The Walking People (53 page)

"We're coming," Julia said. "Unless we hit serious traffic, we'll be there in less than an hour." She flipped her phone closed and rejoined Johanna and Tom.

"Anything wrong?" Johanna asked, again letting her eyes search Julia's body from head to toe. Julia was glad she'd gone out and bought a new outfit for the day, something more flattering than the conservative suits hanging in her closet.

"Not a thing," Julia said. She scanned the rows of cars and tried to remember where she'd parked.

"You're very tall," Johanna said. "Very good-looking. You have a lovely face, like your father. I'm sure he's still handsome."

Julia was prepared to be protective of Greta, but she had forgotten that Michael would need protecting too. Not from insult—it was already clear that Johanna would be careful not to hurt them—but from claim. Earlier, when Johanna first asked for her parents, Julia imagined herself standing in front of Greta in a defensive stance, feet apart, hands on hips. Now she saw herself reach forward and pull her father back to stand beside her mother, to huddle together behind the boundary Julia had drawn, a limit that would not be passable.

"I thought we just decided she looks like herself," Tom said.

"Greta knows, doesn't she?" Johanna asked abruptly. "About us coming?" She looked intently into Julia's face.

"Of course," Julia said. "She can't stop talking about it."

"Can she not?" Johanna asked softly. It was a gentle admonishment, but one Julia did not miss. The message was clear. Johanna would do this—walk into a party where she was not invited—but she would not be spoken to like a fool. Julia felt as if she'd been slapped on the wrist.
Don't tell me about my sister, Johanna's tone said. I know her better than you think.

But then, as soon as the moment began to feel too awkward to slip by without acknowledgment, Johanna nodded, resumed her story about the movie they'd watched on the plane. It was not indifference to the enormity of the day, Julia realized. It was determination to keep the moment light. If this woman ever cried, Julia concluded, she did so privately and made sure the tear tracks were gone before she saw another soul. "The main woman is just recently divorced and puts a notice in the paper advertising herself..." Julia watched as the woman who gave birth to her chattered on, ran her hand through her thick hair, tried to puff it up a bit, switched the pull handle of her case from left hand to right.

This is my mother, Julia thought as she tried not to stare. This woman with impeccable posture who keeps looking down at her pants as if to make sure the crease is still sharp carried me in her belly and pushed me out through the birth canal. She pushed and pushed and tore and bled until I landed in Greta's lap. And then she went away. Greta, who was only sixteen. Greta, who once told Julia that having a baby so young felt a little like playing pretend and how impressed she was with herself when she realized that she could buy Julia's clothes at the secondhand stores on the Upper East Side, where the quality was better than buying new clothes at the cheap stores. Figuring that out, she once told Julia, gave her courage. Not because of the clothes, but because it was a good idea and she'd thought of it. Greta, who'd laughed as she recalled how she used to mash up whatever she and Michael were eating for dinner and try to feed it to Julia, until Mrs. Kline down the hall told Greta the baby was too young, far too young. That child needs breast milk for another four months, the old woman had said, and then frowned when Greta explained to her—and later explained to Julia—that her milk had dried up early on. How on Sundays she and Michael used to take Julia on walks around the neighborhood and fold back the hood of the carriage so anyone who wanted to could have a look.

"How long has it been, exactly?" Julia asked as she opened the trunk and Tom stacked their cases one on top of the other. While sitting at the café, Julia had calculated the years almost to the day.

"A long time," Johanna said, and daintily held the belt of her tunic as she climbed into the backseat of the car.

"But how long?" Julia pressed. "Have you added it up? You must have. All those hours on the plane. Forty years? A little more than forty years?"

"You know..." Tom said as he climbed into the backseat beside his sister. He was most of the way in before Julia saw where he was going, and she decided not to point out that he should sit in the front. "A farmer once found a pig in the bogs of Ballyroan that had been there for more than five hundred years. At first he thought it must be one of his own, sunk down the season before, that he'd never noticed missing, and the people who saw it said it looked no worse off than a pig who might've died the day before. Scientists came to look at it and everything."

"And?" Julia said as she turned the ignition of the car. In the rearview mirror she saw him give Johanna two quick pats on the knee before clasping his hands in his own lap.

"And that's it. End of story. Time is a funny thing."

T
HE PLANE HAD
been delayed. There was traffic on the bridge. Johanna called James to say that they might make it before the end of the party, and they might not. Greta dreaded the thought of them walking in like everyone else, having to see each other for the first time in front of so many people who had no idea what it meant. She also dreaded having them walk into a near-empty house, with no one there for her to hide behind. She stopped herself from looking out the window every minute. She tried to keep busy. Once in a while she walked down the hall to her bedroom, shut the door, and looked again at the constellations Johanna had drawn on the back of the envelope Greta still had not opened. The envelope was light in her palm, and Greta doubted it was more than one page. There's nothing in here that won't be said in person this weekend, she thought each time she replaced it on her nightstand. Nothing here that won't be said a hundred times.

As far as Greta could tell, everyone who'd been invited to the party had come. The sandhogs were all freshly scrubbed, shaved, tucked into slacks and dress shirts. Some were wearing sport jackets despite the warm day. The wives kept sizing up their husbands, as if searching for that last unsightly gash across the knuckles he'd forgotten to bandage, that patch of dried mud he hadn't gotten out of his hair. The rest of the party was made up of people they'd known from Eighty-fourth Street and people they'd met at socials at various Irish cultural centers
over the years. They'd made friends in Recess—mostly the parents of James's and Eavan's classmates—but those friendships had faded as soon as the children grew up and moved away. None were so close that Greta felt she should invite them to the party, and none of them would have fit in. As James once pointed out, all anyone talked about at these parties was Ireland. When they'd last been home. When they were going home next. They bragged about how much home had pulled itself up and dusted itself off since they left. Paul McCartney had gotten married at home. Some famous actor had been looking to buy a derelict castle in Connemara. All the Hollywood types went golfing at home now. Best golf courses in the world. No need to leave home nowadays, these exiles said. No way. No better place in the world. No more Irish pouring into New York without two pennies to rub against each other. The ones who come now go straight to Wall Street or to some other job in downtown Manhattan.

"I have a job in downtown Manhattan," one of the older sandhogs pointed out. Most of the men had partial hearing loss, so they turned and asked each other, "What? What did he say?" The joke was repeated, louder.

The younger sandhogs, and the grown children of the older sandhogs, and the friends from Eighty-fourth Street who'd all emigrated from somewhere else, if not Ireland, listened closely to the talk of home, watched as the men and women who'd lost very few notes of their accents seemed to swagger as they regaled each other with stories of million-dollar condos at Salt Hill, an article that said Dublin restaurants were now as good as those in New York or London. Not as good, Mrs. Quinn corrected. Better. Far better.

It was the kind of talk Greta didn't always understand. She thought of home too, but not in the America versus Ireland way the rest of them seemed to. Greta had never been to Dublin, had never been to Cork City, had never even left Connaught before she placed her bag on the berth she'd stayed curled up in until the ship docked in New York City. She didn't follow Irish politics except to send fifty dollars a year to help the children orphaned by the troubles in the north. She'd lived in Ireland for sixteen years. She'd been living in New York now for almost forty-four. When she thought of home, it wasn't a country
she thought of, but a cottage, a turf fire, the sea, tea leaves at the bottom of the cup, the flowers of the hawthorn bush that looked so pretty but smelled not unlike a piece of meat left to rot in the sun. Every spring they bloomed like a nasty trick. She thought of that tin box she used to keep under her bed. Her box of treasures. Bits and pieces she'd hoarded just to have a collection of something, of anything. And Johanna, of course, in the foreground of every single memory. Johanna in bed beside her, Johanna striding ahead of her to school, Johanna naked on the beach, the brine turning to salt on her skin, which she always licked once before dusting off. At home, time had stopped in 1963. Greta couldn't picture new construction, paved roads with lines painted down the middle, the Catholic Church without its power. She saw only the cottage, still trying to keep from being swallowed up by the sea.

And now, she supposed, she should erase the cottage too and replace it with a big modern house. Maybe a two-story house. Maybe a built-on section for Little Tom to find peace and quiet. Maybe they'd left the cottage where it was, turned it into a stable. Maybe Johanna's two boys had the run of the place. She wondered if the two Rafferty boys had walked all the way to Conch to go to school, if they'd heard of their aunt in America, if, when they were growing up, they'd ever heard Julia's name whispered after they'd been sent to bed. She wondered if people passed through Ballyroan now and said to each other, "That's the Rafferty place."

Greta didn't think of herself as an American, but America had been good to her. It bothered the others, Greta had realized a few years earlier, that Ireland ended up doing so well. They were proud, of course, but also taken completely by surprise. They'd worked so hard to bring Ireland to America as an intact place that they could live inside, and they had succeeded, keeping their customs the same as they were in the year they'd left, making the preservation of the old ways a new kind of religion. They didn't realize until it was too late that home had moved on, grown up, left the old customs behind. It was as if these exiles had used every last dollar to bet on a horse they didn't own, didn't love, weren't interested in loving, but one that had promised to give them the best return. It was as if that horse had been winning, as
expected, for the entire race. Winning by yards, in fact. A seemingly untouchable distance. And just as they bent their heads to calculate their earnings, that horse was left behind by the wild card, the underdog, the one they'd have preferred to lay their bet down for in the first place.

The questions they put to one another were always the same. If you'd known, would you have left? If you had to wait thirty years for the boom to arrive, for the Celtic Tiger to stride across your land, would you have stuck it out? Or would you have still gotten on that ship or that airplane and headed for New York City?

And if you did leave for America, would you have stayed? Knowing about the boom to come? Or would you have worked for a few years and then taken your American dollars and gone back home to stretch those dollars out until prosperity arrived?

I would have gone back, almost all of them said, shaking their heads, describing to one another what they would have done instead. How they would have waited out the hard years. The kind of patience they would have been capable of had they known there was an eventual end.

I would have stayed here, Greta always said. Michael too.

Even if you could have gone back to a good job in Ireland?

Yes.

Even if it meant you would have been able to build a house in Ireland like the ones in America? Could have sent the children to university?

Yes. Yes.

Once in a while Greta turned the question around. Why not go back now? she asked. There's nothing stopping you. Go build yourself a house in the old country. You can get your American pension and the dole on top of that.

And this was another thing she noticed. The moment Ireland became possible again was the very same moment most of them accepted the fact that they'd never move back for good.

"Do you love America as much as you love Ireland?" Ned Powers asked her once. They were sitting on the deck, and before answering, Greta glanced down at the foot of his chair and counted five amber
bottles. Michael had gone up to the store to buy a piece of meat for the grill.

"Love?" Greta had asked, smirking, hoping to tease him out of this seriousness Ned had about him lately. Sometimes he and Michael would sit out on the deck for hours, not saying a word.

"I don't know America any more than I know Ireland," she said. "New York, New Jersey, yes. But the rest might as well be another country altogether."

"Yes, but if you had to choose."

"What do you mean if I had to choose? I did have to choose. So did Michael. So did you."

"I don't understand you," Ned had said. "Neither of you."

 

"Come here to me now," Oran Quinn said to Eavan, putting a heavy arm around her shoulders. "Will you take that
gasúr
home to see where she's from, or will you do like your mam and da and only tell stories?" He stood back and sized her up. "You have, let's see now, four months left? Five? She's due in—no, let me guess—September? Your mam's people are from the west, aren't they? Plenty of room to run around."

"Oh," Eavan said, looking first at Greta and then at James. "I—"

"Eh?" Oran Quinn said, leaning in to hear her better. "Didn't they ever bring you home at all? I suppose when you have the map on your face like your mam does, you don't need to go home too much. I've gone home every year for the past twenty years. Did you know that?"