At six o’clock, Ronan walked through the little wooden gate. Tresses of sweet pea tumbled by the climbing roses. All the windows of the house had been opened; the heat of a warm afternoon lingered; he could hear bees—and a piano, meaning Kate must be home. His own calm surprised him. He knocked. No answer—he knocked again, and was rewarded with footsteps.
Josie appeared. “Yes?” and then, “Oh, Mother of Jesus!” and, louder, “MA’AM!”
“Yes?” Alison’s cool voice echoed in the hall. She looked at Ronan, and he saw her guard go up in a way he knew well, the eyes slightly hooded, the head turned a little to one side. Then she smiled.
“Your father had a beard for a while.” And now she did the calling: “Kate!”
Josie made way for him, and Ronan stepped into the hallway. The piano music stopped; he heard Kate’s footsteps. His heart did not race, his vision did not blur.
“Oh! Oh my!”—that was Kate’s most excited term. “But are you taller, and look how—how big you are.”
She hung back; nobody touched him—no hugs, no kisses; he felt massive relief. At the foot of the stairs he took off the rucksack and said, “I need a bath.”
Now the sisters let go a little of their control and put their hands to their mouths. For the first time he observed how alike they looked above the nose—twins almost. Each, at exactly the same moment, looked directly at the other, then at him, reached forward, and touched his arm.
Alison said, “Thank God you’re all right.”
Kate said, “When did you eat?”
Alison said, “We’re glad you’re here.”
An hour later, sitting down at dinner, he looked at the two women facing him, and for one brief moment he was able to see them as a stranger might. He knew their ages—Alison was forty-seven, Kate thirty-nine; dark-haired, comfortably off, attractive women of some polish, who took care with their looks and their clothes. During that single objective flash he almost could not view them as his mother and his aunt, no matter which was which.
Then their old roles took over, and he saw that they both looked at least expectant and probably nervous—he found he could not judge how agitated, how apprehensive, they were. But if anything good were to come out of this, he had to lead it—and to do so, he had to say something. He looked from one to the other, he looked down at his plate, and he looked at them again—straight into the eyes of each, not flinching.
“I didn’t find him,” he said.
They nodded.
“But—I learned a lot. And”—he never knew how he cranked out the next words evenly—“and I learned nothing but good things. Interesting things. Things that harm no one.”
Kate said, “Your father had a proverb; ‘Time is a fair and just teacher.’ D’you remember?” She looked at her sister; they both looked at Ronan, who frowned.
“If you say so.”
Now the sisters looked down at their plates. But that was the only jab he ever allowed himself to deliver. Knowing they felt stung, he took a deep breath and looked to the future.
“The two of you—you look exactly the same as you were.”
Fatigue, the high emotions of the last few days, and the return from a kind of wandering exile had, he suddenly realized, made him desperate for a “normal” life, and they heard the ice break.
“Well, I should hope so,” said Alison. “It’s only been six months.”
Kate said, “And Toby—he was a help.”
“Oh, yes, a big help,” said Alison tartly, at which all three laughed.
Dinner filled up with conversation about events since his departure. They stinted nothing and raced each other to give him juicy details. In return, he gave them snatches of his experiences; the thaw had begun. By tomorrow, he felt, he might be able to regale them with the Wexford Trilogy.
At ten o’clock, with generosity once again a member of the household, everyone went to bed. Ronan slept for fifteen hours.
Ronan spent the rest of that summer of 1961 doing little. Sometimes he lay in the sun on the lawn, thinking, reflecting, his father’s old panama hat tipped over his eyes. He had not lived in the house since the funeral, and he had dreaded the experience; but John’s absence materialized as a vague and lonely ache, not the sharp pain he had dreaded.
Over the weeks he correctly guessed at essential connections. Alison and Kate must have known of his meeting with Professor Ryle; Kate had mentioned telephone calls from Father Mansfield, Ryle’s good friend. Thus the women had evidently been primed that Ronan knew about his parentage and that he was on his way home. This had given them time to prepare their attitude, to ease him back into their lives. Somewhere along the line they had decided not to reproach him, not to reprove, merely to welcome and accept, to let him be, to give him time.
In general, too, they altered in their attitudes to him. Alison grew warmer, easier; she began to stir memories and tell anecdotes of John. Kate had not exactly grown cooler, but she did not patrol his life so intently; he saw that she watched over him, sometimes made suggestions, never issued directions. The house itself gave off an undeniable and completely new air of calm; Alison smiled more easily, and Kate’s music and songs had lost their madcap quality.
Ronan now had to figure out his own position. What was he to do? Should he raise “it” with them? What exactly had happened around his conception and birth? Why were his origins portrayed falsely to the world? Professor Ryle had said it didn’t matter which was which. Did it? It did. No, it didn’t. As a boy he had read a thriller where, with a soft rumble of powerful machinery, the walls of a locked room began to press toward the trapped hero. The inside of his mind felt like that. Did it matter? Yes, it did; no, it didn’t. Yes, it did matter; no, it didn’t matter. And the ordinary, bloody practicalities: what to call them—“Mother”? “Aunt”?
The solution to that problem gave him another little breakthrough; he already addressed her as Kate; now he’d call them both by their names: Kate and Alison; Alison and Kate; and the very gesture would tell them that he knew. The rumble of machinery stopped; the walls stopped closing in.
His next practical step pushed the walls back a little; he invested a new energy in his own appearance. He shaved off his beard, a little at a time, and then he slowly built up a new, very different wardrobe, reminiscent of his father’s style. He even wore some of the clothes; John’s waistcoats, the pocket handkerchiefs, an old linen jacket. With Alison’s permission he made John’s desk and bookshelves his own and reorganized the thousand or so volumes. And eventually he forced himself to face his great search again—but only by bringing all his notebooks up to date.
From boyhood inquiries to the jottings made on the road, he fleshed them out and turned them into a comprehensive record of all he had done. Not for a second did he feel he should abandon his obsession; every day he checked the newspapers for any trace or mention of the Storyteller. A festival somewhere? A broadcast, radio or television?
But the anxiety of that inner register had dropped; its tone inside him had grown less shrill. A wistfulness had replaced the urgency, and he began to accept that he had long feared the worst, that the Storyteller had died. He surmounted this fear and its potential to cripple him by telling himself that at least he had made a good record of it all, and that now he had other things to do. But still he remained somewhat becalmed; still he seemed unable to command his moods and reorganize his life.
At last, at the end of the long and reflective summer, he resolved the most demanding of his problems—how to address the two women, the whole issue of “it.” Other than changing the form of address from “Mother” to “Alison,” he would never register with them the matter of his parentage. It would have to evolve into his own private history, dwell inside him as a kind of mythical beginning. He had no idea how it would play out—all he knew for certain was that it needed time. And time was something he had in plenty. Besides, by not raising it head-on, he sensed, he was doing them a kindness—and that would atone for his absen
ce and silence.
As if this new resolve had somehow communicated itself to the entire household, the two women now found a way to tell him of his full inheritance—where it reposed (in banks and investments), how much it was worth (he need never work again), and when it came to fruition (three years on, when he reached twenty-one).
The decision and then the sense of security finally released him. In the first serious view of his future that he had managed to take since he came home, he wrote to Professor Ryle, who, in reply, introduced him to the sister faculty of history in the university at Cork, forty miles away. That October, Ronan enrolled in college all over again and embedded himself in his beloved subject more intensively than any tutor there had ever seen.
Three years later, three driven, intensive, committed, focused years later, in the summer of 1964, Ronan O’Mara graduated from University College, Cork, with the highest honors in history that the college had ever awarded in a bachelor degree. His examiners especially acclaimed his “capacity to convey the reality of history while losing nothing of the required formal interpretation.” Learning had become his mature emotional outlet, as it had been his youthful one. And that October he came into his inheritance from his father.
His career, which had never perhaps been in doubt, merely in abeyance, now began to take shape, and he built his life toward it. Alison had taken over the management of John’s practice, purely the business affairs; not herself a lawyer, she hired the best she could find, and matters throve. Kate had taken a teaching job two towns away and bought land there to build her own house. Father Mansfield had begun to appear in her life more and more; since nobody dared ask questions, no explanations were offered.
Ronan took his own cue from these developments. After his bachelor’s graduation and before he commenced his master’s degree studies, he bought a house near Fermoy on the river Blackwater, an equidistant hour away from Kate and Alison; he visited each on alternating Sundays. He learned to drive, owned a car, ran his life like a man. When he balked initially at doing all these things, Alison repeated what she had said at his father’s wake: “At your age men have led regiments into battle, been crowned kings, written everlasting poetry.”
The year of his master’s studies brought Ronan new peace and confidence. A gentle fame arising from his degree results had given him greater personal comfort among people. Professors and lecturers included him in their social lives; eligible girls stepped forward like dancers; but none caught his sleeve. Those who watched over him—his academic supervisor; Kate and Alison; the housekeeper from the town—they all urged him to “live a little more.”
By way of response Ronan threw himself into the establishing of a local historical society, canvassing a wide membership and finding contributors for the journal he intended to edit. He convened and chaired meetings, inviting distinguished colleagues as well as local people to give papers. This, with formal study, dominated his life, and he kept himself busier than anyone he knew. Shrewd observers might have wondered whether it was his means of filling some painful void.
On the day his professor called to tell him that he had handsomely won his master’s degree—“the surest bet in history, Ronan”—he drove the hour-long journey into Cork. Having congratulated him, the professor showed Ronan a letter from the outside examiner: “If you don’t want him, we’ll give him the chair of history here now, tomorrow—I’ll retire to make room for him, and the devil take the hindmost.” It was signed “T. Bartlett Ryle.”
Ronan’s own professor laughed and said, “But I’m retiring in two years—by which time I expect you’ll have completed your doctorate.”
Ronan said, “Is that a job offer?”
“It’s a promise.”
In fact, the doctorate studies had already begun: he called it “Blood on the Page: The Value of Myth in History,” and everything he had thus far accumulated proved of direct or tangential use. By now he truly knew how to study; by now he knew instinctively which paths of scholarship led to caves of treasure and which halted at walls of rock.
Nor did he abandon the old trails. Time and again in his four years of study, he had written to all the people he had met, asking for any trace of the Storyteller, any sightings, any information. All, without exception, replied—and all, equally without exception, had no new trace. Even Ray Cashman answered, letters (on distillery invoice forms) that always began, “I’m still alive,” but had nothing to report on “the old man.”
Slowly Ronan allowed himself to grasp that, one by one, they all seemed to be suggesting that the Storyteller had died. Mrs. Cantwell knew the old man’s age (as she would have done), and she pointed out, “He was born in eighteen-eighty-eight, and he would now be in his late seventies if he lived. And that hard life he led won’t have made him any younger.”
Such letters Ronan filed away with a sigh, followed by a speedy return to work. As a graduate student, he had begun to teach in the university, and his reputation packed his lectures to the brim. His life’s pattern was now fixed in its groove, and bit by bit, he became content, like a sea calming.
Then—it all changed again.
One day, one November day in 1965, Alison telephoned. Their conversations had grown far beyond cordial; he allowed her to express interest in his life; she had even come to a lecture or two. The old wariness between them had more or less dissolved; a true warmth had grown up, based on their common love of his father.
She said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve given your telephone number to a girl you were in school with.”
“Are you matchmaking again?”
“No.” Alison laughed.
“Who was it?”
“D’you remember Deirdre Mullen?”
Green ribbon, red hair, sent to fetch him back to school the last morning of the Storyteller—how could he ever forget?
“God, yes. What does she want?”
“She lives near you—she’ll tell you herself.”
That night, the phone rang, and a woman’s voice said, “Could I speak to Professor O’Mara?”
Ronan laughed. “I’m not a professor yet.”
“Well, when you are, I hope you’ll remember your old friends. D’you know who this is?”
Ronan decided to play. “No-oo.”
“I’ll give you a clue. Brendan the Navigator.”
“Deirdre Mullen.”
“Aah, your mother probably told you. I thought you’d have forgotten me. I’m Deirdre Carroll now—I married Harry Carroll, d’you remember him, you mightn’t have known him. I remember trying to put on your coat in the rain. You were a stubborn little divil.”
“I probably still am.”
“Listen, you’re living near Fermoy, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“I’m living very near you. Are you at home this coming Saturday?”
At half-past three she arrived—unchanged; the same frizzy hair, the same level calm.
“Imagine us living so close!”
“Is your husband working here?”
“He’s a job in the cheese factory over in Mitchelstown.”
They drank tea, and reminisced. Soon Deirdre said, “Now. Tell me. Have you ten minutes to spare?”
“Why?”
She put a finger to her lips. “You’ll see.”
In her car she told him, “I’m a nurse. I’m taking you to where I work.”
Less than two miles from Ronan’s house, on the outskirts of Fermoy, she drove into the car park of a large, gray Victorian house.
Inside, all was still and pleasant. Deirdre led the way along two quiet corridors and into the garden.
“We’ll go in that way, through the French windows—it’ll disturb fewer people.” They walked a path to an annex, and she began to whisper. “Now,” she said. “This’ll be a surprise for the both of you. We have to be quiet—we’re a little late, he starts every day at four. In here—go on tiptoe.”
Deirdre opened a tall French door, and Ronan stepped
into a large, airy room.
Ahead of him in a semicircle sat fifteen, perhaps twenty people, all considerably old. One or two had fallen asleep, mouths gaping. But most were bright-eyed and alert in institutional blue or pink cotton pajamas, nightdresses, and robes; they were in thrall to a seated man behind whose back Ronan now stood.
And yes, he was in full flow; no hat this time; no long black coat; institutional blue, too. But the stoop of the shoulder, the shape of the head—unmistakable again; and the voice—it seemed to have lost little, the same brown richness, the love of words. Ronan almost turned and ran, ripped open by delight and relief; he pressed himself against the wall to listen to the story.
HE WAS ABOUT TWENTY YEARS OLDER THAN me, and believe it or not, he was a bigger man. I wasn’t small; we were about the same height—but Yeats was bulkier, broader everywhere. War had just been declared, it was September nineteen-fourteen, and I think he was under the impression that I was walking into the town of Sligo in order to enlist.
“Don’t do it!” he said to me.
Those were the first words I heard him speak, and whatever his reputation, I have never considered that he meant it as a poetic utterance.
“Don’t do what?” said I.
You can well imagine how flummoxed you’d be if you were walking along a road overlooking the sea, the magic mountain of Ben Bulben in the distance, and a tall, floppy-haired man in a tweed suit and spectacles suddenly barks at you from where he’s perched on a gate, “Don’t do it.”
“Come over here and sit by me,” Mr. W. B. Yeats said—and I did.
It gave me an opportunity to look into his eyes, and I want to tell you, I saw the world in there. I want to say that in his eyes I saw Michael Robartes the dancer, and the boy who spread dreams at his true love’s feet, and the bird’s nest beneath the window, and the old men playing at cards with a twinkling of ancient hands, and the rough beast slouching through the desert to be born, and the falcon turning and turning in a widening gyre, and even his own newborn daughter—all the creatures of all the poems he had already written and was about to write.
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