The Leaves on Grey

by Desmond Hogan

  After Christmas Liam began going out, to dances, to parties, to ice-cream parlours where cherries stood perilously above ice-cream sundaes. He met many young American girls, hair curled like rolls of butter in an Irish country kitchen, lips the optimistic red of 1958, but their friendship only prevailed as far as being invited to their parents’ homes for dinner. For the moment Liam lived without his body, Christine having injured deeply, destroyed the growing nature of a young man.

  Early in 1958 Liam travelled south to view the first of the nomads living on Big Sur, those already blackened by sun, their children like gypsy children and their homes of redwood hidden from beach which marvelled with shadow of sky and slithers of water. It was a unique place, one which he had told me about in the second-last correspondence I had from him. Something was opening in California, an unbeknownst dividend of humanity. Things were quietly spoken of, rivers in India, the I Ching, the Kama Sutra and one evening coming from Big Sur, a place far from nuns and Irish Catholic roads barren of all but the radiance of the sky, at the Santa Cruz funfair Liam encountered a lady studying theology in Los Angeles with whom he became friendly.

  She visited him a number of times over the next few months, sleeping on his sofa, regulating his mind with passages from Martin Buber. She had red hair, wore grey suits and took a Greyhound bus by the ocean to see him. Her drive was uncommon. Her father a doctor in Beverly Hills, she was of wealthy stock and carried herself, an erstwhile Bacall, a model in Paris, a lady journalist with The Washington Post. Her demeanour recalled all these things and more. In white blouses she commandeered Liam’s attention, invoking from him tales of his garden and his mother, photographs of young Irishmen doomed to Prussian guns. In June he finished his thesis and by a mixture of events moved north with Sandra, the lady from LA.

  They found a redwood cottage near Arcata, an Indian preservation, lived there, a running stream outside their cottage and a manifold vision of redwood trees, their tops clouding the flight of birds.

  They did not once make love, an area in Liam like a shelled village, like a broken sage, like a woman crying out and begging in Famine Ireland after the loss of her children. Some grievance would not let up, Christine’s eyes spelling her brand of hatred.

  He was guilty because she told him so and then one evening quietly he and Sandra made love, her body bigger than Sarah’s, more hospitable. Ireland passed out, a most ancient grief. He lay between her breasts, a child. His mouth made for her pubic hair, waited there. Her hand went to his head, stirred a curl or two. He was without country now, without past. He was free.

  We walked through the streets of Derry that afternoon until we came to a hall wherein a meeting was to be held. Liam had come to Ireland with a young girl from Derry who studied in Berkeley. This meeting was one of the many thrown up by anarchists and revolutionaries and as such women with mops about their heads stood outside the hall, waiting for news of the latest development in the world revolution while young women from diverse foreign countries teemed about in long skirts excited by this talk of revolution brewing in Derry.

  I was introduced to Liam’s friend, a filigree redhead who looked at me with blazingly clear eyes. Her name was Marie. California had not disturbed her Derry accent. Her skin was as the skin that advertised powder. ‘Glad to meet you,’ said she, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  The meeting commenced with a man of amazing courage saying that the world was changing and that the time had come to lift the sky and throw off the remnants of imperialism.

  We were on the outskirts of Free Derry, a zone cordoned off by the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA. It belonged to the people and anarchists, Trotskyites, Stalinists from European countries gloated while a certain cartoon played out, women with mops on their heads speaking of dirty diapers and burnt lamb chops. To affirm the statement of the first youth a sluggishly fat girl rose and quoted a poem by Mao Tse-Tung.

  A thousand years and more ago came Wei Were

  Brandishing his whip and drove east to Kieche

  As he tells in his poem.

  Now the sad autumn wind is still the same

  But the world has changed.

  A Protestant rector from Paris spoke in French to his brothers and sisters of the revolution. He was the pacifist in the throng. A baby squealed. A British soldier looked in, went out. Determined warriors sat while he reminded his audience in English of Gandhi. Liam’s girl curled in a corner, another child of war. This time Liam was in love with a girl who’d brought him back to Ireland to display to him her people and their plight.

  Afterwards in a confusion of words we arranged to meet Liam’s friend in a house by Lough Swilly, over the border, where both were staying. We walked on. Evening had come. Light stood in transit. The First World War was suggested, broken and disturbed buildings. Rounding a corner we confronted a young soldier, twenty-two, twenty-three, standing, legs apart, unaware of us, hand perched on his rifle, singing, with a backdrop of the buttercup hills ‘Scarlet Ribbons’. We entered Free Derry, passing first a convoy of Official IRA, masks over their faces, then a guard of Provisional IRA, all but one with masks over their faces. The one without a mask was exceptionally beautiful, dark haired, eyes emerald, reasoning, grinning. The reasons he did not wear a mask he told us was because his face was already known to the British army, he having blown up the post office in Strabane. He laughed about his feats, promising more, yet fear, pain in his childish remarks, a knowledge that any moment he could expect an army bullet.

  We journeyed further, climbing the Creggan. A woman demonstrated to us where her son of nineteen was killed on Bloody Sunday and by a wooden cross Liam left a marigold.

  Young men speeded in stolen cars, armalite guns sticking out the windows and way up, over Derry, Our Lady of Peace stood, her eyes shooting in a crazy fashion as though she too was victim of a bullet. I lived on this island all my life yet I’d never been to this city – Liam in his boldness had led me there – I was impressed, moved, horrified.

  Some weeks before a young Derry soldier serving in the British army had been shot dead by the IRA. A woman looked out on the television aerials of Derry. ‘I thought the Free State army would come once like fairy horsemen. They didn’t. Then the IRA came. My son’s in the IRA. I support him. But God you kill a lad of twenty-two, someone you’ve known since his mother was wheeling him in a pram and you wonder is any border worth the trouble. I think then I’d rather live on my social security from the Queen and send my children on a boat to London rather than to see this fighting go on and on.’

  We left her. Liam was perplexed, saddened. He’d come with his girlfriend, briefed by her about the violence done to her people but now another picture emerged, that of a community, somewhere in its heart Trojan, being used, abused, led astray and yet not stumbling from the only concept they could hold on to, courage. We drove in my car out to the house on Lough Swilly, just in time for tea.

  The house was occupied by students who’d organized the day’s meeting, mainly these affiliated with a Christian Marxist group. Tea was a flourishing cauliflower au gratin. We feasted and afterwards spoke of Marx, God, South Africa, Biafra, Brazil, Ecuador, all those areas needy of student Marxist Christian consciousness.

  A young girl from Antrim, her father a Protestant landowner, told how she supported the Provisional IRA. ‘I was brought up on lies,’ she said, ‘now I want to turn those lies on my parents. With guns if need be. Guns are justified if they tell the truth. The Provisional IRA is the army of the Northern Irish people.’ Her frail figure curled in a corner. She stuttered her words with a special vindictiveness.

  Outside one could view the ocean. Evening was coming, entrailing the bay in a deep spreading lilac.

  I could see she suffered by virtue of being a Protestant. She was contrite. Faces confronted her, all these young Christian Marxists from all corners, justifying in this instance the use of the sword. Liam’s girlfriend spoke of her Derry upbringing, a cardigan on her shoulders, the squal
id flats, endless deaths and dole queues, the timber partition between her mother’s and her father’s beds as her mother died of leukaemia, the prevailing partition between people, the ultimate boat out, a river leading to the sea, away from the factories and the churches and the damp portals where men discussed billiards, racing, or the heartaches of their wives.

  She’d been lucky, securing a scholarship to Berkeley, studying now, but that opportunity given her she intended to make use of it. Her city was one fraught by the effects of imperialism. I in my ignorance wondered at the town whence I came with the last of the leaves at the end of the street. My country, the Irish republic, had been less than mindful of the Northern Catholics but then again one million Protestants lived here who would not give up the ghost of a puppet monarch so easily. I wished I’d done something earlier but my class had bound me, the rugby celebrations, the allegiance to uniformity and conformity and oddly enough I thought of Sarah, her revolution, a revolution never realized but spluttering now, a myriad mad demagogues let loose and a few utterly misguided men of heroism.

  I walked with Liam by the ocean. His youth haunted me, haunted his face. The Earls of Ulster had once fled from this harbour. He told me how his woman left him in 1965 and went to India, how he worked in a café in Berkeley when the riots broke out. One night a naked youth from Kentucky, high on drugs, ran into the riots, shouting about his grandmother’s hens.

  Then, modestly, Liam said, ‘I became a tutor in Berkeley. I met Marie a year ago. For years I was troubled by Ireland. Marie brought me the opportunity to look more closely at a country I left, a country divided, my shame, our shame, a country without hope.’

  I wanted to tell him that the urge I enjoyed most in life was making love to my wife. But I couldn’t; that was beyond politics. I saw him by Lough Swilly, Liam Kenneally, and I knew him to have inherited his mother’s alarm at the cosmic state. I repeated his name to myself. I no longer knew this man. He was coming with the political folly of a Californian college. I had my wife to look after, my children. I wanted to turn away and go home but suddenly I looked around. Liam was throwing a stone in a pool reflecting a sky of sapphire and the odd warning dash of scarlet. He hadn’t changed. He was still here, some point inside him in abeyance to childhood.

  Young people strummed out songs on guitars that night, the usual Northern coterie, ‘Carrickfergus’, ‘My Lagan Love’. They were innocent as thirteen-year-olds. War, violence was forgotten. Stars came out over Lough Swilly and people in the bay slept soundly, a few lights flashing, Liam sleeping with his 23-year-old love and me wondering about my wife and my children.

  Over breakfast next day Liam said he intended driving to see his father that evening. It had been fifteen years since he’d laid eyes on him. I was driving back to Galway. ‘You’ll come to visit us, won’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Sure. Sure.’ And over breakfast I saw his eyes were distant and he was looking at a boy who stood in a leather jacket before a rock pool on the strand.

  Laura wanted to know all about it. The weekend, Liam, Derry. She knew Liam to have lived in this house.

  ‘He sounds strange,’ she slurred over lunch on Monday and I knew she wondered, that wonder was her domain now, that there were areas in her opening and that even on this May Monday her summer dress proclaimed a new and courageous freedom. ‘His mother sounds so strange,’ Laura said.

  Liam rang on Wednesday. He’d seen his father, an old man living in County Down and somehow the sight had dispelled all sentimentality in him, his father grown old, compelled into an antique hat, his eyes bearing all the burning sadness of the past. Liam was returning to California, sad, uncharitable to past figures. ‘I’ve decided to return early,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I can make it to Galway. It would take too long. I’m going back. Flying to London. Then back to California. Goodbye Sean. Maybe you could come to California some time. You and your wife.’

  He put down the receiver. That was it, Liam gone. But now that Laura knew a bit, she asked more, about Liam, my exact relationship with him, his mother, and a woman who had only vaguely been on the edges of her mind for years now fermented and grew, talk of Elizabeth Kenneally was everywhere, her drowning and even my children became aware that a legendary lady once lived here, a Russian who drowned herself. The sole reality that confronted me were books on Russia, books by Russian authors, reproductions of ikons and Laura procured a photograph of Elizabeth Kenneally, admired it, showed it to our children. ‘The snow queen,’ Laura called her and looked at me as though accusing me of killing Elizabeth Kenneally. ‘There’s so much you don’t know, isn’t there,’ she said.

  I was trapped in a criminal trespass. I’d lied. I’d pretended I was ordinary whereas I’d had an extraordinary buried past.

  Laura, naked in our bedroom one day, said to me, ‘Liam. You were in love with him, weren’t you?’

  I worked. I saturated myself in the travail of local cases yet a poisonous flower flourished. My wife trembled before the tree of knowledge. She bid me tell it all, right down to the woman who made stained-glass windows.

  And she said, ‘Remarkable the beauty of stained glass. Light coming through. Those odd windows in rural churches of doves or the Archangel Michael. The secret places in the human heart. Light coming through. A revelation.’

  I told her all now, Liam, Sarah, myself. She listened. ‘Sarah,’ she said simply. ‘You mentioned her before. She must have been lovely.’ I tried to steady her but my wife was not to be calmed. She shouldered off any complicity. There was a journey that had to be done alone.

  My children looked leaner, gawkier, less in the garden. They fired guns with less enthusiasm and observed their mother, burdened by pain. Laura recognized the fact, that inside me was a shattered area, an area unbound by time, a nucleus given to Liam, Sarah and the ensuing bicycles of Dublin.

  In the next few years I opened a branch of my firm in Dublin. I was a big name. I dealt now in trivial and arch matters. I often journeyed to Dublin, seeing to the other branch of my business, dealing in matters of political eminence, leaving two young solicitors to look after the business at home.

  Patrick was fourteen, a tall gawky boy, torn between war comics and books about the Second World War and Gandhi. Annabelle never left a picture of David Bowie, and Jason, true to his name, searched every crevice in the garden for wrens’ nests and thrushes’ nests.

  My office in Dublin overlooked a street of trees. I was back in a city I’d sworn to forfeit forever. I had the same view that I had nearly twenty years before. Occasionally a beautiful girl would pass outside and all manner of misfortune was forgone. I remembered Sarah, Sarah walking by blindly in white, and this discovery of memory was not bitter. It was sweet even, tranquil and unabased as lace hankies long ago.

  On a Friday in May 1974, having left my office, returning to my car parked in the centre of the city I witnessed the effects of one of a triad of bombs that went off about 5.30, rush hour. I was rounding a corner when the bombs exploded. I tried to help. There was little one could do. Newspaper vendors threw the evening paper over bodies smashed in blood. Children miraculously still wandered. Cars were blown to gnarled turnips. Blood ran and odd bits of garment and clothes identified themselves. An old man whispered the Act of Contrition into someone’s ear and I noticed a child’s schoolbook, its pages ripped out but one remaining, that of a tree with a little girl in a Red Riding Hood costume. Ambulances screamed about. Old women spoke rosaries. I was not a doctor or a priest and I soon vacated the place, driving back towards Galway.

  I had been away two weeks. Laura was frantic with worry. Light had not left the sky and the tree out in the garden, over the wall which cut garden from yard, stood out against the sky.

  The children were still out, Patrick gone to a hop in aid of the swimming pool. Annabelle was visiting the house of a new friend, a girl with whom she shared intimate secrets. Jason was riding a blue bicycle by the river.

  Later that evening, cutting carrots, Laura quie
tly told me she was having an affair. ‘I’m in love,’ she said. She’d been seeing the boy, a young photographer, for six weeks now. They’d been sleeping with one another for four. He took photographs of local weddings, of young girls with candy-coloured smiles at their First Holy Communion. His photographs were exhibited in a window outside his studio. But also there were sometimes photographs of rural scenes, picturesque faces. He had an eye for oddity, the crooked smile, the collapsing cottage. He was from the area, was young, talented, one of the first of the young to return to the town after going away to study.

  I sat down. I had been away a lot, true, I myself had sometimes slept with other women, young girls in a small rural hotel after a rugby outing. I would never have expected Laura to sleep with anyone though, read James Baldwin, yes, flirt with his negro angst, entertain Jesuits, have semi-lesbian relationships with literary-minded, bridge-playing bankers’ wives, but an affair, my wife, it shattered me. Laura, the country cinema-going maiden, turned mature woman, breasts, eyes, pubic hair consumed by a youth who did not even play rugby. I buried fingers in my fists, a child holding a clump of daisies. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘It’s your choice. I cannot tell you what to do.’

  ‘It’s an affair,’ Laura said. ‘It will end.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Sean,’ she smiled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s something about Elizabeth Kenneally I don’t know. Did she sleep with the man people said she was in love with or is it all rumour?’

  ‘She slept with him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  I looked at her, shocked at her question. I didn’t know before now except in the sense I’d been between her legs. I too had been in love with Elizabeth Kenneally. The whole world had been in love with her and slept with her and left her so all she could do was drown herself.