Of Irish Blood (45 page)

“A fine report, Tony,” Father Kevin says. “Thank you. So, men, the Pope got his Christmas truce after all. There are reports of these kinds of celebrations all along the line. Some of the British troops even played a game of soccer with the Germans,” Father Kevin says.

“Good on them,” John Feeney shouts out. “A soldiers’ truce.” He turns to me. “I told you strange things happen on the battlefield.”

We serve a decent Christmas meal thanks to Madame Collard, the St. Antoine market, and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s money. After dinner, Mrs. Vanderbilt visits the ward. I get the fellows to sing a Christmas carol or two for her, but it’s Paul O’Toole who really gets the place going. “Here’s one for you, Nora,” he says.

“Mademoiselle from Armentières. Parley voo,” he sings. The others join in. “Mademoiselle from Armentières. Parley voo.” Paul takes the next line. “Mademoiselle from Armentières hasn’t been kissed for forty years. Inky dinky parley voo.”

Margaret can’t help laughing.

“Thanks very much, Paul,” I say. All the soldiers know the next stanza.

“I had more fun than I can tell. Beneath the sheets with Mademoiselle.”

“Let’s leave them to it,” Father Kevin says.

“If they can stop war for a day, why not end the whole thing?” I ask Father Kevin as we ride back to Paris from Neuilly in the horse and cart he got from somewhere. He drives quite well.

“The governments didn’t bring about the cease-fire. Ordinary soldiers did,” he says.

Father Kevin drops me at L’Impasse to thank Madame Collard. Nearly ten o’clock. She and Madame Simone are sitting together sipping brandy. I join them. Madame Collard’s received no word from Monsieur or her son Henri, both on the front.

“No news is good news,” I say. Ridiculous these phrases but a kind of currency these days. I tell them about the Christmas truces. Madame Simone shrugs. “And then they will go back to shooting at each other,” she says.

When Madame Collard leaves us, Madame Simone says, “I have some bad news.”

“Your nephew?” I say.

She shakes her head. “I have a letter from your sister in Chicago.”

Henrietta writing to me? At last! The war. She’s worried about my safety. Hasn’t forgotten me. She’s sorry. She’s told the family she’d lied. They’re so happy I’m alive. I can go home now. Meet Peter in Ireland and then both of us will go to America. Better stay at the hospital until spring. Everyone says an Allied offensive will end the war, but lots of casualties.

Madame Simone hands me the letter. I open the envelope. Only a newspaper clipping inside. I read the headline aloud. “‘Dolly McKee Is Dead.’”

“Oh well,” I say to Madame Simone. “She was not young. Anyone these days who dies in bed is lucky.”

I read on, stop, look up at her.

“Oh, dear God. She was killed. Murdered. Her maid, too.”

I remember that snowy November night three years ago and the two women who had rescued me. Tim McShane. Carrie had always feared Tim McShane. But the newspaper says Dolly was murdered by a burglar who broke into her isolated mansion, stole her jewelry. At least that’s the theory put forth by her husband. Husband? And there it is. “The deceased had recently wed her longtime manager, Tim McShane.” Married. So he’ll get everything, I think. Poor, poor Dolly. I remember Tim’s hand around my throat. The burglar’s a fiction. The murderer will inherit.

“McShane killed her,” I say to Madame Simone. “Look, Henrietta thinks so too.” I show her the clipping with Henrietta’s scrawl. “This could’ve been you or me. Stay away,” Henrietta’s written.

“How horrible,” I say. “Worst somehow for it to happen now.”

“Why?” Madame Simone says. “Because of the war? Men kill their wives, war or no war. It happens.”

“But today the soldiers stopped the slaughter. They refused to fight.”

“And if they do the same tomorrow, their own officers will shoot them as cowards. Make an example to the others. I too think that Dolly’s death is terrible, but what is one life among so many?” she says.

“But soldiers die randomly,” I say. “They’re not murdered personally. Tim squeezed the life out of Dolly while he was looking into her face.”

“I would prefer that my murderer know me,” Madame Simone says. “More terrible to die just because you were born French or German and are a man of military age. Or a Belgian in Louvain or a Russian peasant. But my dear Nora, we should not say such things too loudly. A woman was arrested because she was heard by a neighbor questioning the war.
Soyez sage. Soyez sage.
”

JANUARY 1, 1915

“Of course, this war is ridiculous,” Maud is saying to me as we sit with Father Kevin and a fellow from Dublin in the parlor on New Year’s Day. “A wind of folly and futility that’s driving Germany and France to their ruin. Whether conqueror or conquered both will end up second rate powers, and for this they are sacrificing their strongest and bravest, and no one dare protest. Only England will benefit. Grabbing up everyone else’s trade. At least you Americans have resisted and held onto your shipping trade.”

She’s back from months of nursing soldiers in the Pyrenees. Very thin, with circles under those gold-brown eyes, more gray in her hair.

Father Kevin has developed a bad cold, and Dr. Gros has ordered him to stay away from the hospital. I found him and Maud sitting with this fellow called Thomas Kettle—about my age, I’d say. Father Kevin had introduced him as a barrister and Member of Parliament for the Nationalist Party.

“Tom’s married to one of the Sheehy girls,” Father Kevin says to me.

“A Daughter of Erin, Maud?” I ask.

“She is. Though what Mary thinks of your views on the war, Tom, I can’t imagine,” Maud says.

“She supports my decision,” he says. “Understands why I’m enlisting.”

Maud grunts.

“Redmond thinks,” Kettle goes on, “if all Irishmen, North and South, band together to fight Germany, our country will be united. Home Rule will be accepted in the North and…”

“Bollocks,” Maud says. Both men laugh.

“I tried to get into the Fusiliers,” Kettle says, “but they wouldn’t take me because of my health. There are a few strings I can pull yet.”

“A good number of the Fusiliers at the American hospital where I’m nursing,” I say. “They’ve suffered terrible casualties. I’d say they need replacements.”

“Well, I’m ready,” he answers.

“You want to fight, to die?” Maud says.

“Well, of course, I hope not to die, but if I do, a grave here in the France I’ve loved would be no bad thing,” Kettle says.

“Death’s always a bad thing,” I say.

“I agree,” Kettle says, “but we must fight for European civilization. If we allow the rights of a small nation like Belgium to be trampled underfoot what chance for Ireland, Home Rule or no Home Rule? We Irishmen are Europeans in our hearts. My brother-in-law Francis agrees that our future is with Europe though he’s taken a pacifist stand against the war,” Kettle says.

“As has his wife Hanna,” Maud says.

“Another Sheehy girl,” Father Kevin says. “Francis took her name. They’re both Sheehy-Skeffington.”

“Hanna is a suffragist and like most of them opposed to the war,” Maud says. “Thousands of women from all of the countries fighting signed a Christmas letter appealing for a truce.”

“But,” Kettle says, “many of the suffragist women do support the government.”

“Because they think they’ll get something from them,” Maud says.

“You’re very cynical, Maud,” Tom says. “I’ve tried to put how I feel into the poem I’ve written for my daughter. Something to explain why I’m willing to die. I’ve left it with Father Kevin to send to Mary if…”

Silence, Dear God, I have to say something.

“Would you ever read some of it to us?” I ask. Finally meeting one of these poetic Irish fellows.

Kettle clears his throat. “I’ll just give you the end.”

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,—

But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

Maud stands up. “Tom, Tom, you are deluding yourself. I prefer the line written on the banner James Connolly hung over Liberty Hall, ‘We fight for neither king nor emperor.’ Why should working men die for capitalism?”

“We may not agree, Maud,” Kettle says as he stands, “but I love Ireland as much as you do.”

“Hold on, you two. Irish people of goodwill on both sides. We can’t let the British divide us,” Father Kevin says.

I think of Peter Keeley in the middle of all these ructions, trying to keep Irish fellows out of the British army, and of Woodrow Wilson promising American boys won’t die in the conflict. Running for reelection on the one slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”

Thomas Kettle and Maud manage to be civil to each other talking about mutual friends in Dublin whose sons had died.

“I may be against the war,” Maud says, “but I’m not against the soldiers. I admire their bravery. The fellows I nurse are so stoic. They just hope it will be over.”

Maud and I walk out of the Irish College together. I ask her if we will be celebrating Women’s Christmas this year.

“Oh, I couldn’t, Nora,” she says.

“Why not come to my place?” I say.

“But you really don’t have room to entertain,” she says. “Maybe I could have you for the afternoon. Might cheer Barry and Iseult.”

“I’d like you to meet the woman who nurses with me,” I say.

“And we won’t talk about the war,” Maud says.

“Her name is Margaret Kirk,” I say.

“Kirk,” she repeats. “The Scots word for ‘church.’ An omen. All right, bring her. I suppose a sherry by the fire’s one way to poke a stick into the eye of this war.”

*   *   *

So. We gather on rue de l’Annonciation. Barry and Iseult take Seán and the dog out to the park; Maud, Margaret Kirk, and I settle in around the fire. Maud declaims a bit, repeating what she’d said about the war to Kettle. Margaret looks over at me, raises an eyebrow.

“You should write an article,” I say to Maud.

“I have,” she says. “And sent it to John Quinn in New York, but I just got a letter from him warning me not to sound pro-German. He says the Irish in America are making that mistake. Alienating many supporters. It seems America’s neutral in favor of the Allies.”

“My father was German,” Margaret says. “Noll’s my maiden name. Plenty of Irish-German marriages.”

“Like my aunt Nelly and uncle Steve,” I say. “Hard to see her as a Hun, or her sister, my aunt Kate, either.”

“Of course not. It’s the militarism of Germany, the imperialism of Britain that’s pushed the world into war,” Maud says. “Poor France didn’t really want this.”

“Tell Margaret about Henry Wilson who preferred a world war to Home Rule for Ireland,” I say.

“Maybe we should give war talk a rest,” Margaret says. “Your children are charming, Maud.”

“I want to take them to live in Ireland,” Maud says. “Sean should go to Pearse’s school, St. Enda’s, but I’m afraid if I enroll him there MacBride will snatch him.” She looks over at Margaret. “You know the story?” she asks.

“I know your marriage ended,” Margaret says.

“At least the war’s keeping MacBride in Ireland,” Maud says. “He won’t be trying to beat down my door.”

My very thought about Tim McShane. He might murder Dolly and Carrie, but he wouldn’t chance U-boats in the Atlantic to get to me.

“Drink and jealousy drove John MacBride mad,” Maud says. “Every single man I knew was my secret lover, according to him. And the questions. Over and over. Why was I so long in the meeting? He’d wake me up in the middle of night, interrogating me. Who was I dreaming about? Searched my writing table, found Willie Yeats’s letters to me, years of them. Very drunk that night. Laughing as he read them. ‘He calls you Maeve and he’s Ailill? Is that what you landlords do? Put on Ireland like a costume? Actors in a pantomime?’ he said. Then he found mention of the ‘spirit world’ and ‘piercing the veil.’ More fits of laughter. He piled up the letters, set them aflame. And I stood there and watched. That’s the shame of it. Me, a soldier’s daughter who’s faced down bailiffs and constables and put myself in front of battering rams. I did nothing. Frantic that he’d wake Iseult and terrorize her. Only a young girl and he called her the vilest names. Finally, he staggered away and fell asleep. I collected the ashes of the letters. Saved them. I never told Willie that all those words of his had burnt away. And yet the John MacBride I’d met only a few years before was admirable. A soldier, a gentleman. No hint of what he was to become. Was I to blame? Perhaps I brought out the worst in him, challenged him in ways I did not understand.”

“Not your fault. Yet I understand.”

Maud stops, looks at me. “Perhaps, you do know,” she says.

“I do,” I say.

And something about the three of us gathered around the glow of Maud’s coal fire while the afternoon darkens and a far blacker night falls over Europe starts me talking. I suppose I am still shocked by Dolly’s death, because I tell Maud and Margaret about Tim McShane, matching Maud’s honesty. I’d never gone into detail with Maud before. All she knows is I too had a MacBride in my life. And Margaret, well, she’s so reserved I never thought to confide in her. But now it all comes out.

The years visiting Tim in the State Street Hotel, betraying Dolly. His attempt to kill me. My sister Henrietta’s declaring me dead.

“And yet, I really thought I loved him,” I say.

“Did McShane and MacBride change? Or did we not see what was really there all along? Mean alcoholics. Bullies,” I say.

“In Ireland, drunkenness excuses any behavior,” Maud says. “‘Sure, isn’t the whisky the devil?’ Don’t hold a man responsible for what he does under the influence.” She sighs. “Thank God the French courts see drunkenness differently. Enough to prove intoxicating behavior; didn’t have to go into what he did to my sister Eileen or his attempts on Iseult.”

Maud pours more sherry into our glasses. “And because I can’t get a divorce under Irish law, MacBride still has rights to Seán. The Gonne women are cursed.”

She pokes the fire.

“Really, we are. One of my ancestors stole land from the Church. A priest cursed the family. No Gonne woman would have a happy marriage and it’s come true.”