The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  She had made up her mind. If he didn’t show up, she would go back to Chicago at the end of the school year without a word of complaint. She would make a place for him in her memory, cordon off a small portion of her heart and daydream from time to time of the way the morning sun brought out the red in his hair when it filtered through the wooden shutters of the Casa di Santa Barbara. And eventually, she would move on. She would silence the voice inside of her that said if she lost Eoin, her life would always be less than what it could have been.

  And if he did show up?

  Well, that was something else entirely.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Sister Geneve said, standing up and slipping the envelope into the breast pocket of her pants suit. “Trust in God that what must be, shall be.” She nodded toward Laura and Ronnie on the dance floor. “Now go enjoy the party.”

  Spring had come to eastern Ireland at last. Rainy days gave way to hours of flooding sunlight, and purple flowers bloomed along the hills. Wooly new lambs leaped and played in the fields, and pale yellow furze grew heavy over the guardrails of the highways. Sister Geneve had delivered her letter to Eoin at the Quayside after her Sunday bingo night. He hadn’t opened it in front of her, so she had no information for Maggie other than to confirm that he had received it. All month, Maggie had wondered why Sister Geneve had offered to help her. She knew that nuns were supposed to be selfless and all, but this wasn’t exactly giving alms to the poor: it was aiding and abetting a lovesick teenager. And even though Maggie was grateful for Sister Geneve’s kindness, she wondered, didn’t that break the rules of nun conduct to go against the orders of one’s superior? Didn’t they take a vow of obedience? There was only one explanation that made sense: Dan Sean had put her up to it. So on the night before the concert, Maggie went up to visit him and find out.

  As she climbed the hill toward Dan Sean’s cottage, she stopped to turn her face to the warm sun. The passing of the seasons made her wonder where she would be in a year, in ten years, in twenty years. Would she sit one day at a small stool in the Quayside on Saint Stephen’s Day, Eoin older now, maybe with thinning hair or a belly gone soft, touching her gently on the shoulder before he stood to buy her a drink? Or would her life double back to where it had begun, and would she be living in a bungalow in Jefferson Park or a two-flat in Albany Park, working for the city, married to a cop, watching Bears games on television while outside the air filled with the smell of burning leaves? At Colm’s house, Laura had already begun packing boxes. She’d shipped home all of her summer clothes; there was no staying any longer than she needed to. Colm was barely home these days. He drank at the pub, slept on the couch in the sitting room, and puttered in the shed for hours. Once, Maggie had seen him walking down Adelaide Street with a freckle-sprinkled woman dressed in pair of nurse’s scrubs. They were laughing together. When he saw Maggie, he stopped laughing.

  “It isn’t what it looks like,” he’d said. “Your mother—” he sighed. “Emma, this is Maggie, Laura’s daughter.”

  “Oh,” was all the woman had said.

  When she got to the top of the hill she could see through the window the turf fire illuminating Dan Sean, and there was a figure of a woman sitting next to him. A white puff of hair and octagonal glasses. Sister Geneve leaned over to Dan Sean, caressed his face with the back of her white hand. This in itself might not have struck Maggie as terribly odd, but it was the way the nun looked at him—the same longing look that she’d once seen on her mother’s face when Colm came home from work covered in sweat and cement dust; the look that Aíne wore when Paddy recited Tibullus to her under the canvas tent at the Magic Teacups; the look she imagined must have been on her own face when, in the morning of a Dublin hostel, Eoin had said, I could be the person who won’t hurt you. It was an ageless look, as innocent and hopeful on an old woman as it was on a girl of sixteen. Everyone visited Dan Sean O’Callaghan: it was a duty, a care, an act of respect. But Sister Geneve visited him because she was in love with him.

  Maggie remembered the explanation. I’m not his niece by blood, technically. Though Maggie had not known it at the time, this had been a justification.

  She scrambled behind Billy’s shed when she saw the two of them rise from the chairs, and Dan Sean wrapped Sister Geneve’s jacket around her shoulders. A few minutes later, the tiny nun emerged from the front door, the old man holding steady to the crook of her elbow. He held on to her as they picked their way down the front path. When they reached her rusty Peugeot, he stopped to lean down and stroke the puffy white hair at the crown of her head. Sister Geneve said something Maggie couldn’t catch, and then she reached up to Dan Sean’s jowly chin, standing on her tiptoes on the flagstone, drew his face down to hers, and kissed him: a lingering, gentle kiss that flouted and defeated their old age, their frailty, their worn bodies. When they separated and he made his measured progress back up to his front door, Sister Geneve got in her car and looked around her as if reacquainting herself with the trivialities of grass and stones, before starting the ignition and heading down the hill.

  Maggie slumped against the shed door. That’s why she gave Eoin the letter. She knows what it’s like to love someone when the whole world’s against it. How the town would have loved that scandal: a widower and his dead wife’s niece! A niece who also happens to be a nun of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary! But then, thought Maggie, what was so ridiculous about that, really? We love who we love. We have as little control over that as we do over anything.

  On April 8, the day of the concert, school went by in a torturous blur. Maggie watched the clock until she thought she’d go crazy. At lunchtime, she sat with Nigella and her popular crew, smiled placidly as they one-upped each other with their bawdy talk of blowjobs and nightclubs and clothes. When they finished their sandwiches and Nigella announced they were going out to the chipper to scour for boys, Maggie made a polite excuse that she had to meet Ms. Lawlor to go over a French assignment. Instead, she went into the bathroom stall with her Discman and listened to Nevermind with her eyes closed. Uncle Kev, she prayed, I’m sorry to keep bugging you about this. Just one more reminder: please, please, please, let him be there tonight. It’s kind of important.

  On the walk home from school, Maggie stopped at a shop and bought herself a ninety-nine, her first of the season. A warm breeze blew from the ocean, and the gulls wheeled and called in the harbor. It really felt like spring. In front of O’Connell’s Electronics, a small crowd of longhaired boys with skateboards under their arms had gathered in front of the television sets. Probably some big soccer game, Maggie thought. Or is there a horse race on today? As she walked past them, licking her ice cream cone, she glanced up at the window at the six television screens all programmed to the same channel. She saw six identical images of Kurt Cobain’s face: the matted blond hair, the cleft chin, the eyes both mischievous and sad. It was all she’d been thinking about since she’d woken up, and seeing his face on the screens like that was a little bit like wishing for snow and looking up and seeing it fall, beautifully and out of nowhere, from the sky. Then, at the bottom of the screen, she saw the headline:

  NIRVANA FRONT MAN KURT COBAIN, 27, FOUND DEAD IN SEATTLE HOME

  One of the boys with the skateboards was crying soundlessly. But there were other sounds to occupy the silence: tires on asphalt, women chattering to the babies they pushed in strollers, the deep call, out on the water, of a ship. And the sea, always the sea. Maggie touched the crying boy’s arm.

  “How?”

  “He shot himself.” The boy held out his palm to her, offering a cigarette. The five of them stood there, then, smoking in the bright spring air. Nobody said anything. One by one, the four boys flicked their cigarettes into the street, dropped their skateboards to the pavement, and wheeled away. Maggie had never seen them in Bray before, and after that day she never saw them again. It was as if they had walked in straight from the water and out again, a band of new wave psychopomps shuttling the souls of the dead across t
he wide sea line to whatever it was that lay beyond.

  Because she didn’t know what else to do, Maggie walked home, finishing her cone. She unlocked the door, put her backpack down, and took a shower. When she came out, wrapped in a towel and combing her damp her, Colm called to her from the kitchen.

  “Did you hear the news? That Cobain lad is dead.”

  “He shot himself,” Ronnie, parked inches from the television, said. “In his greenhouse.”

  “Yeah. I heard,” Maggie said numbly. “I can’t believe it. Gone too soon. He had his demons, I guess.” The words fell out of her mouth like stones. They meant nothing. Colm stood in the kitchen doorway, his mouth half open, as if to offer some comfort. But the connection with Kevin was so obvious that mentioning it would have been crass. Maggie got dressed and put his letter in her pocket as she always did. She dabbed perfume on her neck and in the crooks of her elbows, where the veins were plump and ready. She moved through the house like a haunted spirit. She surprised herself at how little she wanted to cry.

  She called her mother at Dunne’s and told her she was going out with friends for the night. Then, she walked the mile back into town to catch the bus to Dublin. As soon as she got off at the Merrion Road stop, she knew that something special had occurred. Outside the RDS hundreds of fans stood soaked in the spring rain, milling about and hugging each other as if at a wake. Under the dripping trees, people played guitars. Someone had brought a CD player, wedged it high between the bars of the front gate, and was blasting Nirvana albums. They were teenagers and dropouts, grungeheads and misfits, the sad-eyed faces and fringe members of Maggie’s generation. The rain seeped into the fabric of their flannels, gave off the wooly smell of wet dogs. A pair of drunken boys walked around taking a poll: where were you the first time you heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? That was an easy one: Nanny Ei’s kitchen, eating canned chicken noodle soup in the failing light of a December afternoon. Uncle Kevin coming home from his job at the Christmas tree farm, smelling of sap and pine. You’ve got to hear this song, Mags. Holy shit have you got to hear this. Turning off Wheel of Fortune on the little countertop television set and plugging in the CD player. Nanny Ei saying, Well, if that’s music, then you can toss me a microphone and call me Aretha Franklin.

  As the wet sky purpled into evening, the street outside the RDS took on the air of a festival. A few disinterested guards patrolled, arms folded, leaning against police horses. Smoke hung in the air; joints were furtively passed. Someone distributed narrow white memorial candles with paper lips to catch hot wax, and people pulled out their lighters, cupped palms to protect the pinprick flames from the rain. A stranger gave a candle to Maggie and she held it in her hands, a gesture as hopeless as everything else about suicide, she thought. Maggie, if you ever feel bad enough to even think about doing something like that, please promise you’ll tell me, Laura had begged. But Kevin’s suicide had not had that effect on Maggie. It didn’t make her want to die but to live. That’s why I went to Rome, she thought to herself. And that’s why I’m here now. She passed through the crowd, down the block, and found the tall iron gates of Beweley’s Hotel. On the other side of the gate, past the green expanse of lawn, there were warm squares of light where older people who didn’t care about Kurt Cobain were dressing for dinner. Night fell in earnest; the streetlights flickered on.

  If he doesn’t come, I’ll go back to Chicago with Mom and Ronnie in June because that is what I’m meant to do. What must be, shall be.

  If he doesn’t come, I won’t fall apart. I won’t cry. I’ll have my answer. It finishes here.

  Then, a ballooning panic: Oh God, what will I do if he really doesn’t come?

  And the converse thought: Oh God, what will I do if he does?

  If he does, I stay. I apply to be a boarder at Saint Brigid’s. Or I move in with Dan Sean. I make Bray my home, because I choose life: not convention, not convenience, not obedience. I choose love.

  The faces of all the people who passed by her were blurred by nighttime. She stood against the gates and breathed the stench of cigarettes and weed and candle wax and far away, on the edge of the wind, the mossy breath of the Liffey. It occurred to her that Kurt Cobain would have hated this. Nobody here at this makeshift wake—herself included—had known him. They had only known something that he made. It was not the same thing. In the years ahead, Maggie promised herself, wherever I go and whatever happens, I only want, once and forever, to be really known to someone.

  Seven o’clock. Had Cobain been alive, the show would be starting. Eight o’clock. Still Maggie waited at the gates of the hotel, clutching her ticket in her palm until it was nothing but a pulpy ball. Rain seeped into her pockets. This is dumb, she told herself, scanning the faces in the crowd. What am I waiting for? But she gave it ten more minutes. Then, twenty. A half hour. At nine, she realized he was not going to come. What must be, shall be. She pulled her hood around her face and began to walk back to the bus stop.

  All those people who stood in their flannels in the rain would always remember that on the day Kurt Cobain’s body was found in a Seattle greenhouse, they came to the RDS in Ballsbridge with their meaningless tickets, to pay tribute. But only one among that crowd would remember, too, the young man with short cropped hair that turned red in the sun, who wore a Liverpool sweatshirt and old track pants, who dodged the glowing candles and the mourners who held them, his gaze leveled on the shining gates of Beweley’s Hotel, running with all the power and determination of the athlete that he was. They would not remember the girl who had begun to walk away; just another grunge girl with pretty eyes drowning in too much black liner and a hood pulled around her wet face, who, hearing her name shouted over the music and the exhale of smoke and the traffic on Merrion Road, had stopped for a moment and gazed up at the sky, mouthing a prayer, before turning around. They would not remember that when the boy hugged her he held her so tightly that she dropped her candle into the mud and it burned out with an imperceptible hush, and her hands grazed the prickly hair at the nape of his neck, the beautiful inverted daub between the tendons, the living parts of him, and that they kissed in the open way of people who only wanted, simply and completely, to be known to each other. She was going to stay. She was going to stay, and she was going to love Eoin, always, because that’s what living people do. They shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild, shatter and rebuild until they are old and worn and stooped from the work of it.

  EPILOGUE:

  MAY 1995

  As tradition dictated, the visitation was held in Dan Sean’s sitting room. The big open hearth crackled with a turf fire, filling the room with a rich peat smell. A warm amber light flickered across the brown-faded pictures on the walls, snapshots that chronicled the spread of Dan Sean’s life across the twentieth century. The room grew close as the neighbors gathered, buzzing quietly with tea and whispered catch-ups, while Mike O’Callaghan and his wife walked around shaking hands and accepting condolences. Then, everyone quieted and bowed their heads while Father Boyle began the rosary and the Ecclesiastes—a time to weep and a time to laugh— and waved curls of sweet incense over Dan Sean’s casket.

  Outside, they lined up on either side of the stone path. Mike, Colm, Eoin, and some of the other neighbors hoisted the pine box onto their shoulders and carried the old man’s body out of the house, as he had instructed. The wind was calm, and it rained, but it was a quiet spring rain with sunshine winking between the clouds, and it made everything sparkle dewy and green. As the procession descended the mossy hill, Billy the goat stared at them with black, derisive eyes and nickered once before resuming her never-ending snuffle around the yard in search of Crunchie wrappers.

  Though Maggie mourned, she did not feel sad. This sorrow wasn’t hers to feel. It belonged to Sister Geneve, who trailed behind the coffin in her black pants suit, the little plastic shawl tied around the plume of her white hair, and cried softly into a handkerchief. Later, at the funeral reception, the neighbors would talk about what a
surprising spectacle of emotion the stoic old nun had given. How odd that a woman who’d seen plenty of death in her lifetime could barely keep it together during Father Boyle’s eulogy, sobbing like a teenage girl for a man of 101 whose death was, in the last months of his decline, practically a blessing! Only Maggie knew why Sister Geneve wept. But she never told anyone, not even Eoin.

  After Cobain’s death, Maggie had returned to Chicago for the summer with her mom and Ronnie. Nanny Ei got her a job working for a friend’s catering company, and she spent three sweaty months standing under the tents of street festivals, manning a deep fryer and selling beer-battered turkey legs and butter-dipped corn to the sunburned masses. That July, she had received a letter from Saint Brigid’s, informing her that she had been accepted as a boarder on partial scholarship—and that the rest of her fees were being paid for by an anonymous donor. Maggie knew with absolute certainty who that donor was, but no matter how many times she asked him, Dan Sean, a stubborn old Irishman to the last, would never admit to it. In September, her family heaved her giant red suitcase into the trunk of Nanny Ei’s Oldsmobile and drove her to O’Hare.

  “If you don’t wear aqua socks in the shower, honey, you will sentence yourself to a lifetime of Plantar’s warts,” Nanny Ei said solemnly as they stood in front of the Aer Lingus departure gates.

  “And for the love of God, try to drink a glass of milk every once in a while,” Laura added, putting a tender hand on Maggie’s cheek.

  It was the closest they could get, these tough blue-collar women, to telling her how much they would miss her.

  Back in Bray, the new school year began, and her relationship with Eoin grew. She shared everything with him: not just the secrets of her body, but also the quieter things that burned softer. There were weekend bus rides out to Wexford to climb the lighthouses that dotted the craggy lip of the island; there were nights when she snuck him into her tiny dorm room at Saint Brigid’s and they lay sprawled side by side on the carpet, listening over and over to (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, trying to decide if it was okay to be obsessed with Oasis when everybody else in Ireland was, too. Weeknights they sat at a back table in the Quayside, drinking Cidona and drilling each other on French history in preparation for their leaving cert exams. This is what they were doing, in fact, on a mild May evening eight months after Maggie’s return, when Dan Sean dozed off in his velvet-backed chair, a copy of the Irish Times folded in his lap, and never woke up.