Of Irish Blood (67 page)

Now Mary Spring Rice speaks up. “May I remind you that my cousin is the British ambassador to the United States. I will wire him right now unless Nora leaves with us this minute.”

“Now I am in charge here and…” Wilson says.

“Don’t listen to him, Johnny,” Charlotte says. “He’s always manipulated you—putting you out front while he schemes behind your back. Pushing you and those other officers at the Curragh to resign. And did he? No. Let others risk themselves while he stays safe in the shadows.”

“Some truth in that, Henry,” French says.

“But…” Wilson starts.

“Best release this woman, Macready,” French says. “She is an American. There’ll be a fuss if she’s dead. Look at the publicity de Valera got in the States. The money he raised. All those Irish over there—power, influence.”

“De Valera,” Macready says. “Your Cuban Jew compatriot, Wilson. But then you’ve Irish roots too, don’t you, Johnny? A pity.”

Macready sits down, opens my passport again, looks at the picture and then at me.

“Perhaps a mistake has been made. You may go,” he says. Then he writes something in my passport. “But you are forbidden to return to Ireland ever.” He looks at French. “I trust you don’t object, General?”

“Fine, fine,” French says.

“But you can’t ban me from Ireland,” I say.

“Come along, Nora,” Maud says.

In a kind of daze as Maud, Charlotte, Mary, and I get into a waiting taxi. It’s nearly dawn.

“We’ll put you on the early boat,” Maud says. “Best to be on your way.”

“But they detained me, threatened me. I can’t just leave and let them get away with it.”

“Get away with it? Those three—French, Macready, Wilson—by their blind stupidity and arrogance murdered hundreds of thousands of their own British soldiers. Not held accountable. Promoted. Sent over here to murder more,” Maud says.

“You have a lot of work to do, Nora. Develop those photographs and get them out,” Charlotte says.

“But my camera and my film are gone,” I say.

Maud only smiles.

Cyril’s at the dock holding my suitcase and my camera case.

“Come on. We got you a cabin.”

The official checking embarking passengers flips through my passport, then stops. Looks up. He’s about to say something, but Cyril stops him.

“Don’t mind that auld writing in her passport. It won’t mean anything in a few months,” Cyril says.

The official nods.

“Welcome aboard,” he says. A Dublin accent, an Irish man.

“You’ll be back one day, Nora,” Cyril says. “As a special guest of the Republic of Ireland. Now, I believe you have photographs to develop.”

27

PARIS
SPRING 1921

I spend the weeks after I return from Ireland in the darkroom. The sheer discipline of keeping the film in the chemical bath just so many seconds and no more distracts me from thoughts of Peter and Pyke, the Black and Tans and Wilson.

Do your job, Nora, I tell myself.

I make the first prints dramatic. Women and children stand numb, staring, next to the ruins of their homes. Shadowed. But the results seem theatrical and somehow diminish the reality. So instead I print the photographs flatly. Documents. No bias. Let the destruction speak for itself, illustrate the committee’s report, stay with the facts.

Though I’d like to write a paragraph or two for some newspaper explaining how I felt when the Tans broke into Lough Inagh Lodge. Those filthy hands grabbing me, Nora Kelly, from Bridgeport, Chicago. An American citizen, for crying out loud. Nothing to them. An Irish woman so fair game. Rape me. Murder me. No consequences for them. Nothing to fear.

“Police, police!” I would’ve yelled if some blackguard had pulled me into an alley in Chicago. But what to do if your rapist and murderer is the police?

I wish I could describe my arrest, quote Wilson and Macready. Macready had said “I loathe this country” to Wilson. And then called de Valera “Your Cuban Jew compatriot.”

Yet Maud told me Macready has Irish roots and his wife is from Cork.

A web of connections. The gentry saving Ireland from the Irish.

I get a check from John Quinn for one hundred francs. The committee’s very pleased, he writes. My photographs were powerful. Ten million dollars has been raised for Ireland.

No word from Peter and the only real news about Ireland comes from what I hear after Mass on Sundays at the Irish College.

A slow grinding war, hidden from the rest of the world. Tourists keep Madame Simone and me busy. Paris has never been so full of visitors.

I keep an eye out for the rugby man or anyone like him but the British seem to have lost interest in me.

Five o’clock on an April morning I hear the soft knock at the door of my studio.

Peter, I think.

“Peter,” I say as I open the door.

“Sorry, missus. Only me.”

“Cyril! For God’s sake, what are you doing here?”

“Not sure it’s for God’s sake, more my own.”

I smile at him but I’m disappointed.

This is the scene I’ve imagined so many times. Peter’s arrival, our reunion, our …

“Very hungry, missus,” Cyril is saying. “I’d welcome a fry.”

“I do have eggs. I can make you an omelette,” I say.

“I prefer to see my eggs. You get out the skillet and plenty of butter and I’ll do the honors,” he says.

Cyril even fries slices of a baguette and talks all through his breakfast.

“Tans raided the ma’s place. Been doing that. Terrorizing the slums. Come driving up a street in lorries. Tanks even. Ridiculous. We’ve heard there are plans to strafe Dublin. Imagine planes flying over the flats. Shooting civilians as if they were enemy troops. The Brits shine bright lights on the buildings. Frightening, the sirens, the rumpus. Soldiers go from flat to flat breaking down the doors, getting people out of bed, sending them out into the cold. Children with little enough warm to wear in the best of times shivering in the night. Claim they’re looking for Fenians, for guns. But really they want to scare the people. Keep mothers from letting their sons join the fight. Of course it does the opposite. After every raid we get more recruits. Mick says we should write the Tans a thank-you letter. They’re so brutal even King George wants them gone. Dev’s back in Ireland. There’ll be elections in May for the little hop-o’-my-thumb Parliament the Brits have given us. Too little, too late. Always the mistake they make. But when Sinn Féin carries the day and are democratically elected…” Cyril sends the words up and down the scale, making music of them. “Then the world will take notice. Who knows? Dev wants Mick to stop the guerrilla carry-on and go toe-to-toe with the British army, Marquis of Queensbury style. Mick only laughed and told him to talk to some of the lads who’d fought at the Somme or Wipers. Anyway…”

Amazing how Cyril times his chewing so as not to lose a word. I jump in. “But you’re here,” I say.

“I am because as I said, they raided me ma’s. Thank God I wasn’t there. But they took her. Put her in Mountjoy jail, would you believe. Maud found out and dragged Yeats himself down there. Gave them a song and dance about how Ma had worked for his family. That did the trick. Well, me ma almost scuttled the whole effort saying she was an Irish patriot and proud of it and go ahead and hang her. Raving to beat the band and telling the officer she had the power to curse him and his family. All Maud and Yeats could do to get her out of there. But it seemed time for me to get out of the country for a while, do a bit of business over here,” Cyril says.

“Peter?” I ask him. “What about Peter?”

“Still out in the mountain somewhere causing the Tans and the police bother,” Cyril says.

“Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t but I would probably know if he were dead.”

“Probably?”

“Nothing sure of these days, Nora. Now, you have a bit of an assignment, too.”

“What?”

“We want plenty of publicity about the elections. Lots of stories in the newspapers in America. A profile of each candidate. The British are trying to portray our fellows as madmen and women. Good few women standing. We want to tell the real story. Show them as people.”

“But I’m not a writer, I take pictures.”

“I presume your camera can copy photographs too.”

“Well, I suppose.”

He takes an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and dumps out a whole load of snapshots. Some are wedding photographs. Some college graduation shots, others family groups.

“Let them see us as people,” Cyril says. “Make it harder for the other side to murder us.”

He pushes the pictures over to me.

“Do you know what Macready was heard to say?” Cyril says.

“What?” I say.

“‘Let them take their seats. We’ll round them up and shoot the whole bloody lot by mistake.’ Harder to do if the world knows who we are,” Cyril says.

So, we enlist May Quinlivan as the writer. She’s back to finish her degree. A position awaits her at the convent school for girls in Donaghmore, County Tyrone.

“The new Ireland will need educated women,” she says.

May and I want Cyril to let us do a special feature on the five women candidates. The three of us work in my room. May lines up the photographs of Constance Markievicz, Kathleen Clarke, Margaret Pearse, Kathleen O’Callaghan, Mary MacSwiney, and Ada English.

“No other country has so many women standing for office,” May says. “Important to put them front and center.”

Cyril resists. “You don’t have to tell me about women fighting for the Cause,” he says. “I saw a young girl ride her bicycle right through a Tan roadblock carrying a message. But this election is serious business. It’s the men we have to concentrate on.”

“But women in America just got the vote last year. They’ll be fascinated with these stories. I bet the
Woman’s Home Companion
will run the whole feature,” I say.

“What’s that?” Cyril asks, “A ladies’ magazine?”

“Cyril,” I say, “get the women on our side and they’ll get the men.” He sighs but agrees.

We couldn’t ask for a better cast of characters. There’s Constance Markievicz. What drama. A privileged young beauty falls for a foreign nobleman, marries him, the two of them become the center of a group of artists in Dublin, and then her awakening. She joins the Irish Citizen Army, founds her rebel Boy Scouts, the Fianna, and commands a fighting unit during the Rising. Then after her almost execution, she’s elected to the British parliament—the first woman—and made a minister of state in the rebel government. The first woman minister in any European government.

Who could invent such a tale?

We print a photograph of the young Constance in a ball gown next to one of her in uniform.

And then Margaret Pearse. Cyril has a portrait of her, with white hair and a half smile, that seems to embody Mother Machree, this woman whose two sons were executed, who as her son said in his poem, did not grudge her two strong sons to the Cause.

Next we tell Kathleen O’Callaghan’s story. Her husband was a a former mayor of Limerick, shot in the hallway of their house, right in front of her eyes.

“But let’s put in that she was a businesswoman,” I say to May. “Had her own shop. Still does.”

Kathleen Clarke and her husband Tom were living in Brooklyn doing well for themselves. Three children born in America. She goes back to Ireland only to have both her husband and brother executed for their part in the Uprising. May tells me that when Kathleen Clarke went to the prison to try to see her husband, she was pregnant and then miscarried. “Do we dare put that in?” I wonder. But decide even the
Woman’s Home Companion
won’t report such an intimate detail.

We write about Mary MacSwiney, sister of Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike. She’s a graduate of Cambridge University, a scholar, a teacher, and now a candidate. Ada English is one of the first women psychiatrists.

What an impressive group.

May and I finish the article in a week.

Cyril reads it and nods.

“I hope they win,” I say.

“Bound to. Running unopposed.”

“But…”

Will I ever understand?

John Quinn sends the article and photographs to the
Woman’s Home Companion
and after they publish it he has twenty thousand copies of our article printed and distributed in the U.S. and Britain. May and I are over the moon. Every one of the women is very pleased. All refuse to take their seats in the Westminister Parliament but meet as the Irish Parliament, the Dáil, a few weeks after the election. But the war in Ireland grinds on.

*   *   *

I’m surprised when the note inviting me to Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salon comes to Madame Simone’s.

“Probably wants someone there who remembers her from before the war,” Madame Simone says.

May would enjoy looking at the paintings, I think, and we both need a break from Ireland. So I put on my green crepe dress and we go.

Hard to even see the walls, the atelier’s so crowded.

Americans voices. Loud.

One fellow is standing alone in the doorway of the atelier as we arrive. Good-looking, dark hair, blue eyes, better dressed then the others.

“Hello,” I say, “I’m Nora Kelly and this is May Quinlivan.”

“Scott Fitzgerald,” he says. He points with his glass of whiskey at the crowd. “Most of these fellows are former soldiers. Went through the war. I missed the fighting. Too damn young to have a real war. Not good for a writer to miss the big event of his times,” he says.

“I thought a writer could make a good story out of anything,” I say.

“Yeah? Well, I suppose that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I can sell anything as long as it’s set in New York and full of flappers and wild parties,” he says. “This is the Jazz Age, lady.”

“There’s a war going on in Ireland right now. You could cover that,” I say.

“No market for it,” he says.

“But you’re Irish,” I say.

“Born and bred. Catholic schools all my life. Zelda and I were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Another world, another time.”

He finishes his drink and leaves. May and I wander into the kitchen. Alice is entertaining the wives. I guess Gertrude likes the women segregated. Probably thinks they’ll interfere in the serious discussions taking place among the men.