The Death of an Irish Tradition

by Bartholomew Gill

  “He’s gone most of the time now, my Tom.” She had paused and glanced at McGarr, who had bent to shake the child’s hand.

  “About last night—” he began saying.

  “Ah, say no more. The poor, unfortunate, lonely, old woman and that tart of a daughter, no sense to her, out with this one and—” The water had come to a boil.

  “Are you a detective, a real detective?” the child had asked.

  “He’s McGarr, McGarr himself,” she put in, “like your father told you. Now, that’s a strange name.” She directed hot water into the pot, emptied that, added tea, and filled it, dropping the lid into its groove. “From the North?”

  “Originally, I should think.”

  “Have you been married long?”

  McGarr wore no rings on his fingers, but it was plain she had found out something about him. “Three and a half glorious years.” McGarr waited, handing his Garda Soichana badge, #4, to the little boy, wondering if she’d have the courage to ask him directly.

  Finally, when the tea was poured, she put it to him straight, “Catholic?”

  McGarr glanced over the edge of the cup and nodded, and he could almost hear her saying to herself, Three and a half years and no children!

  “And your wife now,” she looked down at the jelly donut, her eyes darkening before she bit into it, “I understand she’s…younger than you.”

  McGarr was not surprised. It was a small country and information was undoubtedly the woman’s stock-in-trade. “Twenty.”

  “Twenty?” A hand went to her throat as she swallowed the bite of donut.

  “Twenty years younger. Nearly. Eighteen is closer to the mark.” McGarr again glanced at the child, as though his smile was for him, while she worked on the figures of exactly how old both of them were, when they’d been married, and what had happened or gone wrong to find them now, so many years later, childless.

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “Down in me sock.”

  When the child looked down, McGarr clapped a homburg—one of the hats he had in the boxes by the side of his chair—over the little boy’s head. “Now do you look like a detective, Tony, or haven’t you a clue, there in the dark?”

  With both hands the child pulled the hat off his head and looked at it, then reached it up on top of McGarr’s head.

  “Business woman?”

  McGarr looked at her inquiringly. “How’s that?”

  “I mean,” again the contemplation of the pastry, “it’s what I’ve heard. She has a shop in Dawson Street, does she not? Antiques, isn’t it?”

  “Art.”

  “Oh—art.” It was obvious the word meant little to her and was therefore suspect.

  “Now, Tony—do I look like a detective or a gunman?”

  “Foreign things, I take it. She must be abroad a good deal?”

  McGarr canted his head to the side, concurring.

  “You’re not a detective.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “And says I to you, says I—we’re always on the lookout for detectives down at the Castle, and I’m wondering if you can find me hat, the real one, in all these boxes.”

  “And you’ve got your job, here at home.”

  McGarr nodded.

  “And you’re right up there with them—the commissioners and all.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  The child had hopped off McGarr’s knee and was now tugging open the boxes, pulling out the hats and casting them aside one by one.

  “You needn’t be modest, Mister McGarr. My Tommy told me about you when he got home from work. No use complaining about him, says Tom—he runs the show. Only the commissioner is above him, and there’s no sense trying to track him down at this time of year. He’s probably in—”

  “Cork,” said McGarr.

  “Is that where he holidays?”

  “Ballydehob.”

  “Farrell, his name is, is it not?”

  McGarr nodded.

  The kitchen floor was now littered with hats, hat-boxes, and lids.

  He glanced at the clock, a new digital contraption that gave the time in odd-shaped figures, the seconds flashing in an electronic blur, and he eased himself back into the chair. 12:47. He had called the rectory of Father Menahan’s church and learned that the priest would be saying a 1:30 offertory mass. If he didn’t hurry he’d have to sit through—.

  “A swell place, I suppose. Posh. I suppose he’s hardly ever at his desk.”

  McGarr ignored her. He was watching the child turn the hats this way and that, running his fingers over the bands, peering inside at the silk liners.

  “And I suppose he wouldn’t even listen to the likes of me, just an ordinary citizen.”

  Not if he could help it, McGarr thought. To his way of thinking Mrs. Brady was a bit…unpredictable and spoiled. Perhaps she was the queen in her castle, maybe even something of a figure in the neighborhood, but he was convinced she knew little of how the world—the big world—worked.

  “Is it your opinion that this Farrell would have listened to me, Mister McGarr?” Her eyes, seen over the teacup which she had raised to her face, both elbows on the table, had grown small and hard. Her imagination was getting the better of her.

  The child grabbed the sleeve of McGarr’s jacket and gave it a tug. He was holding a derby off his ears, smiling up at McGarr.

  “Now—is that the hat I’m supposed to wear?”

  The child nodded.

  “Are you sure, Inspector Brady? If you’re wrong, you know, it might cost you your job.”

  The smile fell somewhat, but he nodded again.

  “And that’s the hat you saw the detective wearing yesterday afternoon, the one who came out of the Caughey apartment upstairs?”

  Again the nod.

  “Was he going out or coming in?”

  “Going out,” he said, his voice just barely audible.

  “Well—I think I’ll call him this minute.” She stood; two patches of red had appeared below her cheekbones.

  “Who?”

  “Why, Farrell, of course.”

  “About what?”

  “Just to see. Inaccessible, is he? Not good enough for the common run of citizen. Sure, me and my Tom, we haven’t had a proper holiday in…years. Years and years, and here he himself is, big as life, down in Ballydehob with all the swells and foreigners, and the others of you always off in one capital or another, buying who knows what—art.” The last word sounded like a bark. Her face was contorted with sarcasm.

  “How do you know he was going out?” McGarr said to the child. He didn’t think she’d grant him much more time.

  The child glanced from McGarr to his mother, suddenly shy.

  “Well—go ahead, Tony. Speak up, now. Don’t let him scare you.”

  “Because I heard the stairs. Before.”

  “You mean, the stairs up to the apartment of Missus Caughey? Can you hear them from here?” McGarr glanced at the mother. She was staring at him and her jaw was working, as if she were chewing on something.

  “Not here, but…” The child ran toward the other end of the kitchen, still holding the derby off his head with one hand. With the other he pulled open a door. “…in here. I was playing in here.”

  McGarr had followed her. “May I, ma’am?”

  “Of course. Surely.” Her tone was icy.

  It was a long, deep closet that functioned as a pantry. The walls were lined with canned goods and household supplies, right under the stairs to the second floor.

  “Can you hear people going up?” he asked the mother.

  “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Can you, Tony?”

  The child glanced at his mother and then turned away.

  McGarr squatted down on his haunches. “Tony—something bad happened upstairs yesterday, do you know that?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you hear any voices yesterday? On the stairs?”

>   He turned and looked at his mother, letting go of the derby, which bounced on the floor. He then ran to her and buried his face in her apron.

  McGarr sighed and stood. “Missus Brady—I hope you can appreciate the seriousness of this situation. The…tragedy yesterday, and now the bomb. We’re not dealing with a house breaker here, or a—”

  “You’re no better than you were last night, are you?”

  No, not much, McGarr thought. “Tony—was it a woman or a man’s voice that you heard?”

  “Missus Caughey,” he said into her skirt.

  “Harassment, I’d call it. Harassment of a toddler, a mere baby.”

  Now McGarr knew why her husband was always working.

  “And the other voice, Tony. Was it a man’s or a woman’s?”

  “Come, Tony,” she lifted him into her arms, “I’m putting you to bed for your nap, and when I return the man had better have packed his things and left. My husband will hear about this, don’t think he won’t, and he’ll be having a word with you, so he will.”

  She was flushed and trembling and the child began to cry.

  “Man’s or woman’s, Tony?”

  The child only turned his face to McGarr and bawled, as his mother whisked him past and down a hallway.

  Inside the rooms of the Philosophical Society all was tranquil. Dust sifted through a shaft of direct sunlight that fell between the bowers of the yew tree outside and onto the old leather of a couch that had been set before a window. Behind a newspaper blue cigarette smoke lazed toward the ceiling. The armchairs were empty, the many other newspapers in the reading frames untouched on the rack.

  “Excuse me,” said Ward. “Have you see the porter about?”

  “Paddy?” a voice asked from behind the paper. “He’s out for a sup.”

  “The College Inn?”

  “Think so.”

  Ward hesitated. The Irish Press was just around the corner from the bar, which would be filled with reporters and staff lingering over their lunches on this hot summer afternoon. But he closed the door, hurried down the granite steps of the ancient building in Trinity College, and made for the Pierce Street gate. He’d chance it.

  The campus and the main buildings of the college—the old library that housed The Book of Kells, the chapel, and the examination hall—were thronged with tourists, mostly foreigners. Several tanned blondes walking together and speaking a strange, musical-sounding language turned Ward’s head. They had blue eyes, and the hair piled on top of their heads revealed fine blond fluff on thin necks. And they moved languidly, on holiday, unself-conscious of their special ethnic beauty, but Ward hurried on.

  At the Coin de Paris and Pia Bang Boutique Ward had found persons who had corroborated all that Mairead Kehleen Caughey had stated earlier, and, stopping at the National Library on Kildare Street, he had determined that the institution was still closed because of building repairs and that the foreman of the crew had in fact seen the girl the day before.

  “Who could forget her?” he asked.

  Indeed, thought Ward.

  “Time?”

  “After three, it had to be.”

  Ward knew he could trust the man’s judgment. He looked like the sort who counted his pints. It was only noon and already he’d had a half dozen if he’d had one.

  And so Ward had turned his steps toward the old walls and wide green lawns of Trinity. Something that young Murray had said and had been included in McGarr’s preliminary report, which Ward had read upon first arriving at the Castle that morning, had been troubling him. Murray had told McGarr that others of his friends had picked the girl up at her house to make it appear as though several young men were keeping her company and not just Murray alone. That in itself wasn’t extraordinary, since Ward himself had had to circumvent a suspicious mother or two in his time, but the phrase Murray had used—the “gang”—interested him.

  First, Ward couldn’t imagine a person like Mairead Caughey, who was so involved in her career as a pianist and her pastime of riding horses, being involved with a “gang,” regardless of what the euphemism might mean. And then—Ward had noted long before—other women were not particularly disposed to persons of her…perfection. How could most young women, even those here at Trinity, really hope to compete with somebody such as she? And then, if the “gang” was simply Murray’s group of friends, Ward was interested in just who they were and what they thought of him, the girl herself, and the death of the mother.

  Ward saw a break in the traffic on Pierce Street and sprinted through the white, hot, and dusty haze, seen only now in summer, and was suddenly conscious of the familiar drabness of the city, the dirty gray slabs of the police barracks across the way, the bus terminus, the faded brick of the inn in front of him. And the cidery stink of the pub—dark snugs and shadows, the dampness and conversation and smoke—seemed welcome, as though the old wood and brick had subsumed centuries of drear, wet weather that no spate of sun could drive out.

  There were tourists in the inn too, which was part of the Mooney chain. Ward knew that they could find themselves admitted to any one of the many bastions of Dublin’s peculiar institution, find their sandaled feet in the sawdust, be served and taste the curious, bitter products of a quaint, backward culture, even get a conversation, a laugh, a smile, hear a song, and appreciate the sour dregs of lives which in their terms were misspent, but they’d never get beyond that and really know the people who cozened the dampness, the whisper, the double-meaning, the laugh behind the hand, and what was important and filled the minds of Dubliners:

  The day by day of it. Life in a brickyard. Past, present, and future all in a pint. And discrete. Alone. Even in a crowd, be it of tourists or their own. And big families, because they knew they were—and didn’t like but couldn’t help—being alone. The weave of conversation—an allusion, a familiar, plaintive voice, an old story, never the same. History—at once too little and too much—to be spoken only. The peculiar cerebral hardiness in the residents of Ath Cliath. And in his own, new way Ward was one of them.

  He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then walked toward the shadows at an end of the bar where a small man dressed in a blue uniform had leaned his back against the wall and was surveying the crowd.

  And it appeared that not only his eyes but also his ears were focused on the others. They protruded from his head like two palms raised. A stub of a cigarette dangled from his mouth. His face was lined and creased but black hair, parted scrupulously at the side, denied the appearance of old age, and as Ward made his way toward the man he was reminded that he knew little about him apart from his being a porter in the student activities building at the college, a friend of McGarr’s father, and his having helped them before in other investigations.

  Ward stopped beside him and nodded. “Paddy.”

  “Where’s the boss? Out in Ballsbridge?”

  Ward pointed at the porter’s glass and held up two fingers.

  The barman reached for a pint glass.

  The porter raised his to his lips and in a long swallow that made his eyes bulge poured his away and set it back down, wiping his upper lip with the side of his index finger in a practiced manner.

  “Do you know who she was?” Ward asked him.

  “I have a notion.” His eyes, which were bleary with drink, glanced out over the tables where the reporters sat, and Ward followed them to see a man at one of the tables turn his chair so he could watch them.

  It was Fogarty from the Times, and he was McGarr’s harshest critic. Ward wondered if he was about to get himself in a jam, coming here. He wondered how much the old porter could be trusted to keep his mouth shut, after he left, and how many pints it would cost him.

  “Have you ever heard the daughter play the piano?” He pulled a tenner from his wallet and laid it on the bar between them.

  The porter only closed his eyes and opened them.

  “Any good?”

  He canted his head to the side. “If you like t
hat sort of thing.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  The man smiled. “And it’s you that’d notice, isn’t it now?”

  “Lots of friends.”

  “One or two.”

  “It’s the one I’m interested in.”

  “Thought as much.”

  They had kept their voices low, and Fogarty mooched in the chair, wanting but not daring to approach them, doubtless afraid he might queer a newsworthy meeting, knowing later he might get whatever was said from the porter.

  “Fine family, the Murrays.”

  “The best, the very best—if your taste runs to gombeen men.” The barman placed the fresh pint in front of the porter, who added, raising it, “May the giving hand never falter.”

  “And yours, Paddy. G’luck.” Ward drank in the soft, foamy stout, and set it back down.

  “But mind—” the old man went on, “—I’ve never put a bend on nobody. Nor shopped a feller neither. There’s some around here thinks me a mouth almighty, when it suits them, though I hardly say a word.” The old man’s eyes moved toward Fogarty and flickered away.

  “Peter sent me now,” Ward said, finding McGarr’s first name odd in his mouth. Only O’Shaughnessy called him that, and O’Shaughnessy had age and rank. “He’s after wanting an opinion of your man. Nothing definite, no fix, just—

  “What about his friends?”

  “What friends?”

  “His…gang, the ones he goes around with. He’s got money and a car and—

  “Ah…” The porter turned to face the bar and talked down into his glass.

  Ward moved closer.

  “…he’s got money and a car all right, but the lot of them are nothing but bowsies and touchers, if you ask me. But mind, now—I’ve said nothing.”

  “A studious sort?”

  The porter only passed air between his lips and closed his eyes.

  “But the law—he’s to be a solicitor, I hear.”

  “And he’ll have his days filled with himself, so he will.”

  Ward only waited.

  From the direction of Fogarty’s table they heard the rasp of a chair being pulled back, and the porter glanced over his shoulder.

  He then spoke quickly. “There’s a smell in the rooms they’ve been in, you know. And them smirking and quipping who knows what and wearing them sunglasses indoors and thinking they was pulling the wool—but mind, not a word.”