5

Dublin was a dream city to her, and as she walked across Saint Stephen’s Green she thought the sky was never so blue in County Clare and early summer never so full of promise. The formal park, with its pebbled pathways and trimmed hedges, lawns bordered with gold of daffodils, seemed like an enchanted garden. Jane had been in the city for only two days but already she had walked everywhere, savoring every sight, from the great beech trees of Phoenix Park to Wellington Monument to the stately columned buildings of the Four Courts and the Custom House to the towering Gothic cathedral where Swift had preached and Handel played. As she crossed the graceful footbridge that arched over the crescent pond in the middle of the green, she stopped to lean on the railing, not knowing why until she found herself staring down into the water at her own reflection. It was as if she were challenging herself: What do you see?

She felt so different since coming here that she would not have been surprised to see another’s face on her own shoulders there below in the water. But it was her face, the soft hair, the white skin, the familiar brown eyes into which she looked directly. What will the others see? This was to be her first morning at the Abbey. She was to meet the players, and the ticket seller was going to show her the accounts. In the days before, she’d walked by the theater half a dozen times, eyeing it furtively, as if planning to rob it. She hadn’t dared go in—the hand-lettered sign on the marquee read “deirdre of the sorrows,” rehearsal in progress—because Lady Gregory said they wouldn’t expect her until Monday. Today. Deirdre of the Sorrows was a play she’d never seen or read. Her impression was that Synge had never finished it and it was rarely performed. But what did she know about it? She pressed her brow between both her hands as if trying to push knowledge in.

At Cragside she had never stared into her own face like this, not even before the glass in her room. The impulse that led others to examine their own images before mirrors or dark windows took the opposite form in Jane. She would close her eyes, a deliberate exercise, and try to conjure her face, its most particular details, the line of her brow, the faint cloud of freckles across her cheeks and nose, the tiny blemish on her lip, the color of her pupils and the way minute veins crossed them. For all her concentration she never could satisfactorily picture her face, and that inability had taken on an irrational but powerful meaning—she existed for others but not for herself.

Now, as if released from perverse constraints that had made normal acts outrageous, she was enjoying the simple sight of herself. It was not a matter of mere vanity, as if the pleasure she was taking were in her prettiness. She had been afraid to gaze into mirrors and pools because she was never quite certain she would see anything there.

But she now thought, Here I am. And, Here I am in Dublin.

Suddenly her face was obliterated, and for an instant Jane felt the shock of an assault, the pain of having been clubbed. Her happy mood vanished and, indeed, an overwhelming despair invaded her even as she consciously grasped that the shattering was of her mere reflection, not her face. Some object had plunged through the water just there. But her feeling of despair only intensified as the distorted, undulating water calmed itself and her image appeared once again intact, whole. She saw the fright in her face. As easily as that could her fragile new happiness be lost, as easily as that could she be.

Then she saw, also reflected in the water, craning from the footbridge as she herself was, the image of a man. At first she thought it was her father. The despair she felt was in actuality remorse over what she’d done to him. How could she have left him? Hadn’t that question been stalking her? The novelty of the city, of her rooms in the Gregory house in Merrion Square, of her freedom, had kept her guilt at bay. And now her father had come to take her home.

No, ridiculous thought. And as for the man, the merest glance dispelled her fantasy, for wasn’t he wearing the soft tweed cap one saw everywhere in Ireland, but never, perhaps because of that, on Sir Hugh Tyrrell’s head?

She looked directly at him, though in the water. And he seemed to be looking back at her. Reflected like that it was impossible to discern his features distinctly, to guess at his age, but his shirt was open at his throat and he had a full beard the color of fire. He was a large man. He raised a hand to wave at her.

But no, he was not waving—he was throwing something.

A stone. It struck her on the cheek, her cheek’s reflection, and once again her image collapsed in the concentric chaos of the splash. That easily could she be lost. For a moment she hated him.

When the water smoothed out this time, the man was gone. Jane straightened and knew at once he was approaching her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She turned slightly, saw him reaching for his cap. He was not an old man, but his beard prevented her from seeing him as young. His coat was shabby and he looked like a laborer.

“I didn’t realize . . .” He removed his cap, revealing hair as wild and red as his beard.

His voice seemed disembodied to Jane, as if his words, like his face in the water, came to her by some reflection. But that was a result of her emotion. She felt panic that she might have to speak to him. Was he daring to speak to her? She abruptly swiveled on her heel and walked away. She did not look back once as she crossed out of Saint Stephen’s Green and into the street. She determined to reclaim her mood, and she began by putting the rude stranger out of her mind.

Dublin’s day was just beginning and so hers could begin again. Merchants and shopgirls were opening their stores. Grocers were setting out their fruit, and tea ladies were arranging cakes in windows. Coaches behind plumed horses vied with chugging automobiles and two-wheeled handcarts in the clogged intersections. Claxons whined and drivers shouted, but to no effect. Jane’s flight had become merely the determined stride of an urban walker, and she wondered that anyone would prefer a stalled vehicle to moving by foot through the glorious city. Soon she was crossing between the gracefully arched entrance of Trinity College and the austere mammoth Royal Bank of Ireland, with its curving Greek portico and soot-blackened columns. Her father had pointed that building out to her once, saying that it had been built as an Irish house of parliament and that Parnell had intended to return it to its proper use when Home Rule was won.

But the thought of her father stopped her. She stood on the corner of College Green, traffic whirling past, carriages and autocars, but also clanging electric trams whose wheels screeched with the curve of the crescent street. She pictured a tall man in a dark frock coat walking with a girl of eleven or twelve, her hand in his. It was there, in front of that building, that he’d first begun explaining about Charles Parnell. She remembered the thrill of the realization that her staid, dignified father was revealing himself to her. Much later, when he explained more frankly that Parnell had been identified in a divorce court as an adulterer, he told her that Dublin mobs had jeered him by waving female undergarments while cursing Kitty O’Shea.

Dublin mobs, she thought with a shudder, looking at the throng about her, somber people on their way to work, not the type to jeer. But jeer they had. Dublin mobs were a figment of hers, what bogeymen were to other children. Dublin mobs—she grasped this much at an early age—had utterly destroyed her father’s hero and in some part her father too. A fresh wave of her anxiety rose and broke in her. What was she doing here? Now it wasn’t only remorse she felt, but also loneliness.

She crossed the Liffey into the northern half of the city, where, at Nelson’s pillar, the electric streetcars from several lines converged. Sackville Street, leading away from Carlisle Bridge, was a bustling thoroughfare with the great General Post Office, the Metropole Hotel, where she’d stayed with her father, and the stores she had so loved to browse in. But when she turned off Sackville Street the atmosphere changed at once. There were no fine houses in this part of Dublin. She turned another corner and left the sunlight behind, and the soot-darkened bricks of the run-down buildings loomed over her. This was a district of saloons, and it was alien to her. The odor of stale porter hung in the air. Dublin mobs, she thought again, and drunkenness.

It would not have been brought to the attention of someone like Jane except in terms of their disgusting behavior, but Dublin had one of the most desperate populations in the world. Three hundred thousand people lived in the city at the time, and more than half of them lived like animals. Twenty thousand families lived in one-room tenements, and the death rate, at twenty-eight per thousand, was the highest of any city in Europe. Worse even than Moscow, and Moscow was under the Czar.

Jane wouldn’t have ventured off the main streets on this side of Dublin—what she thought of only as the wretched Catholic slums were just blocks away—but this was where the Abbey was.

In 1915 the Abbey Theatre was in a fallow period that came after its early heyday. John Millington Synge, whose six short plays written in eight shorter years, had quickly made the wildest dream of Yeats and Lady Gregory come true. Between 1902 and his death in 1909 Synge’s art, which Joyce described as “more original than my own,” had transformed English by infusing it with Irish rhythms; had transformed acting by giving players lines that, despite their beauty or because of it, were to be spoken rather than declaimed; had transformed, like Ibsen, the subject matter of serious drama by focusing on the lives of common flawed people. What Synge established at the Abbey survived his own death, Yeats’s disenchantment with the theater a few years later, then a long spate of parochial, audience-pleasing efforts. Lady Gregory, more than anyone, knew the difference between Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, with which they began, or Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, with which they’d touched the sky, and the plays, including her own, the Abbey had been doing recently. It depressed her that the audience didn’t seem to notice. In fact, Dubliners preferred run-of-the-mill peasant dramas to the periodic revivals of the early masterpieces. What they loved was the Irishness of the plays they saw, and in their view Irishness was what qualified them as art. The great works of which the recent ones were banal imitations had Irishness too, of course, but always with an edge. Cathleen had Irish women selling their souls to the devil; Playboy had Irish men murdering their fathers. For that matter Yeats’s Cuchulain had them murdering their sons. Irish propaganda this was not. Indeed, the great Abbey plays never fit in with prevailing pieties or politics, and that was why with shameful regularity the Dublin audiences made mobs of themselves and rioted. “No Irishwoman ever did it!” they cried in Stephen Daedalus’s memory of one brouhaha. The same people who had waved women’s underwear at Parnell went berserk when Synge dared refer to such an item on stage in Playboy. There is no record, however, that they ever objected to the performance of mediocrities.

In any case, Lady Gregory, like a parent administering medicine, forced the revivals on Dublin every year between new plays. She was going to keep those triumphant works alive however she could. When eventually the Abbey players began touring America, it was Synge’s work she featured. Catholic congregations in New York, cousins to all those Dubliners, were told it would be mortal sin to attend, which may be why one who went in 1911 was an actor’s son named Gene O’Neill, who later said Synge inspired him to try his own hand at writing plays.

If the writing wasn’t always great, it stayed above the prevailing level of mustachioed-villain melodramas. Lady Gregory’s commitment to the excellence of the acting company was unwavering. Her players were her chicks, and they knew better than anyone that her devotion to the Abbey was no abstract attachment to a memory or an ideal. It was as real as the festive barmbrack bread she brought up from Gort for every opening night. But there was the difference. In the early days Lady Gregory would not have ensconced herself in Coole Park while rehearsals ran, content to appear only for the opening. She would not have dispatched as her surrogate an inexperienced gentleman farmer’s daughter who was too timid to look at herself in a pool of water.

The Abbey took its name from the street it was on; there is no record that those Protestant founders considered it ironic, but some Catholic objectors regarded the name of such an irreverent enterprise as one more impiety. Yeats and Lady Gregory had first called their theater the Irish National, emphasis on national, and it shocked them when the nationalists who were as opposed to complexity as the clergy were took offense at their renditions too. A converted hall that had also once served as the city morgue, the Abbey was small for a theater, made of drab gray stone, its façade distinguished only by a tacked-on art nouveau canopy. This was the site of such magnificent controversy? It was hard to believe.

Yet however unimposing it was, Jane Tyrrell approached the theater feeling awed, and not only because of its already luminous history. Because of her early trips to Dublin with her father, she associated the landmarks of that city with her attachment to him, none more so than the Abbey. After her mother died, that became even more the case. Excursions across Ireland to see Lady Gregory’s plays, particularly when they were controversial and needed support, became a way of shaking the loneliness they both felt at Cragside but never referred to. As Jane grew older she took increased pleasure in those forays; she loved attending the theater as her father’s lady. When Douglas married Pamela and brought her to live at Cragside, Jane’s special intimacy with her father broke. It was a temporary intimacy anyway, impossible to sustain once she’d become a woman, as she’d only realized when Douglas and Pamela had gone away. So now the Abbey, before which she stood, embodied both the magical bond she’d once had with her father and also, since it was what enabled her to leave him, the abolition of it. That was why awe that had nothing to do with Yeats or Synge nearly choked her.

She was afraid the door would be locked, but it opened easily. The foyer was dark and she hesitated, but then went in, leaving the door ajar behind her. It was a simple but dignified lobby, with square-tiled flooring and handsome walnut-paneled walls. Portraits of actors hung above the wainscoting; she recognized them as having been painted by Mr. Yeats’s father, whose work was everywhere at Coole Park. Directly opposite the door were a pair of grilled ticket windows, and to the left was a broad staircase going up to the theater proper. From that elevated doorway she heard voices and saw the faint glow of a light. With relief she realized the actors were there, at work already.

She turned to pull the street door closed, and as she did her eye was caught by a figure crossing from the opposite sidewalk toward the theater, toward her. His red beard and the wild hair ill-kempt beneath his cap were what she recognized. Involuntarily her hand went to her face as if to be sure it didn’t disappear again. He had followed her—she saw this with a gasp of fear—all the way from Stephen’s Green.

She pulled the door firmly shut, tried for a moment to lock it but couldn’t, then turned and ran across the darkened foyer to the stairs. Stumbling once, she went up quickly and through the doorway into, not the theater proper as she expected, but the balcony above it.

The auditorium, including the balcony, held chairs for fewer than five hundred people, but in the darkness it seemed vast. Only the stage was lit. It was framed by rich red velvet curtains, pulled back by sashes, which contrasted sharply with the stark washed-out white emptiness of the playing space itself. There three men were pulling together chairs of the straight-backed kitchen variety. Two of them were laughing loudly. “Move your arse, Joe,” one of them cried, the punchline of a joke? The third stood apart somewhat. It was to this latter that Jane’s eyes went. Something about him so struck her that she forgot for a moment about her red-bearded pursuer. The actor was dressed like the others, in shirt and trousers, but his rich black hair was longer, covering his ears. Even under the harsh unflattering light, his face, delicate and pale, seemed almost beautiful, like a boy’s. When he walked to the forward edge of the stage to peer out into the auditorium, hooding his brow, his movement had such rare dramatic quality that Jane thought for a moment he was enacting a scene, and then that they all were. But no, it was real. Their action was informal, natural, unrehearsed. “Give me the bloody chair, Joe!” the first man yelped, tugging at a chair, slapping his leg with laughter. The downstage actor, peering intently, was looking for her, Jane decided, and she almost spoke. But then the actor spoke instead. “Time enough,” he said and turned to the others. “Where the hell is Curry?”

The actor, trousers and all, Jane realized then, was a girl. Her voice, clear, sharp, and feminine, had effected such an unexpected reversal in Jane’s perception that she revised her opinion; it must be a play. The actress’ clothing and short hair—the very hair that had seemed long before—were exotic now, highly theatrical. Even for the most difficult chores of dairy farming Jane had never worn trousers, and all at once she couldn’t imagine why not.

“We’ll start without him,” one of the men said.

But before anyone moved, the loud bang of a door slamming back against a wall filled the theater. The sound had come from the entrance just below the place in the balcony where Jane was standing. Before its reverberation had quite faded a voice, resonant and strong, bellowed, “Haec Dies quam fecit Dominus! This is the day the Lord has made . . .” He was walking down the side aisle toward the stage when he came into view, the red-haired man, arms outstretched, cap in one hand, folded newspaper in the other. “. . . Let us be glad and rejoice in it.”

“It’s about blooming time, Dan,” one of the men said.

He leapt up onto the stage and embraced each of the men, saying each time with solemn self-mockery, “Pax vobiscum,” bringing to the actors’ faces broad forgiving smiles. Then he turned to the girl, with arms outstretched.

But she waved him off. “Never mind, Curry.”

Undaunted, he dropped to one knee before her. “Mea culpa, mea culpa . . .” He slapped his breast so hard that the sound carried to the balcony. “. . . mea maxima culpa!” He hit himself again and fell over, lying at her feet in a lifeless heap.

Despite herself, the actress laughed. “You take the biscuit, Curry.” And she started to step around him.

But he grabbed her ankle and made as if to bite. “Biscuit! It’s the tart I want!”

“Let’s do this, Dan.” One of the men spoke with abrupt authority. “You’d better know your lines today.” He hopped off the stage and from a seat in the front row picked up a script. “Act one, beginning from Ardan’s exit. Deirdre and Naisi are left alone.” The director began to read from the script. “Deirdre is royally dressed and very beautiful—”

But Curry, on his feet now, held up his hands and announced to the dark house, “But wait! You haven’t let me apologize!”

“Dan . . .”

He looked down at the director. “Where is she?”

Curry asked this with such a shift in tone, from the stage-boisterous to the real, that despite himself the director said, “Who?”

“Our visitor.” Curry’s eyes were searching the seats. Jane, to be smaller, sat in the nearest chair, afraid he would see her. “The girl who came in before me.”

“No one came in . . .”

“I followed her. I couldn’t believe it when she came here. I was going to apologize.” He looked out at the darkened house again and said in a loud voice, “I didn’t see where the stones were landing until it was too late.” Jane was afraid to move. She knew he hadn’t seen her sitting there.

Finally, after long moments staring out, he turned back to the stage. While Curry shrugged off his coat, the other actor leapt down to sit with the director, leaving only Curry and the actress on the stage.

Curry suddenly swept his arm up toward the balcony, and Jane thought he’d seen her after all. But when he spoke, his voice was different, wholly lacking any hint of the smart aleck, laying bare a seriousness she had not until then suspected he was capable of. “The stars are out, Deirdre, and let you come with me quickly, for it is the stars will be our lamps many nights and we abroad in Alban, and taking our journeys among the little islands in the sea.”

“Dan . . .” The director waited for Curry to look at him. “I said from where Ardan exits. It’s not your line. It’s Nora’s. Please, friends, be attentive. Take it in half-time. I want you to listen to what you are saying.”

Nora sat in one of the chairs and after a moment’s silence raised her hand to Curry. “Come to this stool, Naisi. If it’s low itself, the High King would sooner be on it this night than on the throne of Emain Macha.”

Sitting by her, he said, “You are Fedlimid’s daughter that Conchubar has walled up from the men of Ulster.”

Jane sat forward in her seat in the balcony, forgetting to make herself small. She remembered the old legend: Deirdre, the king who wanted her, and the man she loved. She listened and watched intently and soon forgot that the red-bearded man was someone she’d been running from.

The girl in trousers, because of the way she sat in that simple kitchen chair and because of the haunting dignity with which she spoke, did seem like a young queen. She asked sadly, “Do many know what is foretold, that Deirdre will be the ruin of the Sons of Usna, and have a little grave by herself, and a story will be told forever?”

Her lover looked at her with a sadness that carried all across the empty theater, and Jane, recognizing it as a mark against which to measure her own sadness, forgot her own. She read nuances of sympathy in that bearded face—was it only his eyes that carried that meaning?—that she had never seen before. He said quietly, “It is a long while men have been talking of Deirdre, the child who had all gifts, and the beauty that has no equal; there are many know it, and there are kings would give a great price to be in my place this night and you grown to a queen.”

It was midday before the rehearsal ended and before Jane came down from the balcony.

Several other actors had come in for various scenes, but they had not worked. The whole morning had been given to Deirdre and Naisi. Now the group stood putting on caps and sweaters. The director, still in his seat, was turning pages of the script, looking for a particular passage. Nora—Deirdre—was leaning over his shoulder. It was Dan Curry who saw Jane at the back of the auditorium and watched her walk down the sloping aisle. He was dumbfounded at her appearance now. Through the rehearsal he’d forgotten all about her.

“Good day,” she said, approaching them. “I’m Jane Tyrrell . . .”

The company fell silent.

“. . . the new assistant.”

Curry realized he had put her out of mind, thinking she was too beautiful to have been real. The new assistant? She carried herself like the lead actress in the company. She was wearing a long brown woolen skirt cinched at the waist by a broad leather belt, a plain white long-sleeved blouse open at the throat to display a gold locket. Setting off the face, a bare glimpse of which that morning had turned him into a moonstruck boy, were regal wisps of auburn hair that had come loose from their pin behind. Her eyes glistened, and that was what told him she’d been watching. Who could hear the tale of Deirdre and Naisi and not be moved? He put out his hand to welcome her. “Miss Augusta has finally answered our prayers.”

Jane found it possible somehow to laugh lightly, turning him aside, “You pray to Lady Gregory?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Curry swept an arm toward the group. “There is no God but ’Gusta,” he intoned. “And Willie is her prophet.” The players hissed, Curry pretended to duck. “We’re her non-profit.”

Jane laughed despite herself and realized she would never be able to match the jovial banter of these actors. Would that matter? She put her hand out. “You’re Dan Curry.”

He took her hand, pleased. “You’ve heard of me?”

Instead of deflating him with the truth, which is what an actor would have done, she lied, nodding, but without an excess of flattery. “From Lady Gregory. She speaks so fondly of all of you.”

They introduced themselves one at a time. Jane realized, as each one took her hand with genuine friendliness, what a fool she’d been to arrive afraid. These were young bright people, vital and happy in the way she hoped to be. And they seemed to welcome her. Nora in particular impressed her. She had a bohemian air that, to Jane’s surprise, seemed natural and right. After greeting her, Nora offered Jane a cigarette. Jane declined, but only because she didn’t want them to see that she hadn’t smoked before. It thrilled Jane to glimpse in them the person she might herself become. In the meantime, and beginning at once, she was determined to be of great use to them.

It was Curry who outmaneuvered the others to show her around the theater. In the greenroom, the cramped but cozy space a flight below the stage where the actors waited when they weren’t on, he said, “I meant it this morning when I apologized. I know I gave you a fright at the footbridge in Stephen’s Green.”

Jane shrugged. “When you gave me a fright was at the door of this theater.” Jane laughed. “I thought you’d followed me.”

“I had. I couldn’t believe it when you came here. You might have said something. We could have walked together. You dawdled and made me late.” She won’t look at me, he thought. Why won’t she look at me?

The greenroom was furnished with couches and stuffed chairs. It seemed suddenly an altogether too intimate place to be with this man. His intensity was overwhelming and, as if he consumed more of the small room’s oxygen than proper, Jane found herself short of breath. That in turn, because it seemed girlish, embarrassed her and made her want to get away from him. “And where is the office?” she asked with forced casualness. “That’s where I’ll be spending my time. I think Miss Cleary might be wondering where I am.”

“Behind the ticket windows. Follow me.” But to get there they had to go up onto the stage, and as he crossed it ahead of her before that dark, vacant theater, he stopped suddenly, as if despite himself. This was not his doing, but the muse’s. Instantly he became someone else, facing Jane with a purity of feeling: “I see the trees naked and bare, and the moon shining. Little moon, little moon of Alban, it’s lonesome you’ll be this night and tomorrow night and long nights after, and you pacing the woods beyond Glen Laoi, looking every place for Deirdre and Naisi, the two lovers who slept so sweetly with each other.”

Jane knew it was shameless of him, to recite such lines to her. Did he think the erotic implication would make her swoon? But in fact she was caught for a moment in the spell, not of Dan Curry’s weaving, but the ancient one of those lovers. She had never stood in the middle of a lit stage before; it was to stand, once he led her into it, in a wholly other reality.

Curry sensed that Jane was affected, as he always was, by the stage itself, by the theater, by the primordial expectancy of the place, how it required from actors and, for that matter, audiences, things no one knew they had to give. He raised his arm in a broad sweep that took in everything, saying softly, “Yet it should be a lonesome thing to be in this place, and you born for great company.”

To Jane’s surprise she realized that, having heard Nora drilled in the lines that morning, she knew them herself now. Instinctively she answered, not altogether steadily, but more compellingly for that. “This night I have the best company in the whole world.”

But Naisi turned away to say formally, “It is I who have the best company, for when you’re queen in Emain you will have none to be your match or fellow.”

“I will not be queen in Emain.” She said it simply, definitively, the way Nora had.

He faced her abruptly, amazed. “Conchubar has made an oath you will surely.”

“It is for that maybe I’m called Deirdre, the girl of many sorrows . . .” Jane stopped. How she wanted to go on, to say what that girl said, to give flesh to those extraordinary feelings, that miraculous decision, but she could not remember the lines. She could feel the spell melting away.

In a completely different voice than Naisi’s, Curry prompted her. “. . . for it’s a sweet life . . .”

Jane caught it at once. “. . . you and I could have, Naisi. It should be a sweet thing . . .” She stopped cold again.

And again he fed her. “. . . to have what is best . . .”

“. . . to have what is best and richest, if it’s for a short space only.”

Naisi took her hands—Curry had taken Nora’s hands—and said with distress, “And we’ve a short space only to be triumphant and brave!”

Jane had never before been looked at the way he was looking at her now. She felt as though her survival depended on not meeting his eyes with her own. It did not matter that it was artifice, that he was acting. In some way she was acting too, even as she shyly looked away. She had been acting since leaving Cragside, but if that was so, why did this moment seem more real—more full of threat, but also promise—than any moment of her life before? She took her hands back and said, “I found it very moving, watching you.”

Her compliment, tribute to his art, Nora’s and Synge’s, broke the spell absolutely.

He stepped back from her awkwardly.

“You know the play?”

She shook her head and smiled. “But after this morning, I know the first act.” She looked at him for a moment longer. He seemed to be blushing. She couldn’t think what else to say, so she led the way across the stage. Gathering her skirt, she prepared to leap down, but he went ahead of her. From the floor, he reached and took her by the waist and swung her down. They parted pointedly and walked up the aisle not quite side by side. The lobby was deserted but brightly lit now. Voices could be heard coming from the office behind the ticket windows.

Curry felt that when she went into the office he would lose her again. He stopped her. “In the second act she kills herself rather than go off with the king, who killed her lover.”

Jane looked at him blankly.

“She’s a figure for Ireland, don’t you see? That’s why this play is so important. She would rather die than give herself to England.”

Jane shook her head, shocked at this interpretation. “I don’t know the play, but I know the story of Deirdre. Every girl in the west of Ireland knows it. She and her lover fled the king, yes. But Conchubar is based on Conor, king of Ulster, and where they fled was to Scotland. When her lover dies and Conor takes her, she kills herself because she hates life without her lover, even if it’s in Ireland with an Irish king. It has nothing to do with England.”

“You’re being literal. Synge, thank God, was not. Deirdre of the Sorrows is about Ireland’s rejection of England. Believe me, Jane, it is.”

“One rejects England by killing oneself. Some rejection.”

Curry shrugged. “That’s Synge for you. All his plays are about the same thing. First you get free, then you die. But that’s because he was dying when he wrote his plays.”

Jane knew they couldn’t stand in the lobby and continue this. She had to get into the office and meet the ticket seller and learn about her duties. But Curry clearly was going to go on as long as she let him. She was not oblivious of the fact of his attraction to her, nor was she indifferent to it. But she was far from knowing what to do about it. And equally far from knowing how to handle her attraction to him. The man was simply overwhelming.

Having decided that she had to get away from him, she made no move to do so. Instead she said, “What moved me was Deirdre and Naisi. I don’t care about the larger meaning.” Jane said this as if she was admitting something. And to herself she was. If she identified with the mythic figure of Deirdre, it was not in the obvious way—a girl who must for her own reason desert the beloved realm in which she was raised, no matter the consequences. Jane was not a dramatizing girl, but she had often walked along the cliff’s edge at Cragside watching the sea crashing onto the rocks below and feeling the forlorn piquancy of her fate. In the Druid legend, Deirdre is doomed from birth to be alone, and nothing she does changes that.

Loneliness came as a great surprise in Jane’s life; it came not with birth but womanhood. It was a new role, one written just for her—Cragside, her father, the loss of Douglas and Pamela, the few men of her own background whom she might have befriended gone to the war, a life of resigned but pleasant spin-sterhood—but she refused to play it. Deirdre may have been born to sorrow but Jane wasn’t. No daggers by her own hand into her breast, thank you. She regarded her situation as unique, but in fact all over Europe, women of her generation were coming of age in a whole new way, because no matter how widely their circumstances varied otherwise, they all had one crucial fact in common: they were women without men. Most of them always would be. Their adjustments to that given, carried out instinctively, bravely, and often, by necessity, rebelliously, were beginning to accomplish the twentieth century sea change in the place of women in society. The irony was breathtaking: the liberation of that generation of women presupposed the obliteration of that generation of men.

So of course the story of the tragic lovers—Deirdre is the primordial European love story; “Tristan and Isolde” is based on it—would be what moved Jane. That did not make her sentimental. Like women everywhere in Europe, she knew already, though not consciously, that what had been forever the tragedy of pairs was now becoming the tragedy of an entire race. That was larger meaning enough for her, however far she was from being able to give expression to it. As for Dan Curry’s larger meaning, it seemed frankly trivial. Jane sensed that this big red-bearded Catholic found the theme of Ireland in material the way his peasant forebears found crosses in the trees and apparitions in sunlight filtered through the clouds.

Jane turned away. Peasant forebears? What had just happened? An unwilled visceral disdain for Curry gripped her. For Curry as a Catholic, as a Gael, as the son of peasants. She felt ashamed. He was looking at her the way he had when they’d stood together on the stage, when she’d encouraged that way of looking by seeming to return it. She had welcomed that emotional storming of their differences. The thrill of their enactment had been wonderful. But that moment was artificial and it had passed. Now she wished he would look away. She knew that she was blushing and she knew that he would take that as yet another sign of her being girlishly overwhelmed. But what she wanted was to get away from him. This was a mistake. He had thrown stones into her reflection and she had disappeared. She stood there, blood in her skin, unable to move, like a frightened doe.

A long moment passed in which the only sound in the bright lobby was of their breathing. Even the voices in the office had been quelled.

As she feared, Curry had completely misunderstood her silence and her obvious confusion, as she knew by the soft, caressing tone of his voice when he said, “The only truth the wave knows is that . . .” He paused meaningfully.

Jane forced herself to make his theatrical hesitation into her opportunity. She turned on him, feigning playfulness, pointing her finger at him. “Are you testing me?”

“What?”

“You want to see if I can finish the line. That’s why you paused.”

“Well, can you?”

She composed herself dramatically, then wryly imitated him, even to his Dublin accent. “The only truth the wave knows is that it’s going to”—now she paused—“get all wet!”

“No, no, no! Going to break!”

When Jane smiled mischievously, Curry saw that he’d been had.

“You knew it,” he said. He laughed, realizing he’d made a fool of himself. “Well, at least you’ve read Playboy. I’d begun to fear for your literacy.”

“The only truth I know is that I’d better get into the office.”

“But you can’t.” He almost touched her. “You haven’t called me Dan.”

“Do I know you that well?”

He opened his arms; no secrets.

Suddenly he seemed completely harmless. Jane felt herself relax. “Good-bye, Dan.”

As if she had granted a rare wish, he folded his arms and bowed.

He was just an actor. She was foolish to let him put her in a state.

But when he straightened, he took her by surprise again, now by breaking into song. “Magnificent life,” he sang, and began to dance happily about the lobby. He repeated the phrase. “Magnificent life . . .” He had a rich bass voice and he played each word out elaborately with great musical flare. He was a rough-hewn man, but now, instead of either her previous disdain or her fear of being overwhelmed, Jane felt awed by his large-spirited exuberance. The people she knew well were trim and self-possessed to the point of clenching compared to this. “Magnificent life . . .” again and again. Curry was the size of a longshoreman and carried himself like one, but at that moment he moved across the polished lobby floor with the lithe grace of a waltzing prince. “Magnificent life, the fruit . . .” She had thought him insensitive, but now remembered those moments on the stage, the ones she’d watched from the balcony and the ones she’d shared. As an actor and singer he possessed an elegance he had no right to. She had resolved to dismiss him because he was so unlike her. But what she saw in him now was a delicacy of character, a vulnerability, she thought, exactly like her own. That, not his studied charm, seemed irresistible.

“. . . the fruit of some frenzy of the earth.” He looked over his shoulder slyly and said deadpan, “I’m singing Synge.” Then he danced, humming grandly, toward the door. At the last moment he turned and waved his cap at her, and then he was gone.