Habit of Fear (33 page)

Seamus had then had the dog by the collar and turned it over to the housekeeper, who dragged it outdoors, at once soothing and scolding it.

“The jealous brute,” Seamus said. “Did he get his teeth into you?” He was sitting on the side of the bed, a long flannel nightshirt tucked between his legs. “Come and kneel down and let me have a look.”

Julie pulled off the sweater and allowed him to examine her neck and shoulders.

“Nary a mark,” Seamus said, “but I can hear your heart thumping. Or is it my own?”

Julie got up and pulled on the sweater, not looking to see the extent of the damage.

Mrs. O’Gorman was standing in the doorway. “I’ve put him out,” she said.

“Will you take him up home with you and keep him for a few days?”

“He won’t stay, and you need him here.”

The implication to Julie was that he did not need her.

“Look at you sitting up there,” the woman scolded him. “You’ll be crippling yourself for life.”

“On the contrary,” Seamus said and slipped off the bed and onto his feet. “I’ve been misdiagnosed by the sawbones.” He hobbled across the room and took a bathrobe from a hook behind the door. “We’ll have our toddies in the lounge, Mrs. O’Gorman.”

It was a large cottage named after the Swilly River, which it overlooked. Seamus had added onto it himself so that it was not authentic, as he explained, “but a hell of a lot more comfortable than it was in its authenticity.”

Julie tried to memorize it—the large fireplace in the lounge or living room, the musical instruments. Seamus played the flute—“I’m not James Galway, but I can tootle a pretty tune.” There were books everywhere, and the floors were covered with the woven carpets of Donegal. She took in everything she could, for she knew that she would not be long a guest at Swilly Cottage after all, perhaps not even the night. There was a sad inevitability to her feeling of imminent departure. That Seamus understood her need to go was implicit in his saying, “I was hoping to show you the far, far hills that are very near to here, and the village Richard Garvy is coming over to see before we go into rehearsal. But you’re a writer. You know it’s more a state of mind than a place on the map. And when you see it on the stage, you’ll say you’ve been there, and so you will have been, don’t you see?”

“I do see,” Julie said.

“I’ve a copy of the play for you.”

She did not remind him that she already had one, bought that first morning in the bookstore in Donegal town.

They had their toddies and an early dinner of poached salmon Mrs. O’Gorman had brought already prepared from her house.

“It’s twice poached, you know,” Seamus said, “one from an English lord’s demesne and once in a pot.”

The dog barked incessantly, as though she had not already resolved to go, and Seamus was wincing with pain before the meal was over. Julie spoke to the housekeeper. “Seamus says you can arrange a car to drive me back to Donegal tonight.”

“My son’s in the livery business. I’ll ring him up now.”

“Your haste is indecent,” Seamus growled. “Bring me back a pill when you come.”

“That’s why I’m in haste,” Mrs. O’Gorman said, the last word.

“I’m sorry it’s come out this way,” Seamus said when she was gone.

“It’s better that I finish up one part of my life before starting another,” Julie said.

“I like that,” he said and grinned like a boy with the promise of his favorite treat if he took his medicine.

Back in the same hotel room she had vacated in Donegal town that morning, she read again the inscription Seamus had written in the revised typescript he had given her of
The Far, Far Hills of Home:
“For Julie—with love that is and is to be.”

F
ATHER DANIEL O’MEARA IN
his brown robes and sandals was a towering old man, and the cold, murky office, its windows smudged with the dust of Dublin, seemed to vibrate with his coming. He had heavy jowls and thunderous eyebrows over eyes so searching they could purge a sinner for life, Julie thought. But the large mouth told of humor, and his deep voice filled the room. His first words when he had moved her from the desk to where they could sit side by side, gave her pleasure: “Now, where have we met before, Mrs. Hayes? I know I recognize you from somewhere.”

“I don’t think so, but from someone maybe. Do you remember Thomas Francis Mooney? He was my father.”

The priest pulled at his nose, taking a second or two before he murmured, “Mooney, is it? I do remember him as a lad. I taught him—a bright little fellow with fine, wide eyes like your own.”

Julie could tell that the priest was groping his way through surprise. “I wasn’t trying to take you unawares, Father Daniel. I’ve been in Ballymahon with Edna O’Shea for a week. She recognized me for his daughter, but I don’t think he even knew of my existence. I should tell you that I know you said Mass for him when he disappeared.”

“Yes, well. So I did. Is that why you came to see me?”

“It was something you said that she repeated to me: you said he might have beached the boat himself and vanished.”

“Why did she tell you that, I wonder? Sheer speculation on my part.”

Julie suspected that unless she told all she knew, she would learn little from him that was new. And it would be unwise to throw the cover name Aengus at him, with all its political implications, without preparing the way. “Father Daniel, do you have time to listen if I were to tell you how I got to Donegal in my search for him?”

“I have made a friend of time, Miss Julie. It had become too formidable an enemy. Tell on.”

How odd that he should call her Miss Julie. He and Sweets Romano.

So again Julie told the story of her search for her father, the tale growing longer with each telling, with each new episode of discovery. She wound up with her visit to Rossnowlagh, saying that Brother Charles had told her that her father might very well have gone to school to him, Father Daniel, for politics as well as history and algebra.

“Not a reticent man, Brother Charles. Well, I forgive him as he forgave me my chauvinism. How did you find Miss O’Shea?”

“Through the cashier at Greely’s Bookstore in Sligo.”

The priest’s jowls quivered when he chortled. “I was inquiring after her health actually. An idle question. What did you think of Maise Craig at Greely’s?”

“I didn’t meet her. Another woman spoke to me. It was the night before Roger Casey’s funeral, and Mrs. Craig was at a meeting.”

“Wielding the gavel as though it were an ax. And did you and Miss O’Shea take to each other, having that uncommon man in common?”

Julie nodded. “She’s very special, Father.”

“Oh, she is that.”

They were speaking of someone, Julie realized, who had seemed, at the time she mentioned the priest, to have scarcely known his name, as though it was accidental that he had been the one available to come from Rossnowlagh to say the Mass. Whether or not Edna O’Shea knew it, the priest and her father were not strangers. “Is Frank Mooney alive, Father?”

The priest made a little face as though the direct question pained him. “I see I must tell you now—I was your father’s confessor.”

She smothered the vulgar word that leapt to mind, but she could not stem bitter sarcasm. “Well, you could not have confessed a dead man, could you?”

“I did not say when I served him thus, and I understand your anger to have come this far and have me take the Fifth, you might say.”

“But if he were dead, you
could
talk to me, couldn’t you?”

“Am I not talking to you?”

Julie thought about that. “Is it that I’m not listening to you, Father?”

He smiled and touched her hand—a brief pat—and she thought again of the Crowley hands. “Much better,” he said. “I can accept you as his daughter and I do. I wonder if it would not be useful if I were to tell you the story of myself. I came here to school as a boy—a poor boy of the neighborhood. The country was in turmoil at the time. What rebellion had failed to achieve, reprisal hastened. The more rebels the British shot after the Easter Rising, the stronger the people’s support for the martyrs’ cause. And the young found purpose to their lives, and alas, to their dying. I was no exception. I revered and followed a poet whose name has been deliberately excised from the chronicles of rebellion and the civil war that followed it. It was after a particularly bloody assassination—or it might even have been before it, perhaps during its planning—that he dropped from sight. Rumor had it that he was himself destroyed in the explosion, but no part of him was identified among the mortal remains taken from the waters. He was never named among the heroic dead—of whom, you might have discovered, we often seem more fond than of the living—”

When he paused, Julie realized she had been all but holding her breath. Her neck was stiff, her nerves taut.

“I knocked around a bit without an anchor,” the priest went on, “latching on, where they’d let me, to the literary wing of the republicans. When the cause was lost, or in abeyance, as I’ve come to believe it still to be—until union is achieved—I came back to the Franciscans. Because I wanted an education, I convinced myself and others that I had a religious calling. The Lord is not particular whether you enter by the back or the front door. I was on my way to become a priest. I had gotten as far as subdeacon orders when I was sent to Rome for a year. It might have been to Rome or New York, but I went to Rome, and do you know who it was there who taught me—and in Latin, mind you—Christian ethics? A Franciscan brother, the forgotten republican hero of my youth.”

Fact or fable? Both. Julie drew a deep breath. Her mind teemed with questions, but before she could frame the first of them, the old priest rose from his chair, responding to a bell he said was for vespers.

In the end all she said was, “Thank you, Father Daniel.”

IT WAS A WARM DAY
, Indian summer, and as soon as she found a bench along the Liffey quays, she took her notebook from her carryall and entered the story almost exactly as he had told it. She had a good memory and she knew what she had heard … Rome or New York.

Was her search ended, and if it was, would it ever be truly ended? And must it be? This was much the question Edna O’Shea had asked her: what would we know of him if we knew the truth that would be better than what we know now?

I
T WAS HER SECOND DAY
back in Dublin, and having decided to return to New York within the week, she phoned Tim Noble. He seemed less than excited at the prospect. New York was going to seem very dull to her, he suggested. Then he asked, “What about the character who was shot in your bed? The boss thought you’d file something on that. Where were you when it happened?”

“At a funeral.”

“Lucky it wasn’t your own.” Amazingly, no word seemed to have reached New York on what had happened to her and Seamus McNally. “Are you going to bring me a present?” Now he was trying to sound cheerful.

“Of course.”

“Are you sure you have the right size?”

“Bastard.”

“Julie, the priest at Saint Malachy’s called with a message for you. … Wait now till I dig it out of my drawer. …”

She waited, something like fear in her throat. But Tim would have said outright if it concerned Kincaid and Donahue.

He came on the phone again. “Here we are. He said you’d know what he was talking about and you might want to know it while you were over there: the information you hoped to get from the Chancery Office doesn’t exist. The transaction simply could not have occurred. Does it make sense to you?”

“I do know what he’s talking about. Thank you, Tim.”

The whole annulment legend was pure fantasy. Perhaps there was a divorce somewhere down the years. It was one more thing she did not have to know.

In the early afternoon she phoned Roy Irwin’s home. His wife answered.

“Where are you?” She sounded surprised to hear Julie’s voice.

“Back in Dublin.”

“Ach, and Roy in Donegal. He went down this morning with the Murder Team to Slievetooey. …”

“Slievetooey,” Julie repeated, searching her memory for why the place name was familiar.

“The bodies of two men were found in a cave where there’d been an explosion,” Eileen went on. “They’re thought to be Americans. Another reason Roy went down; he was hoping to find you.”

“Tell him I’m back in the Greer Hotel if you hear from him,” Julie said. “They were killed in an explosion?”

“No, love. The explosion occurred days ago, but Special Branch found the bodies when they went to further examine the site. Each with a bullet in the back of his head. Where will it end, you wonder, where and when will it end?”

A
ND WHAT’S TO BECOME
of the old woman in her bed with the curtains drawn? Julie’s first thought. Her legs were rubbery when she went out from the public phone in the Trinity College lodge after talking to Eileen Irwin. She had expected that something might happen to those two—and not for an instant did she doubt they were Kincaid and Donahue—but not this. They were not that important. Except to one man, a New York gangster who didn’t know they intended not to show up to testify against him.

She did not find a bench in Parliament Square and she very much needed to sit down. Students everywhere. Laughter and earnest conferences on matters nearer to life than to death. She would not have wanted them to die. Not that way. Christ! It was that old woman she was thinking of. Why not of Missy Glass? Why not of their mothers waiting for word much like this, but not from Ireland? She thought of Kincaid’s letter she had wanted to throw away but hadn’t. Finding no place to sit down, she followed a young couple who went, hand in hand, up the steps and into the chapel. At the altar an afternoon service was in progress—High Church Anglican. In which she herself had been baptized. She entered a far pew and sat wondering why her feeling was primarily of grief.

When she returned to the hotel, Detective Sergeant Lawrence Carr was waiting in the lobby. Her first fear was that he was going to ask her to go north with him, possibly to identify the bodies.