Her hope was to make that home in a German or Italian neighbourhood in New York, for Germans were hard-working, proud, staunch Americans, and Italians so beautiful to look at. Her children would be Americans. It was the freest country on earth, the land where everyone married whoever they wanted and if anyone didn’t like it, go hump. How little she knew, but how lovely her ignorance. Sometimes she spoke in contradictions.
You think of her now. My difficult sister. Maybe she is in Paradise today. God help the poor angels, she’ll be ordering them about, getting them organised into a trade union before she’s done. There is a wedding in progress in the chapel near the transept. The party is small, no more than a dozen guests, but the bride and groom, who look anxious and thrilled, are as magnetic as a wedding couple always is. The groom is a soldier, his uniform pressed and neat. The bride fidgets with the hems of her sleeves. Two elderly women are observing, taken by the spectacle. ‘In’t she beautiful,’ one of them says. ‘Pretty as a postcard.’ The fumbling for the wedding ring. Avuncular laughter from the Padre. You are an old lady watching a wedding.
It was the way he had looked at you sometimes, in his dishevelled little bookshop: an expression of such kindness, of hopefulness and courage. His gaiety was a sort of currency, self-replenishing, always new. You weep, wishing not to, wiping your tears with your wrists. And the bride and the groom, alerted by your quietly echoed sobbing, turn from the side altar and stare at you a little resentfully. You cross yourself and move away, towards the doors.
A memory whispers up, of a time you were playing in New York when the child of one of the costume-girls died of meningitis. The woman was from Galway, her husband from Clare. You and Sara attended the wake out of duty or sympathy. Nobody else from the company was free. The funeral was to be held early the following day, for a longer period of mourning would be unwise, the undertaker said. He spoke with the practised diplomacy of all his profession, in euphemisms, sidelong looks; in silences. Flowers would be useful to have in the room. Lilies, if possible, for their aroma is heavy. Better for the casket to be closed, he had murmured, when the deceased was so young, and so thin. You and Sara were silent, as though guilty for something. And mainly because there was nothing to say.
You watched as they draped the ancient mirror in the parlour, as the country people back in Ireland prepare for a waking; for at the hard time of life an old custom can seem important, the practice you might mock at the easier time. The few dollars the father had managed to raise at the pawnshop on 7th Street were spent on food and drink for the mourners. There must always be tobacco at a wake, the father had insisted. A wake must be done with propriety.
Was he trying to help his wife? Did he think it what she wanted? Or somehow did he want it himself? He had borrowed chairs from some of the neighbours, placed them carefully about the parlour, efficiently, like a waiter preparing a function, never once glancing at the terrible object in the corner. His face was slick with sweat.
They filed into the parlour quietly, as though trespassing on a privacy, the women clutching rosary beads, the men with hats in hand. It was as though they were waiting for something important to happen: some sacrament or a revelation produced by their solidarity, their sitting together in a room. Some of the callers were neighbours in the tenement building; others nobody knew very well. Men from the fire station where the father drove a wagon, you assumed, for one or two of them seemed to know his name. Police officers, stevedores, navvies: all Irish, and a man who was an organiser of some sort for the Democratic Party, and another, from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was said to have offered a little money towards the funeral. And others who had insisted on condoling in Gaelic, as though the vowels of the old language could heal. And the German and Italian women who lived in the tenement coming in, in twos and threes, or some of them alone, speaking quietly in their own languages, which the mother did not understand, or in broken phrases of English, or saying nothing at all, but sadly shaking their heads and touching the mother’s hand because conversation was impossible now. How it must have hurt her to be condoled with, for there was nothing to say, no matter the language or the kindness lying behind it. How you wished for her that they would all go away.
You sat together in the room, the women around the coffin, the men in a huddle by the kitchen. Perhaps there was a priest but you do not remember that. The firefighters bowed their heads. Some wept. You had been sick that morning. It was the year the drinking worsened. It was as though you could hear the mother’s thoughts. That is not a body. That is my child. Why are all these people in my home? Candles burned down. The visitors murmuring. The mother was told the child had gone to a better place. A place where there is no suffering, where the poor are loved and honoured. It was how the people in Mary Street used to talk about America. A paradise of honey and milk.
O come to the land where we will be happy.
Don’t be afraid of the storm or the sea,
And it’s when we get over, we soon shall discover
That place is the homeland
Of Sweet Liberty.
And you recalled the waking held for a neighbour’s girl on her last night in Dublin. Her father and mother and the gathering of relations. An uncle singing ‘The Twang Man’ in a corner of the house and then a man with a melodeon, but he wasn’t good. ‘Get up with me, Bridget,’ said the father, late in the night, ‘and face me in a step. Will you do that for me, girl? For likely it’s the last dance we’ll ever have in this world.’ And the girl and her father had danced in the kitchen. And in the morning she had left for the steamer at Kingstown, with a couple of shillings and an address in New York: an agency placing Irish girls as maids of all work in the houses of the wealthy of Manhattan.
Dear mother. More mourners arrived and tobacco smoke purpled the air. The mother couldn’t write, her parents in Ireland couldn’t read, so it was you and Sara who helped her write the letter, as best you could, and someone back in Ireland – the schoolmaster, was it? – would read it aloud to her people. It would be the voice of some elderly schoolmaster that would pronounce the terrible words of the letter: that a child who had lived only five months in this world had lost her life in America. On the night of her funeral you would appear in a play. It seemed absurd and obscene. It seemed pointless.
My child is dead. Why can’t you understand? There is nothing I want said to me now.
An old Connemara woman who lived in the slums of the Five Points had shuffled into the apartment, leather-faced, Iberian, clad in the ragged tweed shawl of her homeplace. She touched her forehead to the tiny coffin and began an ancient keening: a soft ululation, wordless at first, but soon widening into the ochóns and bróns of Gaelic. The German women stared at her. Many of them looked frightened. You and Sara were frightened too.
From outside in the street came the bawls of the vendors, then a shrieked obscenity, and the rattle of a cart. Rain spattered on the windows. The room was too full. The children were restless on the floor. And the main memory you have is of wanting to hold the author of that play, whose lines you would speak that night in New York. To see him again, just for minutes or seconds. But he was gone, as the child had gone.
And you leave the chapel now, into the cold light of London. Must be morning-time in New York and you picturing the busy streets, the workers crossing the avenues and the park. Children in the playgrounds. Someone ringing a handbell. Is there any freer city in God’s wide world? Will you ever see it again? Or Dublin? A long time now since you walked Mary Street or the Coombe, saw the sea at Killiney or Dalkey or Howth. The word ‘Kingstown’ has vanished. It is now called ‘Dun Laoghaire’, a name foreigners find hard to pronounce. And you seem to hear him say it – Dunn Leary – Doon Leerah – as you cross by the gates of the chapel.
And perhaps to change the name is to alter the essence too, as a woman changes her name upon marriage? But maybe baptism means nothing, and marriage means nothing – perhaps they are only words. What has happened has happene
d and you will always carry Kingstown, no matter the name ever given it. And you are there once again, in a place whose name has gone, as you walk the dirty fog of Russell Square. In whatever cells of memory you haven’t succeeded in destroying, you will always be there, old girl. It visits you in dreams and in strange irruptions of the day, the eternal Kingstown, its unease. On your left is the coal harbour, on your right the black belfries, and the slow train is empty but for you. Through the high ivied corridors, the tunnels and cuttings, past embankments of wilderweed and overgrown gorse that nobody can be bothered to burn. And it chunters again into Glenageary station and stops with a screeching of steel on steel. He is buried in Mount Jerome, with his mother, his people. Cruel, to think of it. His body corrupting. And the house looms up at you, grey, many-windowed, asterisks of gull-shit down its half-collapsed storm porch. You think of snow falling into the sea.
You have received a telegram at the theatre. His uncle needs to speak with you. That is why you are looking at the house.
I am alone in the hallway. Dark, wainscoted walls. The pier glass that wanted silvering is gone. In an alcove, framed in bog oak, an ancient map of Kerry. Mounted above a dresser, his violin. And there are photographs of Connemara and the Aran Islands maybe: stone-filled fields, battered thatched cabins, coracles upended on dulse-strewn strands like beached seadragons in a dream. I am not thinking about the photographs but of the eye that framed them. The photographer is always in the picture.
The maidservant returns – but no, it is a different one, older, thinner, more tired. She looks like your mother. Striking, the resemblance. She gestures that you are to follow and you do as you are commanded, down a dark mildewed passageway lined with portraits of magistrates, hunting scenes, prints of portly boars. Past the doorway to a library lined with leather-bound tomes and a long black table stacked head high with papers. You can smell French tobacco, his must, his sickness. And suddenly, now, it is like looking at his face.
His uncle gazes up at you appraisingly. He is dressed all in black. Miss Havisham in the clothes of a man. He looks broken, dead-eyed, like his nephew near the end.
—Please be seated. He gestures. You do as you are told.
—You had an efficient enough journey from the city, Miss Allgood?
—Sir.
—The trains are not always reliable.
—No, sir.
—Personally one ascribes the difficulties to the agitators in the trades unions. The trains were far more punctual previously.
—Sir.
—I should have preferred for you and I to have this talk with a male relative of yours present, Miss Allgood. But there it is. We must rub along as best we can.
—Sir.
—I am to inform you that my late nephew willed a bequest to you, Miss Allgood. You are to receive a small annuity from the performance royalties of his works. I may tell you I disagreed with the proposition but my nephew would not be countered. I am of the unfashionable view that outside of a family one’s income ought to be earned, not given. Nevertheless, you are to receive a sum of eighty pounds per annum. In full settlement and acknowledgement of your occasional assistance to my nephew. It should be enough for you to employ a parlour-maid or a person of that nature. Should you marry, that amount shall be halved. Do you understand?
—Sir.
—I think you have in your possession a number of letters my nephew would have sent to you. It is a matter for a later time. But I should like to acquire them for his archive. Naturally you would be compensated for any material loss.
—I would never want to sell them, sir. They are private.
—Quite. As I say: it is a matter for a later time.
—And my own letters, sir. The letters I wrote him?
—Yes?
—I should like to have them returned. There would be several hundred of them, I believe.
—A literary man’s papers comprise part of his estate.
—But they were private, sir. They are mine. Not to do with his work. I should not like to think of anyone else reading them.
—I can set your mind at rest on that score. They have been destroyed by the executors. So as to protect the confidentiality of the friendship and its particular circumstances. It was thought, should they fall into unscrupulous hands and so on, that they could be vulnerable to exploitation or misunderstanding. I hope you will agree that this was the only correct course. At any rate, what is done is done.
—I –
—This is why one would have preferred you to have a male relative present. A male relative would be able to see that the executors have acted correctly. You will understand it yourself, Miss Allgood, in the fullness of time. Perhaps when you are married. Perhaps when you are a parent. Would you like to see his books, perhaps? Now that you are here?
—His books, sir?
—Have you washed your hands this morning? Some of his books are rare editions and so forth. There is a visitors’ cloakroom with lavatory at the end of the hall. Be sure and use the soap provided, won’t you? Good girl.
The bed in which he sweated. That is what you would like to see. To sink your face into his pillowslip, touch his sheets, his clothes. But the upstairs of the house would be forbidden you. As you rinse your clean hands and come back through the hallway, you wish you were anywhere else.
—Miss Allgood – there is something further I have a duty to say to you. It is a delicate matter. —Sir?
—I am speaking on behalf of the Synge family. For my nephew’s whole family. It would not have been the intention to cause offence to you, Miss Allgood, in appearing not to have invited you to be among us at my nephew’s funeral. It was felt that a private family service would be best. In the circumstances.
—In which circumstances, sir?
—In the circumstances of great sadness. A family closes its ranks. No offence would have been intended, and I have been asked to convey that to you most sincerely. If these things could be approached again, they might be approached with more thought. I would very much wish to apologise if we have behaved with insensitivity regarding your feelings.
Don’t go crying now, Molly, whatever you do. You’ll be back on the train in a few minutes. Look at him, don’t be harsh. He is elderly and frail. He has suffered a loss, too. He is doing his best. The thing he wants to say, he doesn’t have words for. It isn’t his fault. He didn’t write the lines. He is speaking them the only way he knows.
—My late sister – Johnnie’s mother – she married for love. That isn’t always easy. In the old days, these matters were regarded differently. There were many other considerations in the background of a marriage. The world is changing greatly, of course.
You look at the old man. It is like seeing your lover. The dark, pained eyes, the inhibited stance; the way he holds his beautiful hands. And you wonder what would happen if you ripped open his liar’s face with your teeth. Nothing, probably. He would pretend not to have noticed.
—It might interest you, this collection of Mr Yeats’s poems, Miss Allgood. I cannot affect to understand them, I am sorry to say. Some of the earlier ones are melodious enough. The swans and so forth. He is clearly a gifted rhymer. The music, I mean. But I confess that I have little feeling for these modern complexities in verse. Do you understand them yourself, at all?
—Some of them, sir. I know Mr Yeats.
—Oh yes. I suppose you would. Tell me, what is he like?
—Like a priest, sir.
—A priest? How queer. Figure of speech, do you mean?
—It is hard to express in words, sir. He feels things very deeply. He is a very great man. But I do not know him well. I only work for him at the theatre. I have played in some of his works. He would be a fairly changeable person. I am only an employee.
—Somewhat distant is he, then, Yeats? Head in the clouds?
—He has been extremely kind to me, sir, since your nephew passed away. Himself and Lady Gregory have been goodness itself. I don’t know how I woul
d have managed without their tenderness and help. My own family could not have done more for me.
—Would you like to have that book, then? As a keepsake and so forth?
—It’s gracious of you, sir, but I have a copy of it already.
—Something else, then. If you wish. I have been authorised to offer you something from the library as a memento. Anything up to the value of five pounds or so. But we shan’t quibble if it’s a few shillings more. Only don’t go too mad about it, will you?
—There is nothing I want, sir, thank you.
—The matter I raised with you previously, concerning my nephew’s funeral arrangements and so forth. We approach these things a little differently from the Roman Catholic Church. I had intended to say that to you. We regard these things more privately. We are rather set in our ways. I suppose one would term it a tradition.
—Yes, sir.
—In your own faith – as I understand it from my Roman Catholic friends – a funeral is regarded as an opportunity for a very wide gathering of the deceased person’s acquaintances; whereas in ours the approach is one of family and those with very close relationships only. Misunderstandings can sometimes arise as a result.
—There is no misunderstanding at all, sir.
—That is good. Thank you, Miss Allgood. I am glad that we have been able to have this little talk. It has put my mind at ease. At this difficult time.
—It’s my opinion they’re all the same, sir. One as bad as the other. And the sooner this heartbroken country is rid of all filthy hypocrisies of God, the better it would be for everyone.
—I can see that you are distressed. We can sometimes come to rash conclusions when we are upset by a loss.