Tipperary (68 page)

No day had more sun as that great, celebratory Sunday. My mother stood with me—still as straight as a stick—at the door to the opened dining-rooms and watched the seated banquet begin.

“So this is to be the shape of the world,” she said. Mother wore a black-and-white silk dress that day, and a great black hat with a white ribbon. People thronged to her, and she had a smile for everybody and an interested inquiry.

My dear Lady Mollie arrived—whom I had not seen in months, a fact for which she chided me.

I defended myself well; I know all her sallies—and then asked her, “But why did you not bring Mr. Ross? I should like to have met him again.”

To which she replied with an answer that I had heard about others all too frequently in the last eight years: “He died, dear.”

I said, “But I did not know? Was it Vimy? The Somme? Or—in Ireland?”

“Neither, dear. He never went to war; he didn't need to—he was able to die with no reason.”

To which I said, “I'm afraid I have been so absorbed that I have missed much.”

This somber news made a brief black plume in the air—but it was the only such darkness.

Weeks earlier, as we'd prepared for this day, I'd asked Harney the address to which I might send Mr. Collins an invitation. He'd looked alarmed and shaken his head.

“We won't do that,” he said.

I asked why and he told me that, given the bitterness now mounting between those who supported the Treaty with London and those who believed that it gave Ireland too little, Mr. Collins might not be safe here. Tipperary had become rife with anti-Treaty forces—the “Irregulars.”

“But we have no politics here,” I said.

“No, Charles, but the people you invite—they'll have enough politics for everybody. That's not a subject to mention that day.”

There came a moment when I walked away from the dancing and climbed up the highest of the terraces, from where, a few hundred yards distant, I turned and looked back. It looked like a gala from history. The dancers had not confined themselves to the Ballroom; they had, as we intended, whirled out onto the paving-stones outside the Ballroom doors, and as they flew and spun to the music, the bystanders applauded them. Everywhere seemed full of good humor. By the liquor tables, people stood three and four deep, and people of all stripes talked to one another; this was a day of the greatest gaiety.

In the midst of the dancers, I saw April. She danced with Harney and they danced excellently together, and I saw her throw her head back and laugh, and then reach in and embrace Harney, and then laugh again and then dance on, and I remembered Mr. Yeats's wonderful poem, that he conceived here—“And he saw young men and young girls / Who danced on a level place.”

I shall write and tell him, I reflected, of April's “sad and gay face.”

At three o'clock in the morning we still kept torches burning on the avenue. The Paglalonis, the Marchettis, the Lemms—they had stayed together at dinner, and as darkness fell, they came to me almost as a group, and each one said that they wept to think that the work had ended, and each one told me that never would they work on such a rewarding enterprise again, and each one brought me gifts, and I had not the words to thank them.

The Marchettis gave me a marble carving—and rendered me speechless when they told me its provenance: “The Signora's hands.”

“The Signora?”

“Yes,” they said, “the Signora Somaaar-veel.”

Had they asked April to sit for them while they took casts of her hands? It appeared so, and the carving was a perfect replica. Gianfranco Paglaloni gave me a little stucco medallion of a horse—a replica that the brothers had constructed of the first piece of decorative plaster ever placed on the castle walls. Serge and Claudette Lemm gave me a charcoal drawing they had made of the mural's Odysseus: “For Monsieur Charles O'Brien—who knows of these things.”

When everybody had left, and the last of our workers had gone to bed, and no sound could be heard anywhere, the first lemon stripes of dawn began to spear the eastern sky toward Cashel. I leaned against the door and looked out into the gloaming—full darkness seems never to fall on an Irish summer night. Another line by Mr. Yeats came to mind: “ ‘What then?’ sang Plato's ghost. ‘What then?’ ”

MONDAY, THE 21ST OF AUGUST 1922.

Why must Life so mix us up? I have great joy in my heart today at my dear son's triumph, and great sorrow—that I can never speak—at my beloved Bernard's despondency. Dare I say it to him? No. Then we shall have to address it between ourselves, and we are too old. Bernard sits by the fire all day. I know that he broods on the great wrong he has done.

Now it hurts him so. He could not share his son's triumph yesterday. He could not witness how our neighbors hail his son. He knows that some people who went to the castle banquet are aware of his dreadful truth.

Many times, I feel he wishes to tell me what he has done. I fervently hope he does not. For if he does, I shall have to cease speaking to him forever.

And does he not worry that Charles knows? And if Charles does not know, why does he not know?

Oh, I wish I had not written these words here. They despoil the memory of the great day that we had yesterday. Charles tells me that he and he alone chose the yellow that is painted on the walls of the Great Hall—and the raspberry on the Gallery's ceiling. He knows colors better than I do. I am so proud of him.

From Joe Harney's oral reminiscences:

It was three days, I remember, three days after the banquet in Tipperary Castle when I heard the news. What's that machine they ride at carnivals, what do they call it—a roller-coaster? Yes, that's it. There were still people cleaning up and putting the dining-rooms back together after that great party. In the village they were saying that there'll never be another as good—there couldn't be.

I was sitting in the sunshine outside the Ballroom when I heard it. What could I do but weep? I put my hands over my face and I just wept. In floods. That awful feeling we get in our chests—I can still feel it now, all these years afterward. Oh, God! When I thought of the times I had been with him, and how I looked up to him.

It was Charles who told me. A workman rode up from the village in a bad state. Charles didn't believe him—and then he did believe him. Just as Charles told me, April arrived and found the two of us in tears.

“Mr. Collins is dead,” said Charles, and she sat straight down.

None of us said much to each other. She asked one question: “Does that mean our protection has gone?”

Who could answer her? I know that she wanted me to reassure her, but I was out of it by then; I was never going to make war on my fellow-Irishmen.

April nodded as if she understood why we didn't answer, and then she left us alone. When our grief thawed a little, Charles and I talked. We talked for ages—about the first time Charles met Mick Collins, about the clarity of his vision, about how tough he was, about the mistakes he had been making by killing too many of his own countrymen in this new conflagration.

“Did he really protect this place?” Charles asked me.

“Didn't you know he would? You let his Volunteers hide in the cellars.” Charles often played the innocent—and I often stopped him from doing it. “And he liked you a lot. That's why he wrestled with you that first day. He only did that with men who impressed him. I always thought it was childish.”

“But—April's right, those days are over, aren't they?” said Charles. “There are houses being burned again.”

“Left, right, and center,” I remember saying. I thought to burn down these lovely old houses was barbaric and stupid, and they were burning nearly one a night.

Charles sat there, and he said something like, “Well, they tried before.” And he must have caught some look or shadow or something crossing my face—he was as quick as a fish when he wanted to be. He pressed me, and I tried to avoid it.

“That first fire—what was it? What caused it?”

I tried to avoid it, and he pressed me again.

“Harney, what are friends for?”

Well, he found out now. Very slowly and very carefully, I told him that the previous attempt to burn down Tipperary Castle had nothing to do with patriotism or anti-British sentiment or anything like that. It was the result of a conspiracy.

A bunch of local landowners whose properties all adjoined the castle decided they wanted the estate broken up. Then each of them could get some of the land. Charles's father, Bernard O'Brien, was one of them. When the Burkes, April and her father, came into the picture, these men saw the danger to their interests. Without ever telling Bernard, a bunch of them hired thugs to frighten off April, and everyone that had anything to do with her. That's how Charles got beaten up in Limerick—he'd told me all about it. And that's how he got shot, and how I met him.

In fairness to Bernard, he nearly lost his reason when he heard it. Who wouldn't? His son shot and nearly killed? But, mind you, he didn't call off the arson efforts, and he was the one who told the thugs that Charles was away Easter Week. That was when they set the fire in the castle.

Charles asked me about that too, and I told him—to soften the blow—that they had also threatened Mrs. O'Brien. I mean—these fellows followed Charles across the countryside here, and attacked him. They warned people off talking to him; people would go in and shut their doors if they saw Charles coming.

When he saw all this happening, Charles thought—and I did too when he told me—that someone had a grudge against him, that a cure had gone wrong or something. Sure, didn't we spend many weeks visiting people where he thought there might be an old enmity? There was no such thing—there were no old enmities. Unless you count his father.

So—I told him all this. I'd only found it out a few months before, from one of the Volunteers, whose uncle was one of the fellows they hired—a bad pill of a fellow called Donoghue, with a finger missing. He used to mooch around the castle, trying to see what he could steal.

What a grim morning that was. Our leader dead, shot on a roadside in his native County Cork, and shot by fellow-Irishmen, his former comrades. My friend here in front of me, white in the face at the thought of his father's treachery—the father whom he always talked about so warmly. And the threat hanging over us that all our work might be burned down any day or night now.

I could nearly see Charles's mind working. “I'm going to think,” said he. A few days later he said to me, “Regarding that matter—I've decided.” He told me that he was going to forgive his father—that he had already forgiven him. But he was never going to mention it at Ardobreen.

“He knows what he's done, Harney. That's why he hasn't been able to look me in the face for many years—that's why he was never there when I went over to visit Mother.”

Then he made a joke of it. “Anyway,” said he, “after Sunday night's party nobody will boycott me.”