Blue Mercy: A Novel. (7 page)

Short and squat, she wore calf-length skirts, flesh-colored tights and flat shoes of a kind usually worn by women twenty years older. Her dull-white blouses gaped under the bust, exposing dull-white flesh. I never met a woman who made less attempt to be attractive. Mags liked to be underestimated.

My case worried her from the start. She came to Doolough Barracks and sat opposite me at the table in the day room to explain that I might not get bail. The serious nature of my alleged crime, the strength of the circumstantial evidence, and the location of my home and business in another jurisdiction -- all these were against me.

"Anything in my favor?"

"You tell me. Any previous?"

"Of course not."

"So we'll go with good character, respectable, unlikely to offend again, yadda, yadda...They'll want a substantial surety, though. If they go for it."

"If?"

"Not going to lie to you, Dotes." Mags called everybody Dotes. "We're fifty-fifty at best."

"And if not? I'll have to stay here in the barracks until the trial?"

"More likely to relocate you to Mountjoy, I'd say."

"What sadist decided to name a prison Mount Joy?"

She shrugged. "A more pressing question: do you have the funds for bail? And for legal fees? They're going to want to be sure that you're not going to go skipadeedoo back to the States. And of course" -- this with a cheeky grin -- "the services of a good lawyer never come cheap."

Months later, after it was all over, I wondered why I didn't go "skipadeedoo". It seems to me now that nobody would have cared, except perhaps Dr Keane. The Irish justice system knew I was no danger to society.

Mags had brought a copy of
The Wicklow Gazette
to the barracks. I was their front page story.
MERCY KILLING???
 
They loved the play on my name of course and their question marks never doubted whether he was killed, only whether it was an assisted suicide or something even more sinister.
 
RETURNED EMIGRANT ACCUSED OF MURDER
.

A news story on page one continued onto page three and, in the middle of the paper, a double-page spread analyzed the event, complete with a large photo of my father in his uniform, taken at his retirement do. And a smaller, blurry photograph of me in my convent-school uniform. Where had they managed to turn up that?

The reporter had talked to everyone he could find: to the police who said an arrest had been made; to old school friends who said they just couldn't believe it of me; to a neighbor who said I'd been estranged from my father for years before coming back a few months ago; to Dr Keane who said he was confident justice would be done. To everyone except Pauline or Star or Zach or me, the four people who were in the house that day.

"Could have been worse," Mags said. "They're going with the mercy angle. That's good."

"Why? Why is that good?"

"We may need to use that ourselves."

"I didn't do it," I said.

"Right. Let's get you filling these forms then."

She took them away with her. Eight days later, I was climbing into the back of the Garda car on my way to Dublin. We arrived at the Four Courts to a glut of reporters huddled around the entrance. Beneath the statues of Justice, Mercy, Authority and Wisdom, they hovered like bloodsuckers awaiting their feed: notebooks and pens, cameras and microphones poised to sup.

"Your waiting party," said Inspector O'Neill.

I shivered. I was wearing my most respectable outfit, as instructed by Mags, a brown linen suit, but it was too light for the Irish spring.

"Do you want me to try round the back instead?" Garda Cogley asked his boss. "See if we can avoid them?"

The Inspector nodded, curt.

Garda Cogley swung the car through some narrow back streets, then got out to tap on a steel door. Inside, another guard opened it a crack, listened, looked across at us in the car and nodded.

We were led through a warren of back rooms and when I saw Mags, waiting for us outside Court Two as arranged, I felt like she was an old friend. She led me through further corridors, her hand on my elbow, updating me as we walked. Pauline's bank manager cousin had arranged a mortgage on my father's house and farm to put up the bail and it had come through in time.

Good news then. We took our places in court. After a twenty-minute sitting, bail was granted on condition that I surrendered my passport.

We tried the back way out again, but this time we were refused and had to go round the front. "Prepare yourself, Dotes," Mags said, as we walked down the long, narrow corridor that led to the round hall and the front door. "They'll be out in force by now."

She was loving the whole thing, stomping up the corridor in her tough-cookie shoes, steering me through, her hand on my elbow, as the cameras flashed and the questions were thrown our way, like the barking of dogs: "Is the trial date set?" "Did you get bail?" "What are your plans?" One of them called, "Did you do it?" Could he really have expected to me to turn around and say, "Well yes, actually, I did"?

Some of the questions were for Mags. "Did she get bail?" "What's the plea?" As we pushed through, they moved with us, all of us together, like a multi-headed animal. Mags had her keys ready and, as soon as she had unlocked the car, she leaned across and opened the passenger door for me, but not before the journalists had come crowding round, popping questions like toy machine-guns. As we sat into the car, they pressed their faces to the windows, but it all had a forced feel, a going-through-the-motions of what they felt they should be doing.
 

Mags revved the engine, not too gently, and they parted to let us through.

She dropped me to the 1.30p.m. train back to Rathdrum and, from there, I took a cab to Doolough. As I walked from the cab to the front door, the windows looked down on me from under their fringe of eaves.
Was anyone who lived in this house ever happy?
I wondered as I approached.
Did groups of children ever play here, giggle and do tricks on each other?
I couldn't imagine it, but maybe the lack was in me.

What I would have liked to have done, if I'd been free to, was get this house ready for sale. Not so much for the money, as for the activity. Fixing it up, dealing with estate agents, the coming and going of potential buyers would have filled my days, but my bail conditions meant I had to remain, with only my writing as distraction.

I went in the back door to the kitchen. A blast of warmth from the stove greeted me. The house was back in order, the broken furniture chopped for wood, all the rooms cleaned and vacuumed and polished. The kitchen still seemed bare since we cleared it of my father's medicines and water-bottles, but he was still there. Part of him would remain, forever unburied.

I picked up the kettle. I would have a cup of tea. My father always drank coffee, a relic of his years in France, but tea was Mrs Whelan's "pick-me-up" of choice. Pauline's mother tackled her work like she went at her prayers, steadily ticking off the cleaning and the cooking and the washing up just as she pushed each bead of the rosary through her fingers, all the way round till she was back where she began, only to start over again. Between each chore, like the little chains between the beads, were endless cups of tea.

Nothing gave Mrs Whelan more pleasure than the sight of a meal for me and my father well cooked on its serving plate, surrounded by its subordinate dishes of vegetables and gravy and two kinds of potatoes. Except perhaps Monday evening's ironing stack -- sheets and pillow cases and tea-towels end to end, corner to corner -- admired from across the rim of a nice cup of tea.

I've always feared domesticity. I've done what has to be done but I never gave myself over to the tasks, not until much later in life, when I came round to appreciating the virtues, the life-saving properties, of cleanliness and order.

I know I should be keeping the house clean and neat now; that's what my head needs. And I should turn to the practices Zach taught me, that worked so well for me before. Eat and sleep well, balance work with play, meditate and walk. Instead I find myself hunkering at home, because going for a walk is like stepping onto a stage. All eyes are on me. I am the most exciting thing to happen in Doolough since the Civil War, when a shoot-out left a local man dead. The closest they've got to murder since.

Not that anybody actually says so. It's all in the looks or the avoidance of looking.

All right, Zach. I hear your voice telling me it's just resistance. You're right, it is. I'm under-eating and over-working, neglecting my better self. Only the writing saves me but it is hard, scraping up the past and fitting it to the present. That, too, would go better if I was able to do the things you taught me.

Oh, Zach, I'm not just alone here, I'm incomplete. I get through the day, I put in the hours, I live out the minutes, but I want to be what I was when I was with you. All I know how to do, as I wait out what's to come here in my father's house, without you, is write.

Each morning, I go to his bathroom upstairs and take off my clothes and step into the same tub I used when I was a girl. I hear the same water gush from the taps, see the same green light falling in through the opaque glass from the trees outside. I turn off the water and pick up the soap to circle it under my arms, between my legs, over my body, and slide down to rinse off.

As I feel the water close over my face, is it any wonder that all I can think to do is write it down. What's happening now, what happened then, what went on before. So that some day I might be able to pass it onto Star and have her understand.

Before Star was born, Snakeskin and I thought we would be able to keep on living as we had in the commune.

"Babies don't eat much," I'd said. "And, for a long time, I'll be feeding him or her myself."

But, of course, it wasn't about food. Once born, Star needed all kinds of things we couldn't afford: a stroller, clothes in ever-increasing sizes, educational toys. And then there were the needs marching towards us: bicycles, bedroom, school, summer camp...

The drink and drugs and sexual shenanigans of the commune no longer looked the same to us either and, from their perspective, as Zane said, we'd become "a couple of downers".

Whether, and then
how
, we were going to leave began to occupy all our conversations. We'd whisper to each other about it in bed at night, so the others wouldn't hear. We considered Ireland. We'd both been away long enough to become nostalgic, not for our people, but for the place and the ancient mystery of its landscape. But this homesickness was too flimsy a feeling to act on. And, anyway, there were no more jobs in Ireland than in Taos.

In the end, we settled on Brooklyn again. Brendan would get a job and I would take care of Star. It wasn't what either of us wanted, but what we wanted for ourselves was no longer the most important thing in our lives. So, one morning, we drove away with Star in a cot in the back of our VW. We drove straight to New York City -- no more meandering -- into a two room apartment, and a hasty ceremony in a registry office and and a job for Brendan, selling advertising in
Brooklyn Metro
.

We bought him two suits, some button-down shirts and a pair of shiny black shoes, and an apron and oven gloves for me. Snakeskin and Lightning were put to rest and I found myself with another new name: Mrs Creahy.

It makes me laugh, looking back. Was it our Irish background reasserting itself, making us feel that this was the only way to be parents? Brendan would leave our tiny apartment at six in the morning, to be in the office for eight while I clung to the mattress until whatever time Star woke me with her crying. She always seemed to be crying.

This was due to a feeling of insecurity, according to my childrearing manual. To make her feel secure, I should immediately answer these cries.

So I did. I wrapped my time around her needs: for cuddles, for food, for sleep, for baths. Having brought this little scrap into the world, I was determined to do right by her. I bought a baby sling and carried her everywhere, her little body tucked tight on my breast, massaging my heart with the rapid rise and fall of her lungs. I would keep her there -- Look, no hands! -- even as I baked bread, up to my forearms in flour.

In the evenings, after she had been given her supper and her bath and her bedtime stories, I would lie down with her until she dropped into sleep. Often I fell asleep myself, to be woken by Brendan coming in, looking for dinner. Exhausted, we ate in crankiness or silence, in front of the television. He watched
Mission Impossible
or
I love Lucy
while I looked on at us, shell-shocked.
 

Brendan began to say things like: "It was about time we grew up anyway."
 

Then: "Everybody else has been working their way up. We're way behind."
 

Then: "All those wasted years. I can't believe we stayed there so long."

"We've had things other people have never known," I would reply. "I wouldn't change a day of it."

For me, it was simple: up to 1961 we did that, now we were doing
this
. But Brendan had to keep comparing and make Taos the loser. So, in the way of life partners everywhere, we settled ourselves on opposite sides of the argument. I came to stand for New Mexico, its big skies and warm pulse, and whenever Brendan criticized something about our lives there, I would complain about New York. How the cold was so damp and bitter. How my skin, which had been the color of honey, had turned almost grey. How people were separated from each other in their little apartments and offices, but mostly in their minds, bustling by each other on the street, locked in thought, all unseeing, only the steam of their breath showing they had warmth inside.

I became the advocate for that other way of living. "We would have been all right," I'd say. "We could have lived on like that, become crazies, dancing to the hum of the planet."
 

He would look at me like he never thought that way, but I understood. Brendan Creahy, father and provider, had to reject Snakeskin. That much I got, but because he'd been "working" all day -- doing activities that yielded dollars -- while I was "off" -- doing activities that were unpaid, cleaning our home and playing, stimulating, feeding, training, walking, talking and minding our child -- he expected, when he arrived home, to pull off his tie and his shoes and to be served dinner.