“Afraid not.”
I felt a flood of embarrassment that he might know more about my own great-grandmother’s workplace than me, but he was the scholar after all. He, too, seemed chagrined that he had corrected me, and said there wasn’t really all that much known about the street, or the house, since it was long knocked down, though Richard Webb greatly interested him. He said we could try to walk down to Pearse Street, but the Queen’s visit had put a tourniquet on the city.
The letter was sealed in the archival sleeve. He wasn’t perturbed at the idea that he couldn’t open it. He said he had no real idea what had happened to Isabel Jennings, though she had quite possibly helped Frederick Douglass to buy his freedom through a woman in Newcastle, an Ellen Richardson, a Quaker long active in the cause.
—He went back to America unslaved.
Unslaved
. It was a curious and lovely word, and I liked Manyaki all the more for it. There was no more Brown Street left in Cork either, he said. It had been knocked down, as far as he knew, in the 1960s, to make way for a supermarket. He wasn’t sure when the Jennings family had left, though he had an inkling that it might have been during the Famine. There was a good deal of guilt for anyone to carry, he said, English or Anglo. I told him that there had been an amethyst brooch that went down through the decades also, but it had long been lost somewhere in Canada—Toronto or perhaps St. John’s.
He lifted his glasses and squinted up at the television screen. A helicopter hovered. This remarkable peace that has held so long.
Manyaki held the letter at its edges and turned it over, back and forth, then brought it close to the light until I asked him not to expose it too much as the handwriting was delicate, even inside the plastic.
What I liked most about Manyaki is that he did not ask me to open
the letter, nor to borrow it so his colleagues in university could bombard it with protons or neutrons or whatever else they might use to discern what lay inside. I think he understood that I wasn’t interested in getting to the endpoint, if there was any, and that the prospect of truth was not especially attractive: for such a young man, an academic, he was still curiously interested in the elusive.
There was a collector in Chicago, he said, who had paid thousands for Douglass memorabilia. The collector had already bought a Bible that had belonged to Douglass, and had made an outrageous bid on a pair of barbells that ended up, instead, in a Washington, D.C., museum.
Manyaki ran a finger along his temple: “Any clue what the letter says?”
“I think it’s just a thank-you note.…”
“Oh.”
“As far as I know.”
“Well, that’s our secret then.”
“Nobody’s ever opened it. Jack Craddogh calls it a conceit.”
“He would,” said Manyaki, and I liked him all the more for his remarkable candor. He seemed to drift away for a moment, stirring sugar into his coffee. “My father used to write me letters on that thin airmail paper, the crinkly stuff.” He said nothing more, but pried open the top of the plastic and inhaled the smell and then looked up sheepishly at me. What distances had he come? What stories did he himself carry?
Manyaki took out his phone and began snapping pictures of the letter. He was careful with it but there were a couple of tiny little flakes that had separated from the plastic: no more than bits of dust really. The natural entropy of things. I said something inane about us all falling apart in various ways, and he shut the plastic but a tiny pinhead of the paper had fallen on the table.
“You really think you can get a price for it?” I asked.
“How much do you need?”
I half-laughed. He did, too, but gently.
He held his head at a slight angle, like a man whose face has just been touched by someone he did not yet really know. Why had the letter been kept in the first place? The things we put away most carefully in a drawer might very well be the things we will never, again, find. He reached across as if to touch the back of my hand but drew back and picked up his coffee mug instead.
“I can check it out,” he said, pushing back the archival sleeve across the table. “I’ll email these photos later on today.”
The crumbs from the envelope still lay on the table. He glanced down at them. I’m sure he did it without thinking, but Manyaki absently licked the top of his finger and pressed it down upon one. He was looking beyond my shoulder. A tiny piece of paper. The size of a needlehead. He looked at it a long time, but was clearly off somewhere else in a reverie. He dabbed the crumb onto his tongue, held it there a moment, then swallowed.
When he realized what he had done, he stammered an apology but I said it was all right, it would have been swept away with the dishes and teacups anyway.
I DROVE OUT
from Sandymount to Manyaki’s house later that night. He lived farther along the coast in Dún Laoghaire. Georgie had taken ill in the car. She was not able to move her hindquarters, and had lost control of her bowels. I tried to carry her. The sheer weight. I staggered up the steps and rang the doorbell.
His wife was a pale Irish beauty with a sophisticated accent. “Aoibheann,” she said. She took Georgie from my arms immediately and backed into the shadows.
It was a beautiful house with all manner of artwork, small sculptures on white pedestals, a line of abstracts, and what looked to me like a Sean Scully painting along the staircase.
She hurried me into the kitchen where Manyaki was sitting at an islanded countertop. Two young boys beside him, in football pajamas, doing their homework. Their sons. A perfect blend. They would have been called
mulatto
once.
“Hannah,” he said. “I thought you were going back up north.”
“Georgie’s sick.”
“Do you need a veterinarian?” said Aoibheann.
Manyaki spread out a sheet of newspaper near the rear kitchen door, put Georgie down upon it, searched on his mobile phone. It took several calls, but he found one in nearby Dalkey on house-call duty. On the phone his accent was more Oxford than African now, his words more clipped and angular. I wondered what sort of upbringing he’d had, his father a civil servant perhaps, his mother a teacher. Or maybe a small dusty suburb of Mombasa. Swimming pools. Cool white linen. Or a small balcony overlooking a hot street. An imam calling everyone out to prayer. The ample sleeves of his father’s robes. The arrests, the tortures, the disappearances. Or perhaps he had grown up wealthy, a housetop on a hill, the radio tuned to BBC, a youth in the swimming pools of Nairobi. A university education, a squalid flat in London maybe? How had he ended up here, at the edge of the Irish Sea? What was it that brought us such distances, rowing upwards into the past?
He snapped the phone shut and went back to working with his children on their homework. I felt rather foolish standing there alone—he had forgotten me for a moment. I was grateful that his wife took me by the elbow, sat me down at the granite island, and poured a glass of cranberry juice for me.
The kitchen didn’t aspire to a magazine page but it could have—fine
cabinetry, elaborate knives in butcher-block holders, a brand-new stove made to appear ancient, a red espresso machine, a small remote-control TV that actually appeared from a panel in the fridge. Aoibheann fussed over me—“Sit down, sit down,” she said—but then had the grace to allow me to cut some shallots and slice potatoes for gratin. She somehow managed to refill the glass of cranberry without my noticing. The news flickered on the fridge: the Queen with the Irish president, another bank collapse, a bus crash.
The doorbell finally rang. The veterinarian was a young woman who already seemed tired of all the dramas she faced. She clicked open a small black leather case and leaned over Georgie.
“Calm down,” she said to me without even looking me in the eye.
She examined Georgie carefully, caressed her belly, examined her legs, looked at a stool sample, shone a light at her teeth and throat, and told me the dog was old. As if that were a revelation. I was quite sure she was going to tell me that she would have to put Georgie down, but she said that the dog was simply exhausted and a little malnourished, possibly had an intestinal infection, that she could do with a round of antibiotics just in case. There was an element of tut-tut in her manner. Malnourished. I felt myself cringe. She scribbled out a prescription and waved it in the air with a bill. Eighty euros.
I fumbled in my purse but Aoibheann just shook her head, opened her handbag, took out her wallet.
“You’ll stay the night with us,” she said, glancing across at Manyaki.
NOTHING EVER FINISHES
. Aoibheann came from a wealthy Irish family, the Quinlans, who had made quite a fortune over the years in food processing and banking. Her father, Michael Quinlan, was a regular on the pages of Irish business magazines. Father and daughter
were largely estranged it seems, possibly due to the marriage with Manyaki.
She and Manyaki had been married in London in a civil ceremony and some element of mystery shrouded their past, perhaps a child or an immigration scandal, it was unclear to me, though it hardly mattered; they were a good couple, and whatever went on with her father seemed to have bridged them rather than torn them asunder. They moved generously around each other, nothing false or cloying. Their children were loud and obnoxious at the dinner table in the manner of children everywhere. Oisin and Conor. Five and seven years old, as dark as they were light.
Aoibheann ran a bath for me in the claw-footed tub. I put my face under the water. She had left some bath-oil beads in a small jar with a ribbon. I reached for it but the whole jar tumbled. One dissolved in my hand. From a distance I could hear the ship horns, boats moving through Dún Laoghaire. Everyone rushing to get somewhere. The desire for elsewhere. The same port that Frederick Douglass came through all those years ago. The water lapping around me. Traveling the widening splash. Tomas. They shot him for a bird gun. George Mitchell’s peace. The Queen had bowed her head at the Garden of Remembrance.
There was a loud banging on the door and Manyaki burst into the room. I spluttered up naked from the water. My body, obedient to the ongoing forces of gravity. He shuffled backwards, embarrassed beyond himself, out of the bathroom.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he called from the corridor, “I’ve just been knocking. I thought you were maybe sick, or something.”
The water was freezing. I must have been lying there for quite a while. I ran the hot water and climbed back in. Aoibheann came up moments later with a cup of tea for me. “I gave your husband quite an eyeful, I’m afraid.”
She threw her head back and laughed: no derision.
“He might need therapy,” I said.
“Oh, we know all about therapy in this house.”
There was something pure and familiar about her. A device, perhaps, to help her shuck her father’s notoriety. She fanned the hot water upwards with her hands to warm me, dropped a couple more soft bath beads in without ever looking at my body.
“I’ll leave you be,” she said.
“No, that’s all right. You can stay.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Quite frankly I’d like the company. I really don’t want to fall asleep again.”
She dragged up a chair and sat in the middle of the floor, a strange privacy between us. I noticed for the first time that her left eye was just slightly lazy and it gave her the look of a woman who had overcome some distant sadness.
There was a frosted window in the bathroom and she looked towards it as she spoke. An outdoor lamp brightened the dark. She had met Manyaki, she said, at university in London. She had been studying fashion design, he was in the English department. He had come to one of her shows with a girlfriend of his—one of many, she said, he was never short in the girlfriend department—and had stood in front of her thesis project, a line of high-fashion skirts and blouses supposedly inspired by tribal nomads.
“He snorted at it,” she said. “Right there in the gallery. Just straight out snorted. I was mortified.” Aoibheann reached for the hot-water tap again, fanned a little more water down by my feet. “I hated him.” She laughed a little, gathering the folds of her humiliation.
She saw him years later at a publishing party in Soho where he’d written an essay called “The Politics of the African Novel.” She tried
to ridicule the article while he was in earshot, but the problem was that the article was pure irony, head to toe, he had designed it that way.
“There I was, lambasting him, and guess what. He started laughing again. A real smartarse.”
She knuckled the moisture out of her lazy eye.
“So I told him what lake to jump in. I won’t tell you how he replied. I hated myself for it, but I was fascinated by him. So the next week I sent him a Bedouin robe, along with a barbed letter saying how he had embarrassed me, that he was an obnoxious arsehole, a git of the highest order, and I hoped he would rot in hell. He wrote a four-page letter back about my pretentious fashion instinct, and how it might be an idea to learn a culture before I slapped it on a million asses.”
I shifted a little in the bath, the water growing cold again.
“It’s hardly a love story, but we’re married eight years now, and he still wears that robe as a dressing gown. Just to get a rise out of me.”
We sat a moment in silence. It seemed to me that it was possibly the weight of her family she carried. I had heard that her father had once been arrested, or at least questioned, for some financial irregularities just after the boom years. It was hardly any of my business, and I avoided the temptation. I moved to get out of the bath.
“I’m glad you came to visit,” she said. “We keep to ourselves a lot these days.”
I put my elbow on the rim, and she guided her arm in underneath me, helped me out. I kept my back to her. There’s only so much embarrassment we can bear. She took a heated towel from the hot-water press, and put it around my shoulders. She gripped my shoulders from behind.
“We’ll get you a good night’s sleep, Hannah,” she said.
“Am I that bad?”
“I have half a sleeping pill if you want one.”