I shake my head. “I’m all right, Jim, I’m grand.”
It’s not that I’m pained, it’s more like a wash of ease and certainty basting my heart. Jim and I are alone together at last. Away from Galway and Uncle Tommy and Mammy. Away from Dublin and Cosgrave and Gogarty, and Jim’s pappie and brother, Stannie, and the rest of his large, grasping family. It feels good to leave them all behind on the island.
I weep and the salt of my tears buoys me, as sure as if they were the sea and I a bouncing lump of jetsam. How can I explain that I’m happier than I’ve ever been? Happy that Jim has let me share this journey, that we will be joined now, if not in marriage, at least in trust. I look at Jim and laugh, tears still bubbling from my eyes. He pulls me close to him and laughs, too. Yes, I’m happy. I am as easy and free and content now as a goose on the wing, looking for a soft place to fall.
Money
Paris
OCTOBER 9, 1904
THE TRAIN IDLES INTO GARE SAINT-LAZARE AND IT’S A CAVERNOUS and somber place. It’s been a long couple of days, in London first, to pursue a publisher who didn’t want to be netted, and on then to Paris, long hours of trains and boats, dust and stuffy heat and cold. The Saint-Lazare station is a gloomy cathedral over our heads, and I begin to tremble for I’m only now opening my mind to what we’ve done. Jim says we’re married, but in truth, we’re not, and I’m at his mercy, with not one other soul to protect me. What scarce money we had between us is all but gone.
Outside the train station, Paris tinkles with wealth: the buildings glint light and women saunter in white dresses, smart and contained, their children and dogs as neat as themselves. In my borrowed coat, of serviceable black, I feel a drab, slovenly creature in comparison. We haul the trunk and suitcase to a park near the station and I flop onto a bench, clenched all over, and hungry and fagged from traveling. My courses, too, have me low; my bleed has begun, it feels, to spite me and make me tireder yet.
Jim drops down beside me and pulls my head to his shoulder.
“I’m that weary, Jim, I’d sleep on a mantelpiece if I was let.”
He smokes a cigarette and I can almost hear the churn of his mind. “Sit here, Nora, my darling, and wait for me. I’m going to go and borrow a few bob from my old Paris friends.”
I grasp his arm. “Ah, don’t leave me, Jim. What if someone tries to accost me?”
“Shout at them in English, Nora. They’ll leave you alone.”
I look at our luggage. We can’t both go and we need money. “All right then,” I say.
“That’s it, my sleepy-eyed girl. Take your rest and I’ll return, quick as quick.” He kneels on the ground to look into my eyes and I push a smile onto my face. “You’re pale as milk.”
“My courses have come on.”
“Ah. Your boot is pinching you. That’s what my sisters say.” He kisses my nose. “I won’t be long.”
My boot is pinching me. Your boot is pinching you. Those words rollick through my brain like the beat of a train across tracks. My head flops into sleep. My boot is pinching me. Your boot is pinching you. I don’t know how much time passes; only the noise from carriages and horse-clop keep me half conscious. My boot is pinching me. Your boot is pinching you. My head droops like a doll without sawdust and skitters upward when another vehicle passes outside the park. Hunger pangs waken me fully and I hold my stomach and wonder what we’ll do for food and I wish for Jim to come back. I count to a hundred, first in English, then in Irish. A haon, a dó, a trí, a ceathair, a cúig . . . How will we survive without money? . . . a sé, a seacht, a hocht, a naoi . . . Why didn’t I put by more money when I was working? . . . a deich, a haon déag, a dó dhéag . . . When I reach ninety-three, Jim rambles through the park gate and I let out a whimper of joy.
He comes toward me, flapping three notes. “Sixty francs,” he squeaks and lists the names of people he saw or didn’t see—Douce, Doctor Rivière, Curran, Murnaghan—and who gave him what. I nod as he recounts their help, but I’m only concerned with the money.
“How much is that really, Jim?”
“Plenty,” he says, and the knots that’ve been tightening in me loosen a little.
We ride a carriage to Gare de l’Est and Paris unfolds around us, a glimmer of a place that I wish to linger in, but we must press on. I send a postcard of the Eiffel Tower to my mother, with a few short words to let her know I’ve gone abroad. In case she might be fretting.
Jim and I take the night train to Zürich and arrive there on the eleventh of October, a full three days since we left Ireland. And for the first time ever we will share a bed in a place called Gasthaus Hoffnung, which translates, Jim tells me, as the Guesthouse of Hope.
Hope
Zürich
OCTOBER 11, 1904
I FIDDLE WITH MY GARTER STRAPS IN THE BATHROOM OF THE Hoffnung, my fingers suddenly useless as sausages. My cheeks in the mirror are pink, as if from a slapping, but it’s just that I’m hot and agitated, excited too. I unpin my hair so that it cascades down my back and draw a few noisy breaths to balance me out.
I hope I can be good for Jim, enough for him. We’ve never lain together fully and, though we delight each other with hands and mouths, what will the real thing be like? I shiver. He’s waiting for me in the bedroom down the corridor. Jim is no stainless innocent—he told me about his dalliances with wayward women in Monto’s kips and around Tyrone Street. But isn’t that what unattached boys and men do, I scold myself, go to those who lie down for a living? Jim did it from a tender age and, though it cut me at first to think of the baseness of the trysts, I understand why he went. Men need to have a release, even young ones. Women just have to make it up on their marriage night.
I often saw those kinds of girls in Galway; we laughed at them, selling their ripe bodies for bread. Now I know they have hard lives—dirty auld fellas and eager strips mauling them, morning, noon, and night. I also know that Jim expects me not to be like those women, to display a certain amount of virtue while satisfying him fully, and I hope I’m able to do just that.
I take up my brush and go at my hair with a mad fury—I need to hurry along. At the sink, I wash days of grime from between my toes and splash soapy water between my legs. The blood of my courses has slowed its flow and I’m glad of it. I hear Jim cough a few times and realize that he’s signaling to me. I struggle out of my corset—Jim calls it the breastplate for he’s irritated he can never get past it. Over my head I pull the nightgown I bought in Pim’s for this very occasion. The smell and feel of the untouched cotton sends a ripple through me that makes me go lax and taut at the same time. I knot my discarded clothes into a bundle and walk the corridor to our room.
Jim has a single candle lit. He’s sitting up in bed with a shocked, hopeful look on his face. “Come closer where I can see you, love,” he says and I step forward. He holds out his arms to me and recites softly:
. . . may these two dear hearts one light
Emit, and each interpret each.
Let an angel come and dwell tonight
In this dear double-heart, and teach.