The Death of a Joyce Scholar

by Bartholomew Gill

  Their eyes met and hers quickly filled with tears, though she held his gaze. She had heavy, powerful-looking arms, one muscle of which flexed as she swiveled the beer can on the tabletop. “Because people were jealous of him.”

  “Which people?”

  “His…’colleagues,’ they called themselves.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well”—her eyes lit on the can—“there was Flood, for one. And Holderness, for another, though he’s only a research student still, and not much of that.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Well”—the eyes flashed off—“there probably was, though I wouldn’t have known, me being tied up with the kids and all.”

  “This Flood. And Holderness. Where do I find them?”

  “Holderness, I don’t know, apart from hearing his family has gobs of money and some big estate down in the country. It’s summer, and college is closed. And even if it wasn’t, Holderness wouldn’t be there. Kevin sacked him, and he’s not to come back without some committee’s say-so.

  “Flood is still somewhere about, I’d say. Him and Kevin worked on the Joyce thing Bloomsday. Though in truth the bloody business is Flood’s alone and just that—”

  McGarr waited, vaguely remembering that Bloomsday was a celebration that involved James Joyce somehow.

  “—business, as if being a scholar no longer even means being a gentleman, poor pay though it is. ‘Summers we must care for our families too, like other people,’ Flood said, though by care he meant him and his bitch of a wife in up-market style out in Foxrock, and me and Kevin dodgin’ gurriers and bowsies in town. Says him to me one day last year when we had no food in the larder and Kevin…off someplace.” Her eyes moved toward the garden. “‘What—d’ye think I floated up the Liffey in a bubble? When I got the idea for Bloomsday, I brought it to Kevin, who said he wasn’t interested, and I had to go it alone. I put my last pound into the thing.’ Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours, he calls it. He’s even got an office and a staff in Nassau Street.” And all on Kevin, McGarr was to conclude.

  “And then I’m sure Flood wouldn’t miss the party that Kevin’s publisher is throwing for the new book, with all the celebrities he might’ve sucked up to there. He used Kevin like that, sure he did. Every chance he got.”

  McGarr again examined her: the wrinkles that extended deep into her neck, her bloodshot brown eyes. He suspected that at one time she must have been a handsome, if large, woman. “You have some problem with Flood?”

  “Me? Nar’ a bit. It’s just him and the likes of him and all the others there at their grand college—fops, swells, and nances, the lot—couldn’t hold a candle to me poor husband, and him now dead.”

  And not them. McGarr said nothing still. Her voice was now laden with emotion.

  “Sure, it would be easy to say it was a mistake from the start, Kevin forgetting all he and us were and going in to the college to sit the exams. The moderatorship and later the prizes and such. But what was he to do with all his brains? If he hadn’t, wouldn’t he have resented me and the kids all the more?” In a small voice she added, “And us his, make no mistake about that, sir.” She reached for the beer can and drank from it.

  Still McGarr waited. The eight-day clock over the fridge wound steadily on, its beat more a springy tink than a tock. A fly buzzed from the hall through the kitchen and out the narrow gap below the raised kitchen window into the garden. With a kind of groan, the P.M. settled himself on the cool flagstones beneath the sink.

  “Bloomsday?” he asked to keep her talking.

  “That’s the day James Joyce’s book Ulysses was set on. June sixteenth, 1904. And every June sixteenth Flood and Kevin took a bunch of foreigners and Americans around the paths in Dublin. The paths that a fella name of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the Joyce characters, traced in the book. Flood acted as guide, Kevin like Dedalus himself, or Joyce maybe. Flood’d bring the group to a place, and there Kevin’d be spouting the words from the book perfect. He had a brilliant memory, he had. He’d need read a thing onc’t and he’d have it bang off. It’s what earned him all the notice. The memory.”

  McGarr doubted it. He himself had a capacious memory, and here he was, a policeman. He thought of Noreen’s description of Coyle’s work and how it had left him cold.

  “You wouldn’t have another of these on you, would you?” She meant the beer.

  McGarr reached over to the fridge and pulled out the last two cans. Placing one in front of his guest, he asked, “Why do you think your husband is dead?”

  Katie Coyle’s strong fingers readily picked back the serving spout of the can. “Because I’ve got him home with me now. Some miserable fucker stabbed him right through the heart. Bloomsday, I guess. Near the Prospect Cemetery in Glasnevin.” Raising the can to her lips, she drank off nearly all its contents. When she lowered it, her face was streaming with tears. “I thought I might keep him with us as long as I could. But he’s going off now in the heat. None of the kids know. I sent the older ones down to an aunt in Clare, told her to keep them away from the telly and papers. And the babbies—” She looked away.

  McGarr slid the other can toward her. “The address?”

  She told him, and McGarr went into the study to use the telephone again.

  THREE

  THE LIBERTIES refers to a set of trading and tax franchises that the British crown once granted the Archbishop of Dublin. Formerly a wide area that encompassed much of central Dublin, the term now applies only to a small working-class neighborhood distinguished by one of Dublin’s tallest hills, several of its major churches, and the great Guinness Brewery.

  Mainly, however, it consists of a tight pack of shops, row houses, and commercial buildings and yards, near the largest of which Kevin and Katie Coyle lived in a former warehouse. McGarr at first saw only an open door, a battered lift, and a worn staircase.

  Thus he was surprised upon entering the Coyle apartment on the fourth and final floor. It was light and airy and even cool; a westward breeze, sweet with the smell of roasting black patent malt, made the curtains billow out from the windows like wide, white sails.

  And if there were but five rooms for this family of eleven—now ten—they were spacious, with tall ceilings and creaky floors that, McGarr imagined, had witnessed the passage of millions of hand trucks. The planks squeaked under foot. The wood had been sanded and varnished to a mirror gloss that allowed two Coyle children, dressed in summer shorts and thick woolen socks, to skate as easily over the surface as across a pool of blond ice.

  “Mistar, mistar,” said one, tugging at McGarr’s wrist. “Are ya a doctor? Me da has taken ill, he has.”

  And beyond all pain, thought McGarr, finding Kevin Coyle propped up on pillows on a bed which had been turned toward an open window that offered a view of the Liffey and the Georgian perfection of the Four Courts.

  “It’s like he’ll turn to us and say something strange and different about the city, like he always could,” said the wife in a tone that was close to breaking.

  McGarr thought not. Yes, his eyes were open, but—light blue—they were as opaque in death as shattered agates, and his skin, which was gray, looked soft, like scudding soap. A man in his mid-thirties, Coyle appeared to have been tall, with sloping shoulders and a thin, graceful build. His hair was brown and wavy, and his nose—as Noreen had described—seemed a little off to one side. In all, he looked as much like James Joyce as any photo McGarr had seen of the bard, down to the pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses, one lens of which was now broken and starry.

  “I knew it was wrong, but what was I to do with them otherwise. The only time he took them off was in bed, whenever he didn’t fall asleep reading, which was seldom. And without them he looked so—” Unnatural, she thought, though she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  Her husband was wearing an open-neck linen shirt, stained with dried blood from the first button catch to where a sheet had been pulled up and folded neatly over his torso.

&nb
sp; “I didn’t know what to do. With him. Treat him like he was alive or dead. But since I’d never been with him dead—” Her voice cracked and she turned to the door, on which one of the children was now beating. “Will ya get out of that, Stephen, or I’ll thrash ya sure,” she cried.

  “You found him where?”

  “I didn’t, like I said. A mate did. Propped against the wall of gray stones in a laneway at the back of the Glasnevin Cemetery. No life left in him at all. The wound—there—all clotted and thick, glasses by his side, or so he was when I got there and according to a woman whose word you can take.”

  “And she is?”

  “Cat’rine Doyle. ‘Catty,’ we call her.”

  And Katie Coyle.

  “She lives right there off the Finglas Road. There’s a warren of laneways and outbuildings between her back garden and the cemetery wall. Walking her dog, she was, before going off to work. At first she thought he was drunk, it having been in the papers about Bloomsday and all, and her knowing him like she does. ‘Get up. Get up out of that now, Kevin, and come inside for some tea,’ she said before she saw the wound and the blood. It was then she rang me up.”

  And not the police. Why? He waited. Out in the kitchen one of the children was crying; through the open windows McGarr could hear the singsong blare of police horns. “And you?”

  “I came and got him.”

  And broke the law. “How?”

  “With another of me mates.”

  McGarr now turned his head from the dead man and watched her closely. What was he hearing here, another revelation? Or a confession? Somewhere off in the apartment—or was it outside the window?—a songbird was trilling a refrain that McGarr had never heard before. It was oddly disjunctive, given the sight before them—it was sweet and complex and filled with celebration for the sun and the summer and the heat.

  “Mary Sittonn. She’s in antiques in The Coombe.” It was a narrow, busy commercial street in the Liberties. “She has a horse and cart, and we went for him.”

  With a coffin, McGarr reflected. Did they prop him up and put a pipe in his mouth? Or did they just sling him onto the jarvey and throw a tarp over him? A jarvey was not an unusual vehicle for coal men and Travelers, but it was a novelty for a woman in the antiques trade, though McGarr suspected that that explained it. A throwback to a less rushed era, it probably served as a fashionable advertisement.

  And they wouldn’t have won a second glance at rush hour, apart from the motorist with an oath on his lips, having to swing wide to pass the slow-moving cart: two big, aging Traveling women, anybody would have assumed. Especially on seeing Katie Coyle with her freckled skin and dark eyes. With the dole and housing allowance and the state taking care of so much else, there were plenty of well-fed Travelers around the city these days, living in rubble in the city center or along the green verges of the major dual-carriageways leading out into the country.

  “We’ve a lift here, and it was nothing to get him up.”

  McGarr looked at her twice. In another context the phrase might have been misunderstood, and he was further put in mind of the wake motif of all she was telling him. What about the kids? Or had the older ones already been sent down to the aunt in Clare?

  He scanned her rounded but powerful-looking shoulders. The ambulance and the forensic vans had arrived, each switching off its horn as it entered the laneway. “I need the addresses of your ‘mates.’ And tell me this—did you kill him yourself?”

  Her head went back slightly, and did color now come to her face? It did, he judged. Her eyes strayed to the bed and she shook her head once, but with a resignation that was both judgment and curse—on suspicion or on the police or on McGarr himself. “Good, bad, or indifferent, he was my husband. The father of my children.”

  “How was he at that?”

  “At what?”

  “At being the father of your children?”

  Another shrug. “He lived here. The children adored him. He was always joking with them. You know—word games, secret phrases for this and that, for a time there they even had their own language.”

  They? “And as a husband?”

  “He brought his money home. Most of it. And then we had the promise of the new book. As for the first…” She shook her head. “Kevin wasn’t much for trade and sharp practice. He’d read everything but the fine print in a contract, and they took advantage of him there.” Tears now appeared on her cheeks.

  Like Flood had, McGarr assumed she meant. “Why did you think you could move him?”

  She said nothing.

  “You’re not interested in who might have murdered him?”

  “Does it matter? Some low mucker, no doubt. Some drug addict. Some punk. They’re all over places like Glasnevin and Finglas. Ballymun’s just up the road.” The last was the name of a government-planned, working-class housing scheme that had turned into one of Europe’s most crime-ridden communities. “Over and over I told him, ‘You think you’re immune? They don’t give a tinker’s curse who you might be or where you’re from or what your prospects are. Or your credentials,’ as Kevin put it.”

  She turned to McGarr. “You know—how much a Dub’ he was, how gen-u-ine. Half them bastards are foreigners themselves or niggers or worse. But Kevin didn’t drive—he hated the automobile—and he thought he owned the city, streets and all, after the tons of shite they fed him at Trinity, once his book come out. The first one. The little one.”

  “And the big one? The new one?” McGarr asked.

  “Sure, wouldn’t he have moved from reigning deity to interstellar being?”

  There was jealousy there. No doubt about it. McGarr considered the notoriety, some of which would now be visited upon his widow regardless of her rough edges. Dublin was a city that loved its artists best (and perhaps only when) dead, and the affection for the Dublin-born and-bred Coyle with his Trinity background and international acclaim might well result in a bit of money now, both from here and abroad. “What would he have been doing in Glasnevin?”

  She shook her head. “My thought exactly, when Catty phoned me. ‘Glasnevin,’ says I. ‘What in the name of hell was he doing out there,’ though it’s in the book, so it is.”

  “What book?”

  “Ulysses,” she said with a slight twist of the head that was a characteristic Dublin gesture of dislike. “Overblown bullshit and nothin’ more. Glasnevin is in there. The cemetery. It’s where Bloom goes with the others to bury Paddy Dignam, the toper who’s just died. But Kevin and Flood, they never ‘played’ the funeral bit, as they called it. ‘It’s too bloody far,’ I can remember Kevin saying to him. ‘I get land sick out of sight of the Liffey, and the Phibsborough Road looks like a famous side at football. Of course, we all had to guess which side. Says he, ‘The Manchester You Blighted. Then it’s life and rebirth that Ulysses celebrates, with only a stab at death.’” She again inclined her head to the side and added reflectively, “His very words. Kevin was always punnin’, so he was, though how well, he could not have known.”

  McGarr wondered if she had read Ulysses. He hadn’t himself. When he had been growing up it was a banned book; called Useless by those who claimed to have read it. In the Dublin of McGarr’s early years—in many ways the Dublin he could see and hear and smell just outside the windows of the loft in the Liberties—a story wasn’t worth telling unless it could be said with convenient haste and, granted, style, to a cozy of friends who were gathered around a few jars. Others had their own tales to tell, and anything tendentious missed the mark.

  “What did they ‘play’ then? Kevin and Bloom. From Ulysses.” Three days before, if her story were true.

  The children had begun banging on the door again, reporting that some men had come in. McGarr then heard another woman’s voice, shooing them away.

  “Ah—they changed every time, since they kept gettin’ certain ones back every year. Americans mostly, Germans, and recently some Japs and such. Wanting to appear ‘literary’ the easy way.” She r
ubbed her fingers together to mean with money. “Which was all well and good for Flood, like I said.” Her eyes flashed up to McGarr’s. “He never comes up short. Never. Such that he can grant that wife of his her every whim.

  “And then Kevin had it all down pat, he did. They’d choose the soft or picturesque spots. The Martello Tower in Sandycove, if the weather was fair. Davey Byrne’s or the Ormonde, when the food was better, for a few jars and a bite to eat. Most of the pubs mentioned in Ulysses or the ones that have succeeded them they hit year in and year out, both to keep the tourists ‘happy,’ if you get my meaning, and to keep Kevin ‘flowin’,’ like.

  “Beyond all the bluster they pumped him up with at Trinity, Kevin was basically a quiet man, a born scholar and shy, and he needed a bit of courage, so he did. All the more this year, I should imagine.” Her eyes again met McGarr’s. “With the book and all. He was concerned about how they’d take it, the critics, though he’d been told by them that knew, he didn’t have a worry in the world.”

  And you even less, thought McGarr, though that was unfair. No matter how well the new book was received, the woman now had only herself and all those children. And “Cat’rine” Doyle and Mary Sittonn and whatever other mates might appear. Like the one who now announced through the closed door that the “other” police had arrived.

  “Unless you’ve got something else to tell me?”

  “Like what?” Her eyes widened.

  “The name of the woman out there with your children, for starters. Doyle, is it? Or Sittonn.”

  She turned away as Superintendent McAnulty of the Technical Squad pushed open the door and looked around.

  It was Sittonn. As she quieted the children, McGarr rocked back and forth in a tall wicker chair, staring up at an ornate, matching bird cage hanging at the top of an open window. It was filled with sun and contained two brightly colored tropical birds, the source of the song McGarr had been hearing. Across the bottom of the cage was the advisement: “It is important that we never know why the caged bird sings.”