Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Wrong,” Julie said. “If I had my way, I’d never have to see either of you again in my lifetime.”

  “You want us in hell, right?” Kincaid this time.

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe what’s happened to us ain’t hell, but it’s pretty close. Me and Jim aren’t like we were that morning when we did that to you. We don’t want to be excused or anything. Pigs. Animals. It was like we went crazy, you know?”

  “I was there,” Julie said.

  “It was the booze we had, and some guy put something in it. We’d gone to a bunch of porn movies and got ourselves hotted up …”

  “Look, Mr. Kincaid. You can tell this all in court. I may even have to be there. You said something about Christian charity—where does that come in? If you’ve got any of it, you’ll let me go.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re right, and like Jim says, it’s all bullshit anyway. Excuse me. We did what we did and we were going to take our punishment if it wasn’t for our families and Mr. Quinlan. And we wouldn’t’ve had to get beat up to do it, either.”

  “That’s bullshit too,” Julie said. She would never forget the night she left Seamus in order to view these men in a lineup and to share Detective Russo’s despair when she couldn’t and Missy Glass wouldn’t identify them.

  “Okay. When we thought we could get away free—who wouldn’t? That don’t mean we weren’t sorry or ashamed of ourselves. If it wasn’t for Jim being in it too, I think I’d’ve killed myself.”

  Julie drew a deep, audible breath. Her eyes were stinging from smoke, and she rubbed them. “Can’t you leave the door open?”

  “That makes it worse, more downdraft or something,” Donahue said. “It won’t be so bad when the fresh turf catches. …” To his partner: “Stop explaining, Frankie. Just tell her and get it over with. Do you want me to do it?” To Julie: “He’s a craw thumper Do you know what that is?” He beat at his breast to illustrate the mea culpa.

  “Yeah.”

  He took over then. “I’m not saying we’d’ve turned ourselves in if the goons hadn’t threatened to ship us out in cement if we didn’t. …”

  The goons, Julie thought. Then: Wait a minute. These two had denied to Lieutenant Marks that they’d been assaulted at all. Why were they admitting it now? She interrupted him: “Why tell me this? Why didn’t you tell the Grand Jury or the district attorney?”

  “Mr. Quinlan wouldn’t let us. I wanted to, but the thing was, I saw the driver of the car that night up close. A little guy—you’d’ve almost thought he was a midget. He jumped out and started kicking us and spitting on us. But Mr. Quinlan said I couldn’t be sure of seeing anybody under the circumstances. I was to stay with my original story—me and Frankie having a fight—until he said different.”

  Julie understood. She knew Romano’s driver, Little Michael, a man not over five feet tall and very slight. His was a lifetime loyalty to the boss, and Michael would himself have been outraged on her behalf. To put him on the scene was a perfect Romano link.

  She did not want to hear any more. “Why can’t you tell all this to a priest or somebody and leave me out of it? What am I doing here? If I’d been going to turn you in, wouldn’t I have done it the night I saw you in Donegal? I don’t want to know why you attacked me. I don’t want to know why you would have attacked that poor old street woman if I hadn’t come along when I did.”

  “Just calm down and I’ll try and tell you.” Donahue pointed at the curtained alcove. “That old lady in there—that’s our penance, ma’am. Frankie and me aren’t going back. We’re going to stay here till she dies. And take good care of her. She’d be put away if it wasn’t for us. And she will be if they extradite us. Back home—if they got us and put us on trial and called in the psychiatrists. …” He shook his head. “We did something crazy, like perverts. Now, you aren’t going to believe this, but we didn’t want to do it.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Julie said.

  “I told you she wasn’t going to understand.” His lips were drawn tight. Sweat rose beneath the mouse of hair on his forehead. His eyes, screwed up, seemed even smaller.

  But something in what he had said provoked her curiosity: the suggestion of psychiatrists. “You didn’t want to do it,” she said. “And so?”

  “So we did every stinking thing we could.”

  “You sure did,” Julie said, and for the first time participated in whatever it was they were trying to communicate. “What does Joe Quinlan have to say about your staying here?”

  “He doesn’t know yet. And he didn’t exactly bring us over here himself, like by the hand. He talked to us just the once. You’d’ve thought he’d want to know everything. But he didn’t want to know anything. It was like he told us what happened. Like he believed everything my mom and Frankie’s mother and the priest told about us. The people we’ve met over here—they’re his cousin’s family, and they think he’s a whole bunch, Mister Big, he’s God! He keeps them alive, see, when there’s flood or famine or the sheep get sick, and their biggest thing is a united Ireland, maybe a United States of Ireland. I could tell you a lot of things, but I learned to keep my mouth shut.”

  “What do they think about you two?” Julie asked and remembered that Edna O’Shea had wondered the same thing.

  “They don’t know about you. They think we’re being sequestered so’s we can give evidence in a big trial coming up.”

  Julie would as soon they stayed in Ireland and let the Irish cope with their penance or their plunder. She doubted it could happen. Quinlan would whistle, and they would respond, whether or not they chose to. “I’m back at the same old question, what do you want from me?”

  “We want you to say you forgive us,” Kincaid said instantly.

  She was stunned. Then she thought of what seemed a subtle, even a devious distinction: they didn’t ask her to forgive them, but to say she forgave them. But she soon realized that she was wrong. The distinction was her own.

  “The old lady in there won’t last very long, and the handouts we get from plastering and spraying whitewash, they don’t come to much,” Donahue explained. “We’ve taken an oath or I’d tell you what else.”

  “You’ve joined the IRA,” Julie said, not needing to hear more.

  “I’m not saying, and nothing’s happened yet. But I was good in high school chemistry,” Donahue went on, “and Frankie wants to hang in with me. Maybe we can do something and makeup, see?”

  Like killing people outright, Julie thought. Nor could she believe that any revolutionary movement would trust such partisans as these. Possibly a mortician might be useful to them.

  “What else can I do for you?” she said with ironic intent.

  “If we don’t come home in the spring,” Kincaid now took over, “go and see my mother for me. You can tell her everything.”

  “And do you think she will believe me?”

  “I wrote her a letter if you’ll take it. That’s what I wanted to ask you, will you take it to her—you know—if something happens to me?”

  Jim Donahue shook his head. “It won’t make any difference to anybody.”

  The wretched Kincaid stared at his partner across the table, stuck out his weak chin, and said, “It will to me.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  “OF COURSE IT HURTS!” Seamus shouted, and Julie was glad that she had not been the one to ask the question. “It hurts because they kept me strapped to a bloody ironing board when I should have been sitting up normal and looking about me.”

  “I only asked because you’re in such a temper and they left something to give you for the pain.” The housekeeper screwed up her mouth and gave a little toss of her head.

  “I appreciate your solicitude, Mrs. O’Gorman. But if you’d make us a hot toddy, I’d appreciate it more. The hour’s at hand. And don’t be afraid to tilt the bottle, love.”

  Mrs. O’Gorman left the room, a model of dignity, holding in much of herself with her elbows. She was built along the lines of a large carrot, broad
at the top and tapering down. She was ruddy-faced, a reluctant smile, and wore her gray hair braided and twisted around into a peak on the top of her head as though it might add to her stature. From the moment she had opened the cottage door, top half, then the bottom, one hand on the dog’s collar, Julie had doubted her welcome. Both Mrs. O’Gorman and the great black and tan hound dog had hovered near the bedside since her arrival. The dog, on Seamus’s command, had finally curled up on his blanket beneath the double window.

  Seamus, as soon as O’Gorman could be heard clattering in the kitchen, reached for Julie’s hand and pulled her toward him. “To hell with the bastards and their mockery of contrition. You’re here, and that’s all that matters. Will you give us a kiss? I’m dying to know if we can do it after all the bum starts.”

  Julie got up from the chair and leaned down over him, her thigh on the side of the bed. There was no other way, really, him flat on his back. It was their first kiss, and grew longer and deeper, and when Seamus put his hand to her breast, she made a little sound at the shock of pleasure.

  On the instant the dog leaped up onto her back with a growl that mounted in fury. He caught the shawl of her heavy sweater and shook it as he might have an animal he had by the neck. Julie twisted away and covered her head with her arms. Seamus shouted and cursed the animal and got up in the bed to grab him. Mrs. O’Gorman came running, shouting also, and flailed her apron in the air.

  Seamus had then had the dog by the collar and turned it over to the housekeeper, who dragged it outdoors, at once soothing and scolding it.

  “The jealous brute,” Seamus said. “Did he get his teeth into you?” He was sitting on the side of the bed, a long flannel nightshirt tucked between his legs. “Come and kneel down and let me have a look.”

  Julie pulled off the sweater and allowed him to examine her neck and shoulders.

  “Nary a mark,” Seamus said, “but I can hear your heart thumping. Or is it my own?”

  Julie got up and pulled on the sweater, not looking to see the extent of the damage.

  Mrs. O’Gorman was standing in the doorway. “I’ve put him out,” she said.

  “Will you take him up home with you and keep him for a few days?”

  “He won’t stay, and you need him here.”

  The implication to Julie was that he did not need her.

  “Look at you sitting up there,” the woman scolded him. “You’ll be crippling yourself for life.”

  “On the contrary,” Seamus said and slipped off the bed and onto his feet. “I’ve been misdiagnosed by the sawbones.” He hobbled across the room and took a bathrobe from a hook behind the door. “We’ll have our toddies in the lounge, Mrs. O’Gorman.”

  It was a large cottage named after the Swilly River, which it overlooked. Seamus had added onto it himself so that it was not authentic, as he explained, “but a hell of a lot more comfortable than it was in its authenticity.”

  Julie tried to memorize it—the large fireplace in the lounge or living room, the musical instruments. Seamus played the flute—“I’m not James Galway, but I can tootle a pretty tune.” There were books everywhere, and the floors were covered with the woven carpets of Donegal. She took in everything she could, for she knew that she would not be long a guest at Swilly Cottage after all, perhaps not even the night. There was a sad inevitability to her feeling of imminent departure. That Seamus understood her need to go was implicit in his saying, “I was hoping to show you the far, far hills that are very near to here, and the village Richard Garvy is coming over to see before we go into rehearsal. But you’re a writer. You know it’s more a state of mind than a place on the map. And when you see it on the stage, you’ll say you’ve been there, and so you will have been, don’t you see?”

  “I do see,” Julie said.

  “I’ve a copy of the play for you.”

  She did not remind him that she already had one, bought that first morning in the bookstore in Donegal town.

  They had their toddies and an early dinner of poached salmon Mrs. O’Gorman had brought already prepared from her house.

  “It’s twice poached, you know,” Seamus said, “one from an English lord’s demesne and once in a pot.”

  The dog barked incessantly, as though she had not already resolved to go, and Seamus was wincing with pain before the meal was over. Julie spoke to the housekeeper. “Seamus says you can arrange a car to drive me back to Donegal tonight.”

  “My son’s in the livery business. I’ll ring him up now.”

  “Your haste is indecent,” Seamus growled. “Bring me back a pill when you come.”

  “That’s why I’m in haste,” Mrs. O’Gorman said, the last word.

  “I’m sorry it’s come out this way,” Seamus said when she was gone.

  “It’s better that I finish up one part of my life before starting another,” Julie said.

  “I like that,” he said and grinned like a boy with the promise of his favorite treat if he took his medicine.

  Back in the same hotel room she had vacated in Donegal town that morning, she read again the inscription Seamus had written in the revised typescript he had given her of The Far, Far Hills of Home: “For Julie—with love that is and is to be.”

  FORTY-SIX

  FATHER DANIEL O’MEARA IN his brown robes and sandals was a towering old man, and the cold, murky office, its windows smudged with the dust of Dublin, seemed to vibrate with his coming. He had heavy jowls and thunderous eyebrows over eyes so searching they could purge a sinner for life, Julie thought. But the large mouth told of humor, and his deep voice filled the room. His first words when he had moved her from the desk to where they could sit side by side, gave her pleasure: “Now, where have we met before, Mrs. Hayes? I know I recognize you from somewhere.”

  “I don’t think so, but from someone maybe. Do you remember Thomas Francis Mooney? He was my father.”

  The priest pulled at his nose, taking a second or two before he murmured, “Mooney, is it? I do remember him as a lad. I taught him—a bright little fellow with fine, wide eyes like your own.”

  Julie could tell that the priest was groping his way through surprise. “I wasn’t trying to take you unawares, Father Daniel. I’ve been in Ballymahon with Edna O’Shea for a week. She recognized me for his daughter, but I don’t think he even knew of my existence. I should tell you that I know you said Mass for him when he disappeared.”

  “Yes, well. So I did. Is that why you came to see me?”

  “It was something you said that she repeated to me: you said he might have beached the boat himself and vanished.”

  “Why did she tell you that, I wonder? Sheer speculation on my part.”

  Julie suspected that unless she told all she knew, she would learn little from him that was new. And it would be unwise to throw the cover name Aengus at him, with all its political implications, without preparing the way. “Father Daniel, do you have time to listen if I were to tell you how I got to Donegal in my search for him?”

  “I have made a friend of time, Miss Julie. It had become too formidable an enemy. Tell on.”

  How odd that he should call her Miss Julie. He and Sweets Romano.

  So again Julie told the story of her search for her father, the tale growing longer with each telling, with each new episode of discovery. She wound up with her visit to Rossnowlagh, saying that Brother Charles had told her that her father might very well have gone to school to him, Father Daniel, for politics as well as history and algebra.

  “Not a reticent man, Brother Charles. Well, I forgive him as he forgave me my chauvinism. How did you find Miss O’Shea?”

  “Through the cashier at Greely’s Bookstore in Sligo.”

  The priest’s jowls quivered when he chortled. “I was inquiring after her health actually. An idle question. What did you think of Maise Craig at Greely’s?”

  “I didn’t meet her. Another woman spoke to me. It was the night before Roger Casey’s funeral, and Mrs. Craig was at a meeting.”
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  “Wielding the gavel as though it were an ax. And did you and Miss O’Shea take to each other, having that uncommon man in common?”

  Julie nodded. “She’s very special, Father.”

  “Oh, she is that.”

  They were speaking of someone, Julie realized, who had seemed, at the time she mentioned the priest, to have scarcely known his name, as though it was accidental that he had been the one available to come from Rossnowlagh to say the Mass. Whether or not Edna O’Shea knew it, the priest and her father were not strangers. “Is Frank Mooney alive, Father?”

  The priest made a little face as though the direct question pained him. “I see I must tell you now—I was your father’s confessor.”

  She smothered the vulgar word that leapt to mind, but she could not stem bitter sarcasm. “Well, you could not have confessed a dead man, could you?”

  “I did not say when I served him thus, and I understand your anger to have come this far and have me take the Fifth, you might say.”

  “But if he were dead, you could talk to me, couldn’t you?”

  “Am I not talking to you?”

  Julie thought about that. “Is it that I’m not listening to you, Father?”

  He smiled and touched her hand—a brief pat—and she thought again of the Crowley hands. “Much better,” he said. “I can accept you as his daughter and I do. I wonder if it would not be useful if I were to tell you the story of myself. I came here to school as a boy—a poor boy of the neighborhood. The country was in turmoil at the time. What rebellion had failed to achieve, reprisal hastened. The more rebels the British shot after the Easter Rising, the stronger the people’s support for the martyrs’ cause. And the young found purpose to their lives, and alas, to their dying. I was no exception. I revered and followed a poet whose name has been deliberately excised from the chronicles of rebellion and the civil war that followed it. It was after a particularly bloody assassination—or it might even have been before it, perhaps during its planning—that he dropped from sight. Rumor had it that he was himself destroyed in the explosion, but no part of him was identified among the mortal remains taken from the waters. He was never named among the heroic dead—of whom, you might have discovered, we often seem more fond than of the living—”