The Copper Beech (22 page)

And then Maria was born in 1944, baptised by a Polish priest. There were potato cakes served at the christening party, except they called them latkes, and there was a terrible soup called polewka, which they all drank at the drop of a hat.

Maria was beautiful. Helen wrote this over and over. Nora knew from experience that there wasn’t much point in believing old wives’ tales – they certainly hadn’t been much use in her predicament – but she did believe that twins sort of knew about each other, even when they were almost five thousand miles apart.

She read and reread Helen’s letters for some hint of what was troubling her, because Nora Kelly knew that life on Chicago’s Southside was not as it was described in the very frequent letters.

On an impulse she wrote to her one spring day in 1948.

‘I know it sounds like a tall order, but why don’t you bring Maria over to see us in the summer? When the school closes Jim and I have all the time in the world and there’s nothing that would please us more.’

Nora wrote warmly inviting Lexi too, but the implication was that he would not be able to take the time. Helen,
working only part time in the restaurant now, could arrange leave.

Nora described the flowers and the hedges around Shancarrig. She made the river sound full of sparkle and the woods as if they were on the lid of a box of chocolates.

Helen replied by return of post. Lexi wouldn’t be able to make the trip, but she and Maria would come to Shancarrig.

Nora could hardly wait. Their elder sister Kay said that Helen must have money to burn if she could just leap on a plane and fly off to Dublin on the spur of the moment. But Nora felt that it might well have taken a lot of explanations and excuses, as well as unimaginable scrimping and saving. She kept quiet about this. She would hear everything when Helen came home.

It was a relief to the twins when, after the big reunion in Dublin, they were able to leave Kay and travel together on the train to Shancarrig. They held hands and talked to each other, words tumbling and falling, finishing each other’s sentences and beginning new ones … and mainly they said that the camera had not done the little girl justice.

Maria was beautiful.

She was four and a half, with a smile that went all the way around her face. She sang and hummed to herself, and was happy with the piece of cardboard and colouring pencils which Nora had brought to greet her.

‘Aren’t you great!’ Helen exclaimed. ‘Everyone else gives her these ridiculous ornaments or lacy things that she breaks or tears up.’

‘Everyone else?’

‘The Poles,’ confessed Helen, and they giggled like the children they had been when they said goodbye so many years ago.

The sun shone as the train pulled into Shancarrig. There on the platform stood the master, Jim Kelly, waiting to meet his sister-in-law and little niece.

Maria took to him straight away. She reached up with her small chubby hand and he held it firmly while carrying the heavy suitcase in the other.

‘Oh Nora.’ Helen’s eyes were full of tears. ‘Oh Nora, you’re so lucky.’

As they left the station and walked down to the row of shops where of late she had felt that she had been an object of pity, the childless school teacher Nora
did
feel lucky.

Nellie Dunne looked out of her door.

‘Aren’t you looking well today, Mrs Kelly!’ she said.

‘This is my sister, Miss Dunne.’

‘And you have a little girl, do you?’ Nellie Dunne asked. She wanted to have all the news for whoever came in next.

‘That’s my Maria,’ said Helen proudly.

When Nellie was out of hearing Nora said, ‘It’ll be a nine days wonder in the place that someone belonging to me produced a child.’

Helen laid her hand on her twin sister’s arm.

‘Shush now. We’ll have weeks on end to talk about all that.’

They walked companionably through Shancarrig, and home to make the tea.

But Nora Kelly did not have weeks on end to talk to her twin sister about life in Chicago and life in Shancarrig. Five days after she arrived Helen was killed when a runaway horse and cart went across the path of the bus which, swerving to avoid them, hit Helen, killing her outright.
Nora Kelly was in Nellie Dunne’s with Maria when it happened. The child was trying to decide between a red and a green lollipop, holding them up against her yellow Viyella dress with the smocking on it, as if somehow one would look better with the outfit than the other.

The sounds were never to leave Nora’s mind. She could hear them over and over, each one separate, the wheels of the cart, the whinnying of the horse, the irregular sound of the bus scraping the wrong way, and the long scream. Then silence, before the cries and shouts and everyone running to see what could be done.

Afterwards people said there was no scream, that Helen made no sound.

But Nora heard it.

They took her into Ryan’s Hotel. She was given brandy, people’s arms were around her, everywhere there were running footsteps. Someone had been sent up to the schoolhouse for Jim. There was Major Murphy from The Glen, a military man trying to organise things on some kind of military lines.

There was Father Gunn with his stole around his neck. He had run from the church to say the Act of Contrition into the lifeless ear of the dead woman.

‘She’s in heaven now,’ Father Gunn told Nora. ‘She’s there, praying for us all.’

A great sense of the unfairness of it all rose in Nora. Helen didn’t want to be in heaven praying for them all, she wanted to be here in Shancarrig telling the long complicated tale of a strange marriage to a silent man who drank, not like the Irish people drink, but differently. She wanted to arrange that her daughter came to Ireland regularly rather than grow up speaking Polish, hardly noticed amid the great crowds of other children in the family. Lexi’s brothers and sisters had produced great
numbers of new Chicagoans, apparently. Helen had begun to fear that Maria might get lost and never know a life of her own, be a personality and character in her own right like all the children in Shancarrig were. Nora had told her about the children who filled the classrooms during term time, each one with a history and a future.

Nora could not take it in. It couldn’t have happened. Every minute seemed like half an hour as she sat in the lounge and a procession advanced and retired.

The voice of Sergeant Keane seemed a hundred miles away when he spoke of the telegram to Chicago, or the possibility of a phone call.

‘We can’t wire that man and say Helen is dead.’ She heard her own voice as if it was someone else’s. The words sounded unreal. The Sergeant explained that they could send a telegram asking him to phone Ryan’s Hotel and someone would be here to give the message.

‘I’ll stay,’ said Nora Kelly.

No one could dissuade her. It was not three o’clock in the afternoon in Chicago, it was early morning. Lexi was on his meat delivery rounds. It might be many hours before he got the telegram. She would be in the hotel, whatever time he phoned. Mrs Ryan organised a bed to be brought to the commercial lounge; the commercial travellers would understand that this was an emergency, that Mrs Kelly had to be near the phone, day or night.

She drank tea and they brought jelly for Maria. Red jelly, with the top of the milk. Every spoonful seemed to be in slow motion.

Then, at ten o’clock at night, she heard them coming to tell her that the call had been put through. She spoke to the man with the broken English. She had lain on the bed with the curtains pulled to keep out the evening sunlight of Shancarrig. And now it was almost dark. She
spoke as she had drilled herself to speak, without tears, trying to give him all the information as calmly as possible.

‘Why do you not weep for your sister?’ He had a broken English accent, like a foreigner in a film.

‘Because my sister would want me to be strong for you,’ she said simply.

She asked did he want to speak to Maria, but he said no. She told him that Helen’s body would be brought to Shancarrig church the next night, and the funeral would be on the following day, and that Mr Hayes had found out about flights. He had been on the phone to Shannon Airport all day …

She was cut short Lexi would not come to the funeral.

Nora was literally unable to speak.

The slow voice spoke on. It would not be possible, they were not people who had unlimited money. Who would he know to walk with him behind his wife’s coffin? There would be prayers said for her in his own parish, in his church. He returned again to the accident and how it had happened. Who was at fault? What part of Helen had been hurt to kill her?

The nightmare continued for what Nora Kelly thought was an endless time. It was only when the operator said six minutes that she realised how little time had actually passed.

‘Will you ring again tomorrow?’ she said.

‘To say what?’

‘To talk.’

‘There is nothing to talk about,’ he said.

‘And Maria …?’

‘Will you look after her until we can come for her?’

‘Of course … but if you are going to come for her, could you not come for Helen’s funeral?’

‘It will be later.’

The days of the funeral passed without Nora being really aware of what was going on. Always she saw Jim, his big hand stretched out to little Maria, whose crying for her mama grew less and less. They told her Mama was with the angels in heaven, and showed her the holy pictures on the wall and in the church to identify where her mother had gone.

And as the days passed Nora went through her sister’s possessions, while Jim took little Maria up to Barna Woods to pick flowers.

Nora sat on her bed and looked at her sister’s passport and official-looking cards for work and insurance. She could find no return air ticket. Was it possible that Helen had intended to stay here and not to return? There were letters from a solicitor ‘regarding the matter we spoke of’. Could this solicitor have been arranging an American divorce? Did the strange tone of voice mean that Lexi was too upset to talk? Or that all love and feeling had gone from his marriage with Helen? Her head was whirling. Why had they not talked at once, she and Helen? It had been part of the slow getting back to knowing each other, the delighted realisation that each had only to begin a thought and the other could finish it.

What a cruel God to have taken this away from them five days after they had found it.

Kay the eldest sister was as usual practical.

‘Don’t grow too fond of the child,’ she warned Nora. ‘That unfeeling lout will be back for her the day it suits him.’

What did people mean … don’t grow too fond of? How could anyone put a limit to the love she felt for this little girl with the big dark blue eyes, the head of curls and the endearing habit of stroking her cheek?

After a week Nora found herself saying to Jim, ‘Is the
child asleep yet?’ and realised she was certainly coming to regard Maria as her child.

His reply was tender. ‘I read her a story but she wants another from No, she says No has better stories.’

He was smiling at her affectionately, like before. He didn’t turn away from her in bed any more, he reached for her like before. It was as if Maria had made their life complete.

‘I suppose Kay’s right about not getting too fond of her,’ Nora said one summer evening, as they sat watching Maria play with the three baby chickens that Mrs Barton, the dressmaker, had brought along in a box as something to entertain the little girl.

‘I keep hoping he won’t want her back,’ Jim said. It was the first time in four weeks it had been mentioned.

‘We shouldn’t get up our hopes … any man would want his only child.’

‘Any man would have come to his wife’s funeral,’ Jim said.

Nora wrote letters regularly. She described the funeral, the flowers, the sermon. She told about the grave under a tree in the churchyard, and how on Sundays she went there with Maria to lay flowers on it. In a year a stone would be put up, Lexi must let her know what he would like written on the tombstone.

She told him about the bus driver who would never be the same again after the accident; the man who walked alone up to Shancarrig Rock. Everyone had told him that it had not been his fault. No one could have faulted him, it was an Act of God that the horse had shied at that very time. But he said that he would never drive again, and had come with flowers to the grave when he thought no one was looking.

She wrote that Maria said God Bless Daddy and a lot of other names every night, so she assumed that these were grandparents or relations. She didn’t want him to think that that side of the family had been forgotten. She said that when the term started in September Maria would join the Mixed Infants. She was almost five – five was the age the children began coming to school.

She wrote and told him about the place, the huge big copper beech tree in the playground, and the maps on the schoolroom walls. She stopped saying ‘until you come for her’ and ‘for the present time’. Instead she just wrote as if it was all agreed that Maria would stay here for an unspecified amount of time.

The children accepted her totally. They never thought it odd that she called Mrs Kelly ‘No’. They thought it was just because she was babyish and younger than they were. Geraldine Brennan from the cottages decided to be her protector. Nora Kelly had to watch carefully in case part of the protecting might also mean eating Maria’s little sandwich lunch.

The communications from Lexi were minimal. He wrote to say that he was grateful for her letters. His hand was not educated, and his grasp of grammar poor. He told her little or nothing about his intentions. He asked many times about the accident, what court case had resulted and whether the compensation had arrived. Once he inquired whether Helen had any valuables with her that needed to be looked after.

In Shancarrig too, people began to think of Maria as belonging to Jim and Nora. She was even called by their name.

‘Hey, Maria Kelly, come over here and see the tadpoles!’ Nora heard one day during dinner hour, when they played
in the yard. Her heart soared with pleasure.