Cashelmara (93 page)

“It does sound more exciting than matins in the chapel,” said Eleanor wistfully. “You never told us about that before, Ned.”

But I was already thinking of my father’s funeral, the dark somber words of the service, the numbing dreariness, the oppressive stifled grief battened down by good taste and decorum.

“Did the Gallaghers have a garden?” said John, taking up the ritual questioning.

“And cats?” said Jane.

“They had everything,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else.

“More than we have?”

I nodded and walked away. I walked to the far end of the strand where the Fooey River flowed into the lough, and then I stopped to watch the wind rustle the grass above the sandy banks. After a while Jane came and stood beside me.

“If I went to America one day could I take Ozymandias with me?”

I said poor Ozymandias would be most unlikely to find happiness on the Atlantic Ocean, and we walked back again slowly hand in hand toward the lemonade and the jam sandwiches.

When we returned to the house it was after five, and Drummond walked out to meet us as we toiled up the last stretch of the drive.

“I’ve got some good news for you, Ned!” he called and waved a letter in the air.

We came closer. I saw the American stamp and a large unfamiliar handwriting, and suddenly my spirits started to rise.

“It’s from Phineas Gallagher!” said Drummond. “Guess who’s coming to stay?”

Kerry was coming. Nothing else mattered but that. I kept thinking what fun we would have and how wonderful it would be to have someone to laugh and joke with, someone who was bright and happy and gay.

“I’m in Phineas’ debt,” explained Drummond to me. “He helped me get my pardon, as you know, and I promised him—or at least Sarah promised him—that Kerry could come and stay here for a while and learn how to be a lady.”

They were coming in the spring.

“All of them?” I said hopefully.

“No, just Kerry and Phineas. Phineas plans to bring the whole family over later.”

Eleanor and Jane were disappointed not to be seeing Connie and Donagh.

“I’d so like a girl of my own age to play with,” said Eleanor, and Jane immediately took great offense and said she was sure she would never play with Eleanor again.

“Poor Jane’s so sensitive,” said my mother when Jane was finally appeased.

“She wouldn’t be if you didn’t keep making her feel so important,” I said. “Then she wouldn’t be so upset when other people don’t follow your example.”

“Really, Ned!” said my mother, taking offense just as Jane had done. “I hardly think it’s your place to criticize me.”

I said I was sorry. There was so little I could say to my mother those days, but now it no longer mattered because Kerry was coming.

I told my friends about her. “A friend of mine’s coming from America to see me in the spring,” I said casually as we huddled around our fire in the cool autumn air. “She’s Irish. Her name’s Kerry Gallagher.”

“A girl?” They were disapproving.

“I don’t even think of Kerry as being a girl,” I said severely. “She’s just like a real person.”

They still looked glum, so I didn’t mention her to them again.

Meanwhile, my mother was going to enormous trouble to impress the visitors. The drawing room was redecorated in pale green, the hall was painted white (I didn’t like that a bit—it was so cold) and the entire west wing, which was to be set aside for the guests, was refurnished.

“Mama, you couldn’t have chosen this furniture!” I said, horrified, when I saw all the dark heavy tallboys and commodes beached like whales along the upstairs corridor. I had never thought much about interior decoration before, but now I discovered I had a great aversion to solid gloomy furniture.

“Well, it’s not entirely to my taste,” said my mother, whose elegant boudoir was furnished in pretty Regency style, “but Maxwell thought it was smart and modern.”

I opened my mouth but shut it again before I had said a word. No use complaining about Drummond spending my money to furnish my house. She would only say she had given him permission and that it wasn’t my place to criticize. One day, when I was twenty-one, it would be my place. But not now.

The innovations went on and on. A cook was engaged from Dublin to ensure the Gallaghers had the best food, and my mother herself went to Galway to make special arrangements with the tradesmen for the best supplies to be sent to Cashelmara throughout the month of May. I didn’t think it was at all fitting for my mother to haggle with tradesmen in that fashion, but we had no housekeeper, and Drummond was anxious that the merchants should have a personal visit. He wanted to give dinner parties too so that Phineas Gallagher would think we lived a grand social life, but although my mother wrote dutifully to the local gentry they all made excuses not to come.

I hated to think of my mother being cut in that fashion, and I knew she hated it too. But she said nothing. Drummond cursed angrily, but my mother bore it all with resignation. The only time I ever saw her upset was at Christmas when Eleanor wept that the little Knox girls had given a party at Clonbur without inviting her.

“And I would so love to have gone!” she said tearfully to my mother.

“We’ll have a special party for you here, darling,” said my mother soothingly, but I saw her bitter expression before I turned away.

Spring was approaching at last. I began to mark off the days on my calendar, while in the schoolroom Mr. Watson droned interminably about the Reformation and in the chapel Mr. McCardle was disapproving when I told him I wanted to postpone my confirmation at Easter.

The daffodils began to bloom. My father’s garden came alive. Once Drummond talked of plowing up the flowers to plant vegetables, but I objected so strongly that he never mentioned it again.

“I didn’t know you liked the garden so much, Ned,” he said hastily to me, but I wouldn’t reply.

The garden was my father’s legacy to me, my one link with precious times long ago, and when I walked in his garden I would remember my promise to make amends to him and fancy the garden was not only a link with the past but a bridge to a happier future.

May came. I was fifteen and a half years old, Kerry was nine months younger and we hadn’t seen each other for two years.

“Supposing she’s not the same,” I said, worried, to Nanny. “Supposing I don’t like her.”

“A true friend never changes,” said Nanny comfortingly.

I tried to remember what Kerry had looked like. She had been plump and the buttons on her dresses had always seemed as if they might pop off at any minute. She had had red-gold hair and a dimpled chin. Of course she would look older by this time. I looked older. Examining myself moodily in the glass, I noticed that my hair, which had once been fair, was now the color of mud and my face had become a battleground for at least three different sorts of pimple.

“I look awful!” I exclaimed in dismay to Nanny. I couldn’t think why I had never noticed before.

“There, there,” said Nanny. “Keep your hair cut and wash your face properly every night and you’ll soon look as handsome as your poor papa was.”

I thought her optimism bordered on the patronizing, but I did wash my face and asked her to cut my hair for me.

When the Gallaghers arrived Drummond took me to Galway to meet them. I wore a new dark suit with my father’s gold Albert over my waistcoat, and I felt like a lamppost before the lamplighter arrived. With every glimpse of Drummond’s broad, muscular frame I envied him from the bottom of my heart.

I saw Phineas Gallagher before I saw Kerry. He had one of his big cigars in his mouth, and his blue eyes were shining and you could hear the jingle of gold in his pockets at a distance of twenty yards.

“Max, me darling old friend!” he cried, dropping the cigar in the gutter, where a beggar immediately retrieved it, and held out his arms with the tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Bluebeard!” squeaked something small and round behind him.

She danced toward me. Her hair still looked reddish-gold beneath her huge flower hat, but now it was scraped straight up from her ears and the only part visible to me was a frizzed fringe.

“Pudding-Face?” I said doubtfully, but I knew it was her. She had those same eyes, saucily blue, and when she opened her mouth and said pertly, “Hullo—how d’ye do?” I realized she still had the same quaint way of speaking the English language. People who live in Boston are popularly supposed to sound like English people, but I never met anyone while I was in Boston who supported this piece of folklore.

“My,” gasped Kerry in awe, “you grew so big!”

“So did you,” I said, and then realizing that this might sound rude, I added hastily, “In the right places, I mean.” That sounded worse, and it occurred to me with horror that I was going to blush.

Kerry saved me by giggling. She had the naughtiest giggle I had ever heard, and suddenly my blush was forgotten and I was laughing with her.

“Oh my!” sighed Kerry. “Ain’t it grand to be grown up at last?”

“You can bet your bottom dollar on that!” I said with my best American accent and reached out with joy to shake her by the hand.

Phineas Gallagher stayed a fortnight at Cashelmara before traveling to County Wicklow to see his old home. He left Kerry behind with the promise that he would take her there later, but the truth was, as Drummond told me, that Mr. Gallagher was afraid of what he might find. Having talked for years to his daughters about the Elysian paradise where he had been born, he was nervous of disappointing them, and although he had been born a peasant he had traveled so far along the road to prosperity that he feared his relations would seem alien to him. However, when he returned to Cashelmara he was in good spirits. His kinsmen had given him a royal welcome, there had been no embarrassment and his village had so far recovered from being razed by the British that not a sign remained of the devastation of the Hungry Forties.

“If Pa mentions the famine one more time I shall scream,” said Kerry. “Have you noticed that old people are always harking back to the past? As if we cared!”

“In thirty years’ time you’ll be doing the same thing,” I predicted. “You’ll be saying, ‘I lived in the days when Charles Stewart Parnell was the uncrowned king of Ireland.’”

“Pa says Parnell’s finished,” said Kerry.

“Why? That letter in the
Times
was proved false and Parnell was vindicated!” This was the letter that had purported to link Parnell to the Phoenix Park Assassinations of 1882, and it had caused a fearful uproar before the forger had confessed.

“I don’t know anything about any letter,” said Kerry serenely, “but if Pa says he’s finished, he’s finished.”

“Why do you think Parnell’s finished, sir?” I said curiously to Mr. Gallagher over the port that evening. I had never been much interested in politics before, but Mr. Gallagher and Drummond talked of little else after the ladies had retired and some of their obsession had rubbed off on me. Besides, Charles Stewart Parnell interested me, for he too was a Protestant landlord who thought of himself as an Irishman. “He’s still chairman of the Irish Party, and not all the Irish Party are dissatisfied extremists.”

“It’s the woman who’ll finish him,” said Phineas Gallagher.

“Why shouldn’t the man have a mistress?” argued Drummond, who was always loyal to Parnell. “I’d rather support a leader with a mistress than a man who lived like a monk!”

“Well, sure we all know the ways of the world, Max, and I’m agreeing with every word you say, but a man in his position ain’t got no business committing adultery and you know that as well as I do. He’s got away with it all these years because he’s been discreet and the husband’s played ball, but if it comes out now the Saxons’ll be laughing till the Day of Judgment. ‘Faith, look at the poor silly Irish!’ they’ll say. ‘The most moral people on earth are led by an adulterer!’ No, it ain’t good enough, Max. It won’t do at all.”

“I see,” I said. “Mr. Parnell could have been responsible for the Phoenix Park murders and all Ireland would have cheered him to the echo. But if Mr. Parnell comes between a man and his wife he’s damned to all eternity.”

Phineas Gallagher laughed and said what a smart boy I was. “But it’s not so simple as that, Ned,” he said. “If Parnell had been responsible for the Phoenix Park murders it would have been a political blunder, and only the fools would have cheered him to the echo. And as for the adultery, the great political sin is not in the adultery itself, for that’s been going on for years. No, the blunder is that he’s letting everyone find out about it. The man’s a fool. If O’Shea brings a divorce, Parnell will be politically dead within a year, and if he can’t see that he ain’t got no business being chairman of the Irish Party.”

“It’s bloody hard you are on him, Phineas!” exclaimed Drummond, and to my astonishment I saw he was flushing with resentment.

“Faith, Max, don’t take it so personal! We ain’t discussing you. We’re discussing Parnell.”

“It’s all wrong that a man should be ruined for loving a woman as if she were his wife,” said Drummond stubbornly, but Mr. Gallagher merely said, “It’s the way of the world, Max,” and changed the subject so neatly that Drummond had no chance to argue with him.

I didn’t like to ask Kerry how much she knew about my mother’s situation, but it was obvious Phineas Gallagher had said a word to her on the subject. When we had lived in Boston my mother had been known as Mrs. Drummond and all the Gallagher girls had believed her to be Drummond’s wife. Even when my mother had won her divorce later I had never mentioned it to Kerry in my letters for fear of causing trouble, and although I now realized she knew the truth I still found I couldn’t discuss it with her. It was easier to talk of other things, and I had a fine time showing her the valley and introducing her to my friends. Despite their doubts my friends thought she was very nice, but they were shy with her and I saw at once that I couldn’t expect Kerry to become part of the gang. That was awkward, for I no more wanted to drop my friends than I wanted to abandon her, but fortunately the problem was solved at the end of June after Mr. Gallagher returned to America.