“Do you think the tenor John McCormack can hold a tune as well as I can?” he says.
“No.”
“Did that bowsy Cosgrave try to hold your hand when he chaperoned you to the concert rooms to hear me sing? Did he try to kiss you? Or worse? Be frank with me now, Nora.”
“He did not.”
“Did you think Stannie looked at you queerly that time you met?”
“Ah, Jim. What is it you’re trying to say? Queerly? Your own brother!”
“Do the other girls who work at Finn’s Hotel have boyfriends?”
“They have.”
“Are they free with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“But don’t girls talk about everything, Nora?”
“They do, I suppose.”
“So, are you lying to me?”
“Ah, shut up, Jim, for the love of the Lord, and kiss me again.”
He leans in and I take his tongue between my teeth and press until he laughs. He pins my wrists over my head and bores his own tongue deep into my mouth, poking at every tooth and lapping all around until I’m liquid with the madness of it. Our breath comes fast like horses after a race and we roll in the marram and the sea gives her siren call and the air is keen and fresh. We finish kissing, mouths bruise-soft, and lie on our backs to watch the cloud shapes roll above us in the blue: here a cottony ship’s masthead, there a stippled mackerel. I take Jim’s hand in mine and squeeze it.
All my loneliness for Galway is gone. Since I took up with Jim, Dublin has opened her arms to me, taken me to her breast. My jackeen Jim. He’s cut from Dublin as sure as Nelson’s Pillar was. But still he talks of getting away, of leaving all behind; he sees a lit-up future far from this country. I daren’t ask if I can go, too; I’m hoping he will invite me.
I roll sideways to look at him: the wrinkled linen jacket, the dirty plimsolls, the clever eyes, stilled now under sleepy lids. He looks serene and innocent, yet he’s the same man who stole one of my gloves and took it to bed with him and told me after that it lay beside him all night “unbuttoned,” as if I could believe that. I’d say that same glove saw plenty of skittery movement! I gaze now at Jim and wonder what Mammy would make of me lying on the seashore with a glove-caressing jackeen’s fingers roaming into my garters and beyond. What would she say to my hands powering over his prick, snug inside trousers? She’d be polluted with rage, to be sure. And Uncle Tommy? Well, he’d beat the thunder out of me and no mistake, like he did over Willie Mulvagh. After seeing me with Willie, Uncle took out his stick and left me purple and raw and running for the first train out of Galway. Yes, Mammy and Tommy would be galled to their bladders if they could see Jim and me now, carefree as birds, love wrapped snug around us like a shawl. And I find I do not care.
Memory
Dublin
SEPTEMBER 1904
THOUGH JIM IS JEALOUS OF ANY OTHER MAN WHOSE MOUTH has met mine, he makes me talk of the two dead Michaels, Feeney and Bodkin, and poor Protestant Willie, who Uncle Tommy objected to so strongly. Jim loves details and takes meaning from everything: dates, songs, tiny occurrences, objects. Mostly Jim wears me out with his investigations into my life before I met him, but I play along anyway, to please him.
“Tell me again about Feeney,” Jim says.
Jim and I are once more walking by the sea, this time at Sandycove where his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty lives in a squat tower. I let the breeze lap over my face and remember Michael.
“He was never a robust young fellow, there was something of the lamb about him.”
“Lamb?”
“What I mean is Michael was pale-faced, sunken. Always a little sick. But he was gentle and he could sing well.”
“Feeney sang for you often, I suppose.” His nose wrinkles.
“He would sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ and linger over the saddest parts.”
“The pair of you were thwarted, Nora, a bit like the lovers in the song. Go on.”
I sit on the seawall. “Ah, Jim, you have me repeating myself like some doting crone. Haven’t I told you all this before?”
He sits by me and takes my hand. “I like to hear these things, they’re good yarns. Tell me again about the night of the rain.”
I spurt air between my lips to help me keep my patience. “I was in bed one wet night, the wind howling, when I heard stones hit my window. I looked out and there was Michael Feeney, under the tree, shaking with the cold. ‘Go home, you’ll catch your death,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to live if I can’t see you, Nora,’ he called back. I ran out to Michael and embraced him and went back inside. A week later he was dead. It was terrible. Only a gossoon of seventeen.”
“And you think you were the cause of his death.”
My heart babbles in my chest. “He shouldn’t have been out on such a squally night. He was ailing.” I drop my head. “And then when Sonny Bodkin was taken by TB. Well.”
Jim puts his arm around me and squeezes; his look is impish. “Nora, my little man-killer.”
I shrug him off. “It isn’t funny, Jim. Dying is not one bit funny.”
“It’s not, Nora. Death descends so lightly but it’s the hardest thing of all.”
Long-gone Granny Healy floats across my vision like a blot in my eye, but as she does in my dreams, she merely smiles. Jim’s face slackens and I know he’s probably remembering his dear mother just as I’m thinking of the only woman who was a real mother to me.
We sit together on the seawall, letting the jounce of the waves, their gray-green light, soothe and calm us while we conjure the dead.
Wanderer
Dublin
SEPTEMBER 15, 1904
“I‘M A WANDERER, NORA,” JIM SAID TO ME WHEN I MET HIM FIRST just three months past and it has proven to be true. He flies from lodging to lodging, now with this friend in Shelburne Road, now with that one in Sandymount. He doesn’t want to live with his pappie and the family for they draw on him like leeches, he says. The way it is, Jim finds it hard to settle in one spot and people, generally, annoy him; he finds their oddities hard to deal with.
“I’ve enough foibles of my own without having to figure out other people’s,” he told me once.
“People are strange, it’s true for you,” I answered but I thought about it for days, the business of him not getting along with others. I can muddle through with most people and, I think, life’s easier on those who can.
At the moment Jim is staying with his friend Gogarty in the old tower by the sea. It’s a bit of a trot from there to town, so I see less of Jim and that pains me. I prefer to be with him every day for I feel complete when we’re about each other. Therefore, it’s a lovely surprise to find him outside Finn’s when I step out for a minute of air on my dinner break.
On seeing me, he tosses away the cigarette he’s smoking. “Nora, I summoned you with my mind and you came.” He steps forward and grabs my hands and his look is feverish.
“Jim, what in heaven is the matter?” His lovely blue eyes are bloodshot and the lids swollen. “Have you been weeping, my love? Has something happened?”
He pulls me along by the wall, away from the hotel door, to talk; his sharp glances to left and right unnerve me. “Nora, I want to get out of Dublin. Life is waiting for me, if I choose to enter it.”