by Aine Greaney
In October, he goes back to Dublin for his graduation, a ceremony with a cap and gown and a dinner for parents. Jo has already decided not to go.
He startles her, the height of him suddenly there, as if she’s forgotten that he’s come home. Or sometimes, she passes the parlor door and, just for a second, she wonders who that man is, this man who is suddenly sitting there in one of the good parlor armchairs, his nose stuck in a book.
He is avoiding her. She is avoiding him. She’s up and out and working by the time he comes downstairs in the morning. In the evenings, he doesn’t sit for supper but clomps upstairs to wash and change, then leaves the house by the front door to stride around the house for his racing bicycle.
It’s late afternoon, the 21st of June, St. John’s Night. Down in the village, the kids are collecting for the St. John’s bonfire.
They used to come up here, running up the avenue with their wheelbarrows and their cheeky faces, knocking on her front door and giggling at the sight of the old woman as they asked, “Have you any ould tires or timber for the bonfire, missus?”
But for years they’ve stopped coming. No village child is brave or foolhardy enough to make it all the way up Knockduff Hill to knock on old Mrs. Dowd’s door.
In his two weeks home, he has managed to colonize her parlor. He has spread his books and his newspapers across her dining table. He leaves his dirty teacups along the hearth or the mantel. In the late afternoons, she comes in from the fields to the clack-clack of his portable typewriter, one of the items he unpacked from his Dublin boxes.
“Could you come in here a sec?” He calls to her from the parlor table, where he’s sitting typing up another CV and letter of application.
“Mam, I got engaged,” he says, over his sheet of typing paper. “And the wedding’ll be soon. We don’t want to wait. And we’re not having anything big. Just a few friends.”
Engaged? We? A girl, yes, some college girl, someone he knows in Dublin. But married? At his age? Ridiculous. “Who’s the girl?” she asks.
He gives her a weary look. “Ma-am. You know damn well who ‘the girl’ is. It’s Carmel. Always was.”
Carmel. Carmel. Carmel who stood naked and smirking at her, here in this house, here in Jo’s own kitchen.
“Is she pregnant?”
“Yes.”
The air stops inside her. She swallows. Swallows back this killing rage.
“Look, we’d have been getting married anyways, so what’s the difference?”
Her hand twitches. She wants to walk over there and batter his face. “Is it yours?”
He levels his gaze on her—a slow, poison look, a look filled with every bitter thing that has passed between them. “Look, Mam. We’re getting married. We’re making it the same weekend as my graduation, when our friends will already be in Dublin. Auntie Kitty and Uncle Brian are coming. So you can attend or not. Up to you.”
He shoots the typewriter’s carriage home. Then he starts reading his typed paper, his head swiveling to review the lines he has typed.
Kitty knows. Knows. Her own sister, and she never told her. So Jo, his mother, is the last little detail in his plans.
She watches him sit all the way back in the dining chair, its mahogany frame creaking beneath him. He has a malicious little smirk. “We’ve it all sorted. I’m actually filling out forms now, typing my letter of acceptance for this job. It’s an insurance company in Galway. Selling life insurance. It’s part salary and part commission, flexible hours, so it’ll still leave me time to work here.”
Jo pats her cardigan pockets, then her trousers. Jesus, where are her fags?
He’s still talking as she walks away, across the hall to the kitchen. There are her Bensons in the window. She folds a piece of newspaper, lights it in the grate of the range. Then she stands there puffing, watching the swatch of sky framed in the kitchen window.
Clack-clack-clack from the parlor. She puffs impatiently. My son is going to be a father. Trapped.
She walks back to the parlor. “What are you talking about, work here?”
“We’re going to build a house,” he says. “In that bottom field below at the road. I mean, it’d only be a half-acre. I had a chat with Seamus Ryan—Ryans the builders. He says we could start the foundation before the winter and then the builders could really get moving.”
His words ping off the parlor walls, the mantel, the china cabinet. Her mind can’t grasp them, what he’s proposing. They keep escaping her. She has to relay them to herself. He’s talking of building a house. My boy and his pregnant girlfriend, a man and a woman and a child in a house.
“. . . and I could take over and work the land now, not later; you’re not getting any younger, Mam.”
She sees her boy’s life reeling backward. No longer her bright boy—the boy the newspaper wrote about after his school exams. In her mind’s eye, he is one of the local Gowna men, the jokers who spend their Saturdays sitting along the counter in Flanagan’s. Then there he is, with that jaunty, eegit’s walk, crossing Gowna’s main street. He’s puffed up with porter and bravado chat. He’s carrying an armful of Tayto crisps to quiet the carload of wailing kids.
At home, the little wife is waiting and grumbling. With each baby she has grown fatter and sourer. She’s waiting in a house built on her, Jo Dowd’s, land. And after all his education, he’s back home working this land and with a half-arsed job selling insurance, going door to door like a knacker.
“No,” she says, pushing aside his forms and papers to lean across, her face level with his. “No.”
He pushes back his chair, stands there opposite her, taller by almost an inch. “We’ll do it with or without you,” he says. He spreads his hands to take in the parlor, the yard outside the two curtained windows. “It’s all half mine anyways. All those bloody years out there mucking out stables and up before school for the milking when I should’ve been like any other kid? It was my father’s and now . . . until . . . well, it’ll be half mine.”
“Half your father’s?” Stupidly, she wonders if he’ll burst out laughing. Laugh at his own mad joke. Or while he’s been away living that city life, has he somehow forgotten who he is? No, who they are. Has he somehow forgotten the sufferance, the bitter sacrifice that forms the core, the credo of Jo Dowd’s very existence?
She reaches to hit him. But this time he holds her wrist in midair. He tightens his grip, his strong, man’s fingers squeezing until his mother whimpers in pain.
39
“THEY’RE GONE TO THE PICTURES,” Tom Fitzgerald says, as he shows Ellen into a huge living room set with cream leather couches and russet-colored walls. “In Castlebar. Dinner in a burger place first, then some action flick Lorcan’s been going on about for weeks. The kids were thrilled.” Then, “How’s our patient been today?”
“Okay. The same. Slept most of the day.”
“The agency nurse turned up on time?”
“She was early. When I left, she was already settled in for the evening. She brought her knitting. Seemed like a nice girl.”
“Sit. Sit!” he says, nodding her toward a cream armchair to the right side of the hearth. Ellen’s armchair makes a puff sound as she sits on the cushiony leather. He says, “With the agency nurses, it’s kind of potluck. Sometimes, they’re just in it for a job, the fantastic hours and pay, but sure you can’t blame—”
Her look stops him, interrupts his usual village-doctor small talk. “So I’ve got a stepdaughter,” Ellen says.
Tom flops on the couch. In his sweatpants and T-shirt and stocking feet, he looks younger. He also looks exhausted as he passes a hand over his chin, across a gingery five o’clock shadow. “Yeah. Catherine. She was home with the mother here last summer, that night we met her down in Flanagan’s.”
“What’s she like?”
Tom smiles. “Oh, you know, like every young teenager. A big streel of jet-black hair down over one eye, the black eyeliner or whatever you call that stuff they have nowadays. And it probab
ly all costs a fortune to make it like that. And she certainly wasn’t happy to be stuck in Gowna, or down in Flanagan’s with her mother and her uncle. Actually, the only thing that got a smile out of her was our Riona. First, they did the usual thing: sniffing around each other like two strange dogs. Then, next thing we look, they’re thick as thieves and giggling and talking about their music and dance classes.”
“Dance?”
“Our Riona’s been taking ballet after school. Oh, yeah, and Carmel’s girl—Cat she insists on calling herself, which, of course, our Riona thought was way cool—is mad into some sort of modern dance, too. So they hit it off, our girl and the little cockney kid.”
“That was the only time you saw her—Cat?”
“No, we saw her around the village after that—down at the shop, swishing around the street. Hard to miss a kid like that—the gimp of her, tall as a telegraph pole and all dressed in black and always looking like she’d love to kill you. But sure, they’re all like that nowadays. Can’t be easy for Carmel. And there was no mention of a boyfriend, a partner or husband.”
“So your daughter liked her?”
“Oh, yeah. The whole week after they rang and texted and texted more, and Riona pestered her mother to be let down to the house on her own on her bike. But . . .” Tom pulls a theatrical face. “’Twas a bit . . . awkward.”
You’re lying, thinks Ellen. You just didn’t want your blond, clean-cut daughter hanging out with a kid like that.
Tom leans over to grab one of the couch pillows. It’s a pretty, tapestry cushion of deep russets and yellow in a Tex-Mex design. “But I know they’re still in touch—e-mail or instant messaging or whatever. And they exchanged photos of themselves—each all done up in her dance gear.”
“Tony said they were poor, making ends meet. That Carmel just worked menial jobs there—in London.”
Tom shrugs. “Possibly. Carmel left school early, never did her leaving cert—unless she took some Open University thing over in London.” He gestures his head. “Have you actually seen the house above? In the Lane?”
“Yes. Tony lives there now?”
“He moved in with the mother. His kids come on weekends sometimes. He had his own house out the Galway road, but he sold it after the divorce.”
Tom cradles the cushion against his crotch, then leans all the way back against the leather couch. He’s watching, gauging Ellen’s reactions. The doctor suspects that something ugly passed between Tony and Ellen. “Carmel Cawley always had notions of herself. Even last year, even that night in the hotel, the way she’d tell it, you’d think her life was going fantastic. And long before she went off to England, she’d a job as an aide above in the hospital in Galway, wheeling the trolleys and doling out tea to the patients. But to hear her tell it, you’d think she was the head matron—the nurse in charge.”
“Where did they meet, her and Fintan?”
“Oh, at the dance hall back the road here. ’Twas the only place you met anyone back then, twenty years ago. This was the tail end of the show bands and the start of the whole disco thing.” Tom smiles nostalgically. “It was great, when I think about it. Really kept an oul’ buzz around the village.”
“He was in love with her.” Ellen conjures that photo of Carmel and Fintan at the house, in the closet in his old room.
Tom is obviously wondering whether to confirm or contradict. “I don’t know. I think he was obsessed with her, like, he could never believe his luck that she’d actually picked him. She was at least three years older—out of school, working, driving her brother’s car around the place. Back then, a woman with a driver’s license and a job and a room away from home seemed really exotic.”
“So what happened with the baby—with Catherine? Tony said that Jo tried to get rid of it—the kid.”
He runs his palm across the cushion’s tasseled edges. His voice turns low and mournful. It’s as if he’s speaking to himself. “We were all really naïve and stupid. We thought we were smart, sophisticated, but even after four years of college, we were as green as the grass.”
“We. We—who?” Ellen whispers as pieces of this story propose themselves in her mind. “What did you have to do with it?”
“We had no legal abortion here in Ireland then. We still don’t. There was one referendum, but it was defeated. So girls went to England—stayed with friends or a cheap guest house, checked themselves into an English hospital, paid their money and came back with the damage undone. Nobody the wiser. Their mothers or fathers or the boss in their office jobs knew nothing. Nobody knew how many girls went. But some said it was nearly 20,000 a year.”
“So that’s why Carmel moved to England? Fintan sent her to get rid of the baby, but she decided to keep it?”
He tilts his chin at her. “Oh, Christ, no. No. Fintan wanted that kid. He was finished his degree, top of his class. And that’s what fellas said back then, that she got pregnant on purpose, to make sure she’d keep him here, in Ireland at least, before he emigrated with his diploma under his arm like half of the rest of the country. Look, we were only twenty-one. And Jo wouldn’t have the . . . the termination done in England. Oh, no. That wasn’t Jo Dowd. She wanted it done where she could make sure it was done, make sure she got what she paid for.”
“You. You—were—a—medical—student.”
He holds the patterned cushion to his chest like a shield. His voice is monotone, barely above a whisper. “Me and a mate of mine from college.” He swallows. “She paid us 2,000 quid apiece—a fortune to a student.”
“And you agreed?”
“Yeah. My father wanted me to take over the practice here the minute I qualified, though I had high-falutin’ dreams of taking off to Australia. I even applied and got a residency in a hospital in Melbourne. Then, my father got wind of it, and for the last few months of my studies, he started traveling to Dublin, ringing on the doorbell of my flat and insisting that I remember who’d paid for me, what my family duty was. But with 2,000 quid of Jo Dowd’s money I could’ve taken off, free and clear.”
“But it never worked.”
“It was supposed to.”
“What, Tom? What the hell happened?”
He props one foot on his knee. “She was clever, Jo was. I’ll say that for her. She left no detail uncovered. We needed a place where we wouldn’t be seen, where nobody from Gowna would see or tell. It was her came up with it—the dance hall on a Sunday night. A Sunday evening when it was all boarded up and empty, and when nearly everyone in the village was at a Sunday evening devotions down in the church.
“She knew there was an entrance around the back. And there was this cloak room behind the stage, just off the ladies’ toilets. It was perfect.” His voice trails off. His expression is tortured.
“And Carmel actually went there—of her own free will?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, no, not at first. But Jo took care of that, too. She offered them—the Cawleys—even more money than myself and Vinnie, my friend from college. I don’t know how much, but either way, a woman like Jo Dowd comes along, offering a large check. So Carmel went along with it. Tony drove her up there, up the road on a Sunday evening, the 30th of June. I remember,” Tom says to Ellen. “I’ve forgotten anniversaries and birthdays, but I’ve always remembered that date; 30th of June, 1985.”
“So you and this other medical student were ready, waiting.”
“Yeah. Had everything from my Dad’s surgery. Carmel was only six weeks pregnant, so it was going to be easy. To be honest, we thought of it as a kind of a lark, something that us fellas could do for each other—get poor Fintan off the hook. I even remember thinking how cool, how level-headed Jo was, that she was just paying to get her son out of trouble. Cool and broad-minded and not said and led by the Catholic church, the way everyone else was.”
“And Fintan went along with it, too.”
“Afterwards. We found it all out afterward. It never crossed our minds that Jo was only acting on her own behalf—not his. And we nev
er dreamed that he actually wanted to have a kid—but afterward.” Tom’s rakes his fingers through his thinning red hair. “He didn’t know. His mother had set it all up, behind his back. Part of Carmel’s bribe was to pretend, say she’d had a miscarriage. It was an easy lie. Easy money for everyone.”
“Except it didn’t work?”
“Obviously not.” He reaches a hand toward her, as if, in fact, he could magically stretch that far, across the space between them, from his couch to her chair. “With all Jo’s smartness, all her little well-thought-out operations, it all backfired on her, on us. We were up there at the appointed time, me and my friend Vinnie; Vinnie had a car. We found an old table in the hall’s ticket office. We scrubbed it down, laid a sheet over it. The day before, we’d bought two cheap desk lamps in Woolworths in Galway. We plugged them in, set them on each end of the table and angled them to keep the light focused but low. We were like kids, stupid kids playing in our own episode of Trapper John, MD. I even remember what was hanging from the hooks in that old cloakroom—stuff that people had left behind. There was a dark blue blazer with glittery lapels. And there was a woman’s winter coat, off-white with fur along the collar and cuffs.
“I had stuffed two plastic bags with antiseptics and a speculum and swabs and all the gear that the textbook told me I’d need. We’d even brought a six-pack of beer to have when it was over, when we were finished and Jo came with our money.
“Tony and Carmel arrived. At first, Tony came striding in, all cock-of-the-walk, but when he saw our setup, saw the actual table and the sheet, the speculum and all the rest laid out on a towel, he mumbled that he’d just wait for his sister out in the car.
“So it was just Carmel and me and Vinnie. And I introduced them ’n’ all. Like, ‘Vinnie, this is Carmel,’ as if we’d all met at a party. And she was flirty with him, all smiling and jokey.
“I handed her a hospital gown and I said we’d just ramble around, us boys, that we’d walk out into the main hall while she got undressed.