by Ross, Orna
Take that concern of hers. That was the burden of my childhood. She never said it out straight, I grant her that, but I always knew I was the one who was holding her back, who had brought her to small town suburban life, who was keeping her in deadbeat jobs.
If it wasn't for me, she'd be traveling through Europe, reading and writing poetry, dancing in the moonlight on a misty Irish beach.
As a child, that felt right to me. She was my lovely mother, so much younger than the other moms, and so much more beautiful and free-spirited, that an ancient kingdom of Celtic mists and shadows was where she deserved to be.
I do remember that.
And I remember her singing to me. Twinkle twinkle little Star, how I love you, all that you are. I thought that song was mine and hers alone and was amazed when I went to school and heard it in other mouths, with different words.
In those days, I would sit on her bed, watching her, adoring every gesture -- the way she shimmied into or out of a dress, or twisted her hair into a coil, or kicked off her high heels. I would put the shoes on after her, feel her warmth through my soles, admire my feet and measure how I was growing into them. When she sat me down to look into her mirror with her, she would show me how alike we were -- our long hair down, our eyes the same shade of blue, our freckles in the same spatter across both noses.
"Never forget we are of Ireland," she came home one day and said. "Land of saints and scholars and female fighters. Maeve, the warrior queen. Grainnehuile, the pirate princess." I was surprised the first time, because before, Ireland was that forsaken country, that priest-ridden theocracy, that patriarchal hell hole...
I knew she'd been reading something.
"Tiny Ireland held out against the Romans first," she said, as she brushed her hair and stared at me through the mirror. "Then against the English. It kept the Celtic culture alive. In the village where I grew up, they told stories and sang songs that were old when Homer was a boy."
She made me see what she saw. I imagined misted mountains and rained-out fields, heard the clash of spears, felt the strange, outlandish alphabet in my mouth. Maedbh. Grainnehuile. Doolough. My mother fought to remain true to all that. I felt her struggle and I was the weight pulling at her, drawing her down.
Enter my dad. He was hopeless, I won't deny it. Even a twelve-year-old, bowled over by surprise that the father she had given up wishing for had suddenly appeared, could see that he wasn't good enough for her. He wore denim jeans and jackets and a long grey pony-tail. He was puffy and pale from drinking and too much time indoors. He rolled his own cigarettes with a sweet-smelling tobacco that once, when I smelled it twenty years later in another country, brought him right back to me. His shirt buttons strained over his stomach, he didn't wash often enough, his manners were bad.
But I liked him. He had a lovely smile, that said, "Sorry for not getting it right." He was soft all the way through. He taught me to play poker. He introduced me to old movies, actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Katherine Hepburn. He told me I was going to be a "smasher", that the boys would soon be lining up. He was full of words like this, words I'd never heard, and the Irish lilt in his voice was much stronger than Mom's.
And hers was much stronger when she was with him.
The night after he came back, as we got the house ready together for dinner, I knew that -- for once -- her thoughts were the same as mine. We were going to be three now. She would have help and everything would be easier and more right and she wouldn't want to go anywhere else.
I gave thanks as she lit incense, nag champa, the only one she allowed, and let her hair dry loose, walking barefoot around the house, in a white dress, humming.
We ate dinner together, the two of us listening to his stories, trying to laugh in the right places and, after I'd pretended to fall asleep, I crept out of bed to open my door, and listen to the sing-song of their Irish voices, one deep, one light, in the dark.
It was a hot summer that year, the winds blowing down from the canyons, shrivelling the grass. The TV news showed fires burning to the south. The hills closer to us seemed to smoulder and the wind smelt burnt.
In the supermarket, a man fell over a trolley, looking at my mother. She often invited looks, only to stare back at the man with blue eyes fixed, until he would grow awkward and not know where to look. The man dropped his gaze and stepped backwards, and was felled by the low trolley behind.
I didn't like her doing it that day, with my father there. It was wrong now; there was no need.
"Men," she snorted, turning away with a sideward glance at him, a glance that almost knocked me over too. The two brackets either side of her lips included him in her scorn. He didn't know it, not yet, but I did. There and then, I tipped out the hope chest I was starting to built in my heart: a chest full of summer camp and a bicycle, new clothes and Thanksgiving dinner, and all the unnamed, taken-for-granted things that girls with fathers knew.
It hadn't even begun and it was already over. After twelve years as Mercy Mulcahy's daughter, I could spot a dead man walking.
Some time after that day in the supermarket, she brought me out onto the screen porch. It was dusk, the blue of the evening turning black, not wanting to leave, a lingering hope. She looked up at the stars that she said were all wrong to her here in California, and told me he had left us again, as I tried not to notice the judging look in her cornflower blue eyes that would wither any living thing.
My mother had a story she loved to tell about WB Yeats, her favourite poet. Apparently, when informed that he had mispronounced Benito Mussolini's name, he supposedly said: "I am told the name is not Missolonghi but Mussolini -- but, does...it...really matter?
Mom thought that was the coolest line. It makes me want to barf, as does almost everything about old Double-You-Be (the name I heard in my child ears when she spoke of him, before I'd seen WB written down). His monocle, and affected poses, and the floppy bow-tie he used to wear so people would know he was a poet. What she loved best about him was his disdain for fact. "Only a breath separates fiction from nonfiction," she said to me once. "That breath is the backwind to my story."
To which I could only reply what my girlfriend Ginnie and I used to shout at her when we were teenagers: Pretensho!
She didn't laugh. I guess I wasn't joking. Me, I like facts. To me, that kind of talk is cover-up and turning real lives into a story is suspect. Mingling the imagined with what happened, invented thoughts with memories, diaries with made up dialogue. As one of her other fave raves, Ezra Pound, used to say: very, very bughouse.
When I think of her fumbling around the chasm between the two, trying to touch what should remain untouchable, I get so mad. My mother was a writer and a thinker and just about the last person anyone would expect to commit murder. Not just murder, patricide. Yet - strange thing - when she said she hadn't done it, nobody believed her.
In her book, in her looking glass, there is nothing about her "friends", the string of men without whose favour we could not have lived in the house we lived in, driven the car she drove, eaten the food we ate. Her need was more than financial. Did she really think I was unaware of the tension that used to come fizzing out through her skin? I would fizz too, as I felt each wave of yearning swell in her, as the air in our house thinned and grew crackly, while she ached for whoever it was going to be this time.
Sometimes I knew them. The father of my friend, Jeff. The man in the deli. Once, Mr Cronenberg, one of the male teachers in my school. Mostly it was someone I never saw, someone she met at the restaurant or elsewhere but did she really think I had no eyes or ears to notice how all changed? How her gestures inflated, her clothes mutated, her laughter loosened, her pupils darkened. How a new smell emanated from her, like she was carrying someone else's scent?
Breathing, which I never noticed most of the time, would become hard to do, as I watched and waited, fearful each day when I was leaving for school, fearful each evening as she left for work. What if this guy did what the others had failed to d
o and swept her away on the love enchantment she craved?
In the end, it always collapsed, suddenly and completely. It was then, when she was flattened, that we had our best times, when she'd read to me and tell me stories. I loved those post-lover weeks when she was sated, when she was back to me and we breathed ordinary air again. Until the next time.
To Doolough Stores today, to stock up on provisions -- a trip I'd prefer to avoid. I left early, while Mass was on, so the village would be quiet. I searched for spring in the hedgerows as I went and found it in primroses and snowdrops. The village itself felt small and closed and sealed tight, much as it was when I left, which was much as it had been for decades before, but I did like the lanes that took me there.
McFadden's, Doolough Stores, is one of those shops that used to be common in the Irish countryside, stocking the most unlikely items alongside milk and bread and newspapers. Should you find yourself in need of a tea towel or fish bait or a primus stove, Wellington boots or string or a plumbing u-bend, a tyre repair kit or feather duster or drawer liners, you would find them in McFadden's, among thousands of pounds' worth of other stock, all snuggled together under a blanket of dust. My needs were more everyday: milk, orange juice, bread, tomatoes, potatoes, dried pasta, sugar. As I was gathering them together in my basket, the bell tinkled over the door.
"Good morning, Pauline," boomed Mrs McFadden. I turned and yes, it was my friend, her too-blonde hair lighting up the dull morning. Just the person I wanted to see.
"Hello folks," she said, her big, open smile including Mrs McFadden, Deirdre on the other till, the two other customers and me too. "Lovely day."
It was, in fact, another dreary grey morning but, to Pauline, every day was lovely.
At the till, as I took my change, she came across to me. "Hang about for a minute," she said. Mrs McFadden's eyes prodding us both. "I'll walk back that way with you."
"Lovely, I'll wait outside. Take your time."
"Great," she said, in a loud voice, refusing to be shamed out of associating with the accused. "Would you like to come back to the house for a cup of tea?"
"I'd love to," I said. "Thanks."
I didn't just mean for the tea but for showing our Doolough audience that at least one person believed in me.
Pauline and I had gone to the National School up the road together, where I was the sergeant's daughter and she was one of the Whelans, the seventh of eight girls and a brother, the boy that Mr and Mrs Whelan had kept on trying for. "If Josephine had been a boy, they would have stopped then and I wouldn't exist," she told me one day in school, all solemn-eyed at the thought.
Eleven of them lived -- I can't imagine how -- in scrupulous simplicity off a tiny patch of land and a couple of pigs that Mrs Whelan used to fatten for the local bacon factory.
"I'll have coffee," I said to her now that we were all grown up, sitting not in her mother's kitchen or my father's but hers.
We chatted about inconsequential things like her children being back at school and the end of the winter, as I noted from the sparkle of her kitchen how she must love to clean. Just like her mother. The oak table, on which I was now laying my cup and saucer, was scrubbed. The oven and all its racks gleamed inside their glass. The undersides and insides of everything were as pristine as the sides that were up or out.
Her movements around the kitchen, too, were just like her mother's. Flick the switch of the kettle. Tap the coffee into the container. Pat it down with the back of the spoon. Splash the water from jug to pot. Click the coffee canister shut. Every action sharp and distinct, bringing a little more energy than necessary. Her efficiency made me feel tired, inadequate, though I was also enjoying the room filling with the aroma of percolating coffee and our idle, easy conversation. I pushed away the question I wanted to ask, to bask for a minute or two in these moments, to pretend that we were what we appeared to be, two ordinary friends having a coffee.
Before I came back to Doolough, Pauline looked after my father, given the job by Dr Keane of monitoring his vital signs, a role she'd continued after I arrived. Those were tough months for us all, those months before my father died, only Pauline knew how tough. Only she and I had privy to that hateful bedroom where he saw out his days.
"It doesn't have to be like this, you know," she'd said to me one day, a month or so into my return, when I was complaining of being unable to get out for a walk or a drive. Looking after my father brought me back to when Star was a child, the constant tie of caring. "I could organize some respite."
"He wouldn't like that." It had taken him long enough to accept Pauline, he was never one for letting strangers into the house. Or letting strangers become friends.
"Whether he'd like it or not is really beside the point. You can't look after him if you don't look after yourself first."
I shook my head. Guilt, I know. If I loved him more, I would no doubt have been at ease with doing less. Caring and careful as she was, Pauline understood even that. Half the time when she called to the house, I felt she was monitoring me too. Now I was going to further draw on her good nature.
"Pauline, my lawyer wants to know if you would consider appearing for the defense."
The cup stopped on the way up to her mouth.
"You don't have to, of course, if you'd rather not."
"I don't know what it means."
"To be a character witness. To say that you think me of good character and why. To talk about what you witnessed while you were nursing my father."
"Oh."
"Like I said, please don't feel that you have to. You needn't even tell me what you decide." I pulled a business card from my jeans pocket. "All you need do is let Mags – that's my lawyer – know."
I changed the subject then by telling her about a man from the Right to Die Society who had called me out of the blue, saying they wanted to take up my case. According to him, I could be a role model for the thousands of people who care for the terminally ill. Carers were the ones who knew best about what was right for their charges. Certainly, they knew better than the courts, or than the doctors who wanted to keep the patients alive, against their own wishes.
"Oh my heavens," said Pauline. "What did you say to him?"
"When I could get a word in edgeways, I told him I didn't do it."
"Do you ever wonder," she said, "whether those people aren't right?"
A prickling sensation crawled up my back. "Is that not against your religion, Pauline?"
"It is, I suppose. But when you see the things I've seen... It would be hard, in some cases, to say a person was wrong for taking that road."
I topped up my coffee from her pot, unable to meet her eye, uncertain what was being said. "I wouldn't let Dr Keane hear you saying that, Pauline," I said, in a jokey voice. "He might think you did it."
He wouldn't, of course. None of them would, not of her. But they thought it of me.
One evening when I arrived home from work, a package was waiting for me in the hall. I immediately recognized the handwriting. My heart clenched, as if an ice hand had thrust itself inside and squeezed.
Star looked up at me, bangs falling into her eyes."What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
"Aren't you going to open it?"
"Maybe later."
"Who's it from?"
"Have you done your homework?"
As soon as I could, I took it into my bedroom. Inside, I found a book. Words Alone Are Certain Good: WB Yeats, Religion and the Occult. By Zach Coleman.
The room started to spin. I sat on the bed and when it came to a stop, I opened the book and found this inscription on the fly-leaf, in his handwriting: For my first love, Mercy Mulcahy. And below, a quote from Yeats, writing about Maud: "I will not in grey hours revoke/ The gift I gave in hours of light."
Zach forgave me?
Could it be? With him at my side, I would be able to cope with Star. With anything. With him, all would be well. I opened his letter with a shuddering heart.
Dear M
ercy,
I hope you are well. I can write that sentence now -- and so I can write to you (don't worry, just this once).
I wanted to send you a copy of my book (enclosed). I teach English Lit. now at UCLA and this book is based on my MPhil. In it, I try to show how Yeats combined the myths of ancient, heroic Ireland with a belief in Western magic to create a new mythology and a new religion. That all his writing, including the poetry, was devoted to disseminating his belief system.
Will you read it? I'd like to think you might try. Will you enjoy it? I doubt it. I'm not sure any lay person can even finish it -- but I wanted you to have a copy because it was you who introduced me to WB.
Also, I wanted to say to you that I've come to think of him as being so like you, in the way that oppositions tormented him and at the same time drove him on.
Perhaps none of this is of any interest to you. Then how about this? That famous line he used to describe Maud Gonne: "I had never thought to see in a living woman such great beauty." That's just how I felt all the time when I was with you, Mercy. Are you still beautiful? Still breaking hearts?
For a long time, I have to tell you, I did not wish you well. I wanted something to come along and hurt you like you hurt me. You killed our love, so how could I not hate you, even if, in the doing, you hurt yourself too? But now I am grateful to you -- and I wanted you to know that.
And to know how my work benefitted from knowing you. Whatever I might have studied, it would not have been Yeats's magic and poetry had I not known you -- and now the influence of Eastern philosophy on his beliefs and poems is opening up another world to me. He, and all the writers you introduced me to, have led to a thousand good things for me, Mercy, so for that, too, I am grateful.
I hope it worked out for you with your ex but I suspect it didn't. Maybe that's what you really wanted -- to be alone? I don't know. This isn't coming out right, I really didn't want to go over all that -- otherwise I'd have written long ago. What I wanted was to tell you that I am, at last, over us. And now that I am, what I'm left with is gratitude.
