The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘The jinteel Swiney Nitsters,’ she called after us in the street, or, ‘The Seven Wormy Wonders of the World, so they are, laudy daw, laudy daw.’

  Nor did she hesitate to scribble such on our show handbills if she passed one on a wall, and even on the door of our own barn, where she was still to be found very often with her eye pressed against a crack while we rehearsed.

  Under siege from the Eileen O’Reilly’s slanders, we had to stiffen into saints at school, on the stage and anywhere in public. At home, of course, it was deeply otherwise. Our cottage door became like Harristown Bridge when it divided the Liffey’s temper between serene and foaming. The door had the magical property of changing our natures, sluicing us from one state to another. Outside it, we were in compulsory harmony, singing and dancing in immaculate time. But once we came inside, all was the accustomed turbulence among us again, with the usual symptoms of Swiney passion breaking out in a clatter of slaps and embraces. The remaining pewter on the dresser was almost never at peace, constantly jangled by the slamming of the door. The seashell lamp swung from side to side, whispering urgently of shipwrecks.

  Through it all, I sat quietly writing at the deal table. The insults that my sisters shouted at one another were soon woven into their roles on the stage, as were, when Darcy permitted it, the touching affection between Oona and Enda and myself and the tender bonds that fixed Berenice to Ida and Pertilly.

  After the incident when Berenice’s lice massed like a halo around her head, we could no longer perform at Ladysmildew Hall, or anywhere within a cheap omnibus ride of the Eileen O’Reilly’s butcher shop.

  Of course Darcy had a different account of it: our hair was too big for Harristown now, or at least her ambitions for it were. She told Annora, ‘We cannot make the most of it here at the back of Godspeed.’ But the truth was that we were forced to set our sights wider and higher, not out of ambition but as a result of our shaming.

  While we smiled on increasingly large stages, and we hefted our hair in more elegant salons, my heart was impacted with fear and a persistent sense of our poor inferiority – our ‘feeble habit’, as Doctor Rowland would have said of us, despite the fact that our earnings were now lining our stomachs with better food than we’d ever eaten before and we now danced in shoes that fitted our own feet. We might now be dining on grand handsome potatoes and Indian meal without a weevil; Annora might even braise a shank of mutton once a week; when Enda embraced myself and Oona, we might breathe on bought lavender water; but we younger sisters were as far as ever from the sight or smell of money. Darcy alone held the purse, and the reins.

  As for the rest of us, all we really had was hair, the hair that every woman grows upon her head and at her nostrils, eyes and the entrance to her womb. (Even above her mouth there is a down; in Darcy’s case, pronounced.) At those portals to our bodies, hair offers but fragile resistance. It does little more than remind those with a mind to brush it aside that there is a boundary transgressed, as I knew from my encounter with the troll on Harristown Bridge. And there were some who found that transgressing the boundary only added to their pleasures.

  In the Swiney Godiva shows our hair became our tongues, telling stories for us, situating us ever more grandly at the heart of the myths and legends I wrote into our songs. Our brave talking hair was tasting new things for us – certainly, we were being led by the hair into a different kind of life, seeing places and people that we backwoods backward girls hardly had the wit to engage with.

  And if any sister dared to voice a misgiving or a fear, then Darcy would silence her with a smart blow or a threat, depending on which side of the table she was.

  ‘Do you want to be the nothings you were before you were the Swiney Godivas?’ she raged. ‘The hungry barefoot nothings?’

  Every time Darcy said that, I dreamed of flight. I wanted away from the sniggering disdain of our schoolfellows, from the staring and the craving in chapel and from the fear of happening upon my troll gentleman once more, the mysterious grave in the clover field, the insoluble enmity of the Eileen O’Reilly that I had brought on myself. Most of all I wanted away from the Swiney Godivas and the increasing shame I felt every time I exposed my hair and my blushing nape to a crowd of men whose breath was close enough to feel.

  But with each new show, it seemed that it would be harder to separate the Swineys from the Godivas. Some lamentable process, almost chemical, had cemented us together as an act. Darcy cared not a buttered crumpet for me personally, but she’d see me dead before she’d let me retire from the show.

  There was not even the luxury of a new chapter of my imagined adventure in which I escaped from Darcy and the Godivas. Reality fenced me in. Escape into what? I’d never been further than Naas on my own. I was not yet fifteen. Darcy loved to read aloud from newspapers about girls younger than us who sold their bodies on Dublin street corners and frequently got themselves butchered for it.

  I did not want to imagine the loneliness of a life without Enda’s petting and Oona’s tenderness. And if I found the wherewithal to run away? How would Darcy punish my tribeswomen if I defected? What kind of shows would she get up without me to try to retain a bit of modesty and dignity for us?

  Darcy would go where she smelled money, and that opened us up to risks she refused to see or think about.

  We had arrived at a delicate moment. It could have gone so badly for the Swiney Godivas, with immoral pits gaping everywhere for innocent Irish girls to drop into, girls who had physical characteristics that made them stand out and get noticed, and noticed in a way that had men dragging them into copses.

  So it was ‘very fortunate, better than you bliggards deserve’ – as Darcy put it – that this was the very moment when our highly telling hair (and its much-abused tenants) attracted the eye of an entrepreneur who would require the Swiney Godivas – late of the long grass, the thin geese and the slow crows – to transform into irreproachable ladies of Dublin fashion. And so, to hear Darcy tell it, we Swiney sisters owed it all to her that we were now to neatly sidestep those immoral pits and the haunting horror who was the Eileen O’Reilly, and place our fourteen feet firmly in the sturdy, respectable empire of Retail.

  Chapter 12

  Mr Rainfleury was a manufacturer of dolls. He had found his way to County Kildare when news of our show reached Dublin via six lines in the Freeman’s Journal. Every word of those six lines was a joy to Mr Rainfleury, for they spoke of nothing but our hair. He was on the train and at our show in Ballymore Eustace that night, in the centre of the front row. After his first taste of the air that wafted from our hair waterfall, there was his round belly and his moustache jutting out of the front row at our every show, the dust straining the glitter of his pale hazel eyes through his pince-nez, and his lips apart to inhale and swallow deep into himself all the different flavours of our Swiney hair as it came down.

  The small man with the ravening great mouth on him made me hate my hair as I had not hated it since I met the man on Harristown Bridge.

  Darcy had our admirer under observation from the wings. ‘There it is again, the old moustache. Comes like the bad weather, uninvited.’

  The moustache sent his catalogue – Little Princess Dolls – backstage. We crowded around the handsome volume, marvel­­­l­­­ing at the illustrations of dolls who looked so much like ourselves, though somewhat finer in the complexion and a tint larger and rounder about the eyes. All his dolls boasted the most delicate feather eyebrows and luxuriant hair that tumbled down to their bisque or wax feet.

  After reading his descriptions in that catalogue, I knew the moustache for my certain enemy, as one more of those men who abandoned a healthy interest in the entire person of a girl in order to fix their appetite on just the one hairiest part of her. If you wanted to see a full-grown man to whom female hair was ambrosia, you had only to watch the way the doll man’s mouth worked whenever we sisters let down our hair at the end of our act. I always stared at it accusingly when I cast my look over my shoulder
into the silent audience. An oyster, moistly engorged with blood, wriggled under his moustache. Not yet knowing his real name and having no desire to do so, I had privately christened him ‘Mr Chops’.

  He was a florid barrel of a gentleman with around forty wistful years visibly sagging around his middle. He himself was but sparsely endowed with head hair, perhaps naturally or maybe due to it rotting at the roots by the application of too much bear grease. For a man who loved hair, he must have had a desperate time of it: he’d evidently been eating to compensate. His capillary deficiency was especially unfortunate because the lack showed up his big ears and the quaint angle at which they stuck out from his head. Those perkers were pink and triangular like a pig’s. They were soft enough to flop slightly as he walked. As did the drooping moustache he’d managed somehow to deliver himself – I could imagine the straining and praying that had gone into that.

  It was after the fifth night of watching us that the gentleman had sent his card backstage with a note: I trust that my catalogue was of pleasant interest?

  I fingered it. Augustus Rainfleury and a Dublin address were embossed in dull gold copperplate. My own ‘Mr Chops’ still seemed more appropriate to the man than the picturesque romance of ‘Rainfleury’.

  I suggested, ‘Perhaps we should invite the gentleman for tea and a scone with butter?’ This was not inspired by a spirit of hospitality – I nursed a repulsive interest in seeing Mr Chops’ rosy oyster closing around some actual food instead of dream-nibbling on our hair.

  But Darcy tore the card in half and sent it right back. ‘He’s just another of your men for the hair. He cannot do us any possible good.’

  ‘I’d like one of those dolls.’ Ida would not be parted from the catalogue and would not be done with whining about wanting a long-haired wax princess for herself.

  ‘Did you see the prices?’ shrieked Darcy. I stared fixedly at her latest new hat.

  The next night Mr Chops was there once more. Unchastened, he sent his card round again, this time with an envelope and a letter. Darcy ripped it open and read aloud to us:

  ‘Dear Young Ladies, do not be alarmed at my enthusiasm for your follicular attractions. It is above all of a professional nature. Allow me to present a business proposal that could prove the making of you. Respectfully yours, Augustus Cecil Rainfleury.’

  A business proposal was a horse of a different colour for Darcy. Within minutes, Mr Chops was laying his pendulous haunches upon a handkerchief he’d spread on the backstage ottoman, and Darcy was doing everything but sitting on his knee. Ida was squirming with pleasure, whispering that there was to be sure a doll in it for herself. The rest of us sat at respectful intervals on stools and stage chairs, staring. The air was redolent of Breidenbach’s Violet Mouthwash, for Darcy had insisted that we quickly swig and spit before the arrival of the business proposal.

  Close up, I could see that there was more to the man than his mouth. Despite the nerves that quite naturally beset him, being seated so very close to Darcy, his hazel eyes were alert and shrewd as they scanned our faces and hair, still flowing loose from the end-of-show cascade. Darcy stared pointedly at the attaché case by Mr Rainfleury’s feet.

  ‘May I?’ trembled Mr Rainfleury, his fingers fluttering above her hair.

  ‘Touch my hair, is it?’ asked Darcy. ‘Well, just a very little, and you must stop directly I say so. Stop!’

  ‘But I didn’t touch it yet at all.’

  ‘You can touch Pertilly’s or Manticory’s if you like.’

  Darcy darted across and wrenched us forward, one by each shoulder. ‘Well, have your feel, though don’t be doing anything that would interest the Royal Irish Constabulary, mind. And then let’s be hearing your plan.’

  Mr Rainfleury hesitated deliciously over his choice. Pertilly’s swelling nose and damp overbite must have swayed him.

  ‘The red-haired girl,’ he said thickly. ‘The young tigress. Miss Manticory.’

  ‘Not so much a tigress,’ purred Darcy. ‘More of a forest fawn, really. Or a reddish-brown rabbit. Go to him, Manticory. See how biddable she is?’

  This was not what I’d intended at all by inviting Mr Chops backstage. Bile churned in my throat and the cheap prints blurred on the wall. But Darcy gripped my elbow and put one of her large feet down on mine, pinioning me to the floor directly in front of the man.

  Mr Chops stood and raised his pink hand at me. I looked up at his mouth, working away. I sniffed his feminine cologne. With light fingers, he turned me round by the shoulders, so that my back was to him. Darcy repinioned my foot and fixed me with her black eyes. He started at the crown of my head, running his finger along the parting. It was too lightly done, like a sick spider dancing down my skin. With all the same uncertainty, he traced a curl past my cheekbone, his moist thumb grazing my lip, before he proceeded flitteringly down my shoulders, back, lifting his hand just at the last minute before it slid into the indecent tracts below my hip. The dressing-room mirror showed me that he was trembling all over himself, his face like a pulsing lump of living coral. Then he bent to stroke my hair down past my knees. Pale and beaded on his forehead, he kneeled to caress the ends. Only then did he finally relinquish his loathsomely delicate hold.

  The man on Harristown Bridge was less horrible than this, I thought. There had been sharpness and quickness to that danger, not this sanctioned, havering, prolonged unwholesomeness.

  A long shudder ran through my body. The pink hand was gone but I still wanted to shake the haze of Mr Rainfleury off my hair and skin. On a warning glance from Darcy, I stayed motionless, rejoicing in the clean fresh air around my hair where his hand had been and was no longer, while the man recovered himself down there on the floor. Some moments passed before he was capable of rising to his feet.

  ‘A curl sometimes does that to a man,’ he murmured. ‘You can taste, touch, smell and even hear a curl. It is the essence of Romance. Such a curl is, after all, what makes a woman different from a man. The softness of your hair has surpassed my most roseate expectations, Miss Manticory, being that red hairs are the stoutest individuals. There is nothing so pleasant for a man to run a finger down as a red curl – it always gives a teasing bit of resistance, so delightful to overcome.’

  He smiled at Oona. ‘Your blondes have the finest kind of hairs, each with a fairy diameter compared to those on redheads like Manticory here. And those fairy hairs grow in the densest number, do they not, my dear?’

  She nodded silently.

  ‘But red hair! Red hair is the rarest kind. It’s fashionable to say that redheads are hot for conflict, and that among highwaymen and murderers you’ll find a disproportionate number of that persuasion. More red-haired witches were burned at the stake than any other variety. Judas Iscariot, they say, couldn’t help his crimes: he was a redhead. Cleopatra and Nellie Gwyn were red in tooth, lip, claw and hair.’

  Of course, he knew his hairs and his hair histories. In that moment, the humour was on me – again to cut every one of my curls off. I would never think of him as ‘Mr Chops’ again. It was too good for him. Furiously, I experimented with other titles in my mind: ‘Mr Disgustator’, ‘Mr Flittergoblin’ and ‘Mr Fingerlimp’.

  ‘Business proposal, is it, your honour?’ drawled Darcy, her eyes tricksily downcast. ‘There is nothing so pleasant as a pot of money, as we say in Harristown.’

  ‘There is nothing so pleasant.’ He tore his eyes from my hair, and reached inside his case for a roll of closely written paper.

  Then he stood up, announcing, ‘Miss Darcy, aged twenty, sixty-two inches of hair; Miss Berenice and Miss Enda, aged eighteen, sixty-eight inches of hair apiece; Miss Manticory, aged almost fifteen, sixty-nine inches of hair; Miss Pertilly, aged thirteen, sixty-four inches; Miss Oona, twelve, sixty inches; Miss Idolatry, eleven, sixty-three inches.’

  He nodded to each of us in the correct order – of course, in attending all our performances he had long since matched face to name, and inches to ages.

  ‘No dou
bt there are desires and yearnings in you ladies for bettering your lovely selves,’ he began.

  ‘We’re not free of desires and yearnings,’ conceded Darcy acidly.

  ‘No more you need be, my dear young ladies, because God’s gifts to you can be turned into a fortune, if skilfully rendered through the mill of industry.’

  ‘Mill? I don’t want—’ whimpered Ida.

  ‘It’s nothing to me that you don’t want—’ Darcy began.

  ‘I speak metaphorically, my dears,’ he intervened. ‘The Swiney Godivas shall never toil in a menial manner, not when they have in superabundance exactly what the world craves. The world is starving for hair!’ he cried. ‘Starving!’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes and—’ Darcy tapped her foot impatiently.

  ‘Which part of his adored wife may a man gaze at equally in public and in private?’ demanded Mr Rainfleury. ‘Only her hair.’

  There are whole religions and whole continents, I thought, where the men would not agree with you, Mr Pig-Eared Ignorant.

  But my sisters were staring with their mouths open as Mr Rainfleury continued. ‘So how highly charged with looking is this softest part of her that a husband shares with others? How that hair soaks up the looks of men . . . Other men see it bound up, coiled on the head – but all may own the fantasy of it let loose, rippling over the shoulders in private. But what need I teach the Swiney Godivas about that? Your gifts have already been showered on thousands of men. But you need to understand that a certain kind of man needs to see only one curl . . . ahem . . . This is why women must cover their hair in chapel. There is so much more to explain to you blessedly, magnificently endowed girls—’