Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  During the intermission, Seamus got her another whisky and himself a Guinness, and put the evening into a saner perspective. For him this was a sad sight. “Don’t you see, we’re wafting all this energy like a puff of smoke, and when these lads move on to Derry in the morning, we’ll have naught left us but ashes in our mouths. Neither passive nor resistant, we’ve been crippled by the joy of suffering.”

  And talk, Julie thought, but she didn’t say it.

  “There’s a line in my play you may remember: when the old man looks down where the valley’s flooded and says, ‘It makes you wonder what we’re being punished for.’ That’s very Irish. I heard the words and took them home with me. Do you like what you’d read of the play before I interrupted?”

  “I do. And it’s a wonderful part for Richard Garvy. I stopped and visited his grandmother in Sligo.”

  “A wonder, isn’t she?” he said, but with a lack of enthusiasm that Julie had sense enough to realize might have little to do with Gran Garvy.

  She put out her hand to him. “I am loving the play, Seamus. It’s very funny and sad—the way this is tonight.”

  “Aye, that’s the point,” he said and cheered up at once. “Did she read your hand for you?”

  “She started to and then decided against it.”

  “Having seen ill omens and alarms?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The old devil.”

  “She wasn’t wrong. Sligo was a bad experience. I’ll tell you about it, but not now.” She finished the whisky and shivered. With pleasure, she supposed: it was a shock her system took with less protest every time.

  After a few seconds Seamus said, “Are you the American woman”—he lowered his voice—“I read about in the Irish Times today?”

  She nodded. It was fair to assume so.

  “They tore up a copy of To Spite the Devil,” he said.

  “That wasn’t the worst they did,” Julie said.

  “No, but it meant something to me that they did that. And I didn’t know it was you, see.”

  “They tore the book into three parts. Do you know anything about the ONI?”

  “I wouldn’t say. Not where we’re sitting now, I wouldn’t say,” he muttered.

  Foolish of her. She eased away from the subject. “Did you say the Wolfe Tones go to Derry next?” Derry, she was careful, not Londonderry. “Isn’t that in the north of Ireland?”

  “It’s in Northern Ireland. They also play in Manchester and in London.”

  “The same songs?”

  “The same songs and the same audience, you might say: the forlornly passionate.”

  Julie shook her head at the sorrow of it. A girl in the next seat accidentally jostled her, then reached over and touched her hand, saying how sorry she was. Her lips were red and her eyes were bright blue diamonds. Her boyfriend, in the next seat on, leaned forward and winked at Julie. “I can’t take her out but what she disgraces me. She’ll step on your toes next, watch.”

  There was great giggling between the two. The conviviality was spreading and was meant to draw in Julie and Seamus. She was willing. As was Seamus for her sake. With the space between his front teeth, every time he smile, he looked like a very young adult. “What do you teach, Seamus?”

  “When I was teaching, I taught everything to them who’d learn and damn little to them who wouldn’t. Primary school—all subjects. And them who wouldn’t learn anything else I managed to make read. I’ve no bloody patience for stubborn ignorance—or for laziness. They go hand in hand. It’s been a hundred years since doing nothing was legitimate protest in this country, and like most of our protests, it hurt ourselves more than it hurt our enemies.”

  Midnight approached, and the audience wanted more and more to participate. The group sang songs they could join in, and that soon led to their standing up and crossing arms with their neighbors and swaying from side to side. “Here we go,” Seamus said. He tucked his and Julie’s glasses under their chairs and stood up. The boys without girls were getting drunk and noisy and in need of action. Rowdy, but not punk. Soon chairs were pushed aside and glasses kicked under them while little groups of dancers formed, some clowning and awkward, some who could really dance. Now and then a girl was called up to the platform who could show what an Irish jig was about. People were sweating, their faces red, mouths wide in laughter and singing, and June though there was madness in it. Seamus, grinning, hung onto her hand for as long as he could, but the surge of the dancers split them apart, and one man, then another passed Julie and others of the girls along, giving each a whirl on the way. She forgot the stiffness left over from the Born Agains’ rock. She spun around as a great bouncing youth let go of her and sailed her into the arms of a red-bearded man whose hair rose out of his scalp like bristle. His laughing face collapsed at the shock of recognition: he let go of Julie, turned and plunged into the crowd. It was Frank Kincaid.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE WHOLE ROOM WAVERED, HEADS and faces like images under water. Kincaid’s flight seemed very funny. He seemed to be dog-paddling into the crush of people, a Chaplinesque figure. She wanted to shriek with laughter, to explode it on the room. Momentarily. Then she was in control again, and Kincaid was gone. Seamus made his way toward her. Her impulse was to turn away from him, but she waited, holding her ground against the buffeting waves of dancers.

  “Are you all right, girl?”

  “Yes, but I want to go now.”

  “I’ll give you my coat and we’ll walk out a bit. All you need is a breath of air.”

  He had offered his coat on Ginny’s balcony. The same coat. She felt back to normal. But she was not, not even in what had been her heart’s desire—to be close with Seamus. He now seemed as much a stranger as any man in Ireland. She had turned cold against him again as she had the night Russo called to say he was putting Kincaid and Donahue into a lineup.

  In the deserted lobby she pulled McNally toward a couch and made him sit beside her. The whole building throbbed as the concert neared its climax. “Give me your phone number, Seamus, and let me call you in a couple of days.”

  “I thought you were coming with me.”

  She shook her heard. “I thought so too, but we were both wrong.”

  “What changed you? Did you get a fright in there or what?”

  Again she shook her head. She was not afraid exactly, but what she was she didn’t know. Numb. Frozen. Kincaid had been afraid; he had panicked seeing her, and that needed thinking about.

  She would seem to have escaped nothing coming to Ireland. And now Kincaid must feel the same way—he who was not supposed to leave the United States but had obviously managed it. Without the dire help of Romano. Suddenly she felt on the verge of knowing what it was all about—including the Gray Man. “I’ll call you from Ballymahon. Very soon. I’m sorry about this turnabout, Seamus.”

  “If you were an ordinary girl, I’d tell you what to do with your sorrow, but you’re not, and there’s more you’re not telling me than you’ve told. I know that. I’ll come and fetch you if you ask, but you know, in the States, after three strikes you’re out.”

  She managed a smile. “Thank you, Seamus. Safe home now.”

  In her room, the door locked, she sat on the side of the bed and removed her shoes. She was going to have to grapple with what it meant that Kincaid and, she was sure, Donahue were in Ireland. She could be sure that Quinlan knew and had probably arranged it. But why? For their own safety? Were they meant, here, to be hidden away from Romano? To be produced in time for their own trial? Or to appear as government witnesses against Romano when that time came? A bargain between Quinlan and the district attorney’s office? A bargain struck by Lieutenant David Marks, who would not under any circumstances jeopardize a rape conviction? Yeah.

  In the morning she tried to reach Tim at the New York Daily. Without success. After thinking about it for a couple of minutes she put through a call to Father Doyle at Saint Malachy’s Church on New York’s West Side
. The priest came to the phone out of breath. “Is it true you’re calling from Ireland or are you pulling my leg?”

  “It’s true,” she said, “but it’s nothing to be upset about.” She explained that someone had used his name trying to get her address in Ireland.

  “Now who in the world would that be? And I had no idea you were in Ireland, Julie, until the man from your office called and asked if I’d referred someone to him.”

  “No one asked you about me?”

  “No one did. Are you having any luck over there?”

  “I’ve found family. But not my father, not yet. Father Doyle, how are the families of Kincaid and Donahue?” She had chosen the words carefully.

  “I don’t know how to answer that. They’re waiting every day for word and praying it won’t be more than they can bear.”

  “That’s cruel,” Julie said.

  “Well, now, it is for them, isn’t it?”

  After which they had nothing more to say to each other.

  The question of whether or not to report having seen Kincaid was a troublesome one. To whom, if she were to do it? And what was to be gained? What lost? The remains of her privacy certainly. That she might reveal their whereabouts, that she might even be in pursuit of them had to be the cause of Kincaid’s alarm.

  She reported her own whereabouts to Gardai headquarters. Nothing more.

  Donegal town was serene, with a few old men sitting about the market stalls in the diamond. The only sign of the night’s wild concert was a tattered poster advertising the itinerary of the Wolfe Tones.

  Edna O’Shea did have a telephone, but it was a private number. “Ah, now, you’ll have no trouble finding her in Ballymahon,” the telephone assistant assured her. She took the noon bus.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  EVERY TURN IN THE road opened another primitive vista—Donegal Bay on the one side with only an occasional white dot of a cottage on the opposite shore, and before her and further inland long stretches of rocky and barren hills. The road twisted in and out of view, as did the telegraph poles that carried but a single line. She left the bus for its few minutes’ halt at Killybegs and looked down on the fishing port. The fleet was out, she was told, but the trawlers laid up for repairs, the nets stretched on the quay, the long, low factory buildings and the smell of smoke and fish proclaimed a busy village. The whitewashed houses with their slate roofs clung to the side of the hill. The shops catered to boat fitters and to tourism, with samples on display of the hand-tufted carpets for which the village was famous.

  The country grew wilder beyond Killybegs. Ballymahon, which seemed to overhang the sea, was a cluster of mean shops and pubs huddled together against the wind. The bus put her and a few locals who had boarded at Killybegs down outside a sweet and tobacco shop, dropped a bundle of newspapers, and quickly sped out of sight. Julie went into the shop and asked the woman behind the counter if she could tell her how to reach Edna O’Shea.

  The woman, dark and hollow-cheeked, mumbled something Julie did not understand.

  “I know she had a phone,” Julie said, “but it’s a private number not to be given out without her permission, and how am I to get that if I can’t reach her?”

  “She’d have her reasons,” the woman said, but went on, “it’s near three miles to the Stone Ring, which is the name on the place, after the way the buildings are strung round.”

  “I can walk three miles,” Julie said.

  “She does herself often.” The woman took a shawl from a hook on the wall and came around the counter. “Best leave your bag here for the time. I’m open until half past six.” Outdoors the shopkeeper tightened her grip on the shawl, for the wind would have torn it from her. She directed Julie further up the hill. “You’ll go up to the cross by the abbey ruins and bear left along the river. It’s no more nor a footpath from there, but it’s shorter by a mile nor the road.”

  Julie climbed the narrow street to where the village came to an abrupt end at a gate to the ruins. The wind gusted fiercely. The river became rapids alongside the ruins and rushed noisily down the hillside. Looking down, she could see boats at anchor, heaving in the heavy waters. Beyond the inlet was the Atlantic, blue and white-capped and dappled with dark patches where the clouds threw their shadows. As she went on, she could see the coast road with an occasional cottage and bits of gay color where the stacked turf was tucked around with plastic tarps. She caught an occasional whiff of smoke, so that she knew there were people nearby—over some rocky hillock. The bleating of sheep was a forlorn sound, and whenever she came near a flock, they would flee pell-mell. She dreaded the confrontation ahead. She knew in her soul that her father was not here. Or she might have dreaded it more.

  She recognized the Stone Ring in the distance. A great square tower dominated it. The nearer she came, the more detail she could make out. There was a weather vane atop the tower, which proved to be a lion rampant. It quivered as though fighting the wind. A clock faced her from the tower; on closer view she saw that it lacked hands. The buildings were several, huddled close upon one another, the roofs steep and separate. An ornamental finial crowned the arch of each facade. Most of the windows were either boarded up or shuttered. Through one that wasn’t she saw piles of mattresses and oddments of bedroom furniture, and daylight through a window beyond, so that she knew the building opened onto a courtyard within. The great door near the tower was high, double and arched, of a size that would admit a bus. She looked in vain for a bell or clapper on or alongside the big doors and finally rattled the iron handles and called out a long “Hello.” Her voice was as thin to her own ears as the cry of the distant gulls. She waited and called again, and yet again. When no one came, she started to walk around the ring. Then she heard the scrape of a bolt being drawn and turned back. A tall woman wearing jeans, a coarsely knit sweater and laced boots squeezed out and pushed the door open by another foot or two.

  “Miss O’Shea?” Julie ventured.

  “You must know that I am.” A low growl of a voice.

  She determined not to be intimidated. “I’m sorry to come without notice, but there wasn’t time and I could not get your phone number. My name is Julie Hayes. I’m looking for Thomas Francis Mooney.”

  The woman stared at her. Not hostile, but not friendly either. Her expression suggested disbelief. Once she would have been beautiful, Julie thought. She was striking now, many lines running down from a scowl and from the corners of her mouth, the mouth itself determined, not to say tough. The eyes were deep-set and dark, the brow and cheekbones prominent, the nose long and straight. Her black hair was peppered with gray and hung in two untidy braids. “Go in,” she said finally, and, when Julie had entered, followed and bolted the door. The passageway was occupied by an aged but operational Ford, the tires buoying it up. Edna O’Shea led the way into a courtyard open to the sky. Old farm machinery lay about. But what caught Julie’s attention were the several large blocks of stone. One piece, surrounded by scaffolding, the ground white with chips at its base, seemed to be taking the shape of a hunched figure. A fat donkey was grazing on the withered grass. It brayed raucously as they passed, and O’Shea said, “That one does all the talking around here.” The woman had humor. Julie noted her shirttails where they hung beneath the sweater, daubed with paint of many colors. She had to suppose she had interrupted the artist at her work.

  O’Shea opened a door off the courtyard into a large kitchen. She wiped her feet on the whitened mat before crossing the threshold. Julie did the same. The floors were flagstone and scattered with rugs woven of red, brown and orange strands. The kitchen ceiling was low, a loft overhead, the stairs to which were the only partition between the room and a studio so full of light it had to come from the sky. An easel stood there, a bucket beside it, and on it a work in progress draped with a sheet. At one end of the kitchen was a stone fireplace. A door alongside opened into a bedroom. At the other end stood a range much like the one she had seen in the house of her Wicklow relatives. A kettle was
on the boil. On the long kitchen table, along with a pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl and a crock of butter, were rags and paint tubes, brushes and the artist’s palette where, likely, she had set it down to cross the courtyard and open the outer doors to Julie.

  “I’ll take your coat,” O’Shea said. She hung her own sweater on a peg behind the door, and now hung Julie’s coat alongside it. “You’re a walker, aren’t you?” It sounded like a challenge.

  Julie nodded.

  “So was he.”

  Was. “Is he dead?”

  “They say he is, gone seven years the tenth of October.”

  “That was his birthday,” Julie said.

  “He’d turned forty-five that day. … Sit there in the rocker out of the draft.” She went to the cupboard and took two mugs from their hooks. Into each she spooned a coarse-grained sugar and half-filled the mugs with boiling water. To this she added whisky from a stone bottle, the fumes sweet and pungent when she stirred the mixture. She put Julie’s mug on a footstool near her chair and turned the handle toward her. Her own drink in hand, she looked down at the visitor and said, “Could you not have come sooner?”