Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Irwin tapped his teeth with a thumbnail while thinking. Then: “I’ve got it! Kearney and Sons is an export firm, and their main line is Irish crystal.”

  “I should have started with the phone book,” Julie said.

  “So you could, but you’re committed now to letting me work on it over the weekend. What you should do is go up the coast to Wicklow town, since that’s where your dad was born. It’s a two-hour run through some of the sweetest country in Ireland. You’ll go to Saint Patrick’s on the hill, and it wouldn’t harm to arrive in time for Mass and then have the priest put you onto the clerk of records. You know you won’t be the first American to be tracing her forefathers back to their Irish christening.”

  “I do know that,” Julie said.

  “But it’s not as though you were wanting a coat of arms going back to Brian Boru. The office of the Register General here in Dublin has records of births, deaths and marriages for over a hundred years. But it’s humaner going the route of the parish church. You’ll get on to the family quicker that way.” He sat back and looked at her and almost smiled. He was not a great smiler. “It’s a romantic sort of mission. Are you going to write a book about it? Americans are always writing books, it seems to me.”

  “I suppose it depends on how it ends.”

  “If you knew that, don’t you wonder—would you start it at all?”

  She had met, Julie thought, her first melancholic Irishman.

  She had left word at the desk that she expected to be called for, but she went downstairs a few minutes early, loitering to look at the prints on the second landing. They were illustrations from Carleton’s Irish Folklore. The crystal chandeliers were lighted and augmented by wall sconces converted from gaslight long ago. The walls were a deep crimson, the arches and balustrades white. Georgian bits had been retained.

  When she turned in her key, the clerk said, “Ah, Mrs. Hayes, the gentleman is waiting. …” But there was no gentleman to be seen. “He may have gone down to the bar. I’ll get the porter to rundown—”

  “Don’t bother,” Julie said. “He won’t be long.” She assumed Irwin’s wife would be waiting in a car outside. “A dark-haired man with a bushy beard?” she asked, an afterthought.

  “Ah, no. A slight man, rather pale. I told him you’d be down soon, expecting him at nine. He said he’d wait there in the lounge.”

  “My friends may have arranged for him to meet us here,” Julie said.

  But when the Irwins arrived, Roy coming in for Julie, his wife staying in the car, the man had not returned to the hotel lobby, nor did the newspaperman recognize the clerk’s description: “a gray-faced man of forty or so … slight build, thin brownish hair …”

  Julie asked the clerk to get whatever information he could if the man returned. Outdoors, Irwin opened the front door of the car and asked his wife if she had told anyone about Julie.

  “And who would I tell?”

  Irwin introduced the two women. Julie climbed into the backseat. “Let’s forget him,” she said and sat forward. “It’s great of you to take me along tonight, Mrs. Irwin.”

  “You must call me Eileen. I hope the crowd is not too rough for you. You never know who’s following who these days. I myself don’t like the punks and their music, and they turn up everywhere.”

  “We’re going out to have a good time, for the love of God,” her husband said.

  “I intend to, and you will too, Julie. The Burnigans are a wonderful rock group.”

  When they reached the disco and Julie saw the posters, she realized the “Burnigans” clearly were the Born Agains.

  THE FIDDLE was a converted warehouse with more light than any pub in Dublin. It kept the neckers from going too far, though there were some, Julie noted, going quite a ways. There were more bars also, and more noise, and a startling parade of younger men stationed along the wall, hanging close to the shelf provided for their drinks. They stared at all arrivals. They looked terribly young, as though they were still growing out of their clothes. Now and then they exploded into laughter and made rude comments on the new girls as they came in.

  Julie sank into a cushioned wall seat and studied Eileen Irwin while the Born Agains returned from an intermission—an “interval,” in local parlance. Eileen was plump and pretty, and several times a mother despite her youth. She would fill her eyes with concern every time she was spoken to. Whenever Julie said anything to her, she seemed to listen with her whole being. When Roy went to the bar to get their drinks, someone from the stag line came and asked Eileen to dance. She looked tearful at having to turn him down. “I’m that sorry but I’m promised,” she said, as though he’d asked her to marry him. Julie felt like a chaperone—or a widow. A grass widow, which she was: she tried to remember where she’d heard the expression. Mrs. Ryan probably.

  The walls were painted with clowns and aerialists and crudely drawn circus animals. Over the stage angelic mobiles floated as they might over a Christmas tableau, and the Born Agains themselves wore flowing sleeves and floor-length robes, which kept them in perpetual motion when the beat took over. Irwin danced with his wife. Julie was on her own. Women on the dance floor outnumbered the men, especially among the very young; girls were stomping and shaking, bobbing their heads at one another and not letting on if they gave a damn that no boy seemed to want them. The young men hung near the wall. Julie decided on a bold move. After all, she was a Yank, and a New York Yank at that. She marched over to the stag line and chose a partner at random, except that she avoided pimples. The rest of the line collapsed in noisy mirth while a flushed and wet-palmed youth stalked solemnly into the dance with her. Once on the floor he went loose-limbed and wildly rhythmic. They didn’t touch again for ten minutes.

  When the music stopped, Julie threw back her head and laughed. She brushed the sweat from her forehead. Her partner offered his breast-pocket handkerchief. “I’m Julie,” she said.

  “I’m Sean.”

  They shook hands, and Sean carefully refolded the handkerchief when she returned it to him and put it back in his pocket. For his own use he had a khaki-colored rag that had been freshly laundered.

  “All right,” she said and started back to where the Irwins were bringing stools for another couple. The place was getting more and more crowded. Sean fell in step with her. “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “New York.”

  “I’ve been there. I have an aunt in Poughkeepsie. Do you know where that is?”

  “Sort of.” She motioned with her thumb over her shoulder. “It’s up thataway.”

  “On the Hudson River.”

  She nodded.

  “Will you dance with me again?”

  “Of course. But you’ll have to ask me this time.”

  “They’ll all ask you now, sure.”

  If not all, most of them did. She could not remember when she had last danced that much. “You’re doing swell!” Her partners assured her: their notion of pure Americanese. Irwin, his wife locked in conversation with a friend from her convent-school days, asked Julie to dance.

  As soon as they stepped onto the floor, the Born Agains shifted from rock to a waltz and toned down the amplifiers.

  “I don’t believe it,” Julie said.

  “They’re a versatile lot.” He danced like Jeff, Julie thought. Oh, Christ.

  In the new quiet, Irwin said, “If it turns out that Lady Graham-Kearney is in the west, and I think she is, I’ll be going down Sligo way on Wednesday to cover a funeral. You could go along and chip in on the petrol. I wouldn’t mind even staying over if you needed more time. I’ve a parcel of friends in the west.”

  Richard Garvy’s grandmother lived in Sligo, Julie remembered, and he had said on that day long weeks ago that she ought to visit her when she got to Ireland. Said half in jest, to be sure, but Garvy was about to do a play on Broadway, and one written by an Irishman … “Roy, do you know the playwright Seamus McNally?”

  “Well, yes.” Nothing more, although she wai
ted.

  “Let me see what happens in Wicklow,” Julie said of his offer. “That comes first.” Where her father was born.

  Irwin was no longer listening to her. “I’m going to steer us round by the wall just now. There’s a queer-looking older fella just joined that lot. See if you recognize him.”

  She saw a stranger, someone she was sure she had not seen before. His clothes looked loose on him; his jaw was square, his nose had a bump at the bridge, his coloring was gray. When he turned his back as they approached, she had to assume he was the man who had inquired after her at the hotel. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before, Roy.”

  “I think I have, but I’ll be damned if I know where.”

  As they moved away, the gray man turned to watch them again.

  “Shall we pack it in?” Irwin asked.

  As soon as they left the floor, the band switched back to rock. Julie went on to the ladies’ room. When she came out, Sean was waiting for her a polite distance from the door. The gray man was not in sight. Julie asked Sean if he had noticed him.

  “I think he cut out,” Sean said. “Is he a friend or foe? He asked my chum if he knew who the man with the black beard was, the one dancing with you. That’s what made me think.”

  “And what did your chum tell him?”

  “He asked around. Somebody said he worked for a newspaper—maybe from Belfast or Derry. From the north anyway.”

  Which was more than Julie knew of Irwin. She had noticed a difference in his accent from those with which she was becoming slightly more familiar. “How about the man who asked? Did any of you know him?”

  “Wouldn’t seem like. When he left, everybody gawked and shrugged—you know, ‘Who’s he?’”

  IT WAS AFTER TWELVE when Julie got back to the hotel. A different clerk was on duty. No one had inquired after her to his knowledge. She and Irwin had decided that the “gray man” had not gone to the bar. He’d gone outdoors and waited in a car and, after the Irwins picked her up, had followed them to the dance. There was still a question between them about its being the same man, and as soon as Julie told Irwin that the gray one had asked the boys about him, Irwin was sure it was he, not Julie, the man was interested in. “You’re not just saying that, Roy?” She’d been much relieved. “You’d better believe I’m not. I’m no bleeding knight in armor.”

  The hotel was quiet, and the night clerk took her upstairs in the elevator, leaving the lobby unattended. Security was not a strong point with the Greer Hotel. Julie asked him to wait until she had opened her room door. The man blocked the elevator gate and went to her door with her. “You Americans are a careful sort these days. I don’t wonder with what’s going on in the world, but I wouldn’t like to live that way myself, being fearful all the time.”

  “It’s a bad habit,” Julie said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  JULIE WAS THE ONLY passenger to leave the bus at the first Wicklow stop. A woman boarded there, first handing up a basket with the yellow claw of a dead chicken poking out from under the lid. “It’s a soft morning, by the grace of God,” she said, stepping up as Julie stepped down.

  The bus driver revved his motor and took off into the town. Julie waited until the lone car on the road behind him passed and then crossed over and lingered briefly in the arcade over the entrance to the Grand Hotel. She could see no sign of guests within the hotel or, for that matter, of service personnel. The softness of the day was owing to a fine mist and perhaps to the Sunday stillness everywhere except at the corner pub. She could hear the rumble of voices when she passed, but the heavy three-quarter curtains cut off any interior view she might have had. Farm trucks were among the few cars in the courtyard behind the pub, and she caught a smell familiar to her only from the bridle path in Central Park. A road sign in both English and Gaelic told her she had a half-mile walk up the hill to Saint Patrick’s church. The pub voices fell away as she started up the hill, and the quiet that then prevailed seemed to isolate her. Her sleep had been troubled, and the noise of the disco pounded in her head. She had resolved long before dawn not to watch for the Gray Man, but she found herself watching for him all the same.

  At an abrupt turn in the road she saw the towering neo-Gothic church high on the hill and stark against a changing sky. The air cleared as if by magic, and by the time she reached the church gates, there was not a trace of moisture on the flagstone walk. The view from the steps when she looked back was a vast panorama of tawny hills and green wooded slopes dotted with white cottages and sheep, and with silver splashes of lakes and forking rivers; at the land’s edge a far-stretching gold crescent of sand bordered the dark waters of the Irish Sea. The clouds were breaking apart and casting great shadows. Within the church a thin chorus of voices tried to hold the melody of an old hymn against the tumult of the pipe organ. She had made it before the end of noon Mass.

  Miss Redmond, an ample woman of fifty or thereabouts, the parish bookkeeper as well as the clerk of records, finished her accounting of the Sunday collections and took Julie into an office in the parish house. With remarkable good cheer, considering the hour and the smell of roast beef permeating the whole rectory, she got out the registry of baptisms that included the year 1934. She told Julie while paging through it of all the people who consulted her for information of this one and that one, most of them long dead and forgotten. Julie observed among the popes and prelates on the office walls an autographed picture of President John F. Kennedy.

  “Ah, now here he is,” the woman said, “Thomas Francis Mooney. Born October ten, christened October twenty …” Her voice faded out as she read ahead. Then she explained, “I was trying to remember, that’s all.” She read aloud the names of parents and sponsors, the officiating cleric and the certifying officer, pausing to let Julie write them down. The mother’s maiden name was Crowley. Something in the bare-bones record had given Miss Redmond pause, Julie thought. It almost had to be a name.

  She asked outright: “Do you know any of these people, Miss Redmond?”

  “There’s a Crowley in town, and that’s it. He lives with his daughter-in-law and her child. The house is on Strand Street near the quay. You’ll know it by its green shutters and a geranium in the window. There’s been a lot of dying in the family, but I’m sure you’ll be welcome by them that’s left.” She flashed Julie a smile that seemed to belie the welcome she promised on behalf of the Crowleys.

  Daughter-in-law and child, Julie thought, going down the hill into the town. Another fatherless child like myself?

  THE OLD MAN SAT DOWN carefully beside her, his hands on his knees. She paid attention to the hands, thinking she might be able to judge his age by them or to learn whether he worked with them or with his head. They were clean and scant of hair, the backs speckled with brown; the fingers, while not stubby, were almost square at the tips. The nails fascinated her; they seemed—the whole hands seemed—familiar, and suddenly she knew why. They were aging replicas of her own. The squared fingertips, the proportion of the nails to the length of the fingers, their shapes at the crest of cuticle, even the difference in the size of their little fingernails, that of the left hand smaller, could be attributed, she felt sure, to a common lineage.

  “Look,” Julie said and put out her hands alongside his. She was not wearing polish; she rarely did.

  He leaned forward to see better and caught on at once, looking from her hands to his and back to her own. He touched the little finger of her left hand, then looked at his and said in amazement, “What do you know about that?” To the chubby woman on her knees in front of them trying to quicken the turf fire, he said, “Emily, get up and look at this miracle of reproduction.” He smiled at Julie, a smile that sent the lines scurrying between his bright gray eyes and the corners of his mouth. “We must be kin truly, wouldn’t you say?”

  She agreed, aware of her heartbeat and feeling ridiculously and unexpectedly happy.

  “I said to myself when she opened the door to you,” he went on, “‘There stands a
woman I’d love to see come into the house.’”

  Emily looked around at him as though surprised. Or hurt. A burst of flame caught at the turf. She turned back and fanned it vigorously. Whereupon it vanished.

  “Will you let the fire be? It’ll come sooner without your ministrations.”

  He had been very handsome once, Julie thought; he was handsome still, a fine, long nose that had kept its shape and a large, sensual mouth. A wisp of his thin gray hair hung rakishly over his forehead.

  Emily’s bones cracked as she got to her feet. She was less agile than her father-in-law. “What is it you’re looking at?”

  “Our hands, our hands,” the old man said. He and Julie, side by side, held them out before her.

  She looked puzzled, “What about them?”

  “They’re out of the same cast. Have you no eyes in your head?”

  Emily looked at her own plump hands, turning them over and back. They were quite different from theirs and showed the stains of cooking and scrub work. She hid them away under her apron and said, “I’d best put on the water for tea.” She was round of face as well as body, her blue eyes more wondering than intelligent—a sweet, placid face that Julie would not have thought Irish at all. Flemish, perhaps, to be painted by a van Eyck—resignation with just the trace of puzzlement at how she had become pregnant without ever having felt the presence in her of the Holy Ghost. Julie would have liked to stretch out her hand to her, but she feared the familiarity might put the woman off.

  “Now who was your mother?” the old man asked Julie. “An American, of course.”

  “Her name was Katherine Richards.”

  “And Hayes: where does that come in?”

  “My married name.”

  His eyes darted to her bare ring finger.

  “We are separated.”

  He made a sound that suggested he had thought as much. “My son went off and left this one to me, an act of generosity I don’t think was in his calculations. We always called your father Frank, by the way. There was another Tom in the family then, my oldest son. Frank was back, you know, years ago. But only the once to my knowledge.”