The Heroines (3 page)

W
eeks later, after everything had settled, Mother told me what had been happening back at the Homestead. I can easily imagine the scene. Mother tried to mollify Deirdre while keeping one eye on the TV, where Walter Cronkite discussed the Supreme Court’s pending vote on whether Nixon had to release the rest of the White House tapes (which would incriminate him beyond doubt). For five days, while the nation awaited the vote, Deirdre had been crying over the death of Noisiu, a name Mother made Deirdre repeat several times:
Noy-shue.
We’d assumed that Irish people gave their kids Celtic names, just as Fawn, Summer, Sage, and Chastity had become popular in the late sixties here. After Mother ascertained that there were no further updates on the national saga, she led Deirdre up to her bedroom, so she wouldn’t disturb Mr. Mazar, the boarder who’d complained about Deirdre’s constant crying, and whose complaints precipitated her moving to my room, the farthest from his. Mother had the biggest room in the house, with a four-poster bed, sitting room, screened-in porch, and lovely bathroom with a marble sink. They settled into comfortable wicker chairs on the sunporch, and Mother poured a can of ginger ale into two ice-filled glasses.

Deirdre’s sea-green eyes were finally free of tears, and she tossed a long blond tress over her shoulder. “Everything in my life changed the day I saw the raven drinking the calf’s blood.”

“Uh-huh,” Mother said. She could truly be the Queen of Non-reaction. One could say such a thing to her, and she’d hardly blink an eye.

“I knew then that I wanted a man with hair as black as the raven, skin as white as the snow, cheeks as red as blood.”

“I had an ideal man when I was your age too,” Mother said. She felt, I’m sure, protective of Deirdre, who was no more than sixteen. “I wanted a boy with blond hair and blue eyes.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Actually, he was quite the opposite…” Mother wasn’t likely to go into the melodramatic details of my paternity.

“My vision came true! The son of Uisliu was exactly that! Dark-haired, fair-skinned, ruddy-cheeked. And now he’s gone! Murdered by his own people! Ulstermen turned on the brave Ulsterman!”

Mother assumed that Deirdre’s Noisiu had been involved in the IRA. Also, Deirdre’s accent was wholly different than that of the southern Irish people who had previously stayed at the Homestead. When she’d arrived with a backpack and her hair bound by a red bandanna, we’d figured she was just another traveling student. Mother was careful in her assumptions, however. She didn’t want to ask directly if Noisiu was IRA; mistaking sympathies in the northern Irish conflict would be like falling on a cactus: a prickly situation that would be hard to get out of. “Did Noisiu betray somebody?”

“They betrayed him! They pretended to welcome him back, when all the while they’d plotted his murder! They considered his love for me an act of betrayal!”

“You’ve been through a lot!” Mother patted Deirdre’s arm, trying to make a logical deduction about the situation. It seemed that Deirdre’s sympathies must lie with the British; Noisiu must be Catholic. Maybe Deirdre’s father was high up in the provisional government, or a policeman. Had Noisiu been killed for falling in love with a Protestant? Was this a classic Protestant-Catholic romance? Star-crossed lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type? Suddenly it dawned on Mother that Deirdre must be a Heroine. While Deirdre recited poetry about her exile from Noisiu, their lovemaking under dolmens, and fires across Erin, my mother sat with her hand on her cheek, mouth hanging open, trying to figure out from which story Deirdre had come.

After Deirdre finished her ginger ale, Mother led her to my room. Now that she knew Deirdre was a Heroine, I’m sure she even tucked her in, watching her rosebud lips fall open as she drifted into sleep. Her profile made a cameo of the round blue pillow under her head. Without the bandanna and bell-bottoms, Deirdre could be a Heroine from any age. In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill. Beauty gave no clues. Beauty was too damn timeless.

Afterward, Mother crept up the creaky attic steps. She pulled the string to turn on the bare lightbulb and groped for the bookshelf keys, hidden on a broad crossbeam. As she blew the dust off the keys, she realized her hands were shaking. She hated not knowing a Heroine’s story. She unlocked her shelf of English and Irish literature. She reached immediately for
Ulysses
. If only Deirdre’s name were Molly! She flipped through the pages, knowing deep down that Deirdre’s story was too plot-driven to be Joycean. So she sat on the dusty floor, an overturned mousetrap a few feet from her sandaled feet, reading and reading. The bare bulb hardly illuminated all the pages. She scanned
Portrait of the Artist, Gulliver’s Travels,
and cursed her lack of contemporary Irish lit. No matter that Mother was incredibly well read, she still chastised herself.

Her own mother had worn away her confidence with a relentless perfectionism.
Stir the pot this way, Anne-Marie. You left the
light on again. Chop the meat in the direction of the tendons, not like that. Iron the sheets! Your pleats are crooked. It will cost me hundreds to replace that vase.
Her nickname for Mother was Marmiton, which Mother learned only later meant kitchen gopher in French. Mother’s only recourse was to retreat to her books, to laugh at her inadequacies, and to get the hell out of the house as fast as she could. Her father was torn between his haughty wife and rag-doll daughter. Mother’s startling intelligence had everyone stumped, and I think her father dreamt of an Ivy League oasis for her. But then I came along and stirred up Mother’s romantic notions of a Better Life for
Her
Daughter. My father must have possessed a more quotidian intelligence, with a dash of cunning. Mother may have been able to recite verbatim whole pages of
Finnegan’s Wake,
but while she had her nose in books that night, I was in the thick of the action.

A
nother M-80 boomed, and the horse took off as if nobody sat on its back. Branches battered our faces. The man pulled the reins and they dug into my upper arms. The rough motion almost jolted me off the horse’s back, and I gripped the mane tight. He and Deirdre had to be from an old story, before the invention of the saddle. The threat of snapping branches scared me so much I closed my eyes, let my body fall in with the horse’s gallop. Finally, the horse started to slow, the man’s chest moved away from my back, and the tug of the reins slackened. I opened my eyes. The horse headed toward Horace’s pond; the bird must have taken flight ages ago.

The man stopped the horse and dismounted. He held his hand out for me, but I glared at him and slid my foot over the horse’s side. I pedaled my feet, trying to gauge how far the drop was, but then his hands were on my hips, and he lowered me gently. Having never felt the press of a fatherly hug, I didn’t know what to make of him. Before I could figure it out, he gripped my wrist and held on tight. He patted the horse’s rump and sent it off to the water. Holding the torch next to his face, he examined me, still cuffing my wrist. He peered into my eyes, and I gave him the once-over back. He wore a burgundy tunic under his cape, which was fastened with a gold brooch at the throat. I wondered why he wore period clothes, when none of the Heroines ever did, and how had he brought the horse with him? Physically, he was stocky, thick in the calves and arms, but not overly tall. From the slight wrinkles around his eyes, I guessed he was around Mother’s age, in his early thirties. He had thick, dirty blond hair, but by the torchlight I couldn’t determine his eye color. His beard was well combed and his mustache trimmed. I hated him for pulling my hair; my scalp still stung, but that trick he did to get me on the horse was cool, and I dug his strappy sandals. But I couldn’t let on. He wasn’t hissing and vowing to eat my heart out, but still, I couldn’t go soft.

“What kind of Villain are you?” I asked.

“Villain! Ha!” He let go of my wrist and pulled an enormous sword from his belt. “I am Conor, King of Ulster! Lord of the Red Branch Knights! Leader of the Men of Erin! Master of the Red Branch, the Twinkling Hoard, the Ruddy Branch.”

His name didn’t sound familiar, but I wasn’t too expert in Irish lit. I’d read only a couple of stories in
Dubliners,
and at twelve I hadn’t really understood them. If I had thought for a minute that Deirdre was a Heroine, I might have skimmed Mother’s books days ago. We’d missed the obvious cues because her name didn’t ring any bells. “How much ransom are you going to ask for?”

“There’s no fear for you! A ransom!” Then he laughed that big, phony, lowbrow novel chortle. A girl couldn’t help being offended. “I wouldn’t ask for more than a mewling calf!”

“My grandfather’s got
some
money left!”

“I’m not interested in you, you—you are a mere irritation, a fly I could swat, a maggot”—he dug his heel into the ground—“I could squash. I am a man of honor, not a kidnapper. I only need you to help me reach my wife!”

“Deirdre’s your wife?” I gave him a good, adolescent scowl. “She’s only sixteen. You’re old enough to be her dad!”

“Bound to me, she is. I spared her life. My men would have torn her from the womb of Fedlimid’s wife and killed her at birth! It was I who said, ‘Such beauty will not be destroyed!’”

“She was cursed at birth?”

“In the womb! She howled from the hollow of her mother. ‘A weird uproar at the waist!’ as Fedlimid said. Cathbad foretold that a woman with twisted yellow tresses and green-irised eyes of beauty would be born. High queens would ache with envy at the sight of her pure perfect body. And he said, ‘Much damage, Derdriu, will follow your high fame and fair visage. Ulster in your time tormented.’ My men wanted her killed, but I offered my protection, hid her high in the mountains, to spare the hard men of Ulster from carnage. But she defied me! Running off with the son of Uisliu. Harsh deeds were done in Erin on her account!”

I wondered what he meant by harsh deeds, but I was too afraid to ask. “So you want to rescue her from…?”

“From herself!” He lunged and pointed the sword in the air. “And to rescue Ulster itself!”

“Why won’t she come back to you on her own?”

He ignored my question and lifted the sword higher into the trees. “I could give her golden goblets, cups, and drinking horns, houses paneled with red yew, copper screens with golden birds, apples of gold. I could protect her with javelins and shields and swords, three times thirty warriors—”

“Why wouldn’t she want all that?”

“This Deirdre is a stubborn child. Sure she doesn’t know what’s good for her.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Sure, Conor was mighty robust, but he seemed a little too cocksure of what was his. My mother had warned me to beware of men who referred to women as children. She was a “libber,” as they said back then, a feminist who, despite her own passivity, believed in equality between men and women. I had assimilated those ideas through her breast milk, but I had enough common sense not to try to enlighten Conor. Pretending to go along with him was my only hope to escape him.

“She
is
stubborn,” I said. “She’s always yammering on about true love and some guy that got murdered.”

“Noisiu was doomed the moment she grabbed his ears!”

I let that cryptic allusion fly. “Why do you need me?”

He lifted his chin and sniffed the air. His wide nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “There is a druidical spell on that field. Somebody has conjured a shield.”

“Really?” That could be why he still wore his period clothes. “You think I can get you through the prairie?”

“With your ginger hair, I thought a shape-shifter you might be. But since you couldn’t take flight to escape me, I saw that you had no power. But you must do something to lure Deirdre back into these woods.”

Imagine me, luring a Heroine into the forbidden woods. Over Mother’s dead body! “Deirdre won’t listen to me.”

“You must make her.” The horse wandered farther into the trees, and Conor stepped over a fallen trunk and led it back to us. The horse rubbed its forehead against Conor’s chest and he pushed it gently away. The horse pushed back, and Conor gave in, lovingly stroking its long nose. “Together—you and I—we can save her.”

The movement of his hand along the horse’s nose stirred me. He was so different from the clumsy boys and dull fathers I knew in the suburbs: more earthy, more confident and commanding. More sexy. “I don’t know.”

“Better for her to come with me than to be captured by the Red Branch Knights. They won’t spare her.”

“Why can’t you just come to the house?”

“That field—prairie, as you call it—sure there’s magic there. Deirdre must have put a druidical spell on it. I can’t pass it.”

I didn’t know what to think or believe. Conor seemed valiant, but most of the Heroines ended up with us precisely because of bad men. Maybe escaping Conor had been Deirdre’s heroic moment. But all the Heroines returned to their stories in the end, of their own mysterious accord. Mother believed the best strategy was to play dumb, to provide tea and sympathy and clean linens. Conor’s presence annihilated Mother’s strategy. No one else had ever followed a Heroine into our lives. And would my encounter affect Deirdre’s fate? I didn’t know anything about this story, so I didn’t know how to play it. Possible plot lines twisted in my mind, and it struck me suddenly that the key to this scene was figuring how to get myself out of it. Exit stage left, quickly and with as little drama as possible. I looked at the pond, considered swimming across it, but imagined swallowing the scum and getting tangled in slimy seaweed. I was a weak swimmer in a regular pool, worthless with that kind of drag. To reach it I’d have to jump a log, and Conor would have me by the ankle in no time. Plus, it was entirely the opposite direction of home. For a minute, I wished Horace would swoop down and fly away with me on his back. Then I got real. A selfish twinge snaked up my spine. Just because Mother sacrificed herself and me for the Heroines, it didn’t mean I had to. With Deirdre gone, I’d get my room back. And my mother.

“I know. I’ll tell her I want to collect mint or cresses with her from along the water. She keeps talking about gathering herbs.”

“Spells, no doubt. But a woman such as Deirdre has had servants to tend to such matters. She’ll expect that you’ll collect them yourself.”

“I’ll play dumb. Like I don’t know a weed from an herb.”

“There’s sense in that. You’ve a clever head, have you not?”

I fought a smile. I didn’t want him to think I was pleased by his compliments. I didn’t want to feel anything for him at all, though I felt closer to him than I did to Deirdre, and attracted in a way I didn’t wholly understand. In three years only one Heroine, Franny, had taken me seriously; the rest treated me like a nonentity. But Conor needed me, and I needed him. We had the same aim: getting Deirdre out of the Homestead. I saw myself running through the prairie, opening the door to my house, climbing the stairs to my bedroom, hiding beneath my pink satin duvet, reunited with all my things. This plan would work in two ways: I’d get what I’d want, and he wouldn’t hurt me if I helped him. My mother had impressed one thing upon me: never meddle in the Heroines’ lives. But where had it gotten me? I was marginalized either way. I had to fend for myself.