by Aine Greaney
After Christmas, there are no sheepdog trials for the winter. The weather turns bitter; there are bus strikes in Dublin. So he says he can’t get a bus across the city to the train. When the bus strike ends, he says he has a Saturday morning tutorial in a professor’s office.
On those absentee weekends, Jo rings Kitty’s house, long-distance, to inquire for her son. They are not used to telephoning across the country, from sister to sister. As Jo dials the number, she has a creeping suspicion that he might not really be there, that she’ll catch him out in some lie or charade. Always, there’s something extra trilling about her sister’s voice, which Jo attributes to the telephone. Kitty was always one for putting on airs.
“Hold on and I’ll get him for you,” Kitty says. Jo listens to the high heels down a hallway. “Fintan, darling, it’s your mother.” Standing there, still in her Wellington boots from the evening jobs or the fields, Jo hears their distant whispers. When her son takes the phone, she swears she hears some mischief in his voice.
37
SOMETHING SKITTERS through the grass, straight across Ellen’s path. Rabbit? Field mouse? It’s the 27th of July already—so just a few weeks until Fintan’s one-year death anniversary. The way things look, she’ll be already landed back home then by mid-August. Home. The word stalls.
Except for a few packed-up storage boxes, she has no home.
The very minute she gets back, she’ll look for a rental near the academy—a short-term lease to buy her time until she finds and buys something permanent—something suitable for a thirty-nine-year-old widowed teacher.
In a month, it will be time for all those new-semester committee meetings and new-student orientation. Then, just after Labor Day, here comes that sudden return to classes and tutorials and the campus suddenly alive with the students walking between the quads in the still-warm September days. Now, striding through these summer meadows, the thought of her life, her old life, makes Ellen stop along her path. From up here in this high meadow, Ellen has a top-down view of Jo Dowd’s house—its slate roof and the twin chimneys set against the backdrop of Jo’s front paddocks and the evening sky.
She won’t be needed here much longer. The thought should cheer her, make her feel some blessed release. It could be a week or even less. Nurse Ryan and Dr. Fitzgerald have said so.
She walks on down the hill, onward through the sloping fields. The elderberry trees are overripe and drooping. Here and there, the freshly mown stubble grass is stained purple from their fruit.
Tom Fitzgerald’s Volvo is already gone from the yard. An hour ago, when he came to check on Jo, Ellen grabbed her cardigan and set out for some fresh air.
There’s a sudden hum, a noise on the still air. It’s something in the telephone wires. No. She scans the yard, then the avenue. Someone is coming up the front avenue on a motorcycle. Ellen watches the black speck speeding among the green fields and stone walls. Just before the yard gate, the driver does a wide, arching turn and then stops.
A nephew? Jo said that her late husband had nephews that were “thick as double-ditches”—avaricious men she wouldn’t tolerate near the house or her death bed.
A man in a black jacket gets off, sets the bike on its kickstand. Dark hair, no helmet. He unlatches the gate, clanks it shut, then he strides across the yard to the house. Even from up here, the man’s gait is familiar.
She watches him glance around him toward the orchard, the upper yard, then he knocks on the back door. He waits a minute, then disappears into the house.
They stand staring at each other across the back scullery. He’s standing by the kitchen sink, arms folded, as if waiting for someone to show up. It’s him again, Carmel Cawley’s brother, the man she met at the lake, the man who lives in the tiny house down in the village. “Hi there!” she says.
He looks annoyed, dismayed to find her here in Knockduff.
“Hi?” she says again. Ned, she thinks. Ned’s car is already gone from along the orchard wall. She wishes that it wasn’t, that he’d stayed late.
Tony. That’s his name. Tony Cawley, who is standing here staring at her, where she’s standing inside the back doorway. She watches the truth dawn, his look of annoyance as he adds up the facts in his head.
“So you’re the feckin’ wife?” He glances around him, at the back window, the line of winter coats and hats hanging from their wooden pegs behind the door. He’s looking for someone to blame, someone who never told him who Ellen actually is. “The bloody wife!” He says it again. Standing here in his black leather jacket, his crumpled jeans, he seems to crowd the narrow space between the sink and the door to the inside kitchen.
“Yes. I’m Fintan’s wife—widow, actually. He died.”
“Yeah. I’m only after hearing that part—about him being dead. Only a few days ago. In town.”
“How . . . ?”
“Friend of mine in Ballinkeady. We used to play football together; still play the odd match from time to time—Seán. Seán McCormack. He has a sister beyond?”
“Sheila?”
“Yeah. Nice looking, that wan. Had a few goes at her myself in my time, back before she went off to Boston for herself. Married now. The money, of course. Kids, the whole works. They come home in the summers, swanking around.” He nods his head toward the kitchen door. “So . . . ah . . . how’s the ould wan anyways?”
“Mrs. Dowd’s not well.”
“Well, yeah, I know that, but how’s she doing? Like, now?” He shifts from one foot to the other. Is she supposed to invite him in? No. No, answers the voice in her head.
She folds her arms. “Does your sister know about Fintan’s death?”
“Yeah. I texted her. Not . . .” He gives Ellen a twisted smile. “Not that our Carmel’d actually give a shite.”
“What do you want, Mr. Cawley?”
He takes a few steps toward her, where she’s standing inside the still-open back door. His eyes are spiteful. And yes, here’s that flirtatious smirk again. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want to know the minute, the very second that oul’ bitch kicks the bucket. Because we’ve some business for doing, my sister and me. We want what should’ve been ours years ago. I want my sister not to have to slog away in some dirty kitchen in a posh school for little rich English bitches, half of them feckin’ Arabs that don’t even speak English and that’d blow us all up faster than they’d ate their breakfast. And I want her to stop living in the school’s dump of a flat because she’s had to bring up a child, our Catherine, on her own. Slogging away while your wanker of a husband got off free as a bird. Promised her the world and then took off to America for himself.”
A child. A girl. A daughter. Fintan had a child named Catherine. She watches him rant on, a litany of wrongs. She watches his right hand rising. He makes jerky, furious movements. Stop. I must stop him, she thinks. He’ll waken Jo. He’ll frighten her.
Catherine. Fintan has a daughter. A girl who lives with her mother in an apartment in England. The kid that was here, in Gowna, last summer. She was with Carmel that night that Tom and Ruth Fitzgerald met them down in the village. Ellen is sure of it.
In her mind, Ellen hears Jo’s voice, the out-loud dreams in that darkened bedroom, the morphine ravings when the old woman’s voice turned crooning, cajoling. Jo was obviously seeing, talking to a child. A little girl. Her granddaughter. She listens for movements inside the house, listens for the call bell attached to the bed.
Nothing except for Tony Cawley’s voice booming through the scullery.
Ellen raises her palm, traffic-cop style, to stall him. “Please lower your voice. Now!”
He stops in mid-rant. His voice drops to a loud, seething whisper.
“This time,” says Tony Cawley. “This time we’re getting what’s coming to us.”
I’ve it all taken care of with my solicitor. Jo said that once. A long time ago now, when Ellen first got here, when Jo Dowd believed, assumed that her daughter-in-law had come from America for one thing only: inheritance, lan
d, a family’s hilltop farm.
“So you’re here for your or your niece’s inheritance?” Ellen asks. “But she’s . . . Jo is still alive. Sounds like that’s an inconvenience for you.”
He steps closer, towering above her. He jabs his forefinger at her. “Sure, don’t I know bloody well she’s still alive? Otherwise, Fitzgerald wouldn’t be still coming up here, would he? I watch his car leaving the house, turning up along the lake road. Every bloody evening. He’d hardly be coming to see a dead woman, would he? Not even Fitzgerald’d charge the government for treating a corpse—though I wouldn’t put it past him. But we’ve a solicitor got. And the minute that oul’ wan snuffs it, you’ll get a letter. That’ll tell you what’s what. They’ve told us you can do it with a grandparent’s DNA. The grandmother is the best. So we’re ready to get a paternity test. No more schemes or fast ones.”
His black leather jacket smells moldy. He’s eyeing her breasts.
He reaches above her head and pushes the back door shut. Ned, she thinks. Ned. This man watches the doctor come and go. So he watches Ned McHugh, too.
She forces a steady, inquisitive voice. “Has Jo met this girl? Your niece? Her granddaughter?”
“Oh, please. If that oul’ bitch’d had her way, our Catherine wouldn’t be around at all. There’s be no Catherine. An’ if she thought she could get away with it, she’d have had my poor sister done away with, too.”
Done away with? No.
Just an hour ago, before she went off for her walk, Ellen sat by Jo’s bed, the old woman propped against the pillows, their hands clasped on the white bedspread—the only acknowledgment, only awareness that there was someone still there, except for those people in her dreams, the people Jo muttered and called out to. Then, when Dr. Fitzgerald came tiptoeing in, he looked from his patient to Ellen and smiled wincingly at the younger woman. It was the kind of smile that said the end was near, that nothing could be done.
“But Jo wouldn’t—” she starts.
Suddenly, he touches her right breast, lightly first, as if he’s just discovered that it’s there and available to him. His eyes glitter. Through her T-shirt, she can feel his forefinger moving around her nipple. She steps backward, collides with the back door.
“Oh, now, sweetie pie.” His words keep a rhythm with his moving, circling finger. “You’d find out a lot if you just asked your little mate there, our so-called doctor. You’d find out exactly what the Dowd bitch would or wouldn’t do.”
She angles into the corner, between the doorjamb and the line of coats. He steps closer. His left hand grabs her left shoulder. Then she feels his fingers along her neck, his thumb cradling her head. “Yeah, ask him. Fitzgerald was fucking there. He was her right-hand man, Mister Genius young doctor himself. Yeah, ask Fitzgerald. He’ll tell y—”
Jo’s old woolen coat. It’s hanging right in the middle of all the others. Ellen hung it up in a hurry on that day, Jo’s last good day when she went walkabout, inspecting her meadows and her land one more time. When Ellen got Jo back into the house, Jo was so weak that Ellen carried her back to bed.
And Jo’s walking cane. Please. It should be there, hanging from the same wooden hook, out of sight.
“Jayzus, Fintan’d love to see us now, hah?” Tony says. The musty smell of the jacket as he moves in for a kiss. But she smiles at him, musters a teasing look, as if his mentioning her dead husband titillates her. Then she moves a little to the left.
“I knew, you know,” he says. “That first day I met ya. At the lake. I knew you’d take whatever was goin’, that you’d enjoy th’oul ride as much as anyone else.”
She musters a befuddled look, as if she is battling between her own guilt and desire. Then, she edges further along the wall, until she feels it, right there beneath her left elbow: Jo’s walking cane.
“We should go upstairs,” she says, forcing her voice steady, full of lust and guilt and compulsion. “Where she won’t hear us.”
He drops his grip to step backward. He makes a little bow in a parody of gentlemanly chivalry. “Right. Well, after you. Lead the way, ma’am.”
She whacks the left knee first, then the right. “Fuck!” His legs buckle. The fury drives her. Gives her vicious strength. He holds up his hands to stall her next assault. She whacks his arms, his waist. He squeals and yelps. “Fuck! Fuck!” With Jo’s cane, she flocks and angles him into the corner, the corner between the kitchen counter and the back door. His black hair has fallen all the way across his forehead. Whack! Whack! Whack! He keeps his hands up, jabs them left and right in a boxer’s maneuver. He’s trying to protect his face.
Stop. A voice tells her inside her head. Stop or you’ll kill this man.
But rage drives her on—his thighs, his waist again. Tony is whimpering. He lowers his hands from his face and bends over to protect his crotch. “Please! Aw, Jesus, fucking Christ!”
She is about to hit one more blow, the last, good blow to the balls. But she stops herself, the cane held above her head.
“Get out! You have two minutes to get the hell out of this house.”
He straightens up. He stands creakily, his face creased with pain. He limps toward the back door.
“Fuck you!” He hisses at her from the yard.
She calls after him. “Yeah, you wish you had.”
Tom Fitzgerald answers his cell phone on the first ring. The voice is flat. He is expecting the worst and final news of Jo. “Hello?” he says, then pauses.
Ellen says, “I need to talk to you. Tomorrow.”
“Ha? What’s wrong? Did she take a turn?”
“No. No. I just checked on her. Jo’s resting. Fine.”
Something in her voice alarms him. “Ellen, are you all right?”
“Tony Cawley was here.” She swallows, forces her voice on. “He says that he and his sister have a lawyer. They want a DNA sample, a paternity test.” She stops. “For Catherine. For my husband’s daughter.”
Silence again. Down the phone, in the Fitzgerald household, Ellen listens to a TV twitter in the background. “He says that you can tell me. Tell me what happened. He says that Jo tried to get rid of Carmel—and their baby.”
Someone turns the TV volume down. Then the phone reception crackles slightly, as if he has moved into another room of his house. “Are you all right? Did Tony frighten you? Do anything? He was always a bit of a hot-head. He didn’t?”
Ellen pictures Tony Cawley limping across the yard to his motorcycle, cursing her to hell and back. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m fine. Or I will be once you tell me what happened. Seventeen years ago.”
He sighs heavily. “Yes. No. I mean . . . Ellen, it’s not what you think.”
Ellen is sitting at Jo’s kitchen table, the receiver from the black telephone cradled between her ear and her shoulder. The windowsill has been cleared of its clutter of magazines and ashtrays and cigarettes. Tonight, she has a clear view across the backyard. She watches the half moon that sits, half-hidden beyond two crab apple trees in the orchard.
“My husband had a kid. For our entire marriage. He had a kid in England. I was married to man who didn’t give a shit. About his own child.”
“He did c—” Tom starts.
“—Yeah, I want to believe that. But I wanted to believe a lot of things. The problem with that is that they just weren’t true. So I want to know now.”
There’s Fintan. She can see him now, at their kitchen counter in their Boston apartment. He’s drinking his morning coffee and scanning the front-page headlines on his folded-up copy of the Boston Globe while absently taking bites from his morning English muffin. All this ordinary life while there, lurking behind him, hidden in the sleeves of his overcoat, dancing through his head while he read the morning headlines, was this whole other part of him. Another existence.
“Ellen, you’re doing a great thing for a sick old woman. But if you’ll take my advice, when this is all over, you’ll just go back to Boston and your life and—”
Now,
in his mother’s kitchen, Ellen’s voice comes screechy. “No! I’ll go back to Boston when I’m good and ready. Or when all of you stop screwing around and tell me what happened. When you tell me who the hell I married!”
And loved, she thinks. Because she’s there, too, in that image in her head. In that breakfast scene where her hair is still wet from the shower, padding across the tiled kitchen as they mumbled their good mornings. Now she tells that younger version of herself: “Pitiful. You were stupid and pitiful. You loved him—or at least, you loved the part you were allowed to see or know.”
“I need to talk to you—and I’ll do what needs to be done to force you, even if I have to get some local police records.”
There’s a long silence on the other end. Outside Jo’s kitchen window, the moon has slipped most of the way behind a night cloud.
“I’ll see what Ruth and the kids are doing. And I’ve a full day’s surg—”
“—Tomorrow evening,” Ellen interrupts. “Unless one of your other patients is actually dead or dying, you’ll make it tomorrow. Evening. Seven o’clock. I’m calling the nursing agency for a replacement. Seven. I’ll be at your house.”
38
IT’S ALMOST THE END OF JUNE and the boy has been home for a fortnight, arrived home from college after completing his final exams.
Jo winces at the sudden voice in the house, this intrusion on her solitude. She has come to think of him as an upstairs lodger, someone who carries that air of another world, a city world full of noise and traffic and voices.
Since his first leaving she has grown used to it, this silence, the tick-tock of the wall clock, the quiet, secret rhythm of her days. Even Rosie the dog seems to have muted her mad, barking ways. In the winters, especially this last winter when, except for Christmas, he has found reasons not to come from Dublin.