Of Irish Blood (49 page)

“Any luck?” I ask.

“Not much,” she says.

Of course Paul O’Toole appears out of somewhere. Not about to miss this. And charms the ladies. Going on about his Sullivan relations to Annie. He somehow knows Helen Keller’s a dog lover and launches into a speech praising man or woman’s best friend.

Helen wants to meet the blind soldiers right away.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she says to me. “Do you know the name George Kessler?” she asks.

“I don’t,” I say.

“Really? He’s the Champagne King.”

“French?” I ask.

“American,” she says. “One of the passengers on the
Lusitania
.”

Well I’ve been so immersed in Maud’s mysticism, I think Helen’s going to tell me George appeared to her, popping corks in heaven.

But no, Kessler was rescued. While bobbing around in the Atlantic, he’d promised that if he were saved he’d spend his money doing good. Got in touch with Helen and they have just started the French, English, and Belgian Permanent Blind War Relief Fund.

“I’ll show you to the ward,” Paul O’Toole says to her.

Emily and Carolyn walk together and Paul’s got Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller mesmerized. So it’s Jane and me.

“So Miss Addams,” I say. “You’d be against America entering the war.”

“Absolutely,” she says.

“But what if by coming in, we’d help end the fighting?” I ask her.

“Easy to get into a war,” she says. “Hard to get out. I told Woodrow that.”

So. Quite an afternoon. It’s over one of Paul’s conjured-up teas that Helen Keller makes the argument against that the war that convinces me.

“Congress won’t be going to war to defend the people of the United States. No, they plan to protect the capital of American speculators and investors and benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines,” she says.

“These are the points I’ll make in my speech in Carnegie Hall in January,” she tells us. “All modern wars are rooted in exploitation. The present war is being fought to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Egypt, India, China, and Africa. And now America’s whetting the sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us. But the workers who will fight and die are not interested in the spoils. They won’t get any of them anyway.”

I don’t know. Maybe because Helen’s blind and deaf and her being able to speak at all is a kind of miracle, her words hit me.

She’s right, I think. Flags, patriotism, the songs, the drums, all a cod, as Paul would say. Ways to get soldiers to die to make other people rich.

There. I’ve decided. Nora Kelly, pacifist. Peace now. And I hold on to my commitment through that terrible winter.

19

JANUARY 1916

So.

I suppose I should have become suspicious when Paul O’Toole starts asking me all those questions about Helen Keller and James Addams, but I assumed he was interested in them because they were famous. Nothing secret about their views, after all.

Yet, Paul quizzes me for days after “the peace women,” as he calls them, toured the hospital. Still, the penny didn’t drop, even when he said to me, “They’re socialists, you know.” Using a certain tone.

“So what?” I said. “Lots of the patients are too. Working fellows after all.”

Since Christmas, the union members among the soldiers have started meeting in the hospital dayroom most afternoons, the French and British soldiers together, and the Scottish, Irish, and English fellows mixing with each other. Unusual that.

I stop by on New Year’s Day to wish them health and peace. Tell them about the women’s peace march in New York. I repeat Helen Keller’s statement, that the war was being fought for capitalism.

“She’s right,” one Scottish solider says.

“But what odds,” says another. “We have to win the thing now. Too many fellows have died to let it all sputter to nothing.”

But then a third solider speaks up. “Maybe we should all go on strike. The Christmas truce made permanent.”

Paul starts going on about Big Jim Larkin and James Connolly. Tells the fellows he was one of the men locked out in Dublin in 1913.

“But I thought you were from Kildare,” I say to him.

“I was working in Dublin,” he says, “as a tramcar driver.”

Now I haven’t forgotten Paul is an informer, but nothing hidden about these meetings. Officers from the other wing of the hospital even attend, the only time they mix with ordinary soldiers. Strange to me this insistence on absolute separation between the officers and the enlisted men, but as Margaret Kirk says, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Or in this case, follow the dictates of the British and French armies. Even the prison camps were divided, that Italian monsignor had told us.

I hold a very small Women’s Christmas in my room at the place des Voges. Maud isn’t easy about the date, January 6, 1916. “Six is an unlucky number,” she says, but comes along for a glass of wine with Margaret Kirk, Madame Simone, and me.

No secrets round the fire this year, only sad news. Two of Madame Simone’s nephews have been killed. Maud says the French army is suffering greater casualties than the British. Millevoye’s son is dead. Maud’s convinced the British will try to impose conscription on Ireland.

“British ships are already refusing to carry Irishmen of military age to America,” she tells us, “and arresting anyone writing in favor of peace.”

Before she leaves, she gives me a book.

“Willie Yeats sent it to me. I didn’t like it,” she says. “Written by this young fellow Willie is trying to help called James Joyce. Joyce was in Paris years ago, sent me a note asking to call. I wrote back, telling him I was sick. Never heard from him again. Took offense, I suppose.”

She shrugs.

“Maybe just as well, this James Joyce has a very sordid imagination. Sees only ugliness in Dublin, and yet he was a friend of Skeffington and Kettle. Spent musical evenings at the Sheehy house, knew all those girls. Such vivid young people, but I’m afraid Joyce is the kind of writer who looks at the stars and sees only bits of tinsel paper.”

So why give the book to me, I wonder.

But then she says, “I might be missing something. Read it and tell me what you think, Nora.”

During the rest of January, I read a few pages of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
each night, imagining Peter across from me at the fire, deep in his own book.

I find I like Stephen Dedalus and his friends. They remind me of the fellows I grew up with in Chicago. At least the ones who went on to St. Ignatius, or even Loyola University. Easy to imagine Ed and Mike walking through Dublin with Stephen’s crowd.

Odd to find mention of the Litany of Our Lady, the Sodality, and prayers like “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts” in a book. That long sermon that scares Stephen? Redemptorist priests thundered those very words at me, during the yearly mission at St. Bridget’s. And I certainly understand Stephen’s lightness of spirit after confession. Hadn’t Father Kevin given me the grace of a cleansed soul? Must give him the book.

Father Kevin tries to come to the hospital every day. Says Mass here Sunday and marks every holy day. The rituals seems to console the fellows.

I stop him on Ash Wednesday after he’s distributed ashes in the wards and ask if the Jesuit school Stephen goes to is a real place. “It is,” he says. Father Kevin met James Joyce when the writer came to Paris ten years before, he tells me. “Joyce wanted to be a doctor then,” Father Kevin says.

“A prickly fellow, but being very young and short of money does that to you,” he says.

“I think he’s going to France at the end of the book,” I say. “Stephen’s mother packs up his new secondhand clothes and prays for him.” I read a bit to Father Kevin: “‘That I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels.’

“Exactly what I’m trying to do,” I say. “Though the last lines seem to be a little highfalutin for me.” They should have pleased Maud. Listen, ‘Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.’”

“Lovely stuff altogether,” Father Kevin says.

Definitely reaching for the stars, not tinsel paper.

The next week I give Margaret Kirk the book to read.

“Glad for anything in English,” she says to me.

Not as enthusiastic as I was after she reads
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.

“I skipped all the religious bits. I had enough of that growing up,” she says.

“What about the ‘welcome, o life,’” I say, “and ‘encountering experience.’ Did you like that?”

“Well, we’re encountering experience all right,” she says.

New casualties are coming in faster than ever. Only February, and yet the fighting has begun in a place called Verdun.

All of us run off our feet, Paul O’Toole working right along beside us all through February and March. The dayroom becomes a ward again, and most of the union fellows are sent back to the front lines.

APRIL 1916

April now, and a load of French soldiers in my ward. I confuse them with my French, I know, but thank God today a wounded French officer comes in to visit who speaks perfect English.

“Prosper Cholet,” he says, introducing himself. “I am a lieutenant in the Chasseurs a group like your Marine Corps,” he tells me. Handsome though his whole head is bandaged.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

“I am a lucky man,” he says. “I was buried under debris on the battlefield. Only the top of my head sticking up, left for dead. But I was saved by these fellows from my unit.” He points to three soldiers propped up in their beds, smiling. They don’t understand a word but are happy their officer is telling the story of his rescue, and their heroism.

Lieutenant Cholet’s very different from the English officers who inspect the men when they visit by marching past each bed, hardly speaking.

“Nice to see an officer at ease with his men,” I say.

“Well, you see,” Lieutenant Cholet says, “I have lived in America for years, I am a chemist and worked for the Michelin tire company in New Jersey. Do you know New Jersey?” he asked.

“Heard of it,” I say. “But I’m from Chicago. My name is Nora Kelly.”

“Irish?” he says.

I get ready. He’s had an Irish cook in New Jersey, I suppose. But Lieutenant Cholet takes something out of his pocket, a photograph. He shows me a portrait of a young woman.

“My fiancée,” he says. “Mary Caroline Haywood. She gets her beauty from her Irish mother.”

“She’s lovely,” I say. “You must miss her.”

“I write to her every day. Even from the trenches.”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lieutenant,” Paul O’Toole says. Sidling up out of nowhere, nosy as always. Lieutenant Cholet becomes very aristocratic and French of all of a sudden.

“I am Lieutenant Prosper Cholet,” he says to Paul. “I appreciate the service you are giving my men.” And then turns to me. “
Bonsoir, mademoiselle.
I will return tomorrow.”

“Toffee-nosed,” Paul says.

When the lieutenant comes the next day, he asks me about Paul. “Why is an able-bodied man not fighting at the Front?”

“He is meant to be spying on us,” I say. “But he’s harmless.”

“Soyez sage, mademoiselle,”
Lieutenant Cholet tells me as he leaves.

Paul comes up to me. “Who does that fellow think he is? Walking around us as if he owns this place? I saw him yesterday, out in the garage, chatting away to Tony and Charlie.”

“Well he works for a tire company, maybe he’s interested in the ambulances.”

“Can’t trust those frogs,” Paul says.

The next day, Lieutenant Cholet tells me he heard I take photographs, and he would like a picture to send to “my beloved Caroline.”

I go to get my Seneca from the nurses’ dormitory where I’ve been sleeping sometimes. He’s to meet me in the back garden. I find him posed against a blossoming apple tree. He wears a kepi, which disguises his wound. The brim of the cap diffuses the light, brightening his eyes.

“Very handsome,” I say, when I line him up in the lens. “Mary Caroline is a lucky woman.”

“Because of her I will survive,” he says. “She’s praying for me. You Irish are more intensely Catholic than we French.”

I ask if he’d care to read James Joyce’s book. He finishes it in two days.

“I like the way the boys in the book joke back and forth. That male camaraderie is what armies count on.”

As he gives me back the book, I see Paul O’Toole watching us.

“Are you looking for me, Paul?” I ask.

“For His Nibs. He’s got visitors. Big shots at the front entrance,” Paul says.

Big shots, no question. Not only Mrs. Vanderbilt in her white couture nurse’s uniform, but her husband, W.K. himself. A man I’ve only seen once in the two years I’ve worked at the hospital. Dr. Gros stands with them, and a man I don’t know. Older, bearded, heavyset.

“Prosper,” the man says, grabbing Lieutenant Cholet’s hand.

“Édouard,” he replies.

I intend to just walk past them, but Lieutenant Cholet stops me.

“Please, let me introduce Édouard Michelin, my employer and friend.”

Paul’s right there, of course. “I could arrange some refreshments, Mrs. Vanderbilt,” he says.

“Very kind of you, young man,” she says, “but Lieutenant Cholet is dining at our home.”

We watch them leave.

“Well, I like that,” Paul says. “Who is this fellow anyway?”

Lieutenant Cholet comes to the ward early next morning.

“I am here to say good-bye, mademoiselle, to you and my chasseurs. I have a new assignment. I am to serve with the Americans who are flying for France.”

He’s filled with enthusiasm, telling me how Dr. Gros has enlisted Mr. Vanderbilt’s financial support in starting an American flying unit.

“They have pilots now, and planes, and the French have accepted the unit. The Lafayette Escadrille they are calling it. A fine name, isn’t it?”

“You are a pilot?” I ask.

“Not yet,” he says. “Few are. But I can help with the mechanics. Mr. Michelin has given land for an air station, and one of your young drivers has already offered to volunteer.”