“Do you mean our Salthill, where we walk the prom?”
“The very place.”
I sat before Granny and imagined a pearly shell lying on the shore, nobbled like the conch Uncle Tommy gave me.
“Go on, Granny. Tell me more.”
“This beautiful shell burst open on the shingle at Salthill and inside there was a dark-haired baby, serene and curious. The baby smiled and smiled, and she had one droopy eye that gave her a wise and holy look.” Granny leaned forward and put her cool finger to my eyelid.
“Me.”
“Yes, my lovely Nora, it was you.” Granny set down her cup. “Your mother was walking the Salthill prom that day and, when she saw that fine shell, she tripped down to the beach. She clapped her hands when she found a baby inside, smiling up at her. She was so happy. Your mother picked you up and brought you home, her little barnacle gooseen.”
I settled back against the rungs of my chair. I lifted the china cup to my mouth and let the tea scald my tongue.
“All that trouble I took to be born,” I said. “All that falling from a tree and bouncing on waves and landing onshore and bursting from a shell to be scooped up by Mammy.”
Only to be sold off like a goose at a fair, I now think. Might it not have been better if I had come more naturally, I ask myself, to have entered the family with some portion of stealth? If I had managed that, maybe Mammy would not have given me away to Granny. If I’d managed that, maybe I’d still live among my sisters and brother and be part of everything in the house in Bowling Green. Maybe, if I’d come into life more naturally, Mammy would love her Gooseen well.
Heartbalm
Finn’s Hotel
AUGUST 1904
MONDAY AND I LIE ABED, THINKING OF JIM, WHEN I SHOULD be up and getting into apron and cap. But divil I’ll get up until I’ve let my imaginings play out. My hands wander under my nightgown, I slip a finger into my crevice and press; I knead my bubbies and let my palms slide over my nipples, while keeping Jim’s sweet face fixed in my mind. He’s all I need in my head.
Last night, when we walked to Ringsend, he told me he was called “farouche” by a lady he knows, one of those moneyed ones, no doubt.
“Farouche, Jim?”
“Wild, savage.”
He seemed hurt by the word. “Sure, isn’t your savagery one of the best parts of you?” I said. “Isn’t it what makes you the man you are?”
And he pushed me against a wall and whispered my name into my ear over and over and called me by his names for me: Goosey, Sleepy-eye, Blackguard.
He said, “I will make you my little fuckbird,” and my reason slithered to pulp when I heard that and I kissed him with all the fierce light of my body.
JIM HAS ME WRITE LETTERS TO HIM, BUT MY THOUGHTS ARE STIFF on the page—I’m not fond of writing; words don’t slide off my pen the way they do for him. I left school at twelve, like most people, and haven’t had much call to write more than a few lines since. But Jim wants to know what I think of when we’re apart, to bind us closer, but it seems to me all I think of is him and does he want to read letters that are all about himself? Perhaps he does.
I slip from the bed, gather my paper and a book I’ll use to help me write the letter—I need it, truly, for I don’t know what to be saying and am sitting here chewing my fingers and gawping at the blank paper. After much scribbling and mashing of spoiled pages, I come up with a few lines:
Darling Jim,
At night my soul flies from Leinster Street to Shelbourne Road, to entwine with yours. Jim, I can’t bear to be apart from you and my mind conjures and caresses you every minute of every hour that I do my work fixing beds and waiting tables, as if my heart will dry up without the balm of you to oil it. This is love, Jim, it is constant and racking and true and I will see you, my precious darling, tonight and we will hold hands and rejoice that we found each other of all the people in Ireland. I bless the day you first accosted me on Nassau Street with your serious face and sailor’s cap and dirty shoes, and I thank Our Lady that I could see immediately, from your polite manners, that you were a good man. And I bless the day we first walked out together—the sixteenth of June is etched on my soul. I am lonely without you, Jim, believe me to be ever yours,
Nora
I scramble into my uniform and web it, lightning quick, to catch the post for I want Jim to read my words this morning; I hope he likes them. He’s right about jotting things down, it does make me feel closer to him. The letters are heartbalm.
Mouth
Dublin
AUGUST 1904
JIM HAS A MARVELOUS WAY OF SPEAKING. IT’S NOT ONLY THE lovely words he knows, a whole dictionary of them inside his mind, it’s his voice. It goes up and down but keeps itself still and contained, too. Jim sounds like a man on a stage, giving a speech. He could be saying any old thing and still he comes across as if he’s rehearsed lines and is now delivering them. Every sentence that falls from his mouth does so at the right time and in the exact right way. I see it as a God-bestowed gift that he has. And, because his voice is a fine one, like an orator’s—a Thomas Kettle or a Charles Stewart Parnell—you can’t but believe everything he says.
The girls I work with in Finn’s call Jim “posh” and they can’t believe he’s with me.
“You’d think the likes of him would be with one of his own kind,” Molly Gallagher said to me one day.
“But amn’t I good enough for any man, Molly?” I said, stung by her.
“You are of course, Nora,” she said, linking arms with me, but I could see the doubt in her face.
In truth, I too find it hard to credit that Jim would choose me above the educated ladies he knows, those Sheehy women and the rest. They, like him, have a grand air about them and they sound so fine, like creatures from another world. My voice, in comparison to all of them, is that of a honking goose, loud and fast and spilling out of me. But Jim tells me I sound “melodious” and longs to hear me speak.
“Speak to me in your western tongue, sweet Nora,” he says, when we lie atop Howth Hill, letting the cool dusk wind lap over us. I love to be by the sea with him, bathing in the salty air.
“What do you want me to say, Jim?”
“Tell me,” he said softly, “the siren songs of your soul. Let me hear the melodies of your mind, my little Galway rogue.”
That’s the way he talks. From another man, the things he says would come across daft, but Jim can sound like a poet and a politician, both at the same time. He has the perfect voice for himself, for who he is, a thing to admire and love about him. And yes, I do love him, I do indeed. I know it already because when I’m not with Jim, it’s as if I carry the whispering ghost of him wrapped around me. I feel him gone from me as if part of my body were taken. He never leaves me, head or heart. And is that not the sweetest of God-bestowed gifts?
Today, though, he chastises me.
“What sort of a letter was that, Nora?”
“How do you mean, Jim?” I roll on my side to look at him.
He pets my hair with his fingers. “It didn’t sound like you at all.”
I dip my eyes and pout my bottom lip. “I don’t know how to write like me.”