Academy Street Read online

  4

  AFTER THREE YEARS, Tess’s schooling comes to an abrupt end. Maeve has gone to train as a teacher at Carysfort Training College in Dublin and money is scarce. But that is not all. During the summer Tess spends six weeks away from home, helping Evelyn following the birth of her third child. From the strain of housework and care of Evelyn’s babies she is tired all the time. By nightfall she is weak and every breath she takes is a painful stab. She develops a cough which so alarms Evelyn that the doctor is summoned.

  It is not mentioned, TB, but it is what everyone fears. At the convent, girls would mysteriously disappear, to return six months later, or not at all. Though it has never been said, it is, she suspects, what caused her mother’s death. It is why her mother’s room was fumigated and why they were all tested.

  She has pleurisy, not TB. Nevertheless she must spend three months in the fever hospital in Galway. Her spirits sink when she enters the ward of thin pale-faced women. She settles into her bed and looks out at the windless day, time stretching before her. A flock of starlings rises and blackens the sky. A memory of home, and then of school, materialises. At that moment she understands and begins to mourn what is lost. Exhausted, she lies down and looks up at the ceiling, waiting for her lungs to dry up and quieten. Later, rested, she seeks out books. The hospital library consists of two shelves of ancient-looking paperbacks at the end of a corridor. The Lives of the Saints, Romeo and Juliet, The Red and the Black, The World of Plants. She reads them all. She counts the days until Denis and Claire and her father come to visit. Then, when they come, there is not much said and the visit is soon over. When they leave she stands at the window looking down at patients shuffling around the grounds.

  The patients are mainly from the city. But there is one boy, Tony, a shy loping teenager—almost a man—who is from the country. He is tall—nearly too tall—and hangs his head and has large agricultural hands. She feels a pull to him and senses his pull too, and more and more her thoughts turn to him. But then one evening something happens: a commotion arises at the back of the common room. A woman squeals. There is a rat. She catches a glimpse of a long creature—brown-and-white like the piebald horse the tinkers keep—with a tail as long as the body and a belly that grazes the floor, darting along, disappearing into a hole in the corner. Tony—his eyes wild—is lunging after it, intent, and then he bends and inserts his long middle finger into the hole after the rat. Again and again, he thrusts his finger in to the hilt, poking, jiggling it around, frantically trying to get at the rat.

  On her return home, she slips back into life at Easterfield, into the rounds of housework and the comings and goings on the farm, under the roof with her father and brothers and Claire, and Mike Connolly. Though she herself does not feel delicate, the word attaches to her, and she is spared from heavy tasks and farm work. She begins to mark events—the births of Evelyn’s children, Oliver leaving the national school, her father’s £200 win on the Sweepstakes, the arrival of electricity. In the dark corner under the back stairs she writes these dates on the distempered wall. When she is eighteen Denis teaches her to drive and, from then on, she regularly drives her father to fairs and funerals. One hot summer’s day, with Maeve home on holidays from her teaching job in Dublin, they drive their father to the sheep fair in the town, leaving him to his business among the pens and carts and dealers. They browse the shops for an hour, and then, flushed and giddy and parched with the thirst, they enter the hotel in the square. In the carpeted lounge off the hall they stand at the bar and order two glasses of orange and turn to find their father sitting with a group of men in the corner, talking and drinking and haggling over prices. When he sees them his face darkens. He does not acknowledge them, or even glance at them later when they leave. On the way home his fuming silence fills the car. Inside the house, he breaks out. They have no shame entering a public bar like that, sitting up on high stools with men watching them. Like street walkers. Laughing and streecing and making a show of themselves. Making a show of him. ‘How is it at all that things are always going against me?’

  He is full of aggravation. They have learned not to respond to his barging, his oppressive silence, his sighing. They have each, in their separate ways, learned how to read him, how to evade his wrath, how to gauge when his guard is down and they might seek advantage. Over the summer the three sisters, with Denis at the wheel, drive to dances organised by the Pioneer Association or the Ploughing Association and to carnivals held in marquees in local towns. Always, the next morning there is an inquisition. Who did ye meet? Who did ye talk to? Were the Burkes there? Tess lets the others answer. She remembers the men lined up on one side of the dance floor and the women on the other. She danced with every man who asked her, not because she wished to, but because she sensed something of the dread that these hopeful anxious men had endured just to ask, and the awful humiliation they would suffer if she refused.

  Out of the blue, a letter arrives from their mother’s sister Molly, in America, inviting Claire to come out. At first Tess thinks it is a holiday invitation. But the word, and the image of the place, America, evoke a feeling of exile and eternal loneliness. In the weeks following, as the practicalities are worked out—Molly secures a job for Claire at the Bell Telephone Company where she herself works—and the departure date is set, a feeling of dread falls on Tess.

  She does not go with Denis and Oliver and their father to see Claire off at Cobh. She does not want to possess a memory of that parting. The feeling that everything good in her life is now vanishing is too much to bear. She sits in the quiet of the house all morning. She takes down notepaper and envelopes and writes to the only two hospitals in Dublin whose names she has ever heard of. In neat handwriting she states her eagerness to train as a nurse. She gives details of her education and asserts her suitability for the profession. My late mother was a nurse and I would like to continue the family tradition in this vocation.

  A month before her twentieth birthday she receives a letter from the Mater Hospital offering her a place as a trainee nurse, pending an interview, character references and the payment of a fee. On a September morning she boards the train at Woodlawn Station and is ferried across the country, into the unknown. Somewhere in the midlands the sky darkens and the train slows to a halt in the middle of nowhere. There is an eerie silence in the carriage. Suddenly a fork of lightning cuts the sky in two. With her heart crossways she watches the lighted sky as each angry flash erupts and dazzles and disappears.

  She resides in the Nurses’ Home among other girls from the country. Every morning she dons her starched uniform and white shoes and goes on duty. In the evenings she attends classes. She is eager, and learns quickly, in both theory and practice. At night she sits on her bed poring over her textbooks, occasionally startled by a siren in the streets outside. She writes to her father every fortnight and to Claire in New York almost every week. On her days off she walks along O’Connell Street, gazing in shop windows, occasionally entering Clerys to buy nylons or a cardigan and once, during their winter sale, a herringbone tweed coat with a fur collar and cuffs. She goes to the cinema with a girl from Cork, but mostly avoids social gatherings and nights out. The shyness she feels among others, and the terrible need to fit in, cause her such anxiety that when the evening arrives the prospect of going among people renders her immobile, disabled, sometimes physically sick. Whenever possible, she opts for night duty, the low lights and the hush of the w
ard offering the closest thing to solitude available in a working life. When she meets the gaze of an attractive young doctor at a patient’s bedside she blushes and averts her eyes, longing to respond with a flirtatious smile or remark, like the other girls do. She joins the library at Phibsborough, borrows two novels each week, goes for walks along the city streets and down by the river. One day, on Townsend Street, she stands at the entrance to a new building that houses a swimming pool and reads a notice for swimming classes. She has an image of herself cutting a swathe, a solitary furrow, through still blue water. During the two years of her training, and afterwards as a ward nurse, she is warm and polite with her colleagues, but fails to form one lasting friendship.

  Occasionally, on a Saturday when she is off duty, she meets up with Maeve, in from her digs in Blackrock, and the two sisters stroll around the city. Once, in February, as they walk along the footpath outside the GPO, a street photographer appears before them and takes their picture. They are walking arm in arm, both in fashionable tweed coats and pointed black shoes. Later when Tess looks at herself in the photograph she sees for the first time what others must see—a young woman with a nice enough face and smiling eyes—something that does not accord with the image of herself she carries within. She places the photograph in an envelope and writes a note and addresses it to Claire, care of her aunt Molly’s, 731 West 183rd Street, New York. She looks at the address for a long time. 183rd Street. She says it aloud. She sees Claire there, sitting in a chair. She feels something, a streaming across, at that moment.

  With each trip back to Easterfield, changes accrue. Captain is gone. He slunk from the shadows on his belly one day and lay under the wheel of the car as it entered the yard. Often, she replays this image in her mind and remembers his small black eyes gazing into hers on those nights when she took him up to her room. Mike Connolly returned to his own people in Connemara, too old and ill now—and no longer needed—to endure the labour or fulfil the duties he had performed at Easterfield for nearly thirty-five years.

  Oliver, more than anyone, has changed. He is tall and handsome with a shock of blond hair and mischievous blue eyes—so different from Denis’s dark brooding looks. You will charm the birds in the trees, she tells him. And your beauty will cast a spell, she thinks. He has learnt to drive. He takes the car out at night to pubs and dances, indicating a certain wildness of character that is not ordinarily tolerated in Easterfield but to which, somehow, her father turns a blind eye. Tess slips into her old ways with her father when she is back—an attitude of reverence, obedient service, meekness. She has seen him age. One night in the kitchen a memory surfaces. It is, she thinks, her first memory of him. She is no more than two or three years old and she is in his arms, being lifted high onto the back of a horse. She is terrified and starts to cry and he lifts her down, then holds her against his warm face.

  A peaceful lull falls on the kitchen and she looks at him. ‘Will I cut your hair?’ she asks. He turns his head towards her, and she waits to be denounced. He looks at her, baffled, stunned, as if he has suddenly found himself somewhere else. His chin begins to quiver, and he looks down. She is flooded with tender feelings for him. She sees for the first time all he has endured. Holding things together, holding himself together, poised, always, to defend against a new catastrophe. She gets up and lays a towel on his shoulders and begins to cut his hair. Neither of them says a word. She is moved by his silent acquiescence. Gently she takes each strand and cuts, the sound of the scissors in the air between them, the hair falling to the floor. And his sorrow, for all that is lost, lying silent within him.

  PART TWO

  5

  LATE IN THE summer of ’62 Tess flew on a TWA flight from Shannon Airport to New York. Before she left that morning her father handed her a £50 note, and then shook her hand formally, awkwardly. Denis and Maeve, and Evelyn in a hat and pregnant again, sat into the car. As they drove away Tess looked back at the house, her eyes lingering on the upstairs windows, then out at the land. Halfway down the avenue, Denis stopped the car to get something from the boot. She turned her head to the lone ash tree among the beeches and saw, for the first time, a band of barbed wire embedded in the trunk, the flesh forced to grow over the spikes in pained little folds and swellings. Denis sat in and they drove on. How had she missed this before? Who had done it? This was Lohan land, a Lohan tree. So, a Lohan hand.

  At the airport the summer wind gusted and blew Evelyn’s hat off and she ran after it, and they all laughed. This will be my memory, she thought. As they parted they threw holy water on her and she blessed herself. Denis looked down, his long arms hanging, and she remembered the injured ash again.

  Before the take-off, she grew frantic. The plane roared down the runway and she bent her head. It was not flying she feared, but dying. When the wheels lifted and the plane began to climb she pressed her fingers to her ears. Then she remembered the date: 15th August, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven, and her heart began to quell. God would not let a plane crash on Our Lady’s feast day. She began to fill up with trust, like a child newly assured. The roar of the engine eased and the plane levelled and in a while she opened her eyes. They were in upper Earth. They had broken through into the blue. Dazzling light. Glorious. For a moment all thoughts ceased and there was this: a glimpse, a proximity, a feeling of being a fraction of a second away from something pure and sublime, a hair’s breadth from the divine. And then it was gone, the clarity, the fleeting elation, and she looked up and saw the other passengers sitting there reading, sleeping or in quiet contemplation.

  Claire’s husband, Peter, a tall handsome Irish-American, was waiting at Idlewild Airport. Shyly she climbed into his car and he whisked her up to Peekskill on the Hudson where they had taken a summer house. Everything was different—the highway, the sky, the distant forests. The vast country, green and clean and perfect. The trucks thundering past with huge chrome wheels and invisible drivers high up in cabs. For a while she forgot where she was. The trees are juniper, Peter said. His teeth were white and gleaming. Juniper, she said to herself. Beautiful word, beautiful trees. They stopped at a turnpike and paid a toll, just to use the road.

  There, on the front lawn of a low-slung villa above the river, stood Claire, a small child at her feet, another one inside her. Unable to utter a word, they embraced. When they drew away, there were tears in each other’s eyes. Their aunt Molly was there, up from the city to welcome Tess, a large buoyant woman with a shock of white frizzy hair. They moved to the back yard. Later, Peter’s extended family came by and he lit the barbeque and poured drinks and everyone milled around the pool. Outside, on the street, big American cars floated by. In the hours and days that followed, Tess would sometimes look around at the kids and the cars and the pool, at the picture windows and the sun-drenched world she had tumbled into. Once or twice she remembered home, Evelyn’s hat and the injured ash. And then forgot them. In the evening the crickets sang. Peter came up behind Claire, stroked her back, gazed tenderly at her swollen belly. This is what he has done to her, Tess thought. This act of love, of sex, on her sister. In a book, once, she had come on the words fruit of my loins. She remembered the nights she had climbed into Claire’s bed and slept in her arms. They looked at each other now. In the look was an acknowledgement, a declaration, an affirmation that everything was finally settled, and the lives being lived here were the right ones, the ideal lives.

  Slowly, in the months t
hat followed, Tess tuned to the frequency of the city, to the accents and the street-grid and the subway, to the black faces on the sidewalk, the sirens at night, the five-and-ten-cent stores teeming with goods, and buildings that rose up daily from gaps in the streets. The new words too—pocket-book, meatloaf, lima beans, Jell-O. The taste of coffee, the clothes so lovely and cheap and slim-fitting. The abundance of everything.

  In September she started work at the Presbyterian Medical Hospital on East 68th Street, and in the early weeks walked the long corridors every day shadowing her seniors, pushing medicine carts, taking blood, listening, learning, delivering all that was expected of her as things came at her, and her heart beat hard. Unconsciously, she adjusted her accent to be understood, and altered her handwriting until it attained the grace and slant of American script. She sat by herself in the cafeteria. The pall of loneliness that accompanied her from her aunt’s apartment each morning and which was briefly eclipsed by her duties lowered itself again. At night in the apartment she studied for her nursing accreditation or sat in the living room with Molly and Molly’s other boarder—a German man in his sixties, named Fritz—with the fan whirring and I Love Lucy or The Jack Paar Show on TV. When the audience laughed, she felt herself apart, among strangers. Exhausted, homesick, she went to bed and recited the Rosary and afterwards lay tense and sleepless for a long time under a cotton sheet. She woke after what seemed like mere minutes to the squeal of a garbage truck on the street below and the vague anxiety that she always experienced at dawn brimming up again.

  Fritz was a machinist in a factory downtown. In the apartment he fetched and fixed things and on Fridays carried home the shopping from the Safeway store on 183rd Street. On Saturday nights he and Molly sat in the living room, drinking—he, small shots, she, highballs of whiskey. On weekday evenings all three of them sat at the table and ate pot-roast or gammon steak and sweet potato. Afterwards Fritz and Tess washed up, and then Fritz tuned the radio to a jazz station for the night. One night as he turned the dial she caught a snatch of a song she recognised, and, in its beat, briefly forgot herself, until she became aware of Fritz’s eyes on her. The next evening he came in and handed her a box. ‘This is for you,’ he said, in his sad accent. Inside was a new transistor radio. The kettle on the stove began to sing. She saw the jets of flame underneath, their fragile blue beauty, and when she looked up at Fritz she was overcome by a memory of home and Mike Connolly.