the lighted table Anna Akhmatova and Randall Jarrell.

  But how old I was, how unexpectedly old to be walking through that door. Emmet was lining up cars and trucks all around the room, front to back, front to back. Madina still asked for Toora Loora at bedtime, the way I always had. It was funny to think that I had lived with Madina in Ireland a whole year, driving out to Park Baun with her in the rain. If I had only done this twenty years ago, I thought; if I’d even done it ten years ago.

  Later in the autumn, Una telephoned.

  Gramma’s had a fall, she told me; she was angry at me, saying that she’d been left all alone with Gramma again.

  Is she all right?

  Who knows? We’re waiting to find out if she broke anything. What do you plan on doing?

  I’m not sure what I can do.

  Una sighed with vexation.

  I wandered around the house after the kids were asleep. I remembered the house of our childhood in upstate New York, the green birdhouse in the tree outside my window, the sloping roof where I believed Santa Claus always landed. I thought of my mother’s tidiness, her lovely May altars with the statue of Mary and the bowl overflowing with lilacs. She was still tidy, even as an old lady, the nice fresh bar of Sweetheart soap in the dish. Sven said that she raised two slobs, Una and me.

  I should pack up the car and get back as soon as possible, I thought. I was afraid to leave the Northeast Kingdom, as if I’d go back into a zone where no one cared if I ever had another moment’s happiness.

  You are born in a bright field and die in a dark forest. Those Russians, what a proverb. The fields of snow in between the pine trees, Mother Russia as seen from the plane as I approached Moscow on my way to get Madina. You are born in a bright field and die in a dark forest; because, simply because you screw everything up. And you listen to everyone else and do things so abominably stupid your life becomes unrecognizable.

  I thought of Miles Bradford biting the air near me, as if I were so delicious he couldn’t contain himself, and then laughing his sardonic laugh.

  It seemed that was what I was left with.

  Someday you’ll wish you’d stayed with old Mr. Bradford, he’d said at the end. Just like Jane Eyre, you have been loved, he said. But conceited as I was, his remark made barely a dent in my heart in those days. Right-oh, I might have replied.

  The pub; early 1970s

&nb
sp; The roads in East Galway used to bend and twist at will back then. At each curve, you could stop for a full enjoyment of the wind, the grass blowing dark green and light green. You could lean the Raleigh bike against a stone wall and listen to the low whistle that always ran along the ground.

  East Galway was Gramma’s home place, though she’d been born and raised in Watertown. It was thoroughly and utterly her home country, and everyone I met knew her as if she’d been born and raised in Timard.

  Eyre Square was silent on that evening in 1972, a rainy early summer’s night, as Market Street had been silent all day, except for one accordion player and the creaking shut of heavy doors. Most of the upper windows and even the shop fronts were dark. I had arrived in the afternoon and walked around, carrying the canvas bag on my back. You could feel the raw sea air back then, the lanes and alleys still had their ancient cottages, the town was small and self-contained, and a dark grey brume hung over everything. I had tea and sausages at the café in Moon’s Department Store. Lights were reflected in the wet of the pavement, and later there were no lights.

  There is no such place to go to now; that Galway is utterly gone, demolished block by block, ringed around with roads and subdivisions; the link with the sea is broken.

  Well.

  Ireland was the next thing that made me think I could have anything.

  It was the Midas touch, animating the fields and rain, my touch that brought things to life and sent them into orbit around me. I walked a path through the grey air, woke to the sound of bam and bang, sheep hitting the wall outside. The skittering of their feet—do you call them feet or something else, I cannot remember—when farmers changed animals from one place to another, twice a day every day. And I wore the same slightly too small green sweater, jumper I learned to call it, nearly every day, a white stripe around the neck of it.

  You see, it turned into the opposite of the Midas touch as I grew older, that touch of mine that somehow came to switch even lively things to cinders, curled up weeds. And not unreasonably, it seemed to me I was being punished for something.

  When I arrived in Galway, it was all of a piece, the talk and the weather and the maps and the roads and the ease of the frame to the road, gentle and not dangerous, no attacks on you in the night, the gaw of the big blackbirds, seeing people you knew from a car window, they pedaling hard on their black Raleigh bikes, heads down in the rain. Going to the bank by bicycle, taking half the morning, just to withdraw five pounds.

  You little womaneen you, look at the womaneen. You are scarier you are than an Alsatian dog. Now.

  It was the contact of my fingers with the edge of the field that stirred something paradisal; it was all that, and even more. Of course, it had to go. There would be no revisiting the scene, because in short order it was no longer there. As completely as a world could vanish, it did.

  I lived in a pub that year. At a crossroads, looking out over an undisturbed field, a huge field, with the old estate wall still standing here and there in places. There was a constant sound of wind, and no resistance by fields or houses to rain, no complaining about it, since it was so common, an every hour’s occurrence. There was no such thing as a rainy day, just rain that came and went.

  I arrived at the time of year when the sun doesn’t really set; even midnight has a kind of expectant glow. By four in the morning, the sky is streaked with red and white; the animals are up, as has been the case for hundreds of years. Later in the season came the Celtic mugginess.

  Back then, the sea was the sea and the roads ran through fields. You could hitchhike. The sea met the land and every building fit into its place on the land. The house doors were left open.

  That first day, I walked past the jewelry shops in Galway City, with their Celtic earrings laid out in the display windows, straightforward into the dusk and the fog. The telephone was damp. What an effort the telephone was then, big coins jangling around, what a luxury to connect with the other end.

  I phoned Brother Clement.

  I heard the phone ring in the monastery, the muffled double bleat.

  Kilke’n 94280.

  Would Brother Clement be there?

  He would indeed.

  Stepping away on the cold tiles.

  Catherine, are you there? Is it you?

  I am. I’m in Galway.

  We’ll be there, Clement said, in two shakes. Sit tight, we’ll be there.

  The bar in the Imperial Hotel was quiet except for a few men murmuring to each other. The June night fell slowly, reluctantly, but everything was wet outside the window; Eyre Square under the yellow lights, the footpaths, the slate roofs. Summer as I had known it only existed there in the afternoon, never at night.

  Brother Anthony brought him, as Clement didn’t have the use of the monastery car. We left Galway City behind in minutes and the view gave way to long, flat fields and stone walls in the rain.

  Brother Clement kept turning around and smiling enthusiastically at me.

  So you’ve come, Catherine. You’ve come, as if he’d thought in the end I wouldn’t.

  Brother Anthony was heavy-set, good looking. He would be leaving at the end of the summer for Africa, for the missions.

  The fields seemed to be slithering away down towards a low horizon point, like an uneven floor. There were sheep everywhere, stone walls in long, narrow rectangles. With each turn, the car brought us deeper into the country, where the walls were sometimes very high, left over from half crumbled estates, and there were so many empty houses, long deserted, left as they stood. Only seldom did we meet another car. A pale purplish light shimmered above and below the horizon. I smelled a sweet, acrid smoke.

  Such as we are, Catherine, Clement smiled and nodded.

  Out of two boreens, walking, carrying leather bags, one in East Galway, one in South Mayo, Gramma’s parents came without turning around, so far back and long ago that the famine was a part of the memory of their parents. She walked straight, adaptable, practical; he was handsome and lost, dependent and stubbornly unable to get used to Boston. They both, unknown to each other, pitched in their Irish language, saving it only for the odd time when they didn’t want the children to know what they were saying. Or for nursery rhymes that Gramma remembered into old age.

  No other people thought like that, only the Irish, especially those from the West—that the language was no good for getting a job, letting it go just like that without a struggle, muttering that it was useless. So in the space of fifty years, every word of Irish except the place names receded from Galway East, never to return as the language of whispers, love and insults.

  Clement, taken from home into the monastery at thirteen or fourteen on the grounds that he seemed to have a vocation, did all his subjects through Irish, even washed the monastery dishes through Irish, and really knew it, starting of course with the prayers, Christ before me, Christ at my side. Not that he had any real regard for the language as such. For him, it was linked with four a.m. masses in the winter, the cold bedrooms, and the sobbing of the other boys. But of all this, Clement said not a word, not for his whole life.

  Catherine had come, things would go a bit wild, you could feel it. It was a year before Ireland was to enter the EEC, along with Britain, sure if they go, we have to go in as well. Many had left for New York, building and bartending. I was told the selection of young men was not up to the usual standard. It rained what seemed to be on the hour. Each piece was part of the whole; the trees grew into the walls, the houses were crumbling into the fields. There was some pledge I kept hearing of that people would never knock a famine house. The roads disappeared; the clouds moved past in rapid succession.

  Of course, I couldn’t have imagined that night, as we pulled up to the Crossroads Inn, how completely destroyed it would all be; how I would run away from it many years later, leaving my own house behind in Park Baun. Clement had arranged for me to stay at the Inn for nine pounds per week, meals included.

  ——

  I must teach you a
ll about Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, said Nell, our political parties. You’ll want to know their history, Cat, where they came from. She held the Tuam paper in her hands, rubbing it smooth, newsprint coming off on her finger.

  I had moved from the guest dining room to their own kitchen, Nell and Frank’s kitchen, since I did not act or feel like a guest. We sat at the picture window at the crossroads, where each car had to pause before turning. Each pulled up slowly, then drove away again into the rain.

  Tom Collins put his head in. There’s the little womaneen.

  In love with each field and each view and each day, in love with the little bar and the big bar and the mirrors that let you see into the different rooms from a clever angle, in love with the grumbly sound of voices at the bar. I could soon tell who had come in, even from up in my room, even without looking. I could tell by the tone, by the way they closed the outside door, by the sound and type of greeting from the other side.

  I went miles to see all my mother’s relatives, going slowly and deliberately on a borrowed bike, up lanes and asking directions, standing by the open doors and calling in, It’s me, are you in? And inevitably they would greet me extravagantly, dragging out tea and biscuit, all varieties in the cupboard.

  Catherine, are you called, and some do call you Cat? And you are here to stay with us, are you, for the year?

  It was so unheard of a thing to do, coming in reverse, neither spending much nor making anything, living with Nell and Frank Lyons. Clement set it up, did he? Clement is so good, so good to us all. There were aging brothers and sisters living together, armies of the never married, pleasantly agoraphobic, just about able to accept a lift to church. They had complaints about their little hill being overrun with rabbits, with hares as they called them. And at the end of the visit, a wallop of whisky, without any sense of hesitation. Whisky meant something different then; it was presented like medicine or closer yet a vitamin drink. I would sit and sip and listen to the ticking of the clock and we would come around again to my mother, my mother’s mother, to Clement, to Nell and Frank.