The Women

by Alice Taylor

  Eileen travelled on to Chicago where she went for an interview and got a job in a restaurant. She loved the positive encouraging approach of the American people and spent twelve years there, regularly sending parcels back home. Often, as she wrapped up what in Ireland was known as ‘the parcel from America’, her tears mingled with the little luxuries that she knew would be so appreciated at home, and she felt that she was also posting back her tears to the Black Valley. She got great joy from sending home special items to her mother, who had never indulged in buying herself luxuries, but Eileen remembered her admiration for special items of clothing in shop windows in Kenmare. Her mother had an appreciation of beautiful things and Eileen recalls going to a very exclusive store, Marshall Field’s, one time to buy a real leather brown handbag with matching button boots. Their arrival in the Black Valley caused great excitement and the elegant boots fitted her mother perfectly. And when her parents built a new home she posted back all the curtains, to the great delight of her mother.

  Then in 1963 she made a return journey home and still recalls the joy of being reunited with her mother off an early morning flight into Shannon Airport. When she came around the corner at Moll’s Gap she saw afresh and appreciated more the beauty of her beloved Black Valley. On that visit home, Eileen married Michael in the Naomh Muire an Chuimín Dubh church, and he is still her lifelong companion. Michael had gone to America before her and come back after her. When the ceremony was over they went back to the family home for what was then called the ‘wedding breakfast’. For days prior to the wedding the entire family had cooked and baked. After the breakfast people lined up around the kitchen floor and sets were danced to the music of local musicians. Later they were joined by the ‘Biddy Boys’, or ‘straw boys’, who were part of every marriage celebration. They all danced and celebrated into the early hours.

  She and Michael returned to America for another four years and then came back for good in 1967 with their young son. Tourism had taken off in Ireland so they built a family home and guest house, which they still run together. To Eileen the Black Valley is the most beautiful place in the world and she looks back on her childhood there with the belief that it is very good to be stretched early in life and that it is possible to be happy on very little. There, as a child, she had listened to the call of the cuckoo and the musical tones of the cascade of water running down the mountains to the river. Nowadays, in early summer, she likes to return to her valley to hear the cuckoo and the music of the waterfalls.

  Chapter 11

  A Dependable Woman

  In life we sometimes arrive at a place where our coping skills are stretched beyond their limits. When I was a young married woman with two small children, both my husband and I worked in the family business helping Uncle Jacky to run the village shop and post office where the postal delivery came in at six in the morning and there was an all-night telephone service, which meant that someone was on call day and night. Then the house next door came up for sale. I saw the For Sale sign on the gable end and wondered who our new neighbours would be. ‘Aunty Kit’, as she was known in the village, had run a guest house there for many years and had decided to retire. It never crossed my mind that we might buy it! Then one night on the phone to my mother I mentioned that it was for sale and she straight away enquired, ‘Are you not thinking of buying it?’ ‘Us? No, it never crossed our minds,’ I told her in surprise. ‘Well, think about it then,’ she advised. ‘Ye have no back entrance and that is no way to live on the side of the street.’ This was the voice of a countrywoman who was used to wide open spaces and access to every corner of the farm. ‘But we have no money,’ I told her. ‘Don’t let that stop ye,’ she advised. This was when bank managers demanded your skin for a loan and long before the Celtic Tiger was even a pup. My mother, on this occasion, was ahead of her time!

  And so we bought this rambling old house in need of much renovation and finished up with a large guest house in the centre of the village. It entailed a few years of hard graft and a bank manager constantly breathing down our necks. In the middle of the second episode of building I developed a ferocious allergy in my hands, so much so that not alone did my hands look terrible but the itch almost drove me crazy, and I finally had to give in and go to our local doctor. He looked at them in dismay.

  ‘Job for a skin specialist,’ he told me unhesitatingly. And despite my protestation, that same evening I found myself across the desk from a frosty-faced consultant, who took one glance at my hands. They looked as if they had been buried for a week. Without even asking me, he announced, ‘Into the Bon Secours this evening.’ ‘I can’t,’ I protested desperately. ‘What do you mean you can’t?’ he demanded. ‘I have small children and we are in the middle of a big building project,’ I said, almost on the verge of tears. ‘And I’m sure that you’re a big help with that pair of hands,’ he told me icily, looking at my hands as if they smelt as bad as they looked. ‘But I need to be there,’ I told him. ‘Can you not prescribe something?’ ‘No,’ he barked crossly, rising from his desk. ‘Now, you are only wasting both my time and yours. So book in or go home.’

  With no choice I found myself that evening ensconced in a four-bedded ward in the Bons. For two days I didn’t talk to any of the other patients because I slept day and night and woke only when a nurse arrived with a bowl of black evil-looking liquid into which I immersed my hands. My snappy consultant came daily and sniffed disapprovingly by my bed. Finally I felt energetic enough to look around me and a friendly-faced woman in the bed opposite said, ‘Whatever about those hands, what you needed more than anything else was a good sleep.’ She was right and so was my frosty-faced consultant. I arrived home with much improved hands that I was afraid to use! Not much of a help in the prevailing situation of babies and builders.

  Then one morning I met Maude on the street. Years previously she had moved with her elderly parents from a farm much further back in West Cork into a house just outside the village. She cared lovingly for both parents until they died, and then she upped and went to England to train as a nurse. Training with young school leavers cannot have been easy for her, but Maude was not one to flinch at a challenge and when she had completed her training she came back to her house and beautiful garden and took up a nursing career in a nearby hospital. Because she had a caring nature and great capability, she was a wonderful nurse.

  Now she inspected my hands – they still looked like the paws of a skinned rabbit – and nodded, diagnosing a condition I had never heard of. She took a pen out of her bag and wrote down an unpronounceable name. ‘That ointment will sort that out,’ she told me. ‘I have seen the condition before and this is the only cure.’ She was right! After a few applications my hands were back in action. I was eternally grateful to her. But I never again took my hands for granted and on Maude’s advice always wore gloves for tough jobs. She enquired regularly as to my progress and because of my hands we became friends. You could tell Maude your innermost thoughts and they never went further than her.

  Then a mutual friend Molly became very ill and Maude and I sat beside her bed during her last hours while her husband paced the floor like a caged tiger. They had no children and no extended family. It was not an easy situation, but Maude took charge with inspirational sensitivity. She calmed the distraught husband and lovingly comforted the dying woman. She massaged Molly’s hands and face and when the need arose delicately moistened her mouth. I knew no comforting prayers for the dying but Maude seemed to have an endless supply and a deep knowledge of exactly the right words to use when the need arose. As the night wore on I realised that Molly was in the hands of someone who knew her Kübler-Ross stages of dying. Maude had years of nursing experience during which she had been a comforting presence at many deaths and I felt that what I was witnessing then was a deep wisdom and love of humanity. I felt honoured.

  When Molly finally peacefully closed her eyes in the early hours of the morning, Maude had travelled with her to the very edge of wherever it is w
e go when we leave this world. Maude’s absolute belief that Molly was stepping into the arms of a loving creator filled that hospital room with a glow of hope, comfort and love. I realised then that my friend was an extraordinary woman.

  A few years later Maude and I went to Lough Derg together. Now if you have never been to Lough Derg you cannot imagine a place more demanding of your physical and mental stamina. I have been there on a few occasions and if you were to ask me why, I would be hard put to explain my reasons. You arrive fasting since the previous midnight onto a cold miserable little island where you remove your shoes and walk barefoot over stony paths called ‘beds’, praying, and you starve for three days without sleep. Sounds crazy. It is! But for some reason beyond the logic of human understanding you leave that island physically and mentally refreshed and ready to meet any challenge that life decides to send your way. But while you are on the island you question the sanity of the thinking that brought you there. It is a place of total contradiction. One visit can be more effortless than you ever thought possible and you may well be cushioned into thinking that you have cracked it. But then you come back a few years later and that little island takes you between its teeth and pushes you again to the very edge of your endurance. You walk around in a stupor of sleep deprivation and starvation. The cold freezes you into the marrow of your bone or if the weather happens to be warm the midges eat you alive. There is no winning on Lough Derg.

  But doing it with Maude was a whole new experience. To her it was a breeze. She climbed nimbly across the toebattering rocky beds, lost in a meditative world of her own. The only source of sustenance available is dry toast and ‘Lough Derg soup’, which is boiled water with a shake of salt and pepper. This miserable meal is consumed once a day, and when Maude and I partook of it she savoured it as if it were a gourmet beverage. She endured the long night vigil of praying without sleep with stoic tenacity, helping others who found it simply too tough by taking them to the nursing bay where she sourced medical aid when the necessity arose. To put the tin hat on all of this, she actually fitted in an extra round on the dreaded stone beds, which meant an added hour tripping across the crucifying sharp stones. This, she told me, was for a friend who was going through a hard time. You were lucky if you counted Maude amongst your friends.

  Chapter 12

  A Family Secret

  One day last summer I answered a knock on my front door and found two attractive young American girls standing there. ‘We are on a rather strange mission and we think that you might be able to help us,’ one of them told me. ‘We have read your book To School through the Fields and feel that you understand how Irish life works.’ I was more than a little bit intrigued by this statement and invited the two young women in. They introduced themselves as Suzanne and Rose. Suzanne proceeded to tell me a story that had begun to unfold at their father’s funeral a few weeks previously. Her telling was so graphic that I felt I was there …

  As she watched her father’s coffin disappear down into the grave Suzanne felt that the pain inside her would explode. The same pain as when her mother had been buried. It was back. Then she had been a young teenager with no idea of the dark days ahead, but now she knew. She and Rose had clung to each other during those terrible days after Mom’s death. It was so good to have their father with them. Though shattered by his own loss, he still stood strong and helped them to cope. He had been the rock to which they had both clung. Slowly the pain became bearable and they recovered. Dad had been amazing and it had taken her a long time to appreciate the inner strength it had taken from him to be able to comfort them in the midst of what must have been his own terrible sorrow. And, of course, there were the three aunts – ‘The Aunts’ as she and Rose had always laughingly called them. Dad’s three sisters.

  Though these three aunts had left Ireland years before and had settled down and lived happily in America, they remained as Irish as if they had never left Kerry. The eldest of them, Aunt Susan, after whom Suzanne herself was called, was the matriarch of the family, and she doted on her two nieces. Unlike her sisters Mary and Nellie, she had never married and she loved the two girls as if they were her own children. Their mother had got on extremely well with her three sisters-in-law and included them in all family events. Their mother was an only child and having no immediate family of her own was delighted to be adopted by her husband’s ready-made family.

  After their mother’s death Aunt Susan had moved in with them and this had helped them enormously. She was warmhearted and comforting and saw them through their turbulent teenage years. Then Aunt Susan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. They were devastated, but she handled it with such faith and courage that they were strengthened by her serenity and bravery. The other two aunts rowed in and they all cared for Aunt Susan at home, where, they told me, she had died peacefully two years previously.

  Suzanne was unprepared for the wave of desolation that now engulfed her father. She wondered if it was the delayed grief after their mom, now joined with this new tide of grief. It had submerged him. Mary and Nellie seemed to understand him better than Rose and herself and called constantly to the house, spending many hours chatting to him. But he had never recovered from the two deaths in such close succession, and his appetite for life was never again the same. His fatal heart attack, that had struck out of the blue, plunged them all into state of shock.

  It was then that the girls learned about the family secret. Towards the end of the burial service, when the priest had finished the final prayers, Suzanne overheard Aunt Mary whispering: ‘I wonder do they know?’ ‘I have no idea,’ Aunt Nellie whispered back, ‘he never said.’ The exchange had an undercurrent of secrecy and urgency. Even in the midst of the funeral trauma she was taken aback. What on earth could they be talking about? Later, she told Rose about it. They were very puzzled and invited the aunts around to ask them about it.

  The following evening the aunts arrived, Suzanne made tea and when they were all comfortably settled she decided it was the time to broach the subject of the graveyard conversation. ‘Aunt Mary,’ she began, ‘in the graveyard yesterday I overheard you and Aunt Nellie wondering if we knew something and if Dad had told us. What was it?’ She was not prepared for the sudden stunned look that flooded both aunts’ faces. They looked totally shocked. Then their gazes locked as if looking to each other for guidance about what best to do. Slowly Aunt Nellie braced herself and took the initiative. ‘Mary, tell them. It’s time they knew.’

  ‘Well,’ Aunt Mary began hesitantly, ‘this may come as a bit of a shock to you. We were never sure whether you knew or not … Well, both of you always thought that Susan was your aunt and your father’s sister, but that was not the case. She was, in fact, your father’s mother and your grandmother.’

  Her announcement was met with stunned silence. Susanne and Rose looked at their aunts as if they had taken leave of their senses. ‘What?’ they both breathed in shocked amazement.

  Suzanne was the first to recover and very slowly, with an emphasis on every word, demanded: ‘You mean that we had our grandmother living right here with us and we never knew? What kind of goddamn carry-on was that?’ Rose began to cry deep shuddering sobs. When Aunt Mary went to comfort her, Rose pushed her away. ‘You wronged us. You robbed us. Why didn’t you tell us? Now they’re both dead and we can never talk about it with them. What the hell was wrong with you? We had the right to know.’ Suddenly the enormity of releasing the long-hidden secret overcame both aunts and they too began to cry. Suzanne was the first to recover her composure. ‘Tell us the whole story, Aunt Mary.’

  Aunt Mary settled back into her chair, swallowed deeply and began to tell the story in a trembling voice. ‘It was all such a long time ago. Susan was barely sixteen when she became pregnant. She was just a child herself really. We were all younger than her and hardly knew what was going on, but Susan disappeared for a few months. I found out later that my mother had sent her to stay with an aunt in Dublin where nobody knew her. When she came back a b
aby suddenly appeared in the house, and my mother told us that it was her own baby and we simply accepted it. It seems unbelievable now, but back then we were incredibly naive and totally ignorant of the facts of life. We loved the little fellow – your father – and he grew up with us and went to school with us. Some of the neighbours may have wondered about the whole thing, but there were no questions asked. At the time that kind of scenario was not so unusual. The alternative was that Susan would go into one of those dreadful mother and baby homes where they were treated very badly and their babies taken off them. In fairness to my mother she spared Susan that, and Peter had a good life with us. Susan, being the eldest, was the first to emigrate, and it was not easy for her. But our mother had a sister here in America and she looked after her, and then the rest of us followed on. We had no second-level education, not to mention third-level, but we knew how to work, and later we went to school at night and got on well. When all of us girls were here, Peter joined us and we sent him to college and he did well. Then he met your mother and had a great life with her.’

  ‘Did he know that Aunt Susan was his mother?’ Suzanne asked quietly. ‘He did. As soon as Susan judged that he was old enough to know, she told him. And when you were born, I think he was very happy to call you after your grandmother.’ ‘Why did Dad and Aunt Susan never tell us?’ Rose had calmed down as the story unfolded. ‘I think that Susan never got over the trauma of the whole thing. Looking back now, Ireland in the thirties was a terrible harsh unforgiving place for young women. There was only one sin there then and that was to be an unmarried mother. It had a terrible shame attached to it. And I think Susan never got over the trauma of it all. I think she wanted to let things be once she had made her peace with Peter.’ ‘I wish we had known,’ Rose said sadly. ‘It feels as if we’ve missed out on a whole part of their lives that we could have shared.’ ‘We never told you because we felt that if Susan and your father wanted you to know they would have told you. It was their right to make that decision.’