Of Irish Blood (18 page)

“Impossible to do much more than that,” he says. “Sampling all of the various cuisines alone would take a lifetime.” He shrugs.

I laugh. “Very French, that shrug,” I say.

“A variation on our Irish greeting,” he says, then cocks his head. “A wag of the head is how we greet each other when passing on the roads.”

“And do you miss Ireland?”

“I suppose it’s my own homeplace I miss most. My people are fishermen. Our bit of land hugs the coast of Connemara. We’ve the Atlantic in our front garden and the next parish is America.”

The owner delivers the Basque stew.

“Xacco
,
”
Peter says and points to the name on the menu. “Basque is a language like Irish. Best to learn the sounds, not puzzle over the orthography.”

“The what?”

“The written letters.”

Jesus, this fellow’s smart, but he wears his knowledge lightly. Asking me questions now about the Irish in Chicago.

“Some of our Keeleys went out there,” he says, “but we lost contact.”

“So maybe we’re related. As I said, my granny was a Keeley.”

“From Connemara?”

“I don’t know. ‘Born on the shores of Galway Bay’ is all she said.”

He nods.

“Should I claim you as a cousin?” I say.

“Why not?” He laughs.

“A distant one, of course,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to be too closely related to such a handsome fellow.”

Now what was getting into me, teasing the man this way, and him probably married with a family? But he takes no notice, thank God. Here I have a man treating me like a lady, interested in my mind and opinions, and I have to flirt with him. Let’s end this now.

“And so your wife stays in Connemara?”

“Oh, I haven’t a wife. It’s my oldest brother got the farm and the boat and the fishing rights so…”

“So?”

“Can’t marry without substance,” he says. “I thought of following so many others from my village to America but…”

He stops.

“I’m writing a book about the historical connections between the French and the Irish,” he says. “France is Ireland’s oldest ally and yet now the French are so afraid of Germany they’ve joined Britain in the so-called
entente cordiale
and are opposing Irish self-government. Why it’s important to remind them of past connections. The Parisii who founded Paris were Celts. The River Seine and the Shannon are named for the same goddess—the Old One, the Wisewoman.”

He speaks of figures from history as if they were neighbors down the road, going on about Charles Martel and Pepin, and then gets to a name I know—Charlemagne.

“And was he somehow Irish?”

“Not directly,” Peter says, “but Irish monks were the most educated fellows going and Charlemagne invited them to his court as teachers. The monks told the French our tales of the Knights of the Red Branch and Fianna. An Englishman heard them and changed the characters into King Arthur and his knights.”

“The round table,” I finish. “Yes. One of our writers named Mark Twain imagined a Connecticut Yankee transported through time to Arthur’s court.”

Now, Peter has never heard of Mark Twain but seems really interested.

I say, “I must find you a copy of
Huckleberry Finn
.”

“Finn,” he says. “Interesting.”

And we both say, “Irish?” and laugh.

Then I stop. Rose McCabe was the one fond of Mark Twain. I’d been careful not to write to her, sure somehow Tim would confront Rose trying to find out where I was, and somehow show up here. Mad, I know, but fear of Tim still hovers close by, ready to overtake me at any moment. Like now.

Peter notices. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing. No.”

How awful if an honorable shy scholar of a fellow knew the kind of woman he is eating
xacco
with and discussing literature.

But he is away into the distant past again. France had Vikings too, who took over a part of the country and named it Normandy—William the Conqueror’s people. Thank God I could nod at that name and say, “The Battle of Hastings, 1066. He took over England.”

“And his kinsman Strongbow landed in Ireland, our Norman conquest,” Peter says.

As he goes on, I think again of how my ladies might very well like to have a distinguished academic take them through French history. Especially the gossipy parts—like Mary Tudor being queen of France and the no–better-than-they-should-be Boleyn girls and their adventures in Paris. And wasn’t Mary Queen of Scots in Paris too? I imagine Peter with me and an American lady drinking a glass of wine at Fouquet’s. I propose the idea to him, flat out.

“Of course, I’d pay you from what they give me,” I say.

He shakes his head as if the very thought offends him. The owner brings two lovely apple tarts to us but Peter stands up, puts a pile of francs on the table, and walks out of the restaurant.

The owner sets the
tartes tatin
in front of me, returns with a bowl of
crème fraîche
, and lands a dollop on top of the caramelized apples as if to say, There—this will make you feel better. I take a spoonful. It’s good.

The owner sits down with me, eats the other tart, and consoles me in French for what he sees as a lovers’ quarrel. I don’t understand it all and finally he resorts to English.

“Professor—good man!” he says.

And I insulted him somehow. In the wrong again.

I show up for next Wednesday’s tour determined to apologize to Peter. But Peter waves my words away and leads us down the rue Saint-Jacques. He takes us to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“The oldest church in Paris,” he says. “Founded as a Benedictine abbey in 558.”

He hurries over the first thousand years to get to the tomb of Lord James Douglas, who he said commanded Louis XIII’s Scots regiment and that of another Douglas who served Henri IV. He goes on about the close connection between Scotland and France. The “Auld Alliance” he calls it.

“Mary Queen of Scots had a lover called Douglas,” May whispers to me.

No têtê-à-têtê for Peter and me this day. He seems determined to keep the students around him. And then announces the tours are over for the summer. School’s out. The students will be going home.

“Professor Keeley seems out of sorts,” May says to me as we follow the others along boulevard Saint-Germain.

“I think he’s mad at me,” I say.

“How?”

“I asked him if he’d help me guide my ladies, give them a bit of history.”

“And did you offer him money?”

“Of course. They pay me.”

“You offended his dignity,” she says.

“I did what I thought was right,” I say.

“Father Rector gives the professor room and board and a stipend for his work in the library. Your offer would be like charity. An insult.”

So be it, I think. I don’t need a touchy fellow in my life. So long, Peter Keeley.

7

JULY 1912

The summer days bring a good run of clients and nice tips though I do wish I could tell my ladies more about the history of the city now that I realize there’s stories around every corner.

I do take Jane Poole from Maine to the Hôtel de Cluny but forget what number Louis married Henry VIII’s sister. Instead I find myself telling her about this professor and his tours.

“Makes the people who walked these streets down through the centuries very real,” I say to her as we sit in Fouquet’s watching the crowds promenade down the Champs-Élysées.

“Hire him,” she says.

“I tried,” I say, and explain how I insulted Peter by offering him money and …

“Stop,” she says. “You have to be direct. Talk to him straight from the shoulder. He’ll accept the job. You’ll see.”

Straight from the shoulder? Not so easy if you’ve grown up among people easily offended as I have. Feuds in Bridgeport could start at the drop of a word. Be American, I tell myself. Pretend you don’t see any complications. Go to Mass at the Irish College. Find him. I do.

The chapel at the Irish College is a homey space. More of the spirit of my own St. Bridget’s here than in the gloomy grandeur of Notre-Dame. Only one stained-glass window: a lamb in a green meadow. Ireland? The wooden walls glow, painted with interwoven circles and spirals.

A few students who are staying on through the summer come in. May sits beside me. A line of priests in black cassocks file in and take places facing each other across the center aisle.

“Like a monks’ choir,” May whispers to me.

Peter doesn’t enter with the procession of priests and I wonder is he coming at all, but then just as the bell signaling the start of Mass rings, he slips into a pew behind the choir, diagonally across from us.

The whole congregation—maybe fifty laypeople and the twenty or so priests—stands as the celebrant enters. He wears the green vestments of the Sundays after Pentecost, ordinary time.

“Introibo ad altare Dei.”
A lilt in the phrase. The priest’s hair is white. When he turns to us, his eyes are that particular shade of blue I know from my own father and brothers. In fact, half the older generation of Bridgeport look like this fellow.

“That’s Father Kevin,” May whispers.

He has just started the Kyrie when two latecomers stroll in, not ducking into the seats as I’d have expected but taking their places in a front row as if telling us, Now the ceremony can really begin. The man is tall and fair-haired, dressed in a beautifully cut gray suit, very grand. Not Irish, I think, though not French either. But the woman with him could only be Parisian. Small and dark-haired, she wears an elegantly simple black hat with one white feather that makes me want to rip off the bunch of grapes I’ve sewn on my own bonnet. Her skirt and jacket, the same color of gray as her companion’s suit, drape her slim frame. No corset.

I poke May. “Who?”

“Arthur Capel,” she whispers. “English, but Catholic. And that’s, well, that’s Gabrielle Chanel.”

“Oh,” I say, right out loud. Of course.

“Kyrie eleison,”
the priest starts, and the Mass continues.

“Why are they here?” I whisper to May.

“Friends of Father Kevin’s probably. He knows the oddest people.”

Father Kevin steps up into the pulpit. “The Gospel according to Matthew,” he says, and makes the sign of the cross on his lips. We all do the same. But then the words rush out in a stream of sounds I don’t recognize. I look at May.

“Irish. Gaelic,” May says to me.

The language of my ancestors, of my own mother and grandmother. Foreign to me.

And now the priest finishes the Gospel and preaches a sermon in Irish that gets quite a few laughs and nods from the congregation. I recognize a word or two. I see Arthur Capel bend down to Gabrielle Chanel. She closes her eyes.

Communion time and I can’t be a hypocrite here I think. I can’t receive Communion. I either have to go to confession or stop being a Catholic altogether.

Only Gabrielle Chanel and I wait in the pews while the rest go up to the rail. Peter must notice that I’ve stayed at my place. Please let him think I broke my fast with water, not that I’m in mortal sin, or worse that I’m secretly a Protestant or have fallen away entirely.

As it is, Peter says little to me as we gather in the parlor for cups of very strong tea and baguettes, covered with delicious butter.

“From Kerry. Danny Sullivan’s farm,” May explains. She points to a stout fellow talking away to Arthur Capel as Gabrielle Chanel stands looking around the room. “Thick as two planks but he’s got acres and acres,” May says. “Raises horses. That’s what they’re talking about. Probably horse-mad, both of them.”

James McCarthy comes over to us. “Welcome,” he says, “to the two hours a week about which I am able to write home to my mother.”

May shakes her head. “He’s from rebel Cork and likes to make out he’s a wild man, but he’s really a decent fellow.”

James laughs as Father Kevin joins us, and May introduces me.

“Nora,” he says. “A lovely name. Originally Honora. Always nice to have visitors. Hospitality is the great virtue of the Irish.”

“I see we’re even entertaining the enemy,” James says, pointing to Capel.

“Ah well, don’t be too hard on the fellow. His mother’s French, his grandmother’s Irish.”

“I wonder does he write to tell her he’s been to Mass?” James says.

“And his companion,” May is saying, “is famous, Father.”

“Really? For what?” James asks.

“She’s a fashion designer,” I say.

“Not a subject I’m
au courant
with,” Father Kevin says. “She seems a bit lost, listening to all that talk of withers and fetters. Shall we?”

And he leads us over to the three of them.

“Good morning, Father,” Capel says.

“Good morning, Arthur,” Father Kevin says.

And then in French he welcomes Gabrielle, who only nods. Ill-at-ease, certainly.

I speak up, telling her I’m a friend of Madame Simone and interested in fashion.

“Fashion,” she says to me in rapid French. “Fashion fades. Only style remains. It takes courage to distinguish between the two.” She looks at my jacket and shrugs.

Oops. I’m not stylish enough for Mademoiselle Chanel and not holy enough for the Irish College.

A silence.

And then Father Kevin says, “All is transitory but God has put the eternal in our hearts. Though he does clothe our spirits in flesh.”

“Some more than others,” Dan Sullivan the farmer says, patting his paunch.

We all laugh except for Mademoiselle Chanel. What a pill, I think. I’m glad Madame Simone doesn’t let me bring my ladies to her. She’d just insult them.

Then May speaks. “Nora gives wonderful tours of Paris for American women interested in the arts,” she looks at me, “and shopping.”

This gets Capel’s attention. “Must bring them around to Gabrielle’s shop. We need all the customers we can get. Right, Coco?”

She doesn’t reply. He nudges her.

“Oui,
” she says.

“English, Coco,” he says.

She tries, making French words into English. “You
plaît
,” she gets out.

“Please,” he corrects.

“Visitez,”
she says.