Mary’s visit extended into the evening. When she left, Pat called Cassie down and they chatted. According to Cassie, Brad was surprised by what he’d seen in Lissbeg. It wasn’t the kind of St Patrick’s Day parade that he’d envisaged, and Cassie, too, had found it different from what she’d expected. ‘I guess I’d imagined the sorts of things you see on TV. Majorettes and police bands and fountains spouting green water.’
‘Well, no, love, we wouldn’t go in for that.’
‘And the mayor and politicians glad-handing. And multicultural stuff. In Toronto last year we had a dancing green dragon.’
‘You’d get the odd politician out here, all right, but there wouldn’t be much call for dragons. I’d say they’d be more St George’s thing than St Patrick’s. Snakes, now. You might get snakes in a Patrick’s Day parade. Did you and Brad not enjoy yourselves?’
‘God, no, we loved it. Well, I know I did, and he had a ball.’
Mary would have been sure to ask if Cassie had plans to see Brad again, but Pat had a feeling the question wouldn’t be welcome. She decided to leave it at that. He’d looked like a decent fellow, very cheerful and charming but, like Mary said, there was something reserved about him. A kind of smoothness that seemed to keep you at bay. Pat wondered if Cassie wasn’t aware of it, or if she simply had no reason to care.
Later, when Cassie had gone out again, and Pat watched the Dublin parade on the evening news, she told herself she was getting as nosy as Mary. Cassie’s life was her own and she didn’t need her granny sticking her oar in. On the other hand, there were times when she seemed terribly young and vulnerable. She was a girl who’d struck out on her own far too young, perhaps, and had missed having a mother she could talk to. Sonny’s wife, Annette, was nice enough but, like Cassie’s siblings, she was a full-on businesswoman. When the children were young she’d left them to a nanny, descending in a guilty whirl if they were ill or did badly at school, and otherwise being absent or unavailable. Cassie’s career choice had made no sense to her mother, who saw her freewheeling lifestyle as irresponsible. If Cassie were in love, Pat was sure that Annette wouldn’t notice, and if she’d fallen for a lad who worked on cruise ships he wouldn’t be deemed good enough for her upwardly mobile family.
As she turned off the news before going to bed, Pat reflected that she’d been younger than Cassie was now when she’d spent that summer in Resolve. Ger had proposed to her on the beach where the four of them had gone to celebrate Mary and Tom’s engagement. They’d planned a night at the pictures in Carrick after a drink in the pub, but the news of the engagement had put paid to that. Instead they’d taken a bottle of Blue Nun down to the beach near Lissbeg. It was a night of bright stars. They hung like jewels in an inky sky and their pale light glimmered on the waves. The boys went looking for timber on the shoreline while Mary and Pat went up to the dunes for handfuls of grass and dry seaweed to start a fire. Pat could remember sand sliding beneath her feet as she climbed the dunes. They were so steep she’d had to hold the hem of her skirt in her teeth, so she wouldn’t walk on it. She’d pulled herself up by grabbing tufts of marram grass and a sharp blade of it had slashed a cut across the palm of her hand. The blood had tasted salty when she licked it.
When the fire was lit the four of them had sat there, passing the bottle round. After a while, Mary and Tom had started messing around. She’d take a mouthful of wine and kiss him, and pass it on to him that way, mouth to mouth. Pretty soon they forgot the wine and started to snog. Pat and Ger were sitting across from them, feeling awkward and watching through the flames. It didn’t matter, of course, because the other two didn’t notice.
A bit after that, Mary had grabbed Tom’s hand and run with him into the dunes. They’d taken the bottle with them, so Pat and Ger just sat by the fire, looking up at the stars. Pat could hear the sea and smell the tarry smell of the burning timber. She could sense the ocean stretching away for thousands of fathomless miles, black under the moonlight on one side of the world and sparkling under sunshine on the other. And Ger had said, without looking at her, ‘Will we get married, so?’ Pat had said yes at once because she’d known the question was coming. She’d known that Tom would ask Mary too, but she’d kind of been holding her breath in case he wouldn’t. She’d told herself life was strange and that you never knew what might happen. But as soon as she’d seen Tom’s face that night she’d known what he had done.
In those days Resolve had felt like a different world altogether. Looking back, Pat could see herself struggling with the door of the railway carriage, stepping onto the platform and seeing Josie standing there in a little shift dress and a pillbox hat. The hat was made of white petals, her hair was styled, and her makeup looked great. Back then, women in the States never seemed to go out unless they were all dolled up – that was the first thing Pat had noticed when she’d got off the boat in New York. In Lissbeg you might run out to the shops with an apron over your frock, and you only got your hair done for special occasions. Most of the girls made their own clothes and no one had their legs waxed or their nails done in a beauty shop, like Josie did. That was for millionaires. Yet Josie just worked in the office at the factory, and lived in the rooming house nearby with lots of other girls.
The woman who owned the house lived in the basement and Josie said it was great the way she never interfered. ‘There’s places where the landladies act like some class of mother superior, walking in and out of your room and telling you what to do.’
‘But this Mrs Quinn doesn’t do that?’
‘Not at all. Mrs Quinn’s sound. So long as you pay your rent on the nail, and don’t be bringing in lads, she leaves you alone.’
They’d caught a bus to the house, which was on the outskirts of town, only a few stops away from the factory. Pat’s face must have changed when she saw it because Josie asked if she’d been expecting a white picket fence. Pat said no but they both knew she was lying. What else would you expect if all you knew of America was what you’d seen at the pictures? She’d imagined something out of a Deanna Durbin musical or, idiotically, a wooden house like the ones they’d have on the main street in a cowboy film. Instead it was a brick-built, three-storey place with an attic. Josie said Pat was lucky not to have ended up under the roof. ‘There’s no air-con up there and it’s fierce hot in summer. But someone’s moved out of the second floor back, and I’ve got her to give you that.’
The second floor back was bigger than Pat’s bedroom in Finfarran. You couldn’t fault the bed and there was a table where you could sit to write letters. Josie warned her not to think she could eat there. ‘Mrs Quinn’s afraid of mice, but you can bring a cup of tea up. There’s a dining room off the kitchen downstairs, where we have our meals.’
The girls in the house worked different shifts, so you never knew who’d be home. Pat soon got used to making her breakfast in the kitchen and sitting down with whoever else happened to be around. There was a lunch room in the factory where you could get a hot meal any time, and if she and Josie didn’t eat at the Shamrock Club in the evenings, she’d have a snack at the house and take a cup of tea up to her room. A few of the girls kept biscuits hidden in their wardrobes but Pat didn’t risk it. Josie had introduced her to Quinn’s so she didn’t want to bring mice and get the poor girl into trouble. To begin with, she was often too tired to eat anyway: her work as a sewing machinist was exhausting and she wasn’t used to the long hours or the heat.
Other things were different too. Accustomed to Mary’s overbearing manner, Pat had been amazed at how easy Josie was to get along with. Her room on the first floor was always full of chatter and laughter, as people ran in and out, sharing gossip and swapping clothes. She was happy to lend hats, shoes, and even her best jewellery, including the little string of pearls she’d had from her boyfriend on her birthday. Pat had been amazed, but Josie just shrugged. ‘Sure, nobody’s going to take off a necklace and lose it!’
‘Wouldn’t Donal be cross?’
‘He’d have more sense. Besides, the pearls are mine to do what I like with, and I like to be good to my friends.’
It really was as simple as that. Josie was kindness through and through, and Donal, whom she’d married a few years later, was the easiest-going lad you could ever meet.
Josie and the Shamrock Club had made Pat feel safe. The club was smaller then, and Denis Brennan, the president, had been almost like the father of a family. Most of Resolve’s Irish-American community worked either in construction or the clothing industry, and Brennan was the largest developer in town. It was he who’d provided the site the clubhouse was built on, and many of the members worked for him and rented houses he’d built.
Having turned off the television news, Pat locked up and climbed the stairs to bed. As she switched off her bedside light, she remembered buying Ger’s blue pullover in Toronto. Cassie had driven her out to the mall and walked round the shops with her patiently, but Pat had found herself wishing that Josie was there to help her choose. It was strange, considering she hadn’t seen Josie for over fifty years. Then, only a few months later, Ger had been dead and she herself had been back in Resolve again, and, instead of wearing a white petal hat, Josie had been using a walker. She’d always moved like a dancer, running lightly down the stairs in Mrs Quinn’s rooming house, and whirling down to the bus stop in the mornings, her feet in their cork-soled strappy sandals hardly seeming to touch the hot, dusty sidewalk. Everything in Resolve that summer had seemed hot and dusty and very far away from Finfarran. And everything about Resolve last month had felt like a surreal dream.
At some point during the farewell party Cassie had introduced Pat to Jack Shanahan. He was the same height as his grandfather, with the same quiet assurance in his stance. The background music had been very loud and Cassie had had to shout his name. But she didn’t need to. Pat would have known that lopsided smile anywhere.