Blue Mercy: A Novel. (18 page)

"What do you think?" she'd asked, turning slowly around so I could admire her, but the dress showed part of her that I'd never seen and something about her half-naked back frightened me and I started to cry.

"Oh now," she'd said. "What's that about?" She was laughing down at me and up at my father. Happy.

Where had this memory come from? I was sure I'd never had it before, yet already it felt like part of me.

"That old wardrobe was put in from the other bedroom," Rose said from behind to me, making me jump. "I hope it won't be in your way."

"Of course not."

"It's such a lovely dress."

I looked down at it, then back up at her, the ghost of its owner hovering between us.

"You should bring it back to America with you; get a bit of wear out of it."

"Oh, I couldn't."

"Why not?"

I looked at it. Indeed, why not? It was beautiful: a tight, strapless bodice covered in tiny, worked detail over a full skirt. The sort of detail you rarely get now, and far too beautiful to be left to rot here. But where would I wear such a dress?

"Just don't say anything to your Daddy," she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. "You know how he likes to hold onto everything."

So that was how she played it, us against Him. Fair enough, you'd need some survival strategy to live with my father.

"All right then, I'll take it. Thank you Rose."

"Not at all. So tell me, have you everything you need?"

"I'd love a shower," said Star, coming in behind us.

"Oh dear, I'm afraid we don't have one of those."

"You don't have a...?" Star's face would have made me laugh but for poor Rose's discomfiture.

I cut in. "Maybe a bath? I'll show you the bathroom."

"A bath?" said Rose. "Oh, dear me, yes, of course. I'll just need an hour or two to heat up the immersion."

It had become clear that mealtime was the only time we were going to be getting with my father or Rose. Their life was going to go on as usual, with no concession to us. Fair enough, that suited us too. I wanted Star to come with me to Dublin, to hear me speak at the book launch. I wanted to take her shopping and to visit the capital city I'd hardly ever seen, do the sightseeing, touristy things with her.

To have had Daddy sitting in the front seat of our hired car for all that would have been too awkward. If they wanted to stay put, it left Star and me free to explore wherever we wanted.

Except Star was having none of it. Not even my launch. She was refusing to go.

"Who would I talk to? It will be full of whiny critics and up-their-own-ass professors." She shuddered.
 

Star loathed critics ever since our local paper's music column savaged Vixen, with a line about their particular sound of fury signifying nothing and picking Star out for special opprobrium: "The drummer was a big -- let's be honest, fat -- girl in spandex and combat boots, with a sense of rhythm as idiosyncratic as her sense of fashion". It wasn't that harsh, compared to what could be said, but Star was so sensitive.
 

"There will be other people there, ordinary people, nice people."

"You'll be busy and I'll have no-one to talk to."

My moment of glory wasn't exactly scintillating for a fifteen-year-old, I did realize that. For anyone, really. It was only a small essay in an ancillary volume by a subsidized press, but it was publication, recognition that what I had to say was worth hearing by somebody. I tried another tack.

"What will you do here, while I'm gone? I'll be staying in Dublin overnight."

She shrugged that jerk of her shoulders that was almost a sneer. "I guess talk to Rose."

That's what I'd found her doing quite often these days when I got back from a solitary walk or drive, but if I came in and settled down beside them, Star always slipped away.

"What on earth do you two talk about?" Daddy, I suspected, from the few snatches I had managed to overhear. "I didn't think she'd be your choice of company."

"I feel sorry for her, she's on her own all the time."

"So am I."

"Oh, Mom, don't start."

"It's natural that I'd want you there, surely you can see that."

"Granddad says he'll take me fishing."

"If you don't go to Dublin with me."

"Yes."

She knew how I felt about my father. On the plane across, realizing that she had an image of him as a kind of twinkly, Dan Rather figure, I thought I'd better brief her as to what she could expect but, in the telling, I had somehow ended up in tears -- nerves at the thoughts of meeting him, I guess -- so that she had to call the stewardess to bring me Kleenex and a glass of water and we'd both been shaken by that.

Since we'd arrived, we'd had more than a few whispered exchanges about his carry-on, and silent communications with eyes and eyebrows behind his back. Up to that moment, we were forming a bond of sorts around his perverseness so hear her say that made me snap.
 

After all the tirades and tantrums, of being the best I could be, of keeping what shouldn't be said unsaid... I felt something implode inside. I teetered, but only for a moment, before letting rip. I'd called her selfish in arguments before and I called her that now but I also said what should never have been said. I called her fat. A fat selfish lump, to be precise. And thereby undid the work of five, patient forbearing years.
 

"Ladies and Ladies," I said, beginning my talk, for there wasn't a single man at the book launch. A titter broke, a small wave around the room. Looking down from my podium at the faces turned towards me put a nervous wobble into my voice. "In 1889, the year that WB Yeats recalled first meeting Maud Gonne, he was moving away from the influence of older men that had been so predominant in his life. Men like his Pollexfen grandfather and uncles, the old Irish Fenian John O'Leary, the magician MacGregor Mathers and, of course, his father, were ceding their place in his life to a number of strong-minded and unconventional women. These women -- Gonne herself, Madame Blavatsky, Olivia Shakespear, Florence Farr and Augusta Gregory in the 1890s and many others from then on, most notably 20 years later, Iseult Gonne and his wife, George Hyde Lees -- were, variously: emblems, muses, providers, literary and mystical cohorts, mentors, friends, and sometime sexual partners."

There I stopped, blank, a string of panic knotting my throat. My eyes floated back to a couple of kindly faces near the front and I remembered what I wanted to say.

"Of all these women, none were more important to his poetry than the Gonnes and it is them I'd like to talk about tonight, most particularly Iseult Gonne, whose influence is so often overshadowed by the poetry he wrote for her mother. Maud, the radical Irish revolutionary, the celebrated beauty, the unattainable muse, would – I think - have loved to know that we are here tonight, discussing her. Iseult would have hated it. When I started my research, I had a disconcerting image of her watching me with a cool, disapproving gaze as I scoured dead books and papers and letters for meanings they were never meant to bear..."

On I went, talking to a room of strangers with nobody I knew there to hear me. Before I'd left for Dublin that morning, I had checked in on Star who was sleeping with her head under the duvet, like a bird with head tucked under its wing, only her quiff showing, collapsed across the pillow.

"Star," I'd called, gently.

Silence.

"Do you want breakfast before we leave?"

Silence.

"You are going to come, aren't you? Please come, darling. We can talk in the car."

Silence.

I went in, sat on the side of the bed. "I'm not even asking for me, Star. I know what I said the other day was wrong and I am so, so sorry but I'm not asking you to forgive me, only not to let it stop you coming with me today. Today is a big day for me, the biggest day in my life since I had you. I'd love you to be there and I really think that if you don't come, you'll regret it later. Don't let a row stop you. Star? Please...? Star?"

But no.

After my speech, there was a wine reception at which most people, except me, knew somebody. We stood around, eighty or ninety of us, holding long-stemmed glasses between our fingers and our copies of
Between The Words
under our arms, saying what we hoped was the right thing to each other. I can do small talk -- restaurant work is training school for it -- but it always feels more like performance than connection to me and, that night, I had had enough performing on the podium. I wanted to get away, consider how it had gone, work out what I was feeling. Failing that option, I should have liked to be with people I could really talk to, ask them what they really thought, and tell them how I really felt. Star or Marsha or -- stupid thought -- Zach, instead of these strangers coming across to congratulate me.

And then I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around to a pair of dancing, aquamarine eyes that I recognized immediately, even though I hadn't seen them for years, not since my mother's funeral. I had expected the habit and wimple she wore then but it seemed she'd ditched them. She was dressed in civvies, sensible navy, but an ordinary skirt and jumper. "Sister... Auntie... Catherine!" I said, delighted. "You came!"

"Came? Of course I came. Best invitation I've had in years."

I hugged her, taking a moment to settle the emotions that leapt in me at the sight of her. She was my mother's sister, long-time principal of a girl's school in Dublin, and I had sent her an invitation.

"So, the prodigal daughter returns. And..." She cast her lovely smile around the room. "...on a wave of glory."
 

"Not exactly glory," I said.

"Now don't go making little of it. I don't like when people play down their achievements. It's a fine book. Very interesting work. Very important work, excavating all those untold stories. Tell me about your Iseult Gonne..." And she was off. No small talk now. We had so much to tell and ask each other.

After the launch party broke up, we sat in the lobby drinking tea and talking, talking...She knew so much about me and my past and nothing, it seemed, was out of bounds. Towards the end of the night, when we were both overcome by yawning tiredness, she spoke of the woman who had been lying, silent as dust, between us all evening.

"I remember trying to talk to her after she got engaged but she wouldn't let me broach it. It wasn't until the day of the wedding, when we were getting ready, that I got a chance to ask her if she was sure. I made light of it, saying something like, 'this is your last chance now, Martha, to change your mind'."

"What did she say?"

"That he was a good man, a guard, with land and prospects, and she knew what she was doing."
 

She hesitated.

"Go on, Sister."

"I don't know if I should be telling you this but it's always burnt a hole in my mind. She said to me, 'Isn't a bad marriage better than no marriage at all'."

"Oh my God."

"She was twenty-five and her time was running out. That's the way it was, then. Marriage was everything for a girl -- job, status in the community, the lot. Women weren't allowed to work at much else, remember."

"Unless you became a nun," I smiled.

And she smiled back, a smile that was happy for her and sad for her sister. "It was after Martha's wedding day that I knew my own calling."

The next day, driving back down to Wicklow, I thought about Sister Catherine the whole way, how she'd probed, but gently: careful as a cook checking a soufflé, how much I'd told her. Funny how life works, I thought, driving up the lane at Doolough and parking the European car with its awkward gearstick and handbrake and clutch. If Star had come to Dublin with me, I wouldn't have been able to speak half as freely.

As I walked into the kitchen, lunch was being served but as soon as I crossed the threshold, I knew something was wrong. My father looked like a towering tyrant and Star like a frightened child. The smoke of anxiety I remembered so well from childhood immediately swirled up in me. I stopped, afraid to speak, knowing any word or action would unleash the menace that was waiting to pounce. "Oh, here she is," he said. "In time for the food. And arms swinging, of course."

I looked at my hands and forearms, not knowing what he meant.

"Not so much as a loaf of bread to contribute to their keep."

Our keep? We had brought presents when we arrived. A book, handkerchiefs, whiskey for him. Flowers and chocolates for Rose. He wanted a contribution to our keep?

"Nothing but complaints from the moment yez arrived. Coffee, how are you. And showers. It's far from that you were reared but in you come
 
with your notions and your nose in the air, snooting around the place."

Star's eyes were opening white circles all round her irises.
 

"And all your talk about America, America. If America is so damned fine, what are yez doing here?"

His face was swelling, like a red party balloon. I tried to keep my voice calm. "Are you saying you want us to go?"

For the first time in my life, I held his black, blazing gaze. A familiar
throb-throb-throb
began to beat in the space between my eyes but I didn't drop them, and I wouldn't have if I'd had to stand there looking into his hatred to this day. He was the one to break off. His eyes sunk to contemplate the toe of his boots and I felt my heart surge.

From the side, Star said, "We should go, Mom."

"What about you, Rose?" I said. "Do you want us to go?"

Rose looked from us to Daddy, panic-stricken. He put his hand in the air and flicked his wrist, a wave that dismissed us or her, maybe both.

"You can leave her out of it," he said. "It's nothing to her; yez are not her people."

Star stood up, a loud scrape of her wooden chair on the tiles. "Let's just go, Mom."

"That child needs the strap taken to her," he said. "In more ways than one."

"You lift one finger to her," I said. "And I'll call the police."

"I am the police, you little fool."