Patricia Falvey

by The Yellow House (v5)

  Just then Saoirse woke up and started bawling with the hunger.

  I HAD NO shortage of visitors. Mrs. Mullen came with Paddy, who looked down at the child and smiled. P.J., Terrence, and the lads from the band arrived and pronounced Saoirse beautiful. Fergus was with them, but we said little to each other—the looks that passed between us said it all. Father Dornan from Newry Cathedral came in while they were there and brought out his flask of whiskey. They all drank a toast and then another one. They kicked up such a commotion, singing and carrying on, that the nursing sister had to come and throw them out, priest and all. Oul’ Mrs. Conlon came, just to sniff around and tell me how hard she was praying for my soul and for the child conceived in sin. Joe Shields came, all dressed up in a black suit two sizes too small for him and carrying a bunch of flowers. He was so comical looking, I almost laughed.

  “Jesus, you look like an altar boy, Joe,” I teased.

  “Aye,” he said gruffly. “The wife made me put on the monkey suit.” He dropped the flowers as if they were contagious. “I came to thank you, Eileen.”

  “Och, sure I’ve had enough thanks to do me the rest of my life,” I said. “You’ve no need to say more.”

  Nobody from Owen’s side came. It did not surprise me. I was sure Owen had told them, but I did not press him on it. I knew it hurt him. Forgiveness from that side, it seemed, would be a long time in coming.

  I thought of Ma. I wished she were here with me—and Da and Lizzie, too. And Frank, poor Frank. His burns had healed as well as they could, so Sister Rafferty said, but he was still in the coma. How long he would stay in it no one knew.

  What did surprise me was that there was no sign of Theresa. I would have thought she would be the first one in, not just to see me and Saoirse, but to get all the gossip she could. When she came in on the third day, holding Aoife by the hand, I realized why she had stayed away. It was time for her to give Aoife back.

  I had not seen Aoife since the night James took her away. My heart swelled at the sight of her and I reached out my arms, but she did not move. Instead, she stared at the child in the bassinet.

  “That’s your wee sister, Aoife,” I said softly. “Isn’t she lovely?”

  Aoife’s face curled up in the pout I remembered so well. She looked directly at me, accusation in her eyes. Theresa edged the child forward.

  “Och, she’s your sister, love,” she coaxed. “Give her a kiss, now.”

  Aoife shook her head. She tugged on Theresa’s hand. “No,” she said.

  Theresa looked at me. “I suppose you’ll be wanting her back now,” she whispered.

  A spike of anger shot through me. Of course I wanted the child back. I looked over at Aoife. She stared back at me, fierceness in her small face.

  “I love you, Aoife,” I said, ignoring Theresa’s question. “I love you just as much as that baby there. I want us all to be together now.”

  I put out my hands toward her again, but the child balled her fists and gave me the defiant look I was so used to.

  “Mary Margaret!” she declared. “Not Aoife.”

  A sudden, desperate fear that I had lost her drove my anger to the surface. I glared at Theresa.

  “How dare you?” I cried. “How dare you steal my child?”

  I knew it was unfair—it was James who had stolen Aoife—but I didn’t care. Memories of Aoife’s christening day came flooding back. I saw old Mrs. Conlon’s triumphant face as she told me the child was to be called Mary Margaret. James’s family had wanted to steal her from the beginning. Had they succeeded? Had I already lost her?

  “Give her back to me, Theresa,” I cried. “She’s mine.”

  Sobs burst out of me. The noise frightened Aoife, but I couldn’t stop them. She whimpered and hid her face against Theresa’s coat.

  Theresa came over and put her arms around me and rocked me like a child. “Sure I know she’s yours, Eileen,” she whispered. “It’s just… well, Tommy and I have become so attached to her, and…” Her voice trailed off.

  I was suddenly filled with pity. Poor Theresa, desperate for a child, had smothered Aoife with love. Inwardly, I cursed James for putting all of us through this.

  “I’m sorry, Theresa,” I said. And then I added, “Aoife can stay with you and Tommy until I’m home from hospital and settled in. But after that…”

  “It’s all right, Eileen,” Theresa whispered, “I knew all along I could never keep her.”

  When they had gone, I got up and lifted Saoirse out of her bassinet and cradled her in my arms. I nestled my face in the warm fuzz of her head. She let out contented little sounds. “I’ll be the best mother I know how to be,” I whispered. “God help me I will.”

  I HAD BEEN home only a day when a car pulled up outside the house. I sighed. Owen had just left, Theresa was not due back with Aoife until the next day, and I really didn’t want to see anyone else right now. I had just put Saoirse down in her crib and was enjoying a quiet cup of tea, lost in my own thoughts. I got up and went over to the window and drew back the curtain. A black taxi idled in the road. A slightly built young woman with blond hair got out and seemed to say something to the driver, who turned off the motor. She turned and looked up at the house. I dropped the curtain and hoped she had not seen me peering out like some nosy oul’ bitch who couldn’t mind her own business. By the looks of her finery, I supposed she was a visitor from England looking for her poor, unfortunate relatives. Well, good luck to her. She probably wouldn’t be staying too long once she found them.

  A gentle knock on the front door startled me. I strained to listen. The knock was so quiet, I wondered if I had heard right. Then it came again, a bit louder this time. What would she be wanting with me? I hardly knew my neighbors, so it was unlikely I would be able to help her. Annoyed, I got up and opened the door.

  “Yes?” I said sharply.

  She stepped back from the doorstep. “I am sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but I was looking for a Mrs. Eileen Conlon.”

  Her voice was soft and well-bred. Not English, I decided. There was an Irish accent there all right, and something else as well.

  “I’m Mrs. Conlon,” I said warily. “Who’s asking for her?”

  She smiled, a lovely wide smile that showed dimples in her pale cheeks. She put out both her hands to clasp mine. “Oh, wonderful,” she said, “I’ve found you.” She looked genuinely happy to have found me. I waited.

  “I was hoping to find you before I left. You see, I’m leaving tomorrow. I was here two weeks ago and no one was home. Then I had to go to Belfast. I thought I would give it one more try and stop here before going home. And here you are…” She was breathless with the words running out of her like a river.

  “But who are you?” I said.

  “I’m your sister, Lizzie,” she cried.

  I could get no words out. I stood frozen in place on the doorstep.

  She raised a gloved hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, I realize you were not expecting me, I just took the chance that you’d be here, and—”

  I found my voice then, and I opened my arms wide.

  “Lizzie!” I cried. “Oh, my lovely Lizzie!”

  WE SENT THE taxi away and talked through the night, stopping only when the first rays of dawn spiked through the windows. We drank tea and took turns holding Saoirse as we talked. I began at the beginning and traced the whole story for Lizzie, starting with the Yellow House. She smiled as I spoke, remembering dreams, she said, that all made sense now: a house with a garden, children laughing, a dark-haired woman calling her name. She flinched at the account of Ma going away into herself after she lost Lizzie. Tears filled her eyes. “Poor woman,” she whispered. Of course I knew she would never think of Ma as her mother—she would be a stranger always. I told her about how Da was shot the night they burned the Yellow House, and how Paddy and I ran to Newry in the middle of the night. I told her about our grandfather and how poor Frank lost himself. I told her about the mill and James and his passion for the Cause of
Irish freedom. I cried when I told her about Aoife and how James had taken her away. I told her that Owen was Saoirse’s father—and how torn I had been between James and him.

  “And what about the future?” Lizzie asked. “What will you do?”

  I shook my head. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “At one time I had this dream of bringing us all back together at the Yellow House. It was what kept me going for the longest time. But I finally saw how foolish it was. I gave it up.” I looked at her, tears stinging my eyes.

  Lizzie put her arms around me and hugged me. “It was not a foolish dream,” she whispered.

  I held on to her for a while. As I held her, a warmth, sweet and smooth as honey, filled me, a sensation I had never felt before, not even with Owen. I felt a gap in my soul, empty these years with longing, fill up and close. At last I pulled back.

  “Well, now that you have heard the whole story of the O’Neills, what about Lizzie Butler Donnelly? What kind of a life did she have?”

  Lizzie smiled. “It was nothing like yours, Eileen. Not nearly as dramatic, or sad, or tormented. Certainly not on the outside. But on the inside…”

  Lizzie had indeed been brought up with a well-to-do Protestant family in Belfast. She was never told she was adopted, even though she faintly remembered another family she had lived with out in the country. The Butlers had told her that she had been sent to those people for a short time while Mrs. Butler recovered from an illness. They were of no consequence, she was told. But still, Lizzie said, she always felt like an outsider.

  “I was the replacement child,” she said, gazing at me with shadowed blue eyes. “Their only child, also named Elizabeth, had died at the age of nine. They took me because I looked like her, but I could never live up to their idealized image of her. I found myself competing with a ghost.”

  “Jesus,” I murmured.

  “Oh, I was comfortable enough,” Lizzie said briskly. “I wanted for nothing. My father was kind, and my mother… well, I suppose she did her best.”

  Lizzie paused for a moment, then her face lit up with an impish smile. “I got my own way in the end, anyway. I became a nurse at the hospital, despite my mother’s objections, and I ran off and married Eugene Donnelly, a Catholic farm boy. Mother was so scandalized, she took to her bed!”

  “Aye, you’ve the O’Neill stubbornness, so you do,” I said.

  “I see that now,” said Lizzie. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and shivered slightly. We let the silence creep around us for a while, each absorbing what the other had said.

  “And Boston?” I ventured. “What is there for you now in Boston, with Eugene gone?”

  Lizzie hesitated before she spoke. “I suppose my future is as uncertain as yours, Eileen.” She smiled. “Funny, how we should both end up at the same place after all.”

  “Aye.” Then I whispered, “Must you go back tomorrow?”

  “Today, now.” She smiled. “Yes. I have obligations—the hospital, friends. And I have a life there, even without Eugene.”

  “And you have family here.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  We held each other’s hands. My eyes filled with tears. “I will not lose you again, Lizzie,” I said. “Not after all this time.”

  “And I will not lose you, either, Eileen.”

  The sun was rising as I walked her down to the taxi rank at the end of the street. There was a taxi all right, but no driver to be seen. “This isn’t Boston.” I laughed. “It could be hours before John Hurley gets his arse out of bed. He’s a lazy bugger.”

  I knocked on the door of Hurley’s grocery shop. Mrs. Hurley came down the stairs in her slippers, gruff as an oul’ bulldog, but she sweetened up when she saw Lizzie.

  “Och, I’ll be after getting John now so he can drive you over to the hotel and then to the train station. He told me he dropped you off last night with Mrs. Conlon here, and then you came back out and told him to go on home.” She was out for the gossip, I could see, but I gave her nothing.

  “If you’ll be so good as to get him, then,” Lizzie said sweetly, but I could see she was used to giving orders.

  As John Hurley shuffled to the taxi and started up the motor, Lizzie and I gazed at each other. We were both in tears. At last she came forward and hugged me. She was small and slight as a winter leaf. I had an awkward awareness of my own height and strength compared with hers. But yet I felt a steel core in her equal to my own.

  “I’ll be back, Eileen,” she whispered. “Just give me some time.”

  She got into the taxi and rolled down the window. “Give my love to darling Saoirse,” she said as the car sped away.

  I stepped back onto the pavement, tears still in my eyes.

  I forgot that Mrs. Hurley was still standing there. She pounced.

  “Saoirse? Is that what you called the wee one, love? Saoirse Conlon, now isn’t that a grand name?”

  “It’s Saoirse Sheridan,” I said, and turned on my heel and left.

  28

  I badgered Owen to set it up for me to visit James in jail. I could not explain why I needed so much to go. I just had this gnawing feeling that my future could not move forward until I had seen him and talked to him. At first, Owen tried to talk me out of it.

  “What is the point, now, Eileen?” he said, exasperated. “What will it achieve? It will only upset you. The man will be executed—there is little doubt of that. Why don’t you just wait until it is over?”

  “I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t explain it, but I have to go.”

  Owen gave me his familiar look that said he knew once my mind was made up there would be no talking me out of it. He sighed. “I’ll arrange it, then.”

  THE VISITING ROOM was a small rectangle with barred windows set high up in whitewashed walls. It reminded me of the Newry Hospital. Even the smell of stale urine was familiar. I sat at a wooden table and waited. Owen had arranged for me to meet James at a time when there would be no other visitors. Keys clanged in a lock and the heavy metal inside door squealed open. James stood there. I could not believe my eyes. I hardly knew him. He was stooped like an old man, and his face was pale and flecked with stubble. A dirty bandage covered his right arm where he had been burned. I thought back to the blinding white bandage he’d worn when I first met him. Only his eyes showed any sign of life. They blazed when he looked at me, reminding me of the holy pictures of martyred saints the nuns gave out to frighten children.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  The guard shoved him toward the table and ordered him to sit down. He went over and stood beside the door. I recognized him as a lousy oul’ turncoat named Mulcahy—a Catholic who had taken a job with the Royal Irish Constabulary. He’d have his ears wide open for information. There would be no privacy after all.

  “I came to see you,” I said.

  James eyed me up and down. “I see you had the bastard.”

  I nodded. “Aye, a girl.”

  His anger filled the room. Its power crowded in on me. Sweat drenched my hands and face.

  “How are you?” It was a stupid thing to say, but I could think of nothing else. “Are the burns healing?”

  James laughed aloud. “Aye. Sure I’ll be the healthiest man ever to stand before a firing squad!”

  “Och, James,” I said. I put out my hand to touch his, but he pulled it away.

  “What do you want?” he said again. “Why are you here? To gloat, is it?”

  “No, you know it’s not for that.”

  We sat in silence. As I looked at him, I tried to bring into my mind the young James I had fallen in love with—the tall, dashing, passionate James with his glorious plans for a free Ireland! How I had loved his restless spirit and his courage. He was so different from the other lads at the mill. I remembered how we sat and talked long into the night. I was caught up in his fervor for freedom and for justice. It was what I had wanted for myself. But it turned out James wanted freedom and justice on a much grander scale, while
I yearned for it only in my own life. I supposed now that I had known it all along, but at the time I believed James was my savior. I never would have imagined the price I would have to pay for his vision. It was not his fault, I realized. He had never misled me. I believed only what I wanted to believe.

  “I did love you, James,” I said softly.

  “Fine way of showing it. You would have shot me dead if Sheridan hadn’t stopped you.”

  “Aye, I could have. And I would have been in the right. You had no business trying to burn down the mill. It had nothing to do with the Cause. It was jealousy. You lost your head altogether.”

  James attempted a smile, but there was no mirth in it. “I made the biggest mistake a soldier could make. I let my own emotions get in the way of the real fight. But it was you that drove me to it. No man would blame me for what I did. Och, why did you do it, Eileen?”

  “What did you expect after the way you treated me?”

  “You knew what you were getting into.”

  “No! I didn’t,” I shouted. “How could I know you would abandon me and take my money? How could I know you would steal my child and turn her against me? And how could I ever have guessed it would go on this long, you still fighting after everybody else in Ireland gave up? Why, James? Why did you have to keep it going?”

  His eyes blazed. “We had to keep it going for Ulster’s sake. Who else was going to do it?”

  “You did it for your own bloody stubbornness. Even Collins and the other leaders gave it up!”

  “Aye, bloody double-crossers,” he shouted. “They got what they wanted and stranded the rest of us here with the Volunteers and the B-Specials and the rest of the Protestant gits. What kind of future do you think the Catholics here in South Armagh are going to have with the Protestants in charge? You see yourself how they are taking away our jobs and our rights. They want to drive us out or kill us. Then they’ll trample those of us left into the ground.”