Читать книгу The Element of Fire - Brendan Graham - Страница 19

It took her into the following spring ‘to put a shape’ on No. 29. But she was not foolhardy, hunting down bargains – crockery ware on Washington Street, ‘sensible’ curtains from the Old Feather Store, a thick-in-the-hand, good-wearing Turkish counterpane for the floor of the good room; sturdy chairs, slightly shop-soiled, a chip or two gone from them but still perfectly good for sitting upon.

Lavelle did the heavy work – painted and decorated and put a snas on the backyard. Then Patrick wanted to ‘get at’ the gone-to-seed cabbages, but at her request left it. She decked the front and back borders of the cabbage patch with small yellow flowers – a Latin name, ending in ‘ium’ – she couldn’t remember when Mary had asked her. Peabody had told her when he’d given her the seeds, but she’d forgotten. The other two sides she left open, so she could ‘pluck the new cabbages, when they grew’, she hoped.

Eventually, the house was the way she wanted it; for the moment, at least. She had one other idea for the good room, but that could wait a while.

Lavelle, who had always maintained close links with those Boston Irish interested in the ‘Irish Cause’, had recently begun to attend meetings for the repeal of the Union of Ireland with England. She would have preferred he didn’t, that he’d leave ‘the past to the past’. Lavelle’s view was that ‘the past never goes away – the past is a road – always coming from somewhere and leading somewhere else’. She couldn’t win with him, so she gave up trying. She did once remark that with his increasingly frequent absences on ‘matters of Ireland’, ‘Now that the house is settled here, I have a mind to move back to Washington Street – and you could pay court to me every evening, as before!’

He knew she wasn’t serious, grabbed her and kissed her, laughing as he exited the door.

She read, instead, sitting at the rosewood bureau he had restored, her book on the baize-covered writing surface, vanishing her away from the world.

Her visits to the Old Corner Bookstore had been less frequent since they moved here, yet more precious. So that when she did go there she lingered over its store of treasures, lovingly fingering the gold-lettered spines, imprinting into memory the works and the lives within. The English poets: Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – the two contrary states of the human soul – Byron and Donne. These were her favourites, opening her eyes to an England, pastoral, passionate, spiritually provocative, different from the ‘perfidious Albion’, she had known, an England of Cromwell and Queen Victoria, ‘The Famine Queen’.

At Christmas, Lavelle had presented her with Legends of New England, in Verse and Prose, by the Massachusetts-born John Greenleaf Whittier – ‘to wean you away from old England’. And she was much interested in New England writing. Emerson with his spiritual vision, his belief that all souls shared in the higher, Over-Soul, that nature is spirit, rang with a resonance close to her own, one which the organized pulpitry of the Catholic Church could never achieve for her. The women writers of New England, she also sought out, as much for their ‘Bloomerist’ agenda as for anything. However, the Old Corner Bookstore, Lavelle’s ‘Repeal’ meetings, and even the aggrandizement of No. 29 were only the trimmings of life in Boston. The education of her children, the steady growth of the business, and the unerring stability of life in general was what mattered, what she had always craved. What now was within her keeping.

The children all were flourishing. Patrick at the Eliot School, Mary, and even Louisa, with a little additional schooling from Mary, at Notre Dame de Namur. Peabody had now opened yet a further store, his third, in the affluent suburb of West Roxbury. And she had settled more easily than she had expected into the marriage life, seldom a cross word between them, Lavelle, unlike many, remaining sober in manner. Mrs Brophy’s ‘pool of contentment’ continued to surround them, if not indeed deepen.

She thought that maybe the time was now right to try again some of Boston’s better establishments which had once refused her, given that they themselves were better consolidated now. But upsetting the arrangement with Peabody worried her.

‘We are too much in his hands already,’ was Lavelle’s view. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Peabody to go directly to Frontignac himself. What’s stopping him – except you?’ he added, teasingly.

She swiped at him with her apron. ‘You might be right, Lavelle,’ she teased back, ‘but underneath everything, Jacob is all business,’ adding more seriously, ‘he is at no risk financially. That is what’s stopping him. He doesn’t pay until he sells. Nobody else affords him that arrangement.’ She paused. ‘But if we are to give the same terms to enter business with others, then what little reserves we have will be strained. We will need to approach the banks – or R.G. Dun, the credit agents!’

‘Well we didn’t give it to Higgins …’ Lavelle started, referring to the customer he had secured while she was in Ireland; a steady, but not startling account. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t …’ he corrected himself, so as not to appear critical of her arrangement with Peabody. ‘The city is bursting at the seams. It cannot develop quickly enough. There is such wealth here that we can scarce go wrong by expansion, and without having to extend excessive credit,’ was Lavelle’s final word.

She told Peabody of their plan, reassuring him that they would not supply anybody within a certain radius of his own stores.

‘I wondered how long it would take you. Of course, you must expand – God forbid anything should happen to me!’ was all he said. ‘Come, sit now a while and we will discuss life, instead of business – all only business with you Irish,’ he mocked.

She was relieved at his generous response. There were times when Jacob seemed more interested in philosophy than profit, and she did love these discussions with him. He seemed to know so much, quoted freely from poem and psalm alike and had such seeming wisdom. How like her father he was in that respect. Yet, unlike the Máistir, Jacob never revealed much about himself; his defence to veer off into being flirtatious with her, if she probed too deeply. Not that he needed much excuse for that either.

Jacob, how did you come to know so much … of everything?’ She had decided to try some probing of her own. ‘Was it from your father or through schooling?’

‘Neither,’ he quipped, ‘but from gazing into the eyes of beauty. Much wisdom is to be found there.’ Then he turned it around, asking questions of her. ‘That song at your wedding – I was reminded of it again recently,’ he began. ‘The “Úna” in your song intrigues me. Love beyond death? Death in love? Which is it?’

She laughed; he always did this. ‘It is both … it depends,’ she answered vaguely.

‘On what?’

‘On the love, the lovers – you know that, Jacob!’

‘And is this love a common thing, do you think, or only in songs?’ he pressed.

‘It is uncommon. If it were common, it would not be written about.’ She tried to bring the discussion back within the framework of the song but Peabody was having none of it.

‘So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for the many and the other – great, tragic love – for the few. Is that it?’

She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody, the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.

‘Yes … I suppose so, Jacob,’ she parried.

‘What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?’

It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken of it to him on her return to Boston – about how she had shortened her name, dropped the ‘Rua’.

‘I don’t know, Jacob, and don’t call me by that name.’ She stamped out the words at him.

‘Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen … Rua?’ he repeated provocatively.

‘Of course I do!’ she said, angry that he still persisted with her old name. ‘Earth, wind, water, fire,’ she reeled them off.

He held up his hand. ‘Fire – that is it, the Element of Fire. That is what begets the difference, Ellen Rua.’

Sometimes he was hard to follow, the way his mind twisted and darted.

‘The Element of Fire? What on earth are you talking about, Jacob?’ she asked. ‘And I told you – it’s Ellen!’

He ignored her reprimand. ‘That is the difference between love for the many and love for the few – the Element of Fire,’ he answered, as if it were all self-evident. Then, seeing the look on her face, he continued, ‘Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and purifies, it engenders great passion … and it destroys.’ He paused, took her hand as if passing some irredeemable sentence on her.

‘You were named for fire, Ellen … Rua.’

The talk with Peabody had unsettled her. What was he at with such a statement? That she was named for fire, the element that destroys! Jacob was trying to bait her, to stir something in her. Maybe some tilt at Lavelle and herself? But why? While Peabody was dismissive about Lavelle, he was hardly suggesting that she didn’t love him, that it was merely a marriage of convenience? You never knew with Jacob. Sometimes she felt that if she were to encourage him, he would be quite willing to draw down the shutters, pull her into the storeroom, and fling her on to the nearest flour sack, or chest of tea from the Assam Valley.

He was capable too. More than once when he embraced her, he had pushed in close to her, so that even through her underskirt she could feel his ‘scythe-stone’. Whatever about Jacob’s ‘scythe-stone’, his mind was sharp and dangerous, always trying to cut through her thoughts, to lay them bare.

She didn’t speak to Lavelle about her discussion with Peabody except to say, ‘My fears were unfounded, Jacob was most generous at the news.’

‘I don’t trust him, Ellen; and neither should you,’ was Lavelle’s response.

‘He has always been upright in his dealings, give him some credit,’ she defended Jacob with.

‘It’s not in their nature, the Jews.’ Lavelle would give no ground to her argument. ‘While there’s money to be made, they’re trustworthy. When more is to be made elsewhere, then see how far their trustworthiness stretches,’ he challenged.

‘Lavelle, you can’t say that. They’re not all the same, no more than all the Irish are fighters and drunkards,’ she retorted.

But Lavelle was not for turning. ‘History teaches us – didn’t they betray the Saviour for thirty pieces of silver?’

‘That was just one, Judas,’ she responded.

‘Yes … His friend,’ Lavelle retorted. ‘Kissed Him and betrayed Him, and the rest – all Jews – stood by while it happened. How well the like of Peabody got started here. The wandering Jew will get in anywhere.’

‘Jacob was our saviour when –’ she started to protest, but he cut her short.

‘I know you and Peabody have talks, and I know, too, that at the start, he was our saviour, but he is too familiar in his talk with you, and,’ he added, ‘how he looks at you!’

So that was it. How could Lavelle possibly think that Jacob was a rival for his affections? Nevertheless, this side to him pleased her somewhat, and brought a small flush to her neck. She went to him, embraced him.

‘Oh! Lavelle, please stop it!’ she chided. ‘You know he looks at every woman under fifty years of age like that, it’s just his way. Jacob has never made any indecent approaches to me – yet,’ she teased.

He laughed with her, kissing her fiercely. ‘All I say is, beware the Judas kiss,’ was his final word.

Later, on her own, she raked over what had passed between them. She hated it when Lavelle got like this about Jacob and the Jews, as if he never saw the parallels with the wandering Irish, or the Irish who betrayed their own for the Queen’s shilling. She did remember her father telling her about the Jews, condemned to wander the world for ever because they had crucified the Son of God. How they were buried standing up, not like other people, laid out flat. Whatever was the reason for that? She had never doubted the Máistir’s teachings before. All those years growing up, all those years after his death, his voice had come to her, guided her like a beacon in times of trouble. Strange how here, under the shadow of Beacon Hill, he hardly ever spoke to her now. Had he deserted her?

Or, she wondered, had she deserted him?

She encountered the same problem as before with the Pendletons, Endecotts and the others – ‘the wine Whigs of Boston, old world Sassenachs’, as she described the merchants to Lavelle. Polite but definite ‘no thank yous’. They still wouldn’t deal with her because she was Irish; by definition, a Catholic. It must change, she thought. Some day, surely it must change. But it didn’t help her now in their hunt for new customers. She continued to search, now looking among their own – the coming Irish. Those who had ‘upped themselves’ out of the North End and into the South End, in the process forcing the second-generation Yankees to move onwards.

The palates of these burgeoning Irish middle-class now sought a little more refinement than Boston’s one thousand groggeries once supplied them with and still did to their less elevated countrymen. So, on a train journey to Dorchester, she found ‘Cornelius Ryan’s Emporium’, boasting ‘wines, whiskies and refined liquors’.

Ryan, a sly but affable Tipperary man – or ‘Tipp’rary’, as he pronounced it, had come to America before the exodus caused by the Great Famine. Like many he had started his first enterprise in the corner of a tenement basement. Things had obviously gone well for him.

He rolled his ‘r’s like the Scots and gave her an order for ‘half a crate of the “Bordelaux”’, putting back into that region the syllable previously denied to Tipp’rary. She thought it a peculiar twist of his speaking but didn’t correct him. ‘Till I see how it goes … and half of the white too – you can put them all in the one box,’ he added.

Riding back to the city to the sound of steel on steel, she wondered why she wasn’t more excited about finding this new outlet. When she and Lavelle had first started she would have been beside herself to have found a new customer, any customer. Now it didn’t seem to matter an awful lot to her. But it should have. She let her thoughts wander far from Tipp’rary and Cornelius Ryan.

What she loved on such journeys was the way you could lose yourself in the sway of the train. Fix your gaze on everything, your mind on nothing; let the world swirl by. It was a wondrous thing, the way the trains were going everywhere, pushing out further and further, finding out America. Far from trains she grew up – many’s the day barefooted, going over the bent mountainy roads and back again – twice or three times the length of these train journeys in and out of Boston – it not even bothering her.

Everything was so easy here, once you got a foot on the ladder. Neither she, nor the children, wanted for a thing. No mountain roads, no bare feet. Theirs was a secure and comfortable existence and showed every sign of remaining so. Strange how everything had worked out well in the end, if she could call it that – without Michael and Katie and Annie – but it had. It surely had.

She was no longer one of the potato Irish; nor would her children be singled out as such. What harm if in Boston’s public schools her son had to recite the Protestant Ten Commandments and the Protestant Our Father? Or read the King James Bible that he was made to bring home for the ‘edification of your family’, as the Headmaster of Eliot School had so delicately put it. It was all much of a muchness to her. ‘Bishop John’, as the Catholic prelate of Boston was familiarly called, could rant and rail against Anti-Popery all he liked. In the end it didn’t make one ‘Amen’ of difference. She had always maintained it was ‘how you came into the world and how you went out of it’ that mattered. Even to be born hard and bred hard, if, in the end, you died easy – in the grace of God – wasn’t that it? And it was the same, she thought, for black, as for white, for heathen, as for Christian, for Sassenach, as for Jew. The main thing was to see that her children got a good education, Catholic or Protestant. To ready them for this life – and the next.

One evening while reading, waiting for Lavelle to come in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside. Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt, sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched at the windowpane, her withered finger bent against the glass. The sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old woman was gone.

The woman was so frail of limb, that she reminded Ellen of those poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. ‘No use thinking of all that now, is there?’ she said to herself, before closing the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe got frightened and took off.

‘Too much reading, agitating the mind,’ Lavelle had brushed it off with when he had come in later.