Habit of Fear (17 page)

And at that instant she had thought of Missy Glass, who also carried on her back the invisible burden of her life.

W
ITHIN HOURS OF HER ARRIVAL
she had made Trinity College her special place in Dublin. Now, instead of returning to the hotel to freshen up before going on to meet the
New York Daily
special correspondent—whom Jeff would still call a stringer—she turned in at the Trinity gates and passed through the busy portico into Parliament Square. Stone buildings that looked older than they were rose on all sides, enclosing the long green with its campanile and its cobbled walkways that glistened in the misty half-light. Looking up at the “rubrics,” the oldest student quarters, she asked herself if her father might have stayed there. It was all wrong to try to force a fantasy: he sounded much too Catholic for Trinity, and to have gone to the Franciscans didn’t seem the right preparation. As though she knew anything about the Franciscans except for their bare feet and their founding saint. Why the Franciscans? Why Australia? The biography he thought he was going to write? Or did he happen to get a job on a boat that was going there? In the portico she read the notices on a variety of bulletin boards concerning student activities. On the call board of the Trinity Players she read:

Ladies of Players

Your opportunity for fame and fortune is at hand. The Abbey Theatre is looking for well-brought-up young ladies to play French gentlewomen in a Parisian academy in
Hotel Paradise
by Feydeau around Christmastime. The parts are small, but there is money.

She copied it into her notebook to send to Tim, but halfway through she doubted he would find it as amusing as she had: she was traveling at a different tempo. She abandoned the college grounds and searched out a pub called the Bower on Pearse Street.

The Bower was jammed, men four and five deep at the bar, with an occasional woman, and all of them, it seemed to Julie, talking at once. If the language wasn’t foreign, neither was the inflection familiar. She tried to get through to the bar, but one man simply could not get out of her way. “Could I order you something, love? You’re never going to make it unless you can climb over me.”

“I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I’m supposed to meet a man here by the name of Roy Irwin. …”

“Oh, he is a man for certain.” Her informant called out: “Irwin, are you in the house?”

“I am,” came the voice from within the crowd.

“Bad luck to you. I was hoping to be your deputy.”

The crowd pressed in on itself to make way for a large, dark-bearded young man who took her by the arm. “Julie Hayes is it? I’m glad to make your acquaintance. What will you have? A gin and tonic?”

“God forbid,” she said, more Irish-sounding than she intended. “Lager, please.” But then to show off: “A half-pint.”

The order went up, and Irwin introduced her to the man who had hailed him. “She’s a columnist with my New York newspaper, the
Daily
.”

Julie thought, not for the first time since her arrival, of Seamus McNally, who pronounced the word
columnist
the same way.

When her drink came, Irwin steered her to a table given over to them by a young couple. Cheerfully. “I get the occasional pass to give out to theater or the races or a football match,” he explained. “It’s better than legal tender.

“If you’re going to the theater while you’re here, by the way, show your press card at the box office and mention your column. They all think Broadway is only a wing-dip away. You’ll ask the manager to have a drink with you during the interval and he’ll invite you to supper instead—at the Baily or someplace you couldn’t afford. Or I couldn’t. Would you believe I’m special correspondent to six newspapers? And still can’t make a living? Four on the Continent and two in the States, but none in bally Britain. And that’s where, if I had a byline, I could get on in my profession.” He downed half his dark brew and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’re afraid I’m IRA. That’s what my wife says, and she may be right.”

Julie almost said, And are you? but thought better of it.

“Drink up and tell me what I can do for you. Ah—the wife said to ask you, would you like to go disco dancing with me and her tonight? You’d have your choice of a number of decent lads when we get there, whereas if I fixed you up beforehand, we’d bog down in formalities and privileges.”

“I’m willing to play it by ear,” she said. “Thank you.”

Irwin hesitated and then asked, “Are you here on assignment or on your own?”

Something in the way he said it put her on guard. And he wasn’t as young as she had first supposed. The eyes were black and keen, but there were tiny lines around them, and the hair and beard were flecked with gray. He’d resent an assignment, she decided, fearing encroachment on his preserve. “On my own.” She told him of her search for Thomas Francis Mooney and of the Desmond diary she had just seen. She consulted her notebook. “It was someone named Andrew Kearney who brought my father to New York. He was connected with the Irish observers at the UN. This was in 1954.”

“Before my time. But the name’s familiar,” Irwin said, immediately ready to help. “I’ll try and look it up for you.” He made a note of the name.

“Lady Cecelia Graham-Kearney—with a hyphen,” Julie said.

“Ah, now, you’re in the upper register of society. A great horsewoman in her day. There’s a classic race named after her. I’m going to guess she’s in the west—if she’s alive—Galway likely. I can look that up for you, too.”

“If my father had come back to Ireland with them, they were going to find a place for him in the glass works. Is that any help?”

Irwin tapped his teeth with a thumbnail while thinking. Then: “I’ve got it! Kearney and Sons is an export firm, and their main line is Irish crystal.”

“I should have started with the phone book,” Julie said.

“So you could, but you’re committed now to letting me work on it over the weekend. What you should do is go up the coast to Wicklow town, since that’s where your dad was born. It’s a two-hour run through some of the sweetest country in Ireland. You’ll go to Saint Patrick’s on the hill, and it wouldn’t harm to arrive in time for Mass and then have the priest put you onto the clerk of records. You know you won’t be the first American to be tracing her forefathers back to their Irish christening.”

“I do know that,” Julie said.

“But it’s not as though you were wanting a coat of arms going back to Brian Boru. The office of the Register General here in Dublin has records of births, deaths and marriages for over a hundred years. But it’s humaner going the route of the parish church. You’ll get on to the family quicker that way.” He sat back and looked at her and almost smiled. He was not a great smiler. “It’s a romantic sort of mission. Are you going to write a book about it? Americans are always writing books, it seems to me.”

“I suppose it depends on how it ends.”

“If you knew that, don’t you wonder—would you start it at all?”

She had met, Julie thought, her first melancholic Irishman.

She had left word at the desk that she expected to be called for, but she went downstairs a few minutes early, loitering to look at the prints on the second landing. They were illustrations from Carleton’s
Irish Folklore.
The crystal chandeliers were lighted and augmented by wall sconces converted from gaslight long ago. The walls were a deep crimson, the arches and balustrades white. Georgian bits had been retained.

When she turned in her key, the clerk said, “Ah, Mrs. Hayes, the gentleman is waiting. …” But there was no gentleman to be seen. “He may have gone down to the bar. I’ll get the porter to rundown—”

“Don’t bother,” Julie said. “He won’t be long.” She assumed Irwin’s wife would be waiting in a car outside. “A dark-haired man with a bushy beard?” she asked, an afterthought.

“Ah, no. A slight man, rather pale. I told him you’d be down soon, expecting him at nine. He said he’d wait there in the lounge.”

“My friends may have arranged for him to meet us here,” Julie said.

But when the Irwins arrived, Roy coming in for Julie, his wife staying in the car, the man had not returned to the hotel lobby, nor did the newspaperman recognize the clerk’s description: “a gray-faced man of forty or so … slight build, thin brownish hair …”

Julie asked the clerk to get whatever information he could if the man returned. Outdoors, Irwin opened the front door of the car and asked his wife if she had told anyone about Julie.

“And who would I tell?”

Irwin introduced the two women. Julie climbed into the backseat. “Let’s forget him,” she said and sat forward. “It’s great of you to take me along tonight, Mrs. Irwin.”

“You must call me Eileen. I hope the crowd is not too rough for you. You never know who’s following who these days. I myself don’t like the punks and their music, and they turn up everywhere.”

“We’re going out to have a good time, for the love of God,” her husband said.

“I intend to, and you will too, Julie. The Burnigans are a wonderful rock group.”

When they reached the disco and Julie saw the posters, she realized the “Burnigans” clearly were the Born Agains.

T
HE FIDDLE
was a converted warehouse with more light than any pub in Dublin. It kept the neckers from going too far, though there were some, Julie noted, going quite a ways. There were more bars also, and more noise, and a startling parade of younger men stationed along the wall, hanging close to the shelf provided for their drinks. They stared at all arrivals. They looked terribly young, as though they were still growing out of their clothes. Now and then they exploded into laughter and made rude comments on the new girls as they came in.

Julie sank into a cushioned wall seat and studied Eileen Irwin while the Born Agains returned from an intermission—an “interval,” in local parlance. Eileen was plump and pretty, and several times a mother despite her youth. She would fill her eyes with concern every time she was spoken to. Whenever Julie said anything to her, she seemed to listen with her whole being. When Roy went to the bar to get their drinks, someone from the stag line came and asked Eileen to dance. She looked tearful at having to turn him down. “I’m that sorry but I’m promised,” she said, as though he’d asked her to marry him. Julie felt like a chaperone—or a widow. A grass widow, which she was: she tried to remember where she’d heard the expression. Mrs. Ryan probably.

The walls were painted with clowns and aerialists and crudely drawn circus animals. Over the stage angelic mobiles floated as they might over a Christmas tableau, and the Born Agains themselves wore flowing sleeves and floor-length robes, which kept them in perpetual motion when the beat took over. Irwin danced with his wife. Julie was on her own. Women on the dance floor outnumbered the men, especially among the very young; girls were stomping and shaking, bobbing their heads at one another and not letting on if they gave a damn that no boy seemed to want them. The young men hung near the wall. Julie decided on a bold move. After all, she was a Yank, and a New York Yank at that. She marched over to the stag line and chose a partner at random, except that she avoided pimples. The rest of the line collapsed in noisy mirth while a flushed and wet-palmed youth stalked solemnly into the dance with her. Once on the floor he went loose-limbed and wildly rhythmic. They didn’t touch again for ten minutes.

When the music stopped, Julie threw back her head and laughed. She brushed the sweat from her forehead. Her partner offered his breast-pocket handkerchief. “I’m Julie,” she said.

“I’m Sean.”

They shook hands, and Sean carefully refolded the handkerchief when she returned it to him and put it back in his pocket. For his own use he had a khaki-colored rag that had been freshly laundered.

“All right,” she said and started back to where the Irwins were bringing stools for another couple. The place was getting more and more crowded. Sean fell in step with her. “You’re American, aren’t you?”

“New York.”

“I’ve been there. I have an aunt in Poughkeepsie. Do you know where that is?”

“Sort of.” She motioned with her thumb over her shoulder. “It’s up thataway.”

“On the Hudson River.”

She nodded.

“Will you dance with me again?”

“Of course. But you’ll have to ask me this time.”

“They’ll all ask you now, sure.”

If not all, most of them did. She could not remember when she had last danced that much. “You’re doing swell!” Her partners assured her: their notion of pure Americanese. Irwin, his wife locked in conversation with a friend from her convent-school days, asked Julie to dance.

As soon as they stepped onto the floor, the Born Agains shifted from rock to a waltz and toned down the amplifiers.

“I don’t believe it,” Julie said.

“They’re a versatile lot.” He danced like Jeff, Julie thought. Oh, Christ.

In the new quiet, Irwin said, “If it turns out that Lady Graham-Kearney is in the west, and I think she is, I’ll be going down Sligo way on Wednesday to cover a funeral. You could go along and chip in on the petrol. I wouldn’t mind even staying over if you needed more time. I’ve a parcel of friends in the west.”

Richard Garvy’s grandmother lived in Sligo, Julie remembered, and he had said on that day long weeks ago that she ought to visit her when she got to Ireland. Said half in jest, to be sure, but Garvy was about to do a play on Broadway, and one written by an Irishman … “Roy, do you know the playwright Seamus McNally?”

“Well, yes.” Nothing more, although she waited.

“Let me see what happens in Wicklow,” Julie said of his offer. “That comes first.” Where her father was born.

Irwin was no longer listening to her. “I’m going to steer us round by the wall just now. There’s a queer-looking older fella just joined that lot. See if you recognize him.”

She saw a stranger, someone she was sure she had not seen before. His clothes looked loose on him; his jaw was square, his nose had a bump at the bridge, his coloring was gray. When he turned his back as they approached, she had to assume he was the man who had inquired after her at the hotel. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before, Roy.”