In the Company of Others (24 page)

‘I’m glad for you.’

‘It may look impossible for you and Bella, but it isn’t. Ask God’s help. He wants to help—it’s the way he’s wired.’

She slipped off the stool and he stood and set his cup on the table.

‘Will you pray for us, for all of us?’ she asked.

He took her hand. ‘I do and I will,’ he said.

He was going up with the tea when the idea struck. He would build such a room for Cynthia, who had for years plied her trade in a minuscule space scarcely larger than her drawing board. He was shamed that his study, in which he hadn’t actually studied in months, was the largest room in the house. And all that to satisfy what?—a need to appear busy in retirement? He was dazzled by the suddenness of such thinking, an epiphany.

His step was lighter on the stairs. The room would adjoin his study and have its own view of Baxter Park. The money would come from his pocket, not hers, though owing to their early agreement of not spending large amounts unless consulting the other, he’d have to get her John Hancock. He could see the room clearly: She was bent over her worktable in the southwest corner, the air smelling of sawn wood, the walls lined with her work.

He couldn’t wait to tell her everything.

Twenty-four

‘What is it with Mother?’ Liam asked Feeney. ‘You finally talked her into doin’ tests, Anna says.’

‘The lab report came back this afternoon, which is why I was late getting here. I was up to Catharmore first.’

‘And?’

‘Told her what will be no news to any of us—her liver will be her death unless she stops the drinking. She didn’t receive it well, of course.’

‘Surprise, surprise,’ said Liam. ‘What about Paddy? Does he know?’

‘He does.’ Feeney rested his fork. ‘On a more positive note, your mother tells me she wants to live.’

‘I can’t imagine why, seein’ she’s so in love with dyin’.’

Anna looked his way, then lowered her eyes. This was family night, all right.

Cynthia enjoyed such dynamics, as long as they were someone else’s. He wondered how she was getting on with dinner and the telly Anna had rolled in for the remainder of their stay. He had been sent off quite happily to the Conor table, with instructions to ‘watch what you put in your mouth.’

‘So the question,’ said Liam, ‘is will she stop th’ drinkin’?’

‘’t will be difficult, I grant you. Nausea, tremors, hallucinations—even seizures, if it comes to that. Can’t know. What we can know is’—the doctor grinned—‘she will be exceedingly irritable.’

Laughter. Seamus smiled, discreet.

‘You’re full of surprises, Feeney. So how would she go about it?’

‘There’s the treatment option at a clinic, of course, but she won’t have it, nor will Paddy agree to it. A costly and persecuting piece of business, in any case. She wants to do it at home.’

Liam forked a mouthful of ziti. ‘I don’t get it. How could she do it at home with none but Seamus to give a hand?’

‘She’ll need full-time nursing care ...’

‘Of course! To be paid for with th’ pot of gold at th’ end of the rainbow.’

‘. . . and I would supervise.’

Liam said something in Irish. ‘Who was the bloke rolled a stone up th’ hill only to have it roll back again?’

‘Sisyphus,’ said Anna.

‘That’s you, Doc. That’ll have you comin’ and goin’.’

The rain had stopped, though it rattled yet in the downspouts. The August evening was cool, the heat from the Aga welcome.

William had been talkative before dinner but was silent now. Bella picked at the ziti, stared at the wall, unseeing. Glancing up occasionally with a certain gratitude, Seamus ate without hurry.

Bella was the elephant in the room. No one attempted to penetrate the thicket of nettles, save for William. For William, the thicket parted as the Red Sea for Moses.

‘Are ye learnin’ a tune for your Daideo now?’

‘Aye. ’t will make you laugh.’

‘We need a laugh in this world. Has it got th’ strong beat to it?’

‘For you, always th’ strong beat.’

‘You might get me dancin’, so.’

‘I’d give a packet of striped humbugs to see you dancin’.’

The platter was coming around again. His early training frowned on taking two of anything, and his diabetes demanded such a rigor. On the other hand, the ziti was outstanding and life notoriously short. He defied his upbringing, flouted his wife’s instruction—and took seconds. Anna looked pleased

‘
Delizioso
, Bella!’ The poker club tutorial hadn’t eluded him altogether. ‘
Salute!
’

All glasses raised to the cook. ‘
Salute!
’

Some flicker in her eyes—of what, he couldn’t say.

He saw Anna touch Bella’s arm; saw the girl flinch, thought again of Dooley and how he must call tonight without fail.

Liam went across the lodge to work on the unfinished room. Everyone else carried their portion of ‘afters’ into the library, where the Labs drowsed by the fire. Feeney sat with him on the sofa and swiftly devoured a serving of tiramisu.

‘I’ve asked Bella to come up and assist me in the ankle exam. Stay here if you will, I’ll be down directly with a report. You might say a prayer, Tim, for your wife’s cooperation.’

‘In what, exactly?’

‘In doing what has to be done.’

‘Which is?’

‘The pain tells me she must have an x-ray, and no quibbling.’

William poked up the fire, and there went the combing of the mustache, the placement of the cane by William’s chair, the match to the pipe. There shone the pint at their elbows and the old checkerboard in its pool of light from the lamp. He was moved by the grateful satisfaction of the two men, each a harbor for the other.

In the kitchen, he stuffed himself into the farthest corner, away from the gurgle and slosh of the dishwashers, and dialed.

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘Hey, yourself. What’s going on?’

‘Not much. Big fly problem in the barn. How about you?’

‘Not much. A lot of rain.’ He would ask and get it over with. ‘Are you still done?’

‘Look, Dad, you’re worried, I can tell. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘The two of you . . . both of you . . . mean so much.’

‘What else can I do?’

‘Don’t quit,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Hunker down. Talk. I’ll be home soon, we can talk together, the four of us.’

In the silence between them, a cow bawled in the Meadowgate barn.

‘Keep going, son. It’s too soon to quit.’ He heard the odd desperation in his voice.

‘Hey, Dad ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. Gotta go.’

‘Whoa. Wait a minute. We love you, buddy.’

‘Love you back.’

He chose a book and took it to the sofa and opened it at random. He wanted to see his boy—Dooley would return to school at month’s end. He missed Barnabas, and Puny and her two sets of twins; he wanted to fill up the Mustang at Lew Boyd’s and eat a cellophane-wrapped egg salad sandwich and a pack of Fig Newtons and sit around in a plastic chair with Mule and J.C. and Percy and shoot the bull. He found he was completely over the notion of running up and down the road with Walter and Katherine; taking his chances at this inn or that, packing and unpacking. Bottom line, he was no good at vacations, and come to think of it—this was no vacation.

‘Will she be able, do ye think, Seamus?’

‘If Dr. Feeney can’t help her, nobody can. They say it’s up there with peelin’ off your own skin.’

‘God above,’ said William, ‘she’ll need a priest, for all that.’

‘Aye, but she won’t allow Father Tad to do his priestly bit in her company.’

‘I hope he’s sneakin’ it in, then, when she’s not lookin’.’ William gave a honking blow into his handkerchief. ‘Th’ oul’ heathen.’

There was the paw on his foot; the one scratch, the two. He peered down, hardly recognizing the little guy without the shoe. The pleading eyes, and again the paw on his foot; the one scratch, the two. No way was he going to search for the misbegotten shoe.

He patted the cushion where the Labs were sometimes allowed.

Pud leaped up, lay down, sighed. And here he was, three thousand miles from home and scratching another man’s dog behind the ears.

Feeney came along the stair hall and joined him on the sofa. ‘Studies say we live longer with a dog in our lives. I should get a dog.’

‘No doubt about it. How did it go?’

‘She says you must take your time, Bella’s with her. Now, then—she didn’t quibble. I’ll fetch you early Monday at eight o’clock. If I’m with you, things may get done more quickly, though granted, hardly anything gets done more quickly these days.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘She told me about the mishap in the shower. There you have it. The pain, the swelling all over again.’

‘Anything serious, do you think?’

‘I’m thinking a disruption of the ankle joint, which would be good news compared to other scenarios. She has too much history with this thing to suit me. I’ve given her another pain medication, she’ll sleep well and be fine ’til Monday. I should have cracked my bloody whip the night it happened.’

‘She doesn’t take to whip-cracking.’

Feeney had an affecting, albeit crooked smile. ‘I’m a widower with no face across the table in twelve years. Don’t know if I could be married again.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Women are very strong-minded.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll say. But that’s a good thing. I was an old fogey straight from Central Casting—living alone, set in my ways, walking the dog for an evening’s entertainment. What she saw in yours truly I’ll never understand, but she’s made something of me. Definitely.’

‘That’s the problem, Tim. They want to make something of you.’

More laughter.

‘She says you have Type One diabetes.’

‘Correct.’

Feeney cocked an eyebrow. ‘You went at the tiramisu pretty good.’

‘Just this once,’ he said, shamelessly reciting the diabetic’s unholy mantra.

‘Your Irish ancestors were Protestant?’

‘Seven generations back we were Catholic, with a couple of priests to our credit. I fear we took the soup in one way or another.’

‘But for the soup, you may not have been here this evening.’

‘What about Mrs. Conor? Anything you might need from me?’

‘Pray, would be my advice. She’s not such a bad old thing, if you know her history. Why don’t we move to the front hall? Open the door and get a breath of air?’

They stepped out to the entrance hall, to the fishing gear and deer head, where Aengus Malone’s hat swung from an antler like a totem.

He opened the door to the washed August night; Pud bolted outside, nose to the ground. Feeney moved boots and waders from an iron bench and they sat down among the clutter of other lives.

‘How much do you know?’ asked Feeney.

‘She was young, met William, they fell in love. He didn’t return as expected.’

‘Aye. His career as a prizefighter was on the upswing, and soon after their meeting, off he makes for England and other parts.

‘She was desperately in love with him, and took a lot of chiding from her family when he didn’t come back and marry her, as he vowed. She was a very proud girl, and likely boastful, so the insults and harassment grew, became a kind of sport among her kin and neighbors. Her beauty was probably no help, for all that—you’ve seen the painting.

‘She didn’t care for three of her four brothers, but she loved her two sisters a good deal, though they fought like cats. The father had died some years before and the upkeep of the family fell to the women—the boys were not much accountable. Two went over to England, one to Canada, the youngest was finished off in a pub fight. Thomas. He’d been Evelyn’s pet, her bright and shining star, she called him, something of a poet and dreamer.

‘Evelyn and her mother took in washing, did piecework, kept a few hens for egg money; the two sisters were in service to an Englishwoman. It was a hard life in a cabin with a mud floor and no window. Yet it’s the sort of thing the tourists come looking for even today—the famine cabins, the oul’ thatched cottage—a torment to live in the bloody things. Evelyn’s mother was desperate for a better life for herself and her girls and seemed to think William was becoming a rich man out there in the boxing world. She and Evelyn’s uncle put the pressure on Evelyn to find William and somehow force him to marry her.’

‘She was expecting a child?’

‘Still th’ virgin, she says. I tell you all this in confidence, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘None of this is talked about in the family—Paddy and Liam refer to the issues of her past simply as Mother’s Remorse.

‘And so she has this fierce pressure on her. But how does a young woman in the west country of the 1930s make contact with a roving prizefighter who himself didn’t know where he’d next lay his head?

‘But they kept at her like midges, and one evening they had a regular brawl about it. Evelyn had banked up the fire for the night and pulled their four chairs to the hearth with a wash laid over them to dry. Her mother— Maeve it was—called her names I won’t repeat, and the sisters, who were on their night off from service, sided with their mother. Evelyn did her own bit of verbal damage—it was an unholy thing, she said, there was some physical violence among the three sisters—she trembled like a leaf when she told me this years ago. And so she stormed out of the cabin and went down to the farm pond, thinking she might drown herself like the kittens her mother forced her to dispose of when she was a child. It was a cold night, she said, and she was out in hardly a stitch and no shoe to her foot.’

The distant tapping of Liam’s hammer.

‘I wonder whether to say it, for it makes no difference to the tragedy of that night, but she was kept warm by a neighbor lad—her first time in the arms of anyone other than William. When it was over, the guilt was on her, as you can imagine—a crucifying thing to a Catholic girl trying to better herself in the eyes of God and man, and, also to the point, trying to keep herself unspoilt for the one she hoped to marry.’

Feeney got up and walked to the door, stood looking into the black night. The air was cool, seasoned with the wild scent of summer rain.

‘She felt her life changed forever, ruined in some way beyond what had happened at the pond. She said she forgave her mother and sisters, even Thomas for letting himself be killed, as she put it. She wanted nothing more than their forgiveness, even for her proud ways. She was reminded of how her mother tenderized tough meat by pounding it to shreds with the edge of a dinner plate. She felt her heart ravaged in such a manner, she said, and softened with the need to begin again if Providence would allow it.

‘It was the early hours of the morning when she went up to that airless cabin and opened the door. The fire literally exploded. It was of course oxygen flooding into the buildup of unignited gases. ’t was an inferno.’

He felt the terrible weight of his living bones. The sound of rain dripped into their silence.

‘Her uncle forced her to view the remains. I won’t go into great detail, but fire does a wicked thing to human flesh—it leaves only the blackened torso, very little of the limbs. She was driven nearly mad by the sight.’

‘I can’t imagine what it took to survive this,’ he said.

‘She learned to survive by withholding love, or any sort of human feeling, from everyone—especially herself. Later, that withholding would affect her husband and sons—Paddy and Liam say they have no memory of any tenderness from her.’