Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  The old man shook his head. “It was a while before his mother died that he was here. …” He looked to where his daughter-in-law was now building up the fire of coals in the kitchen range. “Emily, come and sit with us. We can wait our tea. You’ll cook us a meal later, love.” He explained to Julie, “She’ll be the one to remember him. She was greatly taken.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Emily protested. She filled the kettle from the single tap in the sink and put it on the stove and then brought a chair from the side of the table. Julie, moving to make room for her, caught sight of a child sitting at the top of the stairs that rose steeply opposite the cottage door. Her mother saw her too. “Go back to your lessons, Mary, if you want Papa-John to go over them.”

  “Let her come down and meet Julie.”

  “She won’t go back up if you let her down, and she’ll make a nuisance of herself, butting in.” But then to the child, who was bound to have heard what went before, “Papa-John says you can come down.”

  But the child chose to stay upstairs. She was not in sight when Julie glanced that way again. There were two rooms downstairs, a small bedroom with a commode off it on the far side of the staircase, and one room upstairs, she presumed, with a very low ceiling. The light was good; Emily had gone from lamp to lamp turning them on when Julie came into the house.

  “Isn’t she contrary?” her mother said of the child.

  “As a cow’s hind leg. Let her be,” the old man said. “It was before the mill closed that Frank was here, and that was eleven years next spring. I remember I stopped by my sister Mary’s house—the child’s named after her—I’d come home those days covered with flour like a wafting ghost, and the woman with him burst out laughing at me. Do you remember her name, Emily?”

  Emily shook her head. “Only her face.”

  “She was Irish. I know that. Or was she a Brit? A fine-looking woman. They were going to marry, I think. Or were they already married? They were, sure, for Mary came over here and stayed with us, leaving them her bed and the key to the cottage. She’d let out the other rooms after all her men were gone, you see.”

  Julie learned that she had two uncles, one of whom was in Australia and one who’d been killed on duty with the Irish Army on a United Nations mission. “My father went to Australia when he left New York,” she said.

  “I heard about that, but nothing I remember about you or your mother. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Not so strange. It was all a mistake. The marriage was annulled.”

  The old man thought about that for a moment. He reached over and laid his hand on hers. “You can’t annul blood. The Crowley line is as strong in you as it is in me. We’re workers and have the hands for it. The Mooneys lived by the sea, fisherman and sailors, all of them dreamers. And the military went a long way back with them. There were Mooneys in Napoleon’s army, and some that came home with the French to be hanged like dogs in 1798.”

  “Wild Geese,” Julie said. “My father wrote a poem about them.”

  “He was a great reader as a boy, I remember—as we are ourselves in this house.” An exchange of glances between him and Emily puzzled Julie. It was both shy and intimate, and yet it did not exclude her. “We read a book a week from the lending library, taking turns aloud. Little Mary says it’s better than the telly, but that’s because she’s our principal performer. Would you like a walk on the ramparts where Frank played as a lad? I’ll give you the true history. The kids never got it straight, pretending to fight off an English invasion. The Brits were already there, mounting a vigil for the French in three directions and for the Irish at their backs.”

  Frank hadn’t gotten it straight in the poem either, Julie thought, but she didn’t say so.

  THEY WALKED ALONG the strand and then climbed up to the castle ruins, where three ancient cannon still pointed out to sea. The old man was nimble and sometimes took her hand more to have it in his than to help her over the rough terrain. He made up family history when he wasn’t able to remember it, she thought. It didn’t matter: she had grown up on lies, but with enough of the truth to have brought her to where she was now.

  They stopped at a pub on Market Street near the 1798 memorial, where he introduced her as Frank Mooney’s daughter. It sounded strange to her and perhaps to the old man’s familiars also, for it set them sorting among the Mooneys they could remember; the one firm in their minds was the soldier killed in Palestine. And they were shy of her, the only woman in the lounge. They smelled of the farm and stayed close to the bar except when the old man called one or another of them to come over and meet his grandniece. They shuffled forward when invited and scuttled back as soon as possible.

  The child, Mary, came to tell them dinner was ready, as Julie supposed she often did with her grandfather. The men scraped and nodded as the threesome was leaving. They were in awe of the old man, and they were respectful; and every one of them turned to watch their departure, nodding solemnly.

  Mary was at the gawky stage, growing too fast at twelve to know what was happening to her. She resembled her grandfather more than she did her mother. In fact, Julie realized, the girl could be taken for her child, and she was old enough to be her mother. Mary was not shy in the way Emily was; she had spent the afternoon accumulating questions about New York.

  “I’ve promised she’ll get to the States while I’m alive,” the old man said.

  “Or I’ll never get there, see,” said Mary.

  Julie did not see, but she didn’t say so.

  “Don’t you have a grandfather?” the girl asked.

  “I must have had two of them, but I can only just remember the one in Chicago.”

  “They’re better than fathers, aren’t they?”

  “Tut, tut, tut,” the old man said.

  “Some grandfathers are better than some fathers, how’s that?” Julie said.

  “It will do,” he said.

  As soon as they entered the cottage, the old man went through the bedroom to the commode. Julie and Mary waited at the bottom of the stairs. The girl’s mother was dishing up at the far end of the room. The smell of cabbage prevailed.

  “Mother doesn’t read with us,” Mary confided in a whisper. It seemed to be something she’d wanted to say—as though to set the record straight.

  “Well,” Julie said, a sound without meaning.

  The meat was tough and there wasn’t much flavor to it, and the cabbage was overcooked, something certainly the cook could not be blamed for. But everybody at the table, including Julie, complimented Emily. While she served the sweet, the old man asked Mary if she had finished her lessons.

  “Almost.”

  “Now, Mary,” her mother said, “you don’t want to grow up like me, do you?”

  It was a rhetorical and oft-repeated question, Julie realized, the truth in it so obvious to the listeners it had all but lost its meaning. She met the old man’s eyes where he had been watching her from the instant the woman started to speak. He made a face, wry and a little sad.

  Emily said, “You’re too easy with her, Papa-John.”

  “I am what I am,” he said.

  Mary said, “Papa-John, may I show Julie my picture?”

  “Your picture?”

  She got up and whispered in his ear.

  “Ah, that one.”

  When Mary brought the framed picture down from her attic room, he explained, “Her Aunt Mary—her great-aunt, that is, your grandmother, Julie—when she was putting her house in order—she knew she was dying—she gave away her little treasures to those she thought might want them.”

  Mary put the oil painting of a clown on the table, leaning it against the teapot so that Julie could see it best. “I call him Pansy,” the girl said. “There was a pansy in our garden once that looked just like him.”

  Julie could imagine it. Perhaps the artist did too. She did not know whether or not she liked the painting, but she leaned forward and looked at the name in
the corner. The painter had liked it well enough to sign her name. “Edna O’Shea,” she read aloud.

  “That was her name,” Emily said, “Edna. Frank called her Edna.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS A LOT to hope that Edna O’Shea was a well-known painter whose works hung in the National Gallery of Ireland. But that was Julie’s fantasy, and she intended to cherish it until she learned otherwise. She asked Roy Irwin when she called him Monday morning if he had ever heard of Edna O’Shea.

  “Seems like. Is she a folk singer or musician?”

  Julie told him of her Wicklow experience.

  “I’m not up on the art scene,” he said. “So, if it were me, now, I’d first go to the Registrar General, where facts are facts. If they were married in this country, it’ll be registered, and it won’t hurt while you’re there to search the names of the dead.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It’s only sensible, wouldn’t you say? Now here’s a bit more for you: I got on to a buddy at Iveagh House—that’s the Foreign Office. Kearney is dead, but my friend is ninety-nine percent sure Lady Graham-Kearney is alive and compos mentis. She’d be living at Graham Hall, which is near Ballina in County Mayo.”

  “How far is that from Sligo?”

  “Closer than Galway, it is.”

  “Can you get me a phone number?”

  “I can try. Ring me up again midafternoon.”

  SHE SPENT THE REST of the morning among the Customs House records and left the building no better informed than she had gone in. The birth of Thomas Francis Mooney was on record, but nothing more about him. Nor could she find any record of Edna O’Shea. They would not seem to have been married in Ireland. Nor had either of them died there. It was a kind of thank-you to the clerk who had so patiently assisted her that she lingered afterward to tour the historic building on the River Liffey. The allegory of its principal decorated facade seemed more ironic than inspired, Hibernia and Britannia holding peace and plenty in their hands.

  In the National Gallery that afternoon—in the heart of Georgian Dublin—she learned that O’Shea (1930-) was a British landscape artist represented in several private collections, none of which was in Ireland. So much for Great-uncle Crowley’s belief that Frank Mooney had married an Irishwoman. O’Shea had most recently exhibited at the Duval Gallery in London four years before. Still, Julie thought, her name was O’Shea, which didn’t sound particularly British. She was both pleased and let down, but mostly pleased. Wherever O’Shea might be now, she was alive when the Art Directory was published a year before. She thanked the gallery assistant who had helped her.

  “A landscape artist,” the young woman mused. “She might well have pained in Ireland, and you must consider there are no taxes required of artists who live here.”

  “Would the Duval Gallery in London give me her last address, do you think?” Julie asked.

  “It’s worth ringing them up, surely,” the woman said.

  Julie went down the magnificent circular stairway, the walls around which were hung with portraits of Ireland’s great. She was turning from the painting of a young William Butler Yeats by his father when she saw the Gray Man on the floor below her. He disappeared immediately beneath the stairs. The clatter of her heels reverberated, overlapping clops, as she ran down the marble steps wanting to overtake and confront him. There would never be a better place to do it. But though she looked in all directions and persuaded a guard to look in the men’s room for him, it was in vain. He had simply vanished.

  She arrived back at her hotel to learn that her New York office had been trying to reach her. Operator Seventeen.

  When the call came through, Tim’s voice was as clear as from across the room. “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Hey! You’re not supposed to be uptight in Ireland. That’s supposed to be the most relaxed country in the Western world.”

  “Okay. I’m relaxed. Tell me.”

  “I got a call for you from Richard Garvy’s secretary. The Stadlemier group put up the money. They’ll go into rehearsal after Christmas. When I told her you were in Ireland, she called back with a message from Garvy: You’re to go and see his grandmother. Her name is Norah Barton Garvy. She lives in Sligo, and he’ll telephone her to expect you. Let me give you the address and phone number. …”

  “Is that all, Tim?”

  “What did you expect?”

  “No word on Kincaid and Donahue?”

  “Not yet. Their lawyer’s asked for police protection for their families.”

  “Oh, boy,” Julie said.

  “The Post started a series today on crimes of vengeance. It mentions Kincaid and Donahue as possible victims.”

  “Any suggestion of who they’re victims of?”

  “You mean Romano? Are you kidding? With his lawyers?”

  “I’m glad I’m here,” Julie said. Then she thought of the Gray Man.

  “How’s it going?” Tim asked.

  “I’m getting some good leads.”

  “I’ve got a great title for you—‘Digging Up Father.’”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch soon. …”

  “Hey, hold on. Someone tried to wheedle your Dublin address out of me on Friday. What I did, I put him onto Roy Irwin. Have you been in touch with him yet?”

  “Very much so. Who was looking for me, Tim?”

  “No name. What he did say, a Father Doyle had referred him.”

  Father Doyle? The priest didn’t know she was in Dublin. He’d suggested she might start her search in Ireland, but he didn’t know that she was going to do it. “Will you do me a favor? Telephone Father Doyle at Saint Malachy’s Church and ask him what it’s all about. I’ll call you in a couple of days from wherever I am.”

  It was midafternoon before she reached Roy Irwin. No one had contacted him about her Dublin address, or about her at all. She told him she had seen the Gray Man at the National Gallery. “It’s as though he deliberately shows himself and then disappears. I wish I knew what it means.”

  “I can tell you where I think I’ve seen him: I think he was in the Gardai, and it might have been Special Branch. I see him in my mind’s eye when there were VIPs around. From the looks of him now, he might have been invalided out of service. And what he could have done was go into the security business on his own. How does that strike you?”

  “Very imaginative.” She didn’t need that kind of guesswork.

  “Think about it,” Irwin said. “Now here’s the number of Graham Hall. See if you can go up with me tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s only Tuesday.”

  “It would be better for me if we could make the Ballina stop on the way to Sligo.”

  On the phone to Graham Hall she identified herself as the daughter of Thomas Francis Mooney. She was invited to lunch with Lady Graham the next day.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE COOL BLUE MIST HAD not yet lifted when they went out from Dublin in the morning. The traffic was light once out of the town, and they were soon traveling at a good speed through farm and cattle country where at every crossroads the milk cans were waiting for a pickup. Julie observed the road signs: No Overtaking … Single Carriageway … Lay-by. A great black circular spot on a white background marked the site of a fatal accident. With Irish perversity, Roy Irwin speeded up to pass the marker, the wheels squealing on the curve. They stopped for coffee at Cloondara and to see the River Shannon where it joined the Royal Canal. Irwin pronounced the name for her in Gaelic and told her its meaning, Meadow of Two Ring-forts.

  Trying to pronounce some of the place names herself, Julie was struck with a curious thought: “Is Gaelic computerized?”

  “Now that’s a good question. There’s a bank of Gaelic words … sure, anything that’s on the typewriter is on the computer, but you had me for a minute there. It’s a fierce language, isn’t it? And you know, it’s spoken still in some of the islands and parts of Donegal.”

  W
here a bucolic playwright lived.

  “When I asked you if you knew Seamus McNally the other day, I was hoping you’d tell me something about him.”

  “Were you?”

  “He has a new play that’s going to be done in New York,” Julie said, “The Far, Far Hills of Home.”

  “It’s not a new play. It may be that to New York, but to Ireland it’s an old, old play.” He glanced at her and then looked back at the road. “It was put on over here last spring, and there were near riots. That sort of thing is out of the history books—Synge and O’Casey.”

  Julie was surprised. Didn’t Richard Garvy know that? Perhaps it was rewritten, she thought, or they might even be counting on the Dublin notoriety to pique American interest. “Did you see it?”

  “No, but I heard. It was withdrawn. For more work, they said. I’ve not heard of it since. It’s about an Irish-American entrepreneur who comes back to his Donegal village and persuades the people to invest in a scheme to drill for oil. He’s a con man with a great line of gab. But they do strike oil, and before the play’s over, the people are destroyed by their own greed.”

  It would be a great part for Garvy, Julie thought. “What happens to the con man?”

  “I’m not sure about that. But the nationalists took grave offense at the play. They’ve been onto McNally for some time, in any case. They’ll turn out to shout him down wherever his plays are shown.”

  “Is he married?” Julie asked.

  Again Irwin looked at her. “How would I know that? I’ve never met the man.” Then, thoughtfully, as he stared at the road ahead: “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought as much.”

  It occurred to her that Roy Irwin might be expecting more of her on this journey than a share in the cost of the petrol.

  They reached Ballina shortly after twelve noon without sight or mention of the Gray Man. The countryside had all changed—now a rocky terrain with small lakes, occasional roofless ruins, in some of which the sheep were in gentle habitation. A long range—the Ox Mountains—rose to the northeast and divided County Mayo from County Sligo. Swift clouds rode the winds that came off Sligo Bay. In the town they stopped at the Downhill Hotel and got directions to Graham Hall. Julie washed up and took the number of the hotel so that she could call Irwin there when she was ready to go on. She thought it fateful, when they drove through the busy market town, to find the chief monument here, as in Wicklow, was to the fallen in the 1798 Insurrection. General Humbert had landed eleven hundred Frenchmen and taken Ballina.