Of Irish Blood (34 page)

She shrugs and I think of Millevoye.

No meeting here today. The church is empty. A vague light comes through the dusty glass skylight. Very plain altogether.

I guess the Irish priests took the good stuff, like the Lamb of God stained-glass window, to the new chapel. Alice grabs my hand and leads me to the far side of the sanctuary, where two stone slabs stick out from the wall.

“These are their graves,” Alice says. She kneels down, puts her two hands flat against one of the graves. In the half-light I can see Gaelic script, the letters worn into the stone. She closes her eyes.

“Imagine them leaving all they love behind them. Couldn’t even lay their bones in the Irish earth. Pray for us, Nora. Pray we succeed. Ireland can’t bear any more exiles.”

She stays still for a long time and I think, This one’s a different kettle of fish altogether from the other Irish revolutionary women. None of Maud’s theatricality or Constance Markievicz’s bold ways. Nor does Alice have the kind of born-to-money confidence of Molly Childers or a sense of worldly accomplishment that Alice Stopford Green shows. She sent me a signed copy of her book,
The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing
, with a note. “As you can see my publisher is Macmillan, the same house that publishes both Thomas Hardy and Lewis Carroll—a happy range of interests,” she’d written. “The Macmillan brothers are from the Aran Islands in Scotland. So kindred spirits!”

I wondered if that formidable Alice Stopford Green was connecting herself to Alice in Wonderland. Showing a sense of humor? Good.

This Alice isn’t laughing as we finally leave the church and walk down the rue des Carmes. She reminds me of someone. Who? She’s from Tyrone like May Quinlivan and both have a kind of quiet flintiness. Women of Ulster. But May’s more well, normal. Catholic of course. This Alice told me her father was a Methodist minister.

I keep sneaking looks at Alice Milligan. Her small features, the decorous hairstyle, subdued clothes, Protestant clergymen background. And I get it. “Jane Eyre,” I say out loud, which stops Alice.

“Pardon me?” she says.

“Er, I was wondering if you’ve read
Jane Eyre
,” I say.

“Of course,” she says.

“Oh, I did too,” I say.

And she looks at me. Who is this crazy woman, I imagine her thinking. But now the connection seems so obvious, she’s Jane Eyre after Rochester died. I loved that book. Not one we read in Sister Veronica’s English class but something Rose and Mame and I found and shared. And we adored the movie. Such an adventure to go to the cinema anyway but even more exciting to see a story we knew up there on the screen. I sometimes wonder if I didn’t fall for Tim McShane because I pictured him as Mr. Rochester. In that dark theater, I wished for Tim to be blinded and lose a hand so that we could be happy together.

Alice Milligan does not look so much like the young Jane, but resembles the older woman she would have become. And now she was talking about the Brontës.

“Their people are from County Down,” she said. “Ulster women in their blood. Their father, Patrick, was involved with the United Irishmen in 1798.”

Oh God, I think, which group is this? The Irish Citizen Army, the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Fenian Brotherhood? I don’t want to ask.

But she’s explaining. “Many Northerners were involved in the uprising because of the Presbyterian leadership,” she says.

Uprising. That should tell me something. But so many waves of uprisings had swept over Ireland. I knew them from the Clan na Gael picnics and Uncle Patrick’s stories. Beaten back. Betrayed. But ever returning.

Alice is going on. “Their newspaper, the
Northern Star
, inspired Anna Johnson and me to start the
Northern Patriot
and then the
Shan Van Vocht
.”

And now she’s lost me entirely. So finally I just have to say, “You have all of the Irish history at your fingertips. But I, I don’t.”

And then she becomes the governess I pictured. “Let’s find a café or restaurant and I’ll explain.”

“Here!” I say, and lead her onto rue de Lanneau, a narrow street. Empty now—early afternoon,
déjeuner
over. No one is following us. Thank God.

And now I parrot a bit of what I remember from Peter’s tour. “This was the rue Mont-Saint-Hilaire,” I tell Alice. “Fourteen bookstores on this street five hundred years ago. There was a medieval abbey. Peter—er—Professor Keeley thinks this restaurant stands on the site of an old Roman bath,” I say as we go into the stone town house.

Of course she’s thrilled and wonders if maybe O’Neill himself drank in this
cave à vin
as we settle ourselves next to a giant stone fireplace.

“My goodness,” she says. “I’d say this hearth is thirteenth century.” The waiter explains that the restaurant has just been bought by a trio of actors.

It had been Puit Certain—Certain’s well, named for the abbot of the abbey, the waiter explains.

“But we’re calling it Le Coupe Chou,” he says.

He sees we don’t understand.

“The name for the barber’s razor.”

He mimes shaving.

“A cabbage cutter,” he says. “A medieval barber had his shop here. Though there are rumors he sometimes”—and the waiter draws an imaginary straight razor across his throat.

“They say some of his clients’ bodies were sent to the butcher across the way as material for sausages. But then these stories are told of many barbers,” he finishes.

“Yikes,” I say.

I suppose it’s a tribute to Alice’s revolutionary spirit or her shaky French that she doesn’t flinch. The waiter agrees to serve us café crèmes and napoleons and she starts my lesson. I keep my eye on the door but no one comes in.

“The United Irishmen,” she says, “were begun by Wolfe Tone.”

Thank God I could truthfully say, “I know about him.”

“They fought for Catholic emancipation though Tone was Church of Ireland and the other leaders were Northern Presbyterians. And Methodists, too,” she says, “as my family is.”

“And were Catholics involved?” I ask.

“Of course. The Defenders were a secret society of Catholic farmworkers who joined with the others. The French Revolution and your American War of Independence inspired them all. ‘Why shouldn’t Ireland have a revolution?’ they said. Napoleon was to send troops to support us.”

“Wait,” I say, “I know this part. I’ve heard my uncle Patrick go on about the ‘Year of the French,’ the landings in Mayo. ‘Too little, too late,’ he’d say.”

“He was right,” she says. “The countryside rose up in rebellion but the French were few enough and then masses of British soldiers descended. The French were sent home, but the Irish were hanged from every tree.”

I nod, sigh, and we each take a bite of our napoleon.

“So another failure,” I say, “like the strike in Dublin.”

“Yet their bravery continues to inspire.” She starts to sing in a soft soprano:

“Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?

Who blushes at the name?

When cowards mock the patriot’s fate

Who hangs his head for shame?

He’s all a knave, or half a slave,

Who slights his country thus.”

And I join her. I know the song and wasn’t I the best alto in St. Xavier’s Glee Club? I harmonize on the words “But a true man, like you, man, will fill your glass with us.”

“That song’s a favorite,” I say, “at the Clan na Gael picnic. I like the last verse:

“Then here’s their memory—may it be

For us a guiding light,

To cheer our strife for liberty

And teach us to unite.

Though good and ill, be Ireland’s still

Though sad as theirs your fate;

Yet true men, be you, men,

Like those of Ninety-Eight.”

“It’s a grand song,” she says, and sips the café crème.

“We should be drinking Jameson’s,” I say.

“Or Bushmills,” she adds. Not so much Jane Eyre after all.

“Well, our rebellions may falter but our songs are strong. Like the one about Roddy McCorley,” I say, and sing a bit of it. “‘And Roddy McCorley goes to die at the bridge of Toome today.’”

The waiter and maître d’ are watching us from behind a very old wooden counter.

“Un autre napoléon, s’il vous plaît,”
I call out to them. And then say to Alice, “Too bad the Emperor Napoleon wasn’t as satisfying as these pastries,” and laugh.

But she doesn’t see the joke. “I remember when Anna wrote that song about Roddy McCorley,” she says.

“Anna? The woman who started newspapers with you?”

She nods.

“The people took to it immediately. Anna and Maud and I traveled all over Ireland, a 1798 centenary tour in 1898.”

The waiter sets down our pastries.

“We went from village to village, lecturing on the ’98 Rebellion, trying to make people struggling against eviction and starvation see that things were not as hopeless as they seemed. Our ancestors had fought the Sassenach and we could too. We were together, Anna a Belfast Catholic, and Maud a member of the Church of Ireland then, and me a Methodist. Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter united just as Tone and the others had hoped. We had some great times in Donegal. The people had nothing, yet they offered us feeds of boxty and potato cakes. And such quick learners; they picked up the tune right away. Anna would sing a line to the crowds and they would echo it.”

Alice sang softly.

“Oh Ireland, Mother Ireland,

You love them still the best,

The fearless brave who fighting fall

Upon your hapless breast;

But never a one of all your dead

More bravely fell in fray

Than he who marches to his fate

On the Bridge of Toome today.”

“Lovely,” I say, “and so sad like Mr. Rochester, burned and blind.”

“Except Roddy McCorley was real; only nineteen when he fought with the United Irishmen,” she says.

“Such a young fellow,” I say.

She says, “He almost escaped to America, but he was betrayed.”

“Too bad,” I say.

And think to myself, I wish to God all the rebels had escaped to America. I wish the song was “And young Roddy McCorley came to Bridgeport and raised a family.”

Oh, Ireland, Mother Ireland, I think, don’t you want to be a grandmother? Why must you always be pictured holding your dead child? Uncle Patrick probably would have been hanged like Roddy McCorley if he hadn’t gotten out and come to Chicago. “He left to save us,” Granny Honora had told me. “The money he made digging the I and M Canal meant Máire and I could leave and bring your Da and your aunts and uncles with us. All of us alive because of him. And he’s why you’re living, Honora. You and your cousins and all their children down the generations.” And I’d said, “Gee whiz. I’m glad he got away!”

Now Alice is telling me about the effect the poems published in their newspaper, the
Shan Van Vocht
, had.

“‘Shan van vocht’ means ‘the old woman,’ right?” I say. “And Ireland’s the shan van vocht.”

Want to show her I’m not a complete dunce.

“Same name as the Seine River, another goddess figure,” I finish. Peter Keeley told me about the connection. I do miss him. Father Kevin’s had no word from him at all.

“Yes,” Alice is saying. “The goddess is often associated with a lake or spring or well. All portals to the other world. And in the same way, the poems and song we published offered an entrance through imagination to another dimension for our people. Important for the Irish to know we have a glorious past; that we have always fought against the oppressors.”

“And lost,” I say.

“Different now. We are truly united. Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter, the theme of so many of Anna’s poems. You probably know her as Ethna Carbery.”

“Oh, that’s why I didn’t recognize her name.” Making it up.

“After she married Seamus MacManus, she took a pen name. He was a poet, too. She was afraid they’d be confused.”

Good, I think. A married revolutionary. Holy woman, neither virgin nor martyr.

But Alice lowers her eyes. “So sad. She died a year after their marriage.”

Oh, great. “In childbirth?” I say.

“No, a gastric problem I believe. Almost ten years now but Seamus keeps the flame burning. Do you know the book he published of her poems?
The Four Winds of Eirinn?
”

“I don’t,” I say.

“I must send you a copy. Very successful. I wonder, does any other country love poetry the way we do in Ireland?”

“And are all the poems patriotic?” I ask. If Ethna loved this fellow MacManus, maybe she wrote some romantic verses, something I could quote to myself when I’m thinking of Peter. So I ask, “Any love poems?”

“I don’t recall any,” Alice says. “Remember, Maud and she and I, all the Daughters of Erin, we see the arts as a way to encourage people. I’m experimenting with using magic lantern slides to tell our history and have music playing behind them.”

“Like cinema,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“Wow!” I say. “I might be a help there. I’m a photographer.” And I realize, I’ve never said that before. “I’m a photographer.”

“Splendid!” she says. “I need beautiful landscapes. When are you planning to come to Ireland?”

“Soon,” I say. And I mean it as I take the envelope of money from her.

But Father Kevin says absolutely no trips to Ireland for me. “You’re an innocent American. You have to stay that way.”

An innocent American, I think, with a growing bank account. Forty thousand francs—about eight thousand dollars.

“How many rifles can we get for that?” I ask Father Kevin.

“Erskine Childers is over in Hamburg negotiating for us right now,” he says.

And then I ask the question I just couldn’t put to the dignified ladies. “Does it bother you, Father, that these weapons can, well, kill people?”

“But they won’t, Nora. That’s the point. When Home Rule is voted into law, the British will see that we’re armed and a match for the Ulster Volunteers and then…”