The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ every woman under fifty years of age like that, it’s just his way. Jacob has never made any indecent approaches to me – yet,’ she teased.

      He laughed with her, kissing her fiercely. ‘All I say is, beware the Judas kiss,’ was his final word.

      Later, on her own, she raked over what had passed between them. She hated it when Lavelle got like this about Jacob and the Jews, as if he never saw the parallels with the wandering Irish, or the Irish who betrayed their own for the Queen’s shilling. She did remember her father telling her about the Jews, condemned to wander the world for ever because they had crucified the Son of God. How they were buried standing up, not like other people, laid out flat. Whatever was the reason for that? She had never doubted the Máistir’s teachings before. All those years growing up, all those years after his death, his voice had come to her, guided her like a beacon in times of trouble. Strange how here, under the shadow of Beacon Hill, he hardly ever spoke to her now. Had he deserted her?

      Or, she wondered, had she deserted him?

      She encountered the same problem as before with the Pendletons, Endecotts and the others – ‘the wine Whigs of Boston, old world Sassenachs’, as she described the merchants to Lavelle. Polite but definite ‘no thank yous’. They still wouldn’t deal with her because she was Irish; by definition, a Catholic. It must change, she thought. Some day, surely it must change. But it didn’t help her now in their hunt for new customers. She continued to search, now looking among their own – the coming Irish. Those who had ‘upped themselves’ out of the North End and into the South End, in the process forcing the second-generation Yankees to move onwards.

      The palates of these burgeoning Irish middle-class now sought a little more refinement than Boston’s one thousand groggeries once supplied them with and still did to their less elevated countrymen. So, on a train journey to Dorchester, she found ‘Cornelius Ryan’s Emporium’, boasting ‘wines, whiskies and refined liquors’.

      Ryan, a sly but affable Tipperary man – or ‘Tipp’rary’, as he pronounced it, had come to America before the exodus caused by the Great Famine. Like many he had started his first enterprise in the corner of a tenement basement. Things had obviously gone well for him.

      He rolled his ‘r’s like the Scots and gave her an order for ‘half a crate of the “Bordelaux”’, putting back into that region the syllable previously denied to Tipp’rary. She thought it a peculiar twist of his speaking but didn’t correct him. ‘Till I see how it goes … and half of the white too – you can put them all in the one box,’ he added.

      Riding back to the city to the sound of steel on steel, she wondered why she wasn’t more excited about finding this new outlet. When she and Lavelle had first started she would have been beside herself to have found a new customer, any customer. Now it didn’t seem to matter an awful lot to her. But it should have. She let her thoughts wander far from Tipp’rary and Cornelius Ryan.

      What she loved on such journeys was the way you could lose yourself in the sway of the train. Fix your gaze on everything, your mind on nothing; let the world swirl by. It was a wondrous thing, the way the trains were going everywhere, pushing out further and further, finding out America. Far from trains she grew up – many’s the day barefooted, going over the bent mountainy roads and back again – twice or three times the length of these train journeys in and out of Boston – it not even bothering her.

      Everything was so easy here, once you got a foot on the ladder. Neither she, nor the children, wanted for a thing. No mountain roads, no bare feet. Theirs was a secure and comfortable existence and showed every sign of remaining so. Strange how everything had worked out well in the end, if she could call it that – without Michael and Katie and Annie – but it had. It surely had.

      She was no longer one of the potato Irish; nor would her children be singled out as such. What harm if in Boston’s public schools her son had to recite the Protestant Ten Commandments and the Protestant Our Father? Or read the King James Bible that he was made to bring home for the ‘edification of your family’, as the Headmaster of Eliot School had so delicately put it. It was all much of a muchness to her. ‘Bishop John’, as the Catholic prelate of Boston was familiarly called, could rant and rail against Anti-Popery all he liked. In the end it didn’t make one ‘Amen’ of difference. She had always maintained it was ‘how you came into the world and how you went out of it’ that mattered. Even to be born hard and bred hard, if, in the end, you died easy – in the grace of God – wasn’t that it? And it was the same, she thought, for black, as for white, for heathen, as for Christian, for Sassenach, as for Jew. The main thing was to see that her children got a good education, Catholic or Protestant. To ready them for this life – and the next.

      One evening while reading, waiting for Lavelle to come in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside. Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt, sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched at the windowpane, her withered finger bent against the glass. The sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old woman was gone.

      The woman was so frail of limb, that she reminded Ellen of those poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. ‘No use thinking of all that now, is there?’ she said to herself, before closing the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe got frightened and took off.

      ‘Too much reading, agitating the mind,’ Lavelle had brushed it off with when he had come in later.

       14

      Whatever about frightened beggarwomen or imaginary phantoms from the past, she knew him the minute she opened the door.

      He didn’t recognize her as instantly. Then the surprise in her face, her intake of breath, alerted him. He looked at her hair. The long-maned tumble of it, that he would have known, was long gone. Instead, a much shorter tangle of curls was rather severely nested to the back of her head and securely pinned above the high-necked collar of the dress she wore.

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