Of Irish Blood (71 page)

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

True.

Then I heard the door open. De Valera and Seán came in and stood in the back. De Valera and Michael Collins had once been the center of the Irish struggle but that center didn’t hold. Battling each other.

Yeats went on, telling us that “mere anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide” have been loosed upon the world. He looked over at de Valera. But surely it’s not too late for Ireland. Ireland can’t dissolve into the kind of conflict that is tearing apart Russia and wiped out a generation of young men in Europe.

“The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” Yeats said, but what did that mean? For some reason I think of Iseult, her flower face, her little daughter. Seán told me the baby had died. “Almost destroyed Iseult,” he said. I can imagine Iseult letting go of life altogether, drowning.

And then Yeats says the line that stirs this audience: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“The best.” Jesus, I think, he could be talking about Mr. Jenson and the Quakers who’d been afraid to stand up to Captain Pyke, his power trampling over their goodness. “The worst.” Does he mean de Valera? Full of passionate intensity, no question. But then, Collins’s followers are just as convinced they are right.

Yeats lowers his voice. “Surely some revelation is at hand,” he says. Good, maybe he’s offering some solution, some way to reach common ground before a blood-dimmed tide does break against those rocky shores I saw in Connemara and Donegal.

Yeats looks up from his text, stops. I know who has come in before I turn around. Maud. And Constance with her. The two of them try to move quietly into the back row. Fat chance. Two men immediately stand up, offer them their seats. I watch Maud and Constance smile as they sit down. A fellow two seats away leans over to shake hands with each one of them.

Ireland’s Joans of Arc—leave it to us to have two. An older man waves to them. “Douglas Hyde,” May whispers to me. The man who started it all, I think. Maud sees Seán, starts to get up. He gives her a thumbs-up and gestures her back into her seat.

Yeats clears his throat, tries to resume the reading, but no one’s paying one bit of attention. Now a woman is embracing Maud. “Mary MacSwiney,” May says.

“Excuse me,” Yeats says, “excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. There is another stanza to this poem.”

“Oh, Willie,” Maud says. “We are so sorry. Con and I were delayed…”

“Better late than never,” a voice shouts out, “like the Irish Republic!” This gets a laugh.

The distraction is a relief. Enough about the best and the worst, blood-dimmed tides. But the crowd does quiet and looks up at him. Yeats doesn’t say anything.

“Go on, Willie,” Maud says. “We’re waiting.”

“Surely some revelation is at hand,” Yeats repeats. “Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!”

He loses me with the next lines. Something about a lion’s body and the desert. The heavyset fellow next to me is asleep, little half snores coming out of him.

“‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’” Yeats stops. That seems to be the end of the poem.

“Bethlehem?” That wakes the fellow next to me. “Did he say ‘Bethlehem’?” he asks me, then shouts out to Yeats. “Are you mocking our beliefs, Mr. Yeats? I know you are not a Catholic but I expect you to respect our religion.”

Conversations and comments all around me. Yeats doesn’t move. I wonder if he’s remembering the riots at the Abbey Theatre after
The Playboy of the Western World
.

The duchess stands up. “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” but no one hears her.

I get up and go over to Maud.

“For God’s sake, Maud, do something,” I say. “Go up there. If you and Con stand with him now…”

“We can’t, Nora,” she says, and points over at de Valera, who is watching us.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I say, and start for the front. Not my place to interfere. But the duchess is completely flustered and …

And then who comes bobbing up to Yeats? Only Cyril. Hadn’t even seen him come in.

“Thank you kindly, Mr. Yeats,” Cyril says. “Very profound altogether I’m sure, but some of us would like to get a blast of your old stuff. Wouldn’t we?” he asks the audience.

“My own favorite’s the one that got a tune put on it,” he says.

Cyril starts to sing:

Down by the salley gardens, my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

Not exactly the blood-dimmed tide, and I wonder if Yeats likes being reminded of a time when he spoke so simply. The audience is listening to Cyril. The man next to me smiles.

“‘She bid me take love easy,’” Cyril sings, “‘as the leaves grow on the tree.’”

And for a moment, all of us—whether from Australia or Africa, South America or North, Portugal, Spain, Tasmania—are in the Ireland of the mind and heart that exerts such a pull on anyone of Irish blood. It’s a song we all know, and so we sing too. Finishing the verses, luxuriating in the lovely, sad ending.

“‘But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.’”

Applause. For ourselves together.

The moment of unity doesn’t last. The audience forms into knots of dissension. De Valera, Seán, Maud, and Constance leave without speaking to Yeats. May follows them, and I think, Get out of there, Peter, please. Just get out of Ireland.

FEBRUARY 1922

May and I find seats in Sylvia’s Shakspeare and Company on February 2, James Joyce’s birthday. Copies of
Ulysses
are stacked up on a table in the front of the shop, the title bold on the blue paper spine. A very different audience here than the group at the Irish Race Convention. French and Americans mostly. Sylvia leads Nora and Joyce out from the back of the store to sit on chairs behind the small table.

I’m hoping Joyce will read from the chapter in Barney McKiernan’s Pub but he tells us his sight’s so bad he can’t see his own text. Instead he thanks Sylvia and Adrienne and all who helped him get
Ulysses
into print and urges the audience to “buy the damn book and read it yourselves.”

We laugh.

Nora speaks up. “And me, Jim, thank me,” she says.

“I do, of course,” Joyce says.

“The whole book takes place on June 16, 1904,” Nora says, “the day Jim and I went walking.”

“It does,” Joyce says.

“And pay attention to that last chapter,” she says, “he’s taking off the way I talk says I don’t bother with punctuation just let whatever’s in my head roll out.”

“Yes,” Joyce says. “Yes, you do.”

He smiles.

“And now will those who wish to buy copies,” Sylvia begins.

But then some fellow shouts out from the back. “Given Ireland’s history of conflict, Mr. Joyce, do you expect an all-out civil war?”

And I know how Joyce will respond. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” he says.

I look at May. She shakes her head.

“Mick and Dev will work out a compromise, they will,” she says as we leave.

I spend four weeks of tips on my signed copy of
Ulysses
. Eager to get to Nora’s last chapter. But slow going. I only read a few pages a night, saying the words aloud to myself.

But then I doubt James Joyce wants readers galloping through his masterpiece. I develop the photo I took of Nora and Joyce. A portrait of the artist and the woman who said “Yes.”

JUNE 1922

May twists the dial on the rector’s radio, trying to bring in the signal. I hold the antenna out a window. Only at midnight do the radio waves from Ireland seem able to cross the Irish Sea and the English Channel, bounce off the Eiffel Tower, and be picked up by the rector’s radio. Early to bed, the rector, thank God, doesn’t seem aware that in the oldest parts of the college, one key fits every door. I’ve kept the key from the office we used during the convention. After the delegates went home to Ireland, the divisions deepened. De Valera gave speeches calling on Irishmen to kill other Irishmen, to wade through blood for the republic.

And then when he and Mick Collins do work out a compromise and agree on a Constitution, the British government insists that all elected officials must take an oath to the king, which the republicans refuse to do. Cyril says the Brits want to force a civil war, have Ireland collapse, bring in British troops and take the whole place over.

“Henry Wilson’s pulling the strings, mark my words,” Cyril said, and then left Paris. “Good-bye, girls,” he said. “Going back on active duty.”

He’s supporting Collins.

Lots of to-ing and fro-ing during the spring and early summer, but no shooting.

But now the crisis has come. For weeks the anti-treaty fellows have occupied the Four Courts, the building that housed the British administration and now belongs to the Irish government. Michael Collins refused to attack. Let them sit there until they tire themselves out, he said. A kind of reverse siege. After all, these were his friends, his comrades.

But then we heard Winston Churchill had issued an ultimatum. The Irish government must retake the Four Courts or he’d order the British army to do it for them. A few rounds of artillery will sort out the rebels, he said. He accused Michael Collins of ordering General Henry Wilson’s assassination. He was shot last week in London. Not true, May said.

“Two IRA fellows took advantage of an opportunity,” May told me. “Spontaneous. They saw him in front of his house and shot him. Not planned really.”

Both men had been in the British army during the World War. One lost his leg. Ironic if Wilson’s death sent British troops back into Ireland, I think. Is he visiting disaster on the “natives” from his grave?

Though May says if the British do attack, the two sides will unite against them.

A week now since Wilson was killed and the Brits haven’t invaded. The stalemate continues.

Nothing but static on the rector’s radio tonight. May hits the receiver.

“Damn this thing,” she says. Finally the static resolves into the announcer’s voice:

“Two hours ago artillery pieces were moved into position facing the Four Courts. An order from the Irish Government signed by Michael Collins has been delivered to the rebels. They must surrender immediately or the Free State army will open fire.”

Static. Then, “I can hear gunfire.” The announcer loses his detached tone.

“Dear God,” May says. “They’re shooting at each other.”

“They can’t,” I say. “They can’t. Jesus Christ, Peter could be in the Four Courts.”

I thought of the Michael Collins I’d met. An easygoing fellow, very different from the stubborn, stiff-necked de Valera. Collins didn’t seem a man bent on impressing a father he’d never known. Why couldn’t he find a way to compromise?

“This is terrible!” May says. “One of my brothers is inside the Four Courts, and the other on the outside, shooting at him.”

She’s crying now.

“They made Mick do it,” May says. “The Brits made him. Why did he listen to them? They want us to destroy each other.”

I remember the song Granny Honora would sing.
“Siúil, siúil, siúil, á rún.”
A woman asking the man she loves to walk home safely to her. Aren’t Irish women on both sides praying for the same thing?
Walk, walk, walk, my love, walk home safely to me.

Now we hear the boom of artillery. The sound that shattered Belleau Wood. Coming across to us from Dublin. I remember the piles of rubble, the damage the British naval guns caused. And now this.

“What is wrong with men?” I ask May. “Can’t they ever leave well enough alone? Collins said, ‘If we don’t have freedom, we have the conditions for freedom.’ Why can’t they work together on that?”

“And bow to King George, like the Brits want us to? No, Nora. Too many have died to settle for half measures,” May says. “I see that now. Collins is wrong. We’ll have to fight.”

Too many have died, so more should?

29

DECEMBER 1922

Paris is a city of war widows. No reason I should be spared. Yet I’ve convinced myself Peter will survive. A man who so loves Ireland cannot be murdered by another Irishman I think. And then in August Michael Collins is assassinated by the IRA. Ambushed in Cork. Traveling with little security to a secret meeting with a republican leader, trying to negotiate a truce. “They won’t kill me in my own county,” he said. They did.

Only thirty-one—a full dozen years younger than I am. I can almost hear his brother Pat saying, “If only Mick had come out to me in Chicago. Took that job in the bank. He’d be married now with family, living here on the South Side.” If only …

The Free State government retaliates. Executes Liam Mellows and three other republicans in November. Then Erskine Childers is arrested for violating the government’s ban on weapons by carrying a pistol that Michael Collins himself had given him. He’s tried, convicted, and shot. How can Molly Childers bear such a senseless loss?

“Nora, Nora. It’s me Cyril, open up,” he says.

Almost midnight. Cold. Snow on Cyril’s jacket. Christmas soon. I think of Peter. That long-ago walk on Christmas Eve.

“I thought you were in Ireland,” I say to Cyril.

“I was.”

“Did you see Peter?” I say.

“I did.”

“Well, how is he?”

Cyril says nothing.

“You’re very serious-looking, Cyril,” I say, and then I know.

“No, no, not Peter. Please, not Peter. Please, please,” I say.

Cyril puts his arm around my shoulders, walks me over to the couch in front of the fireplace. Still a sheen of red on ashy coals that give off no heat. He makes me sit down.

“He’s dead?”

“He is,” Cyril says. “I am sorry for your troubles, Nora.”

“How?”

“Shot by a young fellow at the training camp. A former student of the professor’s. You might have known him. McCarthy’s his name. A redheaded fellow from Cork.”

“James McCarthy?”

Cyril nods.

The student who noticed me that first day. The one who asked all the questions.

“But he was a republican,” I say.