Whitethorn Woods Read online

  ‘I believe that David upset her today.’

  ‘She didn’t say, Mr Harris.’

  But I knew in my heart that David had made her uneasy, her face had shown great alarm when he was droning on about some place over in Ireland with a wishing wood or a magic well or something. I can read Helen’s face like a book. The nurse was impassive.

  She saw and heard everything but said very little.

  I had to know.

  ‘Did she mention anything? Anything at all?’ I knew I sounded unhinged but I had to know if that boy had made her anxious. Now at the very, very end.

  ‘No, no, she told me only of you bringing in champagne for her wedding anniversary.’

  Mercedes was looking at Helen in the bed as if she might still hear in spite of all the medication.

  So it hadn’t turned her whole world around in the fear that her long secret would be discovered. I could breathe again.

  I asked could I sit with her alone. Apparently not. She was to be watched all night. They were worried about her chest.

  ‘Please, Mercedes, I want to talk to her when she wakes,’ I begged.

  ‘Mr Harris, when she wakes I will move across the room and you can talk to her where I don’t hear you,’ she said.

  And that’s what I did – sat by her bed for two hours, stroking her thin white hand.

  They must expect her to die today or tomorrow if there was a twenty-four-hour watch arranged.

  Then she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  ‘I thought you were at dinner.’ Her words came out with difficulty.

  ‘I was, it was wonderful,’ I said.

  I told her we talked about lots of things: that everyone was very happy, and I was happiest of all. I reported Grace telling us that David said, wasn’t it odd that Grace had dark eyes while we were both fair and I told him how my father had dark eyes too. Black as soot, so I told Grace that she must have got them from him. And Mummy had agreed and even added that Grace could also have got the dark eyes from Helen’s side of the family. It was just that we didn’t know them. So David had agreed. And shrugged and gone on to something else.

  Helen looked at me long and hard. ‘You still don’t like him,’ she croaked at me.

  ‘I do,’ I lied.

  ‘You can’t fool me, James, we never lied to each other, not once, remember?’

  ‘I know.’

  And then I told her the last lie.

  ‘I don’t really dislike him, my darling. It’s just that I love my little girl so much nobody will ever be good enough for her. She’s my daughter, my flesh and blood: nothing can make me think any other man will make her happy like we did.’

  And Helen’s smile was wonderful. I could have looked at it for ever but something changed in her face and Mercedes was about to go for the Sister.

  Before she left the room she said to me: ‘You are a wonderful man, Mr Harris, you made her very happy by what you said.’ And even though it’s utterly ridiculous – when you come to think of it – I felt for a moment that she knew our secret. That she knew all about Grace.

  But, of course, that’s not possible.

  Helen would never have told her.

  Not in a million years.

  CHAPTER 10

  June’s Birthday

  Part 1 – June

  Well, it was obvious from the word go, wasn’t it? I was going to be sixteen on 16 June and my name was June. Where else would we go except to Dublin for Bloomsday? It was going to be a magic day, she said.

  I didn’t really believe in magic days but she was so excited about it that she told everyone she met. ‘My daughter’s going to be Sweet Sixteen on the day that Leopold Bloom met Molly.’ Most people hadn’t an idea what she was talking about, but when has that ever stopped Mom?

  The planning began almost a year in advance, with hours on the Internet looking for good-value tickets and low-cost accommodation. I swear we must be the only Irish Americans who don’t seem to have any relatives in Ireland. I really don’t know what Mom did with all her family. Alienate them, maybe. Talked too fancy about how well we were all doing across the Atlantic – which was far from true.

  She had been born in this place called Rossmore, miles from anywhere. But most of the family had gone to live in Dublin. Over the years we had prised this much out of her. When she was a child she used to play in these woods and they all went to a holy well to pray for husbands.

  ‘Was it a real wishing well?’ I asked.

  It had delivered my papa to Mom as a result so she obviously didn’t think much of it. Apparently people went there to this day.

  Mom had lived in Ireland until she was eleven, for heaven’s sake, she must have had some cousins, friends, aunts, uncles. There hadn’t been another potato famine since then to wipe them all out or anything. Why couldn’t we be normal and go and stay with them?

  Oh, no use asking Mom! She would shrug and flutter and say everything was so difficult these days, what with everyone being dispersed and all over the place. But it was never clear who had gone and where and why. It always seemed to me that we were the only ones who had left, everyone else had stayed.

  No point in trying to pin Mom down, asking her serious questions. She knew nothing about Rossmore, and didn’t really remember her years in Dublin. She brushed it all away, and became more vague and restless and anxious.

  It was like mentioning dates and ages and things. It always made Mom uneasy and in the end wasn’t really worth it. Mom is forty-four. She says to everyone around here that she is thirty-five, which means that she was meant to be eighteen when she had me and only seventeen when she got pregnant. I don’t know how that leaves time for all the college education she says she had, in places far from here where all the co-eds and sorority friends once lived. But it’s better not to ask.

  I see my papa twice a year when he comes east. He is Italian, very over-excitable, married again and has two little boys. He shows me photographs and calls them my half-brothers. He doesn’t meet Mom when he comes to collect me and take me to the motel where he stays. If she’s at home she watches from the window upstairs. But she’s usually at work. People who sell water features and garden pools are at work all the time, it would appear.

  Papa is no help when I ask him about things back in Ireland.

  ‘Don’t ask, Junie, don’t ask, you just get a different story every time,’ he would beg me.

  ‘But, Papa, you must know something, I mean, when you and she got married weren’t there guests from Ireland at the wedding?’

  ‘A few, but, hey, Junie, you don’t want to look back on the past, look to the future, I always say.’

  He was about to show me the pictures of my half-brothers again so I headed him off at the pass.

  ‘Okay, this birthday I’m having in Dublin. Did you meet any of Mom’s relatives when you were in Dublin?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said.

  ‘But why? She met all yours when you went to Italy, didn’t she?’

  ‘I never went to Dublin, June honey,’ Papa said. ‘I always wanted to but we didn’t go there. Apparently your mom’s grandpa and her father had words one day. Bad words, and her father was a proud young man, so he took his family off to the United States and wouldn’t let anyone give a backward look.’

  ‘But wasn’t that all years ago, Papa?’ I was bewildered that any row on earth could go on this long.

  ‘Oh, you know the way things snowball, they just grow,’ Papa said, forgiving everyone as usual.

  ‘But when Mom’s father died, when Grandpa was gone, couldn’t it have been made up then?’

  ‘Perhaps she felt it would be disloyal to her father’s memory. Anyway I never got to see the place, Rossmore, or Dublin. So I’m no help to you.’ Papa shrugged.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it, Papa,’ I promised.

  ‘Gina and I are giving you a camera for your birthday, June. Take pictures of everything you see and show them to me next visit. You’ll have a great trip.
Honey, your mom will be so proud of you whoever you meet. She’ll show you a really good time.’ He is so good, Papa is, wants everyone to like everyone else.

  I could feel sudden tears in my eyes.

  ‘You never really told me why you and Mom broke up?’ I began without much hope that I’d hear anything.

  ‘Oh well, you know, these things happen, they’re nobody’s fault,’ he said with a big smile. ‘And you know, Junie, nothing was ever gained by looking back. We’ll look ahead, to your wonderful trip to Ireland and then one day you’ll come out to the Midwest to see your little half-brothers and …’

  I owed him some support. ‘I’d love to meet Gina, Papa, and get to know little Marco and Carlo,’ I said and saw his face light up that I had said their names.

  ‘How was your father?’ Mom’s voice was clipped and strained. It had obviously not been a good day selling garden pools. I longed to tell her how kind and generous he was, so open to hearing good news from every quarter. But it wasn’t worth it, not if it made her restless and upset. So, like Papa had given in all those years ago about not visiting Dublin, I gave in too and said very little.

  ‘He was nice.’ I shrugged. ‘Didn’t have much to say.’

  ‘He never had,’ Mom said, pleased. And she was humming a little tune as she went to get out the big file of info about our trip. The file she had labelled ‘June Sixteen’ in big green felt-tip pen letters.

  ‘What will you do there?’ they asked me at school. I didn’t know how to answer for I simply didn’t know what we were going to do. But unlike Mom I didn’t care what they thought I was going to do.

  ‘Will there be a party there for you?’ my friend Suzi asked.

  I said I didn’t know – there might, as a surprise; there might not.

  I’d have a party anyway when we came back. I was hoping we would go to this place Rossmore where there was a wishing well, but I wouldn’t mention it to my mom until we got there. The only thing I knew we were going to do on 16 June was to go on this James Joyce walking tour. Mom had signed us into this group.

  We were to begin out on the coast at a tower, and go to a museum, then have a huge breakfast of kidneys and liver and things, and then go into Dublin City on a little train. It sounded weird but my mom hadn’t been happier for a long time so that was good. Anyway after all the fussing, the packing, unpacking and repacking of suitcases, the day came and we went to Dublin.

  The flight was crowded, and the bargain economy hotel was okay – not great, just okay. And the stores were all small compared to at home, and the money was different, and I kept asking Mom did she remember it all or even anything about it, and she said she didn’t really know, it was all so long ago.

  ‘Not so long, Mom, you’re only thirty-five, remember?’ I said and for once she didn’t rise to it.

  ‘I feel a hundred and thirty-five compared to all the young faces I see around me here, this has turned into a country of teenagers,’ Mom grumbled. Her face looked tired and anxious. I decided not to tease her any more.

  ‘You look as good as any of the youngsters, Mom, really you do.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, June, you have a lot of your father’s Italian optimism in you, I will say that.’

  ‘And what about the O’Leary side of the family? Do I have any of that?’ I asked. It was walking on egg-shells but if I couldn’t mention them in their own home town, where and when could I bring their unspoken name up?

  ‘Mercifully, no,’ she said. ‘They forget everything but the grudges.’

  ‘Is that why we won’t see them?’ I was as brave as a lion.

  ‘They are strange people, those O’Learys. We all came originally from this one-horse town called Rossmore and settled in Dublin. Then I’m afraid words were said in a house on the North Circular Road.’ My mom’s voice was clipped. ‘But let’s get back to Joyce.’

  She had arranged that we see the doorway of number 7, Eccles Street, which she said was the most famous address in English literature, and we could go to Davy Byrne’s; on the way there we could familiarise ourselves with some Joycean culture and be prepared before the great tour on Bloomsday itself.

  ‘You do know what it’s all about, June?’ Mom fretted.

  I did.

  One Thursday in June 1904 a whole lot of Dubliners went walkabout and kept meeting each other and criss-crossing and somehow even though it was only a fictional story it sort of drove everyone mad, and now they all dress up and do it again every year. I’d have preferred to do a tour of Dublin looking for my cousins, the real-life O’Learys, myself. But that wasn’t on offer.

  On Bloomsday, my birthday day, the city was in fancy dress. They were all dressed like Edwardians in boater hats and tottering on fancy old-fashioned cycles – it was half silly and half fun. I tried to be like my father and see the good side of it all. I tried to be like my friend Suzi who sees every gathering as a source of magnificent and yet undiscovered boyfriends. I tried to take my embarrassed gaze away from my mom who was being deeply foolish, showing off her very limited Joycean knowledge to all the others on the tour. We went from place to place and everywhere there were press people taking pictures of it all and camera teams. Eventually a girl with a microphone who was doing interviews for a radio programme came over to me and asked me some questions.

  I told her it was my sixteenth birthday, that I was called June Arpino, half Italian, half Irish, and yes, I did know a bit about James Joyce and I was fairly interested in the tour but that actually I’d prefer to find my cousins the O’Learys.

  The reporter was a nice girl with big dark eyes and a friendly manner and seemed interested in my story. Why did I not know where my cousins were?

  I told her that they came to Dublin originally from a place called Rossmore miles away in the country. Words had been said, I explained, at a wedding thirty-three years ago in a house on the North Circular Road. My mom had gone to America with her parents shortly after that. Maybe even because of that.

  She was really so fascinated about everything I said, this interviewer was, so I told her that I was just reasonably interested in what had happened to Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom and Molly a hundred years ago, but I told her that truthfully I was really much more interested in what had happened to the O’Learys thirty-three years ago and did any of them remember my mom, and was there any chance that the words that had been said that day could possibly be forgotten by now.

  She seemed very pleased with this conversation and asked me afterwards for the address of the bargain economy hotel. She told me that it had been a pleasure talking to me and that she wished me good luck, she said sixteen was a great age to be and who knew what could happen before the day was over. I didn’t expect all that much to happen actually, just more of the tour, but Mom was having a good time and told everyone that it was my sixteenth birthday.

  But it was an okay day. They were nice people on the tour – Swedes and Germans and fellow Americans. They bought me ice creams, they got photos taken with me. My mom smiled all day long. When we paused at the Joyce Centre and bought postcards I sent two to my half-brothers Marco and Carlo. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, not a bit, but it would cheer them and Papa and Gina.

  Then it was over and we went back to the bargain economy hotel. Mom’s feet were very tired, she said she would soak them in cologne before we went out somewhere for my birthday pizza. When we went in the door everyone at the desk was very excited.

  They had been having phone calls and messages all day. Never had this bargain economy hotel had such attention. Dozens of people called O’Leary, saying that they were originally from Rossmore and more recently from the North Circular Road, had been looking for us for hours now, and there were a dozen numbers for us to ring. Some of them were in the bar already having a reunion and they wanted to give June Arpino a sixteenth birthday she would never forget.

  I looked at my mom in terror. I had done the unforgivable. I had got in touch with people who had Said Words.

&n
bsp; I had also, by saying she had left Ireland thirty-three years ago, admitted on Irish radio how old she was. This was as bad as it could get.

  Amazingly though, there do seem to be magic days.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about words all day,’ Mom said. ‘Joyce was all about words when you come to think of it. Some words are worth remembering for a hundred years, some are worth forgetting much sooner. Come on, June, let’s go meet your cousins,’ she said and led me to the bar.

  Part 2 – Lucky O’Leary

  Well, I know it’s a ludicrous name, but tell me how to get rid of it. I mean, you can’t ring a bell and say from now on I am to be known as Clare or Anna or Shelley or something you’d like to be called. But no. It’s always been Lucky, and it will always be Lucky O’Leary. That’s my curse.

  My parents called me Lucretia after an old aunt who had money. She didn’t leave them any so it was useless, but Dad always called me his little Lucky because he thought Lucretia was too much to saddle a child with, no matter how great the inheritance might be.

  You should have heard the way they used to tease me at school about it.

  If I got a bad mark for an essay, if I didn’t know the answer when the maths teacher pounced on me, or if I missed a pass in hockey, someone always said, ‘Not so lucky, Lucky, now,’ as if it was the first time I had ever heard it in my life.

  Anyway, I was far from lucky in my hopes of going to work for the summer in a diner in New York. You’d think they’d have been pleased. I didn’t want to go and get smashed and have sex with everyone out in a Mediterranean resort like half my class at school wanted to do when we finished our exams. I didn’t want a big expensive university career that would bankrupt them. I wasn’t asking for my fare out to a place that they would consider wild and dangerous.

  All I wanted to do was to wear white socks and support shoes and a pink gingham dress in Manhattan. I wanted to serve pancakes and maple syrup; I wanted to put eggs ‘over easy’ framed with hash browns in front of the customers. And for them to say, ‘Hi, Lucky.’