Ashes of Fiery Weather (8 page)

Helen handed the phone to Norah, her eyebrows raised. With no more than a hello, Sean explained that he had a job as a pallbearer for Reliable's, the funeral home next to the bar. He and a couple other guys carried coffins in and out of the church at the Masses, and then again at the cemetery. In movies, friends and family members do it, but most people can't. Coffins are heavy.

“I know you been to Mass a million times, and there's nothing special for the nuns, but the cemetery where they bury them is pretty cool. If you're interested in that kind of thing. I am.”

Norah said she'd love to go.

She sat alone in a pew in the middle of the church. There were a few old ladies scattered among the back pews, bent over their rosary beads. Across the aisle and a couple rows ahead of Norah was Sean's mother, sitting very still, eyes fixed on the altar.

Up in the choir loft, the organ began to play and the doors of the church opened. Sean and three other men carried the coffin down the aisle and set it in the center, up front, close to the altar. Then Sean came to her pew. Norah saw the surprise on the faces of his friends. One of them called in a loud whisper, “Hey, Sean!” and another guy punched him in the shoulder. They went to a pew a few rows ahead. His mother, too, was watching. Without changing expression, she faced forward again.

During his homily, Father Halloran praised Sister Magdalena, who had been in the cloister for over thirty years, for devoting her life to God in the purest form possible.

Norah blinked. Good God, thirty years. How did you not go insane?

After the Mass, outside the church, Norah stood at the bottom of the steps, watching Sean and his friends place the coffin in the hearse. She turned when Delia O'Reilly came to stand beside her.

“Sean told you about this?” she said lightly.

Norah nodded. “He said the cemetery was interesting.”

“If you like cemeteries,” Delia said.

“I do,” Norah said.

Sean came over. “We gotta go.” He took Norah's elbow and said to his mother, “You're not coming to the burial, right?”

“Do I ever?” Delia said, inclining her head. “Have you seen your sister this morning? I know she's not working.”

Norah assumed Delia was asking if Eileen had come home the night before.

“I'd say she's probably hanging around with a bunch of other twenty-two-year-olds.”

“Thank you, Sean. Helpful as ever.”

He grinned, and Norah watched her expression soften and saw at once that Sean was adored. Norah hadn't been sure, but she surmised now that his mother was simply better than most at hiding it.

Delia turned to Norah. “You should see the Green-Wood if you like cemeteries. There are a lot of famous people buried there.”

“O'Reilly, come on!”

At the cemetery's chapel, where Father Halloran said a final blessing, it was just Norah, Sean and the three other pallbearers. There was no graveside ceremony, Sean explained. The coffin stayed behind in the chapel, and the cemetery crew took care of the rest.

Outside the chapel, Norah stood back a little from Sean and his friends as they finalized some complicated plan Norah couldn't follow, but it had to do with baseball, the Mets and opening day at Shea Stadium. When it seemed to be settled, Sean told his friends to go home without them.

“Whoa, O'Reilly, you know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Be sure and snag some flowers offa the grave.”

The three of them walked off, laughing.

The cemetery was small. Sean told Norah it had only ever been used by the parish of Holy Rosary. Nobody was being buried here anymore.

Sean brought her to where the nuns were buried and where the new grave would be dug, probably later today. The nuns' gravestones gave their nun name and the date of death, but no birth date, and not their real name, whatever they had been called before entering the order.

Sean pointed to the high stone wall and explained that the convent lay right behind it. There were stories of nuns leaving the convent at night to put flowers from their garden on the graves, but that was probably bullshit.

“My grandmother was one of them. In the cloister.”

Norah looked at him, ready to laugh but uncertain. “A nun? She left the convent to get married?”

“Other way around. She went in after she was widowed. This is the one who was born in the firehouse.”

Norah stared at him. “Is she still in there? Or—”

Sean shrugged. “We don't know. They don't have any more contact with their families. Mom never saw her again. I'm sure she's here by now.” A wave of his hand encompassed the neat row of graves. “Whenever one of them dies, Mom goes to the funeral. Come on.” Sean started walking, and Norah had to run a little to catch up.

They crossed the cemetery and came to a corner separated by a low wrought-iron gate. At the center of the enclosure stood a statue of a mustached, helmeted fireman holding a child whose head was buried in his shoulder.

“Fireman's Corner,” Sean said. He took Norah's hand and led her to the statue. She read the inscription, focused more on Sean's warm hand than on the words.

PATRICK DEVLIN

A SON OF IRELAND

WHO BRAVELY FOUGHT FOR THE UNION

AND FOR 30 YEARS BATTLED FIRES FOR

THE CITIES OF BROOKLYN AND NEW YORK

Two headstones lay flat against the ground in front of the monument. One said
Patrick Devlin
and the other
Brigid Cavanaugh Devlin, Beloved Wife.

“They're my great-grandparents,” Sean said. “My mother's grandparents. The ones from Ireland.”

Norah thought for a second. “The nun's parents?”

“Yeah. My mom's dad is here too. Jack Keegan. Right over there.” Sean waved a hand. “But you don't have to meet my whole family on our first date.”

Norah laughed.

“Actually, it's not the whole family. My mother had two brothers who died in 1918, before she was born. They're not here, and Mom's not sure what happened to them. It was the influenza epidemic, and she thinks maybe the city was cremating the dead to try and get it under control. Even if you were Catholic.”

“That's awful.” Norah rubbed her arms.

“I'm probably boring you,” Sean said.

“No, no,” Norah said. She kept wondering what it meant that he would bring her here and tell her about his family. Surely he didn't do this with every girl he met.

“Do you want to go get something to eat? Somewhere besides Lehane's? I'll know everybody in the place. Nobody'll leave us alone.”

Norah agreed and they started the walk back. The ground didn't give beneath their feet. The trees were still bare, though it was already April.

“Working at the travel agency's what you want to do?” he asked.

Norah had been hoping he wouldn't ask. “It's a good enough job, but travel agencies don't get in the blood, like being a fireman.” She tried to laugh but he took it seriously.

Sean rested his hand on her lower back. “Something'll come to you,” he said.

The heat startled Norah when it arrived in early June. In Ireland, if it went to eighty degrees, people complained they were boiling. She was not prepared for ninety-degree afternoons and nights that didn't feel much cooler. All through the summer, she lay on Sean's bed, facing the fan.

Norah shouldn't have been in Sean's room. In Ireland, she'd believed that what her parents thought counted more, but she understood now that she was old enough to do what she liked. Still, it was Delia's house. Each time she and Sean went out, Norah told herself she would have him leave her at the door of Helen's building. Yet again and again she followed him inside the silent brownstone and up the stairs, trusting the sound of his footsteps to hide her own.

Together, they got into his bed. Mornings, Eileen went downstairs to distract Delia, usually by picking a fight, so Norah could slip down to the parlor floor and go out the heavy double doors that opened onto the stoop. Which was the same as climbing out a window, Eileen said wickedly one night when they were drinking together at Lehane's while Sean was behind the bar. Don't think the neighbors don't notice. Though, to be fair, there were only a couple of families they knew left on the block. All the other houses were chopped up into apartments. Norah tried to summon a sense of shame but couldn't.

When she arrived back at Helen's in the morning to shower and change her clothes for work, Helen never said anything, except on the Fourth of July. Irish Dreams was closed. Norah, Sean, Eileen and a group of Eileen's friends were going to Breezy Point Surf Club, in Rockaway, which was in Queens. Later, when it got dark, they'd be able to see the Macy's fireworks from something called A Court.

On the Fourth, after Norah showered and changed, she was ready to rush out the door, but Helen had made a fresh pot of coffee and Norah stopped and poured herself a cup. She'd never thought to make coffee at home, but here everybody drank it. Helen stood in the kitchen doorway and told her that though certainly she, Helen, was not one to give romantic advice, she had one thing to say.

Norah held her steaming mug and waited, curious, already rehearsing the story for Sean. She and Sean had a running joke about Helen being in love with Mr. Fitzgerald.

“I know Delia O'Reilly from the neighborhood, more or less. Well enough to know that if it comes down to it, she raised Sean right and he will do the right thing by you. But isn't it better not to begin like that?”

“This isn't Ireland, Aunt Helen. You don't have to rely on prayers alone.” If Norah could have done it unnoticed, she would have crossed her fingers as she said the last bit.

Helen nodded and retreated.

But after that, Norah started thinking about the future in earnest. Whereas she'd been deliberately steering her thoughts away from her return to Ireland, she began imagining herself stepping off the plane, greeting her parents, walking in the front door of the house. In each scene, she felt acutely the emptiness beside her, in the place where Sean would be.

“You're not going back,” Sean always said.

“I'm only here for a little while.”

“Just tell them you're staying.”

To stay in America for no reason except that she wanted to? Sean had gone to war against his mother's wishes. How could she explain that with the boys gone and Aoife married to a man who had his own business, it was expected that she, Norah, would bring in the son-in-law who would take over from her father?

A brave daughter would have written a letter saying that she wanted to try some other kind of job, or take college classes. Travel, like Sean was always talking about. Boston, Maine, Florida, California. She might have said outright that she had a real boyfriend. An American. An American who was Catholic, but whose mother was divorced. An American who hadn't seen his father in twenty years.

About his father, Sean would say only that his parents had met right after Pearl Harbor. They'd married; his father had gone off to fight in World War II, came home. Eileen told Norah his name, Luke, and that when Sean was four, he'd left Delia for an Englishwoman he'd met during the war.

Norah did ask Sean if he'd ever tried to contact Luke O'Reilly.

“We're right where he left us,” Sean said with the same expression he gave Norah when she tried to ask him about Vietnam, although he turned aside those tentative questions with even less patience. “I was there, now I'm back,” he'd say.

Norah was sure a better girlfriend could have gotten him to talk about it. When he rocketed out of bed, drenched with sweat and sometimes shouting, she didn't do anything but crouch by the bed, afraid his mother would break through the barred door.

Delia only ever knocked, though, and never hard enough to dislodge the chair Sean had jammed beneath the doorknob. He would snap that he was fine. Sometimes he leaned his forehead against the door as he said the words.

His mother would go away. Norah would climb back in the damp bed and wait for him to leave the window where he always went to stand. Early on, she tried to hug him, but he would shove her away, once hard enough so that she stumbled back into the desk. It left a bruise on her lower back. Sean never apologized or even mentioned it. She didn't know if he remembered. She learned to lie down and wait, and when he returned to bed, sometimes he wanted to go right to sleep, but often he didn't.

Those nightmare times, she never asked him to use a rubber, as he called them. She thought of Aoife, who assumed a baby couldn't result because she had fantastic plans. But how could she have? Norah wondered. The danger was like standing on a ledge. Like changing the course of a river or calling the moon to a new orbit.

On Halloween, they settled on Sean's stoop with a bowl of candy for the trick-or-treaters. Norah hadn't planned to tell him on Halloween. He might think she was joking. They sat handing out Hershey bars and Milky Ways to the kids. The little girls singsonged his name, drawing out the one syllable to three. “Hey-y-y, Sha-a-awn, this your girlfriend? She from Ireland? You gotta accent? Say something!”

Sean grinned at Norah. “Say something, Irish. Say ‘Top o' the mornin' to you.'”

Cringing, she did it. The children hooted, and Sean, she could see, was proud of her for playing along.

In one group of four kids there was a guy with them who greeted Sean by name.

Sean grinned. “Hey, Freddy. Sorry—no costume, no candy.”

Freddy waved a hand at a little boy wearing a Batman cape. “That's my nephew.”

The little boy, about seven years old, held open his bag and Norah dropped two candy bars in.

“At least you got a nice girl.”

Sean laughed. “She is. This is Norah.” He turned to her. “Freddy and me were in high school together.”