We arrived at the Bahnhof with about two minutes to spare, but she decided she must have a newspaper. An American newspaper.
“No longer can I read Nazi rubbish, all journalists in this damn country are utterly poltroons.”
Of course foreign newspapers were no longer displayed on the racks at the train station and when she asked for a Paris Herald the newsagent took his time lifting a copy off a shelf behind him, then accepted her money with a snigger. Even the Berlin newsies had fallen sway to the regime.
Then she wanted to buy some fruit, but there wasn’t time. It seemed to me she was trying to linger. And on the crowded platform, with her newspaper folded under her arm, she suddenly stopped cold.
“I cannot, Billy.”
“Come on, our train leaves in a minute.”
“I won’t run away.”
“You aren’t.”
We were speaking in English. People rushing to board were knocking past us.
“I am! People are drowning and I’m running away.”
Anxious people were rushing by us; the loudspeaker was squawking arrivals, departures, and track changes.
Finally I just grabbed her arm.
“Let go of me!”
I ignored her. We struggled. She gave in, and I hustled us both along the platform, located our compartment, pushed her inside, then tossed our luggage into the overhead rack. I was angry, frightened, and sick feeling. I’d never ordered or forced her to do anything. As the train pulled out of the station, she was quietly weeping, but she fell asleep on my shoulder before we were even clear of the city’s ugly outskirts.
We had the compartment to ourselves. I was relieved to be speeding west. I imagined the ride across Germany at night as the first stage of a journey that would end on the Pacific coast of Canada. I intended to withdraw all I could take out from my IG Farben pension fund and purchase as many dollars as I was allowed, but exchange rates weren’t favorable. There’d be taxes and fines. To extract money from Germany was difficult. We’d be on a tight budget from now on.
It was a rattling second-class coach, the sort we called ein Donnerbüchse—a thunderbox. Wooden benches. Karin woke after a while and sat calmly leafing through her Paris Herald. Our relationship had always had the power of sex somewhere near its core. I’d always felt the pull of her body, the beauty of her bones, sweet curve of her ass, heat of her skin.
At Leipzig a pack of stalwart, sunburned young girls wearing the uniform of the Bund-Deutscher Mädel crowded into our compartment.
“Smells like a Jew in here!”
“French clothes and lipstick—she’s no German!”
I wanted us to shift to another compartment, but Karin would not budge. She sat straight-backed, not saying a word, gazing at the leader of the troop, a buxom middle-aged woman who looked like a housewife and seemed flustered by her girls’ behavior. She began shushing them. At last they opened their picnic baskets and, munching their wursts, cheese, and chocolate, ignored us for the rest of the trip.
Her partner, Stefan Koplin? For all his skill at arranging South American visas, he didn’t get himself out in time. Kop died at Theresienstadt. Pneumonia. Winter of ’41–’42.
PRECIOUS GIRL
Holograph letter Constance Ormsby Lange to C. A. Butler. Browne-Butler Family Archive. T16-4-22-1. Special Collections, James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway.
WYCHWOOD
May 13th 1916
SIR CHARLES BUTLER
Army & Navy Club
Pall Mall, London
Charley, a stor
My poor son remains a prisoner at the Alex. Palace. While you are in London Charley do go and see him and the warders will notice that he is not without friends. I can’t help but think of poor OW and the Reading gaol which wrecked his health. What can you say of a country where the best men are in gaol? As for my daughter-in-law Eileen her plan is to stay with her father at Strandhill. I told her she might as well come to live at W’wood there is nothing but bedrooms and we have plenty of food, though the house is wet and the few meagre acres we still hold are neglected because so many of the men have gone into the army or are growing crops for the army. Getting in the hay will be a piece of work, so few hands available.
I don’t know how we would get along, my daughter-in-law and myself, she is such a strong-minded little person.
For the moment they seem to have settled in with her father, an old fenian, Joseph McDermott, Esq.
The fight in Dublin is still all people talk about. E. says Sackville street is a wreck. No one hereabouts spoke for the rebels but day after day as we hear of executions the feeling changes. No one in Sligo had heard of James Connelly but when they had to put him in a chair to shoot him because he was unable to stand on account of his wounds!—he becomes a holy martyr. And Con Booth—the Baroness! Markievicz as she calls herself now, she was Madame M. when last I saw her—is to be shot. The Gore-Booth girls I always thought domineering & tiresome but I admit she has shown courage and spirit. If they shoot her it will cause a stir, the G-B family at Lissadell have been good landlords. E’s father Jos. McDermott in a letter to the Champion writes of “the sickening thud that went through the heart of Ireland at the execution of each victim.” This is correct. At first people called them fools, now the feeling is—they may be fools, only they acted for love of Ireland.
I hope you do find a war job, Charley, it’s too bad for the country if they can’t use an old campaigner in time of war. It’s officers of your age who have the sand and will steady the young. Of course you are too old for active service, you must put that out of your mind my love, but there must be useful work for you, training troops as you said, or buying up horses for the cav., there was never a fellow with your eye for a horse Charley. Don’t be shy but beard all friends & let them know you are looking for a place.
There is the news out of poor old Wychwood. Write and tell me you have seen my son.
Your old friend,
Con
There was a live current of feeling between Grainne and my grandfather. He looked at her as though he were famished and she were something to eat. And to her he was a great man, a sort of king. She took meticulous care of his clothes, brushing, sponging, pressing. She burnished his boots and ironed his snow-white collars. Once, I watched her tying a silk cravat around his neck, the purest moment of whatever was between them I ever witnessed. She had a sort of prideful glow, like an altar boy helping the priest into golden vestments.
The two aunts and my mother were furious at their father for carrying on with a skivvy. What complicated matters was that they couldn’t help liking Grainne, an island girl from Achill. In her shyness and gaiety she reminded them of their mother. They were constantly trying to persuade Grainne to quit the red villa and find work somewhere else. I recall the maid sitting on a three-legged stool with my mother and her sisters berating her—Grainne was weeping. But she had nowhere else to go. Her parents were dead, and her brothers were in Scotland and Boston. Irish was her first language; her English wasn’t strong. Skivvying at the red villa was her first paid job, and she was saving every penny for the fare to Boston even if the ships weren’t sailing on account of the war. Grainne had only the vaguest notion where America was. I tried to explain, using my grandfather’s Cambridge Atlas, but a map didn’t mean much to her. She knew Boston and Sligo were each a considerable distance from her island of Achill, and that was all that mattered.
My grandfather paid her generously, even extravagantly, and Grainne was greedy for money and mad to save. She squirreled away every penny. And there wouldn’t have been many positions open to an island girl who spoke better Irish than English and wasn’t trained to the sort of manners that people who lived in towns like Sligo expected from servants.
Grainne used to play football with me on the cobblestones in the stable yard. My grandfather despised football as an English game, so we never played when he was at home. We didn’t have a real football, only a pig’s bladder my mother had g
otten from a farmer. Grainne was always barefoot. She had a very powerful kick and was speedy and aggressive chasing the ball, laughing, hoisting her skirt to run faster. She fought for the ball relentlessly and never gave it up.
Aunt Frances did most of the cooking but Grainne lugged sticks, and turves of peat, and set all the fires, emptied the jakes, did the laundry, made the beds every morning, and cleaned our boots. A life of endless scouring, scrubbing, and washing up.
One evening she was showing me how to lay a fire in my grandfather’s study when he came into the room and stood over us. He reached and touched the nape of her neck. For a second she froze, then went on with the work, giving the sticks and paper all her attention.
After he’d settled at his desk she demonstrated how to light a fire without wasting matches.
Grainne spoke a clear and beautiful form of Irish, the Achill Irish which has a good deal of Ulster in it, and my grandfather wanted his daughters to improve their Irish diction. But Grainne was very eager to polish up her English for America, and the young women always communicated in English when my grandfather was not at home.
Grainne had no overcoat, only a black shawl. She borrowed my aunt Kate’s mackintosh because she hated the corner boys in town laughing at her as a “shawlie.” Her only footwear was a pair of hand-sewn cowhide pampoots, more like slippers than shoes, which marked her as an island woman. So she preferred going barefoot. All of my aunts’ shoes were too small for her.
“My feet is hard,” she told my mother.
It was a rainy day, we were having tea in the kitchen, and Grainne was polishing the nickel plate on the stove. She liked to polish, liked to see the gleam; probably there had been little of it in her island cabin.
“I don’t like those pampoots, they make me feel like an old woman. And I’m not, am I? I’m your Grainne, I’m your precious girl.”
Like many native Irish speakers in those days, she spoke a form of English I would describe as “exalted.”
“My feet is the real ground, and I shall only have the fine shoes in America.”
She pronounced it Amerikay.
My grandfather offered Grainne to his daughters as a symbol of the comely and pure nation he wished Ireland to become, his mental Ireland. But he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He wanted intimacy with the “real” Ireland. He may have felt he had a right to her.
He never tried to hide the affair—if you can call it that—from his daughters. Everything he did he believed in passionately, no matter who got hurt, but he must have known that if word got around that he was sleeping with a housemaid it would destroy his hope of a political career. Frances and Kate and my mother were too proud—or too ashamed—ever to let the secret outside the house.
My grandfather resented Grainne going shoeless into town. Shoeless on the western islands may have suggested a kind of purity; shoeless in town only meant you couldn’t afford shoes. When he caught Grainne starting off to Sligo without shoes on her feet he would shout at her and she would tear up to her room in the attic, sobbing, then come down clomping in the hated pampoots, which she probably stashed in the hedge as soon as she was out of sight.
“Why does it matter so much that the girl wear shoes?” my mother said. She was the only one who dared question him.
“It’s a disgrace to this house,” he replied.
“Then buy her a decent pair of shoes!”
But he wouldn’t. Maybe he figured she ought to spend some of her precious Boston savings to buy herself shoes.
There wasn’t a lot of money to spare. My grandfather was a professional man, but his father had been a tenant, a cottier. The easiest way for a lawyer in that part of the world to make money was to represent the landed interest, then earn some sinecure from the Crown. He would not do that. He was a Republican, his clients were small farmers haggling over land, and Aunt Frances had to plead every week for the money to buy food to feed us all. But his precious girl Grainne had her wages every week. And there was always enough money to buy the special Scotch marmalade he liked, which was very expensive.
When the Sligo Champion referred to him as “the eminent barrister” Grainne was the only one in the house to think of saving the newspaper, though she herself couldn’t read. (It’s slipcased in one of the boxes at McGill, but the newsprint has gone stiff and yellow and would probably crumble if anyone tried to look at it, but who ever would?)
Grainne assured me my grandfather was the most famous man in Ireland, which even at the time I knew was not the case. The leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin were more famous. Outside the local law courts, who’d ever heard of Joseph McDermott, Esq., of Sligo?
In Sligo town one day, he saw Grainne smoking a cigarette and marched right up to her and tore it out of her mouth. Women smoking in public did not fit his ideal. No one could ever live up to his ideal of Irishness. But that evening when Grainne packed up her belongings and announced she was leaving the house, he burst into tears, pleaded with her to stay, and offered to marry her. My mother and aunts were aghast.
Grainne ignored the marriage offer, but stayed. She needed ten pounds for her fare to Boston, and something to land on.
My grandfather often told Grainne, and me, that America would be the ruin of her. He spoke scornfully of American emigrants. They were people to whom money mattered too much.
He gave me a penknife so that I could whittle sticks into spears and took me along on his rambles in the countryside. He knew the names of every field we crossed. Even the smallest field had an English name and an Irish one.
He would stop to speak to turf cutters and hay makers and men and women lifting the potatoes. People jabbed their thumbs to the west and mentioned Boston as casually as though it were the next town over, which for thousands of them it was.
I recall walking across a bog with my grandfather one afternoon. It is really the light I remember. We’re crossing a shoulder bog, my grandfather Joseph McDermott and me. By then Eilín and I have been at the red villa two or three months, long enough for me to become accustomed to his ways. He frightens some people, but not me. With him, I am who I am. We’re pacing out ground, measuring it by walking it. He wants to win a lawsuit on behalf of a client claiming ownership of the bog. I have only just absorbed the idea of landownership. Turf, heather, rocks, stunted trees—perhaps even the flicker of light and shadow across the land on such a breezy day—it all belongs to someone, exactly as my football belongs to me.
But my parents and I, we don’t own land. Not an inch of it. The house Sanssouci was never ours. My mother had recently explained this fact. And we are never going back there, even when my father gets out of the Ally Pally, where they won’t even allow him to build a hut for privacy. He doesn’t own a piece of the Ally Pally, but the Ally Pally seems to own him. He was not born on any ground but aboard a sailing ship one thousand miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico. My mother was born in the red villa but seems unhappy there. She has been out to see my grandmother Con at Wychwood. The house is not in such bad shape, I’ve overheard her telling Aunt Kate.
“Some of it is tumbledown. Bits are rather grand. She needs help to make the hay.”
As my grandfather and I cross the bog, light is coming in waves off the Atlantic, the sky is gray but luminous, one of those gray midsummer days in the northwest of Ireland when the west wind is warm and active and seems to carry the light. He wears a gold watch on a gold chain hooked to a button of his waistcoat. It must be June or July, because we meet a pair of turf cutters working a bank, not seeing them until we’re almost upon them. My grandfather stops to talk to the men, and they seem happy to pause, putting down spades and lighting cigarettes, and that’s all right, for my grandfather has nothing against the habit in men.
1938
When our train pulled into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, the Mädel maidens were bickering over the tents and camping gear they would have to carry. Their leader looked fed up.
I walked Karin out to a rank of cabs. We hadn’t ca
sh to pay her cab fare out to Walden, her father’s estate, so she offered a driver her earrings instead, which he accepted.
When Karin reached Walden that night, she found her father stretched out asleep on a sofa in his library. The other rooms were quite bare, and the only servant left on the place was Herta, widow of the baron’s chauffeur, asleep on a cot in the kitchen. Karin made herself a nest of blankets in her old bedroom. Her four-poster bed had been stolen, along with most of the furniture in the house, her father’s horses, and her mother’s art collection.
I, meanwhile, walked the silent city of Frankfurt to my rooms near the Römer. After two years, my landlady had at last awarded me my own set of keys. I let myself into the house and tumbled into bed.
After work the next day I took a tram out to the resort town of Bad Homburg, where my parents were living in a once-grand hotel, the same establishment where the baron had been staying in 1895 when he was introduced to Lady Maire, who was touring the Continent with her parents.
Buck and Eilín had their room at a monthly rate, but they’d quickly learned how costly it was to live in a hotel. When the head housekeeper quit, the manager had offered my mother the position, and she took it. My father started working night-clerk shifts soon after.
They were in favor of my getting out of Germany, at least in theory. In practice, it would be a blow. I’d never shown them Günter Krebs’s letter urging that I join him and his SS pals in the struggle for a new world. My father had a history with Günter Krebs, and I figured his letter would only frighten and dismay them.
Back in March, when it had looked like war over Czechoslovakia, my parents had talked about quitting Germany for Eire. But even if they could obtain exit visas—required, because Buck had only a German passport—Eire was desperately poor. And it was unclear what the free state would do with German nationals if it came to war. Probably intern them.
Carry Me Page 9
