Jenny Rose

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “No thanks,” I said, “I’m good.”

  Molly, however, was all set to talk. Now my right ear was getting it all. Molly was an enterprising woman, there was no mistaking it. “Well, now, I’ve been separated from Mr. O’Neill these three years,” she told me. (Everyone in Ireland tells you everything right away. You can’t believe it.) “He lives in Bantry, the next town over. Yes, there he lives with his great favorite, the bottle.” I got up and moved around to her right, indicating I didn’t want Mr. Truelove to catch any of this.

  “Phhh.” She waved a graceful hand in the air. “No one pays him any mind. So, anyway, this was years ago,” Molly continued.

  I liked Molly. There was something reluctant about her, with all her chattiness. “Back then, though,” she went on, “we’d bought the cottage together and patched it up, he’d put in the heating. Wasn’t too long ago nobody had heating. Took me years to get the garden the way I wanted it,” Molly chatted on. “Still not right. We were never happy, though. I liked to read and talk and he liked to drink and talk. He was never home. Always at Dayday’s. When he moved back to Bantry I was nothing but relieved, I admit it.” She shifted her attention past the crowd to see whose entrance had placed the sudden silence.

  It was Jenny Rose. Her face was swollen. She’d been crying, it was obvious.

  “Tch.” Molly lowered her chin with approval. “’Tis a shame.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m glad to see she’s been cryin’ after all,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “The whole village was talking that she hadn’t shed a tear.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Not much. It’s just funny when your mother dies and you don’t cry. Odd.”

  So that’s what Jenny Rose had meant. I didn’t like the implication. On the other hand I found it interesting. Another thing. I wondered had it been because of me, or what I represented to her, that she’d cried. And it hadn’t been in front of anyone. What a little stoic.

  “Jenny Rose is an artist,” I said, by way of explanation.

  “Tch,” Molly said, unimpressed. “My own sister sang. Head in the clouds. Where did that get her? Nowhere.”

  Jenny Rose made straight for the coffin and gently pressed her lips to the rim of the wood. She had a graceful, swaying walk. Her clothes might not be the most appropriate but she held herself erectly. You had to notice that about her. She was skinny, but curvy. She didn’t kneel, she ran her hand along the top of the wood as she walked to the side, like you’d trail your fingers over a fence. Then she went over to the straggle of young people, her classmates, I thought. They seemed used to being together. Seamus scuttled around their outskirts for a while, then settled like a puppy, very gingerly, on the folding chair beside them, not knowing for sure if it would hold him or not.

  The sound of wind and rain outside flared and my aunt Bridey stood up and pushed open the window as if to invite it all in. I shivered. But it seemed to loosen the rest of them up. They loved the rain, all of them did. It was part of them—like their knees or their knuckles—and they would have been lost without it. Uncle Ned stood and went to the table of offerings put there by the guests. It looked like a bake sale. He took up the bottles of Madeira and claret and went around, one in each hand, to all the ladies, pouring ceremonial bits into them. Bridey got there just before him every time with a delicate stem glass, very small, all etched in flowers. They must have been old. The kind of stuff comes out only weddings and funerals and well, here we were, weren’t we?

  I asked Molly how much it would cost for a room at her place. “Seventeen pounds,” she told me. Was I asking because I knew someone who was coming?

  “No,” I said. “More for me. I just feel so bad imposing myself on my aunt when she has so much to deal with as it is.”

  “Well,” she said, truthfully, “in that case, if it were for you, I would make it fifteen pounds. I wouldn’t want to take a normal profit in a case of death.” She had gray roots under all those golden curls, I noticed. Her silver eyes would crinkle up and her voice was narrow and reedy, but firm.

  “Oh, but I wouldn’t want you not to make a profit,” I rushed to say.

  “Don’t worry,” she answered wryly, “I always make a profit. You’ll be gone by high season.”

  “Well. Gee. In that case. Could I come in the morning?”

  “Sure you could. I’ve a free room ’til Tuesday. This being Thursday … let’s see … I could put you up for two weeks, if you don’t mind changing rooms on Tuesday. That’s when the Spiegels get back from Germany. Oh, we’ve always one or two Germans.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a bicycle you could rent me?”

  “I have. But you needn’t rent it. It comes with the room, like.”

  “Terrific.”

  “You can come with me in the car for church on Saturday. Tomorrow will be a long one, afternoon and night. There’ll be a table laid at Dayday’s in between. I mean, the bicycle is fine except you won’t want to be getting wet in this weather.” She regarded me with a long silence. “You won’t want your foreign dress spattered with mud. So you’ll come with me in my car for the funeral too, if you like.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, “this will ease things up for my aunt. I ought to go tell her the good news.”

  I thought Molly snorted. I wasn’t sure, then, how to go on. I safely gazed at the coffin and sighed.

  “We were friends, you know, Dierdre and I,” she said. Her legs were crossed and she, too, stared at the coffin, absorbed and far away.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. Friends to the end, as they say. Oh, I know they were much older. But they liked me about. They used to have me as a fourth. Me and Peg and Dierdre and Bridey used to play hearts on a Thursday,” she said. “All Peg’s idea. She was the great organizer. Before she came along, we always used to play Scrabble. Peg was the one brought the gambling into the picture.”

  “Gambling?”

  “Oh, you know. Cards.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Poor Dierdre.”

  “Which one is Peg?”

  Molly squinted and nicked the top of her head at Aunt Bridey. “She won’t have Peg about.” Molly blew her nose. “Hates her. That’s why she’s not here. Always hated her, if truth be told.” More tears. She blew her nose. “It never should have happened, this. Too young to die. Too many things we never said to each other, should have been said. And now it will always be too late.” She turned to me. “That’s the worst of it. You know?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking right away of Temple Fortune. Wishing things had been different and I would have had the chance to tell him. Oh, Lord, just tell him that I really had loved him.

  “Ach”—Molly put her hands in her face—“poor thing, poor thing!” She sobbed.

  Liam was sitting in front of me now and his father leaned over and said to him, “Remember, Liam, when they waked Larry Shaugnessy?”

  “I do.”

  “Had him sitting up and a cigar in his hand.”

  Seamus, baggy as a sack of flour, sidled over beside him, his unbalanced eyes all ready. You could tell he enjoyed these stories of the dead. He couldn’t get close enough.

  “That’s nothing.” Liam, uninhibited by sobriety, nudged his father. “Remember Michael? Old Michael Shine? He was a joker. That blaggard had a length of twine tied to the corpse’s wrist. That was Sean the baker, poor fellow, dead of a faulty ticker. He tied the twine onto Sean’s wrist and when all the men were up for a nip and all the women were left to the rosary with the priest didn’t Michael kneel down and pull that twine. Up went dead Sean’s arm into the air. All the elderly ladies from the parish raced with no problem at all the whole three miles back into town.”

  “The fellow alongside a me jumped over me for fright,” Uncle Ned said. “We were roarin’ for mercy.”

  They all laughed, remembering.

  “There was no harm in it.”

  Uncle Ne
d wiped his eyes with a hanky. “Father Early was that peeved.”

  “Aye,” said another. “That he was.”

  The lot of them looked furtively around to see where the old priest was but he was out of earshot, thank the Lord, over there with the widow Donovan, listening to the rundown of her sins. She apparently was a great one for telling her sins.

  There was a distinct murmer of disapproval when a barrel-chested man in a suit and clashing vest came in. He went up to the coffin and said his Hail Mary, then took his seat in the rear beside the distant, inconsequential neighbors.

  “It’s Inspector Mullaney,” Molly leaned across and whispered in my ear with outrage. Still, there was the impressed silence for the officer of law and order.

  You could hear Bernadette speaking: “It’s bad enough to have him lurkin’ ’round the town! But to have him here hoverin’ in our own Christian house…” She talked and would not listen. “Suspicious circumstances indeed! If those in charge thought there was something truly suspicious they’d have sent up the chief inspector himself. Everyone knows what happened to Dierdre. It’s those damn kerosene casks. And a wonder more people don’t go mixing them up with the gasoline canisters, blowing themselves up…” She didn’t stop there. “And what lets them think they can stomp through any front parlor in their mud-sodden boots … Can they not at least change their boots?”

  “Here’s a lass who’s never been seen in the same outfit twice, I’ll have you know,” Uncle Ned said to the abruptly still room, as a way of apology. He had a sorry look when he said it. He loved Bernadette, you could tell, but he did wish she’d be less, well, ambitious. Inspector Mullaney, however, didn’t seem in the least put out by Bernadette’s outburst of disapproval. He sat as he was, his great knees far apart, his jowly jowls settled into the peace of the place. He was making his notes and keeping them all without benefit of pen or paper.

  “You—you—you’d think there was evil a lurkin’,” Willy stuttered good-naturedly.

  “There is talk of evil, you know, in the village.” Seamus raised and lowered his head, ominous and important. “I heard ’em.”

  “Evil?” That was enough for Aunt Bridey, who’d gone down under the card table to adjust the leg with the folded edge of a wood chip and was just struggling with her girth to get back up. She flew off the handle. “What foolishness! In Skibbereen?” She heaved herself up with one hand on the bookcase. “Not likely.”

  “Evil can be anywhere,” I said and regretted it the moment I did. Every eye was on me now. I’d have liked to sink into the floor, but I’d said it and couldn’t back down. I could see Aunt Bridey, her face pale and open-mouthed. She was leaning toward me with her good ear.

  “Well, sure,” I said, “not in this room, I mean, but everywhere. The potential for it.”

  “True enough,” Mrs. Driver, or Dayday, said, having arrived in her purposeful gardenia scent and an unfortunate iridescent brown suit. She was a wiry woman with quick black eyes and a prominent chin. She didn’t weigh much. Dayday wore good pearls and lifted her glass as if she were blessing us. Well, she’d been trained.

  “What is evil, after all?” Liam piped up. “The mischief of Oberon and Mab.”

  They all laughingly agreed.

  “The absence of good.” Father Early picked up his cake.

  Content with this formula, the rest of them went about the task of sampling from each woman’s kitchen. I sipped my milky tea. How lucky for them all, I thought, to have lived such charmed and untouched lives. And innocent. Because I knew something they obviously didn’t. Evil was not just the absence of good, I shuddered knowingly, but a real and looming force, calculated with its own convulsive end. And always with its maggot-ridden eye on someone.

  Liam stood beside the card table covered in its creamy linen smock. Here were the heftier glasses and liquors. He uncorked the whiskey bottle I’d presented to him in the car. The men stood up one by one and sauntered over to that part of the room.

  “My, my,” Molly remarked. “You’d never think they’ve been just waiting for the moment. You’ll see them at mass, in a row, delighted with themselves.” She sniffed.

  “I overheard Aunt Bridey remind Ned about it being better ‘certain’ people don’t know Dierdre’s dead.”

  “You mean Peg?” Mrs. Driver piped up. “Sure, she’ll find out soon enough, soon as she’s back.”

  “No one’s told her, then?” Molly said.

  “Th-that’s not right,” Willy stuttered.

  Bernadette sniffed.

  Uncle Ned said nothing, as usual. I went over to tell Aunt Bridey about the room I’d taken at Molly’s. I waited until I got her off to the side and no one could overhear us. She dropped her rosary. Then, raising herself up with a good martyr’s courage, she hauled in the air with a clamped shut mouth. “If that’s the way it’s to be,” she finally said.

  “Hang on,” I said. “You seem to be upset about this idea, Aunt Bridey. On the other hand your message was very clear that my presence in your home is an imposition. Now, I took this room down the road to make it easier for you. If I’ve got something wrong, here, just let me know, ’cause I’m real easy.”

  Aunt Bridey took hold of her bosom and reeled with it.

  Ned came over to see what was up.

  “The way in which she speaks to me!” she cried.

  Molly was suddenly behind me. “Don’t go sayin’ anythin’,” she advised me out of the side of her mouth. “Just make yerself scarce. She’ll come around.”

  I took her advice and slipped out into the night. She was my mother’s sister, after all, and I a guest in her home. She certainly wasn’t responsible for Seamus’s mimicking her. I supposed my nonconservative outfits were a put-off. And my abrasive assertiveness. So unlike what she’d expected. Jenny Rose was up against the side of the house, smoking. “Your lungs will be black,” I said.

  “Never as black as me soul, though,” she said, holding out the pack to me. Young people are always intrigued by the bleakness of life. It’s the boring, predictable truth about them. The prettier they are, the more grim they like to find the world. I surprised myself by taking another cigarette. “Aunt Bridey seems to begrudge me the room by the stairs”—I let her light it for me—“but when I take it upon myself to rent a nice one at Molly O’Neill’s bed and breakfast, she’s highly put out.” I hoped I didn’t sound as petulant as I felt.

  “Don’t mind Aunt Bridey. She’s not happy unless she’s miserable.”

  “You were the one who lost your home. And you don’t seem mad at the world.”

  “I would if it had been my studio. Aunt Bridey just doesn’t do well with change. She was dead close to Dierdre.”

  “Molly is nice, though,” I said. “Soft and serious, interested but not nosy, full of fun.”

  “She is that,” Jenny Rose agreed. “You would have liked Dierdre, I’ll bet. She put a great stock in family life and all that.”

  “Did she?” Was that the way I seemed? Setting great stock in family life? Of course it would appear to be. The evening was over and night was near. It was cool now and the rain felt ready to drop at any moment. I snuggled into my sweater.

  “And she was fun, too,” Jenny Rose said, petting the dog. “She was a great one for a laugh, Dierdre was.” She smiled. “Yes, she liked to laugh. Tell me, what’s your husband like?”

  “He’s a cop.”

  “Oh, he is,” she said, as if that explained it all.

  “My daughter is near your age, you know. A few years younger. You’d like her, I think. She’s interested in art and music.”

  “She’s adopted,” Jenny Rose said, challenging me with her eyes.

  “Well, yeah, but we don’t think of her that way.”

  “But I mean, you didn’t give birth to her.”

  “No. My girlfriend did. But she died tragically young and I took over. Dharma is our maverick. Right now, she’s trying to get together a rock group. She—”

  Jenny Rose
looked away and I thought, Right, what does she care about that world she’s been so shut out of? How would she possibly be able to speak casually about the place she’d never had?

  Out the door came a knot of young men. An unmistakable, glistening look came into Jenny Rose’s eyes before she bit her lip and looked every way but at the boys. Hmm, I thought. What’s this? I looked them over carefully. Young people in a casual huddle, laughing away with Willy Murphy, screwing up their faces and retching at the idea of a prom. Because they couldn’t go. The wake had taken priority over that.

  “I’ve never gone either,” he told them, “and look what a fine upstanding citizen I’ve become.” They shoved one another about in good-natured battle. Jenny Rose fiddled with the locket on her neck. There wasn’t one of them I would have thought stood out.

  “Jenny Rose,” I said, “I don’t know what sort of chances I’m going to have while I’m here to spend time with you and, you know, really talk, but, well, something about a wake loosens the tongue, maybe. I suppose it’s good. Anyway, if I’m talking too much or taking liberties just tell me and I’ll shut up, all right?”

  “No. It’s okay. What?”

  “Well, it’s just that I didn’t expect you to be part of the family, here. I mean so much a part of the family, raised as Aunt Dierdre’s girl.”

  “Ah. You thought I’d be shipped to the local home for unlucky girls and raised there ’til a childless couple from Galway would see their way to takin’ me.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m ashamed that’s what I did imagine. I mean I’m relieved. It’s just hard for me to digest all this at once.”

  Jenny Rose slid with her back down the side of the house and sat on the damp bench. “That’s what almost did happen.”

  “But why did they keep you so secret? So hidden? It was unkind.”

  “Unkind to whom? They never kept me hidden! That was your group did that. No one ever hid me on this end.”

  I shuddered with disbelief. “I’ll never forgive them for not letting me in on you. I would have come right away. I’d never even heard of you until yesterday!”

  “That was part of the deal.”