All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  In the still darkness Conn walked along Mount Street, among the endlessly similar four-story eighteenth-century brick buildings. The sky was clear black and the stars were bright. The moon was only a sliver above him and the stillness of the low city with its orderly streets and symmetrical green parks seemed penetrating. The streets were empty, and his footfall was loud and rhythmic as he walked. He liked the sound. The weight of his guns was comfortable under his coat. When he first began to wear them they seemed heavy, but now they were part of him, no more uncomfortable than his shirt. A steel-plated Lancia went by with a guttural purr. It slowed as it passed Conn, but it did not stop, and soon it picked up speed and drove on, ugly and implacable like an ancient nocturnal carnivore. If they stopped him he’d make a fight of it. He might be able to lose them in the back gardens of the neighborhood, and even if he couldn’t he would rather go down like a soldier of the IRA, which he was, with his guns in his hands. He smiled as he walked, liking the image of himself, two-gun Sheridan, and smiling at his own boyish heroism, though he was proud of it too, and he knew it to be real.

  At Haddington Road he stopped half a block east of Beggar’s Bush before the two-story row house with a red door. He was on his own. There had been no instructions. How he killed this man was up to him. He didn’t like it much, but he’d do it. He’d sworn an oath to a free Ireland, and this balding youngish man he was about to kill had chosen to be a Secret Service officer, had chosen to repress the Irish people, had chosen to run the risk that he was about to incur. Certainly this man had sent over many a good-hearted Irish lad.

  Conn took the big Webley out, and cocked it, and held it by his side. He walked briskly across the street and up the front steps and rapped loudly on the front door. After a moment he rapped again. There was movement inside the house. The front door opened a crack and a voice said, “Who is it?”

  “From the Castle.”

  The door opened wider.

  “What the hell are you doing at this hour?”

  “John Cooper?” Conn said.

  “Aye.”

  Conn raised the gun and shot him point blank in the middle of the chest, and again. Cooper’s mouth opened but he was dead before the sound got there and he fell backwards into his front hall. Conn put the gun back and turned briskly and walked back down the stairs. Behind him he heard a woman scream, “John, dear God, they’ve killed you.” And then he was around the corner and onto Shelbourne Road walking fast in the still night.

  John Cooper.

  Conn

  “They are going to send me to Cork,” Conn said.

  They were walking on Wilton Terrace. The sun was bright and magpies made shrill noise along the banks of the canal.

  “Must you go?” Hadley said.

  “Of course.”

  “Because they say you must?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t go,” Hadley said.

  “I have to. I’m a soldier. I go where I’m sent.”

  “But it’s not like a real army,” Hadley said. He was watching the glisten of her lips as she spoke.

  “Real enough,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  He could smell the lavender scent of her cologne, close and immediate against a faint background of water scent from the canal.

  “To Cork?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why, I’m married. I live here. I have a house.”

  “But you love me,” Conn said.

  She was wearing a green silk dress under a light coat. Her hair gleamed in the sunshine. White ducks drifted on the surface of the canal.

  “Of course I do, but I can’t go traipsing off to Cork with you. Where will we sleep? In a hayloft?”

  “We can stay with people in their homes.”

  “And while you fight with the Black and Tans, I stay home by the peat fire and do what?”

  “Hadley, it’s a war. It’s the best we can do. I can’t leave you.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  Conn held both her upper arms with his hands.

  “Come with me. It’s the only way.”

  She raised her hands and pushed at him.

  “Conn, you’re squeezing too hard. It hurts.”

  He dropped his hands.

  “It’ll be an adventure, girl. It’ll be us, always together, in the countryside, making love every night in a different place.”

  Hadley shook her head.

  “Stay here, darling, with me, in Dublin.”

  “I can’t stay in Dublin, Hadley. I’m too hot. I was one of the gunmen Bloody Sunday. I killed a Secret Service officer named John Cooper.”

  Across the canal an old woman had come to feed stale bread to the ducks. They glided toward her rapidly, making a ripple of V’s in their wake.

  “You were one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you have to run.”

  “I’m transferred, to Cork. To fight there.”

  They sat together on one of the green wooden benches along the canal. Several ducks banked in toward them hopefully, and, ignored, cruised back toward the center of the canal.

  “I can’t go with you, Conn. Accept that. I can’t. I have a husband, a home. I am the spoiled daughter of rich Bostonians. I can’t traipse around the bogs of Ireland, like a camp follower, while my lover fights a guerrilla war.”

  Conn felt as if the air around them had no oxygen. He heard his own voice, as if it were someone else’s, remote from him in time and space, filtered by distance.

  “Then I’ll desert,” the voice said.

  Hadley’s eyes widened and she seemed to rock backwards slightly, as if to catch her balance.

  “Desert? And do what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Conn said. “We’ll go somewhere, anywhere you wish. We’ll stay here or go to America, we’ll be together.”

  “Hiding?” she said.

  “Not in America,” Conn said. She was appalled by the wildness of his eyes, and the frantic intensity of it. She felt as if soon it would wash over her and she would disappear. “We could live anywhere in America, or France, or Australia. Wherever you’d like, and I’d work.”

  “What would you do, Conn? What do you know how to do? You’re a gunman.”

  “I’d do something and we’d be together.”

  “And the cause? The oath you took?” Hadley was searching with a feeling of increasing desperation for something to stop him with. His need was luminous and tangible. It frightened her. She had lost control of this adventure.

  “Fuck the cause,” Conn said. “Fuck the oath. Fuck the world. Only you matter, Hadley. Only you. I would give up everything for you…. I will…. I have.”

  She stood. She could taste something very much like panic in the back of her throat.

  “No,” she said. “No. No. No.”

  “Yes,” Conn said and the word hissed out like venting steam. “Yes. I love you, and, Goddammit, Hadley, you love me.”

  He stood facing her, barely inches between them, not touching her. She backed away a step. She seemed exhausted.

  “Not enough,” she said in a small flat voice. And backed up another step, and then another, and then turned, and began to run along the canal toward the pleasantly arched little bridge where Baggot Street crossed.

  He didn’t chase her. But he called after her without regard for who might hear.

  “You can’t run from me, Hadley. I’ll make you love me enough.”

  She continued running clumsily in her high-heeled shoes, holding her skirts clear, crying as she ran.

  “I’ll make you, Hadley. I will not give you up.”

  And then she had scrambled up the little rise to Baggot Street and across, and he couldn’t see her anymore.

  Conn

  She lived in a four-story red-brick town house with a bright blue door on the north side of Merrion Square. The bricks were the color of cheap rouge, put on early
and worn too long. There was a damp chill in the air, and the sky was low and gray. Thin rain fell lightly, and the smell of coal fires drifted fragilely among the wet leaves in the square.

  He stood against the low iron fence that ringed the square and watched her door. He paid no attention to the rain, or the cold. If he felt it at all it didn’t register. He saw the curtains move once in one of the front windows, as if someone were peeping out. He stayed where he was, his guns holstered and dry under his mackintosh, his gaze nearly hypnotic on the house. There was no wind to drive the rain. It fell straight down, without force. The streets gleamed with it. The bright blue door opened and Hadley came out wearing a dark blue woolen coat, with a stand-up collar. The coat was buttoned up to the throat. On the top step she opened a black umbrella, and got under it, and walked across the street to where he was standing.

  “I can’t have you standing out here like some milk calf in the rail,” she said to him. “One of the servants has already mentioned it. My husband will notice, or someone will tell him. What in hell are you doing?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Waiting for me to do what?”

  “If I stood here, I knew you’d come out.”

  “All right, I’m out. What do you want?”

  “I want you,” Conn said. His voice was very soft, and nearly uninflected. He was saying things he’d imagined and rehearsed. It was as if he were talking to himself.

  “Goddamn you, Conn Sheridan. You can’t have me. You did have me. It was exciting. You are good at sex and fun to be with. You were a lark that got out of hand. Now you don’t have me. It’s over. Let it go. Get back to killing people, again, for the Republic.”

  “I love you,” Conn said.

  “You’ll get over it,” Hadley said. “I’ll get over it.”

  She kept the umbrella sheltered close to her head, so that as they talked they were faceless. She looked at his chest. He stared down at the unyielding fabric of the black umbrella.

  “I will never get over it,” Conn said, spacing the words carefully.

  “You’ll have to,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  They were silent then in the hushed sound of the rain. A bicycle hissed by, its rider pedaling carefully on the slick street.

  “I won’t,” Conn said again.

  “Well, I will,” Hadley said, and turned away under her dark umbrella and walked back across the street to her house.

  He didn’t move. She didn’t look back. The rain was very fine, he noticed. It made everything gleam. The blue door seemed a brighter blue. And the small rain down does fall, he thought, and wondered where he’d read that. He felt solid in his stillness, like a frozen boulder across the street from her blue door. There was not even panic in him anymore, only resolve, which grew as time passed, and seemed to fill him like ballast.

  And he was still motionless when they came for him. A RIC car came up the north side of the square and a lorry full of Auxies came down from the other direction. They were around him before he could move. If he had wanted to move. Which he didn’t. He made no effort to draw either of his handguns. He made no attempt to run. He stayed rock silent, deep inside himself, ballasted with resolve, nearly impervious to anything other than his romantic resolution.

  They took his weapons and handcuffed him. A RIC officer went to the house and brought Hadley to the door. He pointed at Conn, she nodded. He looked implacably across the street at her. Their eyes met. She held his gaze for a moment, nodding as the officer spoke. Then she turned and went back into her house and closed the bright blue door.

  1994

  Voice-Over

  “‘He knew when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.’”

  “You talking about your grandfather or about yourself?” Grace said.

  “I’m talking about Jay Gatsby,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “And Conn Sheridan.”

  “Un-huh.”

  “And me.”

  Grace didn’t say anything for a while. We sat in the bright room surrounded by the dark storm with the careful space between us on the couch and thought about our situation.

  “Tell me a little more about you and me and the perishable breath business,” Grace said.

  “You know the story,” I said.

  “The Great Gatsby? Yes.”

  “It’s about a lot of things,” I said. “But certainly it’s about obsession.”

  Grace nodded. I could hear the wind outside the condo. It was an odd juxtaposition of forces. The strong wind driving snowflakes so saturated that they flattened softly against the window, making no sound.

  “And you’re obsessed?” Grace said finally.

  “With you,” I said. “Or I have been. It runs in the family.”

  “Not love?”

  “Sure, love too, that’s what makes it tricky. To separate out the obsession and the love. And keep one, and deep-six the other.”

  “And you’ve been able to do that?”

  “Yes.” I smiled at her. “It’s my turn. One Sheridan a century.”

  “Could you describe the obsession a little for me?”

  “I was in love with love,” I said.

  “Rather than with me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is to say you used me to fulfill yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  Grace thought about it, her face serious and beautiful, with the first hints of maturation showing in the laugh lines around her mouth. The white sweater was wide at the neck and I could see the definition of her trapezius muscles. Most women had none, and their necks and shoulders always looked a little angular to me. I knew she’d be even better looking when she was older.

  “That seems a better deal for you than for me.”

  “Yeah, it was, in the sense that I had to have it. But it was also like the myth about the guy up to his neck in water who was dying of thirst but couldn’t drink because when he did the water dipped out of reach.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I couldn’t get you to love … no, not love … I couldn’t get you to enter the obsession.”

  “I’d have disappeared,” Grace said.

  “Yeah, but the obsession would have been complete,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “How nice for you,” she said. “And you’re not obsessed anymore.”

  “No. Now I love you.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  I took in some air slowly, and let it out, and felt all right.

  “Because I can leave you,” I said.

  “Do you plan to?”

  “No. I plan to let you see me and where I come from and who I’ve become and ask you to marry me. If you can’t, then I’ll be sorry, and I’ll say good-bye and find someone who can marry me.”

  “Would you really?” she said. Her eyes seemed bigger than they had been and there was a sense of kinesis behind her calm face.

  “I love you. I’d miss you for a while. But, yes, I will.”

  “And you can live with that?” Grace said.

  “After last fall, I can live with anything,” I said. “Happily and well.”

  Conn

  The gray granite walls of Kilmainham jail were six feet thick. The windows narrowed like gunports and were placed so high that at six feet two inches, Conn could just reach the window ledge with his fingertips. Gas jets sputtered feebly, flaring occasionally and falling back so that the flame was barely a blue glimmer above the nozzle. The door to his cell was iron, with a small peephole in it. Through the peephole Conn could see the length of cells on the other side of the corridor. A stench came from the rarely flushed jacks, out of his vision, at the far end. Men who had to use it were escorted by a military policeman from a Welsh regiment. He carried his revolver in his hand as he walked them there and back. The stone chill of the jail was penetrating, and Conn was cold all the
time. There were some dirty army blankets in a pile on the floor, but they were inadequate. Everything was inadequate to the impersonal weight of the British Empire. Beneath this vast pile of disinterested stone, Conn was a buried fleck of rubble in the blank cell where Hadley had put him.

  His first night Conn slept badly, shivering on the floor among the blankets. In the morning a prison orderly came down the corridor yelling, “Burgoo up, burgoo.” Conn got a cup of thick soupish tea and a chunk of bread. Later he was taken to the yard. It was narrow, with high walls, broken by very small barred windows where occasionally featureless faces looked out from cells indistinguishable from Conn’s. The underfooting was gravel with occasional patches of weedy grass breaking through. The other prisoners walked with him, single file back and forth across the small space in a half circle. No talking was allowed, but some took place anyway. The older prisoners had learned to speak without moving their lips.

  “Where you from?”

  “What have they got you for?”

  Conn didn’t answer. They often put informers among the prisoners. Silence came easily to him anyway, for he was still deep inside himself.

  There was no organization in the prison population. The British kept them as separate from one another as possible. Occasionally they were put in an identity lineup, brought to the yard, and paraded before anonymous witnesses inside a closed zinc box with a viewing slit in it. A cardboard sign with a number on it was hung by a string around each prisoner’s neck.

  They would try Conn and hang him. He knew that. But first they would attempt to pry the names of others from him. They had not as yet. They were letting him soak in the despair of the jail.

  A priest brought him an egg and showed him how to beat it first and pour his tea over it. It made the tea taste as if there were cream in it.