Jenny Rose

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “It is. Who else would buy it?”

  “But, she is good. You can see that right away.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re all good, aren’t they? The lot of these little chippies and Van Goghs. All self-appointed gods and goddesses, if you ask me. Without classical training they’ll all of them end up selling collages from the tourist shops over in Kinsale.”

  “And that would be so bad?”

  I got a withering look. “Oh, Lord, now we have another one. Yeah, it would be so bad if you see yourself as someone really good, really worthwhile … and then just because you’re too pig-headed and arrogant to take advice, and, and go to university and study what it is you claim to want to spend the rest of your life doing … so that it all comes to nothing but waste”—the veins in his neck had begun to bulge—“then yes, it is a crying shame!”

  I kept my eyes on the road. “There are plenty of talented young people who go to college and give it everything they have. They make all the right moves and wind up getting a job designing greeting card covers. And those are the lucky ones.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said bitterly. “It’s all who you know.”

  “Which way?” I said. We’d come to the choice of three lanes.

  “Take the coast road,” he said.

  I bumped onto it. I could tell he was miffed. To tell you the truth, I didn’t much care. So this must be their bone of contention, this going to school or not.

  “The middle one winds up the same place. Just no one ever takes it,” Liam continued in a confidential way about the road. Like me, he had an aversion to not being thought of as nice. “They all three of them wind up the same spot if you follow them long enough. Trinity Lanes, they call the lot.”

  “Where does the left road go?”

  “Goes to the Bishop’s seat. Or stops there. Local gentry, like. Anyway, been there forever. Willy Murphy is the young heir. You’ll see him stridin’ about the countryside. Fine fellow, Willy. Lives there with his mother. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy. Never would give up her maiden name.”

  Neither would I, I thought, liking her already.

  “Her people were the Whitetrees, a course. Audrey’s father was the bishop. Bishop Whitetree. Protestants, you understand.” He shook his head. “Died very suddenly of an aneurysm. Totally unexpected.” Liam gave me a shady look. “Then not long after, Brenden Murphy died as well. The husband. Willy’s father. Terrible. Terrible thing for everyone. Bad enough Audrey’s father dropped dead. Not a month after, her husband, rest his soul, went. Terrible. Now there was a lovely man. That was terrible for everyone.”

  “What? The son?”

  “Son-in-law.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Brenden? Fell off the face of the earth, did Brenden Murphy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In his car. Over the cliff, poor sod. Drowned.” Liam scratched his cheek. “Death by drowning, they said. And that after he’d tumbled down the cliff in his father-in-law’s Bentley. Tragic.” He shook his head. “Never hurt a soul. You won’t find a body say a word against Brenden Murphy. No, you won’t. Willy has a right bit of a stutter since then. He always blamed himself. Left his putter in the front seat. They found it jammed under the gas pedal. ’Course it might have just slid there in the fall—”

  “Brenden and Audrey’s son?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I met him!”

  “Did you, now. Oh, you’ll see him often enough. He’ll be walking or fishing, fishing or walking, Willy will. His mother’s a Brit, you know. They live all alone there in that grand manor. Just the two a them and Maura, the tweeny—”

  “The who?”

  “The domestic. And Eileen, the daily woman comes days. She’s Dayday’s daughter, by the way. And then there’s the gardener. Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy will look after the donkey herself, he’s such a stubborn cuss for anyone else. Only the one donkey. But it’s a fearful shame. They used to have the stable full. They sold off all the horses, one by one. And not for the money, as I hear tell. She didn’t want the bother. Can you believe it? Not wantin’ horses?” Baffled outrage whizzed around his eyes. He shook his head. “She’s part Scots, as well, Audrey is, but never you mind about that. Where else would that great lot of money come from? And there’s nothing wrong with that lad, despite his fine looks. Caught the bullest salmon you’ve ever laid eyes on, ever caught in these waters, here. And that just when he was fourteen. ’Course that was a good long while ago when you think of it.” He gave a piece of tobacco on his lip a silent flick, thoughtful of time passing. “Oh, they’re all after him, the young girls. And a shameful lot of the older ones as well. Not that he’d know it. Mind in the clouds, that boy. His mother wants him to run for public office, always has. That’s the last job for shy Willy, though. He’s a great chef, Willy is. Ever you want a leg of lamb that’ll bring tears to your eyes it’s that good, he’s the one. All smothered in port wine and rosemary branches akimbo. Ah! That’s where his true passion lies, as they say. ’Course his mother will not hear of that. The Whitetree-Murphys are far too grand for feeding the hoi polloi. Not for him that poking about with weeds and spice. But to Willy, it’s a science, like. He’ll go down spend an entire afternoon at the widow Wooly’s house and learn all about those herbs, all the Latin names, what they’re good for, what they go with…”

  Then Liam threw back his head and laughed. He was better now. I guessed he liked Willy. And I think he was a bit drunk, as early as it was. Or maybe still from last night. His breath suggested eucalyptus. He was a take-his-shoes-off-fill-up-the-room-with-himself sort of fellow.

  “It’s good to meet you finally,” I said.

  He squinted at me under bent-down red eyebrows. “You used to write letters when you were a little girl,” he said. He didn’t say it as though he’d just thought of it. More like he had these memories of me close at hand. Saved up and carried along.

  “You’re right, I did,” I said, remembering, too. There I’d sat on the porch in the summer. My first experience with stationery. “You knew that?” I said, surprised and pleased to have been thought of.

  “‘Bally Cashin,’ you used to address the place, ‘Anyone at all.’”

  “Did I really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you write me back?”

  He raised his eyes, nodding meaningfully, ominously, up ahead to “them.”

  “Oh.”

  “You once requested a four-leaf clover, if I remember correctly.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. In a self-addressed stamped envelope.”

  “You remember that?”

  “But they were American stamps, so that got you nowhere.”

  I shook my head. “Story of my life.”

  He put his big foot on the dash. “You don’t look like you’ve had that bad a life.”

  “I don’t?” I touched my face.

  “The fault lies in the desire. I mean, wanting to own something so … so…”

  “Mythical?”

  “I was going to say perfect.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you own it, it only withers and dies. Never gets to live its own life, like.”

  We drove along the cliffs, very close to the edge. Only dots of rain piddled the windshield now. I wiped them away with the correct knob and tooled along as if I’d been doing this for years. Spotlights of yellow sun shot from the big production clouds. In the window came bursts of glassy air.

  We passed a stone house. It was to the left of us, sheltered but close. There was a walled garden of roses and a neat vegetable patch at the back. Everything was wet and the wind clean and drippy with the sudden light.

  Liam watched me turn. “That’s the Wattles Cottage. Then it was Molly’s. Or it used to be. Well, it still is but now she calls it Auntie Molly’s,” he said.

  “Oh? Who?”

  “She’s a divorcée.”

  I rhumba’d my shoulders. “I
see.”

  He laughed. “Single, I should say. Sorry. Didn’t mean to sound like that. Runs a bed and breakfast. Does very well, too. She’s on the tourist board list, y’see. And high up on it, now. ‘A’ and all.”

  “A?”

  “For ‘Auntie.’ Alphabetical order. Dead clever of her, really. First on the list, now. When she got the divorce she wasn’t doing well at all. Then she got the idea and named it Auntie’s. Right now there are only fishermen. But there’ll be no finding a bed around here in a week or two, that many tourists about.”

  “Really! Well, there’s no wonder. It’s so pretty.” A cow stood out back. I caught sight of “Auntie” Molly’s slim figure in an herb garden. Her head in a straw hat. Her hands digging in the moist soil. She had delphinium already two feet high and a lavender up to the sill. That’s what I would like to do if I weren’t married, I caught myself thinking. Running my own business and making a go of it.

  A grassy ledge on my side of the car broke off to a dizzyingly sheer drop. Far below, a clear pool of green lapped at a sickle of white pebbles.

  “Oh! What’s that?” I practically turned the car over leaning out the window, feeling I’d been there before.

  He looked away. “Don’t be goin’ there,” he said.

  “It’s lovely! I’d love to walk there as soon as I get my—”

  “Not there.” He said it harshly. Then it was as if he wanted to cover up, like he didn’t want me to think he was so serious about it. “Fairy ring,” he said jokingly. “Bad luck.”

  “Ah.”

  “No, but for real. There’s a wicked tide comes in and cuts you off down below there. Dead sudden.”

  I looked back slyly. Of course I would go. But I would go carefully. I wasn’t sure I liked being told where not to go. I straightened my spine. “Why wasn’t I to sit in the chair at Dayday’s?”

  “What? Oh, Bernadette. My sister, Lady McCatholic when it suits her. No, Mum just doesn’t want Bob’s cat hair all over her clean house. She won’t have the smell.”

  “I see. Say, is Dayday’s a pub or a shop? It was hard to tell.”

  “In the front room is the shop. Everyone stops there for their milk or their paper or jam, even when it’s out of the way. You walk in and there’s that cat as big as a dog in the chair.”

  “Yes, I met the cat.”

  “That cat’s from Malta, they say. And he’s everywhere you look, wherever you go. Dayday’s house has so much clutter it’s hard enough to find a spot as it is, but you’d never move Bob, that’s his name, from the chair. So my sister’s worries are, as usual, for nothing. For a while Dayday sold crockery and whatnots, but she could never come to terms with a price, she couldn’t part with an item once she had it. Anyway, all that stuff is still there. That and more. She’s the one knows everyone’s business, Dayday is.”

  A case of the pot calling the old kettle black, I thought. “But you call her Mrs. Driver,” I said.

  “That’s it, yeah. That’s the way she wants it. My dad’ll call her Dayday now, and get away with it.”

  Wasn’t Liam the one who’d had a vocation? I seemed to half remember a reason I shouldn’t ask. Had he started to drink when that hadn’t worked out or had that not worked out because he’d started to drink? I cleared my throat. “Weren’t you in the seminary at one time?”

  “I was,” he answered, his Adam’s apple moving. Puff, puff on the cigarette. “Chucked me out straightaway, they did. And a good job they did. Look.” He pointed with his chin. “That’s Bally Cashin, now.”

  The lane dipped and ferried inside stone walls to the spangling sea. Four white buildings under slate clustered together at the horizon. Goats hopped the stones and came up to watch the car. My mother’s home, I thought. I stopped the car.

  Liam startled me by quoting: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.”

  His big voice filled the car. I don’t think I’ve ever been so stirred with happy expectation. And so I listened greedily, rapt. I am almost secretly fond of poetry. Poetry is Carmela’s territory. I always felt I had to stay away. Lines drawn in early sisterhood.

  “Nine bean-rows will I have there,” I said, “a hive for the honey-bee. And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

  We laughed out loud and I started up the car. The tires crunched on the gravel. We passed the blown-up house first. A hanging shutter clacked against the stone. It was only a shell, like a castle ruin from long ago. The smell of it was still acrid and charred, though, and I tried not to think of poor Aunt Dierdre, blown to smithereens. At least it had been quick. I navigated the rest of the lane cautiously and came to the big family house. I guessed it had once been a farmhouse. White curtains in every shining window. Aunt Bridey must be, like my mother, a one-window-a-day woman. Roses pressed beneath the black sash on the door. A scraggly grapevine halfheartedly climbed a trellis.

  Outside the house, an old fellow sat on a bench. He had an enormous head, strong, long arms and short, sturdy legs. A sanded board was on his lap with tufts of bright color. He was threading something, like a tailor. Up on the sleeve of his linen shirt he wore a black band. A fishing rod lay across his lap.

  “My dad.” Liam pointed where I should go with the car. “Your uncle Ned.”

  A stork landed and sat down right beside old Ned.

  “Will you look at that,” I said.

  “Many a crooked-winged bird in the county who’d otherwise be long ago eaten by Bob were it not for our old Ned,” he said.

  So that was nice. To hear a son speaking that well of his dad. I told him so.

  “Oh, there’s nothing our dad can’t fix.” Liam pointed me up the gravel, passing praise from himself. “He’s a saint, really.” He lowered his voice, “Putting up with Mum’s sharp tongue.”

  “My mother doesn’t mind saying what she means, either,” I laughed, my superstitious heart still charmed by the descent of the mythological stork.

  A border collie, lolling over from the barnhouse in the distance, circled the drive where the stork was in Ned’s protective space.

  Liam noticed it, too. “And now he has poor Dierdre’s dog, Brownie, to look after as well. Brownie doesn’t seem to mind, which goes to show you what a grand sort Dad is with animals. Brownie’s a cross dog, more often than not, though. And fickle. You’ll mind yourself around her.” He lowered his chin at me. “A right bitch.” The wary bird, mindful of the approaching dog, flew off. The silver light around it struck and held it while it flew away.

  We watched it go. Then Uncle Ned got up stiffly and moved over to the car. “This Zenobia?” He stuck his tight puffed hand in the window.

  Liam told him who I was. He took me in with kind eyes set in weathered wrinkles. “Aye.” He nodded. “Mary’s girl. There’s no doubt about that. You’ve your mother’s fair smile.”

  Aunt Bridey filled up the doorway. Up until that moment I’d pretty much forgotten I was there for a funeral. Aunt Bridey, though, regarded me with a sinking heart. You could see it on her face. I tried to make light of it even then but to this day I remember her outright disappointment and it pains me still.

  Bridey looked a lot like my own mother. The same hefty frame, iron hair and strong eyebrows. That’s where the similarity ended, though. She wasn’t like my big-hearted mom. Disgruntlement flattened and drew her mouth down. A line pressed rigid and permanent between her brows. Right away you could see where Liam got his all-the-world’s-a-dreary outlook. I had to busy myself with my handbag so she wouldn’t notice how it disheartened me to be so instantly disliked.

  Liam reached across for the keys.

  I tried a halfhearted smile at his kindness.

  “Watch that dog doesn’t bite ’er in the face,” Bridey called. I looked up to see the dog, Brownie, her paws on the car door, her interested face cheerfully inspecting me. You’d think I was an old friend.

  “Someone likes you,” Uncle Ned said.

  “She
probably smells our dogs.” I tossed off the information, both happy and sad that it was the dog who liked me. I mean, some people do take an instant aversion to my Indira Ghandi–Willie Nelson look but you can’t blame them for that. I pulled my things together, got out of the car and went to meet my aunt Bridey. I thought she’d kiss my cheek but she drew back when I went near and instead offered me her hand.

  We stood beneath the lattice. “I see you’ve got grapes,” I said, flustered.

  “He’s got the vine,” Aunt Bridey said. “Grapes is another story.”

  “They’ll come,” Liam sulked. “One a these days, they’ll come.”

  “It’s four years they haven’t come,” she said to the back of his head, “they won’t come at all now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Uncle Ned said. “All good things take time.”

  “Bless all who enter here,” I said, walking in, stung, but the way I’d been taught.

  “Take her bag, Seamus. Don’t stand there,” she said to the oversized fellow gawking at me from the stove. He wore big overalls and a belt full of fishing and gardening tools. One black digging claw had a bird’s keen head.

  “That’s not a policeman,” he accused, not budging.

  Ah-ha, I thought. The voice on the phone.

  “This is Claire, Seamus.” Liam came in with my bag. He spoke patiently. “She’ll be staying with us for a while.”

  “I don’t know where we’ll put her, Lord knows.” Seamus’s voice changed from his own dull plod and became an exact replication of my aunt’s. I got a chill. Not only that, but he had one blue eye and one green. “We’ve no room as it is,” he said in a perfect Aunt Bridey voice.

  “Go on with you now.” Bridey shooed him, heavy-footed, moving after him. “Where’s Brownie?”

  “What’s this?” The crisp figure of a young woman whisked into the kitchen where we all stood. If she’d clapped her hands we couldn’t have come to attention any faster. Seamus went away with my bag, small-looking beside his great size. At the doorway he looked over his shoulder and said, “And I did too see a two-headed horse. Jenny Rose will believe me if you won’t.”

  “Hello.” The diminutive woman turned me around and slipped her cool hand into mine in the same movement. “I’m Bernadette.” She took me by the arm and steered me into a big room, letting the rest of them stand there. There was a stone fireplace on one side, a loft on the other. A round table was in the middle of the room, polished to a glow, a beeswax candle in the middle, unlit and poised.