Of Irish Blood (25 page)

“I have three grandchildren,” she says.

We stop for afternoon tea with the most expensive pastries the Ritz offers.

“We weren’t always rich,” Belinda says after eating her third éclair.

“Bartholomew started as a shoemaker with a little shop but then…”

She tells me about how her husband opened a shoe factory that “just boomed.” They moved to Brookline.

“I’m actually rather afraid of Mrs. Adams and the others. I was surprised she recommended you.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well, Irish,” she says. “Not that I have anything against the Irish. Oh no. I don’t know what I’d do without my Maggie.”

“Your maid I suppose?”

“Housekeeper really. She worked for one of the old Yankee families on Beacon Hill and keeps me right when I entertain.”

“Where is she from?”

“Charlestown, I suppose.”

“No, where in Ireland? What county?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t,” I say as she takes another éclair.

I should take her by the arm and march her to the library of the Irish College and have Father Kevin instruct her on the thousands of years of knowledge contained in those leather-bound volumes and ancient manuscripts, and say, “Here is the heritage of your Maggie, Belinda Lawrence.” But I don’t. I consider my account ledger and ask her if she would like to have her picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower. The climax of my Parisian tour.

“Oh, yes,” she says.

Now, I have a favorite street photographer, Louis DuBois, who stations himself at the Eiffel Tower ready to dash up to any tourist who comes to stare at Paris’s most popular attraction.

In seconds he plants his tripod in front of them, sets the camera on top, and then pulls out an accordion folder of photographs.

“At your hotel this very evening,” he promises.

We have a routine, Louis and I. He makes his pitch and quotes an outrageous price. I bargain with him until even the most reluctant client is swept into the joy of getting a good deal.

Soon after my visit to Mike and Sally Stein’s I went with him to his studio on the rue Saint-Saëns, a small street near the Eiffel Tower. He was teaching me how to develop prints. I was thinking of that wonderful portrait of Danny Stein when I asked him if he’d ever thought of adjusting his straight-on process to add shades and shadows—make the tower loom a bit or dance with light.

He wasn’t interested but let me play around a bit.

Louis hated my experiments. “Confusing,” he said.

But he did teach me how to load the plates into the camera, how to focus, and how to open and close the shutter to control the light. Then he let me take a few pictures of him in front of his building.

“You’re quick,” he said. “You have an eye and a sense of the camera which can’t be taught. But no funny business. The camera’s meant to record what’s there.”

But today Louis isn’t at the tower. And Belinda wants five different poses. Fifty francs—almost a month’s rent.

Nothing to do but rouse Louis out of his studio.

“It’s close,” I tell Belinda as she follows me.

“Impossible,” Louis tells me. He’s developing three sets of photographs that must be delivered to the Georges V that night. “Take the camera. Do it yourself,” he says.

I lift the tripod onto my shoulder and almost go down under the weight. Mrs. Lawrence tries to pick up the camera and can’t. “I’m not accustomed to heavy weights,” she says.

“Wait,” I say. The woman downstairs takes in washing. She has a cart. Three francs and the cart is ours for two hours. So we set out—pushing the cart with the camera and tripod in front of us.

Now, the Parisians won’t lower themselves to laugh out loud, but plenty of them snicker at us as we bump along the cobblestones. I’m afraid Mrs. Lawrence will be horrified but when we arrive she actually offers to help me to set up the camera, and we both lift the tripod off the cart.

“
Arrêtez! Arrêtez!
Stop!” one of the regular photographers starts shouting at us. I know him. His name’s Claude. Louis calls him “
tyran
—the bully.” He practically threatens any reluctant tourist.

Another Tim McShane.

Claude rushes toward us and knocks the tripod over. “Oh, let’s go,” Belinda Lawrence says.

But I am not the frightened woman who went running through Chicago’s frozen streets a year and a half ago. I live in Paris. I order my dinner in French. I’ve met an avant-garde painter.

So I shout right back at Claude, using French curses I didn’t know I’d absorbed. Startle him.

I stop him just long enough for the other three photographers to start laughing. One comes over and tells Claude to calm down. He says that I’m
“la femme de Louis
.
”
“Je ne
…” I start, but what the heck? I’ll be Louis’s woman long enough to take Belinda’s pictures. And now the Eiffel Tower attendant who has been watching with great amusement says, “Why don’t you both come up on the platform? Take a picture of the lady with all of Paris at her feet?”

Why not, indeed? The fellow helps me put the camera and tripod on the lift, and we go up to the second platform, where I photograph Mrs. Lawrence against a lovely pink sunset-stained Paris sky. Then I go up to the next level and shoot her from above with the city spread out below.

Louis hates the photographs. “Fussy,” he tells me when I bring them back and ask him to develop them.

But Belinda Lawrence loves the pictures. She pays me one hundred francs (twice the usual fee). I give Louis fifty, which astounds him.

“Americans!” he says. But then he agrees to lend me his equipment. All that spring and summer I’m up and out with the camera and tripod on Madame Celeste’s laundry cart, photographing my favorite buildings.

Louis thinks I’m mad.

“The most important thing to focus on in the frame is the franc,” he says.

I take photographs of Notre-Dame as first light transforms the cathedral, shooting from every angle, catching pieces of the façade.

“Hopeless,” Louis says.

I begin to feel as if I’m rearranging reality too. Following the Hairy Mattress’s example. I convince Louis to teach me how to enlarge my cathedral photos and then hang them on the walls of my room. An atelier at last.

When Father Kevin tells me after Mass on the last Sunday in September that Professsor Keeley will be back at Christmas, I imagine taking Peter to my room to see my creations. A very high-minded conversation served with wine. A
salon de deux
.

What’s wrong with that?

10

CHRISTMAS 1913

Peter Keeley will come walking in behind the last priest in the procession, I tell myself. I’m kneeling very straight in one of the side pews near the entrance that Peter always favored, waiting for Midnight Mass to begin.

Come on, God. I’ve been so good. Haven’t let myself think of Peter more than once a day and then only as a friend, a teacher. No response from God. Father Rector sits on a kind of throne on the altar. I swear he’s staring at me. Hates that I’m at Mass every week but what can he do? I’m back in the fold. I glance up at the Lamb of God in the stained-glass window. “I am the Good Shepherd. I know mine and mine know me.” A year of the Gospel according to Father Kevin and I don’t feel myself such a sinner.

I catch Father Rector’s eye. Gaze right at him. He still suspects me of trying to tempt Peter away from a life of celibate scholarship, which isn’t exactly true. I just want to see him, be with him, and … And, well, I am not sure what Peter wants.

Four weeks ago, the first Sunday of the advent, after Mass, over tea and brown bread, Father Kevin whispered to me that a delegation of Irish Americans had come to Louvain to meet Peter and “some other Irish patriots.”

“One of them, a lawyer, collects old manuscripts,” Father Kevin said, “and might be interested in purchasing the Kelly fragment. He’s a fellow buys paintings too. The modern stuff. Not short of a few bob.”

“Do you mean John Quinn?” I asked, which surprised him. And then I made a bit of a story of my visit to the Steins and meeting Henri Matisse. “Quinn buys his work,” I said, and then told Father Kevin how I’d taken a client to Matisse’s studio. A disaster altogether. Mrs. Fraser from Rhode Island told Matisse his prices were outrageous and that while her husband had said she could get a few pictures to take home as souvenirs of Paris she’d never waste his hard-earned money on blobs of paint.

I thought Matisse would blow his stack but he’d only laughed. And then in quick French she couldn’t follow he’d told me women without husbands, like the Cone sisters from Baltimore, tended to be his best customers. Mrs. Fraser had interrupted and pointed to a half-finished painting on an easel next to a window that looked across at Notre-Dame.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “Is this supposed to be the church? I could paint a better likeness!”

Matisse didn’t laugh that time. I’d started apologizing away in French and English, saying that though my funds were limited I’d be honored to purchase something—a sketch, maybe, or …

And thank God he’d shrugged, rummaged through some papers, and pulled out a charcoal drawing of a flower, all spiky lines.

“Un cadeaux pour vous,”
he’d said as he signed his name at the bottom, then wrapped the sketch in a newspaper and given it to me with a bow.

I’d
“merci”
ed all over the place and should have stopped there but I had to go on and tell him that I’d been photographing the cathedral and would love to give him one of my photographs in return.

He’d waved away the offer. “I prefer to keep my vision pure,” he’d said, but told me that if I’d like to photograph his work that could be arranged. I said I’d be honored. Then pictured myself lugging all that equipment up the stairs and knew I’d never come back.

Mrs. Fraser had become impatient. Annoyed with me.

“You’re only encouraging bad art,” she’d said when we crossed the Pont Sully. She’d bought a watercolor study of Notre-Dame at a souvenir shop on the Île Saint-Louis. I’d never returned to Matisse’s studio and not another word from the Steins.

Father Kevin said maybe this John Quinn will come to Paris with Peter. I imagine him greeting me as a fellow Irish American. We’d go together to Matisse’s studio. Wouldn’t Gertrude and Alice be surprised.

Father Kevin told me not to mention John Quinn’s visit to Louvain to anyone.

Secrets. But Father Kevin says we can’t be too careful with so much anti-German propaganda in the French and British papers and the British ready to see the Irish in league with Germany now that the world seems rumbling toward war.

Madame Simone is keeping her eyes on the Balkans. Delighted that some treaty let Serbia take a big bite from the Austrian Empire. But wary too. Germany’s in league with Austria and Hungary.

“The Boche won’t like that. They’ll retaliate.”

She’s watching Alsace too. In November, the people started rioting to a fare-thee-well because some nineteen-year-old German lieutenant offered his soldiers a bounty for stabbing any “Wackes,” a rude name for Alsatians.

“The German army is beating the demonstrators,” Madame Simone had said. “The French will have to move in to protect the people and then, war.”

The French don’t. But the Alsatian woman vendor is not at the Christmas market. The border between France and Germany as good as closed. A standoff. I don’t send cards home this year. Don’t want to mail them directly from Paris.

The bells start ringing. Father Rector stands. He’s the celebrant. Father Kevin at his side. Splendid in gold vestments. And I pray, “Please. Peter. Please,” with closed eyes. But Peter doesn’t come.

Father Kevin preaches the sermon in English. Father Rector knows people come to hear Father Kevin and he wants a big, generous congregation. “No room in the inn,” Father Kevin begins, and then goes on to talk about how right now in Dublin people are starving because employers have locked out striking workers. “Fathers can’t feed their children. Mothers can’t keep their babies warm. These are holy families, too. And there is no room for them in their own country.”

I don’t really understand all he’s saying but I certainly know about what happens during strikes—hadn’t Mam fed the O’Briens, who lived below us, for months while Joe O’Brien walked the picket line with the railroad fellows?

Father Rector’s whispering to the priest next to him. Not pleased. I remember the story of how St. Bridget’s Father Sullivan got into trouble with the cardinal for preaching a sermon supporting the strike.

During the Offertory the priests sing “Adeste Fideles,” “Come All Ye Faithful.” I close my eyes. Peter’s been delayed but he’ll arrive any minute. Come on, Jesus. It’s your birthday. Be generous. Then, footsteps. I sense someone slipping into the pew beside me.

Thank you, thank you, God. I turn, my smile ready. But it’s a very tall woman who’s settling herself in the pew. A girl takes the place next to her, pulling a little boy along. An older woman piles in behind them. The tall woman smiles at me. A beauty, no question. Older than I am. Plenty of gray in the blond hair that’s piled up in curls topped by a hat that could be Chanel. Unusual eyes, not brown exactly, a kind of golden color. Wait a minute, I know her. Maud Gonne. Why, she’s famous. Ireland’s Joan of Arc, the papers called her when she came to Chicago with Major John MacBride to raise money for the Cause. And now here she is. Next to me at Mass and very devout. Theatrical almost. She bows very low at the Consecration, keeping her eyes closed. Then lifts her chin up high as the host is raised. Gazing at the white circle Father Kevin holds between his fingers, the body of Christ. The little boy kicks his feet against the pew. The older woman grabs his feet. I look over and wink at him. He laughs and so do I. Maud’s son with John MacBride. Some Gaelic name. Seán, I think. Yes, Seán MacBride.

The little fellow becomes very prayerful, as he leads the three women up to the Communion rail. Probably just made his First Communion and feeling holy. Sister Ruth Eileen told us in religion class that Napoleon said the day he received his First Communion was the happiest in his life. And he had quite a life, I think, as I walk behind them. I see the nudges and nods in the congregation as the little group passes.