Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  And Patrick taught us gospels, and good Columba too

  While you threw rocks and climbed tall trees and painted your bottoms blue…

  Her feet refused to carry her all the way back to The White House. She got as far as the bridge over the Liffey and gave up, hailing a taxi and sinking gratefully into her seat. Back in her room, she drew the curtains shut and stretched out on the soft bed. She had stopped at the Abbey Theatre for a ticket for the evening performance and didn’t know if she would have the strength to go. Maybe a nap would help; if necessary, she could skip dinner and get something to eat after the show.

  She set her alarm clock for seven-thirty, kicked off her shoes, and settled her head on her pillow. She was asleep before she knew it, and she slept quite without moving until the alarm sounded.

  The Abbey Theatre had just recently reopened in new quarters on the original Abbey Street site. Fifteen years earlier the building had burned to the ground, and the players had undergone a long period of exile in the old Queen’s Theatre. Now, in the impressive modern building, Ellen sat watching a performance of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. The play had had its premiere at the Abbey, and she read in the theater program how an early audience had rioted over the scene in which the Republican flag was carried into a pub, seeing the scene as an insult to Ireland.

  She looked at the crowd around her. Many members of the audience were tourists like herself who wouldn’t think of visiting Dublin without spending a night at the historic theater. But many of the others were just as obviously native Dubliners who still drew excitement from the city’s traditional drama. There would be no riots now, she knew; the play had become accepted as a classic of the Irish stage, and it was impossible to imagine anyone’s becoming incensed by it.

  She sat absorbed in the drama of the Easter Rising as reflected in the lives of a handful of Dublin slum dwellers. O’Casey’s characters lent a deeply human touch to the harsh facts of the rebellion. And her thoughts went to the streets through which she had passed that afternoon, the buildings she had seen that had played out their parts in the Rising. The Post Office on O’Connell Street, where Pearse proclaimed the Republic and where he and a handful of men held out against the British Army for almost a week. St. Stephen’s Green, where the Countess Markievicz commanded a detachment of rebels and strode through a hail of bullets, giving orders like a man. The unity of past and present in the city was overwhelming. Every stimulus touched her in a different way. The songs she had learned to sing, the history she had read, the play she watched now, the very streets of the city—all combined to give her a sense of involvement that was novel and exciting to her.

  Soldiers are we

  Whose lives are pledged to Ireland…

  After the final curtain, the audience rose for “The Soldier’s Song,” Ireland’s national anthem. Even the anthem itself was a sort of folk song, she thought, written by the rebel balladeer Peader Kearney as a marching song for the Volunteers in the days before the Rising. She left the theater hungry for more singing, hungrier for it in fact than she was for food. She had not had time to eat dinner before the play, but she decided that dinner could wait.

  She walked up Abbey Street to O’Connell and hailed a taxi. “I’d like to go to a pub where there’s singing,” she said. “Is there a place you could take me to?”

  The driver turned and studied her. “You’re all alone, Miss?”

  “Yes.”

  “American, are you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, there’s many pubs that have singing but not all of them that you’d care to go to by yourself. Shall I take you to O‘Donoghue’s? Your Ted Kennedy went there when he wanted to hear good Irish singing, and that should be recommendation enough. And it’s in a decent neighborhood, such as you wouldn’t mind setting foot in late at night.”

  “Will it be all right that I’m alone?”

  “Oh, some may give you the disapproving eye, but don’t pay it no mind. And as soon as they find you’re American they’ll take no heed of you. They’ll just think that you’re a bit daft to go out alone but that all Americans are a bit daft anyway, so what matter?”

  Four

  At first, entering the crowded, brightly lit pub, she thought she had made a mistake. There was no singing, and indeed no singing could have been heard over the hubbub of dozens of young men all talking at once. Men were lined up four deep at the bar, drinking whiskey from stemmed glasses or beer or stout from heavy glass mugs. She stood uncertain for a moment until a waiter came to her and told her there were no tables presently available.

  “I thought there was singing,” she said. “Will it start later, or don’t you have it any more?”

  “Oh, you’ve come for the singing.” He smiled. “You’ll find it upstairs in the lounge, Miss. Do you see, you’ve come in the bar entrance, and the lounge has a separate entrance over to the side. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He led her out to the street again and a few yards to the right, where a door opened onto a flight of steep stairs leading up to the lounge. When he opened the door she heard the sounds of singing. “Now you just follow your ears, and if it’s singing you’re after, you’ll find your fill up there.”

  At the head of the stairs she opened another door and stepped into a small, softly lighted room. A circular bar stood in the center of it, and within the bar a very thin young man with carrot-colored hair and a great beak of a nose sat at a piano. There were just a few empty stools at the bar, and four of the six tables at the sides were occupied. She started toward a table, then changed her mind abruptly and took a seat at the bar. The pianist was playing “The Boys from Wexford” and singing out the lyrics in a rich baritone, and the audience was joining in on the chorus.

  “Your pleasure, Miss?”

  She looked up into the broad, ruddy face of the bartender. She had come for the singing, and it had somehow failed to occur to her that she would have to have something to drink. She didn’t know what to order. She liked wine, but no one else seemed to be drinking it. The men at the bar—she was the only woman there, although there were women at the tables—all seemed to be drinking beer or stout.

  “Stout, please,” she said.

  “A pint of Guinness?”

  “Please.”

  He held a pint mug under the tap and filled it to over flowing with the thick black stout. She put a ten-shilling note on the bar, and he gave her three half crowns in change. She took a tentative sip of the stout and wrinkled her lip at the taste. It was quite a bit warmer than American beer and very lightly carbonated. It was very strong and very bitter, and she didn’t think she much cared for it. But perhaps one had to acquire a taste for it, like oysters or olives—though in fact she had never managed to develop much enthusiasm for either.

  She took another sip of the Guinness. Perhaps, she thought, it would get better as one got closer to the bottom of the glass. She wondered whether she ought to light a cigarette. Actually, she thought, she probably didn’t belong at the bar at all, but ought to be at a table. Or perhaps she had already violated propriety merely by coming unescorted. She recalled the taximan’s words— “All Americans are a bit daft.” She took out a cigarette and lit it.

  For almost half an hour she sat in silence, listening intently to the singing without joining in herself. She had a bit more of her stout and noticed that it did seem to taste better, though her lips still puckered at its bitterness. At least it was an effective antidote for her hunger, if not a proper substitute for a real dinner.

  Mostly she watched the singer or gazed down at her hands and the pint of stout between them. Twice, though, she looked up, to catch the eye of a young man seated halfway around the bar from her. He was tall, with a broad forehead and long black hair, and when he joined in the singing his voice was one of the loudest in the room. He seemed to know the words to almost everything that was sung, although he wasn’t so good when it came to melody; he frequently sang off-key and often l
ost the tune entirely. But this didn’t bother her nearly so much as the way he seemed to keep looking at her.

  She thought of girls at college who had come back from European vacations with tales of being pinched in Rome or propositioned in Florence. She had rather envied them at the time, and now she smiled at the thought of being so intently eyed herself by a handsome Irishman in a Dublin pub.

  But once she began to join in the singing, her own voice soft but sure and clear in tone, she stopped noticing the tall young man on the other side of the bar. She joined with the others in calling requests to the piano player, and she was taking swallows of the rich black stout now instead of merely sipping at it, and before she knew it her glass was quite empty. It wasn’t bad at all, she decided. She felt pleasantly lightheaded. She lit another cigarette and asked the barman for another pint. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and a big swallow from the fresh pint of stout and wondered if perhaps she was getting just a little bit tipsy. After all, she hadn’t had anything to eat since just past noon, so she was drinking on an empty stomach. And how strong was stout, anyway? It ought to be like beer, but then it tasted much stronger than beer…

  “Sing ‘The Patriot’s Mother,’ ” she called to the pianist. “Do you know that one?”

  “Just the chorus.”

  “Ah, that’s a fine old air,” another man said. “Let’s hear it, Tim.”

  “I would, but I don’t know the words. Just the chorus.”

  “I know the verses.” She spoke without thinking. “I mean…”

  “Then sing for us, girl.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. I—”

  “Come, give us the song.” It was the young man whose eyes she had caught. “We’re none of us professionals here except Tim, and he hears so much bad singing every night that it wouldn’t bother him a bit. Give us the song.”

  She let herself be talked into it. The song was a favorite of hers, and she had managed to put it on one of her records. It was the song of an Irish mother imploring her captured son to be true to Ireland and die on the gallows rather than turn informer. It was corny and sentimental, and once at the Gaslight on MacDougal Street she had sung it humorously, holding a shawl over her head and singing in a comic brogue, playing the old ballad for laughs. It had gone over well, but she had sung it straight on the record and she did it straight now.

  Softly she began.

  Oh, tell us the names of the rebelly crew

  That lifted the pike on the Curragh with you

  Come tell us this treason and then you’ll go free

  Or right quickly you’ll swing from the high gallows tree

  And the chorus:

  Alanna, Alanna, the shadow of shame

  Has never yet fallen on one of our name

  And oh, may the food from my bosom you drew

  In your veins turn to poison if you turn untrue

  She was performing now, and she loved it. The song coursed through her veins, sang in her blood, and the music flowed from her like a river. No introduction, no round of applause, but it was a performance, and the others recognized it. At first some started to join in the chorus. Then, as if in response to a signal, their voices died out and left her to carry on alone.

  I’ve no one but you in this whole world wide

  Yet false to your pledge you’ll not stand at my side

  If a traitor you be you’ll be farther away

  From my heart than if true you were wrapped in the clay

  Alanna, Alanna, the shadow of shame…

  Often, at an informal hootenanny or a Village party, she and other singers made it a practice to leave out some of the less vital verses in the longer ballads. Many of the old songs were well nigh endless, and it seemed a kindness to cut them short. One friend of hers knew over forty verses to “Stackolee,” and she herself knew almost as many to “Greensleeves,” and rarely sang more than five or six at a sitting.

  Now, though, she did not omit a single quatrain. She sang all seven verses and sang the chorus each time, sang with her head tilted back and her eyes closed and her body perched comfortably on the bar stool, sang with the room still and silent around her, sang with the piano providing sure but restrained background accompaniment, sang with her own fingers itching for want of her guitar. She sang, and at last finished singing, and for a long moment the room was deathly still. And then there was applause, a sudden, astonishing, thunderous burst of applause. It was the first applause of the evening, and she thought that she was going to cry.

  “But you’re a singer, girl! Here we were playing at singing and you with a voice like that and keeping still…”

  “Fifteen years if it’s a day since a woman sang a song to make me cry, and begod if you haven’t half-done it tonight.…”

  “John, give the girl a drink. Drink up, Miss, and have another. John, tell her to put her money away, it’s all counterfeit and she can’t spend a penny of it here. Drink up, you nightingale!”

  “Not a Dublin girl, are you? And are you singing professional? Have you made any records?”

  “Ah, my girl, give us another!”

  She could not remember ever having felt so proud and happy. She drained her mug of stout in a swallow, and the barman filled it again for her, and there was suddenly a lump in her throat so massive that she thought she could never possibly sing through it.

  She said, “Oh, if I only had my guitar…”

  “Sean, go get the girl a guitar. Get a guitar for the lady. Don’t you have one?”

  “I’ve a banjo…”

  “Can you play the banjo, Miss?”

  “Not very well. I—”

  “Then it has to be a guitar, Sean. Hasn’t Jimmy Daly one?” Not that he could play more than a bird call on it.”

  “Then wake him and tell him we need a guitar for Miss—now I don’t know your name, do I?” The pianist introduced himself with a gesture. “I’m Tim Flaherty, and pleased to be of service to you, and these” —a wave at the rest of the men at the bar— “are all good lads, but you’ll live as good a life without knowing them by name—”

  “Ah, go on with you, Tim!”

  “—But we don’t know your name, Miss, and I’m sure it’s one we’ll want to know.”

  “Ellen Cameron.”

  “You’ve the voice of an angel, Miss Cameron. Will you let us have another while Sean goes for the guitar?”

  “Do you know ‘The Royal Blackbird,’ Miss Cameron?”

  “Now let her be singing what she wants,” the piano player said sternly. And, sweetly now, “Come, give us a song, Miss Cameron. But first have a taste of that pint to wet your throat. A woman that can sit at a bar and drink her stout and sing with the voice of an angel and still be as sweet and pretty as spring flowers. Oh, I’d marry you in a minute, Miss Cameron, but what would my good wife say to that, do you suppose?”

  She had never felt so grand and fine in all her life. Now and then in her daydreams she had imagined herself successful and had tried to guess how she might feel at such moments. Onstage at Carnegie Hall, with the audience on their feet applauding. Or during a guest appearance on a television show, singing at a camera and knowing she was being seen and heard by millions upon millions of people. She had tried to imagine these feelings, and yet nothing her imagination had summoned up could equal the way she felt now, snug in the upstairs lounge of a Dublin pub, just pleasantly tipsy on fine, rich stout (and the bitter taste had miraculously ceased to bother her by now; she rather fancied it) and singing to a group of excited and responsive persons who hung on to every word and every note.

  She wanted to speak but did not trust herself to talk, certain that she would stammer or cry or both. Her emotions were too strong. She could not get hold of them. So instead of talking she tilted her head like a bird and sang like a bird greeting the dawn.

  She sang on into the night, song after song after song. She urged the others to trade songs with her, but they refused. Now and then she persuaded them to join in on a ch
orus, but most of the time she was the performer and they were the delighted audience, and the evening took on a special magic for her. She sang songs from her albums and songs she had not yet recorded, Irish songs and Scottish songs and English and American songs, and when Sean came back with the guitar she seized it gratefully with eager hands and did a quick job of tuning it and began to play. It was a cheap guitar, with none of the resonance of her own instrument, and ordinarily she would have been put off by its poor tonal quality. Now it did not matter. Her fingers plucked at the strings and her throat opened in song and she thought that she could sing forever, that the night could go on for a thousand years and she would never tire of it.

  She did not even notice when the last round was called. But the overhead lights went on just as she came to the end of a song, and she saw that the others had got to their feet.

  “Oh,” she said.

  The barman said, “Closing time, Miss Cameron. A few minutes past, to be truthful, but the last song was worth bending the rules for. Though I wish we could stay open all night.”

  “Oh,” she said. She got up from her stool. The music was gone now and the room started to go around in lazy waves.

  “You can finish your pint, though, Miss Cameron.”

  “Oh,” she said again, stupidly. She reached for her glass, and the room went around again, and she set the glass down untasted. Her hands gripped the bar for support and it seemed to sway before her as if it were made of elastic. “Oh, I don’t think I better,” she said. “Oh…”

  “Are you all right now, Miss Cameron? Someone see to her. Miss Cameron—”

  “I think it’s just that the last pint was more than she wanted, John,” a voice said. “She’ll be fit in a minute. Come this way, Miss Cameron, and have a seat for a moment.” Strong, gentle hands took her by the shoulders and led her to a chair at the side of the room. She sat down but the room kept making its lazy circles. Sit and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. But it wasn’t a hawk, it was a room, and oh, she felt so funny, and—