Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Julie thought of Kincaid and Donahue, whose mothers felt the same about them.

  They went into the dining room for tea, a room of plain, hard chairs and a table with plastic mats over a lacy cloth. The curtains were snowy white, and a colored print of a Dutch windmill hung on the wall. The tea was strong and biting, and the soda bread Sally O’Rourke cut into chunks and served with jam was fresh and good. Michael took his cup and plate to the kitchen while his mother explained that her husband and her older son were at the football match. They went every Saturday. The girls, she said, were into rights and demonstrations and wouldn’t be home till supper. Julie glanced at her watch. It was almost three.

  Mrs. O’Rourke, watching her face as though she could read it, said, “It’s your father you’re trying to find, is it? What makes you think he’s in Ireland, dear, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “He was born here, so it’s a starting place.”

  The woman pulled back. “There, now. I didn’t mean to pry, but there’s no mention of him after Michael himself came home from the States. He’s in earlier, the one called Frank in Michael’s notebooks, and the last mention, he was on his way to Australia. They were in the secondary school together, you know, both studying with the Franciscan Brothers.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here in Dublin, the Adam and Eve parish.”

  Julie repeated the name, finding it strange for a religious institution. “Adam and Eve weren’t saints, were they?”

  The woman thought about it. “They were the first sinners. I suppose they could’ve turned around and been the first saints. Look at Mary Magdalene. Isn’t it strange? I never thought about it.” She bounced up and brushed the crumbs onto her plate. “I’ll get the books for you now, and you can sit here while the light’s good. There’s nothing I could find in the first three that’d interest you, but I’ll bring them all, and when you’re done, you can tell me what you think they’re worth and what I should do with them.”

  As though Julie had said nothing. Four notebooks came, their mottled cardboard covers ringed by a hundred teacups or bottles or glasses. Mrs. O’Rourke had been right: she found the first mention of her father in the last book. Desmond’s handwriting was neat, but the pages were stained, and there was a smell that made her think of the hymnals in an old church. They’d have come up from a damp basement when she had sent the letter she addressed to Michael Desmond. She copied into her own notebook the complete entries that mentioned her father. The first was dated February 2, 1954:

  Reception at the Waldorf for Andrew Kearney and Lady Cecelia Graham-Kearney. Rumor has it he will be assigned our perm. rep. if we make it into the UN this round. Odds are we won’t. Frozen pawns in the cold war games. I was bored sick with the black ties and skirted broomsticks when I chanced to see a fellow I recognized from Adam and Eve, Frank Mooney. Thomas Francis Mooney he signs himself, having the notion it may ingratiate him with the Americans. Named after Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish refugee who wound up a general in the American Civil War. Not a Yank in a million ever heard of him or any other of the Young Ireland lot Mooney thinks so magnificent. He is writing a life of John Mitchel. Who’s he? said I. He was exiled to Van Dieman’s Land, escaped to the United States, and became a newspaper editor. Oh, said I, one of those. Mooney doesn’t have much humor, but I was glad to see him all the same. I’d thought by now he might be a monk, not a rou. He is Kearney’s secretary….

  Julie paused and thought about the last four words. So now, after all the years, she knew why her father was in New York.

  I asked him if he knew shorthand and all that. No, says he, but I can dance the mambo. I take that to mean he’s better connected with Lady K than with her husband. Or else he’s pulling my leg. I took him round with me afterwards to the Snug, but he doesn’t drink. I never trust an Irishman who doesn’t drink.

  Julie reread the parts she had noted. There would be other questions later, but for now she questioned in the margin: “A. K. and Lady G-K where?” She read on. There was good New York color in the journals, lovely sketches of diplomats and pompous attachés, and of actors just below star status, and the habitués of literary drinking places; a paragraph described a younger, wild John Walsh, the literary agent who had started Julie on this mission. She determined to recommend that Sally O’Rourke consult him on the disposition of the journals. A number of entries through into the summer concerned the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. The diarist noted having been instructed by Dublin that he need not report on Washington. “In other words I don’t have the right slant on Joe McCarthy. I like that dry little lawyer from Boston, who a great lot of Irish Americans think is a traitor to his race.” Then:

  Mooney got into a fight with one of them. We’d gone over to Chelsea, to a dockside bar, and Frank took a swing at this baboon who said he was a disgrace to Ireland. The fellow hit him back so fast it lifted him off his feet. His nose turned into a bloody spout. It was a shame we couldn’t save the runoff for a blood bank. I’m beginning to rue the day I got him off the wagon. He’s a lovely drinker but a terrible drunk.

  Julie felt better about her father than she had after the first mention of him, even though she had thought her own dislike of alcohol might be part of her inheritance. There was more warmth to him this way, more honor. Hit it straight, Julie: it makes him seem more of a man.

  19 June 1954

  Politics seem to have turned against Kearney. There’s a puritanical lot in ascendancy and of course they don’t like it that Lady Graham-K has not renounced her title. It has never bothered me. Not that anyone sought my opinion, but I’ve always thought her a lady, with a large L or a small one. In any case, the Kearneys are going home and it will be a dull mission without them. Frank is at sixes and sevens. They’ll pay his fare back and try to find him a place in the glass works. But he’d rather stay a while here. I told him if he wants, he can bunk in with me and get something on paper he can show John Walsh.

  Julie questioned in the margin: glass works?

  23 June 1954

  We had a night last night. Mooney has found a new lot of poets and petticoats. This is too exotic a bunch for me. They hang around a shop called Books of All Nations. There’s a queen bee, knocking them off one by one, if I remember my nature studies. She is a stunning-looking woman and you wonder she could not do better than clerking in a bookstore. I’m sure she does. I’d say the name Richards is Anglo-Irish, and I’m reminded how a certain kind of head-high and bedamned-to-the-world Englishwoman seems to take hold of an Irish youth. I used to think it was the delusion of power on the part of the Irishman. Now I’m thinking it’s an abdication of it.

  Julie liked the description of her mother. She had modeled her own carriage after her mother’s. People thought it came from her attending Miss Page’s School, but it hadn’t.

  Several pages of the journal were devoted to upheavals in the Irish diplomatic corps. “The politics of pygmies.” Desmond also began to take stock of his own life. He wondered if he shouldn’t go home and settle down. “It’s not fair to keep her waiting any longer, and I’m not laying by a penny much less a pound.”

  1 July 1954

  Bedamned to him if he isn’t in love and going to marry the woman. She’s years older than him, and if I’m not mistaken, she’s marrying him out of spite. Or do I wrong her? Is it all a bold show to hide a fearful heart? She’s taking instruction, and that surely is a kind of submission. God Almighty, what do I know of women anyway? What does any Irishman? I’ve agreed to stand up for Frank in the rectory at Saint Giles’s. Then I wash my hands of the lot. I’m no more than three or four years older than him, but he seems like a child. How is he going to support himself? To say nothing of her. Ah, but he won’t. She won’t let him. She’ll give and give and give, and that’s not good for a man.

  21 July

  The deed was quickly done at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. We cabbed down to Rory’s Restaurant in the Village afterwards, w
here we ate shrimp and roast beef and drank Bushmill and the good dark stout of Guinness. When the bride and groom departed, the maid of honor let down her honor and folded me into her large Italian bosom. Though it hurts me to say it, I don’t know her like in Ireland. Her name is Maggie Fiore and she may cause me further dalliance in America.

  Quite a lot about Maggie, but not another mention of Julie’s father until:

  10 September

  It seems Frank has run away from home, though where to and with what, God knows. It was Mrs. Mooney herself who rang me up to see if he was here by any chance. By no chance. Maggie, for so garrulous a woman, keeps close counsel. She seems not to have said a word to Kate about us. And I suppose it’s just as strange that though I’ve seen Frank a couple of times, I’ve said nothing of it to him. It would have been like saying to him—look what I got for nothing when you had to pay the price of your freedom.

  Julie wrote in the margin for her own satisfaction: “Oh, men!” Morgan Reynolds had also put a high value on freedom.

  18 September

  A fortnight ago I promised Father Daly I’d stop seeing Maggie, but instead I’ve stopped seeing Father Daly. A couple of nights ago she told me what’s been going on up on 91st Street. In the first place, Kate’s boss came home after a three-month leave to consolidate a chain of bookstores on the West Coast. The first thing he did, after a wee visit to his wife, was go round to see Kate. He and Frank tried to throw one another out. He refused to believe Kate had married in his absence, and when she offered proof, he fired her. He has since hired her back, according to Maggie. But Mooney is gone, the poor broken-hearted go-been.

  Julie noted in the margin: “The untold Reynolds story.”

  13 November 1954

  A night on the town after theatre with John Walsh. He remains the best company I’ve ever kept. He has heard from Mooney. In Australia and still writing his life of John Mitchel. But he sent him a poem John thought was good and sent off to The New Yorker. If they take it, John is to send the cheque to Katherine Richards. Peculiar. Could they have had the marriage annulled? I asked Father Daly, and he said it would take years and that Maggie and I would be called as witnesses. Well, they’ll have to call me long distance, for I’m going home at Christmas. Maggie is bitter and I don’t blame her. It was cowardly of me to tall her I’d committed myself to a girl at home. I’ll be a long time forgetting what she said, “There’s no shit like an Irish shit.” She’s right.

  Desmond’s journal ended the nineteenth of December without further reference to Mooney, Kate, or Maggie.

  JULIE RETURNED by the way she had come. There was no outdoor life at all, it seemed, on the somber streets of the O’Rourke neighborhood, only the occasional streaking car that appeared without warning from a direction she would not have expected. The lamp lights, high and graceful, had come on along the iron fence of Saint Stephen’s Green. A blue mist hung low in the sky, deepening the twilight. Across the street another set of lights came on—of the high-density variety so familiar to her from home. They shone a misty glare on the bus queues of silent people. A damp chill added to her feeling of sadness. Grafton Street had been more of what she expected of Dublin, not this. And Mrs. O’Rourke and her quiet son stayed in her mind. She’d like to have seen the girls come noisily home from their demonstrations and to have heard male voices rehashing the football game. But none of them had come when it was time for her to go. She thought now of Sally O’Rourke’s lament about the two maiden aunts who died within a year of each other, leaving only her mother and her to take care of Uncle Michael when he fell on hard times and was ill. “He should have written a book himself, don’t you think, having a friend in the business over there?” Then a desperate afterthought: “Do you think you could make a book out of what’s there?” Julie suggested that someday one of Mrs., O’Rourke’s children might want to do it. “Ah, dear, they can hardly scratch their own names. It’s the telly being on from morning till night. I’m as much to blame as they are, but I do wonder, times, what we’d do if we couldn’t afford the telly. Would the kids be better off?” At the door she had raised herself as tall as she could, and Julie had stooped down to accept the brush of dry lips against her cheek.

  And at that instant she had thought of Missy Glass, who also carried on her back the invisible burden of her life.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WITHIN HOURS OF HER ARRIVAL she had made Trinity College her special place in Dublin. Now, instead of returning to the hotel to freshen up before going on to meet the New York Daily special correspondent—whom Jeff would still call a stringer—she turned in at the Trinity gates and passed through the busy portico into Parliament Square. Stone buildings that looked older than they were rose on all sides, enclosing the long green with its campanile and its cobbled walkways that glistened in the misty half-light. Looking up at the “rubrics,” the oldest student quarters, she asked herself if her father might have stayed there. It was all wrong to try to force a fantasy: he sounded much too Catholic for Trinity, and to have gone to the Franciscans didn’t seem the right preparation. As though she knew anything about the Franciscans except for their bare feet and their founding saint. Why the Franciscans? Why Australia? The biography he thought he was going to write? Or did he happen to get a job on a boat that was going there? In the portico she read the notices on a variety of bulletin boards concerning student activities. On the call board of the Trinity Players she read:

  Ladies of Players

  Your opportunity for fame and fortune is at hand. The Abbey Theatre is looking for well-brought-up young ladies to play French gentlewomen in a Parisian academy in Hotel Paradise by Feydeau around Christmastime. The parts are small, but there is money.

  She copied it into her notebook to send to Tim, but halfway through she doubted he would find it as amusing as she had: she was traveling at a different tempo. She abandoned the college grounds and searched out a pub called the Bower on Pearse Street.

  The Bower was jammed, men four and five deep at the bar, with an occasional woman, and all of them, it seemed to Julie, talking at once. If the language wasn’t foreign, neither was the inflection familiar. She tried to get through to the bar, but one man simply could not get out of her way. “Could I order you something, love? You’re never going to make it unless you can climb over me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I’m supposed to meet a man here by the name of Roy Irwin. …”

  “Oh, he is a man for certain.” Her informant called out: “Irwin, are you in the house?”

  “I am,” came the voice from within the crowd.

  “Bad luck to you. I was hoping to be your deputy.”

  The crowd pressed in on itself to make way for a large, dark-bearded young man who took her by the arm. “Julie Hayes is it? I’m glad to make your acquaintance. What will you have? A gin and tonic?”

  “God forbid,” she said, more Irish-sounding than she intended. “Lager, please.” But then to show off: “A half-pint.”

  The order went up, and Irwin introduced her to the man who had hailed him. “She’s a columnist with my New York newspaper, the Daily.”

  Julie thought, not for the first time since her arrival, of Seamus McNally, who pronounced the word columnist the same way.

  When her drink came, Irwin steered her to a table given over to them by a young couple. Cheerfully. “I get the occasional pass to give out to theater or the races or a football match,” he explained. “It’s better than legal tender.

  “If you’re going to the theater while you’re here, by the way, show your press card at the box office and mention your column. They all think Broadway is only a wing-dip away. You’ll ask the manager to have a drink with you during the interval and he’ll invite you to supper instead—at the Baily or someplace you couldn’t afford. Or I couldn’t. Would you believe I’m special correspondent to six newspapers? And still can’t make a living? Four on the Continent and two in the States, but none in bally Britain. And that’s whe
re, if I had a byline, I could get on in my profession.” He downed half his dark brew and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’re afraid I’m IRA. That’s what my wife says, and she may be right.”

  Julie almost said, And are you? but thought better of it.

  “Drink up and tell me what I can do for you. Ah—the wife said to ask you, would you like to go disco dancing with me and her tonight? You’d have your choice of a number of decent lads when we get there, whereas if I fixed you up beforehand, we’d bog down in formalities and privileges.”

  “I’m willing to play it by ear,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Irwin hesitated and then asked, “Are you here on assignment or on your own?”

  Something in the way he said it put her on guard. And he wasn’t as young as she had first supposed. The eyes were black and keen, but there were tiny lines around them, and the hair and beard were flecked with gray. He’d resent an assignment, she decided, fearing encroachment on his preserve. “On my own.” She told him of her search for Thomas Francis Mooney and of the Desmond diary she had just seen. She consulted her notebook. “It was someone named Andrew Kearney who brought my father to New York. He was connected with the Irish observers at the UN. This was in 1954.”

  “Before my time. But the name’s familiar,” Irwin said, immediately ready to help. “I’ll try and look it up for you.” He made a note of the name.

  “Lady Cecelia Graham-Kearney—with a hyphen,” Julie said.

  “Ah, now, you’re in the upper register of society. A great horsewoman in her day. There’s a classic race named after her. I’m going to guess she’s in the west—if she’s alive—Galway likely. I can look that up for you, too.”

  “If my father had come back to Ireland with them, they were going to find a place for him in the glass works. Is that any help?”