Brooklyn (30 page)

Once they had passed Ballyvaloo, they found a place in the dunes where they could sit comfortably. Jim sat down first and then made space for her so that she was resting against him with her back to him. He put his arms around her.

There was no one else on the strand. They looked at the waves crashing gently on the soft sand, remaining for some time without speaking.

“Did you enjoy the wedding?” he asked eventually.

“Yes, I did,” she replied.

“So did I,” he said. “It’s always funny for me seeing everyone’s brothers and sisters because I’m an only child. I think it must have been hard for you losing your sister. Today, watching George
with his brothers and Nancy with her sisters made me feel strange.”

“Was it difficult being an only child?”

“It matters more now, I think,” Jim said, “when my parents are getting older and there’s just me. But maybe it mattered in other ways. I was never really good at getting on with people. I could talk to customers in the pub and all that, I knew how to do that. But I mean friends. I was never good at making friends. I always felt that people didn’t like me, or didn’t know what to make of me.”

“But surely you have a lot of friends.”

“Not really,” he said, “and then it was harder when they started having girlfriends. I always found it difficult to talk to girls. Do you remember that night when I met you first?”

“You mean in the Athenaeum.”

“Yes,” he said. “On the way into the hall that night Alison Prendergast, who I was sort of going out with, broke it off with me. I knew it was coming but she actually did it on the way into the dance. And then George, I knew, really fancied Nancy and she was there. So he could be with her. And then he brought you over and I had seen you in the town and I liked you and you were on your own and you were so nice and friendly. I thought—here we go again. If I ask her to dance I’ll be tongue-tied, but I still thought I should. I hated standing there on my own, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask you.”

“You should have,” she said.

“And then when I heard you were gone I thought it was just my luck.”

“I remember you that night,” she said. “I had the impression you didn’t like us, both me and Nancy.”

“And then when I heard you were home,” he said as though he had not been listening, “and I saw you and you looked so fantas
tic and I was so down after the whole episode with Nancy’s sister, I thought that I’d do anything to meet you again.”

He pulled her closer to him and put his hands on her breasts. She could hear him breathing heavily.

“Can we talk about what you are going to do?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied.

“I mean if you have to go back, then maybe we could get engaged before you go.”

“Maybe we can talk about it soon,” she said.

“I mean, if I lost you this time, well, I don’t know how to put it, but…”

She turned around towards him and they began to kiss and they stayed there until the mist became heavier and the first hints of the night coming down, then they walked back towards the car and drove to Enniscorthy.

A few days later a note came from Jim’s mother formally inviting Eilis to tea the following Thursday and telling her about the reception in the golf club to honour Rose, which they could attend afterwards. Eilis showed the letter to her mother and asked her if she would like to go to the reception as well, but her mother said no, it would be too sad for her, and she was happy for Eilis to go with the Farrells and thus represent the family.

It rained all the following weekend. Jim called on the Saturday and they went to Rosslare and had dinner in the evening in the Strand Hotel. As they were lingering over the dessert, she was tempted to tell him everything, to ask him for his help, even his advice. He was, she thought, good, and he was also wise and clever in certain ways, but he was conservative. He liked his position in the town, and it mattered to him that he ran a respectable pub and came from a respectable family. He had never done anything
unusual in his life, and, she thought, he never would. His version of himself and the world did not include the possibility of spending time with a married woman and, even worse, a woman who had not told him or anybody else that she was married.

She looked at his kind face in the soft light of the hotel restaurant and decided that she would tell him nothing now. They drove to Enniscorthy. At home as she looked at the letters from Tony stored in the chest of drawers in her bedroom, some of them still unopened, she realized that there would never be a time to tell him. It could not be said; his response to her deception could not be imagined. She would have to go back.

Once the event in the golf club was over, she decided, she would pick a date. For some time now, she had postponed writing to Father Flood, or Miss Fortini, or Mrs. Kehoe, explaining her extended absence. She would write, she determined, over the next few days. She would try not to postpone any further what she had to do. But the prospect of telling her mother the date of her departure and the prospect of saying goodbye to Jim Farrell still filled her with fear, enough for her once more to put both ideas out of her mind. She would think about them soon, she thought, but not now.

On the day before the event at the golf club she had gone alone in the early afternoon to the graveyard to visit Rose’s grave again. It had been drizzling and she carried an umbrella. Once she arrived in the graveyard, she noticed that the wind was almost cold, even though it was early July. In this grey, blustery light the graveyard where Rose lay seemed a bare and forlorn place, no trees, nothing much growing, just rows of headstones and paths and underneath all the silence of the dead. Eilis saw names on headstones that she recognized, the parents or grandparents of her friends from school, men and women whom she remembered well, all gone now, held
here on the edge of the town. For the moment, most of them were remembered by the living, but it was a memory slowly fading as each season passed.

She stood at Rose’s grave and tried to pray or whisper something. She felt sad, she thought, and maybe that was enough—to come here and let Rose’s spirit know how much she was missed. But she could not cry or say anything. She stood at the grave for as long as she could and then walked away, feeling the sharpest grief as she was actually leaving the graveyard itself and walking towards Summerhill and the Presentation Convent.

When she reached the corner of Main Street, she decided that she would walk through the town rather than go along the Back Road. Seeing faces, people moving, shops doing business, she thought, might cure her of the gnawing sadness, almost guilt, that she felt about Rose, about not being able to speak properly to her or pray for her.

She passed the cathedral on the opposite side and was making her way towards the Market Square when she heard someone calling her name. When she looked, she saw that Mary, who worked for Miss Kelly, was shouting at her and beckoning to her to cross the road.

“Is there something wrong?” Eilis asked.

“Miss Kelly wants to see you,” Mary said. She was almost out of breath and looked frightened. “She says I’m to make sure and bring you back with me now.”

“Now?” Eilis asked, laughing.

“Now,” Mary repeated.

Miss Kelly was waiting at the door.

“Mary,” she said, “we are going upstairs for a minute and if anyone is looking for me, then tell them I’ll be down in my own good time.”

“Yes, miss.”

Miss Kelly opened the entrance to the part of the building
where she lived and ushered Eilis in. As Eilis closed the door behind her, Miss Kelly led her up a dark stairway to the living room, which looked onto the street but seemed almost as dark as the stairwell and had, Eilis thought, too much furniture in it. Miss Kelly pointed to a chair covered in newspapers.

“Put those on the floor and sit down,” she said.

Miss Kelly sat opposite her on a faded-looking leather armchair.

“So how are you getting on?” she asked.

“Very well, thanks, Miss Kelly.”

“So I hear. And I was just thinking about you yesterday and wondering if I would ever see you because I heard from Madge Kehoe in America just yesterday.”

“Madge Kehoe?” Eilis asked.

“She’d be Mrs. Kehoe to you but she’s a cousin of mine. She was, before she married, a Considine, and my mother, God rest her, was a Considine, and so we are first cousins.”

“She never mentioned that,” Eilis said.

“Oh, the Considines were always very close,” Miss Kelly said. “My mother was the same.”

Miss Kelly’s tone was almost skittish; it was, Eilis thought, as though she were doing an imitation of herself. Eilis asked herself if it could possibly be true that Miss Kelly was a cousin of Mrs. Kehoe.

“Is that right?” Eilis asked coldly.

“And of course she told me all about you when you arrived first. But then there was no news here and Madge has a policy that she only keeps in touch with you if you keep in touch with her. So what I do is I telephone her about twice a year. I never stay long on the line because of the cost. But it keeps her happy, especially if there is news. And then when you came home, well, that was news and I heard you were never out of Curracloe, and in Courtown with your finery, and then a little bird who happens to be a
customer of mine told me that he took a photograph of you all in Cush Gap. He said you made a lovely group.”

Miss Kelly seemed to be enjoying herself; Eilis could think of no way of stopping her.

“And so I telephoned Madge with all the news, and about you paying out the wages down in Davis’s.”

“Did you, Miss Kelly?”

It was clear to Eilis that Miss Kelly had prepared every word of what she was saying. The idea that the man who had taken the photograph in Cush, a figure Eilis barely remembered and had never seen before, had been in Miss Kelly’s shop talking about her and that this news was conveyed to Mrs. Kehoe in Brooklyn suddenly made her afraid.

“And once she had news of her own, then she telephoned back,” Miss Kelly said. “So, now.”

“And what did she say, Miss Kelly?”

“Oh, I think you know what she said.”

“Was it interesting?”

In her tone, Eilis tried to equal Miss Kelly’s air of disdain.

“Oh, don’t try and fool me!” Miss Kelly said. “You can fool most people, but you can’t fool me.”

“I am sure I would not like to fool anyone,” Eilis said.

“Is that right, Miss Lacey? If that’s what your name is now.”

“What do you mean?”

“She told me the whole thing. The world, as the man says, is a very small place.”

Eilis knew from the gloating expression on Miss Kelly’s face that she herself had not been able to disguise her alarm. A shiver went through her as she wondered if Tony had come to see Mrs. Kehoe and told her of their wedding. Instantly, she thought this unlikely. More likely, she reasoned, was that someone in the queue that day in City Hall had recognized her or Tony, or seen their names, and passed the news on to Mrs. Kehoe or one of her cronies.

She stood up. “Is that all you have to say, Miss Kelly?”

“It is, but I’ll be phoning Madge again and I’ll tell her I met you. How is your mother?”

“She’s very well, Miss Kelly.”

Eilis was shaking.

“I saw you after that Byrne one’s wedding getting into the car with Jim Farrell. Your mother looked well. I hadn’t seen her for a while but I thought she looked well.”

“She’ll be glad to hear that,” Eilis said.

“Oh, now, I’m sure,” Miss Kelly replied.

“So is that all, Miss Kelly?”

“It is,” Miss Kelly said and smiled grimly at her as she stood up. “Except don’t forget your umbrella.”

On the street, Eilis searched in her handbag and found she had the letter from the shipping company with the number to call to reserve a place on the liner. In the Market Square she stopped at Godfrey’s and bought some notepaper and envelopes. She walked along Castle Street and down Castle Hill to the post office. At the desk, she gave them the number she wished to phone and they told her to wait in the kiosk in the corner of the office. When the phone rang, she lifted the receiver and gave her name and details to the shipping company clerk, who found her file and told her that the earliest possible sailing from Cobh to New York was Friday, the day after tomorrow, and he could, if that suited her, reserve a place for her in third class at no extra charge. Once she agreed, he gave her the time of the sailing and the planned date of arrival and she hung up.

Having paid for the phone call, she asked for airmail envelopes. When the clerk found some, she asked for four and went to the small writing booth near the window and wrote four letters. To Father Flood, Mrs. Kehoe and Miss Fortini she simply apologized
for her late departure and told them when she would be arriving. To Tony, she said that she loved him and missed him and would be with him, she hoped, by the end of the following week. She gave him the name of the liner and the details she had about the possible time of arrival. She signed her name. And then, having closed the other three envelopes, she read over what she had written to Tony and thought to tear it up and ask for another but decided instead to seal it and hand it in at the desk with the rest.

On the way up Friary Hill she discovered that she had left her umbrella in the post office but did not go back to collect it.

Her mother was in the kitchen, washing up. She turned as Eilis came in.

“I thought after you had left that I should have gone with you. It’s a lonely old place, out there.”

“The graveyard?” Eilis asked as she sat down at the kitchen table.

“Isn’t that where you were?”

“It is, Mammy.”

She thought she was going to be able to speak now, but she found that she could not; the words would not come, just a few heavy heaves of breath. Her mother turned around again and looked at her. “Are you all right? Are you upset?”

“Mammy, there’s something I should have told you when I came back first but I have to tell you now. I got married in Brooklyn before I came home. I am married. I should have told you the minute I got back.”