1921 Read online

  Fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. A salt-rimed ling or cod drying hard as wood on a pole by the fireplace. Sufficient to put a person off eating fish forever.

  The Last Rites. The Removal of the Remains: a somber communal march to the church behind the coffin. The Funeral: old women keening like banshees. Thirty days later, the Month’s Mind. Frequent obligatory visits to the graveyard thereafter. Every anniversary of every death commemorated. Grief continually renewed while the joys of life were stifled.

  On Sundays, even the rope-and-plank swings in the schoolyard were tied up to prevent any accidental pleasure.

  Like all good Irish Catholic mothers, Hannah Mooney aspired to giving one or more sons to the priesthood. On the day of his birth in 1891, her third son, Noel, was chosen for this privilege. He was given the largest potato and the extra quilt for his bed, and exempted from the sibling rivalry encouraged between his older brothers. In spite of these advantages, Noel could not stay out of trouble. When the family moved to Limerick in 1899, every constable in the area soon knew him as “that wild Mooney lad.” Bold words painted on fences and tin cans tied to dogs’ tails were a specialty.

  No one but his mother expected Noel to become a priest.

  Then, on his nineteenth birthday, a local carpenter’s daughter informed him that he was about to become a father after all. “Not priestly, but biological,” Henry had quipped.

  Mrs. Mooney was not amused. “Why’ve ye done this to me?” she shrieked at her youngest son. In floods of tears she had retired to her room and locked the door. The house rang with her adjurations to God. The morning before the hasty wedding she had emerged to announce that little Alice would join the Sisters of Mercy as soon as she was old enough. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

  The child herself was not consulted.

  Alice going into the convent meant Pauline would have to stay at home and take care of their mother until one of them died. Like generations before her, she was to be sacrificed on the pyre of duty. If Pauline had married, the sacrifice would have been demanded of Henry—but he had escaped. His mother unwittingly had driven him away.

  DURING their childhood Hannah Mooney had regaled her brood with the story of their origins. “Me Mam was only a few skips off the bog,” she was fond of recalling, “and me Da was a mountainy man what could turn his hand to anything. He worked all the hours God sends. Everything we had he made for us, from the table we et on to the shoes on our feet, and to make a few shillings he mended carts and wagons as well.

  “When I was near grown, Da was hired to do a job of work on a great lord’s estate on the Shannon. A job with wages every week, it was, so we left Tipperary to live in Clare. One day Da took me with him to the blacksmith to have some carriage wheels bound in iron. That’s where I first saw John Mooney. He come from the old stock and there was some Welsh in him, too. But he was only a smith’s apprentice when I met him. Sure didn’t he look like a young king, though, with the forge light on his face and the great arms of him? ‘I’ll have that,’ says I. And I did. By the time we married he had a forge of his own and the respect of every man in the parish, including me da.”

  Hannah, who had fully expected her eldest son to follow in his father’s footsteps, was dismayed when Henry showed no aptitude for smithing. He could not hammer iron to a shape no matter how he tried. Bernard was good with tools; Henry was interested in people. What Noel, the youngest, was interested in, no one knew.

  When Henry left school, he had taken the first job he was offered, as a printer’s devil with the Limerick Leader newspaper. He began work in the heavy country brogues, shabby serge trousers, and collarless shirt he had worn as a schoolboy. The brogues cramped his feet and the trousers were too short, but when he suggested new ones his mother said, “Wait till they wear out completely, same as your father did. There’s no call for you to put on airs.”

  The official job of a printer’s devil was to carry used lead type back to the hellbox to be melted down again. He also served as a dogsbody for everyone in the office. Henry fetched sandwiches and whiskey, cleaned muddy shoes, took letters to the post office, made excuses to wives when their husbands were working late and collected those same husbands from the pub when they needed collecting. Equipped with a battered bicycle, the ubiquitous form of transport for able-bodied Irishmen, he learned to wobble along with a drunken reporter precariously perched on the crossbar.

  Henry’s hours were long and his pay meager.

  He was blissfully happy.

  Compared to the stifling piety of his mother’s house, the rough-and-ready camaraderie of the newspaper was like a window opened to the world. Newspapermen knew something about everything and loved showing off their stock of information. To Henry’s delight, they were also profane. Good Irish Catholic boys were never profane—not within earshot of their mothers.

  “Christ on crooked crutches!” Henry began muttering on occasion, or “Great God’s garters!” Feeling daring and liberated. His expletives were extremely mild compared to those he heard every day, but they were of his own devising.

  Best of all, newspapermen talked about sex. Like Henry, they had been raised according to the harsh Catholic morality that taught that sex was something vile, and rendered many Irish men and women celibate even in marriage. But the men at the Leader appeared to have thrown off this handicap. From their conversation Henry gleaned tidbits of information that set his senses reeling.

  On Saturdays his mother met him at the door with her hand outstretched for his weekly pay packet. The money did not overcome Hannah’s reverse snobbery, however. “Them newspaper people don’t know what work is,” she asserted. “Not like me da or Mr. Mooney.” When the Limerick Leader promoted Henry to reporter, Hannah’s response was, “No good comes from getting above your station.”

  With his first promotion Henry began quietly saving a little every week—without telling his mother. He discovered that a man who could string simple declarative sentences together coherently could find small jobs on the side. Book reviews, fillers for periodicals, and advertising copy for local stores brought in additional money—not much individually, but they added up. As soon as he could afford to, he bought a tweed suit. Coat, waistcoat, tailored trousers. A wing-collared shirt. Shoes that fitted.

  “You’re all dressed up like the dog’s dinner,” his mother said sarcastically.

  “I refuse to look impoverished when I have a decent job, Mam. It isn’t honest.”

  “I could have put that money to better use. Ye have no feeling for your own family, Henry.”

  After John Mooney died in 1902, Bernard had struggled to keep the blacksmith business going. But he was little more than a boy, and as shy as a stone under moss. He could not ask people for the money they owed. Eventually the forge was padlocked and Bernard went to work in Denny’s bacon-curing plant. When he married, his wife urged him to work his way up to assistant supervisor, and there he was content to remain.

  Noel was apprenticed to his new father-in-law as a carpenter. “At least he’s following in our Lord’s footsteps,” had been Henry’s wry comment to Bernard.

  Hannah Mooney never spoke of Noel’s wife. Nor did Hannah ever visit their house, even when the children were born, though Noel was expected to pay a duty call on his mother at least once a week. Both he and Bernard found modest homes not far from hers. Like Henry, they continued to contribute to the maintenance of their mother’s household. This was a pattern repeated all over Ireland.

  Henry had no intention of marrying. It was not a fear of sex but the possibility of spending a lifetime with a woman who might grow into another version of his mother that appalled him. One woman finding fault with him night and day was quite enough, thank you.

  “It’s for your own good, Henry,” Hannah Mooney always insisted. “Ye should get down on your knees and thank the Sacred Heart of Jesus that you have your poor old mother trying to make a better man of you.”

  The quarrel that brought ma
tters to a head was about John Mooney’s watch. A fine pocket watch on a silver chain, it had been promised to his eldest son, but Hannah refused to pass it on. Instead she kept the watch in the bottom drawer of the chest in her room, where it lay tarnishing.

  “You have no use for a pocket watch,” Henry argued, “with a perfectly good clock on the mantel. I’m a working man and I have to keep appointments. That watch would be useful to me over and above its sentimental value.”

  These were justifications. The sentimental value was what mattered to Henry, but if he said so to his mother, she would never give him the watch. Hannah Mooney despised sentiment.

  She did not give it to him anyway. “Watches is worth good money—we could buy another cow if times go against us,” Hannah Mooney said. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

  One morning in the early autumn of 1912 Henry had packed a portmanteau while his mother and sisters were at Mass. He went to his mother’s room, liberated the watch from beneath a tangle of thrice-mended black stockings that smelled of old woman, and left a note under the blue milk jug on the kitchen table. “Am taking the train to Dublin to look for work there. Will write and send money when I am settled. Henry.”

  Mrs. Mooney’s door-slamming fury continued for a fortnight. In leaving her sphere of influence Henry had committed the ultimate rebellion. She would never forgive him.

  He found Dublin to be bawdy, seedy, shabby, and gorgeous, rattling with British soldiers and frothing with the whores who serviced them. For a man interested in people, the capital was a fascinating kaleidoscope. Aristocrats and intellectuals, businessmen and laborers, poets and paupers and priests. Children singing skipping rhymes that parodied the politics of the day. Indigent gutties lounging on street corners, offering gratuitous advice to passersby.

  Pungent smells of dark Guinness and the dirty river, of tar and abattoirs and venality and vice. And sometimes, like a stray lock of virtue blown across the pustuled face of sin, the smell of expensive perfume.

  Henry loved Dublin from the beginning. But he suspected he would love any place that was more than fifty miles away from his mother.

  In Dublin he had found a job with the Irish Independent and taken a room in a lodging house owned by a distant cousin, Louise Kearney. He unfailingly sent a portion of his weekly salary—”the Limerick tithe,” he jokingly called it—to his mother. He was superstitious about the money. As long as he contributed to Hannah Mooney financially, she could not repossess his soul. In the five years since he left, he had made very few trips back to Limerick.

  “WE haven’t seen you since before the Sinn Féin Rebellion,” Pauline reproved him now, as they sat in the kitchen. “And that’s a year ago.”

  “The British persist in calling it the Sinn Féin Rebellion, Polly,” her brother said, “but you should know better. Sinn Féin is a political party founded by a journalist called Arthur Griffith, who believes in using moral force rather than physical force. Sinn Féin had nothing to do with planning the insurrection. We prefer to call it the Easter Rising.”

  “We!” gasped Alice. “Are you a Republican rebel like Cousin Dan?”

  He shook his head. “If you mean am I a member of the Irish Republican Army, I’m not. By ‘we’ I meant Irish nationalists in general.”

  “But you’re talking like the rebels, and we know what happens to them.” Alice’s pale blue eyes leaked tears. “They get shot.”

  Henry tried to reassure her. “The closest I’ve ever come to danger was when I sneaked my wounded friend Ned Halloran out of Richmond Barracks after the Rising, before the British could deport him. Ned was a member of what you call the rebels—the Irish Volunteer Corps. He fought for Ireland’s freedom in 1916, while I was merely an observer.”

  “You’re a reporter,” said Pauline, “so you’re supposed to observe. That’s what the Irish Independent pays you for.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t work for the Independent anymore. I left them right after the Rising.”

  Pauline leaned forward, as avid as a sparrow watching a spider. “Then you don’t have to stay in Dublin? You could come home?”

  “I couldn’t,” Henry said hastily. “I’m working freelance now, so I need to be where the action is.”

  “Why did you leave the Independent in the first place?”

  “Mmm…I was fired.”

  Pauline sank back in her chair. “Fired! Oh, lawney! Does Mam know?”

  “She does not know, and I don’t want either of you to tell her. She’d make a meal of it.”

  “What did you do to get yourself fired, Henry?” Like her mother, Pauline automatically ascribed blame to him without waiting for an explanation.

  “The owner of the Independent is a man called William Murphy, who considers trade unions an arm of Satan, and James Connolly was the union organizer who defied him. When the leaders of the Rising were being executed there was hope that Connolly might be spared because he was so badly injured. But in spite of the fact that the Independent had been supportive of nationalism, Murphy wrote blistering editorials that described the Rising as ‘insane and criminal’1 and practically demanded that Connolly be executed. I had a blazing row with Murphy and he fired me.”

  “You’re a fool,” Pauline said with undisguised contempt. “Imagine throwing away a good job for a silly reason like that. What did you tell Mam?”

  “Just that I’ve come down to Limerick on business. And that’s the truth, Polly. I’m writing an article on the mood of the country a year after the Rising and I want to interview the bishop of Limerick. I plan to begin the piece with a letter he wrote shortly after the executions. He delivered an almighty belt of the crozier to General Maxwell, who was in charge of the British forces in Ireland. Listen to this…”

  Henry took out his reporter’s notebook and flipped through the pages, then read aloud: “Dr. O’Dwyer wrote to Maxwell, ‘You appeal to me to help you in the furtherance of your work as military dictator of Ireland. You took care that no plea for mercy should interpose on behalf of the poor young fellows who surrendered to you in Dublin. The first information we got of their fate was the announcement that they had been shot in cold blood. Personally I regard your action with horror, and I believe that it has outraged the conscience of the country.’ ”2

  Pauline stifled a yawn. “Sure everyone in Limerick knows about Dr. O’Dwyer. He refused to dismiss two priests who were sympathetic with the rebels. I don’t know why you’re going over it all again.”

  “Because his letter was important for political reasons,” her brother told her. Clearing his throat, he resumed reading. “ ‘Events have proved the bishop right. The British had provoked the long-suffering Irish to rebellion by repeatedly breaking faith with the people of this island. Even so, the vast majority did not stand beside Pearse and Connolly when the battle might have been won. The apathy bred from centuries of subservience paralyzed them. The heroes of Easter Week paid with their lives for that apathy.

  “ ‘But in the smoke and flame of the Easter Rising, the Irish soul was reborn. For one week we had watched the flags of a sovereign Ireland flying over the General Post Office in Dublin; a sight unthinkable before 1916. We had read the Proclamation of the Republic asserting that this land belongs to its people. We had seen courageous men and women willing to lay down their lives for the sake of our independence. We had felt, however briefly, the self-respect of a proud nation.

  “ ‘Afterward we pondered these things, and Ireland was forever changed.’ ”

  Henry closed the notebook. “What do you think?”

  Pauline shrugged. “You don’t want my opinion. You just said I couldn’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, Polly. Please, I want to know how the article affected you.”

  She stood up and began clearing the table. “It didn’t. Do you really think the Rising made any difference? It was just another failed rebellion, Henry, and you’re w
asting your time writing about it. A year from now no one will even remember.”

  But Alice, reading the expression in her brother’s eyes, was dismayed. “Oh, Henry,” she wailed, “you do want to fight!”

  Chapter Three

  IN the room he had occupied as a boy, Henry Mooney was preparing for a new day.

  Three of us lads growing up here with Mam standing guard over our immortal souls. Bursting into the room in the middle of the night. Whipping the cover off my bed because I was the oldest, and me half-asleep and not understanding. “I see what you’re doing! Nasty! I’m going to tell the priest and he’ll sort ye out!”

  If we are made in God’s image, how could our flesh be nasty?

  How is it that I was the only one of us who asked that question?

  Old ghosts clung to the faded wallpaper, waiting to be exorcised with the rituals of adulthood. Slivers of cocoa-butter soap whipped to lather in the shaving mug. Cheeks briskly slapped with bay rum. Braces securely fastened to hold up trousers, tie perfectly tied, shirt collar adjusted, waistcoat buttoned, watch chain draped in a precise curve, suitcoat brushed. Everything according to a personal standard with which he was never quite satisfied. The finishing touch, even here in the country, was a bowler hat.

  As he started for the door he took a final glance in the looking glass—and stopped short, face to face with himself. Perhaps I am jealous of Ned, he admitted to the image gazing back at him.

  Some people loved Ireland with the mawkish sentimentality that had characterized the Victorian era. Others could hardly wait to get on the first boat to anywhere else. When he was a child, Henry’s feelings had fallen somewhere between the two.

  As he grew older, his faith in the religion of his forefathers had waned. Increasingly resentful of the repressive effects of Catholicism, Henry concluded that while he believed in God, he did not believe in priests. To his mother’s outrage he began attending Mass only once a week. He stood at the back of the church with his arms folded amid similar like-minded males, present but not participating, just in case God should be doing a head count.