Chapter Four

When I woke up it was hours later. There were cars outside, lots of them, tightly parked in rows on the grass. The flush of evening was lilac through the lace. Someone whistled. I heard a cow going by, the bells gongling. “Duffy!” someone cried and a line of Gaelic, then part of a laugh.

I sat up, thrilled. I was in Ireland! I washed and dressed in my brown Delhi dress. It seemed subdued and respectful, for me, who is wont to wear Tibetan primary colors. Nor did I put in my chanticleer earrings but settled instead for the brave little hen buttons of coral. Who knew what lay ahead? I took a great breath of Irish inside air and went through the house to the wake.

I was just about to push open the door to the hallway when I heard whispering, and I stopped. I don’t have a devious mind and I’m not one to eavesdrop—no, that’s not at all true. I will eavesdrop anytime given the chance, just don’t let me get caught is my motto and because of the urgency in Aunt Bridey’s voice it seemed more interesting to wait, so I stood there.

Uncle Ned was talking to Aunt Bridey. “She’ll read it in the obituaries,” he said.

“She won’t get the Southern Star in Paris!” Aunt Bridey replied, disgusted, you could tell, by his dimness. “And don’t you even think of notifying her!” she flared.

I heard my name and whirled around. A girl stood there. A college-aged girl. Her face was white and she had flashing hazel eyes. What eyes! More like an Algerian pirate than an Irish country girl. She wore a black scoop-necked sweater with paint on it. Not appropriate for a wake, surely. Her hair was short, like a pixie’s, as though she’d hacked it all off in a hurry, and black. Her mouth was big. Her chin was down. I knew right away.

“Jenny Rose,” I said.

One side of the red mouth turned up.

“I would know you anywhere,” I breathed. “You’re all Carmela.”

We both stood still.

“Except for the eyes.” Eyes with the lights of the night, I thought. And the feet, I thought but didn’t say. Carmela’s huge feet are an event to which no one refers.

Jenny Rose walked toward me. She placed her tiny pointer finger on the tip of my nose. “The same as me,” she said.

I felt the tip of her nose. She had indeed the very same up and down split cartilage under the skin. “Nobody else has that,” I assured her.

“Not your son?”

“Not even him.”

“Huh.”

We looked and looked at each other. She knew I had a son. Had she grown up wondering what we were like? Of course she had. I took her hand and held it in both of mine.

“I never knew about you,” I said, my eyes swimming.

She looked away. Yeah, sure, her expression said. Cool. Like Anthony when he was passed over for something he dearly wanted. Ooh, I knew this kid. I could read her better than I could my own daughter.

“I never could have not looked for you,” I said fiercely.

“Not one for small talk, you,” she mumbled.

“No,” I said.

“Neither am I.” She lit a cigarette, threw back her head and blew the smoke out her nostrils. “I didn’t want to meet you in there.” She nudged in the direction of the voices. “Everyone lookin’. Like on an American ‘let’s get them back together’ show on the telly.”

“You’re American, too,” I reminded her.

“I am not.” She peeked up at me from an elbow up in the air, the hand covering her chin and the crooked thumb between her teeth. She wasn’t generally dirty, I saw right away, just rubbed raw from oil paint and turpentine.

I supposed I was gaping at her. “I want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss,” I finally said.

She looked away. “So you don’t know a thing at all of your aunt Dierdre either, is that it?”

“No. Do you want to know about your mother?”

“My mother is dead.”

“Yes, of course. That was insensitive of me. I’m sorry.”

Suddenly, Jenny Rose took some steps forward, almost past me. She looked desperately about. “What if there’s nothing?” she choked. “After all this, what if you die and there’s nothing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. But if there’s nothing, we won’t know it.”

“I will.” She banged her breast with her fist. “I will!”

I fell back against the wall and looked around at this place I suddenly was in. Don’t ask me why, I lifted the cigarette pack from her hand and took one. So what that I hadn’t touched a cigarette in eleven years and am known by all as Queen Vigilante against it. I lit the thing up as though I’d never stopped. It’s not true that you get immediately dizzy and feel sick as if it were the first time again. It tasted perfectly, berserkly delicious. You couldn’t blame me, not after all I’d been through in the last twenty-four hours. “I’ll tell you one thing.” I leaned against the wall. “We’ve found each other now. No matter what happens, I’m on your side.”

She shot me a look, suspicious at first and then, what?… grateful.

Encouraged, I took a strand of hair still long enough to take hold of, and anchored it to the back of her ear.

She flinched at my touch. “I’d best go.” She stubbed her cigarette out on a pewter candlestick tray. “They all think I’m odd as I’m not moanin’ and weepin’.” She picked up my arm with two fingers and turned it this way and that. “I thought the paint might still be wet,” she said, solicitous. Making up for the flinch.

“It’s good that I’ve come,” I said, taking hold of her childlike hand. It was cold.

“Maybe.” The lopsided smile. The coat on the door moved and I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized it was Seamus, arms down at his beefy sides. He’d been standing there all along like a dangling, or in his case bungling, participle. An eerie fright swept through me. Those two different color eyes were so disturbing. Jenny Rose, unperturbed, patted him on his big tweed arm and led him through to the bathroom. It wasn’t that he was so tall. He just seemed as broad as he was high. Like a big soggy box. “He’ll stand there and hold it in forever if you don’t point him toward the loo,” she confided. A door opened and the sound of murmuring voices mushroomed out. Jenny Rose winked and I went through on my own.

A large crowd had fitted into that long room, more than you would have thought. They all stopped talking and looked at me as I came in. At least my shoes don’t squeak, I thought as I walked through the path they made for me. They say some dead spirits depart right away and some stay to listen and you can feel them if they’re there. Anyway it was a heavy atmosphere when I walked in and I wouldn’t have put it past the dead woman to have been there. The coffin was downstairs because it was closed. Normally they would have had her opened and she’d be laid out in her room. You had the feeling it was a great disappointment to this lot that the body was not on display. Of course it was handier to have her downstairs where everyone could sit and walk around. Before me lay Aunt Dierdre, dead in the closed wooden coffin. The room reeked of lemon polish. Respectfully I knelt down and prayed for her soul. I could hear crying behind me. I cried a little myself. Only it wasn’t for Dierdre, it was for the death of Johnny’s love for me. And mine for him.

This was only the first night of the wake. So we were in for two more of these. Oh, the rosaries were a’rattling.

It was plainly a sorry affair for Aunt Bridey. I worried she might drop dead herself, the way she sobbed and carried on in her shiny-from-ironing good Thai silk dress. Then again, from the expert way not much later in which she took to overseeing the great ham on the table and monitoring the whiskey, I noticed that life does indeed go on. I noticed there’s not a meal to be skipped in this family, either.

I was seated between Mr. Truelove, the solicitor, and “Auntie” Molly O’Neill, the lady with the bed and breakfast down the road, who turned out to be much younger than I’d thought. The “auntie” threw me, I guess. Willy Murphy sat across from us, his cap politely on his lap. “So, you you found it then,” he said to me.

“Yes, thanks.”

“M-m-more’s the pity it had to be such an unhappy occasion.”

“Yes. Well, what can you do?”

“No-nothing at all. That’s the beauty of it,” he said, his handsome head going back and forth, like an addled Punjabi.

Hmm, I thought, pleased that he was not dumb. I was delighted when he presented me to his mother, the elegant Audrey Whitetree-Murphy. It felt a little like meeting the queen. There was something of the upright kidney bean about her head, and a halo of soft hair in a twist. She wore a dowdy gray suit with sheer stockings and fabulously expensive-looking shoes.

“How do you do?” I said and Willy dashed off and left me there with her. She looked me from head to toe. You’d have thought I was an illegible date on a cut of chicken at the market the way she scanned me over. She held her pale marshmallow leather purse with two fingers as though it were a bag full of little turds. “Isn’t it amusing,” she said to me, “how wakes will make one think of murder.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You know”—she cupped her delicate hands as though holding on to a merry-go-round pole—“violence.”

I smiled a stupid, admiring smile.

Liam slipped by and whispered into my hair, “A nice warm Irish woman, that.” He shook hands boldly with her. Oh, she liked my cousin Liam, you could tell. A simpering smile illuminated her narrow face. Then he started in. Liam wanted to know everything about her donkey, Morocco. He wouldn’t let up. How was he and what was he feeling? Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy became glamorous and animated, talking about the donkey. “Is he still longing for a new stall, Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy?” He leaned in and lit her cigarette. “Have you fitted him yet with electric lighting?”

“You know the way he’s always running off!” she said. “I’ve got to make him comfortable, after all.”

“I’ll be over next week to fit him up for a fine bookcase. Sure he’ll be bored. And how about a wee black and white telly?”

“Go on with you.” She shooed him off finally. “Dashed bad form!” she clucked to Molly beside me. But you could tell she was pleased. I thought, I’m going to go have a look at that donkey myself.

Mr. Truelove, the solicitor to my left, was very nice but he droned on. “Now Dierdre’s dead it’s all to come out,” he said to me. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about but I got the feeling it was privileged. He’d read the will over again last night. “All her money to go to Peg Mulligen, her friend,” he announced, all wistfulness and gloom. A real rod-up-your-rear kind of fellow, my husband would have described him. “Sad about Jenny Rose. By rights it should all go to her. She’ll get nothing now.” He looked, searching, into my eyes. Why wouldn’t it go to her? I thought. His little lips were peevish and wet. “It’s a shame, I say. It’s a fine shame I’ll be bound by law to read it all out loud. Even if it be the truth. It doesn’t seem right to bring it all out. Doesn’t seem decent. A friend should be just that, a friend.”

“Yes, indeed,” I agreed. Luckily, Molly O’Neill put a saucer of tea in my hand as the priest arrived, allowing me to turn away. “Don’t look back,” she warned me. “Not even for a moment.”

“Thank you,” I mouthed without sound.

“As soon as Father Early finishes we’ll be able to get up,” she said. Finally the priest went over to speak to Aunt Bridey and everyone breathed a loud sigh of relief and stretched and started talking amongst themselves. “Have a slosh of port,” Molly offered. She held out a white china flask with a thimble-sized ladylike cup attached on a chain. “Medicinal,” she said.

“No thanks,” I said, “I’m good.”

Molly, however, was all set to talk. Now my right ear was getting it all. Molly was an enterprising woman, there was no mistaking it. “Well, now, I’ve been separated from Mr. O’Neill these three years,” she told me. (Everyone in Ireland tells you everything right away. You can’t believe it.) “He lives in Bantry, the next town over. Yes, there he lives with his great favorite, the bottle.” I got up and moved around to her right, indicating I didn’t want Mr. Truelove to catch any of this.

“Phhh.” She waved a graceful hand in the air. “No one pays him any mind. So, anyway, this was years ago,” Molly continued.

I liked Molly. There was something reluctant about her, with all her chattiness. “Back then, though,” she went on, “we’d bought the cottage together and patched it up, he’d put in the heating. Wasn’t too long ago nobody had heating. Took me years to get the garden the way I wanted it,” Molly chatted on. “Still not right. We were never happy, though. I liked to read and talk and he liked to drink and talk. He was never home. Always at Dayday’s. When he moved back to Bantry I was nothing but relieved, I admit it.” She shifted her attention past the crowd to see whose entrance had placed the sudden silence.

It was Jenny Rose. Her face was swollen. She’d been crying, it was obvious.

“Tch.” Molly lowered her chin with approval. “’Tis a shame.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m glad to see she’s been cryin’ after all,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “The whole village was talking that she hadn’t shed a tear.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

She shrugged. “Not much. It’s just funny when your mother dies and you don’t cry. Odd.”

So that’s what Jenny Rose had meant. I didn’t like the implication. On the other hand I found it interesting. Another thing. I wondered had it been because of me, or what I represented to her, that she’d cried. And it hadn’t been in front of anyone. What a little stoic.

“Jenny Rose is an artist,” I said, by way of explanation.

“Tch,” Molly said, unimpressed. “My own sister sang. Head in the clouds. Where did that get her? Nowhere.”

Jenny Rose made straight for the coffin and gently pressed her lips to the rim of the wood. She had a graceful, swaying walk. Her clothes might not be the most appropriate but she held herself erectly. You had to notice that about her. She was skinny, but curvy. She didn’t kneel, she ran her hand along the top of the wood as she walked to the side, like you’d trail your fingers over a fence. Then she went over to the straggle of young people, her classmates, I thought. They seemed used to being together. Seamus scuttled around their outskirts for a while, then settled like a puppy, very gingerly, on the folding chair beside them, not knowing for sure if it would hold him or not.

The sound of wind and rain outside flared and my aunt Bridey stood up and pushed open the window as if to invite it all in. I shivered. But it seemed to loosen the rest of them up. They loved the rain, all of them did. It was part of them—like their knees or their knuckles—and they would have been lost without it. Uncle Ned stood and went to the table of offerings put there by the guests. It looked like a bake sale. He took up the bottles of Madeira and claret and went around, one in each hand, to all the ladies, pouring ceremonial bits into them. Bridey got there just before him every time with a delicate stem glass, very small, all etched in flowers. They must have been old. The kind of stuff comes out only weddings and funerals and well, here we were, weren’t we?

I asked Molly how much it would cost for a room at her place. “Seventeen pounds,” she told me. Was I asking because I knew someone who was coming?

“No,” I said. “More for me. I just feel so bad imposing myself on my aunt when she has so much to deal with as it is.”

“Well,” she said, truthfully, “in that case, if it were for you, I would make it fifteen pounds. I wouldn’t want to take a normal profit in a case of death.” She had gray roots under all those golden curls, I noticed. Her silver eyes would crinkle up and her voice was narrow and reedy, but firm.

“Oh, but I wouldn’t want you not to make a profit,” I rushed to say.

“Don’t worry,” she answered wryly, “I always make a profit. You’ll be gone by high season.”

“Well. Gee. In that case. Could I come in the morning?”

“Sure you could. I’ve a free room ’til Tuesday. This being Thursday … let’s see … I could put you up for two weeks, if you don’t mind changing rooms on Tuesday. That’s when the Spiegels get back from Germany. Oh, we’ve always one or two Germans.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a bicycle you could rent me?”

“I have. But you needn’t rent it. It comes with the room, like.”

“Terrific.”

“You can come with me in the car for church on Saturday. Tomorrow will be a long one, afternoon and night. There’ll be a table laid at Dayday’s in between. I mean, the bicycle is fine except you won’t want to be getting wet in this weather.” She regarded me with a long silence. “You won’t want your foreign dress spattered with mud. So you’ll come with me in my car for the funeral too, if you like.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, “this will ease things up for my aunt. I ought to go tell her the good news.”

I thought Molly snorted. I wasn’t sure, then, how to go on. I safely gazed at the coffin and sighed.

“We were friends, you know, Dierdre and I,” she said. Her legs were crossed and she, too, stared at the coffin, absorbed and far away.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. Friends to the end, as they say. Oh, I know they were much older. But they liked me about. They used to have me as a fourth. Me and Peg and Dierdre and Bridey used to play hearts on a Thursday,” she said. “All Peg’s idea. She was the great organizer. Before she came along, we always used to play Scrabble. Peg was the one brought the gambling into the picture.”

“Gambling?”

“Oh, you know. Cards.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Poor Dierdre.”

“Which one is Peg?”

Molly squinted and nicked the top of her head at Aunt Bridey. “She won’t have Peg about.” Molly blew her nose. “Hates her. That’s why she’s not here. Always hated her, if truth be told.” More tears. She blew her nose. “It never should have happened, this. Too young to die. Too many things we never said to each other, should have been said. And now it will always be too late.” She turned to me. “That’s the worst of it. You know?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking right away of Temple Fortune. Wishing things had been different and I would have had the chance to tell him. Oh, Lord, just tell him that I really had loved him.

“Ach”—Molly put her hands in her face—“poor thing, poor thing!” She sobbed.

Liam was sitting in front of me now and his father leaned over and said to him, “Remember, Liam, when they waked Larry Shaugnessy?”

“I do.”

“Had him sitting up and a cigar in his hand.”

Seamus, baggy as a sack of flour, sidled over beside him, his unbalanced eyes all ready. You could tell he enjoyed these stories of the dead. He couldn’t get close enough.

“That’s nothing.” Liam, uninhibited by sobriety, nudged his father. “Remember Michael? Old Michael Shine? He was a joker. That blaggard had a length of twine tied to the corpse’s wrist. That was Sean the baker, poor fellow, dead of a faulty ticker. He tied the twine onto Sean’s wrist and when all the men were up for a nip and all the women were left to the rosary with the priest didn’t Michael kneel down and pull that twine. Up went dead Sean’s arm into the air. All the elderly ladies from the parish raced with no problem at all the whole three miles back into town.”

“The fellow alongside a me jumped over me for fright,” Uncle Ned said. “We were roarin’ for mercy.”

They all laughed, remembering.

“There was no harm in it.”

Uncle Ned wiped his eyes with a hanky. “Father Early was that peeved.”

“Aye,” said another. “That he was.”

The lot of them looked furtively around to see where the old priest was but he was out of earshot, thank the Lord, over there with the widow Donovan, listening to the rundown of her sins. She apparently was a great one for telling her sins.

There was a distinct murmer of disapproval when a barrel-chested man in a suit and clashing vest came in. He went up to the coffin and said his Hail Mary, then took his seat in the rear beside the distant, inconsequential neighbors.

“It’s Inspector Mullaney,” Molly leaned across and whispered in my ear with outrage. Still, there was the impressed silence for the officer of law and order.

You could hear Bernadette speaking: “It’s bad enough to have him lurkin’ ’round the town! But to have him here hoverin’ in our own Christian house…” She talked and would not listen. “Suspicious circumstances indeed! If those in charge thought there was something truly suspicious they’d have sent up the chief inspector himself. Everyone knows what happened to Dierdre. It’s those damn kerosene casks. And a wonder more people don’t go mixing them up with the gasoline canisters, blowing themselves up…” She didn’t stop there. “And what lets them think they can stomp through any front parlor in their mud-sodden boots … Can they not at least change their boots?”

“Here’s a lass who’s never been seen in the same outfit twice, I’ll have you know,” Uncle Ned said to the abruptly still room, as a way of apology. He had a sorry look when he said it. He loved Bernadette, you could tell, but he did wish she’d be less, well, ambitious. Inspector Mullaney, however, didn’t seem in the least put out by Bernadette’s outburst of disapproval. He sat as he was, his great knees far apart, his jowly jowls settled into the peace of the place. He was making his notes and keeping them all without benefit of pen or paper.

“You—you—you’d think there was evil a lurkin’,” Willy stuttered good-naturedly.

“There is talk of evil, you know, in the village.” Seamus raised and lowered his head, ominous and important. “I heard ’em.”

“Evil?” That was enough for Aunt Bridey, who’d gone down under the card table to adjust the leg with the folded edge of a wood chip and was just struggling with her girth to get back up. She flew off the handle. “What foolishness! In Skibbereen?” She heaved herself up with one hand on the bookcase. “Not likely.”

“Evil can be anywhere,” I said and regretted it the moment I did. Every eye was on me now. I’d have liked to sink into the floor, but I’d said it and couldn’t back down. I could see Aunt Bridey, her face pale and open-mouthed. She was leaning toward me with her good ear.

“Well, sure,” I said, “not in this room, I mean, but everywhere. The potential for it.”

“True enough,” Mrs. Driver, or Dayday, said, having arrived in her purposeful gardenia scent and an unfortunate iridescent brown suit. She was a wiry woman with quick black eyes and a prominent chin. She didn’t weigh much. Dayday wore good pearls and lifted her glass as if she were blessing us. Well, she’d been trained.

“What is evil, after all?” Liam piped up. “The mischief of Oberon and Mab.”

They all laughingly agreed.

“The absence of good.” Father Early picked up his cake.

Content with this formula, the rest of them went about the task of sampling from each woman’s kitchen. I sipped my milky tea. How lucky for them all, I thought, to have lived such charmed and untouched lives. And innocent. Because I knew something they obviously didn’t. Evil was not just the absence of good, I shuddered knowingly, but a real and looming force, calculated with its own convulsive end. And always with its maggot-ridden eye on someone.

Liam stood beside the card table covered in its creamy linen smock. Here were the heftier glasses and liquors. He uncorked the whiskey bottle I’d presented to him in the car. The men stood up one by one and sauntered over to that part of the room.

“My, my,” Molly remarked. “You’d never think they’ve been just waiting for the moment. You’ll see them at mass, in a row, delighted with themselves.” She sniffed.

“I overheard Aunt Bridey remind Ned about it being better ‘certain’ people don’t know Dierdre’s dead.”

“You mean Peg?” Mrs. Driver piped up. “Sure, she’ll find out soon enough, soon as she’s back.”

“No one’s told her, then?” Molly said.

“Th-that’s not right,” Willy stuttered.

Bernadette sniffed.

Uncle Ned said nothing, as usual. I went over to tell Aunt Bridey about the room I’d taken at Molly’s. I waited until I got her off to the side and no one could overhear us. She dropped her rosary. Then, raising herself up with a good martyr’s courage, she hauled in the air with a clamped shut mouth. “If that’s the way it’s to be,” she finally said.

“Hang on,” I said. “You seem to be upset about this idea, Aunt Bridey. On the other hand your message was very clear that my presence in your home is an imposition. Now, I took this room down the road to make it easier for you. If I’ve got something wrong, here, just let me know, ’cause I’m real easy.”

Aunt Bridey took hold of her bosom and reeled with it.

Ned came over to see what was up.

“The way in which she speaks to me!” she cried.

Molly was suddenly behind me. “Don’t go sayin’ anythin’,” she advised me out of the side of her mouth. “Just make yerself scarce. She’ll come around.”

I took her advice and slipped out into the night. She was my mother’s sister, after all, and I a guest in her home. She certainly wasn’t responsible for Seamus’s mimicking her. I supposed my nonconservative outfits were a put-off. And my abrasive assertiveness. So unlike what she’d expected. Jenny Rose was up against the side of the house, smoking. “Your lungs will be black,” I said.

“Never as black as me soul, though,” she said, holding out the pack to me. Young people are always intrigued by the bleakness of life. It’s the boring, predictable truth about them. The prettier they are, the more grim they like to find the world. I surprised myself by taking another cigarette. “Aunt Bridey seems to begrudge me the room by the stairs”—I let her light it for me—“but when I take it upon myself to rent a nice one at Molly O’Neill’s bed and breakfast, she’s highly put out.” I hoped I didn’t sound as petulant as I felt.

“Don’t mind Aunt Bridey. She’s not happy unless she’s miserable.”

“You were the one who lost your home. And you don’t seem mad at the world.”

“I would if it had been my studio. Aunt Bridey just doesn’t do well with change. She was dead close to Dierdre.”

“Molly is nice, though,” I said. “Soft and serious, interested but not nosy, full of fun.”

“She is that,” Jenny Rose agreed. “You would have liked Dierdre, I’ll bet. She put a great stock in family life and all that.”

“Did she?” Was that the way I seemed? Setting great stock in family life? Of course it would appear to be. The evening was over and night was near. It was cool now and the rain felt ready to drop at any moment. I snuggled into my sweater.

“And she was fun, too,” Jenny Rose said, petting the dog. “She was a great one for a laugh, Dierdre was.” She smiled. “Yes, she liked to laugh. Tell me, what’s your husband like?”

“He’s a cop.”

“Oh, he is,” she said, as if that explained it all.

“My daughter is near your age, you know. A few years younger. You’d like her, I think. She’s interested in art and music.”

“She’s adopted,” Jenny Rose said, challenging me with her eyes.

“Well, yeah, but we don’t think of her that way.”

“But I mean, you didn’t give birth to her.”

“No. My girlfriend did. But she died tragically young and I took over. Dharma is our maverick. Right now, she’s trying to get together a rock group. She—”

Jenny Rose looked away and I thought, Right, what does she care about that world she’s been so shut out of? How would she possibly be able to speak casually about the place she’d never had?

Out the door came a knot of young men. An unmistakable, glistening look came into Jenny Rose’s eyes before she bit her lip and looked every way but at the boys. Hmm, I thought. What’s this? I looked them over carefully. Young people in a casual huddle, laughing away with Willy Murphy, screwing up their faces and retching at the idea of a prom. Because they couldn’t go. The wake had taken priority over that.

“I’ve never gone either,” he told them, “and look what a fine upstanding citizen I’ve become.” They shoved one another about in good-natured battle. Jenny Rose fiddled with the locket on her neck. There wasn’t one of them I would have thought stood out.

“Jenny Rose,” I said, “I don’t know what sort of chances I’m going to have while I’m here to spend time with you and, you know, really talk, but, well, something about a wake loosens the tongue, maybe. I suppose it’s good. Anyway, if I’m talking too much or taking liberties just tell me and I’ll shut up, all right?”

“No. It’s okay. What?”

“Well, it’s just that I didn’t expect you to be part of the family, here. I mean so much a part of the family, raised as Aunt Dierdre’s girl.”

“Ah. You thought I’d be shipped to the local home for unlucky girls and raised there ’til a childless couple from Galway would see their way to takin’ me.”

“Yes. Yes, I’m ashamed that’s what I did imagine. I mean I’m relieved. It’s just hard for me to digest all this at once.”

Jenny Rose slid with her back down the side of the house and sat on the damp bench. “That’s what almost did happen.”

“But why did they keep you so secret? So hidden? It was unkind.”

“Unkind to whom? They never kept me hidden! That was your group did that. No one ever hid me on this end.”

I shuddered with disbelief. “I’ll never forgive them for not letting me in on you. I would have come right away. I’d never even heard of you until yesterday!”

“That was part of the deal.”

“I don’t get it.”

“All right so I’m telling you. The deal was Aunt Dierdre would agree to take me only if my birth mother would swear never to come for me, never let on I was hers. Dierdre didn’t want to go to all the trouble of raising a bairn, such a wildlookin’ one as they say I was”—Jenny Rose raised her fingers over her head and made them shake electrically—“‘with black bush for hair and pagan red lips’ and then have to give me up just because my mother changed her mind. After all the work was done, like. I mean, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, but—”

“So your sister Carmela vowed never to return and lay claim on me. Right hand on the Bible and the whole bit. Or so the story goes.”

I shook my head in astonishment. And what about poor Carmela? What kind of emotional blackmail had these Irish aunts inflicted on her to bully her that much she’d never try to see her own child? Never even confide such a loss to her sister! Imagine having a daughter this worthwhile and not being able to see her, touch her … And she was the mirror image of Carmela, except for the eyes. Such eyes! Black spikey lashes around pools of flashing hazel. Under all that wild black hair and fisherman’s clothing, there lurked a beauty, I felt sure. The rain came down, whoosh, all at once.

“We’d better go back in,” Jenny Rose said, pushing the boys out of the way. She wasn’t shy in front of them now. That all seemed to have been replaced with disdain. She walked me into the viewing room, led me to a folding chair and sat beside me. I took this as a sign of acceptance. I was enormously proud to be close to her, it was funny. My niece. What would Zinnie say? There was no way I was going to keep this from her. We would have fought over being Godmother to this one. I noticed Jenny Rose go red and I looked up to see Willy Murphy stumble past. Willy Murphy? I watched him with new interest. He had a way about him, all right. Loose and at home. Made you feel at ease like it was his job to do it. Worried that you’d worry for him that his stuttering would upset you.

I supposed Jenny Rose could do worse. He had a great crop of hair. Didn’t look like a big drinker. From what Liam had said I guessed he was the one to be heir to the Bishop’s seat. Bernadette was placing a plate of chipped beef on his lap and in general fussing all over him. Bernadette, too? I thought. Good grief. I tried to understand Jenny Rose’s dynamics with Bernadette. It was easy. Bernadette bullied and Jenny Rose stayed out of her way. Out of everyone’s way.

It was nice that Jenny Rose was humble but maybe she was a little too humble. Almost as if she’d heard my thoughts, she got up and moved to the first row of folding chairs, where she belonged. I noticed Audrey Whitetree-Murphy, two chairs over and on the end, didn’t bother to get up and move. She should have, after all. She wasn’t family, just local gentry. Maybe my American eyes just had a different way of looking at things. Still, a real lady would have the graciousness to leave the front for the immediate family.

Jenny Rose didn’t look like she was praying, just chewing off the rest of the chipped raw umber from her paint-crusted nails. Well-groomed Bernadette, arms folded, one foot up in the air, rocked beside Willy Murphy, laughing at whatever he said, and Murphy, polite and affable, made what could only be called puppy eyes at pale Jenny Rose every time she didn’t look at him. So maybe he loved her too. My heart leapt with hope for her.

Liam introduced me to the woman from the bus, the one with the broken foot, a Miss Fiona Ferry. She was a gaunt, wormy lady with stringy gray bangs and hopeless hair. Miss Fiona Ferry wore sliced oxfords and sported a thorn stick in deference to her impressive bunions. Liam said, “Fiona, what about it, will you give us a tune?” and no sooner were the words out of his mouth did Fiona stand up and I thought, Oh boy, here goes, but no, the purest tones emerged from that scraggly throat. She sang, “Here I Am, Lord,” and then a song about Skibbereen in the potato famine. Then we got down to the business of prayers and I’m afraid I dozed a little bit.

The protocol, apparently, after the prayers, is everyone gets up and says a few words about the deceased. I sat up attentively. “Dierdre,” Liam swung around with his drink in his hand, “used to tell me I was no good at all at all. That I would not amount to much. Now never will she know that she was right.”

When it was my turn, I shyly admitted to not knowing poor Aunt Dierdre. Wishing I had. “Never mind,” Mrs. Driver said, “you can recite a poem if you like.”

“I couldn’t,” I said aghast, but mentally reviewing “In Flanders Fields” just in case they made me.

Liam swaggered up to the casket.

“Go on, Liam,” someone said. “Give us ‘The Ballad of the Foxhunter.’”

The crowd, upright, rocked in expectation in their seats and I was momentarily disappointed they’d given up on me so easily.

Liam planted his graceful, suede-covered feet far apart and placed his body in a boxing position. He called,

“Now lay me in a cushioned chair,

and carry me, you four,

With cushions here and cushions there,

to see the world once more.

And someone from the stables bring

My Dermot dear and brown,

And lead him gently in a ring,

And gently up and down.”

They nodded happily at one another. I was standing there with my arms crossed and I looked down. Last week’s Southern Star was on the hassock, folded open to the entertainment section. “Native Son Honored” caught my eye and I thought, What?! It was just far enough away I didn’t have to use my glasses. There was the source of my own broken heart, Temple Fortune.

“Last night,” it read, “at the New Cork Hotel’s most glamourous affair this year, the Marist Brothers Favorite Son Award went to Temple Fortune, film director and graduate of Holygate, on location filming Beneath here in County Cork…” It went on about the other illustrious guests in smaller print.

Temple Fortune. Temple Fortune. I put my glasses on. I picked the paper up. There he was. He laughed and lived. It cut me, just to see his eyes sparkle. My heart thudded at the memory of him. I knew exactly when it had been, just when I was settling into my long skirts and comfy beige cardigans, happy with being who I was, living a full life, settling down to recollection.

Then there he was, exciting me at the prospect of my days. I was suddenly looking, pleased with myself, in the still friendly mirror. There was still time, it told me, still time.

I looked again at the newspaper: “… the party continued their celebration on into the wee hours at the Beechers Inn…” it read. Assorted buxom lovelies trimmed the periphery of the photograph. It had nothing to do with me. I let the paper flutter into the delicate wastepaper basket.

*   *   *

“Now leave the chair upon the grass,”

Liam’s good voice rang out,

“Bring hound and huntsman here,

And I on this strange road will pass

Filled full of ancient cheer.”

As if on cue, the glasses all around me clinked. I swallowed mine as well. I swallowed that sherry whole.

“Brown Dermot treads upon the lawn.” Liam swung his head with enthusiasm, knocking into Seamus.

“And to the armchair goes,

And now the old man’s dreams are gone,

He smooths the long brown nose.”

The thing was, desire had so crippled me and for so long, I couldn’t bear to start it up again. It was like the Buddhists say, and the Hindus too, for that matter: desire is the thing which causes pain.

“One blind hound only lies apart

On the sun-smitten grass;

He holds deep commune with his heart:

The moments pass and pass.”

I put my head in my hands. My desire for him had ruined every good thing around me.

“The blind hound with a mournful din

Lifts slow his wintry head;

The servants bear the body in;

The hounds wail for the dead.”

“Here here to Dierdre, then,” Willy Murphy said, lifting high his glass and draining it. “Who loved nothing more than a good ride on a spirited horse!”

There was a general blowing of noses, followed by a moment of silence. Then Seamus announced, “I seen a two-headed horse. A couple a times, it was.”

“And to Yeats,” said Dayday Driver.

We drank again.

Then Liam cheered up and said, “Isn’t it a shame we don’t have a camera, all the family here at once and all.”

“I’ve got my camera,” I said, not caring. “I thought myself rude to bring it up. I didn’t want to be the pushy American,” I admitted.

“Don’t be daft,” they all reassured me at once.

“Liam was only after droppin’ a hint,” Jenny Rose said, selling him out.

“It’s just to give you something to do,” Aunt Bridey said to me, minimizing any generosity on anyone’s part.

Bernadette clearly disapproved. “Such an archaic idea!” She took hold of her throat. “If they all knew how hilarious they looked!” She batted her eyes at me.

So you never know. Off I go, much too delighted by far for the occasion, but I really love what I do. I am ambitious and I had a feeling these would be the best shots I’d ever taken. I came back to find everyone lined up on folding chairs, ready to be portrayed beside the coffin. Even Bernadette had powdered her nose and sprayed her hair. I was so happy to be working, I found my hands trembling with excitement and went about setting up my small sturdy camera, not minding Brownie the dog skirting about and making a fuss, suddenly whining and barking at no one. Dogs in heat and out are a big part of my life. There’s never been a time we didn’t have a dog. And Brownie had been curled up on a tea towel sitting in the window for so long it was the saddest thing you ever saw. I took my first shot, then the dog scampered to and fro, the back door opened and there stood Aunt Dierdre, suitcase in hand. “So you know I’m not generally opposed to the idea of a party,” she said, “but I’d be obliged if ye’d tell me what in Gabriel’s name has become of me house.”

Nobody moved. It was as if the whole world stood still. No one could say a word. Then Jenny Rose fell into Seamus’s arms and Seamus dropped her to the floor. Molly let out a scream, I swear, loud enough, as they say, to wake the dead.

Dierdre was shocked, you could tell, to see the coffin.

We were all delighted Dierdre was alive. But who, then, lay inside the rosewood coffin?

Dierdre’s eyes swept the astounded faces. “Where’s Peg?” she asked.

“It’s Peg!” Mrs. Driver cried out suddenly. “It’s got to be! She’s the only one not here.”

“Peg? Peg’s in Paris on holiday,” Ned muttered and looked, confused, at Bridey. “At the Champs Élysées.”

They all turned slowly to Dierdre. “Where have you been, Dierdre?”

Dierdre looked at her sorry purse. “Paris,” she said, but the sound didn’t come out. “Paris. We had a row. She said she didn’t love me anymore. I took her ticket and went.”

I stood up shakily. “I’ve got to call my mother,” I said.

Dierdre went to the door and opened it, still holding on to her suitcase. The wind rushed in and you could see the hill behind her in the moonlight. “Peg,” she called. “Peg!”

That’s odd, I thought, Peg being in the coffin and all.

“It’s a funny thing that Peg’s the one to die,” Seamus observed, pale and suspicious. He was petting Jenny Rose, his big hands cupping and letting go of her dark head.

Solicitor Truelove tapped his stiff, fat fingers like damp old cigars on the mahogany and confided to Mrs. Driver a remark he would later have cause to regret, “Now nothing will go to Peg. It will all go to Dierdre.”

“That’s what comes of such depravity,” Miss Ferry declared.

Whose depravity? I wondered. Dierdre’s or Peg’s?

“The thing is,” Uncle Ned said in a loud voice, “if that’s Dierdre here, and that’s Peg in there, we’ll have to move her from that coffin. That’s the family coffin, by the way.”

*   *   *

While I stood at the wall telephone, waiting for the outdated transatlantic system to kick in, an entire regimen of reawakened ideas alerted me to the fact I, too, was still alive. All the things I’d never done and wanted to looked at me from my own impending mortality. I’d been so happy in there, working. I called my mother and alerted Zinnie to make sure she was sitting down, there’d been a terrible mistake, Dierdre wasn’t dead at all. I was relieved and disappointed not to have to talk to my mother, who slept. Wait ’til she heard this! Zinnie would have her call me back the next day when she’d pulled herself together, she said, stunned herself. I hung up. Out the little window the drizzle had stopped and moonlight shined the leaves. I looked into the swimmy hallway mirror, picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect me, please, to the New Cork Hotel.

*   *   *

“Mr. Temple Fortune?” the front desk girl took a long time shuffling through her messages. “I believe he’s left for Baltimore.”

“Oh. Oh, okay, thanks.” I might have known. I leave America and he goes there. Well, if that wasn’t a sign I should leave him alone, I didn’t know what was. Never mind. What would I have said? “Ever since we worked together on that job five years ago in Germany, I cannot achieve romantic satisfaction without conjuring up the lust in your eyes?” What if he didn’t remember me? No. He would have remembered me. Unhappily, a little bit guiltily, I put the phone down. Didn’t I have enough going on without needing to run off chasing the unfulfilled past? I peered at the wall. Jenny Rose had hand-painted vertical stripes of maroon on the greenish yellow background. It must have taken her weeks. One way to put obsessive-compulsion to good use. I was just about to walk through the door when I realized it wasn’t a door at all but a tromp l’oeil, a picture so real it seemed actually to be what it portrayed. I stopped. A curious pounding sound made me stay still and listen. A chill went right through me. I switched off the desk light and laid my ear against the Turkish stripe. It was coming from outside. Lifting the gauzy curtain from its pristine hanging space, I was expecting a car jimmied up or a tire thief at the very least but there on the other side of the window, on the pearly gray stones, was the two-headed horse, plugging away.

The front appeared to be Bernadette. It was Bernadette. Then sprightly Murphy. They were having it off in the same direction. Her neat jersey skirt was up around her waist. She looked more intent than involved. He went about it savagely. I dropped the curtain down. My heels thudded on the cold parquet floor and I lifted my neck as I walked the long way back.

There was the buzz of excitement going on by the coffin. I went back in to see Jenny Rose surrounded by a crowd, and who, if she hadn’t shown enough sorrow before, was doing it now, weeping in Dierdre’s heavy arms. Dierdre gasped and wept as well. They melded together in a tragic embrace before the remains of the poor uninvited Peg. I stood at the doorway, watching this intimate yet public scene of resurrection and a cascade of fatigue took hold of me. I retreated, overwhelmed, to bed.