A Letter From America

by Geraldine O'Neill

  As they walked the few yards, Fiona saw a neighbour on the opposite side – a woman in her thirties – out walking her dog. She called hello across to Fiona, and smiled and said what a nice evening it was.

  Fiona smiled and gave a little wave of acknowledgement, knowing that she and Michael holding hands in the street would be discussed the minute the woman got inside.

  Michael held the passenger door open for her. “Have you decided where you would like us to go? I’m in your hands now.”

  “I think Mullingar will be grand. There are a couple of nice restaurants there, and we shouldn’t have any trouble getting a table since it’s a Thursday night.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said and went around to his own side.

  “It’s just dawned on me,” Fiona said, as he started the engine up, “that maybe I should have offered to drive us in my car – it’s harder on you driving on the wrong side of the road.”

  “Not at all. I’m used to it already.” He grinned. “I like the challenge, it keeps me alert.”

  Fiona rolled her eyes. “I think I would die if I had to drive on the other side – it just seems complicated and scary to me.”

  “I am not going to make sexist comments about women drivers,” he said, laughing, “because I appreciate the offer. Maybe I’ll take you up on it another day.”

  “Sexist?” she repeated. “I’ve never heard that word before.”

  “I suppose it’s a fairly new term,” he explained. “It’s when you make general assumptions about people because of their sex – as in ‘women drivers’. He shrugged. “I’m sure there are plenty of sexist remarks you could make about men.”

  She laughed now. “I’m sure there are!”

  She directed him out of Tullamore and onto the Kilbeggan Road.

  “Beautiful green countryside,” he commented, as they turned down the leafy lanes.

  As they drove along, he asked her about the various places, and listened carefully whilst she told him all she knew about the houses or the land or the villages through which the local canal ran.

  When they arrived in Mullingar, they found a restaurant in the middle of the town, which Fiona remembered being in with her parents and her sisters a few years ago. Only half the tables were occupied so the waiter had no problem finding one for them in a corner at the back.

  They both ordered melon to start with, then Michael ordered steak with an Irish whiskey sauce and she ordered duck in a glazed orange sauce.

  “We can have a bottle of wine with the meal, if you can drink most of it,” he said, “because I wouldn’t chance driving on your winding roads when I’ve been drinking.”

  Fiona lifted her eyes to the ceiling as though she were shocked. “I could not drink three-quarters of a bottle of wine on my own,” she laughed. “And especially not after last night – after drinking quite a bit more than I usually do.” She decided on a glass of white wine and Michael chose a red.

  A few minutes later the waitress brought the drinks to the table.

  Michael reached his glass out to hers and they touched them together. “To our weekend exploring Offaly!”

  She asked him about his architecture work back in America and he told her about projects he had been recently working on in both Boston and New York. They moved from one subject to another easily, with the rise and fall of conversation and occasional laughter from the other diners in the background. When they had finished their main course, Fiona had profiteroles and Michael had home-made trifle. Afterwards, as they sat chatting over coffee, the conversation turned to Fiona’s family and how she had found it growing up as part of the family business.

  “When you don’t know anything different, you just feel it is normal,” she said. “But looking back, I suppose it was pretty different to the lives most of our friends had. For one thing, our mother worked – she was always going between home and the shop.” She smiled and shrugged. “Just like I am now, except I’m younger and single. I think it gave us a fuller, busier life in many ways. I enjoyed going up and down to the shop to see Mam, and then helping her when I got older. And I always liked going in and out to Daddy in the bar. It was fine, I have no complaints about it, except I didn’t see myself ever doing this long term.”

  “What about your sisters?” Michael asked. “Did they like helping with the business?”

  Fiona pursed her lips in thought. “They never really did,” she said. “Bridget left for her convent school when she was twelve or thirteen, so she would not have really been old enough to help in the shop. She does help now when she’s home, and she gave me a hand at Easter.” She halted. “And then Angela – well, Angela never really worked in the shop at all because she had a problem with her leg. She wasn’t really at home for a lot of the time.”

  “This is your second sister?”

  “Yes,” Fiona said, “the one who is two years younger than me.”

  “That’s the same difference between my brother and me, only he is the oldest. You said Angela had a problem with her leg?”

  “Polio.”

  “Polio? Wow...that’s a tough one. Did she have it bad?”

  “Yes, when she was younger. She’s had a lot of operations on it, and it’s improved over the years. She used to have to wear a calliper all the time, but now she only wears it when it’s very bad.”

  “You said she wasn’t at home a lot of the time – why was that?”

  “The specialist hospital that dealt with her condition was in Dublin,” she shrugged. “All the kids who had polio went there...Angela was in it for a lot of her childhood.”

  “How old was she when she got the polio?”

  Her eyes narrowed as she calculated. “She was at National School, maybe around seven or eight.”

  “That must have been a really traumatic time for your family,” he said. “Having such a terrible thing happen to her. I have an older cousin, Scott, back in the States who had polio. Both his legs and an arm were affected. He caught it when he was a baby, and he’s been in a wheelchair all his life.”

  “That sounds really bad, much worse that Angela...”

  “It certainly was for the family, but everyone rallied round, making sure he had as normal a life as was possible. His older brothers had a soapbox cart – a sort of racing buggy that they’d made out of wood and old bicycle wheels – and Scott used to sit outside in the wheelchair watching them. Then, one weekend the brothers said they had something on, and when they reappeared they had made him a specially adapted cart, which they used pulled him around in.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “The other guys did everything they could to include him in things, and he grew up kind of thinking he could do just about anything. In fact, he’s a very clever guy – he trained as an accountant, and he has accomplished more than most able-bodied people. The family have a chain of really successful steak houses in Boston, and it’s all down to Scott. They had a middle-of-the-road restaurant which wasn’t doing well, and he went in and studied the décor, the menus and the order books, and then he spent time in the kitchen watching how they did things. After that, he spent a few weeks going around successful restaurants and diners, asking questions and taking notes, and when he came back to his brothers, he had facts and figures about what was going wrong, and what he thought needed doing to whip things into shape.” Michael shrugged. “Amazing guy, really.”

  “He certainly sounds it,” Fiona agreed. “It’s a brilliant story and great that he was able to succeed regardless of being in a wheelchair. Thank God Angela wasn’t that badly affected.” She paused. “You know, I’ve never really thought that it could have been much worse.”

  “But Scott spent all his time at home – it must have been real tough on your family when she had to go away and for all those years. You must have felt it badly at the time, your young sister suddenly becoming seriously ill and then disappearing from your home and not coming back. And it must have made her feel very estranged from the family. Has it has a long-lasting eff
ect on her?”

  Fiona got the same uncomfortable feeling she got any time Angela mentioned being in hospital in Dublin for all those years. “Angela is a very independent girl,” she said. “She always has been. I think it didn’t affect her the way it might have affected others.”

  “Does she talk about it a lot?”

  “No,” Fiona said, “not really...I think she prefers to forget it. I think we all do. She has a good job in an office in Dublin and she has a good social life there as well. She’s so busy she doesn’t come home that often.”

  He nodded his head slowly up and down, digesting what she had said. “Well, it’s amazing both she and Scott have made such good lives for themselves after going through all that stuff with polio. They’re obviously very strong people.”

  The waitress came over to clear their cups and glasses and they ordered two more coffees.

  When she came back with their fresh drinks, Michael took a sip from his then leaned his elbows on the table and looked at Fiona, a serious look on his face.

  “You’ve been open about your family,” he said, “and I think there’s something I should tell you now about mine. It’s one of the reasons I came over here – why I planned to take an extended break from home. I had a fight with my brother, Greg. A pretty bad fight. Bad enough that if he’d pressed charges I could be in a penitentiary somewhere.”

  She was taken aback by the sudden, serious turn in the conversation. “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story that goes way back...” He shrugged. “I’m sure he has his own version of growing up with me, but I’ve always found him bull-headed and competitive. Competitive in every way you could imagine. He’s two years older than me, good at sports, good at music and fairly good in school, although he dropped out early because he couldn’t take teachers telling him what to do.” He stretched back in his chair and gave a wry smile. “And as if he didn’t have enough going for him already, he’s good-looking too, and naturally girls always adored him. He was one of the reasons I decided to go to university in New York, rather than being at home in Boston. Even back then, I knew how he could get my hackles up and how difficult he could be under certain circumstances. I thought it was best if there was a bit of distance between us until we both were mature enough to handle our differences.”

  Fiona lifted her spoon and stirred the sugar in her coffee, listening carefully to every word. She knew by his voice and the serious way he looked that what he was saying was important to him.

  “I had been back living in Boston and seeing this nice woman – Kim – for almost two years. She was a lovely person and an artist with her own successful craft shop. We had some really good times, going out to music bars and concerts and art events...that sort of thing. But then, earlier this year I started travelling to New York again for work and I suppose things weren’t working out as easily as before. There were weekends when I didn’t come home.” He lifted his coffee and took a drink from it.

  Fiona listened, wondering about Kim the artist, whether she had dark or blonde hair – long or short. Imagining what she looked like, and imagining Michael with her at all the exciting music bars and concerts. Glamorous places she had never been to. Places she dreamed of when she thought she was going to New York. As she looked across the table at him now, she wondered if he found this restaurant very tame and boring compared to it. If he found her very tame and boring compared to the artistic – and no doubt, beautiful – Kim.

  “I got the feeling there might have been someone else,” he continued, “another artist guy who she got close to, and I don’t blame her as I wasn’t around. I think they were also probably more suited to each other than we were. Looking back, we had become more of a habit, but we were good friends as well and neither wanted to pull the plug on things, so we kind of drifted along doing the same old things.”

  Fiona put the cup back down in the saucer. The last piece of information about him and his girlfriend only drifting along, and then eventually breaking up, made her feel better. She did not want to be haunted by images of him with another girl, or to feel that she had broken it off with him, and that he had come to Ireland, pining and trying to forget about her.

  But, she could tell that there was some fairly serious problem back home that had instigated his travels, and she needed to hear more about it, to work out where exactly she might fit in.

  “So,” she asked, “where does Greg come into all this?”

  “Stupidly I thought things had improved between us over the last couple of years,” he said, gesturing with his hands. “You have this thing because you’re brothers, and you feel you should get on. And it seemed to be working out. He had even come to stay with me in New York on a couple of weekends. He got drunk, and we had a few verbal run-ins about politics and stuff – he’s a Republican and I’m a Democrat – but nothing major came of it. He’s always been unpredictable with drink, and Mom reckoned he went through a phase of dabbling in cocaine as well.” He shrugged. “He never said anything about it to me, and I never picked up on anything. It’s not my kind of thing, but I know people use it.”

  As Fiona listened, she remembered what Angela had said about one of Joseph’s band members being involved with drugs.

  “It was Greg’s birthday in August,” Michael continued, “and Mom decided to invite me and Kim over for a meal since we hadn’t all been together in a while, but I ended up going on my own. The night went well, we had a couple of bottles of wine with the meal and then Greg, Dad and I had a couple of beers and we all went and sat outside on the porch. Mom asked about Kim and I said that things were cooling off a little, but that I thought we would work it out.” He sat forward now, his hands joined together on the table. “Later on, Greg asked me about it, and well, it all seemed so easy and relaxed that foolishly I mentioned about Kim and the artist guy.”

  He stopped talking as the waitress came with a jug to check if they would like more coffee and they both said they would. As she filled one cup and then the other, Fiona went over in her head all the things he had said to her about his girlfriend and his brother, trying to work out what might have led to the fight. What could be so bad that he had flown across the Atlantic to get away from it?

  As soon as the waitress left, she stretched her hand across the table and touched his arm just above his wrist – the part not covered by the casual rolled-up sleeve. Something quivered deep in her stomach as she felt the unexpected warmth of his skin on her fingertips. She suddenly had the urge to lean right over and kiss him. Instead, she moved her hand and smiled at him and said, “Finish your story, I really want to hear what happened.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking two quick mouthfuls of the coffee as though it might spur him on. “I know Greg so well, and I knew that night that something was simmering away with him. We talked for a good while and we played a couple of rounds of table tennis with Mom and Dad.” He stopped and laughed. “I know it’s kind of strange, grown adults playing such a game but it’s something we’ve always done since we were little kids, and it’s a kind of reminder of the good parts of growing up in the family. Anyway, my parents went off to bed and then Greg and I had another beer on the porch and then he said he had something to tell me about Kim. He said that he didn’t want me to work it out with her because he knew she had cheated on me. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew, but he just kept saying that she was a cheat. Of course, I couldn’t let it go. How could I? So I went back inside and even though it was well after midnight I phoned Kim and I told her what Greg had said about her being a cheat, and I asked her what he was talking about. She started to cry and then it all came out. She said that he had made a pass at her when he was staying at my place one might but she had pushed him off. And then she told me that he turned up at her apartment one weekend when I was in New York. She said they had a few drinks and he had brought some pot and insisted she try it – he said lots of artists used it as it helped their minds become more creative.” He rolled his eyes. “It was bull
shit. Greg hasn’t an artistic bone in his body. He said if she tried just one joint then he would leave, so stupidly she did. After it, she said she asked him to leave, and he said it would be best if he stayed to look after her, as the pot sometimes has a bad effect on people who have never used it. They were arguing and then she said she suddenly felt strange.” He gave a huge sigh. “After that, she said she didn’t know what happened, but she woke up the next morning and he was lying in the bed beside her.”

  Fiona’s face was tight with shock. It was like something out of a gangster film. “Oh, God,” she said, “that must have been terrible for her – and terrible for you.”

  “When I came back out to the deck after speaking to her, he was just sitting there smiling as if nothing was wrong. I just couldn’t stop myself. I punched him and then it went into a big fight, and it finished when we rolled off the deck.”

  Fiona’s hands were covering her mouth. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  “Any time we fought before, when we were teenagers, he usually had the upper hand. But this time I was so fired up, I didn’t hold back.” He sighed. “I’m not proud of myself. Whatever way it happened, he landed awkwardly and ended up with a broken nose, bruised ribs and a broken collarbone.”

  “It sounds just awful. How long ago was this? And is he okay?”

  “Just over a week ago. I stayed long enough to check there wasn’t anything wrong with him that couldn’t be fixed, and to check that Kim was okay. And then I just packed up and came over here. I had been planning a trip to Ireland, but it had never been the right time.”

  “How was Kim?”

  “Pretty shook up with the whole thing. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. He denied having touched her and she decided to leave it at that.” He closed his eyes. “She admitted that he had been openly flirting with her, and she thinks she may have given him the wrong signals because of the pot and everything. But, whichever way you look at it, he should never have gone to her apartment and then encouraged her to take drugs. And the only reason he did it was to get at me – and he certainly achieved that.”