Tipperary (17 page)

I shall leave it for my Journal to reflect my melancholia of the moment; and I shall content myself here with the repeated expression of surprise that Miss Burke took so furiously against me. What occasioned her contempt? Do I carry a mark upon my forehead? Has somebody spoken against me? It is a mystery that a young woman should take so against a man she has never before known.

When I reached home, I decided to tell the whole story, and I can truly say that I have never captured my family's earnest attention so completely as on that first night at dinner. They listened, with no more than an occasional interjection, and they listened with attitudes of great sympathy. When I had finished, Euclid, red with anger, asked the first question.

“Do you think she is dangerous? Might she carry a stiletto?”

Mother said, “This is a young woman who has not yet learned to care for herself, has only been trained to care for others.”

Said my father, “Was Wilde as tall as people said?”

“Indeed,” I said. “As tall as you and me.”

“Goodness,” said both my parents. Then began the advice.

“Go and find her,” said Mother.

Euclid: “I shall make maps of London and Paris for you.”

My father said, “Go and look at the estate.”

He confirmed that in general Mr. Wilde's story of Tipperary Castle's fate had been what he understood, too, that there had been, as he said, “some old story; my father knew it. The lawyers go up there every few years and look at the place. And we rent conacre from them, when we need extra fields.”

When turbulent, I try to step back and view myself. To this end, I soon found myself walking in our wood, in mid-winter, though in mild weather, and in turmoil. Captain Ferguson's plantings had allowed for the seasons, and many orchidaceous blooms gleamed like colorful lamps among the bare trees.

That morning, I saw a sad man no longer young, wrapped in an oat-meal-colored tweed ulster, and wearing tan boots and gloves. Hatless, his thick yellow hair flew back from his forehead in all directions, and as he walked he clapped his hands together and talked aloud to himself: “Learn from what has happened!”

My mother and brother had said that I must go and find April—but I knew not where or how. And my own father—whose advice on life ultimately seemed best fitted to my nature—spoke only of the estate. I found that Father had the best proposal; if I could not as yet associate with the object of my desire, perhaps a visit to the inanimate would inspire me. I strode from the wood and saddled Della.

Charles O'Brien makes it difficult to judge him. At the age of forty he seems not to have made any permanent relationship or experienced significant romantic liaisons. Judging from the tone of his utterances regarding April Burke, if there had been a notable love affair, or even a passing romance, he would almost certainly have mentioned it—unless he was practicing discretion.

Does this mean that he had known no strong feelings for any woman until he reached the age of forty? Or ever felt a desire to settle down? His connection with his parental home seems never to have dimmed. It remained his major port of call—as witnessed by the fact that after the cruelty of Paris he made straight for home and took solace there. Nor did he keep many secrets from his parents. He confided his feelings to the entire family and listened to their advice.

Overall, though, a picture is forming. In 1898, Auguste Rodin un-veiled his controversial statue of Balzac. It showed the novelist as a figure of some giantism. Wrapped in his robe, he stands huddled against the world, eyes deep-set, head held proud, his mane of hair a plaything of the breeze. Rodin gave Balzac more than a hint of Beethoven. The statue has bulk, and a ferocity of withdrawal, a denial of the world; this is a big man, somewhat preoccupied and defiant.

Charles O'Brien may have had none of Balzac's rage against the world, nor his frantic industry. Nor did he have Balzac's—or Beethoven's—desperation to write as much as he could as often as he could. He does, however, have a touch of the same “square peg” syndrome—but he has no great sense of it, no anguish at his own misfittingness.

And he does have the same hint of inner torture—which then escalated sharply under Miss Burke's brusque contempt. Also, in those early pages of his text, he defines a major chasm between how people perceive him and how he thinks they see him.

Who, therefore, was the real Charles O'Brien, and in which direction would he develop? Was he an undeveloped man with character blemishes or an amiable figure like his father? We are about to discover the key that will unlock him.

From years of local knowledge, imbibed unknowingly, I had the impression that Tipperary Castle touched deeply all who saw it. Not many knew of its existence, but those who had heard of it, who had traveled there in search of its legend and then found it, sighed with surprise and pleasure. It exceeded, I understood, what they had expected from the hearsay.

Many local people already knew the house's effect and visited it regularly; a number of them went there often, along their own paths through the wood or by the lake shore, simply to gaze.

Strangers discovered the place in the old formal way that was once open to all. First they struggled through an overgrown gate serene with lions on the pillars, then walked half a mile of a graveled avenue that had once been planted either side with great beauties of trees and flowering shrubs. Then, around a long, gentle corner, the house appeared—at the top of a slope, with green fields leading up to its forecourts. My mood, as I rode, varied between somber and gay. Would I be further cast down that I could not bring this estate into my life? Or would its sight fire me, inspire me, and in some mysterious fashion teach me the way forward?

I succeeded in opening part of the old gate sufficiently wide to lead Della through, and then I remounted. The avenue was quiet, save for a rustle here and there as a small animal slipped away from the intruding hooves. Then I rounded the corner—and gasped.

It commanded total attention, a full halt to take in its splendor. Who had ever seen such a building, such grandeur, such romantic mystery, except in the pages of a child's story-book? From a distance the house looked steady and intact, and the towers had such authority; the walls so strong, the terraces so wide, so generous, the little bridge so sound and firm. I had been here once before as a boy of twelve or so; but this view far excelled that memory.

The construction of the house had been famously sturdy; therefore ruin had entered with caution and it advanced only slowly. Shales of glinting slate held many blue-black expanses of the roof together, and the square eastern tower stood completely intact, with its battlements like rows of teeth.

A great front door stood askew within its frame, leaning as though it had a hand on its hip. It seemed barred in some way from inside. I remembered Father telling us that the timber had been so massive it took six men, using ramps and wedges, to hold the door in place while the carpenters hung it on hinges that were almost six feet deep; they secured it with nails seven inches long that they had fashioned at the site.

My father had told me not to expect too much from the place—he'd said he feared that damage must have been accumulating. From what I now saw, his fears were not justified. In the empty times after the owner's fate, local men had tried to plunder the house by entering through the door—but they had merely forced it partly off one hinge and then had to walk away, irked at the door's victory. They'd never tried again, preferring to talk about their defeat in terms of the door's heroic stature; it had, after all, been built and hung by their grandfathers. Lawyers (as I would learn) had then come by and established iron bars to secure the door further.

The stonework showed no wear and tear. In the construction, the blocks of limestone had been hewed in delicacy or roughness according to their places in the house. Where the finish needed to be robust, on corners and buttresses, the stone had been cut like tweed; on the decorated cornices it looked smooth as silk.

Many of the windows had received elegant and pointed arches; not so crude as Gothic, they gave the impression of having been built for ladies looking out of their boudoirs to see what gentleman might come riding hard across the fields to carry them away. On several walls, windowslits had been inserted—a whimsy on the owner's part, since bows and arrows no longer played a part in defense of a castle when these walls were being built.

And that, I surmised, had been the point of the creators: to make a house like a legendary palace, but with all the warmth of a home. This success of temperament must have made even the house's enemies— hostile tenants, would-be owners—gaze with wonder when they stood in the overgrown avenue. At the end of the march of one hundred beeches, amid gnarled cherry trees and sprawling, uncontrolled espaliers, the layers of stone rose one above another like a child's wooden blocks.

I could imagine walking those grass terraces, giving the Orders of the Day to my steward. My wife, April, could stand in the great—now restored—doorway, welcoming family and friends. A girl—our daughter, Amelia—might stand at her window and let her hair down, like Rapunzel. Our son, Bernard Euclid Terence Oscar, could roam the ramparts and spy through the archery slits, preparing to repel invaders. And, as an entire family, we could walk down to the lake after breakfast on summer mornings and stand on the little stone bridge, talking to the swans.

When I looked at the mountains in the distance, the Galtees, and the peak Galteemore, they were blue as the sky on this winter day; and with the terraced fields and gray sunken stone fences leading down to the lake, and the slopes on the far side climbing up into the beech and ash woods, no other estate in Ireland could have granted as much to the beholder. Here was peace indeed—here was beauty and light. This place, I told myself, is where I belong; I knew not why, but I felt it to be as true as the beating of my heart.

One last observation called me; my father had mentioned that Mr. Terence Burke had locked the theater when his wife vanished. Its fortifications had proven so strong that nobody had been known to breach it, not even the most disrespectful of the local men. I found the doors through which the audience should have entered, and I located the more discreet access marked “Actors”; all felt as though they had been secured from the inside with bolted cords of wood.

I walked back to the ramparts. The unfortunate Terence Burke (how I felt for him!) had taken the structure erected by his ancestors and increased it in wonders until it became as marvelous as a poem. If love and passion can be measured in stonework, the woman who married here had been loved with one of the greatest passions ever felt in a human heart. How matters run in families!

Down the faded avenue, I looked back from my saddle. The house seemed different—and I know how often the face of a beautiful woman changes. I called out, “Halloo! Halloo!”—and the house gave me back my own voice, a sure sign of emptiness. Firmly I vowed that I would make it echo to laughter, and words of love and joy. I received such force of optimism from this idea that I galloped Della all the way home.