Ophelia's Fan

by Christine Balint

  “There you go, princess,” he set her down and bowed to her. She dismissed him with a playful nod. It was then that I saw he had grown and was almost a man.

  We all ate until we clutched our bellies and felt so weighed down we thought we would never move again. My mother’s spirits had lifted with the smell of roasting meat, and now she spoke about the lodgings we would have in London and what a vast city it was.

  That night I shared a bed with my mother. It took all my effort to keep still. In Birmingham I had grown accustomed to my own sleeping space, and now I found it impossible to calm myself. As I lay there listening to the wheezing of my sister in the next bed, I wondered at the profession which had once so lauded my mother and now left her for dead in poor lodgings on the wrong side of Dublin.

  Next morning I was woken by Anne speaking as my mother dressed her.

  “The dress is grown too tight.”

  “We cannot afford to buy you another. You shall have to wait a few more weeks.”

  “Morning,” I said to them. My mother tightened her lips as she tugged at my sister’s dress.

  “Your brother is gone for a walk. There are errands to be run. Will you watch your sister?” my mother said. “There’s some bread for your breakfast.” The air smelled of stale cooking fat, and with four of us and our belongings there was very little floor space.

  “How do you spend your days?” I asked Anne after my mother had gone.

  “I sew a little. Do you like being upon the stage, Harriet?”

  “Some nights I do. There is a lot of life to be had in the theater. One meets all manner of people there.”

  “I wish I were strong enough to be upon the stage.”

  I stared at her hunched back and noticed her watching me. I looked away. “Shall I read to you?”

  There was the hint of a smile on her cracked lips. “I can read,” she said. “But it hurts my eyes.”

  Anne was now thirteen years old, and I realized that my parents had probably not had an opportunity to furnish her with reading. I knelt on the floor and dug beneath the underclothes in my trunk. Down at the bottom I discovered my copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Some of the pages were now loose, and others had tears like tiny cracks around the edges. It was a book I still used to remind myself of Shakespearean plots before I commenced work on a new drama. And now I read from the beginning of the book, from a play I knew well but had never performed.

  “The two chief families in Verona were the rich Capulets and the Montagues. There had been an old quarrel between these families, which was grown to such a height, and so deadly was the enmity between them, that it extended to the remotest kindred, to the followers and retainers of both sides, insomuch that a servant of the house of Montague could not meet a servant of the house of Capulet, nor a Capulet encounter a Montague by chance, but fierce words and sometimes bloodshed ensued; and frequent were the brawls, from such accidental meetings, which disturbed the happy quiet of Verona’s estate. . . .”

  Anne sat perfectly still, her eyes closed.

  When Joseph returned, he found me halfway through Twelfth Night. Anne was lying upon a bed. She was not asleep; every now and then her brown eyes stared starkly into my face as I read. He sat down on a chair and listened silently. I kept reading until the end and then closed the book. Anne opened her eyes.

  “That’s enough for today,” I said. “You can read some more if you like.” I handed her the book and she took it quickly, pulling her feet up onto the bed and arranging herself upon some blankets.

  “It is nice out,” Joseph said.

  “I would not care to go wandering about this vicinity on my own,” I told him.

  “Aye.”

  “Joseph, why have you moved here?”

  “Mother couldn’t pay the rent. Mrs. Cooney bade us leave.”

  “I see. And you are working now.”

  He grinned. “Aye, at the Crow. Just like you did.”

  “Are you acting?”

  “Sometimes in the chorus. Mostly I help with the sets.”

  “Joseph,” I looked at his face and noticed his bristles. “What are your plans?”

  “I want to be a manager. Like Father.”

  “Joseph, you are a gentleman’s son.”

  “Father was no gentleman. And I do not have the education that you have. I was born for the theater. I know nothing else.”

  I thought of the strolling player’s life, the endless trudging from one town to another, the frowns from members of society when one encountered them and one’s profession was made clear. I remembered my father’s debts and the pressures these had placed on my mother. It seemed the theater would always be our lifeblood and our curse. I sighed.

  “You must learn to be an actor first and learn all you can from the other managers. You must pay attention to all that occurs in the theater. Oh, you are a gambler, Joseph,” I smiled, trying to hide my tears.

  TWO MONTHS OF LIVING above the greengrocer’s near the jail stretched before me as a prospect near imprisonment. It was only during the night when I was left to my own thoughts that I could plan and dream of other possibilities. I would visit Ennis and take up lodgings there with or without my family, until it was time to go to London.

  After three weeks in Dublin I received a letter from Elliston informing me that he had taken the liberty of booking lodgings for my family in London. They would be available at the beginning of December. There would be one large room with a bed and table and a smaller room with a further two beds.

  One morning, when my mother was taking the rare opportunity to read some old scripts for pleasure, I broached the subject of travel with her.

  “Mother, I am thinking to go to Ennis next week.”

  “To Ennis? Next week? Is it mad you be? How am I to pack up our lodgings in a week? And we have paid rental until the end of the month.”

  “I am thinking to go on my own.”

  “On your own? A young girl like you does not travel on your own if she doesn’t have to. And what is to become of us while you are gone? You expect me to take care of your brother and sister alone again? Your brother barely makes enough money to feed us.”

  “I could leave you some money. Our lodgings in London will be ready in a month.”

  “London? Aye, that gives us enough time to pack up and give notice. That is grand, Harriet. What would you want to go to Ennis for when you can go to London?”

  And so it came about that I only ever returned to Ennis in my dreams.

  Ennis: 1807

  HARRIET KNEW SHE WAS almost grown up. Father Barrett joked she had grown taller than his cane, and that was why she needed to go with him to the charity school and the infirmary. Her eyes were growing larger, the women remarked when they saw her in the street. And Harriet knew this was because she had to see for Father Barrett as well as for herself.

  Her lessons with him were becoming short and irregular. He would sit in his favorite green chair, a balding gray spot at the place where he rested his head. His right hand would support his chin, and his eyes would close. As he grew older, Harriet noticed that it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether or not he was awake. He could discuss the same matters in his sleep as he would when he was awake, and indeed, he did not seem to notice that he frequently walked about with his eyes closed.

  “Harriet, my child, you know almost as much as I do,” he would say during their lessons. “It is nearly time for you to go to boarding school.”

  “Tell me about France,” she would say quickly.

  “Ah, oui. J’étais jeune en France. . . .”

  Harriet had learned a little French from him and a little more Latin. If pushed, she could conjugate verbs aloud or on a piece of brown packaging. But she found that if she did not think about grammar, she could understand his French as well as she understood his English. The meaning flowed between them.

  Now Harriet also closed her eyes. She saw a younger, taller version of Father Barrett. His eyes were
no longer misty but clear and dark. His hair was thick and framed his face in gentle waves. She saw him walking along a country road by a field in Bordeaux with a group of young men. They were adequately, though not elegantly, dressed. What struck Harriet most about them was their joviality. It was difficult to make out their words. It seemed they muttered quickly to one another, and their words were not for her ears. She was not sure what language they were speaking. It may have been French with an Irish lilt or English with a French sharpness. But their speech was heavily punctuated with laughter.

  And Harriet saw the young men breaking bread and taking wine at a large dining table in a room full of light. After the meal they wandered one by one toward a large salon with heavy maroon curtains and thick carpets. Some sat in thickset armchairs to continue their discussions. Musicians gathered around the piano to sing and play their instruments.

  “It is all gone now, that world,” Father Barrett whispered. “Harangued and burned to a crisp during that revolution of theirs. All those starving people and barely a potato to eat. It will be a century before France has regained her dignity and culture. Remember that, Harriet. You will never know the France I knew. For all their égalité it is no longer a safe place for the education of Irish Catholics. Shame. A terrible shame. . . .”

  Harriet nodded, knowing he could not see her, and wondered whether she was supposed to ask him a question now. But he seemed to have forgotten she was there.

  It was time for them to attend the charity school in the chapel. Father Barrett had established the school himself in 1785. In recent years he had engaged the assistance of a schoolmaster. Harriet remembered when, as a very small child, she had not been permitted to go to school with Father Barrett in the mornings. She had clung to a leg of his trousers as though he was her mother, sobbing, “School! Please, school!” It had been Bridie who dragged her away from him as he wandered vaguely toward the door clutching his books. It was not until she was seven that he had allowed her into the building during classes. And then, he told her, after three years of private tuition, she was too far advanced to participate.

  The day after her seventh birthday, Harriet had pulled on her new dress and laced the boots that Bridie had polished for her. She had brushed her own hair until it shone and tied a navy blue satin ribbon in it. With the reverend she had left the house and stepped into the stone chapel next door. A young man stood at the front of the schoolroom.

  “Harriet, this is Master Godfrey,” Father Barrett said.

  Harriet had looked around and seen fifteen ragged children. Many had bare feet with blackened toenails. Large, hopeful eyes stared out of their bony faces. Harriet could see that these children were not used to bathing; their skin was tinted the brown of the River Shannon during the muddy winter. She remembered her blue satin ribbon and felt ashamed.

  Harriet visited the school every morning now. The children would call out her name as she walked down the aisle. She often helped them with their spelling or their Latin. Sometimes she taught them songs. Occasionally the schoolmaster let them have morning tea. Harriet would knock furiously on the back door of the house until Bridie opened it in exasperation. She would beg for a little food, some bread and butter or bun, to feed the hungry children. Bridie would roll her eyes, but she would always return with something. “Benevolence,” Harriet would whisper after Bridie had made her delivery. Harriet taught the children the games she had learned from Molly and her other friends. Father Barrett’s words were always on the tip of her tongue when she visited the charity school. She would say them at the slightest provocation. “Learning. Love. Harmony.” The children would run up and down Chapel Lane, so that the reverend, if he happened by, would beam at the joy on their faces.

  While she came to enjoy visiting the charity school, Harriet never grew used to visiting the infirmary. Bridie could have gone with him, but Father Barrett insisted that he wished for Harriet’s company.

  “He is mad, to be sure,” Bridie said one day, wondering why the reverend, limping, hard of hearing, and almost blind, would insist on visiting the infirmary every day.

  Harriet would shuffle silently by his side, not knowing where to look as they entered the building. There was a line of beds, each one with a horrible tale to tell. There were the three-minute amputations done after a large dose of laudanum or whisky. Harriet was grateful that the stumps were bandaged tightly and covered by a sheet, although occasionally the reverend would time his visit so that the dressings were being changed as they arrived. There were numerous bad-tempered, cursing men with head injuries. Father Barrett would shake his head at these and click his tongue.

  “The Irish do like their drink too much, and it be not good for their heads,” he would say. It had been necessary for the infirmary to procure a copy of Dr. O’Halloran’s A New Treatise on Different Disorders Arising from External Injuries of the Head with Eighty Five Illustrations. Only in Limerick could there be found more head injuries per capita.

  If Harriet lowered her eyes she could avoid the gazes of these gray, unshaven men. But it was the women’s room that frightened her the most. While occasionally a good-natured Irish wife could be seen visiting in the men’s accommodation, there was never a visitor in the women’s room. Even Sister Rose avoided going there, Harriet sensed.

  “Benevolence: We must bring peace to the troubled,” Father Barrett would say, crossing himself to the invisible altar at the far end of the room. “Hysteria is a female tragedy we must try to understand.” And Harriet wondered what hysteria was and why it was a female tragedy. Was it a disease men could not catch? Had no men ever lived with women so afflicted?

  “Father Barrett?” she spoke loudly and clearly, not wanting to shout in case any of the women heard her.

  “Harriet.”

  “What is hysteria?”

  “It is an unhealthy mental state caused by the deprivation of love. This is why we must visit these women, Harriet. So that they know they are not alone.”

  It seemed to Harriet that the women were afflicted with a great sadness. From the day she first encountered them, they haunted her days and her nights. She dreamed that she spoke with them and they told her their stories. There was a woman from France who could not understand the foreign world around her. Another woman whose husband had left her for his mistress. A third woman who had been paralyzed by drink and loneliness. They wept, and she could offer no consolation.

  There was old Ruth, usually restrained in a straight waistcoat, her eyes bulging as she screamed, “They have murdered my son!” And Harriet would wonder who her son was, and why anyone would have murdered him. Most of all she wanted to know why they had tied up his mother after his death.

  Then there was Aurora, who sat staring out the small window and waving her arms peacefully up and down. Ellen sobbed periodically, whining, “Bring back my husband from that witch. Oh, please, God, bring him home.” And this would bring tears to Harriet’s eyes.

  The youngest woman was Louisa, with long, blond, tangled hair. Harriet sometimes fancied she could see wisps of straw in it. Harriet had never seen a more beautiful woman than Louisa, with her pale, smooth face and high forehead. Louisa spent her days staring at a white wall and muttering about flowers and lost love. Sometimes she would skip about the room laughing, but since she never tried to leave, she was not restrained. At other times she held her arms to her chest; Harriet imagined her to be holding a child. Harriet and Louisa never spoke. Yet Harriet felt as though she understood the woman’s grief. She wondered if she could be that lost child, and feared that she would become that lonely, pining woman. Occasionally a woman would disappear from the room with no explanation. None of them was ever cured.

  As the reverend grew more tired, it became Harriet’s task to make these visits alone. In the mornings she sat at the breakfast table, waiting for Bridie. As Bridie brought tea, she would say quietly to Harriet, “Father Barrett is not coming down this morning. You best make his visits alone.” Harriet would sigh as sh
e put on her cloak and stepped slowly out the front door.

  Visiting with the reverend always offered a distraction. Harriet could concentrate on whether or not he understood what people said to him, watching that he did not trip, and offering explanations when people handed him things he did not understand. On one occasion, Father Barrett had sneezed, and not long after, one of the patient’s wives in the infirmary had handed him a gift of a small embroidered tablecloth. It had only been Harriet’s quickly spoken loud words of praise for the fine work on the tablecloth that had prevented him from blowing his nose in it.

  In a strange way, Father Barrett had offered her some kind of protection. Harriet already knew that her own contented existence was as perilous as theirs. That with each rasping breath Father Barrett took, her own situation was threatened with extinction. If it were not for his attentions, Harriet might have been one of the ragged children in the charity school. Or worse still, like her own siblings, Harriet might not have been educated in Sound Knowledge and Moral Principles at all. And without the reverend’s continuing help, what would become of her?

  Bridie had told Harriet that Father Barrett was not to be disturbed. It was not proper, she said, for a small girl to be seeing an old man in his nightgown, unless he was her own father. Nonetheless, Harriet visited him every day. She would knock quietly and then enter the room. He would be propped up by some fat cushions, sitting and silently beaming with his eyes closed. In his hands, Harriet would always notice his Bible with the worn binding and gilt pages. It had belonged to his mother, Harriet knew. He had told her that one day it would belong to her. Harriet did not like to think about that day. The reverend held on to his mother’s Bible as though it were the hand of an old friend. Harriet knew he could no longer read the pages, even with his eyes open. Yet he could find the correct page for almost any verse and then recite it from heart. Harriet wondered if the script was written in the innermost chamber of his heart.