The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘No,’ he said trying to make light of it. ‘Nothing like that. Just taking the air, don’t you know!’

  ‘Watch out, so, for the air out here’ll kill you,’ she said. They followed the pathway of her laughter as she lumbered up two flights of stairs.

  The lobby of Fitzgibbon Street was the front stage of the house. A constant traffic of cargo and humanity passed through trailing fumes and odours in its wake. It was impossible to do anything and be unobserved, someone always hovering in the wings. It didn’t take long for the entire house to be privy to Susan’s lavatorial excursions. When any of the ragged children saw Bella’s brood gathered in the hall, they would holler out to all and sundry. ‘Susan Beaver’s on the throne!’

  He was their only visitor. His mother kept away. Wouldn’t lower herself, she said. But it was Bella’s lowering Ma couldn’t stomach. Bella came to them instead, bringing her dirty laundry, another matter of principle.

  ‘I will not hang Beaver smalls out on their communal lines,’ she declared. ‘Even the most ragged shirt or threadbare skirt is likely to end up in their baskets. As for the girls’ dainties, who knows what greasy paws of theirs might defile them?’

  Everything in Fitzgibbon Street was theirs.

  He did what he could. He couldn’t offer money even though he’d got himself work on the railways. Casual labour, they called it, though there was nothing casual about it. His bones ached; his hands were nicked and scarred. He wielded hammer and axe from dawn till dusk. It brought in measly spoils but at least it spared him having to doff the cap to some well-heeled boss. The gang he slaved with were like dumb animals, workhorses, silent for the most part, who lived blindly from one pay day to the next and poured the proceeds down their gullets. But they didn’t trouble him with small-talk.

  It was a paradox, but the mindless work freed his mind for his real vocation – writing. Articles and pamphlets and the like, just now, but he nursed ambitions he didn’t talk about, so delicate did they seem, not robust enough for scrutiny. Particularly not Bella’s. She would not approve. In this alone, he was still the awed and craven boy. Once he’d shown her an article he’d written. ‘Sound the Loud Trumpet’, it was, a broadside against the education system. Proud as a new parent, he’d handed it over, but she’d baulked after a few paragraphs. Hardship had mildewed her mind, and made her touchy with it. She seemed to take all of his propositions to heart. As if it were prim and proper Bella Casey and not the damned Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell he was having a go at. Still, he tried to help.

  When he called to Fitzgibbon Street, he would set young Valentine mathematical problems for which he’d offer a small reward. It was a nod to the hours Bella had spent with him when he was at the same age poring over Tennyson and Wordsworth, though he had done such exercises for love, not reward.

  ‘Would you not consider going back to the teaching, Bella?’ he asked her, while Valentine laboured over his sums. ‘You could start again.’

  ‘From a place like this?’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you have somewhere to live, like the grand quarters you had in Dominick Street? And a fine salary and your children at their books instead of out slaving for the Bosses?’

  She flinched, as well she might. She had just taken her eldest, James, out of school to be apprenticed to Swan’s, the printers on Dame Street. Boy came home flecked with silver shavings but was paid in lowly coppers. He remembered the schemozzle when his mother had sent him out to work at fourteen. How Bella had berated her loudly, calling up the memory of his dead Da as ammunition. But she had been Miss Casey in spirit then: bright, indignant, full of mettle. First, the hardening of the heart, then the dimming of the intellect.

  ‘I’m too long out of the teaching,’ she said, ‘too much water under the bridge entirely.’

  ‘But Bella,’ he countered, ‘with all your experience and your gift for teaching …’

  ‘Those gifts, as you put it, are of no earthly good to me here.’ She gestured to the crumbling casements. ‘And anyway, I don’t see you putting your book learning to much good, bar agitation and rebellion.’

  ‘But Bella,’ he persisted.

  ‘Look, Jack, leave it be, would you?’ she hissed, casting a furtive eye on Valentine. ‘You know why I cannot return to teaching. Must I spell it out? The computations can’t be beyond you. Or do you still have only a child’s understanding of my situation?’

  ‘It’s only,’ he began, ‘all this could have been avoided if …’

  ‘If I hadn’t married Nick, is that what you mean?’ She was nettled now.

  Valentine, totting up on his fingers, halted at the mention of his father’s name.

  ‘If you only knew the half of it,’ she said.

  ‘Not in front of the child, Bella,’ he said with an edge of warning. He heard a kind of reckless imminence in her talk.

  ‘Well, you’re the one that brought it up. There’s no undoing the past, we just have to wear our burdens with the grace of God.’

  ‘God,’ he snapped back, ‘helps those who help themselves.’ He wouldn’t stand for her tambourine theology.

  ‘Rich of you to be lecturing me about God, when Mr James Larkin of the Transport and General Workers Union is your only Lord and Master.’

  Someone rapped at the door. The neighbours on Fitzgibbon Street kept theirs open at all times, but Bella would not join with the throng, not even in that. Her spirit showed itself in these adamant refusals. He half-admired her for them.

  ‘There is nothing as desolate as the noise of poor humanity,’ she had said. ‘I try to shut it out.’

  She went to answer the knock.

  ‘Yes?’ she demanded.

  A child stood in the portal. Or rather a walking skeleton with the pallor of a ghost, her tiny claw gripping a chipped cup. There were two hectic spots of red on her cheeks like the powder on a corpse.

  ‘Me Ma’s looking for a cup of sugar,’ the child said.

  ‘Tell your mother we have none,’ Bella replied. ‘Off with you, now.’

  She closed the door and put her shoulder up against it, as if the weakling child might try to storm the citadel.

  ‘What ails her?’ he asked

  ‘Consumption,’ Bella said.

  ‘More victims,’ he said ‘of the inequitable system.’

  ‘The system, is it?’ Bella cried. ‘A neglectful mother, more like, who sends a tubercular child out to walk the halls barefoot, spreading her contagion.’

  ‘Where is your mercy, Bella?’

  ‘I cannot afford mercy towards those who despise me. You don’t know how they treat me.’

  But he did. To his shame, he’d seen it for himself.

  One summer’s evening he’d stood on the street and watched from the long shadows as the congregation of slatternly-looking women gathered on the steps. No 21 Fitzgibbon Street was a kingdom of women; the menfolk out working, or skiving more likely. That evening a child had been sent for a jug of beer so the talk on the doorstep was lubricated and the laughter raucous. In time he came to know them all. Mrs Gogan, Bessie Burgess, Mrs Madigan. Even little Rosie Redmond.

  Mrs Burgess, who sold fruit on the street, was leaning on the handle of her perambulator, a perennial pose. She was a handsome woman, chestnut thatch chopped to her ears, her face a pocketful of florid jowls. Inside the pram was a stash of produce, soft fruit on the turn.

  ‘Oh, here she comes,’ she cried as Bella came along. Seeing the welcoming party, Bella stiffened. Playing the part; playing into their hands.

  ‘If it isn’t our lady Protestant,’ Mrs Gogan chimed in. She was thin and beady, a pinny swaddled around her scrawny waist, vigilant eyes set deep in a skull-like face.

  ‘Good day to you, Mrs Gogan,’ Bella replied. She meant it to be civil, he knew, but it came out superior.

  ‘Is Madawm taking the air?’ Mrs Burgess said. ‘Been on a prominawde, have we?’

  This a take-off of Bella’s diction. The assembled company erupted in guffaws.
Mrs Burgess did a twirl, her pinkies cocked for imaginary tea. She stood in the doorway, blocking Bella’s progress.

  ‘Let me pass, Mrs Burgess.’

  ‘Pray, let me paws,’ Mrs Burgess mimicked to more hoots of derision. It was, he thought, pure theatre. By rights he should have intervened. A man approaching would have punctured the female ribaldry. He could have piloted Bella by them and saved her from the worst of it. But something stopped him. Selfishly, he wanted to see how the drama would enfold.

  ‘Give us an old song, there, Mrs Beaver,’ Mrs Burgess insisted. ‘Aren’t we having a bit of a shindig here and you’d be welcome to join in.’

  Bella remained flinty.

  ‘Give us a bar of “Rule Britannia”, why not? Isn’t that what your lot would be singing?’ Mrs Gogan said.

  Bella stood her ground. The tableau stalled. He could see that scene to this very day; he’d used it on the stage, after all, but no amount of artful scripting could remove the original from his memory. Or was the opposite true? Had he killed the real people off by turning them into characters? Eventually, Mrs Burgess gave way when her goading failed to raise a row. Bella furled her shawl with a flourish, and made her way into the house, braying laughter in her wake.

  ‘Snotty Orange bitch,’ he heard Mrs Gogan call after her when she was out of hearing.

  For him, it was different. He was saluted cheerily.

  ‘There you are, Mr Casey, and no mistake!’ they would greet him.

  ‘Ladies!’ he would say and doff his cap.

  (Ladies, he could hear Bella explode, ladies how are you!)

  They liked him in equal measure to their distrust of her. He thought his friendliness might soften their hearts towards Bella, but she undid his work each time. If he lingered on the steps for even passing pleasantries, she would call him in ostentatiously.

  ‘Jack? Is that you?’

  As if she were a mother summoning a child away from unsuitable companions. He saw the women’s rolling eyes, the smirks behind their hands and knew what they were thinking. A mammy’s boy, at Lady Beaver’s beck and call.

  Bella had more in common with the Greek chorus on the doorstep than they knew. She, too, was gathering coppers one by one to feed her children and to keep want at bay. Like them, she ducked and weaved to avoid the rent-collector, down to the pawn on a Monday and redeeming on a Thursday, hiding in the back room when the insurance man came to call. She used all their devious tricks to thwart old Pilgrim’s Progress. When the agent called, she would get John to answer the knock while she hid behind the door and watched him through the crack.

  ‘My mother’s out,’ the child would say exactly as Bella had instructed him. Or she’s at the dairy or she’s visiting my granny. Or she’s gone to church. If Mr Pilgrim believed that, he must have come down in the last shower, for by John’s accounts, Bella spent half the week on her knees. There would be no Geography Generalised for John; no Superseded Spelling. Bella was schooling him to tell bare-faced fibs and hoping to trade on his big bright eyes, his curly hair, his angelic looks to beguile and to deceive.

  No, the only difference between Bella and the other denizens of Fitzgibbon Street was that they had grown up with perpetual scrimp and save and she had not. They whiffed that off her, his scruffy sibyls. They thought she’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. So it was sport to them to take the Duchess down a peg or two. That was their nickname for her. The Duchess of Fitzgibbon Street. It was a source of glee to see a woman of better birth brought down and they delighted in it. Tuppence looking down on tuppence-halfpenny. The law of the jungle.

  If only Bella could have seen what he saw. That their humour was a comic pride, the light-hearted twin to her po-faced disdain. That if she could have unbent a little, she might have made something honourable of her life on Fitzgibbon Street, mean and all as it appeared. She could have suckled from the solidarity of the working poor. But Bella insisted on her singularity.

  ‘We may be equal in our hardship,’ she would say, ‘but not in our bearing of it. They’re off down to that Society of theirs or calling round to the back door of the convent with their hand out. If that makes me Lady Beaver, too uppity to beg, then so be it.

  ‘You could take the Outdoor Relief,’ he ventured. It wasn’t much – two loaves, a few grains of tea, a pound of sugar weekly – but it would have kept the wolf from the door.

  ‘I won’t become a charity case,’ Bella said. And that was the end of the discussion.

  The world, both big and small, had changed around her, but she would not budge. She’d set her mind against it. He’d changed and she’d never forgiven him for it. He was a worker, a trades union man, an Irishman. He spoke a different language. When he had first started learning Gaelic, the words had sounded strange in his mouth, like clods of fresh-turned earth. But as his tongue found its way around them he grew to love their loamy texture. He’d even changed his name. Not plain, unadorned Jack Casey now, but Seán Ó Cathasaigh, a bardic handle drawn out long and slow by its ennobled vowels. Citizen now, not subject. But Bella remained constant despite her altered circumstances. The paradox of it was that she was more herself in mean Fitzgibbon Street, more the strict and proper schoolmarm than she had ever been when she’d stood before the infant class. The tenements had found the untested girl in her, except that on Fitzgibbon Street, that girl had been turned into a figure of fun.

  Although he abhorred its very existence, he revelled guiltily in Bella’s new world. Her degradation became the mother of his invention. Fitzgibbon Street was the large world writ small. The plays that he would one day write were performed for him daily there. They came to him personified. What a cast these women made – his women, he came to think of them as – with all their fickle prurience, their rowdy ebullience, their self-serving pride! They were characters already, born and ready-made, roaming their foetid rooms in search of a writer. He’d changed their names, of course, but now when he remembers them they seem to have inherited his monikers and forgotten their own. Mrs Gogan, with her thin laughter and sly mimicry, or Mrs Burgess, brave with porter, letting fly with acid wit, were already on the stage before he ever came along, declaiming to the world from the steps of Fitzgibbon Street. Even the little street-walker, Rosie Redmond, all painted up and glam, who lived on the second floor and came home at all hours of the night found a way into his heart. He’d seen her often, trailing in, but he dared not to talk to her. Bella had outlawed all contact with her.

  ‘An offence to decent people,’ she said.

  Her girls, she’d ruled, must not even greet the likes of Rosie, in case they’d be corrupted. Out of deference to Bella, he steered clear of Rosie in the house. But there was nothing to stop him seeking her out elsewhere.

  He buttonholed her on Burgh Quay one night. Slip of a thing she was. Cap of limp hair, teeth too big for her crowded mouth, flashing her garter to all-comers and eyeing him up winsomely. She didn’t recognise him at first. He was just another Mr Gentleman.

  ‘Care for a squint at a trim little leg?’

  He gloried in his incognito.

  ‘Let us go in out of the cold,’ he said.

  It was a windswept place that quay, a gale blowing in off the river and she out in next to nothing. He led her to the snug of the White Horse and ordered for them both. A shandy for himself, a snifter for her. Her hands when cupped around the glass were red-raw.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s only you, Mister Casey.’

  Then she brightened.

  ‘Sure afterwards,’ she said, stroking him on the arm, ‘you and me’ll go someplace quiet, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Let’s just sit and talk,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay you just the same.’

  ‘Are you only for the talking, Mister Casey, is it? Sure who’d pay for that when he can gets it for free?’

  ‘So tell me,’ he began and then he stopped. Pen poised in his head. What was it he wanted to know? The squalid details, the sordid mechanics? No, nothing like that, on
ly to hear her talk.

  ‘Them’s that have it, use it, them’s that don’t grows old and dry.’

  As he was in in danger of doing. His comrades on the railways would go to Monto, take a twirl with a doxy there, but he was too busy in the world of men, arranging meetings, organising, preparing for the revolution that would sweep all before it. He smiled for the young man he had been. Too earnest by half, too lofty for his own good, but how else was the work to be done? He went with Rosie Redmond that night, all the same. She lifted off his glasses in a doorway on Mountjoy Street and took him expertly in hand.

  The news of Bugler Beaver’s death came to Abercorn Road since it was from there he had been carted off. He’d been the one to steer his brother-in-law into chains, now he had to pronounce his final punishment. It was evening, winter-dark. He walked under the clear delineation of the plough, his breath came in globes.

  ‘Passed on this AM,’ the telegram had said, as if Beaver had died a glorious death in battle. Out on a foreign field. Which, he supposed, the Richmond was, in a manner of speaking. He’d never been, but Bella had gone to visit. For what, he did not know. Beaver had retreated to infancy, become no more than a babbling baby, a talking shell. Yet, even though his brother-in-law had been counted already as good as dead, his children training to be orphans, and Bella girding herself for the widow’s weeds, he still dreaded the delivery of the final verdict. Must he always be the bearer of bad news? This news, in particular. Because he’d wished for it, a lifetime ago, on the beach at Bray, with a stone in his hand.

  The front door in Fitzgibbon Street was thrown open, despite the lateness of the hour. He knocked, then let himself in to Bella’s room, bringing a gasp of the cold night in with him.

  ‘Bella,’ he said simply.

  She was sitting in the rocker by the dimly glowing grate, the boys abed, the girls still abroad somewhere. She was reading, and for a moment some old admiring flame leapt in his heart, as if time had doubled back on itself and these past twenty years had been a nightmare from which he had just been roused. He saw the scholar Bella with her books spread about her, glow of the oil lamp on her bowed head. But he shook off the consoling fantasy. It wouldn’t be Racine she’d be reading, or Love’s Labours Lost; no, more likely some cheap novelette and when she looked up, it was not as Isabella Casey but as Bella Beaver. Her blouse warning of its end, a soiled apron, a pair of shattered boots.