Ashes of Fiery Weather (10 page)

“Happy St. Patrick's Day,” Delia said, as she started the coffee.

“Yeah,” Eileen said and, after a pause, asked, “Is it still March 17 in Vietnam? Or not yet?”

Delia knew that Vietnam was a full twelve hours ahead of the United States. It was nighttime there already, but yes, still St. Patrick's Day.

But she told her daughter, “I have no idea.”

“At least he gets to wear green.” Eileen put her bowl in the sink.

“That is not funny,” Delia said.

“I'm not trying to be funny,” Eileen said. “Can I come with you today?”

Delia turned to look at her. “Aren't your friends going to the parade?”

Eileen made a face. “Jackie and Lynn have to go to school. We're meeting up after.”

Delia wanted to ask why the girls didn't simply cut class. It was Friday and they were seniors, for God's sake. Perhaps some teacher had decided to be cruel and give a test. She didn't ask. Eileen's grades were good enough. It hardly mattered now anyway. She would be eighteen in a few months, off to Brooklyn College in the fall. It was settled.

“It's not a party, more of a reception. Wine and cheese.”

Eileen rolled her eyes. “I just want to watch the parade from someplace warm. It's fucking freezing out.”

Cursing, Delia would normally say, makes you sound ignorant. But today she would not lecture.

“You have to dress decently. No jeans,” Delia said.

“No way am I wearing a skirt,” Eileen said.

The doorbell rang and then the front door opened. Delia and Eileen were silent until Nathaniel came into the kitchen, calling,

“Good morning!”

He stopped when he saw Delia. “So it's the High Holy Day? I forgot.”

Nathaniel Kwiatkowski, not much taller than Delia, portly, was an average-looking man who became truly homely when he smiled.

“Coffee?” Delia asked.

He nodded and sat down at the table with a sigh. “What's today then, the sixteenth?”

“It's March
seventeenth,
Nathaniel,” Eileen said, laughing. “What are you, Polish?”

“Eileen!” Delia said, but Nathaniel laughed too. He'd come from Poland when he was ten, young enough to learn English without too much trouble, too old to lose his accent entirely.

“Why do the Irish believe they are the center of the universe?” he asked.

“I think it's Americans who believe that,” Delia said.

She set a cup of coffee in front of him, black, three sugars, and poured one for herself.

“Yes,” Nathaniel said. “But Americans know it and believe the world should too. With the Irish, it's like a secret they're keeping.”

Eileen laughed again. “Sean would like that.”

“And have either of you heard from our boy lately?” he asked. “He didn't answer my last letter.”

“Not for two weeks. But you know Sean, he hates writing letters,” Eileen said.

Or he's dead, Delia thought. Or his eyes are gone, or his mind.

Nathaniel sighed. “Letters. A lost art.”

“Shouldn't you be at the store?” Delia asked.

It was already nine o'clock. Nathaniel's repair shop was on Flatbush Avenue, near Sterling Place. Most of his business was televisions. In the days of his father, it had been radios, but really, they could fix anything. The sign above the shop said simply,
Four Star Electronics Repair,
a name Nathaniel never liked.

When Nathaniel's father bought the business from his retiring boss, he left it that way, understanding that the family name was too hard to pronounce. When Nathaniel took over, he wanted to add his surname to the sign, but Delia persuaded him not to; he added it to the window as a compromise. The name could be seen that way.

“George is there,” Nathaniel said. “I asked him to open.”

George was in his twenties, skinny, long-haired, with a touch of genius when it came to repairing anything electronic, almost by instinct, like Nathaniel. He was also lazy and almost certainly not at work yet.

“You
are
going in today?” Delia asked.

“I'll see.” Nathaniel gestured to the soda bread on the table. “Is that the magic bread?”

He might have been asking if it was an Agnello's soda bread, but really Nathaniel was telling her not to chide him. Her prayer had been answered, hadn't it?

Delia gave him a half smile, as if to say, Don't forget the price.

“No.” Eileen scoffed. “I made that.”

Nathaniel tasted it. “Very good.”

Delia felt a pang of guilt. He was always finding ways to praise Eileen, and she knew it was to make up for her own bad habit of criticizing her.

“Get dressed if you want to come,” Delia told her. “I want to leave in a half hour, no later.”

“The parade goes on all day,” Eileen grumbled, but she did as Delia asked.

Nathaniel shook his head. “You're making her go with you?”

“She asked to come,” Delia said.

Nathaniel raised his eyebrows. “It won't interfere with your day?”

“She'll go off with her friends later. Maybe this is a good chance to talk to her about what she's going to do this summer. She can't quit three jobs like last year. I'm not a bank. She's going to have to work if she wants spending money at school—”

Nathaniel laughed. “Leave her alone. Today at least, leave her alone.”

“But she's so—rootless. I asked her what she wanted to major in and she shrugged. She has no goals.”

“She's young. She'll get goals later.”

“I had goals when I was seventeen,” Delia said, and before he could make a sarcastic remark, she beat him to it: “I never reached them, but I had them.”

Nathaniel pinched a raisin from the soda bread. “So leave her alone.”

“I'll try,” she said, and then added impulsively, “Why don't you come with us?”

“I have things to do. You know that. Go and be Irish, heart.”

Delia and Eileen got off the subway at Lexington and 79th and walked over to Fifth Avenue, which was jammed with spectators, well bundled against the cold. There were all manner of green scarves, and Aran Islands hats and sweaters. Children were perched on the curb, wrapped in blankets.

The American Irish Historical Society was between 80th and 81st. Eileen grabbed Delia's sleeve so they wouldn't be separated in the throng. Delia noted the heads turning, the smiles for Eileen. That hair. It attracted enough attention the other 364 days of the year. She wore it long, more than halfway down her back, and today she had on a white tam-o'-shanter that Sean had given her for Christmas a couple of years ago, for the express purpose of St. Patrick's Day. It set off the dark auburn beautifully. Auburn, she'd taught Eileen from the start. Never say red.

A pipe band was marching by, and unbidden, the words to the song came into Delia's head:

Sad are the homes 'round Garryowen

Since they lost their joy and pride.

And the banshee cry links every vale

Around the Shannon side.

That city of the ancient walls

The broken treaty stone, undying fame

Surrounds your name, Sean South from Garryowen.

Sean, Sean, Sean.

Whenever she thought of her son, Delia wanted to sit down, hard, wherever she was and call his face to mind, feature by feature. Every night, she fell asleep to the thought, like a drumbeat, that Sean was a gift she was not supposed to have received. And yet she'd already paid for him, hadn't she? The day he was born.

When they reached the AIHS, Eileen stopped and stared up at the building. It was beautiful: narrow and three stories tall, with balconies on the top two floors. The Irish flag and the American flag fluttered in the breeze.

The reception was on the second floor. They walked up the wide staircase side by side.

“This was somebody's house?” Eileen said.

“Once upon a time,” Delia said.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Dignity, please,” Delia said.

Eileen rolled her eyes.

Upstairs, Eileen went immediately to the tall windows that looked out on Fifth Avenue. Delia followed, eager to see Eileen's face when she looked down on the parade for the first time. The balcony was narrow, and not many could step out at a time. Right now it was full, but it was so cold, Delia was sure nobody would be out there long.

“Well, well, Happy St. Patrick's Day.”

Delia turned to see Tomás Breen, the novelist. She smiled at him and returned the greeting. He was her age, forty-eight, and also long divorced. When Tomás finally quit drinking, it was too late to save his marriage but, sober, his career had flourished, with two well-received novels.

Delia had first met Tomás at the AIHS two years ago, in October, when he gave a reading. During the Q & A, Delia asked him if he thought his first novel had been denounced by the Church, yet not banned as Kate O'Brien's had been, because he was a man. His answer: probably yes. At the reception following the reading, she'd talked with him and his sister, and they'd gone to dinner twice before Tomás and Fionnula's return to Ireland. Since then, more often than not, when he came to town he'd give her a call.

“Where's Fionnula?” Delia asked.

“Right there.” Tomás said.

When they were young, Fionnula dreamed of being a journalist, but there weren't many such opportunities for women, not in Ireland, so she became a librarian. Fionnula edited Tomás's manuscripts. She accompanied him on book tours and to social events, to keep watch over him. Fionnula was shy and it was a trial for her, but for his sake, she came along.

Tomás made gentle fun of his sister but cheerfully admitted that without her, his liver would rise and kill him. She made his work better too. He fell in love with useless paragraphs and found it impossible to let them go, as though they had hearts and he might break them.

She'd never married. Not that she hadn't been asked, Tomás told Delia. There'd been a couple of fellows who weren't afraid of her mind. But she turned them down cold. Their mother had been a beaut. She hadn't known she was expecting twins. It was unlikely she would have, in Ireland in 1918, unless the archangel Gabriel was still in the business of giving unsolicited information to expectant mothers.

Tomás was born first, and nearly died three times in his first half hour. Then his mother had Fionnula, and almost immediately Tomás got better. The priest who'd been called to give him extreme unction had no patience for miracles and their paperwork, but he did testify that as soon as the girl was born, the boy began to breathe normally. Their mother told Fionnula that she was an angel sent to earth to keep Tomás from going to heaven, or some churchy nonsense like that. Like a character from myth, Fionnula had tied her life to his.

Delia looked over and saw Fionnula seated nearby, her hands folded in her lap. She gave her a small wave. Fionnula nodded once. Delia hated to see her sitting there as though she were a secretary of the old order, one who sewed buttons back on cuffs and made dental appointments for her boss. Yet for all that, the Breens' devotion to each other reassured Delia that she'd been right to adopt a child, for Sean's sake.

She and Tomás began a conversation about what they were reading now, and Delia noted the eager and envious people hovering, waiting for the chance to get a word with him.

Eileen drifted over to them. “Nobody's coming in. I don't get it. It's freezing out there.”

Delia raised a hand to brush Eileen's hair out of her eyes. Eileen, though, saw the hand and stepped back, just out of reach.

Delia straightened her jacket. “This is my daughter, Eileen. This is Tomás Breen, a friend of mine.”

“Your daughter?” Tomás said, his eyebrows raised.

“Can't you tell?” Eileen said.

Delia shot Eileen a warning look.
Don't be rude.

After all, Tomás had not said what people did all the time.
Oh, yes, I see it.
Delia honestly didn't know if they were imagining things, or if they were being kind to a girl who would never be as pretty as her mother.

Eileen widened her eyes.
What?

“Well, good to meet you, Eileen.”

“Same here. Where in Ireland are you from?”

“A town in Donegal called Gweedore.”

“Oh, north,” Eileen said, so clearly disappointed that Tomás looked quizzically at Delia.

“It's not the fictional country of
Northern
Ireland, but it is in the north, yes,” he said.

It had occurred to Delia that Eileen might hope to meet someone here. Yet the type of stupid, wild boy Eileen gravitated toward would be in the bars already and vomiting on his shoes before twilight. John Maddox, Bobby Geraldi, Evan (Spark) Lynch, a litany of young men whose foolishness could not be blamed on youth but inherent character flaws. Each was the sort blamed for leading a girl astray. Delia, though, suspected that in most of those cases, the girl was lost, or nearly, to begin with. But with “Oh, north,” Delia understood that it wasn't a boy she was after. Eileen was searching for her birth mother.

“My family's from Galway,” Eileen said.

“Yes, your mother has told me that.”

Delia gripped her glass, certain Eileen's next words would be
Not
her.

“There was a fireman in my father's firehouse whose parents were from Gweedore,” Delia said. “He played the button accordion.”

“That's right, your father was a fireman. I'd forgotten,” Tomás said.

Eileen turned her gaze on Tomás, and then on Delia.

Delia read her thought. Tomás had
forgotten?
How well did they know each other?

Delia imagined her reporting back to Sean. Both he and Eileen surely wondered why the few relationships she'd had over the years went nowhere. Sean, Delia had always suspected, wanted her to remarry—a fireman, preferably—to prove how little his absent father mattered. Not that Sean ever spoke of Luke. He believed his anger was a secret. How ashamed and furious he would be if he knew that Delia had been reading the longing on his face throughout his childhood. He wasn't usually the only fatherless boy—the war—but none of the others had been abandoned. She'd said it explicitly only once, last year, when he told her that he was enlisting in the army. Her horror made her forget herself.