All Our Yesterdays (3 page)

“But they don’t know he’s here.”

“Not for now they don’t. We’ll move him soon.”

He studied the curve of her breast as she leaned over and put the cool cloth on his forehead again. The
room was quiet. The canted rectangle of sunlight that came through the high, narrow windows moved infinitely into the corner of the room and became more angular.

“When they do, will you visit me?” he said.

“When they do?” she said. “When they do what?”

“When they move me?”

“Of course I will. How do you feel?”

He smiled and closed his eyes and felt the coolness of the cloth and smelled her perfume. She changed the cloth again.

“Fine,” he said.

She laughed.

“Do you know how long ago I asked you that?”

“A bit laggard, am I? Coming out?”

“A bit.”

“You wouldn’t be able to put your hands on a dram of whiskey, would you?”

“You’ve been shot,” she said. “I don’t think you should be drinking whiskey.”

“What better time?” he said.

She shook her head.

“What’s your name?”

“Conn Sheridan,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Hadley. Are you a Volunteer?”

He smiled.

“Brotherhood?”

He held the smile.

“I guess I shouldn’t ask,” she said.

“These are times for secrets, Hadley.”

“I know. Well, I’m for a free and independent Ireland. I want you to know that.”

He was beginning to feel the pain of his wound. It
wasn’t awful, just a low, persistent jabbing sensation. Whiskey would help it.

“It’s a fine thing to be for,” he said. “You’re not Irish.”

“No. I’m American. Boston, Massachusetts. But I’m for the cause and I volunteer every day at the hospitals.”

“Did you mean what you said?”

“About being for Ireland?”

“No, about going with me when they move me.”

“I’ll certainly come and visit you.”

“Maybe we can have some secrets of our own,” Conn said, and smiled at her. He had curly black hair, and the kind of smooth Irish skin that would have shown a high color if he were well.

“I am a married woman, Conn, Mrs. Thomas Winslow.”

His smile widened.

“I’ll not hold that against you, Hadley.”

T
he wind out of the northeast pelted the wet snow against Grace’s window. Motionless at her end of the couch, Grace waited.

“When I was in Dublin,” I said, “I walked along the Liffey and thought about Joyce. You ever read
Finnegans Wake
?”

“Not all the way through.”

“Christ, Joyce probably didn’t read it all the way through. I was thinking about the way it starts, ‘rivverrun,’ no capital letters or anything, like in mid-sentence, and then at the end, you know the ending?”

Grace shook her head.

“‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the,’” I said. “No period.”

“Is this how we do it?” Grace said. “You make obscure literary references and I try to figure them out?”

“I never understood the damn book, but I always liked the circular trick, the way the end is the beginning. It’s like us, it’s all connected backwards and forwards, past and present, ‘Along the rivverrun, past Eve and Adam’s.’”

“You may have spent too much time reading, Chris.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re very concrete. But I’m not. I see things and I think of other things. I’m very—what?—associative, emblematic. You look out the window and see a stormy night. I look out and think,
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks
. It’s one of the ways we’re different. But it’s not a way that should keep us apart.”

“It’s not what keeps us apart, Chris.”

I stood and walked to the window and looked out at the inappropriate lightning flashes in the anachronistic blizzard.

“It wasn’t so much different then,” I said. “The rifles were mostly bolt action instead of clip fed, and they still had cavalry units, but there were automatic pistols, and Thompson submachine guns. Stuff like that. I’ve seen some of the weapons in a museum in Dublin. The Webley .45 is a big, ugly-looking brute of a thing, but it’s not much different than any revolver that caliber you’d see today.”

I could see Grace reflected in the dark window. She radiated patience.
He’ll get to it if I just remain calm
. Easy for her to say. I didn’t even know what
it
quite was.

“I’m sorry. I guess I ramble.”

She smiled.

“A long way past Eve and Adam’s,” she said. “But that’s all right. We’ll get there. It’s about the rest of our lives; it’s okay if it takes time.”

I came back and sat down on the couch again, carefully at my end. I felt as if everything needed to be done carefully, as if it could all too easily spill if we weren’t careful, and ruin everything.

“It’s probably hard for us, late twentieth century, post-Vietnam, to have any real sense of the kind of passion the Anglo-Irish war was fought with. You can still see some of it in Northern Ireland, I guess, but mostly that’s sunk into some kind of ingrown religious economic war that has long since started to feed on
itself. For Conn Sheridan, a year and a half after the end of the World War, fighting for freedom, everything must have been heightened, enlarged, elongated by the times. Free Ireland, throw off the yoke of tyranny, rid our land after—what?—ten centuries or so of what he must have thought of as foreign oppression. Boys could go through the blood rituals of manhood and never leave the neighborhood. No pushing up poppies in Flanders field to prove yourself. You could do it in Dublin, or Cork, or Kerry. It was certainly awful in many of its moments, but it must have been fun as hell too.”

“You sound wistful,” Grace said.

“I am wistful. I’ve spent my life not doing anything.”

“That’s a little harsh,” Grace said.

I shook my head.

“Always read about it, always studied it, always observed it, even taught it. Never fucking
did
it.”

“Did what?”

“Anything. My grandfather fought a war, my father fought a war, I went to grad school.”

“That’s doing something.”

“Sure, but it ain’t high deeds in Hungary, is it?”

“Does it have to involve guns?” Grace said.

“At least it ought to involve courage,” I said. “Enough courage to at least act, and not just be a poor weak fool seeing both sides of every issue.”

“Last fall involved courage,” Grace said.

“What the hell did I do?”

“Enough.”

I shrugged.

It was hard to concentrate. Grace’s eyes were very large, and dark blue. She had a lot of thick auburn
hair, and smooth skin and a wide mouth. She was five feet nine inches tall and strong looking, like the California beach girls that play volleyball on ESPN. I had met her in law school and loved her neither wisely nor well ever since. In the years we had lived together I had seen her naked a thousand times. I knew every hint and nuance of her naked body. I could remember exactly how she looked. And now, sitting four feet from her on the couch, I could hardly breathe with wanting to see her naked again. It was barely about sex. It was about possession. I wanted to be the one to see her naked. Not another guy. Me. The insubstantial room around us seemed to coalesce. The momentary couch on which we sat seemed random and kinetic. I could hear my heart. I could feel my breath going in and out. Reality seemed to heel beneath me the way a plane often does at takeoff. I centered on her eyes as she looked at me; held on them as the phenomenological world scattered and regrouped around her, and slowly settled and steadied and became again a small room in a nice condo inside while an odd early spring snowstorm raged and huffed outside, and the girl of my dreams sat quietly at the other end of the couch.

U
nder an empty blue sky, half a block from Merrion Square, Conn sat wrapped in a blanket, on a chaise, in the high-walled garden of a house on Clare Street. Against the back wall of the house, snaking up one of the porch pillars, was a thick trumpet vine, leafless yet at the earliest edge of a raw Irish Sea spring. Conn’s wound had healed and he was almost well. Hadley was reading aloud to him, some poetry by Yeats. She had kept her word, she had come to see him as he healed.

“
Why
,” she read, saying it right, understanding it, “
what could she have done, being what she is?
” And he joined her, reciting from memory. They spoke the last line in unison. “
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
”

“That’s a good one,” Conn said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Does your husband know you come here?”

“Oh, my God no,” she said.

“He’s not for a free and independent Ireland?”

“Oh, I think he is,” she said, “in his way. But he wouldn’t want me venturing among the rebellious ruffians.”

“What’s his way?” Conn said.

“His way?”

“You said he’s for a free and independent Ireland in his way. This is your way. What’s his?”

“Oh, well, he’s older. He’s stable. He believes in good business practices, and a calm homelife.”

“He’s in business?”

“Yes. He has a factory. Mulroney’s Heather Scented Irish bath soap. Mostly for export to America.”

“Not Winslow’s.”

She laughed, the volume of poetry closed in her lap, a forefinger holding the place.

“Now, what would that sound like,” she said, “—Winslow’s Irish soap?”

“It would sound like an oxymoron,” Conn said.

“You’re educated, aren’t you?” Hadley said.

“Self, mostly,” Conn said. “I like to read, my father was a schoolmaster.”

She had brought them lunch in a hamper. Cheese and bread and fruit and a bottle of wine.

“I had Cook pack this for us,” she said. She handed him an apple.

“Are you well enough to uncork the wine?”

“Yes,” he said around a bite of apple.

“Then please,” she said, handing him the wine and the corkscrew.

They sat together in the garden and drank the wine and ate the cheese and fruit and bread in the still-weak sunlight of early spring. The wine was a Graves, its flintiness refreshing against the richness of the country cheese, and the sweetness of the fruit. The wine added color to her face, a touch of red along the perfect cheekbones, and her eyes brightened. They finished the bottle.

“Wine’s gone too quickly,” he said.

“Remember when I met you the first day in the hospital?” she said. “And you asked for a bit of whiskey?”

“And you, being nursie-nursie, said I was too sick.”

She smiled and drew a bottle of whiskey from the hamper.

“Now you’re well,” she said. “It is time to celebrate.”

She poured whiskey into his empty wineglass, and some into hers.

“Just like that?” he said. “Neat? Like a man?”

“
Just
like that,” she said. And drank.

He sipped from his glass, feeling, for the first time in what seemed too long, the warmth of the whiskey enriching him.

“No pretty little faces?” he said to her. “No delicate wrinkle of the nose, no ladylike heckle to suggest that whiskey is too strong a drink for fragile high church ladies?”

“I’m not fragile,” she said. “I like whiskey. I like many things that high church ladies aren’t supposed to like.”

“Do you, now? Well, that’s encouraging.”

“It was meant to be,” she said.

They sipped their whiskey.

“And Mr. Winslow?”

“I like him too.”

“Do you love him?”

She leaned back in her chair, and the pale sunlight rested on her face. She was wearing a mannish tweed suit and a high-necked gray wool sweater.

“Do I love him?” She swallowed more whiskey. “How utterly Irish of you.”

“To ask if you love your husband?”

“It’s in your nature,” she said. “The romance of lost causes.”

“Is loving your husband a lost cause?”

“A husband who sees to all your needs, and is proud
to have a young and beautiful wife—that is not a lost cause.”

“And love is?”

“It certainly should not take precedence,” she said.

Her eyes were very bright and the flush on her face was deeper. She poured whiskey into each glass, and leaned back again, her eyes closed, her face to the lukewarm sun. Motionless in the wicker chair, there was about her a kinesis to which his own body vibrated like a tuning fork.

“Practical,” Conn said.

“Yes!”

“But pleasure loving,” Conn said.

“One does not preclude the other,” she said.

As he healed, Conn’s strength had come back, and he could feel it now in the bunching of muscle between his shoulder blades, in the resilience of his neck.

“Good to know,” Conn said. His voice seemed disconnected from the burgeoning center of him.

“Good to know both things,” Hadley said, her face flushed, her eyes shining. He could see her breasts move as she breathed. He hadn’t noticed that before. Was she breathing more, or was he seeing better?

“Are you well?” she said.

“Well enough.”

“Well enough for what?” she said, and her bright eyes were full of laughter now.

“Anything,” he said.

And she slid forward onto her knees beside him and he put his arms around her. Her mouth pressed on his and opened. He fumbled at her clothing. She helped him. And helped with his and they were naked on the cold grass, tangled in his blanket. He put his hands on
her and felt a quiver ripple through her body. She arched against him, her mouth hard against his. His front teeth cut her lip. He tasted her blood for a moment, and hesitated; but she pressed even harder, and moaned softly, and the center of himself seemed to escape him and envelop them both.

“Don’t say,” she gasped, her mouth still pressed against his, “that you weren’t warned.”

Then there was only the inarticulate sounds of their lovemaking, and the twitter of finches in the trumpet vine.

D
etectives from G section of the Metropolitan Police were being shot by the IRA on the street in Dublin. Curfew was now midnight to five A.M. Sitting in a café on Grafton Street in the late afternoon, with the high weather clouds scudding fast toward England, Conn drank tea and watched as the city became every day more warlike. The Dublin police were always on the street. And the Royal Irish Constabulary, the peelers, founded by Sir Robert Peel, responsible only to Dublin Castle. British troops moved about in lorries. Aloof from everyone else, brutal, scornful, and many, the mercenaries swaggered through Conn’s city like conquerors. Ex-British enlisted men wore the black-and-tan uniforms for which they were named. Auxiliaries, former British officers, wore dull bottle-green. The men of both forces were combat veterans, blooded in Britain’s colonial wars, hardened in the trenches of Europe. Both forces existed exclusively to suppress the Irish rebellion. The detectives and the Secret Service moved about in civilian clothes, but their weapons too were apparent, deadly angular shapes under tight coats.