Tipperary (71 page)

One mystery was solved. The greater one faced me. If I was descended genetically from April Burke the First, what was her connection to my own mother? Or to me? I felt bucked up at my detective work—which is no more than the use of reason to dispel the irrelevant and inaccurate, and zoom in on the core.

Over and over, the words of Mr. Lisney kept at me: “the dead spit and image.” I went out and bought a good magnifying glass.

My mother, Margery Coleman, got very sharp results with her camera. On the day of the Tipperary Castle banquet, she took pictures mostly of the inanimate—the stonework, a general vista, the bridge, a long view of the dancing, the swans on the lake. But when I looked through the magnifying glass at the one and only crowd picture she took, the faces were like characters on those medieval tapestries. Their noses even looked as big as those on Bayeux's great embroideries.

No sign of Charles—but April was there; she wore a dress with wide vertical stripes. She stood at the outer edge of the photograph, her arms around a man. I knew it could not be Charles; in no way did it resemble his description of himself. That was when I wrote to Marian Harney, and that is when the long, final unfolding of this story began. She wrote back immediately and asked me to come and stay in her house for a weekend.

Within eighteen months of that weekend in Dublin, I sold my house. I changed my life. My existence improved in ways that I could never have imagined. I ascended to, and stayed upon, a plateau where my view of life was sunnier. Although I had always kept it to myself, I had still grieved every day from my losses. No more, now.

Marian Harney lives in Monkstown, in the southern suburbs of Dublin, in a house that she inherited from her father. From the outside, it appears to be as small as a cottage. Inside, it has many large, pretty rooms, where the sun pours in. Built in 1865, it's a classically Victorian town villa, with two floors of levels below the front door, and a long garden, which she keeps superbly.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon. She'd told me where the key was, so I let myself in and waited in the garden. She came home at about six o'clock, poured drinks, and said, “Where do you want to begin?”

I told her “the story so far,” and she listened with great attention; we were sitting at a wooden table. When I had finished she rose, said something like “Back in a minute,” and she reappeared, lugging a suitcase. It was a particularly beautiful piece of luggage, solid leather, with reinforced corners; I guessed (accurately) that it had been made in the 1920s.

Memory uses strange devices. I remember the most significant moments of my life in two ways—either by what I was wearing or the weather at that time. When President Kennedy was shot, I was wearing a tweed overcoat and had been back at school to give two boys extra tuition—it was seven o'clock in the evening, Irish time. For this suitcase, I recall the weather—as balmy an early summer evening as I have ever known. In the distance, I heard a seagull's cry over the nearby sea.

We lifted the suitcase onto the table. As she thumbed back the round brass clasps, Marian said, “I have to warn you: some of this might distress you. But I think you should read everything that's in here.”

She threw back the lid, this librarian, this woman whose life was spent managing repositories of knowledge. Inside stood rows and rows of packages, neatly held in rubber bands and with a card bearing the month and year in the front of each package. There were some other packages too: “Receipts” and “Doctor” and “Plantings.”

Marian took out the first package, and before she handed it to me, she said, “When Charles O'Brien and April Burke came back to Tipperary as man and wife, they entered upon an agreement. They decided to write to each other, if at all possible, every alternating day of their lives—that is, he'd write one day, and she'd reply the next. It seems to have been her idea.

“And when they started it, they liked it so much that they didn't confine themselves to one letter a day. They often wrote five, six, seven letters, most of them short notes, with the occasional longer expression of affection or the clearing up of a memory or something. Here's the first package.”

I opened at random.

Christmas Eve 1922

A long time ago, I said to you that I wanted to call you “O'Brien.” But I couldn't keep up the intimacy—you were too forbidding, too distant from me. If we do what we talked about on the boat, viz., write to each other every day, then you shall be “O'Brien” and you may use any name you like to address me.

Oh, O'Brien—I have so much I want to tell you.

By the by, the lower bolt on the first loose box on the right as you enter the stable-yard has come away from the wood of the door.

I read the letter again, and I realized that Marian was watching my face.

“Have you read these?” I said.

“Every one of them.”

I observed that April “doesn't quite stay on the point.”

“All her letters are like that. Here's his reply.”

Again, I read, and I found myself thrilling to the familiarity of the handwriting.

Christmas Day 1922

How well you have observed me in that I like being given “tasks.” I will attend to the stable-door bolt this morning. And I have given myself other tasks. To watch over you. To try and be aware of what you need before you need it. To let you weep out all that shame and unsafety. To make sure your roof is ever safe and your walls are ever sound, so to speak.

And today, yet again, I shall have the pleasure of your company. All day. And then all night.

The same loops in the letters; the same brown ink; the same excellent writing paper; I turned the note over in my hand and held it to the light.

“This,” I said, “is the man I know. She, however, is a revelation.”

“They both are,” said Marian.

I said, “What do you think of them?”

Amazingly, her eyes filled with instant tears. She shook her head and laughed. “

I'm not telling you. Ask me again when you've read everything in the suitcase.”

I said, “What else is in there?”

“You'll find out soon enough.”

“You're teasing me.”

“No, I didn't mean to. What I'm saying is—well, there's Charles's mother's journal. AmeliaO' Brien—that's very revealing. She doesn't write about him very often, but when she does it's always worthwhile. And her entries about the running of her house—I found those more interesting than perhaps you will. You'll love her—she was a terrific woman.”

“Anything else?”

She went vague. “Yes. But the best way to take in the whole experience is by reading the letters first.”

For that weekend, I did nothing but sleep, eat, and read from the suitcase. So much material—and I learned that even in the preservation of it, the differences in the two characters had been obvious. Charles had preserved all April's letters in sequence, and in numbered boxes, filed with delicacy and respect. She had kept all his letters too, but tossed into drawstringed silken bags, of the kind in which some ladies kept their nightwear. Marian had put them together.

“Typical librarian,” I said, with admiration. “Unable to bear disorder.”

“It's not so much not being able to bear disorder.” She thought for a moment. “It's—it's the fact of the disorder preventing an interesting and instructive human experience from being recorded.”

It seems possible that, one day soon, I will transcribe the letters, add a commentary, footnote them where necessary, and have them published. They may well amount to more than one volume. For now, I include here a selection, based on nothing more demanding than relevance and my own taste.

Tuesday, the 16th of January 1923

Please do not go out in the motor-car without your warmest coat. Gloves are not enough. I heard you coughing this morning; I have left a tincture of mint and eucalyptus in the kitchen. Helen knows where it is, and she will heat it for you to inhale.

Wednesday, the 17th of January 1923

Harney once told me that you, O'Brien, had “a fussy side.”

I'm learning what he meant. And I coughed because it was morning;

I am not tubercular, or ague-ridden, or creaking.

I read again this morning from the Browning you gave me,

I read “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” Did you know that Papa and I went to Venice once and we saw Galuppi's house? How can we live long enough to tell you all the things I want to tell you?