by Anne Emery
Brennan opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “And then?”
“And then Charlie saw Miss Teresa Clare Montoya Brennan making her elegant way down Grafton Street. The bollocks came home and told me all about it.”
Dublin, 1936
“Wait till I tell you who I saw today, Nessie!”
“Who?”
“A girl in Grafton Street.”
“Well, smack me in the gob! Imagine that.”
“Not just any girl. She’s brilliant. She has black shining hair and dark, dark eyes. She’s tall and slight and carries herself like a queen!”
“Isn’t that a fine thing for a Republican to be saying!”
“Oh, you know what I mean. And she looked right at me. Donal O’Leary was with me and she spoke to him! Donal says she comes into his father’s bakery in Dawson Street, nearly every day. She has the grandest name: Teresa Clare Montoya Brennan. Her da is Spanish. He teaches at Trinity College, but he used to be a diplomat; they call him ‘the Ambassador.’ Her mother’s one of the Brennans from Ranelagh. Donal told me all this, and he says his da needs another young fella to help in the shop. So, since I don’t work at Guinness on Saturdays, I’m going to work in the bakery.”
Oh, here he comes from O’Leary’s, with flour spilt all over his jumper and him not even knowing it’s there. And the grin on his face — doesn’t he look like he’s been touched by the angels? Bad scran to him!
“I spoke to Teresa today, Ness! In the bakery. We talked a bit. Well, her and me and Donal. She’s going to the opera tonight with her parents. Dublin’s a grand spot for the opera, as you know.”
“No, I don’t know. If I had the money for the opera, I’d find a better use for it, so I would.”
“We talked of other things as well. You’ll love her, Nessie – she rides!”
“Oh we’d hit it off just fine then, Charlie. Half the fun of riding is hearing all about somebody else doing it when you can’t do it yourself.”
“Ah, well, now . . . Tell me this, Nessie. Should I ask to call on her at home? She lives in Merrion Square, you know.”
“Ha! You with the arse out of your trousers going to Merrion Square. They’ll have the Guards on you; you’ll be thrown in the nick. Stay clear of there.”
Isn’t this a day to be treasured! Charlie is taking me out for a hobble round Stephen’s Green. Knowing full well that one Teresa Montoya Brennan is known to promenade through this very spot. And sure enough, isn’t she coming towards us now, with a younger girl. A plain little thing. Her sister? Bad cess to the pair of them. Now they’re on the footbridge. In the shade of the trees, except of course where the sun breaks through in a blaze of glorious light around herself. And I see she hasn’t spared any expense in her appearance. A royal blue dress, belted at her tiny waist, with a pleated skirt falling just below her knees. Soft leather shoes. She hasn’t bobbed her hair like so many of the girls; she has it pinned up in an old-fashioned style. Janey Mac, will you look at Charlie beaming at her like an eejit. He’s so dazed with joy he hasn’t even remembered to speak to her. Well, I’ll speak up for him. Oh, there goes one of my crutches . . . I’m slipping to the ground.
“Pardon me, Miss Brennan, could you help me up?”
“Certainly. Are you all right there?” Such a refined voice. “Good day to you, Charlie.”
Listen to him stuttering. I’ll do the talking here: “Did you happen to see my horse anywhere, Miss? He seems to have escaped me, the brute.” Me, with the crutches!
Poor Teresa. As polished as she is, she can’t quite hide the look of disbelief on her face. “I’ve seen no horse,” she says to me, “but if I do I’ll give him a crack on the arse and send him galloping back to you.”
Oh, isn’t that a sight, Charlie blushing from his collar to the top of his head to hear her say “arse.”
That might have made him bold for their next encounter but alas! there’s another suitor at her side now. Yes, somebody else has come along and ground little Charlie’s dreams into dust. Charlie didn’t witness their first meeting of course, though it’s a wonder, the way he kept watch for her. But he saw the rogue today. In Grafton Street. Of course Charlie takes her part in the quarrel.
“He came right up to her in the street, Nessie. Full of himself, he is. Handsome in that swaggering way some of them have. They were having a row. I was nearby and heard it.” Cowering in the shadows, no doubt.
“This fellow was trying to talk to her and she was putting him off. ‘You have something of a reputation, Mr. Burke. And I don’t mean for accosting young ladies in the street, though that doesn’t commend you either.’
“‘I didn’t accost you in the street, surely, Miss Montoya Brennan. As I recall our meeting, I simply made a courteous greeting to you in response to a little smile I thought I saw on your lips.’
“‘I don’t smile at strange men, Mr. Burke. You are mistaken.’
“‘I’ll have you smiling at me before the day’s out, Miss Montoya Brennan. I’ll have you laughing so hard you’ll be in fear for your linen.’
“‘Good day, Mr. Burke.’ And she turned on her heel and stalked away.
“But he persisted and walked after her! ‘I apologize for that remark. It must be the company I keep. My mother’s always telling me I should ingratiate myself with a better class of people. What do you think?’
“She didn’t turn to look at him but said something like: ‘I think running around with rifles and taking part in not-so-secret revolutionary organizations tends to coarsen a man.’
“And then he said to her, as serious as could be: ‘I promise you that you’ll never be touched by that part of my life. Hold me to it.’”
“Well, you know the rest. She married him. But still, Charlie had eyes only for Mrs. Burke, whether she was done up in fine style for the opera, or lumbering around with a big belly after Declan got her up the pole. All the same to Charlie.
“Until disaster struck. Declan committed a mortal sin and got himself excommunicated from the Holy Republican Church. And that part of his life bore down on the two of them like an armoured personnel carrier on the streets of Belfast, to the point where they fled Ireland in the middle of the night and left everything and everyone they knew behind them. Charlie didn’t last a year without her.”
The old woman began to croon: “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen. Come back again to the land of thy birth! But she wasn’t coming back. So my brother packed up and emigrated with a new name and an important commission from the ’RA to raise funds over here to send guns over there.
“My brother made a point of learning everything he could about your mother and that led him to all kinds of information about her husband. Including what oul Dec got up to in his first few years as a model US citizen. And give the devil his due, when Charlie set himself to learning something, he mastered it! Fool that he was in many ways, he was a very able fellow indeed when it came to his tireless work on behalf of Mother Ireland. I guess he had to do something with the passion that burned within him; must have compressed it all into the intense flame of Irish Republicanism.” She looked at us as if newly reminded of our presence. “Did you say something?”
“How do you know what you claim to know about my father?” Brennan could not keep the anger out of his voice.
“Oh, a great man for the pen, was Charlie. Cathal. He saw, he heard, he memorized, he wrote. In his own peculiar shorthand.”
“Who was Stephen? What was that queer drink, Lameki?”
“Oh, now, you’d have to ask Cathal all that. But, sadly, he’s no longer with us. God rest his soul.”
Brennan leaned towards her and demanded: “Who shot my father?”
A crafty look passed over her face. “I guess it was someone who can read better than you can, Burke.”
Brennan launched himself out of his seat and loomed over her, grasping the arms of her chair with his hands. His face was only inches from hers. “Someone fired a gun into a room full of men,
women and children at my niece’s wedding! My father nearly lost his life. Because of you and your malicious little jest with the obituary. Your own father was shot. You were shot. How could you sit here plotting and scheming for the same thing to happen to someone else, someone you don’t even know? I suggest you examine your conscience, and I also suggest you won’t like what you find there. And after you’ve done that, you can let us know who is behind the attempted murder of my father. And make no mistake. You are every bit as guilty as the man who pulled the trigger!”
Gone was the insinuating smile, the smug amusement. Nessie Murphy shrank back in her seat, looking small and old and frightened.
“Brennan,” I began, “let’s all sit down and —”
“Get out of here!” Nessie cried. “Get out, the two of you, or I will scream the house down! The neighbours will call the police, and you’ll be taken out of here in handcuffs. Frightening and tormenting an old woman in her home. Get out!”
I got him out of there but not before he turned and pinned her once more with his damning black eyes.
“Brennan, for Christ’s sake!” I said when we got into the car. “The woman is seventy-three years old. You could have given her a heart attack.”
“The poisonous creature! I’ll get the answers out of her yet.”
“How? By terrorizing her? We’ll never get near her again. She’ll call the police if she catches sight of us.”
“She won’t want the police around, the nasty old reprobate. Imagine being Cathal Murphy and being saddled with the likes of her.”
“I wouldn’t have envied him, I admit. No wonder he died!” Then my mind veered off in a direction it had not taken before. “Or did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Did he die? We know the obituary is in some kind of code. Maybe the whole thing is a fake. Maybe there wasn’t even a death.”
“Jesus Christ that died on the cross! What next?”
“We have to consider it. I think we can safely assume he really existed.”
“Are you getting metaphysical on me now, Collins?”
“No, just lawyerly. I want confirmation that the man is six feet under. If not, did he finally act out his revenge on the man who took away the love of his life?”
“Why wait forty years?”
“Well, somebody did.”
“I’ll call Patrick, get him to look into the death records, however one does that. Then we’ll know. There’s no point speculating any further.” We didn’t say another word on the drive to Sunnyside. We went in the house and down to the family room, and sat at the card table. Declan Burke looked unconcerned as he dealt a hand of cards to the two men who were trying, without any help from him whatsoever, to unravel the mystery of his life and his near-death experience. Would I soon become so accustomed to this situation that I would find it normal?
“Who shot you, Dec?” Brennan asked. “Did you tell us and I wasn’t after hearing you?”
“I believe I made it clear that I don’t know who shot me, Brennan. Let’s leave that to the experts, shall we? In the meantime, let’s play cards.”
“That obituary now, Dec, would you be so considerate as to offer us anything by way of an explanation —”
“Your oul da is alive; he intends to remain alive for a while yet. Ergo, no obituary.”
“Would the name Charlie Fagan mean anything to you, Da?”
If it did, he gave no sign. “Would you ever fuck off with yourself and get serious about your cards? I’ll be dead of natural causes before we get through this hand.”
We heard someone on the stairs and turned to see Terry flying down two steps at a time, dressed in a suit and tie, his hair newly cut.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. O’Madden Burke!” his father exclaimed.
“Why O’Madden Burke?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m Mr. O’Madden Burke today,” Terry explained. “Whoever shows up looking particularly well-tailored and respectable gets slagged. You know, from Joyce.”
“A character in Dubliners, right?”
“And Ulysses, of course,” Brennan put in. “That’s where Molly got her nickname. Her real name’s Maire but when she was a young girl she spent the good part of a summer lying about in bed, daydreaming about her boyfriend, who was out of town for the holiday. We started calling her Molly Bloom.”
“I never read the whole thing,” I confessed.
Terry stage-whispered. “Neither did I, but don’t tell the rest of them. The Baltimore Catechism and the works of James Joyce were required reading in this house. No wonder we’re all a little schizo. Do we celebrate Bloomsday or Corpus Christi? Do we rebel against the Church and all its works, or do we refuse even a sip of Kool-Aid before receiving Holy Communion?”
“Corpus Christi! I haven’t thought of that in years. There used to be a parade.”
“That’s right.” Declan joined the conversation. “And this fellow —” he jerked a thumb at Brennan “— before he became the Reverend Father Burke declared one year at the breakfast table that, since Corpus Christi also happened to be Bloomsday, we should spend the day walking around the city the way Bloom and Daedalus did in Ulysses, stopping at various pubs to eat and drink, and ending up at a whorehouse instead of venerating the Body of Christ.”
“Ever get that conflict sorted out, Brennan?” I needled him.
“Not a problem unless Corpus Christi falls smack in the middle of June, on Bloomsday. Those years I’m torn.”
Terry looked at his watch and sat down at the table. We settled in to a poker game and played for half an hour before the game broke up.
“I have to go,” Terry said.
“Where?”
“Wine and cheese with the missus. Sheila told me if I miss this, it will be mac and cheese and no wine for me all week. Let’s get together for a night out sometime, lads.” We agreed, and he left us with a little salute.
“I’m off too,” Declan announced. “And where would you be off to?” Brennan asked. “Someplace I’m not all that keen to go, to do something I’m not all that keen to do. But I’m lucky to be invited there at all. So I’m going.”
“Where?”
“The bride and groom’s apartment, to view the wedding photos. Your mother’s there now.”
“You will let us know if you see someone in the photos who shouldn’t be there?”
“Anyone who shouldn’t have been there will not be showing his face in the pictures. I think we’re safe making that assumption. Find something to distract yourselves, why don’t you?” We heard him shut the door.
Brennan looked at me. “Alone. At last.”
“Your point being?”
“We can go through this place, with a crowbar if need be. There’s got to be something here. Let’s start in their bedroom.”
“You start in their bedroom. Give me a more neutral assignment.”
“Attic or basement?”
“Attic.”
“All right. You’ll see a door at the end of the hall up there; it leads to a narrow staircase to the attic. Watch your head.”
I hoisted myself up into the attic. There was one bare bulb to light the place, and it did not do much against the fading light coming in through the one dusty window. The far end of the room was devoted to the storage of old furniture: an incomplete set of shield-back chairs, a banged-up mahogany china cabinet with mismatched tea cups, saucers and old tarnished silver, some wardrobes full of women’s and children’s clothing. A side wall was lined with bookcases. On the other side was a museum of children’s toys from the last forty years: a wood-seated kiddie car, long tubes of Sta-Lox Building Bricks with white multi-paned windows and transparent green awnings, Tinker Toys, a tinkly baby piano, an old folk guitar. I had to remind myself I was there to work, not to play.
There was a large steamer trunk that I marked for future consideration. Everything else was stored in cardboard boxes. The first one I tackled contained framed photos of family groups, obviously in the old co
untry, and crumbling black-paged family albums held together by laces. There were old Roman missals from various years back to the turn of the century, along with jet and wooden rosaries, crucifixes, holy cards and religious medals. I had to smile when I saw a church collection envelope with the words “Saint Bratty’s” scrawled on it in red crayon, over the words “Saint Brigid’s.” A bit of sibling rivalry? Had little Brigid Burke been less than saintly, prompting one of her brothers to deface the envelope bearing her name?
The next box held photographs of the Burke family during the early years in New York. There was a smiling, blond Patrick as an altar boy. An older girl with black hair — Molly — held two smaller kids by the hand on the steps of a church. One little boy was trying to twist out of her grasp. Here was Brennan, looking angelic as a choirboy of twelve, with his black hair combed to the side and his mouth in a perfect O. A respectable-looking Declan and an aristocratic Teresa stood beaming as an older priest presided at the christening of one of their babies. Then there was an insolent-looking teenage Brennan dressed in skin-tight jeans and a black T-shirt. He was sprawled in an arm chair, cigarette dangling from his lips, looking lazily up at a slim, fair-haired girl who regarded him uncertainly.
My interest was piqued when I discovered a box full of documents relating to the house. The deed, dated 1950, and the abstract of title. The mortgage. Lawyers’ correspondence showed Declan had scraped together a fairly good down payment. Old bank statements from the 1950s and early 1960s. Cancelled cheques for coal and then oil, electricity, telephone and all the other necessities of life. Regular deposits, and occasional cash withdrawals in varying small amounts. Nothing out of the ordinary. I pored over the papers for a long time but could not see anything of significance.