Ashes of Fiery Weather (30 page)

I pressed my face into my pillow for hours, until my throat ached from turning screams into whimpers. My mother appeared at the foot of the bed. Not herself as she was, an old woman, but a young one. She told me without speaking that she would give me the chance to die. But my daughter would follow. Bridie vanished. I rode out the next pain. When it had faded, I climbed out of the bed, made my way out of the room into the hallway and called for my mother.

CHAPTER FIVE

MAGGIE TIPS HER FACE
to the gray sky. Mist touches her forehead, her cheeks. A soft rain, the Irish would say. That is, rain that seems to fall both up and down at once.

She is on the cobblestone path to the building that houses the humanities. Lysaght Hall, with its stone façade covered in red ivy, its steep staircases and random alcoves, suits their department of literature professors and writers. They joke about being in exile at the very northern edge of campus, but the truth is they like being outsiders. This part of campus doesn't get many passersby.

Though Maggie doesn't mind the rain, she has been in Ireland for a little more than a year and has become enough of a local to enjoy winning one against the weather. She rushes inside and is already halfway up the stairs before the heavy door slams behind her.

She is relieved to find her office empty. She and the adjunct professor with whom she shares the space keep to opposite schedules, as the office is too small for both of them to comfortably use at the same time. The day they met, Cillian told her he was far more musician than teacher, but as far as jobs go, he's had worse. She told him she was one of those people who choose to teach because they can't do . . .
fill in the blank.
He'd laughed.

Maggie sets her bookbag on the desk and goes to the window. The rain is falling harder now, but she can sense it more than she can see it. She touches her hair and finds it is not a bit damp. She has it pulled back in a low ponytail today because she has a class at noon and has the idea that putting it up helps distinguish her from her students.

The clouds are so low over Slievekeeran, the mountain that lies four miles outside the village, that she can imagine climbing straight from its summit into the sky. Later in the morning it will surely clear, and then this afternoon, rain again. She loves the way Ireland lights its days, takes the light back, returns it.

Her office hours are from ten to eleven, but she is not expecting any students to appear this morning. Michaelmas term is just two weeks old. The first paper, due in a week, is the short one whose sole purpose is to shake the summer cobwebs out of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old brains. Her students are almost exclusively undergraduates, many of them taking literature classes only because they have to. The next paper, a longer one, will likely see pre–due date visits, because the class will have learned how she grades and that, yes, grammar counts.

Maggie turns her computer on, and as it boots up, she puts her glasses on and sips her coffee. This morning's line in the bakery turned her ten-minute walk to campus into a twenty-minute commute, but Murt's coffee is strong and she got out of bed still tired. Yet she needs to get some real work done. She is determined to use every block of free time to make progress on her dissertation. The start of September has brought a sense of urgency. She finished her own course work in the spring. This semester and next are about teaching and, even more so, about writing.

If all goes well and her dissertation is accepted, by the start of next summer she will have her postgraduate degree. Soon enough, she will have to decide whether to look for a job in Ireland or go back to the States.

Before settling down to work, Maggie skims her email. Rote stuff—except that her standing four o'clock meeting with Dr. McAlary has been canceled. He canceled last week too.

Dr. McAlary is the head of the English Department and her dissertation adviser. If you were casting an Irish literature professor in an American film, he would be as blue-eyed and as clever as Rory McAlary. He would be named Rory McAlary. During Maggie's first semester, she was his teaching assistant, grading his papers, sitting in on his classes, occasionally handling part of a lecture. She ignored his practice of not letting students call her by her first name but adopted his policy of calling on the reluctant. Often, he told her, that student's opinion will be far more interesting than that of the girl in the front row with her hand up. Not to be sexist, he'd said with a grin, but it's always a girl. Maggie believes it's more likely that the guy with his hand up is not seen as a pest.

Rory is forty-three, Dublin born. He lived in New York for a time in his twenties but returned to Ireland for his then girlfriend, now wife, who grew up in Ivehusheen. Her uncle, in fact, owns the town bakery.

Maggie sometimes thinks about Rory drinking in Hell's Kitchen on weekday afternoons after the day's construction job ended. He was, he said, typically on a barstool by three-thirty. She would have been eight, nine years old, in her plaid skirt and knee socks, walking home from school to her family in its first configuration of five. Father, mother, herself, two younger brothers.

Maggie gets up and goes back to the window. An Outlook calendar cancellation. She wonders if he will sneak a call this evening from his backyard when he goes outside for a cigarette.

When she hears hesitant footsteps in the hallway, Maggie half hopes they will disappear, and in fact they stop in midstride. Cillian has told her the campus is haunted, built as it was on the grounds of a workhouse. Kilmaren College's main administration building was once the intake building where the destitute Irish who'd come to live there were processed before being sent to dormitories segregated by gender and age. Lysaght Hall is the former fever hospital. The chapel is where the mortuary once stood. The garden was planted over the cemetery, where the dead were buried in mass graves during the famine, when the workhouse was overrun with the sick and the starving.

Right now the garden's black gate stands open, though it isn't supposed to be for another two hours. The college's security staff locks the gate every afternoon, but by morning it is often found this way.

The footsteps start again, and in a moment an American girl who took Maggie's class in
Dubliners
over the summer peeks in.

Amy O'Connor is smart, though she tends to pause while giving her opinion, waiting for approval before continuing. Maggie has learned not to rush a silence.

“Hi? Um, Maggie?” she says. “I wanted to talk to you, if you have a minute.”

“Come in.” Maggie smiles and gestures to the chair in front of her desk.

Maggie is probably supposed to favor the girls who arrive at Kilmaren already bookish, but it's the ones like Amy who interest her more. These are the girls who likely daydreamed through their high school English classes, and who would never have spoken to
her
if they'd been classmates.

Amy sits and crosses her legs, pulling her skirt over her knees.

“I already talked to Dr. McAlary a little while ago. It's about me maybe doing my master's here.” She offers a nervous smile.

“Okay.” Maggie hides her surprise. She thought Amy was going to ask for late admittance into one of the classes Maggie is currently teaching. She folds her hands on her desk. “Dr. McAlary gave you the basics?”

“Sure. How to apply and the courses you have to take, all of that. He said I should talk to you to get the real story since you're in the program.”

Maggie smiles. “He wants me to tell you how much hard work is involved. See if I can scare you off.”

Amy laughs and sits back, relaxing.

“When will you get your BA?” Maggie asks.

“I'm a junior now, so a year from this May,” Amy says. “I know that's a long time, but I'm a communications major, so since I'm switching to English, I've got some catching up to do.”

“What you take here will count toward that.” She speaks briefly about the application requirements and deadlines.

“Have you told your parents that you're thinking of grad school?”

“Not yet,” Amy says. “They're coming to visit in a couple of weeks, from Oregon. I'm sure once they see Ireland, they'll get why I want to stay.”

“Well, good. I've yet to get my mother to pay a visit, and New York is much closer.”

Amy laughs. “You're from New York? Somebody said that.”

Maggie has wondered how much speculation goes on about her personal life among her female students. Quite a bit, she thinks. She is herself both professor and student, older than they are but not by much. She's an age they want to be. Because she is unmarried but still under thirty, she gets to be independent, not lonely.

Amy is looking past Maggie, scanning the bookcase, which Maggie notes with approval. A real reader will always look first to the bookcase, no matter what room she is in.

“Is that your daughter?” Amy asks.

Maggie doesn't turn to see the picture Amy is pointing at. It's in a frame on top of the bookcase. Rose, a year old, at her first Glory Devlins Christmas party, wearing a red velvet dress with a matching bow in her black curls, smiling on Santa's lap.

“That's my little sister,” Maggie says. “She's seventeen and a senior in high school. But I like to remember the time before she learned to talk.”

The second configuration of five: Mother, herself, two younger brothers, baby sister.

Rose is the reason Maggie was up late last night. She called at a decent hour New York time, seven o'clock at night, but, as ever, failed to remember that it was midnight in Ireland.

Rose is still angry that she didn't get to visit Ireland this August, though their mother had only promised to think about it. In the end, Norah decided she could not miss work. In a phone call she had no time for, Maggie listened to her mother explain, and instead of pointing out that she and Marian owned Irish Dreams and didn't need permission to take time off, Maggie said it was a shame that August was such a bad month. Then she hung up.

Last night, Rose announced her plan to come by herself over Christmas break. Aidan told her no way in hell was he letting her fly by herself, and Rose pointed out that she will be eighteen by then.

Maggie listened to Rose's account of the fight, relieved that she was an ocean removed from it. If Aidan was so worried, Rose said dismissively, then he should come with her. Maggie knows he won't. Visiting her is not a priority for either of her brothers, but in Brendan's case it's because of his recent move to L.A. He is broke, since he had to buy a car, and right now he's working as a bartender.

Maggie does hope Rose visits, but at the same time, she knows what it will be like afterward. Though only in Galway for a week, Rose will become a character in the lives of all those she meets. How is Rose, Maggie will forever be asked by professors and other postgrads, shopkeepers, by all the regulars at Derrane's.

Rory McAlary has called Maggie beautiful. She isn't, but it was nice to hear. He won't say it again if he meets Rose. Nobody who has seen her sister would say it about them both.

“I couldn't shut up either when I was seventeen,” Amy says, laughing. Then she shifts in her seat. “Will you be a professor here when you graduate? I'm just wondering if you'd even be here if I get in.”

“That I can't say.” Maggie explains about the need to be flexible in this field, and how you often have to go where a job opens up.

She is not going to say that there is at least a possibility of a position at Kilmaren. Rory has explained that the college did not generally hire their own postgraduate students right away. They didn't want the programs being seen as a fast track to professorship. But he's suggested that they might make an exception for her. As an alumna of the MA program and an American, Maggie would be an asset with regard to attracting international students. And Kilmaren, which touts the benefits of studying in the Irish countryside, near the mountains and not far from the sea, is working hard to compete with cities like Galway proper and Dublin for study-abroad students.

Maggie has already proved popular. Her classes have all filled. It is partly word of mouth, but Maggie believes her name also attracts those students randomly thumbing through the course catalog for a class. They might find her bio in the back with its small black-and-white picture, which she admits is flattering, and read that she is from New York.

She never says Brooklyn.

As she was writing up the dry paragraph detailing her education, she typed “M-a-g” and then, without planning it, her finger came down on the “d.” Magdalena O'Reilly was certainly a more intriguing woman than Maggie-presumed-to-be-Margaret. If you threw a stone into a crowd in Ireland, you'd hit a Margaret O'Reilly. If you threw two stones, you'd hit two. Magdalena O'Reilly sounds like a woman with a past.

Which she is. And her present is nearly as convoluted.

She accepted Rory's invitation to give her a lift home from an evening on-campus event and reception. She usually walked home. But it was a cold night in early February, a month into the semester. Her friendship with Cillian had begun to tip into flirtation, not only in the ten minutes or so they saw each other as she was arriving at their office and he was leaving, but in the evenings too, at Derrane's, the pub where the professors and grad students gathered. He played in the weekly
seisiúns
there, and joined the group when the music was done for the night.

She had even mentioned him to her cousin—offhandedly, she thought, but email didn't dull Noelle's instincts.

How are things progressing with the fiddler?

Maggie hadn't mentioned his name. Noelle asked a few times before Maggie finally answered.

Re: the fiddler. Nice guy. Cute. Shared office. Could get awkward.