by Leon Uris
Roger had crossed the line from which there could be no return, now or ever . . .
“What are you going to do with them!" she cried.
"It's already done."
"Roger .. what. . ."
"The Brigadier and Mr. Herd, whom you found so disgusting, have faced Jeremy with the fact that two of his friends have sworn to have had sex with Molly O'Rafferty."
Caroline's body trembled uncontrollably and she looked around the room half mad, then plunged to the phone. "Freddie . . ." she gasped.
"Don't bother to call. Freddie quite agrees with me. He is also aware you will probably become sentimentally hysterical over Jeremy."
"But that girl. . . Molly. . ."
"Adequate compensation is being arranged."
"The child, Roger! Your own grandchild! You know what happens to foundlings. They can't survive! And Molly! That precious girl! She'll be condemned like a common whore, all but burned at the stake as a witch."
"If the young lady is sensible she'll accept our offer to leave the country where arrangements will be made to have the child put up for blind adoption. She will have enough money to remain quite comfortable for a long period."
"Who are you? God? Manipulating your son's life as if he were some sort of dumb animal. Roger, you're a bloody monster!"
"Am I, Caroline? Am I? Your darling boy Jeremy chose to believe that Miss O'Rafferty had been unfaithful to him. Is that how deeply his love runs? You see, Jeremy might have stood up like a man for once in his life and told us all to go to hell. At that point we would have had no choice but to accept the girl. So lump Jeremy in with the rest of the pack you suddenly find so indecent."
Caroline broke, weeping long and hard and without his comfort, only his statue glaring down on her. "What about us?" she said at last.
"When I knew what I had to do I realized the risk to you and me. All I knew was that in the end I could not be responsible for destroying my family. After we're gone, what does it really matter how we ended our time together?"
His completely detached cold incisiveness chilled her.
"There's something I don't know," she said. "I cannot have lived with a man for twenty-five years and not have sensed the power of hatred I feel from you now. You hate me and you hate Jeremy. I want to know why!"
"What difference does it make now?" he said softly.
"I want to know why. What have we done? Why . . . when . . . I have to know, Roger."
He walked to the bedroom door as if in a trance. His voice was far away, as though speaking in a tunnel. . .. "It happened in there . . . on that bed . . . you lay there . . . glistening with sweat and writhing with birth pains . . . and then there was a burst of blood between your legs and you screamed the instant Jeremy was born . . . You screamed . . . for your father . . ."
CHAPTER FOUR
The turf fire glowed aromatically delicious, whiskey was in my glass and Conor Larkin stood before me. On the surface of it he had entered middle life with all the strength and beauty that had marked his boyhood and manhood. No woman would turn away and few men would care to challenge him. There was a softness, a mellowness that only comes to a man who has endured enormous suffering. So much of his ways and speech now reminded me of his daddy, Tomas.
But what of the scar? Did it still leak blood in his brooding hours? Had scar tissue formed so thickly as to lock in hurtful memory? What defenses had risen to detach himself from our sorrowful land? Had Conor numbed into a new person, not apparent on the outside, whose spirit, poetry, rage and awesome will power had fled?
Was he still Conor after his year in America?
"It was a long way to go for a few bags of gold," Conor said, "but it was worth the journey. A hell of a land, Seamus. Can you imagine a single country with four different zones of time and forty-six states, each one larger and more populous than our four paltry provinces? It bent my mind riding over that land remembering that Irish navvies laid down every mile of the railroad track. Aye, but there it is, the worst shantytown was better than what they left here. Then, of course, the American dream is held up before them like a vision of the holy grail. "Just reach out and grab it!" That's what they're told from birth. "It's yours! Take it!" Ah, and all those self-made tycoons all trying to fart higher than their Irish asses filling up obscure churches with vulgar stained glass windows to the memory of fathers and mothers they truly want to forget."
I had slurped my glass dry and himself promptly refilled it.
"My problem was that those few who did remember their beginnings want to buy their way into heaven by their donation to the Brotherhood. They don't like giving secretly. They want to shout about it, as though God were not aware."
"For my own selfish purposes, I'm glad to see you back, even though it means your having to live on the run," I said. "The underground paper comes out biweekly, thanks to your fund raising, and the British haven't found our presses."
"Is anyone listening to you, Seamus?"
"Maybe. We're getting attacks from sources that used to ignore us. We're annoying someone, sure enough."
Conor bit his lip thoughtfully and set his glass down. "Why was I ordered back?" he asked.
"Dan Sweeney has given the word to start forming units. He's going to have you arrange friendly farms around the country and take over charge of organization and training. You'll command everything outside the Dublin area."
Conor whistled softly.
"Lord Louie has agreed to let us use Dunleer here as our primary training base."
"Aye, that's good, but why me? You've a number of more qualified men on the Supreme Council."
"Alas," I said, "that august body is notably devoid of knowledgeable soldiers as well as practical politicians. Dreamers hold high rank. Dan gets sick of them in regular cycles of two weeks. Not once but a dozen times he's hit his fist on the table over a thorny problem and wished out loud that you were back in Ireland."
Conor shrugged and said something unfittingly modest.
"I detected a look of disappointment when I entered the cottage today," I said.
He broke into a defensive smile.
"Like maybe you expected Atty to show up with me?" I said.
"If I burned you for a fool, I'd have wise ashes," he said.
"Funny. Atty had the same expression on her face when she saw me off at the train station. I thought to myself as I pulled away from the platform, Isn't it strange for a woman to look like that in light of the fact she hasn't had a letter from you in six months?"
"All right, runt," he said, "I hear you."
"Well?"
He studied the fire for a time. "There was a wise old jailor by the name of Hugh Dalton who was with me when it happened to Shelley. After I reached bottom he told me that all men in that instant of ultimate agony make the decision to live or die. It's not a conscious decision, but one your spirit makes. Apparently I made the decision to go on living . . . in one form or another. The question since then has been . . . how much can you live? How much of me lies in Shelley's grave? I don't know the answer."
"It might need more testing," I said. "You did miss Atty?"
"Aye, sorely."
"That tells you something, doesn't it?"
"It does. Look, man, Atty and I shared an uncommon, horrible experience. She refused to let me die. She saw me in dark moments nae man nor woman has or will again. In one form or another, I'm Conor again and she is Atty again. Here at Dunleer at that time we were two different people."
"Or perhaps the same people just grown taller?" I suggested. "The total person, all of you revealed, not a studied person who presents a calculated version of himself to the world."
"God knows I thought of her a great deal in America," he said. "What Atty found so attractive in me in the beginning was my strength and my hold over her. I think that no man ever had that before. When she came to me at Dunleer after Shelley, she saw a weak groveling little cur. Weak, like any man and every man she had ever known. Having seen me in
such a state, she knows I am capable of weakness again. I believe that once Atty smells weakness in a man it's no less than a wolf smelling the blood of a wounded elk. In time it would become my strength against hers. Even so, what is in it for either of us? Half the man she once knew? The ghost of Shelley rankling around over the both of us?"
"As a practical matter, my friend," I said, "the two of you are going to be locked into each other's lives from here on out Don't you think the woman knows she is not going to replace Shelley?"
As he became uneasy I pressed him.
"All right," he said at last, "what do you think?"
"I think you're the one man I know capable of going from one great love to another great love. An entirely different kind of love, but a great one, nonetheless. There is so much that binds you and Atty together. Even knowing that every moment could be your last binds you. You'd be the worst kind of a fool not to find out."
"Perhaps I will," he whispered.
"Will you let me take a message back?"
"Nae . . . I'll know when the time is ready . . ." Conor took another long drink and I think the whiskey found its mark. I'd not often seen him drunk but the trip back, the transfer at sea, slipping into Dunleer, the confusions of America, all ganged up on him now.
"Aye," he mused, "so I'm back in Ireland . . . really back and alive . . . only you know, Seamus, nothing ever happens here in the future. It's always the past happening over and over again. We and the British are like two comets streaking through the universe and leaving tails of cosmic dust a thousand miles long trailing after . . . we orbit through the heavens, each in a different direction, and then we inevitably move at one another . . . we bear down for a head-on collision . . . sometimes we barely miss one another, coming so close that the dust in our wake brushes and tumbles through the skies and the heat from our bodies stifles the planets in our wake . . . steaming . . . hissing . . . swirling into invisible infinites. We disrupt the order of the heavens. And we pass and go our separate ways, screaming off into space and circling, circling, circling until we once again have made our individual sweeps of the universe and have come full circle into each other's path again . . . What will happen this time? Do we merely brush close or do we smash into one another at last?"
CHAPTER FIVE
Never having penetrated the innards of Dublin's Liberties, Lord Jeremy Hubble entered as though he intended to hold his breath the entire time. Stares followed him. He was obviously so out of place in the squalor, his discomfort heightened with every step. Turning off Bridgefoot Street into the narrow confines of Tyndall's Alley, he walked as if on eggs in unpaved muck bounded on either side by hovels where poverty had bottomed out. Jeremy pulled himself together and rapped heavily on the door, then lowered his eyes to avoid the sight within.
"What do you want?" a man answered.
"I'm looking for Molly O'Rafferty."
"She ain't "'ere."
"She is here," Jeremy insisted. "I intend to see her."
"If you are who I thinks you are, she don't want to be seem the likes of you."
"Look here, my good man . . ."
"I ain't yer good man."
Jeremy couraged himself, called up his reserves and made a move. "I'm coming in and I'd advise you not to stop me." He caught the door before it slammed in his face and shoved it back open.
"It's all right, Finn," a voice called from inside. "Tell him I'll be right out."
The man sneered and turned away. In a moment Molly O'Rafferty passed through the door into the alley. Jeremy had not seen her in over a week. The past days had driven him to the brink of hysteria. Molly looked beautiful, even in this sordid background. She made her own clothing. He had always been so proud to have her on his arm. Jeremy glanced to her belly. She didn't show yet. All he had seen of the coming baby was her breasts enlarging and that had excited him. Her voice was tiny and pure when she spoke and, when she sang, a springtime of innocence that matched big black eyes and long raven hair.
"I'll not ask how you found me," she said, "but I'm telling you to say what you're after saying and be on your way."
"Who are they?" he asked, nodding toward the house.
"Old friends."
"Look, can we go somewhere and talk? Down by the river?"
The figure of a man lurked protectively in the window. Molly thought about it for a few seconds. "I'll be back soon, Finn," she said.
Molly tightened a shawl about her shoulders, refusing Jeremy's arm. They walked apart down Bridgefoot Street to Usher's Quay along the River Liffey and found a bench. The greened copper dome of the Law Courts loomed over the way past the browned slow-moving water. Jeremy gathered himself again near the rail.
"I hardly know where to begin," he said nervously, flailing the air, scraping at his hair and wringing his hands. He sucked in gasps to fight off tears. "They came to my flat with Mal Palmer and Cliff Coleman. Each one in turn recited how they had made love to you, swore it, feigned sympathy, said there were others. Something in my mind just snapped. Plain violent, purple jealousy. The entire atmosphere of it was unreal. Once Mal and Cliff were dismissed, Brigadier Swan and the Herd chap went at me, pounding into my brain. You've got to understand, Molly, this kind of thing is their job. They're masters at it. First the business about disgracing my family. Then the other thing . . . about you and the others."
He gritted his teeth and looked to her but was unable to hold his eyes to her.
"When they had finished, my father came down from Londonderry. He said I'd been bringing them nothing but grief since I was a boy. He said, "God knows whose baby she has." At any rate, they said they'd do the proper thing for you. Even my brother Christopher. I looked to him for some sort of sympathy, but the bastard waved the flag of Ulster in my face and pounded slogans in my ears I'd been hearing since childhood."
Molly remained immobile, her hands quietly in her lap, a vast sorrow in her eyes fixed on the tormented young man.
"Your family," he said, "did they throw you out? I mean, have you been . . . you know what I mean."
"No, they didn't throw me out. But they're divided and broken. I've brought the ultimate shame to them. When a girl goes up the pole, the rules of the game are quite clear. I have to leave my home and chances are my name will not be spoken again."
"Oh, Molly, I've done a frightful thing. When we had the fight and you left . . . after the fall . . . I began to piece it together. First I was consumed with overpowering loneliness and then I realized fully what I had done by believing them. I went out and found Mal Palmer and I tore the truth from him."
"You might have asked me, Jeremy, I would have told you the truth," she said.
"I know, you tried, but I was crazy. Well, the bloody truth is Mal Palmer and Cliff Coleman were bribed, two hundred quid each."
"You've a very generous family, Jeremy. They spread goodness wherever they reach. They've gone and made all sorts of arrangements for me as well."
"What kind of arrangements!" Jeremy's voice quivered.
"It seems there are some very fine clinics in Switzerland to take care of bastard children of the aristocracy. I'm told everything is done under sanitary conditions. And, if you insist on having the child because of religious reasons, you are assured of a splendid adoption."
"Molly, for God's sake!"
"I was only saying how considerate your family is."
"Listen to me, darling. I'm sick inside. I'm sick at myself. I can't even beg forgiveness. But I want to earn it and I’ll prove to you every day and every night how much I adore you."
"What do you mean to do, Jeremy?"
He puffed up a large chest full of air and beat his fist in his hand to mark the depths of his determination. "Father has ordered me to quit Dublin and take a year or so of public duty. Colonial Office, consular service or some such sort of thing. From there it will be the family regiment. Fine with me. I mean to say, I've known all along that this would be in store."
"I know how important family dut
ies are," she said.
"See, I'm a fool, Molly, an utter fool. All during this ordeal my mind was allowed to stray from a single devastating piece of reality. I am the Viscount Coleraine. There is nothing on God's earth my father or anyone else can do about it. The succession to the earldom is mine and mine alone. He can bully me all he wants, he can threaten me, but he can't take away my birthright. I shall quite simply go to him and inform him that Jeremy Hubble is going to marry Molly O'Rafferty and he can lump it if he doesn't like it. Don't you see, he has no choice but to accept you then."
Molly smiled tinily and let out a little peep.
"I say, you don't seem terribly pleased," Jeremy said.
She patted the bench. "Sit here beside me, Jeremy, and hold my hand." Doing as he was bid, Molly ran her fingers through his hair and traced his cheeks and chin delicately with her fingers.
"I love a boy, a kind and gentle boy trying so hard to be a brave man . . . but not quite able to make it. I love you, Jeremy, for what you are and nothing else, lad, and I'll go any place in the world with you, except Ulster."
