“Is that your sister in the photos in the parlour? Is she away?”
Daniel sat heavily on the wooden bench. His face shone with sweat, which was not altogether due to the warm day.
“She just vanished one day. She told me she was going away for a few days, and that’s the last anyone saw her. It was years ago. I still miss her,” she told Iris.
“You never found out what happened to her? Oh, that’s so awful.”
“Thanks,” Jude said and turned the conversation. “Look, Mike has kept the grave all neat. You’ll have to meet him.”
They went to the big pine to look at the little cat grave. Daniel and I sat and listened to them chatter. It was quite a warm day and a spread of branches over the bench cast a dappled shade.
“I hope this visit doesn’t work her up about Fran again,” I said to Daniel.
Before he could answer the two of them returned. He patted the seat beside him. Iris sat and turned her face up to the sun. Jude paced behind the bench.
“Come, Jude, sit with us.” Daniel inched over to make room for her. Jude sat.
“Skin’s grave is still intact,” she said.
Daniel shrugged. “That cat was the bane of my life. Mike Kennedy’s a good man. He cleared up the cat’s grave, but said the cross was rotted out. Can’t think what you girls put up a cross for.”
“Fran didn’t think it was necessary, but I wanted it,” Jude said. “Can’t remember why now. We buried a few mice here too. Skin’s murders, we called them.”
“Did you have other animals? Do you have a whole pet cemetery here somewhere?” Iris looked around as if one would pop up among the trees.
“No, we just had that one cat, though it seemed like a hundred.” Daniel laughed. “I think it had a grudge against me.”
“I thought your house would be full of animals. You have some great ones in your books.”
“That’s where I liked them best. They didn’t run away with my stuff and eat it.”
I listened to them banter. Iris told stories about some of the pets she’d had. Daniel listened and asked questions as if this conversation were the most important in the world. As Iris and he conversed, he laughed more than I’d heard him do so far.
The walk back to the house was slower, and Daniel stumbled now and again on the uneven ground.
“Careful,” Jude said after one such stumble. She came forward to take his other arm. The path was so narrow that it was even harder to walk this way, so she dropped back again to walk with Iris.
We settled into the chairs by the garden. Daniel was out of breath and sat heavily, but insisted on tea, or whiskey for those who wanted it. Jude and I had tea, Daniel and Iris a whiskey.
“So, you’re looking for your mother’s family,” he said to Iris as he swirled the ice in his drink.
“Yes. I have some photos, if you want to see her,” Iris said. “And I brought the little watercolour of the village that hung on our wall.”
She went inside and came back with a brown envelope. I watched her open it, glad no one could hear my heart rattle about in my chest. She pulled out the watercolour first, then two small square photos with serrated edges from the envelope. She passed me the watercolour. It showed the village from the square near the war memorial. The old TB hospital was on the hill above the village, still a hospital then, and the building that now housed the café, a small variety store and a craft shop was still part of the old Garda barracks. The road to Daniel’s house led away to one side. It was a shock to see it, because, even though it was unsigned, I knew at once that my sister Maggie had painted it. She was a dab hand at watercolours when she was younger. She sold them to raise money for the church at the Christmas sale. I passed the little picture to Daniel without a word. He looked at it briefly, then passed it on to Jude.
“Let me see those, then,” I said to Iris and held out my hand for the photos.
“I don’t have many photos of her. She hated having her picture taken,” Iris said. “When I went through them after she died these two were the best we had.”
No matter how I tilted and turned the snaps in the light, I didn’t learn much from them about Iris’s mother. The first picture was of two females, one clearly a younger version of Iris. The other woman was about five foot four or five, a bit taller than Iris today. She was very thin; her head was turned to the side and was wrapped in a scarf that trailed down across her left shoulder. All I could see was the line of her jaw and cheekbone on the right side of her face, the rest no more than a blurry shadow.
The second picture showed what could have been the same person. She stood full face to the camera, but the photo was out of focus. She wore a wide-shouldered jacket and midi, her legs cut off at the ankles in the photo. She stood in front of some impressive stone building, her hat pulled low on her forehead. She could be any trendy woman of her day.
“Can’t say I know her,” I said.
I held out the photo to Jude.
The eagerness in Jude as she took the photos roused pity in me, for at once I realized she was hoping against all hope that it might be her lost sister. Her shoulders drooped and some of the light left her face after she’d examined them as closely as I had done. God forgive me, I should have been more sympathetic to her still mourning the loss of her sister, to her hope that Fran would turn up one day. She needed to put it behind her and move on. We all have to do it with the tragedies and disappointments of our lives. Few of us get the outcomes we want when it comes right down to it.
11
Daniel was besotted with Iris. He lit up like an altar whenever she showed up. I should have been happy that something cheered him up, the state he was in, but I couldn’t help but wish it were not Iris who caused it. Ever since Jude had invited her to lunch she’d become a regular visitor. It seemed, in fact, that she was everywhere, all the time. On a trip to the butcher’s the other day I saw her run past the window dressed in a pair of shorts and T-shirt. Her legs pumped up and down with no apparent effort as she loped along. She ran every day, she told me later, and it showed, because although she moved with some speed, it looked like it was no effort for her at all. It was a long time since I felt my own body light, breath that slipped in and out with ease. A weight was on me these days, underscored by the silences that fell on the little groups of villagers as I drew near on the street or in the café. Even outside the Chapel on Sunday. They were all speculating about Iris showing up looking for her family, the Buckleys. I wished her gone back to where she came from. Speedily.
She was underfoot at Daniel’s more often than not. At first it was Jude who asked her up to the house. They had a mutual interest in the gardening and I thought perhaps Jude was lonely with no young people around except for Mike. Then Daniel took a shine to her and wore himself out as they played poker in the afternoons. In no time at all she was a daily visitor.
Any fine day found Jude and Iris out in the garden, and this day was no exception. They dug and weeded what was once the kitchen garden and already had a few piles of discarded plants on the side of the path. From the kitchen window I watched Jude on her haunches as she pulled weeds from between the rosemary and oregano and tossed them to the edge of the path. Iris dug out the old potato plants that had gone to seed. She bent and lifted the shovel, came up with a sod of earth attached to old plants, her muscles bunching and flexing with each load.
And to think that I was the one who suggested the garden needed attention in an effort to find something to occupy Jude! Well, I never imagined Iris Butler showing up when I did that.
Jude and Iris laughed at something. They stood close together, Iris leaning on the spade as she bent over in mirth, their giggles almost indistinguishable from each other’s.
“Iris brings a bit of life to this place, doesn’t she? She cheers me up, and Jude too.”
I jumped out of my skin when Daniel spoke. So absorbed was
I in the two women, I hadn’t heard him come in. We stood a moment together observing them.
“Aye, she does that. I hope Jude isn’t getting any strange notions,” he said.
“What do you mean? What sort of notions?”
“That this is Fran’s child. You know she’s thinking it, same as I know it. Are you sure you’re not related to her some way? By a cousin or something?”
For a moment I wondered if he was playing with me. It was hard to believe he did not see what I saw when I looked at her. Before I could answer, Iris looked towards us and waved. Daniel waved back.
“She cheers the place up, though, doesn’t she?” he said again, then took up his walking sticks and went out to them.
“Iris is a great help clearing that patch. She knows weeds from useful plants, which is more than I can say of myself.”
Jude and I were in the kitchen after Iris left and Daniel went up to rest. I sorted out his medications so that Jude could keep them straight the next day when I was off.
“You’re making good progress there, all right,” I said.
“Yes, thank heaven. For a while it seemed like we were getting nowhere. You know, Iris had all her hope on you being able to help with her search for family. Too bad you can’t.”
“Well, she got on this long without them, it seems to me she’ll do all right on her own. She’s looking for a needle in a haystack.”
I counted the pills, then double-checked them in the little squares of the box Jude used when I wasn’t here.
“I can understand it. I’ll have no real family left when Daniel dies. He has a sister, Aunt Maud. She’s older than him and is crippled with arthritis. She lives in New Zealand and never married. Mother was an only child, so unless Fran turns up, it’s just me.”
“You can’t possibly believe your sister will show up after all this time, can you?”
I was genuinely curious, and my question brought tears to her eyes. She sniffled, got a hankie from her skirt pocket and blew her nose.
“It’s my hope, Delia. I just can’t give up hope. It seems like letting her down, giving up on her. So many times over the years, walking in a street somewhere or at an event, I have imagined I caught a glimpse of her, or heard her laugh. Many times I’ve followed some strange woman in the street, convinced by her walk, or her hair, or even some gesture she made, a turn of the head or some other thing, that she was Fran. Even when I knew the person I followed was too young I still followed them. For a few years I kept a second job so I could pay a private investigator to look for her. The PI had no more success than I.”
She wiped her nose again. I snapped the lid on the pillbox shut and patted her on the shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Jude. But you know...”
“Yes,” she interrupted me, “it’s better to let the past go. So you keep saying, but it’s not such an easy thing to do, is it?”
“No, pet, it isn’t. Not at all,” I said. “But we have to sometimes. We just have to.”
Around this time I saw a softening in Jude toward Daniel. Perhaps in the evenings when I had gone home they had time to talk. Daniel no longer sent her so many long, broody looks when he thought she didn’t notice.
“You seem to have forgiven your father,” I said to her one afternoon when we were alone. She looked at me in surprise.
“It seems I have. I suppose so. He’s so frail, Delia. Whatever grudges I have kept against him seem...trivial...in the face of his life ending.”
She echoed what I’d been thinking myself. All those years I’d nursed a hatred and contempt of him seemed a waste of time now. Besides, they’d had no impact on him, only on me.
“Compassion is a good thing,” I said, as much to myself as to Jude.
She nodded and looked at the floor. A tear took a slow trip down the side of her nose. I gathered her in my arms and patted her back. She clung to me like a child as her shoulders shook with grief. Something inside me shifted, dislocated, as I held Daniel and Ellen Wolfe’s surviving daughter and tried to console her.
12
St. Joseph’s Church was at the far end of the village from Daniel’s place. As I walked in for Devotions on Friday the soft misty rain was more like a caress than a nuisance. By the time I reached the middle of Main Street I had joined up with the other people as they made their way to the chapel. It was always a great chance to catch up on gossip, find out who was expecting, who was ill, who was going out with whom, who was moving away to the city, or emigrating altogether.
Eileen McGrath fell in step with me as I neared St. Joseph’s. Any news you wanted to get around the village, all you needed to do was tell Eileen and almost every household would know it before you got to bed that night.
“Well, hello, Delia. Isn’t it grand that you can get away to Devotions? How are things at the Big House?”
She was not subtle, Eileen.
“Ah, I hate to miss my Friday, you know.”
“Indeed. Sure we can count on you to be there always, no matter what’s going on. How’s himself?”
“Mr. Wolfe is doing as well as can be expected, Eileen.”
“Mm. I hear he’s pretty bad. Will he get over it, do you think? “
I wasn’t certain whether she had actually heard that or if she was just fishing.
“He’s grand at the moment. The drugs are hard on him, you know. He sticks close to home.”
“Ah well, he’s always done that now, hasn’t he? And his daughter came all the way from Canada. Then there’s that young one in town looking for her people. By name of Buckley, I hear. Have you met her?”
“Her name is Butler. Yes, she came to the house to talk to me. Sure there’s no help I can give her.”
Eileen was not deterred.
“But the family she’s looking for is Buckley, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But it has nothing to do with us, sure. None of us would have known her mother at all.”
We walked in silence for a while. St. Joseph’s was in sight, so I quickened my step.
“Your sister Maggie, now. She’s been away a while, hasn’t she?”
“She has.”
“Aye. Where is it she is now?”
I was out of patience with Eileen McGrath, but like all gossips she could sniff out reluctance to impart information before a person knew she wanted to keep something to herself and it only made her more determined.
“Still in the home in Dublin where she’s been for over twenty years. Doing as well as can be expected.”
“Ah, yes. She is. She is. I wonder if she’d know anything about this Butler girl.”
“How could she? Sure she was in the home when Iris Butler was born. She’d know nothing. Even if she did, she’d not remember it now anyway. Well, here we are. I wonder what the sermon will be tonight.”
“Father Halloran does such a grand job it doesn’t really matter, does it? I expect it will be about love your neighbour or some such. You don’t have to worry on that score, Delia. Aren’t you great the way you look after the sick.”
“It’s what I’m trained to do, Eileen.”
We were at the church door. I dipped my fingers in the Holy Water font and blessed myself. Eileen McGrath and I went in side by side and took our pews.
Instead of listening to Father Halloran’s sermon, I thought of the first time I met Daniel. I was working on the children’s ward at the local hospital. Instead of the picnics the FitzGibbons held on their estate during my childhood, Daniel now came once a year to visit the children and to read to them. He also gave them each a copy of one of his books. Although we had lived in the same village for most of my life, I’d never actually met him before that I could remember. I’d met his wife and Fran and Jude at those picnics and run into them in the village now and again when we were young. Jude doesn’t remember me, but I remember her, always tagging along with F
ran, but keeping in her shadow.
In any event, I happened to be on duty the day of Daniel’s visit to the hospital in early spring of 1967. It was a beautiful spring that year. I remember the scent of lilac as I walked out home after work and the fields bright with bluebells, all the bushes alive with sparrows and linnets.
Of course I had seen photos of Daniel. Indeed for weeks before he came his photo was plastered on every notice board in the hospital. He was, then, about forty-five, a man at the height of his vitality. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had that confidence, a sense of who he was, that made him seem so.
The children were crazy with excitement. For once none of them objected to being washed and tidied up. Those who couldn’t get up sat as straight as they could in their beds and those that were ambulatory congregated in the biggest ward where we had wheeled those who weren’t too ill but who were still confined to bed. I was alerted to Daniel’s arrival by the hush that struck the ward. It will never leave my mind, that first moment when I turned and saw him. He stood just inside the door, a smile a mile wide on his face. I was drawn to him right away, at a glance dazzled by the energy that radiated from him.
“Good morning, everyone,” he said.
Nobody answered, the children being struck dumb by the presence of the man who wrote the books most of them had listened to and read just about their whole lives.
“Well, that’s not much of a welcome,” he said. “Don’t you want to hear about the adventures of Wally Wee?”
“Yes!”
A little girl shouted that out, then buried her head in her book, but emboldened by her, all the other kids joined in. A chorus of yeses rained down around Daniel.
He was wonderful with them. He talked to them very naturally. For their part they adored him. He asked all about them and answered their questions with some humour and patience. He read to them for a long time and I was quite moved to see how engrossed they became, the ward, their loneliness and discomforts forgotten.
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