Ashes of Fiery Weather (4 page)

Thankfully, in the past few months, Sean had been less furious and more worried about how the men were treating her. For the first months on the job, firefighters rotated from firehouse to firehouse. Wherever Eileen worked, they'd have her back at fires; it wasn't that. But in between runs, in the firehouses, what the fuck was going on? When he asked Eileen, she'd only say that she was handling it.

Two weeks ago, Eileen was assigned her permanent firehouse, and Sean, satisfied, told Norah that Eileen would be okay there. The captain was a law-and-order type who wouldn't put up with any bullshit.

Norah didn't ask, but she assumed Sean had pulled strings to get Eileen in there, and that Eileen didn't know it.

“Sean would have been all right, Eileen.”

“Yeah?” She looked at Norah hopefully.

Norah hesitated slightly. “I think so.”

Eileen yanked her hair out of its bun. It fell down around her shoulders. She was thirty-three but looked like a college girl.

Norah often forgot that they'd once been close. Before she'd taken up with Sean. Her wedding day, the way it came up so quickly, like a storm, and her own family not there, for much the same reasons they hadn't come to the funeral, though she and Sean had pledged to travel to Ireland in the summer. Her parents had been pleased with that idea, because the neighbors would turn out to see the American husband and baby without knowing when, precisely, the wedding had taken place.

Eileen had been her bridesmaid. Norah had been happy to have her best friend in America as her sister-in-law, but somehow their own friendship had fallen away, leaving only the sister-in-law part. Eileen was still single and Norah was not, but Norah thought it was also that she couldn't talk to Eileen about Sean. Eileen shrugged or took his side whenever Norah issued a complaint. He left early for work, Norah would say. Just to get out of the house, away from the chaos. And Eileen would defend him, saying that he liked to get to the firehouse before nine to bullshit with the guys coming off the night shift. They all did. On St. Patrick's Day, he left at eight in the morning to march in the parade and didn't stagger in until almost three the next morning. Well, it's St.
Patrick's
Day, Eileen would answer.

“Eileen, I need to lie down for a minute,” Norah said.

“You okay?” Eileen asked, standing up straight.

Never again, Norah thought. She said, “I just need a minute. Can you go find the kids and see if they're okay?”

“Right, right.”

“And check on your mother.”

“Sure,” she said with much less vigor.

Eileen left, shutting the door behind her. Norah jammed the desk chair under the doorknob. She curled up on the bed. Sean had slept in this room through his whole childhood, never imagining he'd be given only thirty-five years.

Sean had passed the lieutenant's test, and she'd already been told that he would be posthumously promoted. All well and good. There would be a nice ceremony, but the pension she would get as a fire widow was based on the money he'd been currently making.

A job would probably be easy enough to come by. Some fireman or some fireman's wife or sister-in-law or fourth cousin would know someone who needed someone who could type or answer phones. She wondered about Irish Dreams, the travel agency over in Park Slope, and the position there that had been waiting for her upon her arrival in New York thanks to her aunt, who'd been the office manager. Helen, her mother's sister, had left Ireland when she was barely twenty. She'd come over just in time for the Depression. Depressed America, she'd liked to say, was better than any kind of Ireland.

Norah knew that her own former co-worker Marian Clark ran the place now, but she could hardly ask her for a job. It was altogether possible that Marian had been at the church today, somewhere in the back. Glad, finally, that Sean had never looked twice at her?

The Glory Devlins would no doubt organize a fundraiser that might bring in enough to pay Aidan's and Maggie's tuition at Holy Rosary for the next year. Brendan would be in public school for kindergarten, since Holy Rosary didn't have one. A year's grace there.

If she had to, she'd put them all in public school. Sean and Eileen had gone to Catholic school, and Sean insisted their children would as well, too bruised by the stories of his mother's years as a public school teacher and principal.

Norah agreed. She didn't much buy the claims of being scarred for life by nuns and priests. Eileen went on about it now and again. Delia would say sharply that if she'd been better behaved, they'd have left her alone. Norah secretly agreed.

Still, her children ending up in public school was hardly adding to the tragedy.

At the Mass today, Father Halloran told the congregation how impressed he was by “Norah's strength” when he went to see her the afternoon of the fire. Norah did not recall saying much of anything. She'd been watching the front door for Sean. Father Halloran told her to come by the rectory if she needed to talk. His own parents were from County Down, he added.

Norah wondered what the priest would do if she did indeed appear in the rectory office, if she sat down in a chair opposite him, if she crossed her legs and explained that she'd lost the member of her family she loved best and now she didn't want to be the mother anymore. Not of three children, and sure as hell not of four. He'd probably stammer and say, “Most widows keep their children, Norah.” Then maybe he'd jump into a verse of “The Mountains of Mourne.”

Here in the United States, a woman could. Nobody needed to know, ever, and were it to be discovered, surely her grief would excuse her.

“I was out of my head,” Norah said aloud, rehearsing.

Sean would never forgive her. Maybe she could plead ignorance, like Mary. The Immaculate Abortion. An angel would appear and say, I'm taking it back. And Norah would answer, Take all of them back.

Set free, she would go home to Ireland, and back in time, find her twenty-year-old self, which held like a pearl the twenty-year-old soul who knew hardly anything at all. Somehow, she'd displace that girl, slip back into her childless body and her childless mind. She would never take the life handed to her by her sister when it became clear that Aoife herself couldn't have it. America would remain untouched by them both.

On Saturday afternoons, Aoife and Norah rode their bikes out to the farm where their father had grown up, the only boy in a family of eight. His two oldest sisters, the ones who'd neither married nor gone to America, lived together in the house. The land was leased to a neighbor who farmed it.

Even when they were very young, Aoife and Norah knew the town was divided over what her father had done. Jimmy Mulryan sold the family farm out from under his sisters because he knew he'd do better as a shopkeeper. Ambitious, he thought too much of himself to be a farmer.

Veronica Daley was a pretty girl, but wasn't her father's grocery prettier? Some thought it was a sin how Jimmy Mulryan made his two sisters tenants on what had been their family's land. Some said he'd seen his chance and he'd taken it. He'd hardly turned the sisters out.

In their bicycle baskets, Aoife and Norah had bread, cans of soup, sausages and a few other items their father thought his two sisters might like.

The farm was at the edge of Ballyineen. Aoife rode ahead and Norah pedaled behind her. At the foot of the drive, they hopped off their bikes, and after taking the grocery bags out of their baskets, they set the bikes on their sides and walked up to the house. One of their aunts would be watching from the window and would have the door open before they reached it.

Aoife and Norah took off their shoes, even if it wasn't raining. Every week, they said they weren't hungry as they'd just eaten, and the aunts would exchange a glance and sniff.

You like what your mother makes for your tea, then?

Norah said nothing, too afraid, but Aoife always said they did, they liked it very much. The aunts would share another sour look. One would begin unpacking the groceries. Now and again she would hold up an item for her sister to see.

“The other brand costs ten cents more.”

“Too much for himself to spare.”

When the groceries were put away, one aunt or the other would say, “And how much does his lordship want?”

Aoife would say what their father told them to say. “He doesn't want anything. It's for you to have.”

It would go on for another few minutes, the aunts trying to get Aoife to take their money, though Norah noticed that neither ever reached for her pocketbook.

Aoife and Norah would ride home, lighter without the bags in their baskets. Norah was so relieved to have it over for another week, she sometimes laughed aloud, and Aoife would turn her head, eyes off the road, against the rules, and she would laugh too.

When it rained very hard and the road was too muddy to ride, they had to get off their bikes and walk. They should have gone back to wait it out, but neither could bear the thought of sitting with their aunts in the cold front room.

“Don't you feel sorry for them?” Norah asked once. “Even a little?”

Aoife was twelve and Norah was eleven. Aoife had the answers.

They were at the top of the hill, Ballyineen in view, before she answered.

“I don't feel sorry for them,” Aoife said. “They should have gone away.”

Their mother's sister was the one relative who'd left Ireland and kept in touch.

When they were girls, Aoife and Norah stayed awake long after the light went out and whispered across the lane between their beds.

Their aunt Helen worked for a travel agency in New York City, and along with letters home, she often sent brochures from the trips they offered.

Their mother asked what good it did her, working in that place, when she never took the trips herself. She could have, Veronica said forcefully. No husband, no children. Helen could have gone anywhere she liked, whenever she liked.

“We will,” Aoife told Norah. They'd go together to Italy and Spain and France and Greece. They studied the pictures of sunny beaches and the ocean that didn't look at all like their ocean. The blue made it look like a painting. Often the brochures had small maps on the back that said things like
Places of Interest. Local Attractions.

But then, when Aoife was thirteen and Norah was twelve, one of the travel agents Aunt Helen worked with started his own business and asked Helen to come with him. In her letter home, she wrote, “Mr. Fitzgerald has stolen me away.”

The new office was not in Manhattan but Brooklyn, because the rents were much cheaper. Most of their business was conducted over the phone; nobody had to come to Brooklyn to book a trip. And Mr. Fitzgerald was looking to target those who'd always wanted to visit Ireland, and those perhaps because they'd seen
The Quiet Man.
Those who'd left decades ago and had not been back. The new agency was called Irish Dreams.

The brochures Helen began sending from Brooklyn were of the Ring of Kerry and the Burren. Aoife always took a quick look and flung them to the floor. Norah took Aoife's side, but she did think that it wasn't as though Aunt Helen herself were getting on a plane and flying to Ireland again and again. She'd left at nineteen and had only come back one single Christmas.

Mr. Fitzgerald had stolen Aunt Helen away for her brogue, but before long she was doing far more at Irish Dreams than answering the phone.

From spring through fall, not so often in the winter, tourists who'd booked through Irish Dreams arrived in her hometown. It had been Helen's idea to send the groups over to Ballyineen, or, in Irish, Baile Iníon, which meant Town of Daughters. Americans loved the strange story about how no sons were born in the town for almost a hundred years after the famine.

The itinerary suggested a meal in the pub, or that they go to Mulryan's grocery and buy sandwiches for a picnic. Helen instructed her sister to have sandwiches made and wrapped, ready to buy. Ham and cheese or roast beef. Make them thick and don't butter the bread. Americans don't care for that. Have packets of mustard or mayonnaise available for them to choose from.

Norah's father objected.

“Across the ocean, and she's still the boss of you?” Jimmy said.

“It's for the boys,” Veronica answered. “To build up the business for them.”

“Any one of them comes back, he'll be lucky to get a job off me,” Jimmy said.

But he never spoke another word against it.

Norah thought it was when Cathal left that their mother and father started living in separate parts of the house, meeting for tea in the kitchen.

“We won't see the boys again,” Aoife said scornfully of their three brothers. “Not for good. Why would they come back here when they've got the run of London?”

Aoife and Norah made the sandwiches, first under their mother's eye and then, when she was satisfied, without her supervision.

Americans turned up in the store, often muddy and wet from walking around the hills and the small cemetery beside the church.

“Helen in the office said we should say hello to you,” one or the other visitor would say, followed by a look, like they expected something.

Norah never had a guess as to what until the night her mother, talking about the man who wanted to record them all saying things like “Top of the mornin' to you,” said, “Helen's made us into characters, like in an American film.”

In 1967, when Norah was eighteen, she went into the grocery, working the cash register. It was important to have one of the family back there, her father thought. Saying hello and the like. Norah did, and she smiled, but her tongue often pressed at the back of her teeth as she listened to the old ones complaining about the price of this or that. Jimmy also hired their neighbor's youngest son, Hugh Quinlevan, to stock the shelves and make deliveries.