by Mary Gordon
But it was not like that at first. I can tell you what it was like at first, those late afternoons in Breeda and Stevie’s flat in Fatima Mansions. And I must tell you what Fatima Mansions were: four-story blocks of flats built in the Stonybatter section of Dublin in the 1930s, built hopefully, very hopefully. Slum clearance, they were called. Flats without central heating, even in the year 1998. Considered a failure now, an urban disaster, a breeding ground for crime and drug use and depression.
Pearl had been working with Stevie for a couple of weeks, having him write stories as her mother had advised, when Breeda sent a message with Stevie. “My mam wonders if you’d come to our place for tea.”
It is more difficult to trace the course of a friendship than a love affair, a friendship that consisted of drinking tea and telling things about themselves, quiet stories, details of childhood. What is the critical mass, the point at which the thin material thickens so that a solid has been formed, and you can call it, without overstating anything, a friendship? That is what they had.
The first shy afternoon: three shy people, Pearl, Breeda, Stevie, drinking tea, talking about cookies—biscuits, they were called. “Mrs. Reilley told me these were on sale and as I knew you loved them I bought five packets of them. I think they’ll be good in the freezer.” “That’s a great thing, mam,” and they really did seem happy about the purchase; they went on talking about it for what seemed to Pearl an excessive amount of time, but she would learn it was not excessive. Their life was made up of small events, small triumphs like that: packets of biscuits gone on sale, the opportunity seized, the memory hoarded, as were the biscuits, for future delectation.
Pearl and Breeda were drawn to each other by a net of likenesses and differences. They were both shy, they both liked to be quiet, they both looked more than they spoke. And yet Pearl felt she’d never known anyone like Breeda, someone who thought of herself as so much in the hands of fate, someone to whom things happened, rather than someone who made things happen. She wondered if that was what it was to be American, that you thought of yourself as someone not in the hands of fate. Certainly, the people she had known in America, her friends, her mother’s friends, but most especially her mother, had thought of themselves that way. She and Joseph had been unusual among the people who surrounded them because they watched others moving rather than move themselves. When she was with Breeda she felt the same sort of peacefulness drop on her that she felt when she was with Joseph, when they would walk or go to museums, often for long periods in silence.
They didn’t speak about things that were important to them at first. For a while, there were patches of silence that were not comforting but uneasy, broken, perhaps by talking about Stevie’s stories, almost as if the stories were a guest that had been invited for his social skills, his ability to start a conversation. Then Breeda would let something drop—“I miss my friends fiercely since I’ve come to Dublin”—and ask Pearl about her friends. And Pearl would say something without much detail, and Breeda would say something with a little more detail; they built the edifice of their friendship slowly, bit by bit, as if they were building a stone wall, each stone chosen deliberately, carefully, for its shape and size. So that when Pearl had heard some stories about Breeda’s friend Paulie and his sister Rosalie who won dancing competitions, Pearl told her about Luisa and Luisa’s family and how her aunts could dance no matter how old they were (but not about Uncle Ramón), and Breeda told her about her Uncle Joe who liked to dress up as Elvis for family parties (but not about Uncle Tom, who’d been shot by the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or Uncle Will, who’d been interned without trial). So they made, at first, a pastel-colored world of each other’s childhoods, and then soon they understood that as children they had both been, quite often, afraid and ashamed of that among others around them who seemed never to be afraid: in Pearl’s case, her mother and Luisa; in Breeda’s, nearly everyone she knew. They didn’t tell each other the things that had really frightened them, they didn’t need to, perhaps; it was enough that each knew the other had been frightened by things that most people didn’t think were frightening.
It was easy for Pearl to understand why Breeda had been frightened; she’d been brought up in a time and place of violence. She’d been one year old in the year of Bloody Sunday 1972, the killing of thirteen unarmed civilians in Belfast by British troops, and had no memory of a life before the Troubles. Breeda, though, didn’t understand why Pearl would have been frightened. She didn’t understand Pearl’s relationship to her mother, who seemed so strong and so energetic. When Pearl finally told Breeda the story of Luisa’s Uncle Ramón (after they’d begun to darken the pastel palette of their memories of childhood and tell each other the details of what had frightened them), Breeda didn’t understand why Pearl wasn’t grateful to her mother, why she was so angry at what her mother did much later, when Pearl was well out of danger, when she’d been safe for years.
“My mother has no idea that some things aren’t hers to tell; she has almost no sense of privacy. She’ll sing at the top of her lungs right on the street.” Breeda wanted to ask why that was so bad, but she didn’t want to seem not to understand. It was then that Pearl told the story of Uncle Ramón. She’d told Breeda all about Luisa, that they’d been friends since they were three; that she loved going to Luisa’s house, because there were always so many people there, and Luisa’s mother was so kind and liked to cook and dance, and that her mother liked to come, too, and cook and dance with Mrs. Ramirez. But that Luisa didn’t like Maria, because she thought Maria had no right to think she understood Luisa’s parents, when she’d never been poor. Luisa, who was never frightened and often angry (just like my friend Eileen, Breeda said), and always had the courage to do or say exactly what she wanted—which was why, Pearl told Breeda, the situation with Uncle Ramón was so hard for her.
Uncle Ramón lived with the Ramirezes for months. He slept on the living room couch. Every night he drank quarts of Corona beer and got drunk, and all day he slept in his stained underwear and snored with a noise that Pearl and Luisa knew meant nothing good. Those snores, that underwear, his hairy legs, his black socks with the holes: Luisa and Pearl knew they would never go near that kind of man.
“He kept calling me Chiquita Rubia, Little Blondie. Little Blondie, he’d say, almost growling it. I was eleven years old. Whenever he saw me he would find some excuse to brush against me, saying Rubia, rubia, Chiquita Rubia, and whenever Luisa went to the bathroom he would stand behind me and rub himself against me, and when I tried to get away, he’d say, What’s the matter with you, blondie, little chink blondie, you think you’re too good for me, with your Jew mama? You’re nothing but a little chink Jew. Then he would rub up against me and say Rubia, Chiquita Rubia.”
For some time, Pearl told Breeda, she didn’t think there was anything she could do about it. She was afraid of embarrassing Luisa’s mother. Afraid if Luisa got embarrassed she’d get mad and then she might not be her friend. She began having nightmares, and one night she told her mother. Maria understood everything—why Pearl felt afraid to say something—and said Leave it to her; she’d take care of it.
“And she did take care of it. She had a friend, a guy who worked in one of her day-care centers. Great with kids but scary-looking. Leshawn was really huge. She told him what Uncle Ramón was doing. She waited with him by the apartment house till Ramón came out. Leshawn went over to him. He twisted Ramón’s arm and took him to the back of the building, shoved him against the wall, and told him if he ever went near Pearl Meyers again he’d be wearing his balls for a bow tie. Uncle Ramón went back to Santo Domingo the next day.”
Pearl told Breeda she found out about it only a year ago when Leshawn died of a heart attack. “He was only forty. My mother told the story at his memorial service. And when she used his words, ‘You’ll be wearing your balls for a bow tie,’ everybody laughed. I was furious at her. It wasn’t her story to tell. My mother will do almost anything for a good story. She h
ad no sense that she’d invaded my privacy. And if I told her, she would have said, ‘You have to have a sense of humor about things. It’s the only way to live with them.’”
Breeda would have liked to say, Well, a sense of humor is a great thing, in the same way that she would liked to have said that what Maria had done was a great thing. But she knew she mustn’t, because she didn’t understand Pearl and her mother, not the first thing. Why had Pearl gone so far away from Maria, to study? This seemed unthinkable to Breeda, who would never have left Belfast if her mother had still been alive. Her mother, who loved her but was disappointed in her, though she tried not to show it, her mother a staunch Republican, never afraid, embarrassed, almost, by her fearful daughter, whom she tried to shelter. Breeda, the youngest of the family, the only one young after the Troubles began: small, nearsighted, asthmatic. Her mother wanting to protect her but afraid for her, so sometimes she would be harsh, her fear turned to impatience. “You’ll have to learn to be a bit tougher, Breeda pet. This is a war we’re living through.” So that Breeda knew her mother was a bit ashamed of having a daughter who needed to be sheltered; she would have liked Breeda to be like her sisters, her cousins, a warrior, hardening her eyes and tightening her lips when she passed a Protestant on the street, singing along at family parties instead of sitting silent, as she did when the family sang the song, laughing themselves silly, to the tune of “Catch a Falling Star,” a Perry Como song from the fifties.
Catch a falling bomb and put it in your pocket,
Never let it fade away.
Catch a falling bomb and put it in your pocket,
Keep it for the IRA.
For a peeler may come and tap you on the shoulder
Some starry night,
And just in case he’s getting any bolder,
You’ll have a pocket full of gelignite.
Pearl said it was amazing, she never talked to anyone about being frightened of songs as a child; no one she’d ever known before Breeda would have understood. Breeda was thrilled with this distinction. Pearl told Breeda about the song that had scared her. It was on a record her mother liked to sing to, her voice higher than usual, strange, as if she thought no one was listening to her or didn’t care. “Mary Hamilton” was the name of the song. Pearl told Breeda it was about a servant girl who’d had a baby by the king and killed it; she sang the words that had scared her:
I put her in a tiny boat
And set her out to sea,
That she might sink
Or she might swim
But she’d never return to me.
And Breeda confessed (it did seem like a confession) that she was scared by a song the girls would sing on the street:
Wallflower, wallflower, growing up so high,
All the little children are all going to die.
All except for Breeda Donegan, for she’s the only one,
She can dance, she can sing,
She can show her wedding ring.
Breeda said it made her scared either way. When it was her name put in, that she was the one who could dance and sing and show her wedding ring and live, she was afraid she’d be the only one left alive; when her name was not put in she was afraid of dying when still a child. And they both remembered they’d been terrified by the end of “Molly Malone,” when she dies of a fever and no one can save her, and her ghost wheels her barrow through streets broad and narrow.
Breeda never told Pearl the relief she felt at being able to speak just as she liked, to tell stories the way she wanted to, not strung together by events but by the look of a thing, a smell, snatches of a song. She knew that sort of thing wouldn’t be admired among the people who raised her. Until she met Pearl, Breeda had never felt admired. Perhaps we forget that admiration is something large numbers of people never feel but yearn for without being able to name. Admiration is a luxury, a big-ticket item. And yet it can’t be bought or even asked for. It must be bestowed. Pearl bestowed admiration on Breeda, and Breeda felt its richness; suddenly she was, to herself, a person of wealth.
Breeda knew her mother loved her but did not admire her. She was pretty sure no one she had ever known admired her, except for her body: slender, high-breasted. Mick Winthrop had admired her body and wanted it, for itself but also, as it was the body of the sister of a hero, so he could engender a hero son upon it. To his disappointment, Stevie was not a hero. Stevie was a tender boy.
Breeda was often afraid, ashamed; she felt herself inadequate. Who do we blame for that? Do we say she was just born at the wrong time and place for someone of her nature? But can’t eggs be laid in the wrong nest? Breeda, brought up in a family devoted to violence, was appalled by violence, frightened by it. Shouldn’t someone have seen that, shouldn’t someone have been looking out for her? It simply wasn’t possible, among those people, at that time, at that place. She had an older brother who might have done this, but he thought of himself as a soldier, on active duty in a time of war. How could he look out for his little sister when he was placing bombs in railway stations? And her mother? Her mother thought of herself as the mother of a soldier in a time of war, and in times of war, sacrifices had to be made. So the offering of Breeda’s young, desirable body to a rich American who could pay for Reg’s legal defense—it seemed like the kind of thing the mother of a soldier son should go along with. Shouldn’t Breeda have been glad to offer herself as a sacrificial victim for the ancient cause? But I will not call her a victim. There is more to Breeda than that: she has her ways of getting through; she can surprise us. Simply, I will say: I wish there had been someone to look out for her.
At least her mother stood by her when Stevie was born. But her mother had also stood by when they gave her to Mick, as payment for the American dollars he raised for Reg’s legal fund. Breeda didn’t like to think of that. She loved her mother. If you loved someone, you didn’t think anything bad about them. She didn’t understand Pearl, criticizing her mother all the time: My mother’s a control freak; my mother thinks she wants people to make up their own minds, but really she wants everyone to agree with her. Breeda didn’t understand why Pearl was so angry. Maria had seemed very good, bringing Pearl up on her own as she did, which couldn’t have been easy. So there were, between Breeda and Pearl, areas of silence, tactfully observed, as if they were two diplomats creating a new state. A state where men were excluded, except for Stevie. And Pearl’s mother was excluded. As long as these exclusions were honored, it was a livable state, a state that nurtured its people.
They didn’t talk about Finbar or Mick. Pearl knew she had never before met a woman whose life had been so critically shaped by doing what men wanted without saying “This is what I want” or “I don’t want that.” Breeda had been made pregnant by Mick Winthrop when she was sixteen. Pearl knew that, but she didn’t know what Breeda really considered her greatest shame: that she was given to Mick Winthrop, sold by her family, for her brother’s sake. She tried not to think of that. She told herself that she’d been flattered by Mick’s attentions, proud that such a man, handsome, well educated, from America, would want someone like her. And he’d been a good father to Stevie. Many people say that; that I don’t quite believe it, and that Pearl didn’t—I suppose we are in a minority. Breeda wouldn’t allow herself, for a very long time, to question whether or not Mick was a very good father, in the same way she didn’t allow herself to understand how cleverly she’d seen to his doing what he did for Stevie: keeping Mick in touch with the people in her family whose politics would excite him, so that there was that ring of violent men behind her, exciting to Mick, who he was just enough afraid of that if he reneged on his obligations to their nephew he might be worried for himself, or at least worried about losing their regard. Like Pearl, I admire Breeda. She was reared in difficult circumstances, but she saw to it that she had some things of her own: her son, her own flat where they could live in peace, free from fear and violence. That she lost nearly everything is another matter. The point is, she made some things ha
ppen. There are many who cannot do this, not once in a whole life.
Pearl may not have understood how Breeda got herself and her son out of a place where she was frightened and ashamed to a place where she felt proud and on her own. Pearl only knows that Breeda came to Dublin because some man brought her and then went away. She doesn’t know that Breeda attached herself to Dan Callahan partly because she knew he had plans to move south and she couldn’t bear the northern life, the violence, the danger. And then, when he left, because he didn’t like living with Stevie—Dan felt Breeda wasn’t giving him enough attention, and Stevie was an embarrassment to him—Breeda didn’t really mind. She wouldn’t have been able to make the move south herself, but now the move had been made. So I think you’ll see it’s possible to say she got what she wanted. But Breeda suspected Pearl wouldn’t like the way she went about it, so she was careful not to put Pearl’s admiration in danger. She knew how elusive it was, how fragile, how precious, how easily lost.
Occasionally, Pearl was taken up short, almost shocked, by the things Breeda didn’t know. When she told Breeda that her friend Jessica had had to go home because of encephalitis, but that they were lucky because it was viral rather than bacterial, she understood that Breeda didn’t know there was a difference between a virus and a bacterium. When she got a postcard from a friend taking a year in Brazil, speaking of the oddness that in February she was tormented by the heat, she came to see that Breeda didn’t know that in the southern hemisphere the seasons were the reverse of those in the north. And once, when they rented The English Patient to watch together, a film chosen by Pearl (she wouldn’t make that mistake again, forgetting Stevie and Breeda in her desire to see a film interesting to her), she was shocked that Breeda didn’t understand that the invalid in the bandages was the dashing pilot who had tried to find his lover in the cave. She was careful after that to choose only films that they could easily all like: older films, musicals, My Fair Lady. Oklahoma! They would sing along. They would talk about how much they liked the songs. Favorite lines: “I have often walked down this street before/but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.”