Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The woman returned to the phone. “You’re to come right along, Norah says, and will I send someone to guide you?”

  “I’ll find you.”

  When she stepped away from the phone, the man next in line said, “You’ll turn right when you go out from here and then left and carry on till you come upon John Street …” He gave her the exact location of the house. She didn’t know whether to feel safer or less assured. She had wanted very much to love Sligo, the home of her beloved poet, Yeats. And she would! To hell with Quinlan and all the crawling anxieties his name had loosed in her. There are no snakes in Ireland: how about that? She hitched her shoulder bag into place and strode across the room. The Gray Man was at a table near the door drinking tea.

  JULIE STOPPED in front of him and demanded, “Who are you?”

  The face was pale and pinched as if with pain, even as Irwin had observed in the Dublin disco. He half-rose and then dropped back into the chair. “My name is Edward Donavan—if it concerns you.”

  “I’d like to know why you’ve been following me,” Julie said.

  His colorless eyes stared up at her, blinking steadily. “Madam, to the best of my knowledge I have never laid eyes on you before in my life.”

  She could have been mistaken, but she was sure she wasn’t. She did not apologize. She shook her head and walked on. Irwin had gone off on his own by then. She stopped at the desk and inquired if there was an Edward Donavan registered. There was. So, he would have checked in before her arrival. Which proved nothing except that in this instance at least he was not literally following her.

  The town was gray with the sky going overcast. The wind was prickly and smelled of the sea. She passed yet another monument to the men of 1798. It had been erected in 1898; and so, likely, she now realized, had the other monuments in Wicklow, Ballina and wherever else the centennial of that disaster had been celebrated. Achieving a perspective on those manifestations restored a faltering self-confidence. The Old Town, of which John Street seemed the bustling center, caught her imagination. She composed of it a background for whatever she would write about Richard Garvy’s grandmother. The whole street was eighteenth-century. Even the shops had the sound of another time—a chandler, a turf accountant, the greengrocer, the chemist, a drapery shop … a Chinese takeaway. Norah Garvy’s was one of a series of red brick houses built wall to wall. The ribs of the fan transom above the door were freshly painted white. So were the window frames. As she approached, there was a flutter at the heavy lace curtains within.

  A dumpy, red-faced little woman with her white hair stacked to a peak opened the door to her. “I’m Peg,” she said, “Gran Garvy’s niece. We spoke on the telephone.”

  She had wonderful bright blue eyes and a smile that seemed perpetual. She led the way through a narrow, high-ceilinged hall, past an open door where Julie glimpsed a tile fireplace and above it, brightly illuminated with a picture light, the portrait of the Christ Child at the age of bar mitzvah. When they reached the door at the end of the hall, Peg paused. “Will I put your coat over a chair here, or do you want to keep it? Americans find it chilly this time of year.”

  Julie kept her coat.

  “You’ll have to speak up to Gran,” Peg said, her hand on the doorknob. “She’s going on ninety-three, you know. And you mustn’t stay too long. Just tell her you’ll come back and see her tomorrow.”

  “But if I can’t?”

  “It won’t matter.”

  The very old woman sat in a platform rocker at the curtained windows where the late-afternoon sun filtered through. Her feet were on a stool, her knees covered with a shawl and another shawl was around her shoulders. She had once been tall, Julie thought. It was at the draft of air from the opening door that she turned, not at the sound. She reached for her cane at the side of the chair. Julie went forward and introduced herself, leaning toward the ear the old woman turned her way.

  “It’s a pity Richard couldn’t come himself. He’ll come to my funeral. Tell him I said that.” She had dark eyes, which Julie hadn’t expected, Garvy having famous blues. “He’s made his mark over there, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Did you know I put him through Trinity?” The voice was wavery but high and clear.

  Julie nodded and sat in a kitchen chair Peg brought her. Gran Garvy hooked her cane around one leg of the chair and tugged. Julie drew the chair closer to her.

  “A waste of money on an actor. What do you do? He told us, but I’ve forgotten.”

  “I work for a New York newspaper.”

  “It’d be the funeral that brought you, then. Whose is it, Peg? Roger Casey.” She answered herself as soon as she’d asked the question. “Little Roger Casey. Do you know how it happened he was in Dublin at the time of the Easter Rising? His mother wanted him to go to the Christian Brothers school there and sent him to her sister.” The old woman paused and drew several long breaths. Julie could hear the wheeze. Gran Garvy put an arthritic hand on hers to hold her in place until she could go on with the story. Her cheeks were sunken, but she had most of her front teeth still. “The sister, unbeknownst to the boy’s mother, was a Sinn Feiner. She set him to studying the flute thinking he’d learn to play all the old airs that would catch the hearts of the people. But he was slow, and she let him take to the drums: they’d wake him up at least. Are you musical?”

  “I like music,” Julie shouted.

  “James Galway is the best thing Ireland has exported since John McCormack—long, long before your time. I can hear music, you know, with the headphones. Is it true that Richard is going back into the theater?”

  “Yes—a play by Seamus McNally.”

  “Not that one!” Peg said in alarm, and to neither Julie nor the old woman.

  But Gran Garvy said, “Speak up, Peg. What did you say?”

  “Richard wouldn’t do that to us, would he? The one about oil wells in Ireland?”

  “And why not?”

  “Are you forgetting what happened when they put it on here?” To Julie then, and through it all the little smile persisted: “There were demonstrations and alarms. It puts us in a bad light. He’d not take that kind of a part, I’m sure.”

  Julie said nothing, but she caught the old woman squinting at her, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Speak up!”

  “The Far, Far Hills of Home,” Julie said.

  “That’s the one,” Peg crooned. “It’ll be us they’ll take it out on. I’m too old myself to be listening in the night for trouble.”

  “Oh, God help us,” Gran Garvy said. “You’re enjoying yourself. If it’s a good scare you want, give me your hand and I’ll read you what’s left in it.”

  The little round woman made a ball of her fist and hid it in her bosom. Gran Garvy turned her Gypsy eyes—and that’s what they were, Julie thought—toward Julie. She smiled, showing every yellowing tooth in her head. “Would you like me to read your hand for you?”

  “All right.”

  “Make us a cup of tea, Peg.”

  Peg frowned and darted a glance at Julie. It seemed that already she was staying too long.

  “Shall I come back tomorrow, Mrs. Garvy? Wouldn’t that be better?”

  “It would not. It might be too late.”

  So Julie drew her chair up closer while the old woman put down the cane. She opened the drawer of a sewing table beside her chair and took out a magnifying glass as wide as a hand’s palm. She ordered Julie to get a cushion from another chair. She positioned the cushion on her lap and Julie’s hand on top of it, palm up. This, obviously, was the pleasure of her life. She took up the cane again and with it pushed aside the curtains to let in more light. The sun had gone from sight. The very old woman explained, “I rely only on natural light to show me the truth. It is the truth you’re seeking?”

  “Yes.” Years before Julie had gone to a reader and advisor, more out of mischief than belief. She also had played at the game herself. But when the old lady crossed herself and said a silent pr
ayer before focusing the magnifying glass on Julie’s hand, Julie decided she had better pretend more serious attention than she felt. The truth was she did not want to pay serious attention. Too many things were troubling her that a seer might pick up on.

  Gran Garvy was slow to speak. Her mouth grew taut, and then she drew in her cheeks, suggesting alarm. Was it an act? Julie couldn’t tell. At times Gran closed her eyes to rest them and then opened them and looked again. And still she did not speak.

  “Will I bring the tea when it’s ready?” Peg spoke to Julie from across the room. “You ask her. She can’t hear me.”

  Julie asked loudly and clearly, “Do you want tea now, Mrs. Garvy?”

  She looked up at last and put the magnifying glass back into the drawer. She folded Julie’s fingers over the palm and gave the hand a brief shake with both her own. “Yes, tea. I cannot read your palm, dear. It is beyond me.”

  “What does that mean?” Julie was distressed in spite of herself.

  “It means I am an old woman, too old to discuss any death save my own.”

  “And death is here?” Julie said, thrusting out her open hand toward the woman.

  “It is you that said it. I want my tea and a scone.”

  “There are no scones,” Peg said.

  But Julie did not bother to convey the message. “I had better go now.” She got up. “I will tell Richard Garvy I was here when I see him.”

  Quick as a piston, the old woman’s cane caught Julie in the midriff and propelled her down into the chair again. “Where are you going from here?”

  “To meet my friend, a newspaperman.”

  She had to repeat it and gave the old woman Roy Irwin’s name. She said she had never heard of him.

  “Are you going looking for Seamus?”

  “I don’t know yet, Mrs. Garvy. I haven’t decided.”

  “I shouldn’t if I were you.”

  “I’ll remember the advice,” Julie said, unable to keep the chill out of her voice. “Good-bye.”

  Peg brought the tea, two cups of a dark brew. “You’d better have this before you go,” she said. “Richard would never forgive us. Would you have a drop of whisky? You mustn’t take her too serious, but for all of that, she has the gift. I wouldn’t give her my hand for anything in the world.”

  “I heard every word, Peg,” the old woman said. “Where’s the scones?”

  “It’s too near your supper.”

  “Mrs. Garvy,” Julie said, “have you ever heard of a painter named Edna O’Shea?”

  The old woman repeated the name. “Is it the wild shores of Donegal she paints and pilgrim sites the likes of Lough Derg?”

  “Do you know where she lives?” Julie asked.

  “How would I be knowing that? But you might try Greely’s Bookstore on Stephen Street. Is Maisie Craig still there, do you know, Peg?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Peg said; a tightness at her smiling lips suggested a low opinion of Maisie Craig. And at the door when she let Julie out: “You don’t need to tell Maisie we sent you, mind.”

  IT WAS DARK and after six when Julie reached the bookstore. A sign on the door indicated that the bookstore would be closed the next day in honor of Roger Casey. There were window posters announcing cultural events, musical, poetic, and historical. Julie could not remember having seen a bookstore as crowded. And the shelves were well stocked, books in Gaelic and French as well as in English, paperback and hardcover. She followed a sign, Art Gallery, that took her upstairs. Watercolors and prints and a few garish oils, but nothing attributed to Edna O’Shea. “Not in my time,” the young clerk said when she inquired.

  She went downstairs again and browsed among the books before going to the cashier’s cage to ask for Maisie Craig. She had not enjoyed her visit to the Garvy house. Nor had she done a decent job for the column: she had not even asked what Richard Garvy was like in his Trinity days, and there would have been tales aplenty. She had let her anxieties intrude, the feeling of strangeness, the Gray Man. Use your fear, Jeff would have said. Sharpen your wits on it. She found the plays of Seamus McNally, but The Far, Far Hills of Home was not among them. She chose To Spite the Devil and counted out her two pounds fifty pence before going to one of the two cashier’s windows. “Are you Mrs. Craig?” she asked, paying her money.

  “Bless you, dear, I’m not. Are you with the funeral party?”

  “I’m not. I’m trying to find the painter Edna O’Shea, and I was told Mrs. Craig might help me.”

  “And who told you that?” The woman looked over her glasses as though the better to see her. There was no challenge in her voice, but there was the suggestion of alarm.

  “I went upstairs to the gallery first,” Julie said.

  “Ah, well, they’re all new up there.” Julie had said the right thing. The woman, her tawny hair straggling out of a twist at the back of her head, poked it into place with a pencil and bade Julie step aside till she took the customer waiting behind her.

  “Now then,” she said, getting back to Julie. “It’s several years since we were her agents here in the west. I was working upstairs myself then. She came to a disagreement with Mr. Greely, shall we say, and took her things away from Sligo entirely. I can tell you where they went—a village on Donegal Bay called Ballymahon.”

  “You knew her, then,” Julie said and made a note of the place name.

  “No, dear. I was a mere clerk.”

  “What about her husband?” Julie asked, her heart beginning to pound.

  The woman was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then: “Are you sure she had one?”

  “Yes. Or did have.”

  “That would be it, then, wouldn’t it?”

  Julie could hardly swallow the lump of disappointment in her throat. But she told herself that she had been due for an interruption. She would go on to Ballymahon in any case. She thanked the cashier and left the store without ever meeting Maisie Craig. She wondered, thinking back, what might have happened if she had said she was with the funeral party. Of which, it was to be presumed, Joseph Quinlan was a member.

  She also wondered if Gran Garvy’s dire intimation of death referred to her father. Would she grieve if she learned that he was dead? And what was grief? Had she grieved for her mother? No. Not as she understood other people’s grief. But then, her mother wouldn’t have allowed it. Or—and the possibility further shook her—was she still grieving?

  She reached the hotel ten minutes late for her meeting with Roy Irwin. He was not in the lobby. Nor had he left a message at the desk. But there was good news: the hotel had a room for her.

  She waited the rest of the hour—until seven-thirty—for Irwin and then went upstairs for a quick wash. The room was a fair size, but the wardrobe and the huge old bed with its bolster and its backboard made it seem small. The windows overlooked a courtyard two floors down. She drew the shade, unpacked necessities, washed and went downstairs to dinner. During which she read McNally’s To Spite the Devil. Roy Irwin did not show up. Nor did she see the Gray Man again that night.

  THIRTY

  THE HOTEL LOCKED ITS doors and drew heavy drapes across the front windows as the funeral procession approached. Julie told herself that if she was ever going to be a decent newspaperwoman, she could not run away from the action. She went out and watched from the crowded steps of a nearby church. There was a chilly wind, and the clouds tumbled into one another crossing the sky. The casket was borne by eight young men, while eight old men, honorary pallbearers, struggled to keep in step behind them. Church bells tolled, picking up on one another, all over town. A great number of priests marched, some in red, some in black, some in purple, and some in the brown robes and sandals of the Franciscans. Behind them came the flagbearers with the green, white and orange flag of Eire in the center, flanked by a green and gold banner that featured the Irish harp and by a faded, threadbare flag of the same tricolor as the national emblem: it might have been preserved from the 1916 Rising. Then came a half dozen ominously masked marchers
in their dark berets, IRA Provisionals, she assumed, and after them some twenty or so prosperous-looking men of middle age with one white-haired woman among them. They wore green sashes and an air of elitism: they had survived an earlier service to their country. Righteous, militant, arrogant. Julie made up their resumes and hated them because she was sure that one of them was Joseph Quinlan. Three drummers drummed the dead march, and the fifes sounded a dirge. People on the church steps and along the way fell in with the procession—men, women, and children, most of the men with black armbands, and some of the women shrouded in black veils. At the end came women all in black, wailing lamentations. These were such sounds as Julie had never heard, but she knew the word was keening. It was a little like flamenco and yet not. Ceremonial yet primitive, savage. Such vocal grief seemed too much, unreal.

  A lone woman standing beside her on the steps pulled a long face and said to Julie, but loud enough to be heard around, “They do put it on, don’t they?”

  One of the marching mourners whipped up her veil and spat in their direction.

  “And they want to be called travelers,” the woman said scornfully. “They’ll be nought but tinkers as long as I can call them.”

  “It’s not real grief, is it?” Julie asked.

  “They’re paid for it. It’s all part of the show and a mockery of the tradition.”

  Following the procession came an ambulance and two cars marked Press. Roy Irwin stepped out of one of them and ran alongside until he got his balance. He came to Julie. “Come with us. There’s room in the car. I’ll walk alongside.”

  “I don’t mind walking. I’d rather.”

  “I’m sorry I stood you up. When I got there, they told me you had a room. You’d gone up an hour before.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Well, it has to be. There’s an American here you might find interesting. Joe Quinlan. I got wind of a meeting last night and went round and got an interview with him after. An exclusive.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Wait till you hear. You know who he is, don’t you?”