by Aine Greaney
Eight o’clock and there was no sign of him. The chicken was desiccated on the stove; scum had formed on the white sauce. Nine o’clock and there she was sitting on the couch, the TV switched off so she could immediately hear his footsteps on the landing. Worry gnawed at her. Had he and his new bosses gone for drinks after his first day? Should she call around a few of his friends? Look up Mahoney Brothers Home Builders in the yellow pages?
No. No. He’d be home soon.
He arrived at last. Red-faced, sweating, trekking snow slush across the living room floor.
She rounded on him, furious: “Where the hell were you? I made chicken and then I got worried and—”
The look stalled her. Just a look as he crossed to the bathroom and slammed the door shut.
In his bath towel, his curly hair still dripping wet, he came, barefoot, and flopped into the living room armchair.
In an airless voice, he told her what had happened.
After the welcome handshakes and office introductions, Mike Mahoney had teased him about the suit; asked if he was off to a funeral or something. Then Mike had shoved a folder of paperwork at him. “Fill these in,” the older man said. “You know, whenever. Then give them to Judy, the secretary, here.”
Mike had led Fintan to his new business manager’s office, with its venetian blind window, its white desk and a newfangled thing called a Radio Shack computer. The dang contraption was supposed to work wonders—keep track of costing and bids and keep them all in line. But hey, that’s why they’d hired Fintan. To figure all that computer stuff out. Keep them all modern and thriving.
Midway through the morning, Fintan, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, crossed to Mike’s office, a huge room cluttered with surveyors’ maps and building permits, boxes of files still unpacked.
“I’ll just leave this till . . . well, till later,” Fintan said, holding out the I-9 form, verification of employee eligibility, and the part where the employer took a copy of your social security and alien registration number.
Fintan kept his voice low, a collusive glance at the main office where Judy the secretary sat thwack-thwack-thwacking at an electric typewriter.
Mike glanced up from his desk. “Oh yeah, right. You didn’t bring your green card with you? Well, no problem. Bring it in tomorrow. Judy can make a copy.”
Suddenly, Fintan felt himself blush, a horrible stammering red. “I’m not actually . . . I don’t have . . . But I thought you . . .”
Mike’s expression puckered. Holy. Shit. An illegal alien. Not in the goddamn office. It was different out on the sites—painters, bricklayers, gofers. Ask no questions; get told no lies. But not in the office, not sitting here in his suit at a computer.
In these late-1980s days, there were too many front-page headlines of immigration raids, all those landscape companies, horse stables, and building sites where little brown Mexicans went scrambling, skittering over rooftops. All of it was bad press, bad faith, bad patriotism.
Fintan saw Mike’s flicker of rage at having been duped by this off-the-boat Mick. “Well, for God’s sake, buddy. What the hell did you think? I mean, you worked how long in that bar?”
So Fintan left his parka and new suit jacket still hanging from the back of his office door. He walked past the small reception desk, the shirt collar choking him, leaving him airless, gasping. He clamored down the stairway, past the first-floor offices, their company names on the doors, the smell of new timber and concrete.
In his shirtsleeves he walked all the way back into the city, through the south Boston neighborhoods, past bars, schools, chain-link fences, a convent, past the pebble-pocked snowbanks. Along the way, he saw nothing of the city and its suburbs and overhead highways. He could just as easily have been walking along the Gowna Road back home, or, for that matter, he could have been strolling through Tokyo. Humiliation had made him deaf and blind to the stop-and-go of a city in its afternoon rush hour.
“It’ll be okay,” Ellen said to him, sitting there in the armchair with his towel still wrapped and knotted around his waist. His pale freckled arms, his white chest was growing goose-bumped. She felt a new fear rising. “You’ll find something else.”
His voice came low and scathing. He cursed American naïveté, the fucking national stupidity that thought everything, always, went by the rules. “Rules, rules, and more rules,” he screamed. “Yanks never fucking know, never know shit. People half my intelligence sitting on their fat arses in offices across the country.”
Standing there, Ellen suddenly remembered that Sunday afternoon, which already felt like half a lifetime ago, when she’d overheard an Irish girl, a girl called Sheila McCormack at that party in Dorchester. Fintan’s Green Card. Her. Ellen. The girl had called her that.
“But . . . ?” she began. Now he stood up and screamed right into her face. “Shut the fuck up! Shut fucking up!”
“Not my fault,” she screamed back. “And I damn well warned you.”
Thunk!
First there was the sound. A strange, distant sound. Then her jaw throbbed. He hit me. The pain and the truth came, one trailing the other, like an aftershock. He just hit me.
He stood there staring at the red welt on her cheek. Stared in horror as if he had just walked in upon this, upon someone else—a stranger’s violence.
“Oh Jesus!” he said. “Oh, Jesus, Ell!”
On the 12th of April, 1988, Fintan Dowd and Ellen Boisvert got married at Boston’s City Hall. It was exactly two months since his botched job, two months of him being unemployed and both of them being extra polite and contrite with each other.
At night Ellen woke to a ghost pain in her cheek, to the memory of his fist coming at her. But in the mornings when he stood there by their bed, holding out a mug of fresh coffee for her, she told herself that it was his one bad day, his one slipup.
By their wedding morning, the thick file of INS paperwork, his affidavits and chest x-rays and testimonials—everything except the marriage certificate—were completed, the responses written in black ink. Parents: John Patrick and Josephine Mary Dowd. Deceased.
They were living together anyway, they’d reasoned. They were in love, planned on living together forever. So why spend money on an immigration lawyer, spend money they didn’t have, only to have to wait, to be disappointed anyway? It was time, Ellen assured him, time he went back to night school and got a job that fitted his skills. Time they both got started on a real life.
Liam from County Offally, Fintan’s old roommate from the Dorchester days, was his best man. Louise Boisvert, who had flown north from St. Petersburg, was the bridesmaid, shivering inside a clingy, nylon dress with matching high-heeled sandals and dark, flesh-toned stockings. Fintan wore his new white shirt and his new suit trousers with a sports coat they bought on a menswear clearance. Ellen, petite, pretty, her hair scooped into a jaunty ponytail, wore a cream-colored blazer over navy blue slacks—both of which could and would be worn to work for future job interviews.
That morning, Donna and Thomas Boisvert had driven south from Patterson Falls. They would drive back again that evening.
After their city-hall nuptials, five of them went for lunch to DiSienna’s, an Italian restaurant on Boston’s North End, where Ellen and Fintan had reserved a table. Liam was working on the buildings now, so he said he’d love to come for the bit of grub, but he had to get back to the building site. He’d only just run over to City Hall on his lunch break.
Across the table in DiSienna’s, Thomas Boisvert avoided his new son-in-law’s eyes. After their fish and pasta lunch, the waiter brought a small white cake, on the house—an Italian rum cake. The other waiters left their tables, the other lunch customers watched and clinked their forks against their water glasses.
Then the bride and groom, Fintan and Ellen, kissed and cut their cake.
34
AFTER THE VISIT to Father Bradley’s and the village, Ellen gets back late to the house in Knockduff. As she drives in through the farmyard ga
tes, she sees only Ned’s mud-spattered car in its usual spot. Nurse Ryan’s blue car is already gone. It will be fine, she assures herself. After Nurse Ryan’s visit, Jo is usually exhausted, usually fast asleep.
She drops her bag of groceries in the scullery, then walks up through the house to check on Jo.
Empty. Jo’s bed is empty. The walking cane is gone. The bedding is rolled back and there’s Jo’s head imprint on the stacked pillows. It’s impossible.
“Jo.” Ellen rushes through the parlor, the hallway, toward the downstairs bathroom.
She runs up through the scullery, back out into the yard. Has someone come? Has Tom Fitzgerald summoned an ambulance?
This is crazy. A sick old woman doesn’t just go missing, go walkabout. Ellen stands there, feeling useless and stupid. Then she turns back for the house and the phone.
Voices. From beyond the upper yard and the line of sheds. First Ned. Then . . . Jo? Ellen rushes to the five-bar gate to the upper paddocks.
Ned and Jo stand on a grassy path, just a hundred yards past the gate, their backs to the house and the yard. Jo leans on her cane. She’s dressed in an old winter coat with her nightgown peeping from underneath. She’s in a pair of pair of old boots; a bobble hat on her head. Ned’s hand flutters around her elbow, her back.
For the past two days, ever since the men and the baling machine have finished, the sloping fields are dotted with cylindrical hay bales inside their black plastic wrappings.
Jo lifts the walking cane, jabs it high into the air, to the right, then the left, the bobble hat following her movements.
Ellen walks to the gate and stands there, awkwardly, wondering if she’s not an intrusion, a voyeur. But still, Ned might need help.
Jo jabs the walking cane again. “Didn’t he leave too much stubble?” The voice is high and quavering. “He should’ve cut closer up along the wall here.”
“Ach no, ma’am,” says Ned. “Sure, they’re all leaving a bit behind them now. The new machines are all—”
“—I don’t pay that fella to be only skirting the tops and the sides,” Jo interrupts.
Ned doesn’t answer.
They turn back for the house. Just over a hundred yards to the gate, but their approach is so slow, tap-tap-tap. And Ned, cap on his head and the cigarette trapped under the moustache, keeps pace. Stopping, starting, that perpetually impassive face.
Tap-tap-tap. Jo’s toothless face is set with determination. From here, Ellen can see that her patient is winded, panting. Ellen opens the gate and rushes up the path to meet them. “Is she all right?” Ellen asks.
“Ach, she’s grand. Just out for a bit of a walk, isn’t that right, ma’am? Out getting a bit of air and having an oul’ look at this year’s hay.” He looks at Ellen. It’s the closest that Ned has come to a smile.
He nods to Ellen to walk along the other side, ready, waiting in case the cane slips, in case Jo grows more winded and falters.
They cross the yard toward the house like this, one of them on each side of her. Stop. Start. Stop again. Jo’s raspy breaths compete with the pigeons in the orchard.
A jerk of the elbow tells them that it’s time to stop again.
The air and the birds are suddenly silent, time suspended, as Jo Dowd leans on her walking cane and takes in her yard, her house, the avenue down the hill. “I remember,” she whispers. “I remember the first time Mother brought me down there. I was only four years of age, and she strapped me onto the carrier of the bike and she brought me down the hill to the village.” She shakes her head.
“I’ll go to the gate,” Jo whispers, her breath wasting. “I want to see the front fields.”
So they’re off again. Step. Step.
On the way, Jo nods toward the orchard. “The beauty of baths should be ripe soon. But you know, they drop a lot. Ned, you’ll spread the straw under the trees?”
“I will, ma’am. Sure, we’ll do that now for sure.”
“And you pruned the Bramleys?”
“Pruned, ma’am. All pruned.”
At the gate, Ned disengages himself, nods Ellen toward the stone stile to the left of the gate. Then he disengages himself as Ellen stands in front for their practiced ritual of Ellen and Jo standing together, chest to chest, while Ellen lowers the older woman into onto the stone slab. They wait for her to catch her breath. The bobble hat pushes forward on Jo’s forehead.
“There. Is that good?” Ellen settles the hat back on Jo’s head, back to where it’s not quite so ridiculous looking. Ned stands there, his eyes darting nervously. Embarrassed by this women’s intimacy, he doesn’t know whether to retreat or stay.
Jo nods, heaving, panting.
Madness. Complete madness, letting her come out here. But Ellen doesn’t know how to protest, how to make her patient get back into the house and to bed.
Jo keeps looking into the distance, down the avenue past the hazel rock. The pigeons have started again. The silence stretches between the three of them. At last, Ned turns away for the upper yard.
Jo’s voice startles Ellen. “Down there in them fields he used to train her, the dog. Hours he spent at it, hours and hours of a Saturday and Sunday. He’d be whistling and training her and then carting her off to every sheepdog trial in the country.”
“He loved her,” Ellen whispers. “Loved that dog.”
Jo shifts around in her spot to stare at a spot behind them, into the shadows under the apple trees, the highest of the crab apple trees inside the orchard wall.
At last Jo turns to her. “He was fond of her. Shockin’ fond. But a man should love his wife, not a bloody dog. A girl like you, he should’ve treated you like a queen.”
“He did,” Ellen says. She believes it. Out here in the cool, summer evening, among the fields where he once ran and laughed and called his dog, she believes what she just told Fintan’s mother.
Jo sniffs. Then she steadies her toothless gaze on the younger woman. “No,” she says. The voice is low but steadfast. “I see it in your eyes, a leana. I see what he, my son Fintan did.”
Jo watches, follows the path of Ellen’s hand as the younger woman touches her jaw. Jo shakes her head slowly. Her eyes are stricken. “I knew. I knew all along.”
After that first night, after the night of his botched Boston job interview and when he actually hit her, there had been the almost times. There were the other times when she saw the fury in his face and watched in a strange, laughable disbelief as she watched the fists clenching, his body closing in on her, the eyes lit with fury. And sometimes, there was the fist rising, coming toward her again. Except that he always stopped just before, just in time. After that first occasion, he learned not to spook himself.
But here’s his voice in her head, the half-Irish, half-American accent, the words spitting in her face. That first time when she drove excitedly home from her new academy room and job. There he is ducking out from under their leaking kitchen sink. Stupid bitch. Stupid fucking bitch. And yes, there’s the fist rising except that time—and all the other times—he just keeps screaming her all the way into a corner of the kitchen until she’s trapped there, with his voice and spit in her face.
“They’re weak,” Jo says, as if the old woman has been watching the movie inside Ellen’s head. “They’re all as weak as bloody kittens. His father was the same way—all moods and huffs and temper. But no bloody balls.”
Ellen says, “They’re both gone now. It’s all in the p—”
“Not yet,” says Jo. “Not in the past yet. But it will. Soon. I hope—for your sake.”
“It’s—” Ellen starts.
“—I wrote, you know. Oh, yes, once that woman in the town told me where he worked, I wrote, sent him money in case he was hungry or lost. Then I heard he was after getting married, so I sent him money again, to start his married life and put a deposit on a house. Begged him to ring or write. Just one line. Just to let me know he was alive. It’s a terrible thing to have to get news of your own son from a stranger, a stupi
d little woman in a supermarket.”
“I didn’t know,” Ellen says, reaching to touch Jo’s shoulder. “You have to believe that. I never knew.”
Jo cocks her face at her. She masticates her toothless mouth. “I know you didn’t.”
Jo says, “At the end, the real end, they say it’s like drowning. The dying. They say that’s what it’s like—for everyone. So don’t let them cart me off anyplace, hospice or one of them dying places. I won’t have any of those rosaries and a funeral mass and every old fánach below in the village coming with their sympathizing and their handshakes. They’re just coming for a gawk, and to gloat that it’s not themselves in that coffin.”
“So, what do you want?”
“Cremated. I want to be cremated.”
“And the ashes?”
“Whatever you think yourself. Pitch them under that big crab apple. Or put them on the ridges of carrots. Don’t even bother getting them back from the undertaker if you’d prefer that.”
“Let’s get you back inside,” Ellen says.
Jo clutches Ellen’s forearm. Then, slowly, she raises the younger woman’s arm, presses Ellen’s hand to her own cheek. The touch brings a little toothless smile. “You’ll do that for me, won’t you? I know you will. No masses or any of that malarkey.”
“All right,” Ellen whispers. “I promise.” Then she stands in front of Jo again. She reaches her arms out to lift the older woman up, this shrunken, emaciated woman with the knitted hat on her head. For just this split second, Ellen imagines that she is the mother, standing there waiting to gather a child into her arms.
Jo’s face is in shadow, just out of the glow of the night light from the night stand. She’s tucked into bed again, propped against the pillows. Lying here like this, Jo Dowd’s eyes are fluttery with exhaustion. She is a sick old woman again. It’s as if this afternoon, as if their little walkabout never happened.