Habit of Fear (16 page)

Julie climbed the stairs and answered for herself on the way.

“You couldn’t ring up,” Mrs. O’Rourke explained for her, before she had time to do it, “us not being on the line.” She was a little woman, perpetually bent forward, possibly because she was always on the run, having to be somewhere before she could get there. “It’s the children,” she explained. “The girls are getting to the age of exorbitance.” She ran across the living room to close a door to the rest of the flat and then ran back to recommend a large upholstered chair. She snatched off the plastic cover and stuffed it into a magazine rack behind
The Illustrated News.
“You can’t keep a thing in the house decent for them. And they don’t care. It’s not like when you and I were kids.”

It shocked Julie to realize that this bent woman with her tinted hair and pale, eager eyes thought of her as a contemporary. Mrs. O’Rourke would be wiser by far in the ways of human nature than she was. Or more cunning. She could almost feel herself being played upon. The woman perched on the edge of the sofa and plucked at the apron she wore over heavy slacks and sweater. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have prettied myself up.”

“You know, even when I see your uncle’s papers—if you let me see them—I won’t be able to say whether or not they are valuable.” She wanted no assumption of false promises.

The woman gave a quick little tilt to her head and flashed a smile. “Well, they’ll be valuable to you, dear, won’t they?” Oh, yes: wiser by far.

“As soon as Michael comes up, he’ll put on the kettle for tea, and then we’ll have a nice talk.” She slipped off the couch and pattered, swift as a mouse, to the hall door and opened it. Michael was bringing up, step by step, the shopping cart with the laundry in it. “Leave it on the landing, Michael, and come meet the lady from New York who’s here about your great-uncle’s notebooks.” And while she led the boy, who was taller than she, into the room by the hand, she explained, “Michael’s named after his famous antecedent. Shake hands with Mrs. Hayes, Michael. Is it Mrs. or Miss? Or do you prefer Mzzz?”

“Mrs.”

The busy eyes darted to and from the hand without a wedding band. The quick smile seemed to put a price on the contradictory information. “Michael, put on the kettle like a good boy. Do you think you could make us a cup of tea without scalding yourself?”

The hand he gave Julie was as soft as snow. He gave it and took it back silently, and as silently crossed the room and left them.

“He’s so good, that one,” his mother said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

Julie thought of Kincaid and Donahue, whose mothers felt the same about them.

They went into the dining room for tea, a room of plain, hard chairs and a table with plastic mats over a lacy cloth. The curtains were snowy white, and a colored print of a Dutch windmill hung on the wall. The tea was strong and biting, and the soda bread Sally O’Rourke cut into chunks and served with jam was fresh and good. Michael took his cup and plate to the kitchen while his mother explained that her husband and her older son were at the football match. They went every Saturday. The girls, she said, were into rights and demonstrations and wouldn’t be home till supper. Julie glanced at her watch. It was almost three.

Mrs. O’Rourke, watching her face as though she could read it, said, “It’s your father you’re trying to find, is it? What makes you think he’s in Ireland, dear, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“He was born here, so it’s a starting place.”

The woman pulled back. “There, now. I didn’t mean to pry, but there’s no mention of him after Michael himself came home from the States. He’s in earlier, the one called Frank in Michael’s notebooks, and the last mention, he was on his way to Australia. They were in the secondary school together, you know, both studying with the Franciscan Brothers.”

“Where?”

“Right here in Dublin, the Adam and Eve parish.”

Julie repeated the name, finding it strange for a religious institution. “Adam and Eve weren’t saints, were they?”

The woman thought about it. “They were the first sinners. I suppose they could’ve turned around and been the first saints. Look at Mary Magdalene. Isn’t it strange? I never thought about it.” She bounced up and brushed the crumbs onto her plate. “I’ll get the books for you now, and you can sit here while the light’s good. There’s nothing I could find in the first three that’d interest you, but I’ll bring them all, and when you’re done, you can tell me what you think they’re worth and what I should do with them.”

As though Julie had said nothing. Four notebooks came, their mottled cardboard covers ringed by a hundred teacups or bottles or glasses. Mrs. O’Rourke had been right: she found the first mention of her father in the last book. Desmond’s handwriting was neat, but the pages were stained, and there was a smell that made her think of the hymnals in an old church. They’d have come up from a damp basement when she had sent the letter she addressed to Michael Desmond. She copied into her own notebook the complete entries that mentioned her father. The first was dated February 2, 1954:

Reception at the Waldorf for Andrew Kearney and Lady Cecelia Graham-Kearney. Rumor has it he will be assigned our perm. rep. if we make it into the UN this round. Odds are we won’t. Frozen pawns in the cold war games. I was bored sick with the black ties and skirted broomsticks when I chanced to see a fellow I recognized from Adam and Eve, Frank Mooney. Thomas Francis Mooney he signs himself, having the notion it may ingratiate him with the Americans. Named after Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish refugee who wound up a general in the American Civil War. Not a Yank in a million ever heard of him or any other of the Young Ireland lot Mooney thinks so magnificent. He is writing a life of John Mitchel. Who’s he? said I. He was exiled to Van Dieman’s Land, escaped to the United States, and became a newspaper editor. Oh, said I, one of those. Mooney doesn’t have much humor, but I was glad to see him all the same. I’d thought by now he might be a monk, not a rou. He is Kearney’s secretary….

Julie paused and thought about the last four words. So now, after all the years, she knew why her father was in New York.

I asked him if he knew shorthand and all that. No, says he, but I can dance the mambo. I take that to mean he’s better connected with Lady K than with her husband. Or else he’s pulling my leg. I took him round with me afterwards to the Snug, but he doesn’t drink. I never trust an Irishman who doesn’t drink.

Julie reread the parts she had noted. There would be other questions later, but for now she questioned in the margin: “A. K. and Lady G-K where?” She read on. There was good New York color in the journals, lovely sketches of diplomats and pompous attachés, and of actors just below star status, and the habitués of literary drinking places; a paragraph described a younger, wild John Walsh, the literary agent who had started Julie on this mission. She determined to recommend that Sally O’Rourke consult him on the disposition of the journals. A number of entries through into the summer concerned the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. The diarist noted having been instructed by Dublin that he need not report on Washington. “In other words I don’t have the right slant on Joe McCarthy. I like that dry little lawyer from Boston, who a great lot of Irish Americans think is a traitor to his race.” Then:

Mooney got into a fight with one of them. We’d gone over to Chelsea, to a dockside bar, and Frank took a swing at this baboon who said he was a disgrace to Ireland. The fellow hit him back so fast it lifted him off his feet. His nose turned into a bloody spout. It was a shame we couldn’t save the runoff for a blood bank. I’m beginning to rue the day I got him off the wagon. He’s a lovely drinker but a terrible drunk.

Julie felt better about her father than she had after the first mention of him, even though she had thought her own dislike of alcohol might be part of her inheritance. There was more warmth to him this way, more honor. Hit it straight, Julie: it makes him seem more of a man.

19 June 1954

Politics seem to have turned against Kearney. There’s a puritanical lot in ascendancy and of course they don’t like it that Lady Graham-K has not renounced her title. It has never bothered me. Not that anyone sought my opinion, but I’ve always thought her a lady, with a large L or a small one. In any case, the Kearneys are going home and it will be a dull mission without them. Frank is at sixes and sevens. They’ll pay his fare back and try to find him a place in the glass works. But he’d rather stay a while here. I told him if he wants, he can bunk in with me and get something on paper he can show John Walsh.

Julie questioned in the margin: glass works?

23 June 1954

We had a night last night. Mooney has found a new lot of poets and petticoats. This is too exotic a bunch for me. They hang around a shop called Books of All Nations. There’s a queen bee, knocking them off one by one, if I remember my nature studies. She is a stunning-looking woman and you wonder she could not do better than clerking in a bookstore. I’m sure she does. I’d say the name Richards is Anglo-Irish, and I’m reminded how a certain kind of head-high and bedamned-to-the-world Englishwoman seems to take hold of an Irish youth. I used to think it was the delusion of power on the part of the Irishman. Now I’m thinking it’s an abdication of it.

Julie liked the description of her mother. She had modeled her own carriage after her mother’s. People thought it came from her attending Miss Page’s School, but it hadn’t.

Several pages of the journal were devoted to upheavals in the Irish diplomatic corps. “The politics of pygmies.” Desmond also began to take stock of his own life. He wondered if he shouldn’t go home and settle down. “It’s not fair to keep her waiting any longer, and I’m not laying by a penny much less a pound.”

1 July 1954

Bedamned to him if he isn’t in love and going to marry the woman. She’s years older than him, and if I’m not mistaken, she’s marrying him out of spite. Or do I wrong her? Is it all a bold show to hide a fearful heart? She’s taking instruction, and that surely is a kind of submission. God Almighty, what do I know of women anyway? What does any Irishman? I’ve agreed to stand up for Frank in the rectory at Saint Giles’s. Then I wash my hands of the lot. I’m no more than three or four years older than him, but he seems like a child. How is he going to support himself? To say nothing of her. Ah, but he won’t. She won’t let him. She’ll give and give and give, and that’s not good for a man.

21 July

The deed was quickly done at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. We cabbed down to Rory’s Restaurant in the Village afterwards, where we ate shrimp and roast beef and drank Bushmill and the good dark stout of Guinness. When the bride and groom departed, the maid of honor let down her honor and folded me into her large Italian bosom. Though it hurts me to say it, I don’t know her like in Ireland. Her name is Maggie Fiore and she may cause me further dalliance in America.

Quite a lot about Maggie, but not another mention of Julie’s father until:

10 September

It seems Frank has run away from home, though where to and with what, God knows. It was Mrs. Mooney herself who rang me up to see if he was here by any chance. By no chance. Maggie, for so garrulous a woman, keeps close counsel. She seems not to have said a word to Kate about us. And I suppose it’s just as strange that though I’ve seen Frank a couple of times, I’ve said nothing of it to him. It would have been like saying to him—look what I got for nothing when you had to pay the price of your freedom.

Julie wrote in the margin for her own satisfaction: “Oh, men!” Morgan Reynolds had also put a high value on freedom.

18 September

A fortnight ago I promised Father Daly I’d stop seeing Maggie, but instead I’ve stopped seeing Father Daly. A couple of nights ago she told me what’s been going on up on 91st Street. In the first place, Kate’s boss came home after a three-month leave to consolidate a chain of bookstores on the West Coast. The first thing he did, after a wee visit to his wife, was go round to see Kate. He and Frank tried to throw one another out. He refused to believe Kate had married in his absence, and when she offered proof, he fired her. He has since hired her back, according to Maggie. But Mooney is gone, the poor broken-hearted go-been.

Julie noted in the margin: “The untold Reynolds story.”

13 November 1954

A night on the town after theatre with John Walsh. He remains the best company I’ve ever kept. He has heard from Mooney. In Australia and still writing his life of John Mitchel. But he sent him a poem John thought was good and sent off to
The New Yorker.
If they take it, John is to send the cheque to Katherine
Richards.
Peculiar. Could they have had the marriage annulled? I asked Father Daly, and he said it would take years and that Maggie and I would be called as witnesses. Well, they’ll have to call me long distance, for I’m going home at Christmas. Maggie is bitter and I don’t blame her. It was cowardly of me to tall her I’d committed myself to a girl at home. I’ll be a long time forgetting what she said, “There’s no shit like an Irish shit.” She’s right.

Desmond’s journal ended the nineteenth of December without further reference to Mooney, Kate, or Maggie.

J
ULIE RETURNED
by the way she had come. There was no outdoor life at all, it seemed, on the somber streets of the O’Rourke neighborhood, only the occasional streaking car that appeared without warning from a direction she would not have expected. The lamp lights, high and graceful, had come on along the iron fence of Saint Stephen’s Green. A blue mist hung low in the sky, deepening the twilight. Across the street another set of lights came on—of the high-density variety so familiar to her from home. They shone a misty glare on the bus queues of silent people. A damp chill added to her feeling of sadness. Grafton Street had been more of what she expected of Dublin, not this. And Mrs. O’Rourke and her quiet son stayed in her mind. She’d like to have seen the girls come noisily home from their demonstrations and to have heard male voices rehashing the football game. But none of them had come when it was time for her to go. She thought now of Sally O’Rourke’s lament about the two maiden aunts who died within a year of each other, leaving only her mother and her to take care of Uncle Michael when he fell on hard times and was ill. “He should have written a book himself, don’t you think, having a friend in the business over there?” Then a desperate afterthought: “Do you think
you
could make a book out of what’s there?” Julie suggested that someday one of Mrs., O’Rourke’s children might want to do it. “Ah, dear, they can hardly scratch their own names. It’s the telly being on from morning till night. I’m as much to blame as they are, but I do wonder, times, what we’d do if we couldn’t afford the telly. Would the kids be better off?” At the door she had raised herself as tall as she could, and Julie had stooped down to accept the brush of dry lips against her cheek.