Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  They gossiped—if it could be called that—about Frank’s family—Julie’s own, she kept reminding herself—in Wicklow. There was a high rate of desertion among the men and of fidelity among the women, who loved them more than they may have deserved. Julie told O’Shea what she could of Jeff and was surprised at how uncertain she herself was of many things about him. “It’s like I was afraid to know him, except to blame him in my own mind for things that didn’t matter much. I was afraid to love him the way I sure as hell wanted to love somebody.”

  “Why afraid?”

  Julie shrugged. “I was afraid it might turn him off. Too much.”

  “Or on?”

  “Maybe.” She avoided the eyes of the older woman. “He’s got someone now who turns him on. That’s for certain.”

  O’Shea pounced: “And you?”

  The time had come to tell her stepmother what had happened to her that Sunday morning in June after Jeff had told her he wanted a divorce.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  O’SHEA LEANED BACK. SHE had moved her chair closer while Julie spoke. “The dirty dogs!” she cried out. “And the arrogance of sanctuary in Ireland!”

  “The more I think about it, the less surprised I am,” Julie said. “I believe now there’s a link to everything that’s happened to me. I’ve always said nothing is accidental.”

  “You saw but the one of them. Are they together, do you think?”

  It had not occurred to her that they might not be. “Yes. But it’s just a feeling, and that’s because they’re jammed into one place in my mind … like a sickness.” She’d had to grope for the word and the nausea came with it. “Oh, Christ! Like being damaged for life. I’m not! I will not be!”

  “Indeed you’re not. But they are. They’ll never escape.”

  Julie saw again in her mind’s eye Kincaid’s wild flight from her, his crash into and break through the dancing barricade. “He was more shocked even than me.”

  “Do you think you’re in danger for having seen him?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I know how they got here: it’s for their own safety—they’re supposed to be out of Mr. Romano’s reach. … Isn’t it crazy! I still call him Mr. Romano—a gangster.”

  “Who loves art,” O’Shea added, for Julie had told her in the course of their long conversations of her troublous friendship with the underworld figure.

  “And buys it at auction or on somebody’s advice—legitimate—only not under his own name.”

  “Most collectors go that way.” She put Julie back on track: “Kincaid and his partner—how did they get here?”

  “I don’t know exactly how, but I think their lawyer got them over and hid them away among his Irish connections. Do you know who Joe Quinlan is?”

  “I do know. Is he their lawyer? Ah, now I begin to see the shape of things.”

  “They were supposed to be safe and anonymous here till he brought them back to New York for their trial, or maybe even to give testimony against Romano if they can identify his thugs. Isn’t it ironic? I was trying to find a safe place for myself—to get away from the whole scene. That’s what finally pushed me into the search for Thomas Francis Mooney.”

  “And not the pending divorce?”

  Julie sighed. “That too. But it’s all connected. I think the man who was killed in Sligo may have been hired by Romano—either to protect me or to follow me in case I was on the track of Kincaid and Donahue. What I ought to know by now is that Romano has more ways of finding things out than the FBI, and I’ll bet customs people all over the world are among his best informants.”

  O’Shea sat back in her chair and rocked herself gently. “It would be interesting to know if the people giving those two cover—in the Donegal hills it must be—know the nature of their offense.”

  “They’d do it for Quinlan,” Julie said.

  “Almost anything,” her stepmother agreed.

  A sudden thought: “Would my father have known him?”

  “He might have—but, more likely, Quinlan’s lieutenants.”

  “Do you know anything, Edna, about an organization called the ONI?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “They’re more radical than the IRA, I think.”

  “One Nation Indivisible. Do you find that so radical?”

  “I meant more violent. I used to say the words in school every morning. They’re from the American Pledge of Allegiance—‘one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’”

  Both women were quiet for a moment. It was dark outside by then, and the wind was all but silent, only a whisper. “I feel Frank to be very close tonight,” O’Shea said, her voice pitched higher than normal. “It’s a sorrow to me, for I’ve tried these seven years to draw him near. That I couldn’t I took to be a sure sign that he wasn’t dead at all.”

  A memory of the keening women at the Casey funeral flickered in and out of Julie’s mind. “I don’t think he’s dead,” she said.

  O’Shea turned in her chair to look at her.

  “I don’t,” Julie repeated.

  O’Shea turned back to the fire, which had almost gone to ashes. “Oh, child,” she murmured.

  After a moment Julie asked, “Who was Aengus?”

  “An ancient Irish god of love and poetry. Long before Christianity cooled us off.”

  “‘The Wandering Aengus,’” Julie said. “I should have known from Yeats’s poem: ‘the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon.’ I must call New York in the morning and I must call Seamus.”

  “Will you go on looking for your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will you let me know if you find him, dead or alive?”

  “I will.”

  They were gathering the supper dishes into the sink, the kettle on the boil for coffee, when the phone rang. There had been few calls since Julie had arrived, and O’Shea put off most of them to return, herself, at another time. She answered now in her usual manner, giving her phone number. Without a word to the caller she said, “It’s a Seamus McNally for Mrs. Hayes.”

  Julie was quicker than she would like to have been, her stepmother watching, but her heart had leaped ahead. “How did you find me, Seamus?” She had not gotten to tell him about Edna O’Shea.

  “I started with Garvy’s gran and came to a halt with the next stop …”

  “Greely’s Bookstore,” Julie said.

  “Aye, and by good fortune I was able to squeeze out the information that you’d been there to inquire after Edna O’Shea. Old man Greely himself gave me the number.”

  “You’re a wonderful detective, and I’m glad you found me,” she said softly.

  “Does that mean you’re ready for me to come and get you?”

  “I was going to call you tonight,” Julie said. “Shall I ask my stepmother to give you directions?”

  “Your stepmother,” he repeated. Then, after a pause, “No, love, I know where I’m going. Just tell me the name of the house.”

  “Tell him the Stone Ring,” O’Shea said. “That’s all he needs to know.”

  When Julie had put down the phone, her stepmother said, “Your father and Ned Greely were friends. But after Frank was gone, Ned and I never got on. I’m surprised they told you where to look for me.”

  “Edna, what about the person who said he might have beached the boat himself and vanished? You said to remind you.”

  “I don’t remember saying that at all.” She was becoming impatient, Julie thought, perhaps for her to go, since she was going. “It was the observation of a tubercular Franciscan, who may well be dead himself by now. He came from Rossnowlagh to say Mass on the Sunday we prayed for Frank’s safe return—or the peaceful repose of his soul.”

  “Can’t you remember his name?” Julie persisted. She might not come this way again.

  “A Franciscan: Brother Daniel. It might have been that.”

  O’Shea made coffee that neithe
r of them any longer wanted. And conversation had become strained. Julie proposed to go up to the loft early.

  O’Shea did not protest. “I’ll be up and away in the morning before you leave, and if I’m not back, be sure to close the great doors so the animals won’t get out. They’re the devil to catch, and the bogs are treacherous.”

  Julie thanked her for many kindnesses, but they did not even touch. O’Shea stood resolute, her back to the fire, her hands clasped behind her. Julie reasoned that her leaving might seem a betrayal, as though she’d made a choice between O’Shea and Seamus McNally. And for her own part, she felt the pain of yet another separation.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  SHE AWOKE IN THE morning to a silent house and knew that O’Shea must have already gone out. In the kitchen she found a fire built up in the range that would last the morning, and on the table a framed watercolor of the pale and misted sun O’Shea had described as a will-o’-the-wisp. Alongside it was an envelope marked “Julie.” It contained two lined pages from a notebook. She read one with her name on it first: “I like this watercolor the best of my attempts to catch that morning’s sun. Take it in memory. And you had better have the enclosed. He wrote it out for me. Go and Godspeed. Edna.”

  The enclosure, the paper yellowing, was the poem “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More,” in her father’s hand.

  SHE LISTENED FOR THE SOUND of Seamus’s car and twice went out to the great doors when there was no one there, the wind and her imagination playing tricks on her. She tried a last time to make friends with the donkey called Maud, but she would have none of Julie, the only improvement in their relationship a dubious one: now she waited until Julie’s hand was almost upon her before turning her backside and kicking out her heels. And Julie would have none of the goat, a fragrant creature. O’Shea squeezed milk from her morning and night, a rich, strong-tasting milk that made Julie slightly ill even to think about.

  Seamus came while she was in the courtyard, and she was out the big doors to meet him as soon as he had parked the car. He caught her in his arms and lifted her from the ground. “This time it will take an act of God,” he said.

  “Sh-h-h-h,” into his ear.

  “Obeisance, not a challenge,” he said.

  Julie led him by the hand past the stately Ford.

  “Is Edna O’Shea your stepmother truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father? Why have I not heard of him?”

  “He’s been dead for seven years—or gone from here anyway. But Seamus, you have heard of him. Edna said you would know him under the code name Aengus.”

  McNally stood stock still and turned Julie around to where the sun was full in her face. “Holy Mother of God,” he said. “I’ve been wondering since the night we met at Ginny’s who you reminded me of. I met him but the once, but I am never likely to forget it. I was doing a documentary film script on piracy and patriotism—how does that strike you?”

  Julie grinned and pulled him toward the kitchen door. “Edna left early this morning. We’re alone here.”

  “Are we? It’s about time.” Then, soberly: “I daresay she didn’t want to see me. I’ve moved away from my fervent days, and I don’t suppose she has, once married to Aengus. He was IRA, you know, and a Provo at that, yet the gentlest man I ever met.”

  “Wait,” Julie said. “I want to listen carefully and hear everything right.”

  THE TEA was a lot stronger than what she had given him that night on Forty-fourth Street. “I’ve learned,” she said in response to his compliment.

  “It was like a pilgrimage,” he said presently. “I climbed a mountain trail and found the cave where he sometimes lived. It’s all hallowed ground, the cliffs and the hills thereabouts, where saints once trod, it’s told, and the fairy people are still conjured by those who need them. And that’s what we talked about, Aengus and I. He’d been gathering the legends of Ireland’s wild west. ‘I’ll preserve them, never fear,’ he said, ‘though the land’s salvation might have lain in their destruction long ago.’ A lovely man, half-wise, half-simple. You know, I think I did hear that he was dead. Lost at sea, was he?”

  “His boat was found ashore, but not him.”

  “Are you satisfied?”

  “No.”

  “And the widow?”

  “She may be—after seven years’ waiting.”

  “Do you know where she is right now?”

  “I don’t. We’ve walked miles and miles every day since I’ve been here, and wherever we went, she’d been there many times before.”

  “You’re beginning to talk Irish, girl.”

  Julie laughed. “I’m a chameleon.”

  “Could we have a wee look around the place as long as we’re on our own?” he asked conspiratorially. “The Stone Ring has a dark history—smuggling, and it was once a prison for men they’d call terrorists today, during the struggle with the landlords.”

  Julie was reluctant to poke around the several buildings she had not been shown by O’Shea herself, who merely said they were no longer in use. And she wanted to go before the woman returned, but Seamus was alive with curiosity and primed her favor with anecdotes concerning Aengus. He was supposed to have been high in forbidden councils, at one time a district IRA commandant. So it was said. The word gave Julie no great pleasure. Such bitter romance as The Informer or Odd Man Out belonged on television at home, where it seemed much more real. Then it occurred to her that Seamus might be weaving a story he thought she wanted to hear and was reminded of what O’Shea had said—that a bit of the teller’s dream goes into every tale told to the seeker of origins. She asked Seamus if he had ever been associated with the IRA.

  “I wasn’t, but I had chums who tried to recruit me. If I’d been in Derry as a kid, I’d have thrown a few rocks and banged the pot lids to sound the alarm, but I don’t have much taste for radical personalities, however just their causes may be. There. I hope I haven’t offended you.” So he had not been weaving tales.

  She showed him the tower room, where all her father’s papers were stored much as he had left them, notebooks now molding in the cold salt air. The stove looked not to have been lit in his absence. She was slightly hurt that Seamus showed no great curiosity about her father’s writing. Hypocritical: her own curiosity had been soon reduced when she tried to read them.

  A sound like that of creaking hinges stopped them in then-tracks. Julie went to the stairway and called out her stepmother’s name, but no answer came. As they went down to look, one side of the double door banged in the wind. Julie was sure she had closed it behind them, although she had not bolted it, thinking they would soon leave.

  “Edna,” she called again from the courtyard. Her stepmother might have returned to the house by the meadow door. Then from off somewhere she heard the gee-haw of the donkey. “Oh, my God, she’s out.” The goat was placidly munching near the kitchen door. But when they rushed outside the Ring to look for Maud, the only life to be seen was a donkey-drawn flat cart with two men aboard on the road to Ballymahon. The donkey brayed, and the driver laid a whip to its flanks that hurried it along. From inside the Ring came a responsive bray.

  “That’s Maud—there all the time,” Julie said, laughing with relief, and when they went in, they found the beast on the other side of the scaffolding.

  “Maud. After Maud Gonne, do you think?” Seamus ventured.

  “Yeats’s beloved?”

  “Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, a patriot beyond the call. But some called her all the same.”

  “I don’t understand,” Julie said.

  “She was a woman of flesh as well as spirit, and that created a terrible conflict among the patriots.”

  When they went out from the Ring a few minutes later and Seamus pulled hard on the great doors to be sure the latch had caught inside, Julie said, “I can’t really be sure: I may have left it open.”

  “And you may not have done,” Seamus said.

  She thought about the implications of
his remark while he was putting her suitcase in the hatchback of the Nissan. She walked back to the ring of huddled stone buildings she had thought long abandoned and discovered that where the great doors on the entry were secured only by a latch and a hand bolt on the inside, the locks on two of the weathered doors she now looked at more closely were comparatively new, modern certainly. And in the loose earth close by she detected the wheel marks of a cart and the imprints of a donkey’s hooves.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked when Seamus joined her.

  “That she has a secret life interrupted with your arrival.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am and I’m not. It’s you that lived near a week in her house.”

  “What could it mean?” she said.

  “For one thing it could mean she’s storing arms that have been smuggled into the country. Drugs, I doubt, but something. Whatever it means, Julie, I have the feeling you’re better off not knowing.”

  “She said something like that herself concerning my father. I believed everything she told me.”

  “And why not? That doesn’t mean she had to tell you everything, does it?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  JULIE, HAVING DECIDED TO do nothing about the presence in Ireland of Kincaid and, presumably, Donahue, saw no point in telling Seamus they were there. If she was ever to throw off the feeling of degradation they had cast upon her, it must happen during her visit with Seamus. While he drove, he reached his hand for hers now and then and held it until the next jagged curve in the road required both hands on the wheel.

  “Old friends,” he said, not quite what she had hoped for. Then: “And lovers to be?”

  She gave his hand a squeeze.