by Sara Dillon
Back are you, Cat? And how is our Clement? Good to you, was he?
There was this thing about the roads. You couldn’t go anywhere without everyone knowing; and there was nothing that everyone didn’t know. As you progressed down a road, those ahead of you knew you were coming. I could always manage to make someone pass by when I wanted them to pass by. As I said, this contributed to that unfortunate sense I had that I could have whatever I wanted. I became accustomed to magic.
I saw him one day; he passed me out, then stopped the car and pulled slowly back. It was a navy blue British car, not new, but unusual. He was dressed well that day as he generally was. You wouldn’t know where he was coming from; I wasn’t even sure what he did.
You’re at the Inn, aren’t you?
Yes.
And related to who was it?
I went through a litany list of cousins and relations.
May I offer you a lift back?
I hadn’t taken the bicycle, so I was free to go, free to ride along next to him.
I told him I was hoping to go to the university in Galway.
It would be that, the uni, a smart girl like you, I remember him saying.
It was terribly wet on the road, though not quite raining. In between dark and light.
Do you know who I am? he asked.
Yes, I said again.
Who then?
Gormley, with brothers.
He laughed as if very pleased with my answer.
As the Inn came into sight, he pulled off the road and leaned into me, as if to smell me. He ran his hands over my hair.
Who did you say you were related to? he asked. He nuzzled my ears, the side of my head.
I hoped simply to duck into the side door and up the stairs, but Jerome was there, and Frank was standing, holding a glass, behind the bar. Neither spoke to me. There was no point in lying in Galway; and there were none of those handy remarks like, I was just busy, or just over the way, there was no such thing that you could be doing, and so everything had to be revealed. In this case, I knew they probably already knew. Jerome drank back his chaser. Frank was speechless for a moment.
Where’s he gone, then? he asked at last. He glanced towards the stairs, as if wondering whether I would ever be that reckless.
The next morning, Frank did not open the bar on time. He was, well, missing. Frank was nowhere to be found. Old men on bicycles pulled up at the door, saw it closed, tried it once or twice and continued on their way. The rain started to fall and kept on for hours.
When Frank appeared later in the day, his eyes were red and shining; he was dripping wet and standing in his own bar as if lost, uncertain what to do next. He’s back on the drink, whispered Mary, the girl who helped out in the bar and who’d come over to open up when she heard Frank was missing. As if it was necessary to say it.
He cannot drink, she said. Just cannot; he goes mad.
Ha, ha, Cat, Frank shouted. How’s my girl? And Mary, such a great girl you are.
Nell took one look at him and left the house, off to her sister’s in Castlerea, slamming the door behind her.
I remember driving in the car with Frank, through the rain that was falling mercilessly, up hill and down dale, to visit people he did not need to see, waving his arm to tell them I was in the car with him, with me waiting and watching out the window. Mary explained to me that Frank was one of those people who could not go near the drink, and that Nell kept him away from it constantly; though he worked in the bar, he pretended it was some other kind of business, always made a point of not smelling the glasses or bottles, and keeping up a big smile.
I’m fond of you, Cat, surely you know that? he said, staring straight ahead at the road as he drove. Darkness was falling; it was a failure of a day, a terrible day. Generally it rained a few times during the course of any day; on this one it rained with barely a moment’s pause. When we got back to the yard at the Inn, there was quiet and darkness everywhere, as if word of the tragedy had spread, and people stayed away. Fog rolled in from the fields; the place to turn around cars was muddy.
Come up now to bed, Frank, Mary said, very professional. No one’s out tonight, sure they’re not. Frank was compliant, the drink wearing off, repentant, tired. He clung to me a moment, murmuring, Darlin, darlin. That bad one could never have you. After he’d gone up the stairs, Mary and I sat morosely in the lounge, she very wise. Let’s close up early, she said.
Around nine, we saw Nell’s car pass by the front window, and heard her enter the small lounge, tentatively, peering around, not knowing of course what she would find.
So where is he? she asked first thing. We didn’t answer.
He must have been wild that I left; was he out looking for me? I had to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. My sister was firm about that.
Mary and I still stood foolishly, Mary pretending to clean the counter.
Did he come back at all, or was he out looking for me? The car’s there, I see.
He’s back, Mary ventured.
What did he say about me going? Nell asked.
At that point, there was a great thump from above; I thought Frank might have fallen out of bed. Nell looked up at the ceiling, then turned and headed for the stairs. We never saw another thing of either of them for twenty four hours. When they emerged, it was as if nothing had happened.
And you could say that after that it was a little awkward. I began to think about the piano; I hadn’t looked at a piano since leaving home months before. Clement managed to set me up with a piano at the convent in Tuam; I could go there whenever I wanted, play to my heart’s content. It was cold those days, and the room in the convent was unheated except for a big box of a space heater. The piano sounded tinny and ever so slightly out of tune. I took the bicycle whenever I couldn’t get a lift, play for a few hours, then stroll around Tuam; the newsagent, the shoe shop, the home goods store. The young nun who scrubbed the stairs at the convent was always happy to see me; I was asked to come and play for the sisters.
I still wasn’t that amazingly good. I was all right; I had the feel, I had the sound, but I did not really have the thing it was that made you go off on your own and play freely. I was stuck to the music books, I knew what I wanted to sound like, but I couldn’t go head to head with someone who had a true musical gift. I didn’t mention that, though I didn’t hide it, either. I think that the nuns, sitting there listening, knew it.
It was just there, a fact.
But it was because of the piano that I left the Inn and left Galway.
I got it into my mind that I should go to Dublin and study music. Then it became, Oh, Catherine and the music, the muuusic. That girleen and her music. Funny enough, Frank and Nell took me to Dublin to audition.
Ah, twill do me good to get out of here and off to the big city for a couple of days, Frank said.
We stayed in what was then one of the newer hotels, with little fripperies of windows and a garish bar off the lobby.
Dublin in those days was damp and dark and you saw old men out on the street. There were newspaper hawkers and lottery ticket hawkers, and always the sound of the skinny sea gulls overhead. Dublin felt old then, and gritty, with yellow street lights, the burnt maple smell from the Guinness brewery, and the acrid smell of fires in tens of thousands of grates. The little alleyways hadn’t been knocked down yet; there were still ponies and traps on the quays the odd time.
I auditioned at the school of music for a woman who had no interest in me or my playing and only talked about crotchets and quavers. It was decided I would move to Dublin and sign up for four lessons per week, on condition that I got myself a piano and learned my quavers.
Clement helped set me up in a hostel run by nuns on the near north side, catering to girls from the country. The hostel had once been a magnificent Georgian mansion, I wasn’t sure whose. It had huge drafty vistas of balconies and stairs. We ate in the basement, where girls stood in line to get custard poured over everything. I would sit i
n my room at the very top of the hostel, looking out over the roofs of the north side, reading Rousseau, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Balzac, in no particular order but at voracious speed. After a while, they put a girl named Bernadette from County Clare in the room with me, and we soon decided to move out to our own flat.
How we survived that I don’t know.
We moved into a one room flat in an eighteenth century building on Harcourt Street, long since demolished to make way for some mess, perhaps a bank. The building itself was once the scene of great parties with lords and ladies, but had fallen into incredible and audacious disrepair. Each room was turned into a mishmashed apartment; IRA members were rumored to occupy digs on the upper floors. At night, the students from other flats would visit us and we’d have a sing along. I remember doing a solo:
I was born with the name Geraldine
With hair coal black as a raven
I traveled my life without a care
For all my love I was savin’.
You should hear the kid sing it! the English girl told the others enthusiastically. Thinking of it now, I am not sure how one could be born with the name of Geraldine.
And frankly, I am not much of a singer.
The rug was so wet you almost left footprints in walking across it. The only heat was a stinky gas heater that you had to light with a match; incredible that it never blew up. Everything we owned came to smell like gas cylinders; we could even taste it. Bernadette and I went off with the students to the films or to local jazz clubs; she had a job with the civil service, and I only had the classes at the Music Academy. Winter in Stephen’s Green was bitter and spare; it was raw from the sea winds, no real snow, but lots of rain that went on for days and nights at a time. Bernadette and I came to a parting of the ways, and I moved on to a bedsitter off the South Circular Road, with lots of mice, so many mice you could hear them rustle and titter, and even watch them run past. I rented a piano that took up half the flat, and one of the other music students gave me ear training tests by making me close my eyes and guess what note he was playing. Come on, come on, it’s a b flat, surely you know that one.
In company with what seemed to be the rest of Ireland, I went home on the weekends, leaving Friday night by train, then getting the bus to Tuam, then getting back to the Inn by hook or by crook, I could always find some way. I never had to ask Frank and Nell in advance, I would just appear.
Catherine, the very one! Frank would say, order restored. Jerome sat at his usual place in the corner of the small lounge; he would pat the seat next to him and say, Come here, girl, and let me tell you all about it. The tips of his fingers on the good hand were yellow as saffron from years of smoking; his cap was tilted rakishly to the side, but never ever taken off. Nuala came and grabbed my arm and whispered that Joseph had disappeared; he’d said he was going to take the exam for the Guards but had slipped off to Australia; loved it there, said he’d never come back.
In the distance, I could see Manus throwing darts, sad and brooding, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
In the morning, I slept in. Before Galway, I had never slept in in my life. It had been unheard of in our house, early rising being a sign of authenticity or anxiety in the appropriate degree, expectations fulfilled or otherwise, you had to get up. And it was not hard to; we just did. Up and out, ready to go. At the Inn, I slept, and the rain woke me as it had before, the animals hitting against the wall. A car, stopping, moving forward again. The sound of cattle, unchanged since the time of Queen Maeve.
As light as the summer had been, the winter was equally dark; combining the pea soup dark of the night and the wet, into a mix so bone chilling I could never have imagined it. One night after Christmas, Jerome and I left his house and walked towards the Inn. The wet grass seemed to shine in the dark, the starless, relentless night lay silently around us. No wonder people went out to the pubs at night, clawing their way along the dark roads, though this thing with pubs was relatively new, the last hundred years, less, and women never used to go, I was told. Those nights on the dark side of the year, the rain, the rattle of a bicycle, the sound of wellies on the floor, the loud voices on the telephone, Tuam 23568, Tuam 23568.
Jerome said he wanted to find ducks. I’d never heard him talk about ducks.
There were ducks down this way, he said, and I followed him down a boreen. My feet were wet and my face would have been cold to the touch.
There are ducks down this way, so there are, he said, and continued on, bent forward. The crossroads where the large tent had been put up that June night was in view, but made small, as if seen through the narrow end of a pop-open binocular set.
He wheeled around and held me to him, squashed me against his wet jacket. It was strange, as if pushed up against a scene already washed away by history, as if washed through the wall into another time, the wet grassy smell all around me and the scene of the crossroads visible but not accessible by ordinary walking. He continued to hold me, desperately tight until the direction of the wind was clear as a bell. I could have mapped it out precisely, by the angle of the rain falling against us.
After a time he let go and turned in the direction of the Inn.
In the time of your Gran, he said, men were shot in this field, did I ever tell you?
Sometime later, I told Nuala about the ducks, something even years later she never forgot, and the full details of which she could imagine without me saying a word.
The ducks, Cat, wasn’t there something about ducks? And she would laugh, gums showing, until the laugh finished in her smoker’s cough.
It ended in the early spring, the back and forth on the mail train; the mice, the piano, the organ lessons, pumping at the big pedals in the dampness. The bicycles, the whistle of the grass, the rain that came across the island and found nothing in its way.
Clement had taken me to the old home place, down a one-car-width-across boreen, a narrow rectangle of a house set kittycorner to the road, sharp glass set in the old concrete of the fence. Not pebble dash, but a much older house, hundreds of years old. More of my mother’s cousins, a brother and sister, lived there now, passing out the cigarettes, huddled in cardigans. The sister looked like a grown up child, her cheeks fresh and red. The walls were kept painted dark red and green, the windows were so small they barely let in the light. Out of this road walked my mother’s mother, carrying her bag, heading for Boston. And out of this same road Gramma got her ideas about body and mind.
I was in a jumble, a muddle as I left them, without any great goodbyes. I promised Clement I would be back.
Book III
Stannard; 2006-2007
The heating system in the Greensboro house was terribly noisy; it banged and shuddered, making Emmet cry. The landlord said there wasn’t a thing wrong with it; the furnace was built to last. I never ventured into the basement; in fact, every night I checked to make sure the door going down into the dark was locked as tight as could be. I never liked finding myself in a house alone, especially after waking in the night. It reminded me of Park Baun every time; I’ve no idea how I survived that. Whatever was right or wrong with the heating would remain hearsay. The first snow fell in early November; November was a funny month for me. My birthday, the beginning of the winter holidays, the slow trail into the winter solstice.
Snow, snow, snow, said Madina, leaping up and down in front of the window. She hauled Emmet up like a puppy so he could see through the window. But in fact, Emmet was not so keen on the snow. As soon as it began to pile up, he wouldn’t even try to walk through it, but would stand staring at it in outrage. I had to pick him up, snowsuit and all, and sort of drag him along the footpath.
Should I congratulate you on being back in Vermont? Things are complicated with me, different, and I have no plans to return to Vermont, I assure you.
Calvin
That didn’t tell me much; Calvin was intent on not letting me in on any of his thoughts, though I pursued this goal—trying to find out what he might be thinking—in a
half hearted way.
I liked the very boredom of it; the simple contours, the lack of choice, the same few loaves of bread for sale at Willey’s. Madina liked her little school well enough; in the evening we did her homework, the beginning of times tables and fractions; cutting the pie into pieces, seeing her joy when she realized that a piece of it was a fourth or even an eighth. I felt old and tired as I saw where that road would run, all new to her, off into the distance where I would lose the ability to help her with advanced algebra, Geometry II and even calculus.
How clever you are, Madina, much smarter than I ever was.
She accepted this smilingly, knew it to be true.
And me, me smart? asked Emmet.
You too, you’re the builder. He thought about this; was it as good a deal, as big a prize?
Madina’s face clouded over; she disliked the comparison.
I’m smarter, she muttered.
Nooo, Emmet rolled on the floor, as if in pain.
And so things went, as the days got shorter and people ran from their cars into buildings, grimacing in the wind. The buses that passed through filled with foliage seekers disappeared, and I was left as I wanted to be.
Gramma has it in for you, Una told me.
Gramma hadn’t broken anything this time. I wouldn’t have to make a plan to bring the kids and go see her. Whenever I phoned her, she answered the phone as if she was at death’s door, Hello, small, far away, breathless. It’s me, I would say, and then silence. She wouldn’t ask anything about where I was or what I was doing; she waited for me to speak.
I’m going to be teaching a course, I told her chirpily, at Stannard State. Do you remember Stannard?
Oh? she said, perhaps feigning disorientation.
Stannard, not so far from where Daddy was from in Hardwick, you remember.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t like my disappearance and I suppose even less the idea that I would make something permanent of it. Before I’d left, she used to comment on my fortitude, my getting dinner on the table for the kids every night, with all I had to do. Since I hadn’t married an insurance salesman, this was the next best thing. Giving off my special aura of intractable aloneness, like Dolce Vita perfume, bringing the kids over weekly, in a predictable sequence, Emmet pulling everything out of her closet. My, he can defy you, she would say. But she genuinely liked children; that was what she had done best, taken care of children.