Leon Uris (13 page)

Conor Larkin had gained the fine measure of success that Kevin O’Garvey had prayed for. His line of wares from carpenter hammers to skillets were of such superior quality and design that the Protestant merchants of the region reluctantly trudged to the Bogside to place orders. Likewise a number of Protestant preachers came to the conclusion that the Lord did not take sides in matters of magnificent scrolled ironwork and small commissions came in for their churches. The forge survived its worst crisis, a burnout, when Conor bid against Caw & Train. After he rebuilt, Caw & Train called upon him for consultations and subcontracting so often he was accepted as somewhat of a left-handed member of the Protestant establishment.

Conor cared little for his own comforts, continuing to live in a small tidy flat over the forge, big enough to hold five or six mates to drink with, or bed down a willing lass, or spend his nights in luxurious reading. He saw to the needs of his family and particularly his brother Liam in New Zealand.

It was not as though Conor had not always loved the Ingrams, he simply would not and could not come to them until he felt he was on some kind of equal footing. The return to a close relationship was a glory.

Conor
was
Bogside. His second homes were in Celtic Hall and the football pitch. He also filled out a few dandy suits of clothing and ventured into the new cultural life of
the city. Blessed with the kind of handsome and playful looks that made the ladies swarm to him, he always had a beauty on his arm, though he never became serious. He had created a perfect lady in his fruitful imagination, and until someone in real life could knock her off her pedestal and send himself crashingly into love…well, then, he was always kind and gentle. Unable to bear such a grand-looking and happy bachelor, Enid Ingram put an entry into the derby, a lovely young school teacher whom Conor cared for very much, but not totally enough.

As Conor thrived and grew in stature, Andrew Ingram found himself suddenly in a springtime of discontent after he had agreed with Kevin O’Garvey to help keep Conor in Derry.

Conor had no idea that there had been maneuverings behind his back to put him into business. At first, like all lies, it seemed small and unimportant. After all, the deception had worked. Conor was not driven out of Derry, and his success had paved the way for others to succeed.

After another springtime of discontent, a brief announcement in the newspaper opened Andrew Ingram’s mind with a sense of horror.

The announcement read that the Select Committee of Parliament chaired by Kevin O’Garvey was compelled to postpone his long-vowed investigation of the Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory.

Following logic, Andrew began to wonder about this anonymous group of Americans financing the ventures in Bogside. Trying to pin a master politician like O’Garvey down was like trying to close one’s fist on a handful of mercury.

Was Andrew reading too much into O’Garvey’s postponement? He questioned Kevin. Kevin came back with an unsatisfactory explanation about a parliamentary maze and a double cross by a couple of members of his Select Committee.

Well, there is only one way to get to the bottom of it,
Andrew thought. He must demand to know who the financiers are. That would end all doubt. Kevin had shared many secrets with him prior to this. Kevin would have to lay it on the table.

A meeting had been set, but the night before Andrew Ingram found himself wandering along the promenade of the River Foyle, flushed and dazed. The simple demand he was going to make was not so simple at all. Andrew had wondered about Roger Hubble’s passive reaction to Bogside’s new run of progress. Except for the burnout of the forge, Hubble had accepted it…almost as though he endorsed it.

This was in keeping with Roger Hubble’s overall strategy. When a challenge arose, Hubble calculated how much energy was going to be needed to crush it, and if the challenge succeeded, how much it was going to change things. In most cases it was easier to allow a competitor to take hold, then take control of him. What better way than to control your own competition?

Larkin’s forge would be a perfect example, would it not? After allowing Conor to struggle to establish himself, Caw & Train would quietly draw him in by throwing him a bone.

What Andrew Ingram was revealing to himself was so crushing that, for the first time, he did not confide in his wife until it was too late.

The truth that was emerging was that there were no Americans involved in this. The money had come from Roger Hubble! Dear God! What did Kevin O’Garvey give him in exchange?

The springtime of discontent sank into a gloomy autumn and winter and finally the news that the Select Committee had made a second postponement.

Kevin O’Garvey had called off the investigation of the Witherspoon & McNab factory in exchange for Hubble’s financing of the new enterprises and apprenticeships.

Roger Hubble knew there might be a few successes, but in the end there would be one failure after another and Bogside would still be Bogside.

O’Garvey could no longer bear the destitution of Bogside and more failures of the croppies out on the land. He had tried to do something desperate to bring some light and hope to his people, but he had made a Faustian bargain!

But before you confront Kevin O’Garvey, you’d better think it over, man! Andrew told himself. Kevin had come to Andrew first and lured him into the scheme without his realization, using Conor Larkin as bait.

Once Andrew added his voice for Conor to remain in Derry, he was locked in, whether he knew it or not.

And now, what if he exposed the plot! This lie, the secret, the deceit would devastate Conor Larkin! Ingram, his mentor, and O’Garvey, his godfather and fighter for the people, had passed blessings by allowing child and female slave labor to continue at the shirt factory.

All those lofty flights of idealism he had flown with Conor Larkin and Seamus O’Neill…worthless. Ingram, beloved teacher, just another ha’penny hack politician, eased into the system. O’Garvey had cried that “They always find out where you are hurting most and carve their deal.” Yes, Bogside hurt the most and Roger Hubble knew how to protect the money machine that poured out of Witherspoon & McNab.

Andrew Ingram began to change. He pulled the blind on the window in his office that faced the factory. He could no longer hear the factory whistle without gritting his teeth and closing his eyes and finally clamping his hands over his ears.

He was a welcomed friend in Bogside. He had done more for Catholic students than three hundred years of Anglo ascendancy. He was coming close to establishing a college…to what avail…to what avail…to allow the most indecent part of the system to continue unabated.

Andrew Ingram no longer went into the Bogside.

He had been a progressive and enlightened schoolmaster who feared no preacherman nor Orange ignorance nor Anglo arrogance.

But a Kevin O’Garvey, a devoted politician, a maker of
events trying to penetrate the blackness of a Bogside, had to risk much more. Like a military general, Kevin O’Garvey had to risk other people’s lives. Drawing Ingram in was a clever part of the tactic.

Andrew Ingram had always loathed his academic colleagues, who did their protesting from the safe bunker of a university. Ideas there were risk-free, till the moment when Kevin O’Garvey made him partner to a lie.

An educator counts his life by the achievements of a few golden scholars. Andrew’s were Seamus O’Neill and the ethereal Conor Larkin.

Had he made too much of Conor? He had failings. Wasn’t Conor drifting away from the agony of Bogside? A few less hours at Celtic Hall as a starter? Was Conor now a Lothario, a clever seducer of women, some of them unhappy or adventurous married women on the prowl?

When all was said and done, the plain and utter truth, God, was that Andrew Ingram was unable to face the moment to tell his prodigy that he had surrendered his idealism in a dirty bargain.

Enid, a power of a supporting mate, became frightened watching her husband do himself in. In the deep of another sleepness night, Andrew caved in and blurted it out.

“I knew the minute Kevin walked in I was knowingly going into a deal, becoming the keeper of a lie. I had betrayed Conor by not demanding to know, immediately. Funny, how an ideal so nobly spun in the sunlight of a high meadow can become a web of total entanglement in reality. And what will Conor do? Try to blow open the stench of the deal? Destroy Conor by keeping him from ever believing again that the men he loves the most will not dishonor him?”

“To hell!” Caroline cried, crumpling Andrew Ingram’s note. Where have I been? she asked herself. Such a decision didn’t happen between yesterday and today. Caroline was terribly close to the Ingrams, both in civic matters and socially. She chastised herself for not picking up on his duress.

Bloody hell! It was nigh on impossible to tell if Andrew was more somber or less somber behind that Scottish mask.

For Andrew Ingram, there was more than Conor to consider. There would be the heartbreak of Seamus O’Neill as well. A scandal whose bottom line read, “Hands off the shirt factory,” would destroy Kevin O’Garvey, too, and try as Andrew might, he could not bring himself to totally blame Kevin for doing what he did.

What of Caroline? She was aware that both her father and husband were scoundrels, but there was no way she could have known about the shirt factory. If she found out now, what would happen to her own marriage?

When Enid let Caroline into Andrew’s study she could see the pallor of his face. Enid excused herself as Caroline took a chair uncomfortably, then did the obvious foolish thing of trying to bait him with candy. She unrolled a map of the district on his desk.

“Roger has all but agreed to donate three hundred
acres of land here for the college. O’Garvey says the minute Roger announces he’s in favor, he’ll start the bill through Commons.”

Ingram looked at the map. “Lovely situation on the Protestant side of the river, in Ulster, between Lettershambo, the largest arsenal in western Ireland and a military barracks two miles away.”

“Let’s get the damned thing built and worry about student riots later,” she retorted.

“That will be for you and my successor to iron out.”

“As the chairman of your board and as your friend, I have a right to know. Without you, Andrew, there are no woods or forests of learning in Londonderry, only an empty, rock-filled, windswept moor.”

Andrew’s eyes were misty. “I always held in disgust that my robed and hooded colleagues espoused the ideas of brave men, but from a position of no danger to them. That is why I left the campus. I have infused in a few extraordinary pupils the struggle required to have a grand ideal win out over evil. Yet, when I came to my own Rubicon, I slunk away.”

“Just how vague do you intend to be, Andrew?”

“I knowingly let someone lead me into a game of deals and lies and compromise, pretending to myself that I had done the right thing and that I had let go of nothing sacred. Such mendacity has brought me to a conclusion that I have forgone five decades of idealism.”

“I see a lovely man dreaming about being a perfect self in a perfect world who had to come face-to-face with the reality that he wasn’t perfect.”

“Caroline, I was party to a scheme. The price was to lie to myself by making myself believe there would be no price to pay. There is no such thing as a free lie. If I stay in Derry, those young people will turn acidly from idealists to cynics because I have betrayed them. Better that their beloved mentor simply disappear into the Scottish heather.”

“Who the hell are you to believe that you are the only
one who is going to get through this life without making your deals with the devil?” She looked at him as she had never looked at him before. “What do you think my marriage was?”

Andrew turned away, stung by her stab.

“When I was a wee lad,” he whispered, “ our family was Scottish poor, which is about as terrible as being Irish poor. The one thing we had was a warm fireplace glowing at night and my daddy gathered us about to read the Bible. We all knew it so well that we’d only pretend to read, because actually we could recite it from memory…and I moved on to Burke’s writings on the French Revolution…and
Gulliver’s Travels
and Oliver Goldsmith…and Thomas Jefferson and Plato…and Mendoza and the great philosophers of the East. I was a fortress, Caroline, a fortress that could not be conquered. In my years as an educator, no man, no army could breach my fortress. Can you imagine my joy when I was able to secretly pass along the most passionate and stupendous of my books and their thoughts to a pair of yearning croppy boys from up in the heather?”

“You have told me that redemption is the greatest of all human qualities,” she insisted.

“So it is. I must redeem myself in Scotland, lass, for here I will shake the walls down.” For an instant he hovered on letting it all go. Soothing Caroline’s curiosity would change her life, forever. She was stuck in Derry with a preordained existence.

Enid knocked and entered with a tray of tea, cognac, and Irish whiskey. The whiskey helped with Caroline’s sense of numbness. Enid had also grown pallid, and Andrew’s eyes were very weary.

“Why exile yourself to a nameless boarding school, Andrew?”

“I don’t want to be around college teachers for the reasons previously stated. As for the students, each one reaches a level when he is certain he is infallible and doubly certain he knows more than his professor. No one is less wise and
more stupid than a college student. No one is more strident in his beliefs. No one has better solutions. No, Caroline, I want fresh-faced young boys and to load them up with idealism before they have to make their first compromise with the devil.”

As Caroline dabbed her eyes they became fixed on the most unusual piece of ironwork she had ever seen, a half-dozen delicately curled deep leaves, each of which was a holder of a live flower. There were iron threads so thin that one could scarcely see them above the leaves, and these held wrought-iron bees and birds so that the slightest zephyr would cause them to move as though they were hovering over the flowers. Between two of the leaves was a spider web, so fine it could not possibly be of iron…but it was. The stand at the bottom was incredibly balanced. Caroline’s fingertips whispered about it.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Caroline said.

“A gift from one of Andrew’s students,” Enid said.

Andrew sipped his whiskey and appeared to be mesmerized by the multivase holder.

“One of your very prized students?”

“Aye,” he said.

The moment had a strange quality to it. Caroline knew, without saying or asking, that this magnificent piece of work had something to do with his entire situation. Andrew was uncomfortable, as though he didn’t want to share this with her.

“It’s the work of a master, isn’t it?” Caroline said.

“Yes,” Enid answered.

“Who might he be?”

“His name is Conor Larkin. He has a forge in the Bogside.”

Caroline was compelled by a surge of excitement. “You know how desperately I’ve wanted the great screen restored. Why haven’t you told me about this chap?”

“That’s not the way the system works, Caroline.”

“To hell, you say. I should have met him. Does he know about the screen?”

“He’s worked on it as a laborer for both your Italian and German masters. Caroline, he bid against Caw & Train and was burned out. His second home is in Celtic Hall, not your average manor house artisan.” Suddenly Andrew’s voice betrayed him and his words betrayed him further. “He’s searching for the Holy Grail.”

“And he is the reason you are leaving here. You feel you’ve betrayed him.”

“It would kill Andrew if you told him!” Enid cried.

“Oh no. I love you both so dearly, so very dearly,” Caroline assured. “It will never get past me.”

“ Strange how a little bloody lie takes on arms and legs and wings and heads. Anyway, Caroline, be very careful. I saw the fire flashing from your eyes,” warned Andrew.

“Caroline, Conor Larkin is innocent of all the deals that have been made around him,” Andrew continued. “He is fierce about what he believes of Ireland. I know you’ll see him now, but I warn you, the great screen in the Long Hall has been a symbol of oppression to the Catholics. It was used as a prison and almost five hundred women and children died of torture and hunger behind it.”

“That’s in the long past.”

“There is no long past in Ireland.”

“It’s a great work of art. Its creator never intended it to be a prison.”

“I’ll be brutally blunt, Caroline,” Andrew said. “You’re flirting with the one man in the world you can’t handle. You’d better know that going in.”

In that instant, Andrew knew he had said the exact opposite of what he wanted to say.