Habit of Fear (27 page)

Julie began to see a character resemblance between her father and herself. She, too, could do fairly well, and sometimes better than that, anything she put her mind to, and what had she not, at one time or another, put her mind to? Acting, art history, psychiatry, bead-making, fortune-telling … a gossip columnist now, of all things … striving to write her way out of it. Determined to write.

“He loved to sing and he could tell a good story, mind. It was only the writing he couldn’t keep alive. No one was ever blessed with better company than I,” the widow went on, and her tone embraced her widowhood, more and more a croon. “If there had been a war in his lifetime, he’d have been an Irish soldier in an alien army—so long as the cause served Ireland. It was always in his head, you see, the urge to do something for this divided land. And the problem had been what to do. In olden times he would have been a servant to the king.”

Julie thought of the Graham-Kearneys, whom her father had served in a number of ways. “Or the king’s fool,” she said.

“If he’s gone from me by choice,” O’Shea went on, “and I think now it may well have been that way, it’s a wonder he didn’t go sooner.” She turned in her chair to look at Julie. “The king’s fool who was wiser than anyone knew but the king?”

Julie nodded. “Did he ever speak of my mother, Katherine Richards? She’s dead now too.”

“He loved her very much.”

Julie wondered if that answer had not been on the back of her tongue waiting for the question. “Then why did he leave her?”

“Because he could not serve. She was surrounded by servitors and some more favored than himself. He felt he had nothing to give her.”

“Only me,” Julie said.

“I would swear on my life he did not know of you.”

Julie got up, unable to sit quietly any longer. “I must have been a natural consequence—even if I wasn’t on their agenda, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, but she would not have told him, don’t you see?”

“I don’t know what I see. It’s like a house of mirrors.” She touched her foot to a square of turf that had fallen away from the rest, returning it to the fire. “She was never supposed to have seen him after he left, but wouldn’t he have had to return to New York at least for the annulment?”

“Things can be done by affidavit, or—not at all.”

“What were the grounds?” Julie turned from the fire. “I know it gives a Catholic a second chance. Or did back then, but there had to be some pretty stinking reason for it. It isn’t just handed out like Communion.”

“You’re angry, and I don’t wonder,” O’Shea said.

“I want to know,” Julie said, her voice rising, “
I want to know.”

O’Shea gave an impatient toss of her head. “Do you think either one of us will ever know the truth about him? And what would we know if we did that would be better than what we know now? Isn’t it enough that I recognized you for his daughter? I, too, am a teller of tales. I could weave you a heritage. For every mortal in search of who and why he was born there is a conspiracy of witnesses who may not have been there at all. A bit of the teller’s dream of himself goes into every answer. There are always circumstances which are indiscernible, and the truth is in their shadow. Come and sit down and tell me: has anyone you’ve asked about him had less than a good word of Frank Mooney?”

“There was one. But he was my mother’s lover—before and after my father. How about that?”

“And couldn’t believe he’d missed the mark himself?” O’Shea said.

Julie, when she caught on to the implication, nodded. It might well be so.

O’Shea threw back her head and laughed heartily. “It takes two women to know any man—if he’s worth the knowing at all.”

It was her laugh, really, that first made Julie love her.

F
OR THREE DAYS
they talked during most of their waking hours. They packed sandwiches and a thermos of tea in a knapsack and walked the Coast Road; they followed sheep trails high among rocky crags. They took refuge in caverns through pelting showers and from them watched the racing clouds, the clearing skies. They timed themselves to the tide and trekked along the sands, fleeing the swift reach of foamy water like children defying every wave to come and get them. They talked of painters and painting, of which Julie knew more than she had thought she knew, discovery implicit in the growth of love. She learned that Edna O’Shea had been born in England of Irish parents and she learned that the Stone Ring had been provided her by an Irish benefactor to be given to the nation on her death. The ground was sacred to saints and kings, legend had it, “And you can be sure none of them ever tried to till it. It would unmake a saint to try.” Legend also had it that it had been a stopover for smugglers.

In the morning light of the fourth day Edna O’Shea brought out a number of paintings and set them one by one in front of Julie, leaving those Julie especially admired tilted against a chair leg, table leg, the leg of her easel. Julie was surprised at their severity. More and more O’Shea seemed to strive for simplicity. The latest pieces were stark, bleak. She was certainly not an artist Julie would have called a landscape painter. Except that you’d say the same of Dali or O’Keeffe. Nor was there any sign of the clown the Wicklow child called Pansy.

They gossiped—if it could be called that—about Frank’s family—Julie’s own, she kept reminding herself—in Wicklow. There was a high rate of desertion among the men and of fidelity among the women, who loved them more than they may have deserved. Julie told O’Shea what she could of Jeff and was surprised at how uncertain she herself was of many things about him. “It’s like I was afraid to know him, except to blame him in my own mind for things that didn’t matter much. I was afraid to love him the way I sure as hell wanted to love somebody.”

“Why afraid?”

Julie shrugged. “I was afraid it might turn him off. Too much.”

“Or on?”

“Maybe.” She avoided the eyes of the older woman. “He’s got someone now who turns him on. That’s for certain.”

O’Shea pounced: “And you?”

The time had come to tell her stepmother what had happened to her that Sunday morning in June after Jeff had told her he wanted a divorce.

O
’SHEA LEANED BACK. SHE
had moved her chair closer while Julie spoke. “The dirty dogs!” she cried out. “And the arrogance of sanctuary in Ireland!”

“The more I think about it, the less surprised I am,” Julie said. “I believe now there’s a link to everything that’s happened to me. I’ve always said nothing is accidental.”

“You saw but the one of them. Are they together, do you think?”

It had not occurred to her that they might not be. “Yes. But it’s just a feeling, and that’s because they’re jammed into one place in my mind … like a sickness.” She’d had to grope for the word and the nausea came with it. “Oh, Christ! Like being damaged for life. I’m not!
I will not be!
”

“Indeed you’re not. But they
are.
They’ll never escape.”

Julie saw again in her mind’s eye Kincaid’s wild flight from her, his crash into and break through the dancing barricade. “He was more shocked even than me.”

“Do you think you’re in danger for having seen him?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I know how they got here: it’s for their own safety—they’re supposed to be out of Mr. Romano’s reach. … Isn’t it crazy! I still call him Mr. Romano—a gangster.”

“Who loves art,” O’Shea added, for Julie had told her in the course of their long conversations of her troublous friendship with the underworld figure.

“And buys it at auction or on somebody’s advice—legitimate—only not under his own name.”

“Most collectors go that way.” She put Julie back on track: “Kincaid and his partner—how
did
they get here?”

“I don’t know exactly how, but I think their lawyer got them over and hid them away among his Irish connections. Do you know who Joe Quinlan is?”

“I do know. Is he their lawyer? Ah, now I begin to see the shape of things.”

“They were supposed to be safe and anonymous here till he brought them back to New York for their trial, or maybe even to give testimony against Romano if they can identify his thugs. Isn’t it ironic? I was trying to find a safe place for myself—to get away from the whole scene. That’s what finally pushed me into the search for Thomas Francis Mooney.”

“And not the pending divorce?”

Julie sighed. “That too. But it’s all connected. I think the man who was killed in Sligo may have been hired by Romano—either to protect me or to follow me in case I was on the track of Kincaid and Donahue. What I ought to know by now is that Romano has more ways of finding things out than the FBI, and I’ll bet customs people all over the world are among his best informants.”

O’Shea sat back in her chair and rocked herself gently. “It would be interesting to know if the people giving those two cover—in the Donegal hills it must be—know the nature of their offense.”

“They’d do it for Quinlan,” Julie said.

“Almost anything,” her stepmother agreed.

A sudden thought: “Would my father have known him?”

“He might have—but, more likely, Quinlan’s lieutenants.”

“Do you know anything, Edna, about an organization called the ONI?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“They’re more radical than the IRA, I think.”

“One Nation Indivisible. Do you find that so radical?”

“I meant more violent. I used to say the words in school every morning. They’re from the American Pledge of Allegiance—‘one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’”

Both women were quiet for a moment. It was dark outside by then, and the wind was all but silent, only a whisper. “I feel Frank to be very close tonight,” O’Shea said, her voice pitched higher than normal. “It’s a sorrow to me, for I’ve tried these seven years to draw him near. That I couldn’t I took to be a sure sign that he wasn’t dead at all.”

A memory of the keening women at the Casey funeral flickered in and out of Julie’s mind. “I don’t think he’s dead,” she said.

O’Shea turned in her chair to look at her.

“I don’t,” Julie repeated.

O’Shea turned back to the fire, which had almost gone to ashes. “Oh, child,” she murmured.

After a moment Julie asked, “Who was Aengus?”

“An ancient Irish god of love and poetry. Long before Christianity cooled us off.”

“‘The Wandering Aengus,’” Julie said. “I should have known from Yeats’s poem: ‘the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon.’ I must call New York in the morning and I must call Seamus.”

“Will you go on looking for your father?”

“Yes.”

“And will you let me know if you find him, dead or alive?”

“I will.”

They were gathering the supper dishes into the sink, the kettle on the boil for coffee, when the phone rang. There had been few calls since Julie had arrived, and O’Shea put off most of them to return, herself, at another time. She answered now in her usual manner, giving her phone number. Without a word to the caller she said, “It’s a Seamus McNally for Mrs. Hayes.”

Julie was quicker than she would like to have been, her stepmother watching, but her heart had leaped ahead. “How did you find me, Seamus?” She had not gotten to tell him about Edna O’Shea.

“I started with Garvy’s gran and came to a halt with the next stop …”

“Greely’s Bookstore,” Julie said.

“Aye, and by good fortune I was able to squeeze out the information that you’d been there to inquire after Edna O’Shea. Old man Greely himself gave me the number.”

“You’re a wonderful detective, and I’m glad you found me,” she said softly.

“Does that mean you’re ready for me to come and get you?”

“I was going to call you tonight,” Julie said. “Shall I ask my stepmother to give you directions?”

“Your stepmother,” he repeated. Then, after a pause, “No, love, I know where I’m going. Just tell me the name of the house.”

“Tell him the Stone Ring,” O’Shea said. “That’s all he needs to know.”

When Julie had put down the phone, her stepmother said, “Your father and Ned Greely were friends. But after Frank was gone, Ned and I never got on. I’m surprised they told you where to look for me.”

“Edna, what about the person who said he might have beached the boat himself and vanished? You said to remind you.”

“I don’t remember saying that at all.” She was becoming impatient, Julie thought, perhaps for her to go, since she was going. “It was the observation of a tubercular Franciscan, who may well be dead himself by now. He came from Rossnowlagh to say Mass on the Sunday we prayed for Frank’s safe return—or the peaceful repose of his soul.”

“Can’t you remember his name?” Julie persisted. She might not come this way again.

“A Franciscan: Brother Daniel. It might have been that.”

O’Shea made coffee that neither of them any longer wanted. And conversation had become strained. Julie proposed to go up to the loft early.

O’Shea did not protest. “I’ll be up and away in the morning before you leave, and if I’m not back, be sure to close the great doors so the animals won’t get out. They’re the devil to catch, and the bogs are treacherous.”

Julie thanked her for many kindnesses, but they did not even touch. O’Shea stood resolute, her back to the fire, her hands clasped behind her. Julie reasoned that her leaving might seem a betrayal, as though she’d made a choice between O’Shea and Seamus McNally. And for her own part, she felt the pain of yet another separation.

S
HE AWOKE IN THE
morning to a silent house and knew that O’Shea must have already gone out. In the kitchen she found a fire built up in the range that would last the morning, and on the table a framed watercolor of the pale and misted sun O’Shea had described as a will-o’-the-wisp. Alongside it was an envelope marked “Julie.” It contained two lined pages from a notebook. She read one with her name on it first: “I like this watercolor the best of my attempts to catch that morning’s sun. Take it in memory. And you had better have the enclosed. He wrote it out for me. Go and Godspeed. Edna.”