F
or the last ten days of March the bomb had been ticking away in the bedroom, in the kitchen. Nora Haines McGinty knew it was going to explode. Bombs always exploded. They had torn apart the Belfast of her youth. Was it so surprising that they should follow her to America?
Part of the bomb had already gone off. The shock of learning that Hughie was working for the IRA again had lost the baby. It had been a simple miscarriage, the doctor said in his cheerful way. He was a Protestant and didn't think Nora should have gotten pregnant in the first place. Two children were enough. It had left her feeling unbearably sad, thinking about the little life that the war for Ireland had claimed.
Weeping, she labored over a letter to her father. Because of the bombing campaign, Nora had seldom gone to school. Her mother had kept her home because the streets were not safe for anyone, much less a girl.
Dear Da: I'm sorri to heer you are still sick. Can't you get your lawyer to stop them from putting you out of hospital that way, even when you have a fevir? It's terible the way they mistreat you and Eddie. I lie awake at night thinking of the good old days before the Trouble started. When you had your job at the shipyard and you'd get out your fidle and play for us when you come hom. Eddie was such a good dancer. I bet he could have gone on the stage. The bulet in his knee ended all that, alas. The way things are makes me glad Mother is gone from us. She'd have never been able to bear the thot of you and Eddie caged for life. It would have driven her mad. She'd have shot a policeman or something. I'm sure she's praying for you wherever she is. I pray every night too and so do the kids. Hughie doesn't, he says he doesn't believe in God anymore. He's a good man in spite of it. We're still hapy and the kids are thriving. Your loving darter Nora.
You're becoming a liar at all points, Nora thought, mournfully sealing the letter. Maybe you get like the people you live with, as the Americans say.
In the cellar, in the attic, in her mind, the bomb ticked. Something was wrong. Hughie was not telling her the truth about working for the IRA. She sensed it constantly, in the way he talked about it, in the way he looked at her across the supper table with a strange anger on his face. She had been horribly upset by the discovery. Even more upset to see that slimy bastard O'Gorman again.
But the job did not seem that dangerous, compared to duty in Belfast. There she had watched men go out to risk violent death night after night. She had watched her mother's heart falter under the strain. Compared to that, the danger of arrest, perhaps a jail sentence, was mild. She had calmed down and made Hughie promise it was the last time.
Then the bomb began to tick. It started in the bedroom.
Hughie tried to make love to her that night. She had encouraged him, she had worn the shocking pink nightgown he had given her for Christmas, the chorus-girl special, she called it. She liked the way he wanted her. He was not her heart's desire, but he was a good husband and she liked to make him happy.
Hughie couldn't do it. She had heard of it happening to men, but it was the first time it had happened to them. He said he was tired and flung on his pajamas and hurled himself into bed with his back to her. That was when the bomb began to tick.
After that it was the silence. Hughie was a talker. He was always spouting his opinion about President Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or the pope. Now he said almost nothing. Then he stopped bringing candy to the kids. He barked at them for playing the TV too loud and yelling in the house when he used to make more noise than both of them, romping around like a ten-year-old.
What was it? Nora could only think of one thingâthe job was a lot more dangerous than Hughie had told her. They were going to kill somebody, kill an informer. The IRA never forgot or forgave an informer. They hunted them down around the world. More than a few of them were in America, men who couldn't stand the bombing campaign, the maximum war they had launched in Belfast.
Nora felt sorry for them, mostly. She could barely stand it herself and all she had to do was live with it. She did not have to drive those ticking car bombs through the British roadblocks, break into Protestant houses in the middle of the night and shoot a man with his wife screaming beside him in bed.
It was terrible but what the British had done to Ireland for four hundred years was a lot more terrible. What the Protestants had done to the Catholics in Belfast was part of it. Nothing in this world was achieved without suffering. Even the priests admitted that much. So it had grown clearer and clearer to Nora over the past ten days that
Hughie was going to kill somebody and he was afraid, he was sick with the fear of it.
That was the bomb, trying to find a way to tell Hughie she knew he was afraid and understood it, that she forgave him just as she forgave him for running to America in the first place. There was nothing left for her in Belfast once her father and brother got those life sentences. Nothing but being screwed around by black-eyed bastards like Dick O'Gorman. She had told certain people about O'Gorman, and they had assured her that one of these days they would deal with him.
The telephone rang. “Nora. Come on next door for a cup of real coffee”
It was Suzanne Conti, her best friend on the block. Suzy was Italian and a talker beyond belief almost. Nora put on a sweater and slipped out the back door. The cappuccino machine was smoking away in Suzy's kitchen. She claimed only Italians knew how to make coffee, and Nora was inclined to agree with her whenever she tasted a cup of her cappuccino. Suzy's husband had given her the machine for Christmas last year. It cost $650. The presents that American husbands gave their wives left Nora breathless sometimes.
The wives were hardly ever impressed by them. They talked about their husbands in such condescending ways. Suzanne called Joe Conti “the Raging Bull,” after a character in a movie. He was actually a big, easygoing fellow who worked as a salesman for Merrill Lynch, a stockjobbing company.
This morning Suzanne was off on her latest obsession. She was going to start an interior-decorating business and she wanted Nora to join her as an equal partner. Nora would be the salesperson, calling on people; Suzanne would handle the decorating. Her sister had started a similar business in Connecticut and was getting rich. It was an exciting idea but Nora thought her brogue and her lack of knowledge of decorating were severe handicaps.
“Nuts to that,” Suzanne saidâher favorite exclamation.
“The brogue is cute. It makes you sound honest. As for the decorating, I can teach you enough to sell our approach in twenty minutes. The idea is not a complete overhaul, see? We're going to specialize in accessories, rugs, paintings, draperies. Things that will make a room go from a four to a nine or ten.”
Ten was perfection, Nora knew that much of Suzy's slang.
“You're serious about this?”
“Am I ever? I got the Raging Bull to put up ten thousand dollars to get us going. He's coining money over there on Wall Street.”
“It's a deal,” Nora said, holding out her hand. It would be exciting to have a job, like so many American wives these days. With both children in school, she had plenty of time on her hands. Maybe a job was better than a new baby. Maybe Hughie would take heart and not be so terrified of the killing he had to do if he knew she could support herself and the children should the worst happen.
But it wouldn't, it couldn't happen. She had paid her price of admission to a little happiness. Leaving Suzy's, Nora walked to the corner in the spring sunshine to mail the letter to her father. Tonight she would defuse the bomb. She would give Hughie the courage he needed, somehow.
He was barely in the door when he blurted the news: “Tomorrow's the day.”
“I'll be so glad to get it over with.”
“You're to call me in sick. The flu or some damn thing.”
“Can't you tell me what you're going to do?”
“No.”
“My brother Eddie used to tell me. Da stormed his head off when he found out. But Eddie kept on tellin' me. I wanted to know. It made me feel better.”
“This won't make you feel better.”
“It would. No matter how dirty it may be, I'll find a way to be proud of you, Shewy dear.”
“Oh, you will,” he said with a strange bitterness that she took to be fear of admitting his nerves.
“Yes. I didn't marry you for your courage, but it would be a reason to love you so much the more.”
“What did you marry me for?” he snarled. “A ticket to America?”
“I married you because I thought we could love each other as well as any man and wife in the world. It's turned out a good deal better than that. I love you tremendously, Shewy. You know that.”
“Do I? After Dick O'Gorman comes to visit?”
“What's that slick blatherskite got to do with us?”
“More than you'd think. A lot more. He told me about the two of you. He told me everything, laughing in my face, the day before we sailed.”
“The bastard. If I see him again I'll kill him. I'll stick a knife in his heart.”
“That won't be necessary. I'm going to do that, tomorrow.”
“You're going to kill O'Gorman? Is that the job?”
“I'm doing better than that. I'm turning him and that little ferret Kilroy in to the FBI. They'll get ten to twenty years and we're going to get forty thousand dollars and a new life, far far away from this coast, where no one's ever heard of the IRA. We're going to Arizona and I'm going to own my own business and never take another lousy order from the likes of Friel.”
The bomb had gone off. The explosion was tearing through Nora Haines McGinty's life, ripping it into a million bloody fragments. She felt her body, her soul, catapulted into a black oblivion infinitely worse than on the day she had heard about her father and brother receiving life sentences in England. That bomb had left her clutching love to her breasts like a frightened child, the one possession she had left, but a precious one. This bomb annihilated love and loyalty, its blast left her naked, bereft, destroyed.
It was so terrible to see the knotted tangle of hate and
profit on Hughie's face, to see the countless times that Ireland had been betrayed by these twin motives recapitulated before her eyes. “How could you do this without consulting me?” she cried.
“Consult you?” he shouted. “Is that all you've got to say? Not a word of shame, of pleading for forgiveness?”
“It happened before you came near me,” she cried. “When I was in need of comfort and the lying bastard knew just how to offer it. Why didn't you put it out of your mind? It had nothing to do with you.”
“Is that so? A man finds out his wife's a whore and it has nothing to do with him?”
“I don't deserve that name and I won't let you use it. And I won't let you do this thing tomorrow. Oh, Shewy, Shewy, can't you see what you're doing? You're killing us all. If I don't die from the grief of it, I'll die and so will you and the children in a year or two or ten. It doesn't matter where we go. They'll find us, and all the time while we wait, there'll be the terror shriveling our hearts. For God's sake don't do it, Hughie.”
“They'll never find us. The FBI has a program. They change your name and give you a whole new identity.”
“Dear God, you'll risk your wife and children and your own life on the strength of those kinds of promises? Look at the South Vietnamese. Where are they, trusting to American promises? They're using you, Hughie, using you as truly as if you were taking British gold.”
“I'll not only risk all that, I'll win the game and so will you and like it. That's the price you can pay if you want my forgiveness for O'Gorman.”
“I won't. I won't ask your forgiveness for that. I'll leave you. I'll take the children and leave you! Tonight!”
“You try that and I'll arrange for you to spend some time in jail along with O'Gorman. I'll take the children and you'll never find me or them.”
“Oh, you bastard. You bastard.”
She picked up a Waterford glass vase he had given her for Christmas and threw it at him. It smashed against the
wall near his head. He rushed at her swinging his fists. She crashed to the ground, her mouth bloody, and fled sobbing to the bedroom. Raging, he pounded on the door and demanded her surrender, but she refused to unlock it.
The children came home and he fed them. She heard him explaining that Mother was sick. At nine o'clock he put them to bed and knocked on the door. This time she opened it. “I'm going,” he said. “I've got to dress.”
He put on rough clothes, corduroy pants and a checked shirt. To her relief, he did not try to kiss and make up. “You'll see I'm right when you think it over,” he said. “We couldn't have gone on with the thing eating away at me. This will end it.”
It was hopeless. He could not see the way his greed and fear of failure in America had twisted his mind. All he knew was the satisfaction of his revenge. She lay on the bed, her head turned away, saying nothing until his car drove down the block. Then Nora began to think about life after the bomb.