by Stuart Woods
“Two years in law school is a large personal investment to simply set aside,” he said, finally.
“I’m not necessarily setting it aside permanently. I may go back and finish, I just don’t know yet.” I stole a careful glance at my mother, who was, uncharacteristically, holding her peace. She is Irish. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem real, yet. Law is still just an exercise, something to memorize and discuss, not something to do. It was even that way when I interned at Blackburn, Hedger last summer; it was all so technical; I felt removed from it.” All of this was true, though it had entered my consciousness only during the time since my meeting with the dean.
“Will,” my mother said, “how long have you been thinking about this?”
“All year,” I lied. “When I came home for Christmas I didn’t want to go back, but it seemed stupid to drop out in the middle of the year.”
“It’s not sudden then,” she said, resignedly.
“No, Ma’am.” I hated myself a little for deceiving her.
“I take it you don’t know exactly what you want to do?” my father asked.
“Well, sir, I’d like to go ahead and visit Grandfather in Ireland, the way I’d planned [that would please them] and then … I’d just like to keep going for a while, take a year and travel.”
“Travel where?”
“Everywhere, anywhere.” I honestly didn’t know.
“I see. How were you planning to finance all this travel?”
“Well, I can get about a thousand for my car, and I’ve got my calf money.” We lived on a cattle farm in Meriwether County, near the town of Delano. The land had been in my father’s family since the 1850s, but it was my mother who had been the real farmer, building up the place after World War II, when my father was starting his law practice and his political career. “That’s a little over three thousand dollars. I can get a student air fare and hitchhike in Europe.”
My mother was looking at my father and shaking her head. “Billy, I am not going to have him hitchhiking.” It was my first inkling that they were not going to try to talk me back into law school—not yet, anyway. I looked back to my father.
He went through his drill of silence again before speaking. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll loan you another three thousand. Buy a good used car—no hitchhiking. You can sell the car when you come back and pay me back then.” It was typical of him to make it a loan. “In September of next year you either go back to law school, or to graduate school if you’d rather, or you’re on your own in the cruel world. Fair enough?”
I found that I had been holding my breath, and in my sudden exhaling I found wind to say back to him, “Fair enough.”
A few minutes later I passed the study door and heard them talking quietly. “Maybe it’s a good thing for him, Billy,” my mother said.
“Maybe,” my father replied. “I was just thinking about all those unfinished model airplanes when he was a kid. Those just about drove me crazy.”
“I know,” she said.
“He was never much for finishing things. I hoped he would get over that.”
“Maybe he will. He still may go back and finish.”
“I hope so. I won’t count on it.”
Young men who cannot be counted on should not listen at doors; it shames them and stings their eyes. I got out of the house as quickly as possible.
2
THE TWO-HOUR FLIGHT to New York and the six-hour flight to Shannon gave me an opportunity to think—or rather, forced thought upon me. I was running, I knew that; I had done a lot of running from problems in my short existence. I also knew that, had I wished to summon all the persuasive powers at my disposal, I could have convinced Dean Henry to let me remain in law school. I was good at convincing. Had I remained, though, I would soon have disappointed him again. I would not have been able to back up my persuasion with performance. A long series of childhood and schoolday incidents had brought me to know that as a part of myself. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know how to change it. I looked out the jet’s window at the floor of rosy cloud beneath us and tried to summon the resolve for an assault on my flawed character, but I was cautious about making promises even to myself. Instead, I began to look forward to my newfound freedom. Maybe in Europe I might find something in myself that I could admire without shame.
I arrived in Ireland with a sense of freedom only partly gained. I had the obligatory family visit ahead of me before finally cutting the bonds. I approached it impatiently. My grandfather didn’t know quite what to make of me, but he was kind. I had not visited him in County Cork since I was twelve, but he and my grandmother had stayed with us in Georgia when I was sixteen—and she was still alive. He seemed much, much older, and though in good health, shrunken in his appearance and careful in his movements. He had become accustomed to solitude and was not anxious to change his habits.
I exercised his hunters—he was grateful for that in the off-season—galloping them over long stretches of densely green countryside, down to where his land touched the water at the entrance to Kinsale Harbour. There I would walk, leading the animal of the day, and watch the sailboats cruise in and out, or, on Sundays, watch them race—the tiny dinghies with their red sails, squirting here and there. I had spent six summers at a sailing camp on the North Carolina coast—two as a camper and four as an instructor—sailing dinghies and small cruisers, and I thought I might look for a ride in some neighbor’s boat. The neighbors, though, were of my grandfather’s generation and were more oriented toward horses than boats.
I drove into Kinsale in Grandfather’s Land Rover to shop for him and passed a squadron of young girls playing field hockey in a meadow beside the road. I stopped and watched for a moment, watched their coach, mainly, a sturdy blonde girl of about my own age, with good, if muscular, legs and largish breasts. I experienced a stirring in the loins, I believe the expression is. I have never known exactly where the loins are located, but believe me, they stirred. I must have produced some primitive animal scent that wafted over the field, for she began stealing glances at me, and when the play was over she waved the children back toward their school and ran over to the fence. For a moment I was gripped with a panic that she was angry at my watching, and I nearly bolted, but she was too quick for me.
“You’ll be Miles Worth-Newenam’s grandson,” she said, still panting from her play.
“I am,” I said uncertainly. This was before I learned that everybody in Ireland knows everything about everyone else.
She waited for me to say something else, but I couldn’t seem to think of anything. “D’you have a name, then?” she asked, impatiently.
“I do,” I replied. “My name is Will Lee.” I was careful, as always, to enunciate clearly. My name could too easily come out as “Willie”, and in my South that was a black’s name. I was no racist, but like all southerners, white and black, I made certain distinctions.
“Mine is Concepta Lydon.”
“I perceive that you are Catholic.” Oh, God, I thought, now I’ve made fun of her name.
But she laughed. “You are perceptive, indeed. I mention my whole name to get that out of the way. If you ever call me anything but Connie, I’ll punch you.”
I thought she probably would. “Connie it is.” I groped for some way to continue the conversation. The first few minutes with any new female were always awkward for me. “You’re a coach, are you?”
“A teacher. At the convent.” She motioned toward the group of low, gray, stucco buildings across the field. “But only until four o’clock.” She pointed past the Land Rover and up a hill. “D’you see that yellow house up there? It’s a pub. If you’re there in half an hour you can buy me a pint.” Without waiting for a reply she turned and sprinted across the field toward the waiting group of girls, who were clapping and jeering.
I quickly bought my grandfather’s nails and paint and found the pub—the Spaniard, it was called. Irish pubs rarely have any of the charm associated with their English co
unterparts, but Kinsale is on the tourist trail, and the Spaniard was contrived to please a foreign visitor and those locals who liked a bit of atmosphere and a turf fire, even in June.
Concepta Lydon—Connie, lest I get punched—arrived, bustling, speaking to the landlord and a customer or two. She was wearing a loose sweater which could not conceal her breasts and tight, American jeans designed to conceal nothing but skin. Her hair was still wet from her post- game shower, and her ears stuck out. They were nice ears.
“There’s no natural turf hereabouts,” she said, sipping a pint of lager and nodding at the hearth. “He must go to Galway to get it. The tourists like it, I expect. I like it myself.” I liked the smoky, earthy smell, too. “Why aren’t you in Vietnam?” she asked without missing a beat. “Your country’s at war, you know.”
“Bad knee. Sports injury,” I replied. “And my country’s not at war. Richard Nixon is. I’ve got nothing against those people.” She smiled and nodded, as if I’d made the right response to her baiting, and continued to question me closely. It took her no longer than three minutes to extract a fairly complete life history.
As she asked and I answered a young man came into the pub and sat at the bar behind her. He was in his early twenties, not very tall, a thick, muscular body, long, dirty, sandy hair, a thin beard. As soon as his pint arrived he turned and stared dully, fixedly at me, hardly blinking. I had never seen him before, but I knew him. He was one of the brotherhood of bullies who had haunted me throughout my life—in the schoolyard, on the football field, at summer camp, in the fraternity house. It was as though they were members of some secret fraternal order who had been read my dossier and then sent out to pick at the scabs of my cowardice. I turned my attention to Connie Lydon, but checked on him occasionally. He drank his pint and stared.
“All right, now,” I said to Connie, throwing up a hand. “Any more information and you’ll have enough for blackmail. Now you. Why are you teaching school? There can’t be nearly enough there to satisfy a curiosity like yours.”
“I like the sport, and I like teaching it to the young girls. The nuns are all right, if you know how to get along with them. I went to that very convent school myself; I know how. I’m twenty-one, I’m the daughter of a retired bank manager, I’ve two brothers—one of em’s a priest—I’ve an honours degree from the university in Cork, I’ve traveled on the continent a bit—” she leaned forward. “Will you come to dinner tonight? I’m something of a cook.”
I leaned forward myself. “Where are the two brothers?” I asked.
“The priest is in India doing good works, the other is in England,” she grinned.
“Do I have to face a bank-manager father?”
“I’ve my own cottage at Summercove, along the water. Seven o’clock?”
“Seven it is.” My stay in Ireland was going better than I could have hoped.
She tossed off the remainder of her lager and got up. I walked with her out of the pub, passing the fellow at the bar. His gaze wavered only to take in Connie Lydon. She nodded curtly to him. Then, as we came out out of the pub, I was startled to see him leaning against a car, talking to another young man. It was as though he had vanished from the pub and instantly rematerialized outside. Connie saw me start.
“They’re the O’Donnell twins,” she said, “Denny and Donal. Was Denny looking at you in the pub?”
“Yes,” I said, relieved to know there was not witchcraft afoot. “Does he have an interest in you?”
“Not one that’s reciprocated.” She got into a shiny, new Mini and started it. “You know Summercove, do you?”
“Sure.” Summercove was a fragment of a village on the north shore of Kinsale Harbour. My grandfather’s land touched it.
“The cottage stands on its own, just past the village, down by the water. You can’t miss it. Seven, then?”
“Seven.”
She was off in a spray of gravel. As I got into the Land Rover and drove away, Denny O’Donnell joined his twin outside the pub and sneered me down the hill. God help me, this time there were two of them.
My trouble with bullies had started in kindergarten. At the first recess on the first day a boy named Roy Scott had walked over to me and punched me in the stomach, knocking me down and rendering me breathlessly helpless. I somehow attracted more of these types during my school days, but fortunately, with the passing of the years, they hit me less, because that became an increasingly unacceptable form of social behavior. Still, they found other ways to taunt me, and behind this harassment there was always the threat of violence, and I was always afraid of it.
Football was both a blessing and a curse. Our coach was a maniac for physical fitness. I despised the calisthenics and running, but the exercise put some weight and muscle on me, and the physical contact gave me a bit more confidence, showing me that within clearly defined perimeters I could accept and inflict violence without fear. Although fairly athletic, I was not an outstanding player, adding my coach to the long list of adults who were always telling me I was not living up to my potential. In the last game of my sophomore year the cartilage in my left knee went, and I was relieved when after the surgery I was told that I should avoid contact sports. At once, I had my badge of courage and an honorable way out of, then, an unappealing game and, later, the Vietnam War.
Connie Lydon’s cottage could nearly be seen across the hills from my room on the third floor of my grandfather’s old house but was a five-mile drive on the roads. I was there at the stroke of seven, a bottle of wine in hand.
The cottage was very small—three tiny rooms, with a bath built onto the back—and she had done it up nicely. She cooked wonderfully, too; we had a pasta dish theretofore outside my experience; we drank the burgundy. After dinner she produced brandy, and we curled up on the sofa before a fire of peat briquettes. I had had a rural/small-town upbringing right on the buckle of the Bible belt and had attended a state university in the same behavioral territory. My sexual experiences, which I could count on the fingers of one hand without using the thumb, had taken place, respectively, on two back seats, a hammock, and a rather gritty beach towel. Now I found myself in circumstances I had experienced only in fantasy: there was a snifter of cognac in my hand, a fire at my feet, a down cushion under my backside, an attractive girl at my elbow, and a double bed in the next room. And there were no parents, housemothers, or roommates to concern myself with.
“How’sˆyour brandy?” she asked.
“What?”
She laughed. “You seem a million miles away.”
I turned toward her. “I’m exactly where I want to be,” I said, then I kissed her lightly on the lips.
She kissed me back. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. We didn’t talk much after that. We kissed a lot; I made a pass at a breast, which she skillfully parried; I aimed a knee between hers, but they closed; we kissed a lot more. I left at midnight, and she pressed her body against mine as we kissed at the door. I drove home in a haze of unfulfilled desire, already thinking of the next time.
For three weeks we saw each other constantly. We rode my grandfather’s hunters—she rode better than I; we went to the movies in Cork; we sat in on hoolies—drunken songfests—in local pubs; I gained weight on her cooking. But nothing—not physical persuasion, not all the logic I could summon from two years of proximity to the law—could pry her loose from her stainless steel virginity. I came to think of her as two girls: Connie, the fun-loving, funny, athletic, sensual, lovely thing of my days; and Concepta, the convent-educated, maddeningly Irish, immovable object of my nights.
In spite of the wonderful time I was having with her, I began to become irritable. I wanted her so much that it never occurred to me that, perhaps, I didn’t want enough of her. Finally, it all came to a head.
We were back on the sofa, in front of the fire. We had progressed to some heavy petting, but I could get no further. I had not counted on the effects of centuries of Irish Catholicism.
“You’re not makin
g love to me, Will Lee,” she said.
“Okay, whatever you say,” I said, trying harder.
“You’re a winning boy, but …” she gasped and made a little sound.
“You realize where my hand is,” I panted.
“Oh, yes, yes, but that’s all that’s going to be there.”
I may have been a winning boy, but I seemed to be losing. I sat up, abruptly. “Connie, do you have any idea what you’re doing to me?” I placed my face in my hands for effect.
“The same thing you’re doing to me, I expect.”
I shook my head. “If that were the case, we’d be in bed right now.”
“That’s not what’s important, don’t you understand?”
“It’s important to me, believe me it is.”
“But that’s all that’s important to you. It’s not me you want, it’s just sex.”
“Now Connie, that’s not true. You know I’m … I’m …”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know how I feel.”
“I’m afraid I do. That’s why we’re not in bed right now. If I thought you really cared for me, the Pope himself couldn’t keep me out of bed with you, but you don’t, not really.”
“Connie …”
“Don’t, Will. If you think about it you’ll know what I mean. There’s something … detached about you. There’s this … distance; it’s the only way I can explain it. I want more than that, and you’re clearly not ready to give it.”
She was right, of course, and faced again with something that required more than I could give without effort, I did what I had always done; I ran.
