The Parting Glass (14 page)

“I’ll do that.” Irene closed her eyes. “It’s a happy story, at least at first. The telling of it won’t be so hard.”

1923

Castlebar, County Mayo

My dearest Patrick,

As always, I think of you, my only brother, so far removed from Ireland, and I mourn your leaving for Ohio as if it only happened yesterday instead of nearly a lifetime ago. Cleveland is more your home now than Ireland ever was, and St. Brigid’s still the center of your heart, even though you have now retired and serve as its priest only occasionally. But how sharp your mind has remained, and how astute your observations. We are lucky, you and I, that we still have our wits left, and that only an ocean separates us and not yet death.

How different our views on the plight of our people. Yours garnered at one end of our national tragedy and mine at the other. Yours when the immigrant steps off the ship or train and into a world of belching factories and hastily constructed shanty houses. Mine when the emigrant leaves his poor barren farm, prayers in his heart and hope glimmering in his eyes.

They say we live in a new Ireland. So far I’ve yet to see it. Last year assassins killed the Big Fellow at
Beal na mBlath,
a terrible loss to all men and women who believe our best fate lies in compromise. We Irish still fight among ourselves, as surely and naturally as we fought the British invaders. Men who survived the horror of Gallipoli fall in Dublin’s streets, and sabotage, execution and other atrocities have become as symbolic of our ancient and honorable culture as rainbows and church spires.

You tell stories in your letters of new Irish blood for Cleveland, of men with surnames such as Durkan and Doyle, Heneghan and Lavelle, names as familiar to me as my own. I mourn for these men, although I never knew them, for their need to depart the country of their birth, and for unwelcome surprises on arrival. I remember too well your letters about the place called Whiskey Island, dear Patrick, and the horrors of life there for men who had only known Ireland’s green splendors. Perhaps things are better now, but Cleveland will never be Ireland, will it?

There are still few enough opportunities here, particularly for those who allied themselves with the Republicans. Some wounds never heal. Perhaps it is better they leave for America’s far-off shores, but perhaps it is not. For what will our beloved Ireland do without its strong, courageous sons?

Your grieving sister,

Maura McSweeney

chapter 9

A
t his father’s knee, Liam Tierney had learned not to expect anything from life. At his mother’s, he had learned he was not deserving of love. Fortunately for Liam, he met Brenna Duffy when he was still young enough to be skeptical.

Lorcan Tierney, Liam’s father, was a hard man, and having a son late in life hadn’t softened him. He provided the bare essentials without a smile and demanded nothing more of himself.

Walton Gaol, Liverpool’s prison, had made Lorcan the man he was. As nothing more than a feckless boy, he had left the family home in Shanmullin to seek his fortune in England, but only a month later, overriding hunger, a slab of hastily stolen beef and an unlucky eyewitness to his robbery cured him of hope. Deeply ashamed, he told no one what he had done or where he was.

Upon his release years later, he returned to Ireland to find his family gone, likely all dead, and nothing left for him except the rocky soil and tumbling cottage he had abandoned with such expectations in his youth.

Liam’s mother had been a spinster, sickly and morose, who accepted Lorcan’s curt offer of marriage when a brother made it clear that she would have no place to live if she said no. She gave birth to Liam, her only child, with a maximum of pain and a minimum of joy. Had Lorcan not intervened, she would have left their infant son on the doorstep of the rectory that night.

Twelve years later, upon Lorcan’s death, she made good on her threat and abandoned the adolescent Liam at the rectory doorstep, disappearing that same night, never to be seen or heard from again. Castlebar’s conscientious parish priest sent Liam south to finish growing up under the strict tutelage of the Christian Brothers. Very little of what he learned in the orphanage served him well.

Lonely, angry boys find others like themselves as friends. Lonely, angry boys seek solace in action, in violence, in causes that fill the empty places inside them. Upon leaving the orphanage at sixteen, Liam Tierney found just such friends and just such a cause in the political upheaval of his time. Only the miraculous appearance of Brenna, an auburn-haired, blue-eyed angel and orphan from another institution, had saved him.

Now Liam and Brenna had come to Cleveland for a new life, a new start, a new home for their darling baby girl. Brenna had named their red-haired daughter Irene. It wasn’t an Irish name, because at Irene’s birth Brenna had hoped so desperately that someday the Tierneys would not be Irish anymore.

“Irishtown Bend?” Brenna looked at the tiny, lopsided house that perched on a hillside looking over the place the local people called Whiskey Island. “We’ve come all this way, Liam, gladly left everything behind, to live in a place called Irishtown Bend?”

It was so rare for Brenna to be critical that Liam felt her words in the pit of his stomach. “I’m aware of the irony,” he said. “But we needn’t live here forever. It’s a place to start, and not such a bad place at that. Isn’t it better to be with people we understand? People like us? So many of them came from Mayo. I might well run into people I knew there.”

“Exactly what I hoped you wouldn’t do.”

Liam wanted the world for Brenna and Irene. He was going to give them the world, but unfortunately, not quite yet. And, of course, she wasn’t asking for that. She only wanted freedom from worry, from a past that haunted her nights.
His
past.

“I think the house has charm.” Liam cocked his head and stared up at it. The house was narrow as a young man’s hips and tall as a young man’s dreams. A rickety front porch ran across the front. His inspection had turned up boards so rotten that Irene’s meager weight would crumble them to dust.

Brenna hiked their daughter higher on one hip. Most of the time Irene would not allow herself to be carried. She was a lively child, only content when she was moving. But the voyage, the nights in Boston, then the nights in a West Side hotel that housed as many rats as immigrants, had nipped at her good humor. She rubbed her eyes and angrily brushed red-gold locks of hair away from her face.

His daughter. His reason for coming here.

“Perhaps it has charm,” Brenna said, “but I suspect it has mice and bugs, as well, and in winter, it will have icicles inside.”

“By winter we’ll live somewhere else, farther up the hill into the Angle, perhaps someday away from the Irish entirely.” He hesitated. “Unless we find family.”

Brenna looked as exhausted as their daughter, and that prospect didn’t seem to please her. “There’s little chance of it, Liam. You shouldn’t raise your hopes so high.”

Liam didn’t need the warning. His hopes weren’t high; in fact, he wasn’t sure what to hope for. Once, in a rare moment of conversation, his father had told him of uncles who had come here during the last century, Lorcan’s own brothers, Darrin and Terence, both of whom had died young and poor.

All the Tierney family had already died or abandoned Shanmullin when Lorcan arrived home from Liverpool, as had most of the villagers he had known as a boy. Even Shanmullin’s priest had moved to America, but one neighbor recalled that Terence had married, and his wife might still be alive. The wife might even have given birth to Terence’s child. In a place called Cleveland, where she and Terence had gone to live.

Liam knew so little of his family’s past, and he cared only a little more. Family had failed him so miserably. What reason was there to think that anything might change? He had made his own family when he married Brenna Duffy and sired Irene. If Tierneys were here, he would observe them carefully before he told them who he was.

Now he tried to make the best of their bad situation, hoping to cheer his wife. “Be careful on the stairs,” Liam said. “Best give me Irene. I know what to avoid.”

He took the little girl, who was fussing, and jiggled her as he climbed. He skirted the worst of the holes and pushed open the door. The house was dismal inside but surprisingly clean. The former occupants had been too poor for repairs but too proud for dirt. Only the faintest dust filmed the rickety table in one corner and the ladder-back chair beside it. The windows were few but gleaming.

“Good people lived here.” That was the most he could say, since the house had nothing else to recommend it. It was cramped and dark, and the moldering boards on the porch had close cousins here. He hadn’t been inside before this. The house was all he could afford, and the state of its interior had hardly been at issue. It had a roof and a floor of sorts, a place to cook and sleep. Until he found work, there was little else he could ask for.

He didn’t look at Brenna. He didn’t want to see the horror on her face. He had brought her here, far from everything she knew. True, like him, she had no family in Ireland. The orphanage where she had been taken at birth was a cruel place, and her memories of Ireland were sad ones. But she had married him to improve her life. And this was no improvement.

“Oh, Liam, look at the way the sun shines in this window.” She stepped carefully around the room and peered outside, down the gentle slope that led to the river and the smoke of Whiskey Island.

The sunlight wavered through the old glass, making patterns on the wall. He was pleased she’d chosen to notice them.

“And it’s all ours,” she said, turning to face him.

“It’s not much—”

“All my life I lived in a room with twenty girls, sometimes more. I yearned for space like this, for a place where I could move without stumbling over someone.”

He knew what she was doing, knew the effort this forced spate of optimism was costing her. He loved her more for it. “You’ll need to be careful where you move here, as well. Or you’ll end up on the ground below.”

“But it will be our ground, won’t it? Not charity. No one reminding us that we didn’t earn it and we’re lucky to have it. No sisters to beat us if we aren’t thankful enough. Yes, it’s meager, Liam. But I’m sorry about what I said before. If there are mice, they’ll be our mice, won’t they? And if the icicles form inside, then we’ll know exactly where to patch, and we’ll thank them for the insight.”

“I’ll get a job. I know there’s work here, lots of it. I’ve been told so by every man I’ve encountered. We won’t be in the house long. And I’ll patch the floors. There’s driftwood on the lakeshore. I’ve been told that, as well. I’ll patch, and we’ll make it a home until we can find better.”

“I never expected to have this much. I have you, and our darling Irene, and I have this new land of ours, away from all our sad memories. We’ll start again here. The three of us.”

He set Irene down, and she ran to the window where her mother stood. Brenna lifted her daughter in her arms.

“Smoke,” Irene said, pointing down the hillside.

“A sign of progress,” Brenna said. “A sign of good things to come.”

Liam followed his daughter. Brenna held out an arm, and he let her enfold him. The only moments of pleasure he’d ever experienced had been due to this woman. He felt the warmth of her breast pressing against his side, smelled the wind-tossed scent of her hair. He put his arms around the only two people in the world whom he had ever loved, and Liam Tierney counted his blessings.

chapter 10

M
egan pulled into the parking lot of the Whiskey Island Saloon in Casey’s red Mazda and turned the key in the ignition. She didn’t move to open the door. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, and her foot continued to rest on the brake. She closed her eyes and reminded herself to breathe.

When she opened them again, nothing had changed. No fairy godmother had waved a wand in the intervening seconds to restore the rubble into a functioning Irish-American pub. The Whiskey Island Saloon would be a work in progress for weeks, maybe months, and Megan was going to have to accept the fact that life as she had known it was never going to be the same.

The driver’s door opened. Startled, she looked up and saw her sister staring down at her. “You like my car so much you don’t want to return it?”

“How did you know I’d be back today?” Megan stared up at Casey. “Is this sisterly ESP?”

“Nick called Jon and told him what happened. I brought Charity for you and came to get the Mazda.”

Niccolo’s phone call to Jon didn’t surprise Megan. He was already acting like a husband, even though they’d only been married two weeks. He’d fallen into the role like Olivier into Hamlet.

“It’s a long drive by yourself.” Casey extended a hand. “He was sorry you had to make it alone. Not the way to end a honeymoon, huh?”

Megan hefted herself out of Casey’s car. “Nobody’s fault.”

“Jon says Nick’s mother had a heart attack? She’s in Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh?”

“Chest pains. They put her in yesterday morning for tests. I haven’t heard any results yet, but Nick thought he ought to be there. He flew out last night. It was too late to make the drive home, so I stayed there alone until this morning.”

“You had what, four nights together? Not much of a honeymoon.”

At least they had been blissful nights. The lake lapping at the shore, Niccolo’s lovingly chosen wines, gourmet meals prepared together, moonlight walks, the glowing eyes of nocturnal animals in the forest beyond their cabin. The big, soft king-size bed.

“It’s a bad break, but it couldn’t be helped,” Megan said. “Marco told him not to make the trip home, but you know Nick. If he can’t help, he doesn’t exist. And she
is
his mother.”

“You deserved longer. Between the tornado, the bids and estimates, the insurance adjustor, now this…”