He tips my chin upward. “Yes, you do. Write as you speak, Gooseen. Isn’t that why I like you so much? Your gorgeous Galway voice and your funny little tales.”
“I’ll try, Jim,” I say, though I haven’t a notion how I’ll do what he asks.
Song
Dublin
AUGUST 24, 1904
I HAVE THE NIGHT OFF WORK AND JIM’S FRIEND VINCENT COSGRAVE comes to Finn’s Hotel to walk me to the concert rooms in Brunswick Street. Jim will sing there tonight and I’m fit to burst I am that proud of him.
“I will go on ahead of you, my little pouting Nora,” Jim wrote to me last night. “Dire performance nerves will not permit me to see you before I sing.”
Outside Finn’s, Cosgrave offers me his arm and I hesitate, but then I take it. He saunters like a man following a hearse so, after a minute, I withdraw my hand and increase my pace.
“Where are you off to so fast, Miss Barnacle?” says he. “You’re like yon stallion Throwaway, belting out ahead of me.”
I laugh. “That horse, Mr. Cosgrave, seems to be the only horse I know.”
He smiles. “Why’s that?” I shake my head. “Ah, go on,” he says, “tell me.”
“Well, all right, I’ll relate to you how I first heard of Throwaway.” I slow down until Cosgrave falls in beside me and I tell him all about the man in the hotel with the razor and his distress over that very horse winning Ascot. Cosgrave laughs and I laugh, too, though it was alarming at the time. “Throwaway!” I bellow, just like the man.
“And did you tell Jim that the fella was in nothing but his undershirt, inside in the room in Finn’s, Miss Barnacle?” Cosgrave asks, reaching for my arm; there is a wicked pull to his mouth, a class of leer. I step away from him. “Oh, you didn’t reveal that to darling Jim? Naughty Nora.” He waggles his finger under my nose, then grabs my hand, and tries to kiss it. I snap it back.
“Mr. Cosgrave! Jim Joyce wouldn’t be happy with these antics, after asking you to escort me.”
“Jim Joyce, Jim Joyce,” he mocks. “I have it up to my neck with the same Jim Joyce. And you, Nora Barnacle, know little about him. That fella may tell you he adores you, but it’ll never last. Mark me. Joyce is mad, for one thing—who wouldn’t be, that had to live with his father? Mr. John Stanislaus Joyce, the disappointed, drunken snob.”
“That’s no way to speak of Mr. Joyce. You know little about it.” But I’m struck that Jim gives me few details of his family life except to sigh bitterly about his father from time to time and the plight of his sisters and brothers who live at home still.
Cosgrave leans his head in close to mine. “And your Jim, you should know, is also a man of particular urges and very fond of his trips to the particular houses of Tyrone Street.”
I don’t like his tart manner and I can feel my skin heating inside my dress; I don’t even know the man and only agreed to be escorted by him as he’s Jim’s good friend. “I think you’ve said enough for one day, Mr. Cosgrave.”
“Well, Miss Barnacle, not quite—the biggest thing is that Joyce is a class of lunatic. Stone mad.” He taps his forehead then points into my face. “Remember I said that.”
Cosgrave pulls back and stalks on ahead of me. I follow behind him to the concert rooms and he doesn’t let another pip out of him, for which I’m very glad; it suits me better not to listen to his bitter, slobbery talk. The outright cheek of him, talking to me in that way. Jim is mad, indeed! But it occurs to me that I’ll have to ask one of the girls in Finn’s what goes on in Tyrone Street, though I fear I already know.
Jim’s brother, Stanislaus, is at the concert. He comes to me in the foyer at the interval where I’m drinking a peppermint cordial, standing alone with my back to the wall, Cosgrave having disappeared with himself. I recognize him the second I see him though we haven’t met before. Stannie is both like Jim and not like him—he is slim and serious, in the same way, but blockier and shyer and his hair is more bountiful.
“Miss Barnacle,” he says, quietly, offering me his hand, “Stanislaus Joyce.”
“Oh, Stannie, I thought it was you,” I say, shaking it. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to lay eyes on the best brother in person, Jim never stops talking about you.” I sip my cordial from pure nerves at meeting one of Jim’s relatives. “But how did you know who I was?”
“I confess I’ve seen you with Jim on occasion, across the street in town.”
“And you didn’t wave or come to us? For shame, Stannie!” I laugh.
He blushes and I’m alarmed. “Oh, it was lightly meant, I’m sorry. It’s very lovely to meet you at last, Stanislaus Joyce.”
I grab his hand in mine and shake it again, but he takes this as a dismissal and walks off, leaving me alone with my peppermint in my hand and, I feel, a silly, surprised set to my gob.
MY FACE ALMOST BURSTS FROM SMILING, I’M SO PROUD OF JIM. There is not a man who can talk like him and now, it’s clear, not a one who can sing like him either. Even when the pianist bursts out crying like a babby and runs from the stage with nerves, and Jim has to provide his own piano accompaniment, he doesn’t falter. Down he sits and plays like an angel. Out of his mouth come the sweet words about the Sally Gardens and taking love easy. I know that he’s thinking of me as he lets the notes roll and rise—my own heart rolls and rises with him. I would go to the side of the earth with Jim Joyce, for sure. And I’d drop off into black, starry space in his arms if it came to it.
Eyes
Dublin
SEPTEMBER 1904
JIM HAS GOAT-BLUE EYES, CLEAR AS SALTWATER, EYES ELECTRIC from the jumps of his fierce mind. My eyes are mud in comparison, but Jim says they’re like mountain pools. He says I have the eyes of a saint, a virgin, a pleasing plaster Mary.
“Go on out of that,” I say. “A blessed statue?”
“Your eyes are quiet like the Madonna’s,” he says. “Even when your hand tickles me to pleasure, your eyes stay molten and melancholic.” He rubs his fingers across his forehead. “My own eyes, alas, ail and fail. I’ll be blind by fifty, I wager. Blind as biblical Bartimaeus.”
This is the way Jim talks. He got education, away in Clongowes Wood school in County Kildare and then in Belvedere College and the university, here in Dublin. Places for boys from moneyed families. He even went to Paris to study doctoring but came home when his mother was sick and ready to pass away. His pappie had colossal hopes for Jim, but the same man drank those hopes away, Jim says. Money is all in fine schools and colleges, and when it’s gone, you’re out on your ear, no matter how grand a sentence you can spin.
Our heads are puddled together in the marram grass, mine and Jim’s, and the Irish Sea is a nearby shush. We have different heads. Jim’s is full of song and story, questions and schemes, bothers and dissatisfactions. Mine, I think, is full of other things: songs, for sure, but mostly memories and, most important now, feelings. I’m happy to lie in his arms and kiss, feel the soft heat of lips, his hands roaming into my drawers, mine into his. But Jim loves to talk and muse and go on about everything; he’s always bothering himself, trying to figure things out.