by Ann Claycomb
THE DAY BEFORE we left, Tom showed up and announced that we were ordering takeout for dinner.
“And here’s my contribution to the meal!” He pulled a bottle far enough out of its brown bag for me to see the foil-wrapped champagne cork. Kathleen was in the bedroom on the phone. I shook my head.
“No?” he said. He usually tried to talk people into things, but this time he immediately slid the bottle back into the bag. “You want to put it away, then?”
“Thanks.” I took it and put it in the refrigerator. “Thank you, Tom. It’s not like she can’t see the bottle or anything. It’s just that—she’s kind of precarious right now.”
He nodded. “I know. I guess I thought that might help. Don’t worry about it.” He sat on one of the bar stools at our kitchen counter. “How are you doing, Harry?”
“Me?”
Tom heaved an exaggerated sigh. “You. I feel like I’ve hardly seen you all semester, especially since spring break.”
“I have five private students right now and I sang a wedding last weekend and now we’re packing for this trip.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “What’s up with that, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you guys went to Florida last minute over break, and now you jet off to Ireland as soon as the curtains fall on spring performances—nice job in the scene, by the way. Your voice made me think of snow.”
I flushed. “Thank you.”
“But I was giving Kathleen shit about her jet-set lifestyle and she got all prima donna on me, said something about how the trip to Ireland isn’t exactly a vacation. So what’s going on?”
I wished Kathleen would get off the phone and join us. I wasn’t sure how much she wanted Tom to know. I remembered that he was really her friend more than he was mine, and why. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, but I always felt like he was interested in other people’s drama, like a boy watching bugs on the sidewalk. And if he couldn’t find anything to be fascinated with, he made something up.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said. “Kathleen’s family is from there and she’s never been back.”
“And when you get back?” Tom asked. “If Kathleen is still precarious?”
“She’ll be better.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Tom murmured. He caught sight of my face and put his hand on my wrist. “Sorry! That’s not what I meant at all. I meant her singing. That’s what I meant to talk to you about,” he said, “without Kathleen. I wanted to know if you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“How she’s been singing, since she got back from break and being out of commission for that week. I was in rehearsals with her for concert opera and for acting techniques and—Jesus, I don’t know . . .” He made a face. “She’s been scaring me.”
Join the club, I almost said, but didn’t. I sat down and waited.
“The voice itself hasn’t changed,” Tom said, “not really. But there’s something about it now—listening to her, watching her, it seems as if she could literally just go on singing and singing. I’m standing there beside her feeling the strain vocally, physically, and she’s just—don’t take this wrong—but it’s like people I’ve known doing coke or something. And then when the music stops, she’s just done. Goes gray, has to sit down, does that weird thing with her mouth where you think she’s trying to spit something out. She almost passed out a couple of times.”
She hadn’t told me any of this. Of course. And why hadn’t Tom told me before, or anyone else who was in the damn opera with her?
“She’s pushing herself too hard,” I said. “That’s—it’s part of why we’re taking this trip.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Tom shook his head. “I thought you should know about the singing piece of it. Because if I were you, I’d be really worried for her, but if I were Kathleen right now”—he shook his head again—“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“She’s singing better than ever,” he said, “which is saying something when you’re talking about her. And she knows it; she can feel it. Whatever’s going on, that’s not easy to give up, you know?”
“She won’t have to,” I said.
Tom gave me a level look. His face, without the mischief that usually animated it, was fine-boned and full of shadows. An artist’s face, like Kathleen’s. He knew I was willing it true, wishing it true.
“Magical thinking, Tom,” I said. “It’s my latest solution to everything.”
I’d meant it to be a joke, but it fell flat and instead sounded alarmingly accurate.
KATHLEEN SLEPT SO heavily on the plane ride over that I suspected she’d taken something. When I thought about my conversation with Tom the night before, though, I wondered. I’d defended her to him, said she’d been pushing herself, but how much of that had I even understood myself when I said it? I reclined both our seats, curled up under my sweater beside her and tried to sleep too.
Shannon to Ennis to Doolin, where the answers would be.
That was the mantra I dozed off to on the plane. When we actually got to Doolin, though, some twelve hours after we’d left Boston, we were both reeling from exhaustion and jet lag. I left Kathleen sleeping, with the windows open to the sea air, and went to ask at the front desk of the inn for directions to the local offices of the newspaper and of Records and Genealogy. We were here, after all, and only for four days. I felt like there wasn’t much time to lose, and I had no illusions about Kathleen coming with me to do anything involving the phrase “archival research.” When I came back to shower and to get dinner three hours later, Kath was up, though still drawn and snappish. She did take something, I thought. I put the notebook and the pen I’d used back into the side pocket of my carry-on, carefully, precisely, like it mattered. I was angry at Kathleen for not helping me, for not even seeming to believe that anything could turn up. I was angry with her for what felt to me like giving in: not eating, sleeping too much, taking the pain out on me. Being used to her doing it didn’t make it okay. In fact, I thought, and my hands shook a little as I straightened the pens in the inside compartment of my bag, it felt worse now, felt like I was doing all the trying and she wasn’t doing any.
“So,” Kathleen said, “what did you find?”
I wanted to snap at her for so obviously sounding like she was trying to care. Come on, Kath, aren’t you a better actress than that? But I wasn’t just angry at her. I was frightened too. I hadn’t found anything that we didn’t already know. And if there weren’t any answers here, then I was the one to blame; my false hopes had dragged her all the way here, pushed her past her limits, brought her too close to the sea again. Even the promise of discovering some family connections had evaporated today: there was no one left, as far as I could tell. All these women had had one daughter and then died, and their husbands were either dead too or gone, out of reach of the local records. There weren’t any cheerful cousins or aunts or uncles to present to Kathleen as consolation, just obituaries and the locations of graves.
I stood up and went to gather my toiletries for the shower.
“Nothing new,” I said. “I found brief mentions of Deirdre’s death and Moira’s death in the local paper. I didn’t find anything about Caolinn, but I don’t know exact dates and it looks like even if there was a paper here in the 1940s, it may have stopped printing during the war. So that’s a dead end.”
“How are the deaths written up?” Kathleen asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are they written up as suicides? Are the survivors mentioned by name? Do they mention the weird thing with the knife in Deirdre’s case? The one that Robin says they never found?”
“Sort of,” I said. “At least, that’s how I read the piece, knowing what Robin had told me. Moira’s—your mother’s—is written that she drowned and that you, your father, and her father survived her.” I caught her eyes in the mirror, saw the next question coming. “Her father’s dead, though. He apparently never
remarried after Deirdre, his wife, died and he had a heart attack ten years ago.”
Kathleen drew her knees up to her chest and rocked back and forth on the bed. “And Deirdre’s death?”
“It’s carefully worded. I mean, it was more than forty years ago and in a small Catholic community, right? So the phrasing I think was ‘perhaps, tragically, by her own hand.’ And there’s a mention of the police still investigating, which is where I read the uncertainty of the knife coming in, that maybe the coroner—if they even had a coroner here, I’ve no idea—brought that up.”
“That must be it,” Kathleen said. “I mean, if everyone in the village knew that was how she’d died and knew, when Robin and Moira were older, that the knife had vanished. The police must have gossiped about it.”
I nodded. “I’m going to get a shower and we can eat, okay? I don’t know about you but I’m starving. I can’t even figure out what meal this is supposed to be.”
I went into the tiny bathroom, balanced my various travel-size bottles on the soap dish in the shower, and turned the water on. Kathleen opened the door as I was undressing.
“What about Caolinn?”
“I told you,” I said, anger winning out for a moment. “There wasn’t a regular newspaper or record before then. There would be church records of births and deaths, I guess, but I couldn’t figure out where to go for those. The woman at the records office said that she wasn’t sure there’d even be anything beyond the headstone in the graveyard, that it might have just been left to the family to record the death if she was really from that tiny little village.”
“So you couldn’t even confirm that she was one of us, huh?” Kathleen asked. “That’s too bad.”
She stood holding the doorknob while I got into the shower and tucked the curtain so water wouldn’t leak onto the floor.
“Did you check other death notices—is that the word?—or other reports of suicides in the same town?” she asked. “Wasn’t that one possibility? That it was more widespread, somehow? This illness or predilection of mine?”
“You know,” I said, safe on the other side of the curtain, “you could have come with me and done some of this research yourself.”
She didn’t answer and I finished showering, quickly, in silence. When I slid the curtain back, though, she was still standing there. She held out a towel.
“It’s terrible water, isn’t it?” she asked. “Smells funny. It’s probably from the pipes, I know. But I could hardly stand it.”
“It smells a little like iron or something,” I said. “I don’t smell it on you, though, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She shook her head. “I thought I would like it here more,” she said.
“What? The inn?”
“No, silly.” She made a face. “Ireland. I thought I would feel connected to it. But I just feel tired and everything hurts, and now you’re mad at me because I’m not helping you and—” She broke off, caught herself on the sob and checked it. I waited, blotting my hair on the towel and resisting the impulse to say it was all right, or alternatively, that right now I was tired too and my head hurt and my feet hurt and I was so hungry that my stomach hurt.
“Can you just tell me, please?” Kathleen said. “Is there any kind of pattern to it? Outside my family, I mean?”
“No,” I said. “There isn’t. Not that I could see. There aren’t that many people in the papers at all, not many people dying certainly, and the others died of old age or illness or were lost at sea.”
“Lost at sea,” she repeated. “Now there’s a phrase.” She backed out of the bathroom and shut the door.
O’CONNOR’S PUB WAS dimly lit, smoky, and smelled of fried food and cigarettes. We sat at a table in the back, near the corner where a band was setting up. The process seemed to involve a lot of beer. The waitress took our order without any expression on her face at all, except when Kathleen—trying to get a rise out of her—asked what kind of lettuce was in the salad.
“What kind, then?” she asked, her voice rising a little. “Well, I don’t know. Regular lettuce is all it is. What kind were you expecting it to be?”
“Regular is fine,” Kathleen said demurely.
“What are you up to now?” I asked when the waitress had gone. “What did you expect her to say?”
“I wanted to see how annoyed she’d get,” Kathleen said. “She hates us, can’t you tell?”
“No,” I said. “Hates us? Why?”
“Tourists,” she said. “It’s like we’re a necessary evil to her, to everyone here, probably. I mean, the band’s local or at least Irish, and the staff of course, but I challenge you to pick out anyone else here who’s not clearly a tourist.”
The waitress brought us our water and Kathleen’s salad—pretty much lettuce in a bowl, with some shaved carrot on top. I scanned the room. Most of the people here did look like they came from somewhere else. There was a preponderance of backpacks in frames up against the walls and the group of fifty-something women sitting together all wore sensible layers and expensive, sturdy walking shoes. The only immediate exception I saw was an elderly nun sitting at the next table with a burly black-haired man. The nun was tiny, white-haired, and wearing large glasses. She was smiling owlishly up at her companion, and I heard him chuckle in response to something she said. If she hadn’t been a nun, I would have pegged the two of them as mother and son.
“Does a nun count?” I asked. Kathleen took a forkful of salad and chewed thoughtfully.
“She could still be a tourist,” she said. “I mean, nuns get vacations, don’t they? Maybe she’s on a pilgrimage.”
“To Doolin?”
“Well, it is the music capital of Ireland.”
As if on cue, the band started to play. They were good, though Kathleen smirked across the table at me when they opened with The Proclaimers.
“See—tourist music!” she hissed. I shook my head at her and sat back to watch them. They played like they’d been together a while, loose and almost sloppy visually, with sly moments of eye contact that came during the musician-friendly sweet spots of the songs, not necessarily the crowd-pleaser moments. There were two guitarists and a jack-of-all-trades guy on keyboard who also had a harmonica and a tin whistle tucked into his shirt pocket. No drums—it was too small a space for drums and most of the music they were playing didn’t need them anyway. One of the guitarists did most of the singing. He had a nasal tenor voice but good pitch and he wasn’t indulgent, didn’t try to hold notes too long or mess around with vibrato. He kept his phrasings nice and tight for the most part as they moved from “500 Miles” into “Oh, Danny Boy”—Kathleen rolled her eyes—and “The Fields of Athenry.”
The waitress brought our fish and chips and Kathleen ordered a beer. I pretended not to notice. The food was greasy but good. I felt my headache receding a bit. I glanced over at Kathleen and saw that she had some color back in her face too. The band was an event here, clearly. We could have talked over them but no one else was. People were there to eat and listen. It wasn’t a bad idea for us to be together and not have to talk for a while, to actually listen to music together.
Then the band began the plaintive notes of another song, just the keyboard in the opening bars and Kathleen tensed, then stood up. She was in front of the band before the measure was done, her back to me while all three musicians eyed her curiously. She said something to the singer that made him laugh and step back from his microphone with a grand gesture, guitar pick in his hand. Kathleen turned around behind the microphone and smiled at the audience, but only briefly, because the song was sad and it was about to start. I watched her, the way all the light in the room seemed to catch on her. She was wearing jeans and a white oxford shirt untucked, sleeves rolled up, her long red hair falling all over her shoulders and arms. Showy, I thought, but she couldn’t help it. I remembered what Tom had told me about her singing lately, how much she seemed to need it. And now, in a moment, she’d gone from fragile to incandescent, th
e whole bar quiet, people who couldn’t see or hear her clearly getting up from their seats to come around, leaning against the bar, murmuring to one another. The band members exchanged another glance behind her back, excited now, unique to artists who know what they’ve found.
And Kathleen sang:
The water is wide, I can’t swim o’er,
And neither have I wings to fly
Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I.
She sang about being afraid of drowning, willfully, in love if not in the sea, in a love as deep and abiding as the sea. It was a Scottish song I’d heard before, even heard her sing along with it in the car or in the kitchen. Kathleen knew an astonishing number of Celtic folk songs by heart. But hearing Kathleen sing anything full voice is different, and after the second line, when she began, “Build me a boat,” she sang to me, her voice splashing across the little distance in the room like a stream tumbling downhill, something joyful in its very nature even though the song was sad. She was wearing dark blue ballet slippers with sequins on them that sparkled when she moved her feet. She was bouncing on her tiptoes so I knew her feet were hurting but no one else would know, no one listening to her sing could possibly know. Her voice dipped low like a swimmer going into the trough of a wave, then came up again, somehow at once teasing and forlorn: “When cockle shells make Christmas bells, then will I leave my love for thee.” Listening to her sing, I felt the sick surging knot in my belly ease even further. It was going to be okay. It would be okay. Even if we couldn’t find out what was wrong exactly, so long as she had this to hang on to, Kathleen would be Kathleen.