Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Julie was a second or two weighing what she said. “Then you know that he was my father?”

  “I have only to look at you.”

  “I didn’t think he was aware of my existence.”

  “I’m sure he was not.” She made a slight gesture with the mug toward Julie before she put it to her lips.

  Julie took a careful sip. The fumes cleared her head. “I had to want to come before I could. I had to find out where to come, and I had no idea what kind of welcome I’d get if I did find him.”

  “It would have been a willing one. And is.”

  “Thank you.” Almost a whisper. “I have the feeling you’re not surprised that I’m here.”

  “Oh, I am. But I expect surprises every day of my life. Not cataclysms, thank God. Most of them are little miracles of the unexpected.”

  Julie was reminded of Wicklow and what her great-uncle had called the miracle of reproduction, the similarity of their hands. Edna O’Shea had also been in Wicklow town and had left a clue behind. Julie was soon telling her of how her search in Ireland had begun.

  “Ah, the clown,” O’Shea said, hearing of the painting the child, Mary, had brought down to show Julie. “And Frank’s mother, is she gone now?”

  Julie wondered why it was not already known to O’Shea that the woman was dead, why communications seemed to break abruptly where her father was concerned.

  “It’s a gracious part of Ireland, Wicklow, but I could not live there.”

  “My father couldn’t either, could he?”

  “Where could he live? If I knew, I’d tell you, and if I knew for certain where he died, I’d tell you that, for it’s time I believed him dead. I’ve put a marker in Saint Columkills and a bit of the boat that went ashore without him, but there are no mortal remains.” She tilted back her head and drank most of her toddy. She blew a little steam into the air. “Drink up before it’s cold.”

  Julie asked, “What was he like?”

  O’Shea’s eyes wandered about the room, resting here and there as though she had decided on something to say and then turned from it. Julie sipped her whisky. A wry, tight smile appeared on O’Shea’s lips. “What do you think he was like?”

  “Romantic … restless … fun …” Once started, Julie plunged ahead: “Fun, good-tempered, no money, didn’t care, generous anyway. A lot of solitude, sheep, the sea, not much of a fighter. I’m not sure about loyalty or humor. I don’t think he’d have been cruel, and if you hurt him, he’d try to hide it. Religious maybe, anyway a seeker …” She had avoided the woman’s eyes. Now she met them. O’Shea suppressed a smile. “Oh, boy,” Julie said, “I haven’t let go like that since I got off the couch—and I wasn’t much good at it there. You know, Freud, free association …”

  “I do know.” Julie felt the color in her face. “It was the word seeker that stopped you,” the woman added.

  “I’ve done a lot of seeking,” Julie said. “Maybe I’m just talking about me.”

  “You’re not far off about him. I’ll tell you what I can.” She got up and took their mugs to the sink. “First I must ring up the butcher before his boy goes home for the day. We’ll have a bit of steak for our dinner. Or are you a vegetarian?” Julie shook her head. “Good. A nice bit of steak. And he’ll collect your luggage from Meg Riley’s and bring it up when he’s coming.”

  Julie thought about that. “You knew I was coming as soon as I left Ballymahon.”

  “And I knew you were a walker by the time it took you to get here.”

  O’Shea went to a phone at a table near the bedroom door. She stood while she spoke and then, making a second call, slowly turned her back on Julie. Julie went to the courtyard windows, restive but not wanting to venture further within the house until invited to do so. A goat was grazing not far from the donkey, a fat or pregnant goat that made her think of Picasso and of the New York museum where she had seen the sculpture.

  O’Shea went from the phone to the range, shook up the fire and added fresh turf. She said not a word. It was as though she had forgotten Julie was there. She washed her paintbrushes, still without speaking. Finally, over her shoulder: “I should have asked you long ago—why didn’t you speak up? The W.C. is through the bedroom.”

  Julie was grateful. On suggestion, she needed the convenience, but even more than that she wanted to escape the silence. She observed as much of the bedroom as she could in passing: a wide bed covered with a quilt, with two long rows of books on the wall behind it—heavy on history and politics, some poetry and folklore. Not a title that she recognized. A crucifix hung on the wall alongside the bed, a brightly bleeding Christus. A huge wardrobe left little room to pass. She wondered if her father’s clothes might still hang at one end. The bathroom was modern mail order, including the water heater, stone cold to her touch. A box of matches stood on the shelf with the clean towels, but there was no sign of a wall or floor radiator. The room was bone-chilling, and the rush of water thunderous when she flushed the commode.

  When she returned to the kitchen, O’Shea was sitting at the table, her knees drawn up, her feet on the bench. She had thrown off whatever mood had come upon her. “You came north by way of Sligo town, did you?”

  “Yes.” And of course she should have guessed what had gone on on the telephone: newspapers had arrived on the bus that brought her to Ballymahon with a story until then hardly noted as it came over the television or radio. Now it would take on meaning locally with the arrival of a young American woman in the village. Why it should have silenced Edna O’Shea instead of rousing her curiosity on the instant was something she might learn in time. “A lot of weird things have been happening to me,” she added.

  “You’re fortunate that weird is the worst word you have for it.”

  Julie admitted that the presence of a murdered man in the bed where she had slept the night before was not the sort of thing that happened to everybody.

  “Have you any notion why?”

  Julie shook her head. “Was my father a political partisan? Is it all right to ask that?”

  “His mother was Ireland. There’s no harm in asking, and I doubt there’s much in telling.” She drew a deep breath. “He was very much a partisan. Now before we go on, you and I must decide by what names we’re to speak to one another. Whenever you say Miss O’Shea, I expect to be charged with some breach of the law.”

  “Everybody I know calls me Julie. Even people I don’t know.”

  “I think for you to call me mother would take more getting used to than we’ll have time for. I dare say you’ll be rushing on as soon as you learn all I can tell you. So you’ll call me Edna.”

  “Edna,” Julie repeated. “I have promised to visit a friend soon—Seamus McNally. He’s a playwright.”

  “Is he now?” said mockingly.

  “Then you know him,” Julie said, again chagrined at her assumption of her stepmother’s lack of sophistication. But it was not that; it was the fear of seeming herself brittle, a show-off.

  “Oh, yes,” O’Shea said. “But then over here most of us know one another.”

  “When Seamus was in New York, I asked him if he knew the name Thomas Francis Mooney. He didn’t.”

  “I think he’d have remembered the same man under another name,” O’Shea said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  JULIE WAITED FOR O’SHEA to give her the name by which McNally might have known her father, but it was not forthcoming, and the longer she waited, the more difficult it became to ask.

  The afternoon was well on when O’Shea suddenly asked her, “Where were you seven years ago this time?”

  “In New York. I must have been.” She reached for the cup of strong, dark tea and held it, warming her hands. “I was two years into a marriage that recently came apart.”

  “By your choice, I trust.”

  “It takes two,” Julie said. She drank her tea, her third cup of the day. It was almost dark in the room, and Edna O’Shea seemed to be an old woman in the failing light. They h
ad drawn chairs to the fireplace, and when the turf was burning well, O’Shea had hung the blackened kettle over it and had twice refilled the teapot.

  She got up now and lit a lamp. “I can go through that October day minute by minute and often have. I went out at dawn, which is my habit, to watch the sun come up. It was cold and misty, and the sun once out was like a will-o’-the-wisp. I’ve painted it from memory many times since. It’s never been like that again, and I’ve not got it right yet, but I can see it true. I brought a rose in with me when I came and put it with a hand-woven shirt where I set his place at the table. I made our porridge and had my own, and when the mist lifted, the sun was hard and bright, and I went out to my work. He came out to me wearing the shirt and very handsome in it—a tall man, a head taller than myself. Those same gray eyes as yours. He said he’d be going out in the boat, that it was a good day and I was not to worry if he was gone longer than usual. I never saw him again. He left by the meadow door not to disturb me. There were some in the village who saw him cast off, but if he was seen thereafter, no word of it ever came to me. His battered boat was found washed ashore clear across the bay three days later. I’ve heard it said that he could have beached it there himself and vanished into another life. I don’t know what to say to that to this day.”

  “Who said it?”

  O’Shea returned to her chair. “I’ll try to remember if you think it’s important.”

  Julie felt the woman was piqued though she could not imagine why, but she pursued the question because it was important: “Do you feel that could have happened?”

  “I do. But I also believe he’s dead now. I think I’d have known. He would have let me know.”

  “I was told he was never in touch with my mother after he left, but I’m not sure that’s so. For one thing, he published a poem and had the money for it sent to her, something she never told me at all.”

  “‘Where the Wild Geese Fly No More,’” O’Shea said, and both of them started to recite the lines at the same time and continued until they broke up with laughter. It was a good moment between them. The older woman said, “It’s a great thing to write one poem only and to live your life by it. You and I have much to say to each other. You’d better plan to stay the week.”

  Julie thanked her. “I’ll call Seamus in a day or two.” She did want to stay on a few days with the artist: she needed the rest, and the time to sort out, and maybe someone to share the sorting with. It might have been Seamus, but it wasn’t. “What was the name he would have known my father by?” The question came out so easily when the time was right.

  O’Shea hesitated. Then: “Aengus.”

  “Just Aengus?”

  “A cover name, known far better than the name he came with. I’m not going to burden you with information you’re as well off not having, and the God’s truth is I don’t know myself if it was by choice he left this place and foundered at the mercy of the sea. I can tell you what made him a partisan, as you call it. That I can tell you. We were crossing the North Channel by water—I’m not fond of flying except to look at the clouds up close: golden fleece in the sunlight; silver fleece by the moon. I’d had a successful exhibition in London, and right after it Frank and I were married. Now, we’d met on that same Glasgow-to-Larne boat going the other way a month before, and no sooner met than madly in love.” She gave a snort and fell to gnawing her thumbnail while she stared at the fire, her eyes aglow with its reflection. “It was a time of ecstasy, and I was having my first experience of it at the age of forty-six.” She rocked back and forth. “There now: it could only happen to an Irishwoman.”

  Julie laughed. And then thought it was not an experience to which she had been overly exposed herself.

  “I was going to say what turned him to the cause: a drunken, loose-tongued Belfastman on the boat saying that all the west of Ireland was good for was raising jackasses. I think Frank would have knocked him into the sea if I hadn’t been there, and he never got over it. We weren’t long settled in when he took the oath. He was a born sailor and, provided with a boat, he learned the bay waters and guided many a darkened ship through them. Nobody knew the Donegal coast like he did. He went up and down learning it and at the same time gathered materials for his writing. The sadness of his life was that he was not a writer, though he never gave up trying. He could do most anything else he put his mind to. He mended the slate roofs and built me two windows to the sky. He made the frames and stretched my canvases for me. He cooked my meals and built the scaffolding around the piece we called ‘The Wandering Aengus’ where it sits in the courtyard today. I did not touch it from the day he left until he was gone seven years. On that day I went out and took off the tarpaulins with which I’d shrouded it. He made the sculptor’s tools for me and kept them sharp. You’ll see the anvil and the furnace, the bellows and his hammer and tongs—there’d been a smithy’s shop in the Ring long ago. …”

  Julie began to see a character resemblance between her father and herself. She, too, could do fairly well, and sometimes better than that, anything she put her mind to, and what had she not, at one time or another, put her mind to? Acting, art history, psychiatry, bead-making, fortune-telling … a gossip columnist now, of all things … striving to write her way out of it. Determined to write.

  “He loved to sing and he could tell a good story, mind. It was only the writing he couldn’t keep alive. No one was ever blessed with better company than I,” the widow went on, and her tone embraced her widowhood, more and more a croon. “If there had been a war in his lifetime, he’d have been an Irish soldier in an alien army—so long as the cause served Ireland. It was always in his head, you see, the urge to do something for this divided land. And the problem had been what to do. In olden times he would have been a servant to the king.”

  Julie thought of the Graham-Kearneys, whom her father had served in a number of ways. “Or the king’s fool,” she said.

  “If he’s gone from me by choice,” O’Shea went on, “and I think now it may well have been that way, it’s a wonder he didn’t go sooner.” She turned in her chair to look at Julie. “The king’s fool who was wiser than anyone knew but the king?”

  Julie nodded. “Did he ever speak of my mother, Katherine Richards? She’s dead now too.”

  “He loved her very much.”

  Julie wondered if that answer had not been on the back of her tongue waiting for the question. “Then why did he leave her?”

  “Because he could not serve. She was surrounded by servitors and some more favored than himself. He felt he had nothing to give her.”

  “Only me,” Julie said.

  “I would swear on my life he did not know of you.”

  Julie got up, unable to sit quietly any longer. “I must have been a natural consequence—even if I wasn’t on their agenda, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, but she would not have told him, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t know what I see. It’s like a house of mirrors.” She touched her foot to a square of turf that had fallen away from the rest, returning it to the fire. “She was never supposed to have seen him after he left, but wouldn’t he have had to return to New York at least for the annulment?”

  “Things can be done by affidavit, or—not at all.”

  “What were the grounds?” Julie turned from the fire. “I know it gives a Catholic a second chance. Or did back then, but there had to be some pretty stinking reason for it. It isn’t just handed out like Communion.”

  “You’re angry, and I don’t wonder,” O’Shea said.

  “I want to know,” Julie said, her voice rising, “I want to know.”

  O’Shea gave an impatient toss of her head. “Do you think either one of us will ever know the truth about him? And what would we know if we did that would be better than what we know now? Isn’t it enough that I recognized you for his daughter? I, too, am a teller of tales. I could weave you a heritage. For every mortal in search of who and why he was born there is a conspiracy o
f witnesses who may not have been there at all. A bit of the teller’s dream of himself goes into every answer. There are always circumstances which are indiscernible, and the truth is in their shadow. Come and sit down and tell me: has anyone you’ve asked about him had less than a good word of Frank Mooney?”

  “There was one. But he was my mother’s lover—before and after my father. How about that?”

  “And couldn’t believe he’d missed the mark himself?” O’Shea said.

  Julie, when she caught on to the implication, nodded. It might well be so.

  O’Shea threw back her head and laughed heartily. “It takes two women to know any man—if he’s worth the knowing at all.”

  It was her laugh, really, that first made Julie love her.

  FOR THREE DAYS they talked during most of their waking hours. They packed sandwiches and a thermos of tea in a knapsack and walked the Coast Road; they followed sheep trails high among rocky crags. They took refuge in caverns through pelting showers and from them watched the racing clouds, the clearing skies. They timed themselves to the tide and trekked along the sands, fleeing the swift reach of foamy water like children defying every wave to come and get them. They talked of painters and painting, of which Julie knew more than she had thought she knew, discovery implicit in the growth of love. She learned that Edna O’Shea had been born in England of Irish parents and she learned that the Stone Ring had been provided her by an Irish benefactor to be given to the nation on her death. The ground was sacred to saints and kings, legend had it, “And you can be sure none of them ever tried to till it. It would unmake a saint to try.” Legend also had it that it had been a stopover for smugglers.

  In the morning light of the fourth day Edna O’Shea brought out a number of paintings and set them one by one in front of Julie, leaving those Julie especially admired tilted against a chair leg, table leg, the leg of her easel. Julie was surprised at their severity. More and more O’Shea seemed to strive for simplicity. The latest pieces were stark, bleak. She was certainly not an artist Julie would have called a landscape painter. Except that you’d say the same of Dali or O’Keeffe. Nor was there any sign of the clown the Wicklow child called Pansy.