1995-1
1995
The thick double door beneath the sign – Parle’s Bar & Grocery – is shut. A For Sale board juts from the side wall, with a Sale Agreed banner across it. The blinds are down, as if the house, too, has closed its eyes and died.
That’s all I have time to notice as my taxi whips past. I can’t tell the driver to slow down, as I have already given him instructions to hurry. I look back as we pass. Nothing about it has changed, I don’t think, yet it looks different. Lesser.
Then the road swerves and it is gone, disappeared by the bend.
We fly past the post office, and Lambert’s farm, and the two-roomed schoolhouse where I learned to read. “That’s it!” I have to say, before we pass it. “That’s the church there.”
The car screeches to a stop, bidding goodbye to my hopes of a discreet arrival. Heads huddled around the door turn to look. I should have known the crowd would be spilling out of the church. My mother was the proprietor of Parle’s, the village shop and pub. The village hub. It was always going to be a big funeral. The years peel away and I’m instantly laid bare.
But the driver is out of the car, taking my suitcase from the trunk, opening my door saying, “Here we are, so,” in his strong Wexford accent.
I will do this well. The vow that seemed so potent yesterday in my apartment in San Francisco, feels puny now. Doing it well doesn’t necessarily mean going into that church, does it? I’m so late. Wouldn’t it be more discreet to shrink back into the seat and wait it out, catch Maeve later, on her way home? Or, even better, go back into Wexford town, lie low for today, return tomorrow, when all the fuss is over?
Catch yourself on! I admonish myself in the local lingo. You’re not an over-sensitive child now, you’re a 38-year-old woman. A magazine writer. An apartment-owner. A car-driver. Get in there! As I psyche myself, I’m putting on my sunglasses to protect me from the staring eyes. I’m taking out the clasp to let my hair fall forward, a veil of sorts. I’m taking a breath so deep it hurts.
And yes, I’m stepping out of the car onto Mucknamore soil for the first time in twenty years.
The heat is unseasonably sultry. Surely Ireland is never this hot? The air feels thick, hardly like air at all, and the nausea that’s been plaguing me all the way down here growls again. I walk through the open gates of the little church yard. Here I am, folks, the entertainment of the day, the happening that you’ll pass, one to the other, whenever Mrs D.’s funeral is recalled.
As I fix my stare beyond their curious eyes, it collides with the door of the black hearse, open like a mouth. It draws me towards it, inexorable.
I draw nearer. People begin to recognise that it’s me. One voice says, “Hello Jo. Welcome home.” Another, “Sorry for your trouble.” Then there is a general murmur of greeting and sympathy. I nod acknowledgement.
“Yes, Jo, welcome home,” says another man, turning the greeting to a snigger. I know his face, one of the Kennedys, who always used to mock me from his high stool at our bar counter.
At the door, they part to let me through and I walk towards words I haven’t heard for a long, long time: “Giving thanks to you, His Almighty Father, He broke the bread…”
The priest is a bald as a Buddhist, a big man, a performer, wallowing in emphases and pauses. “…gave it to His disciples and said…”
Two other clerics in purple robes stand behind him and the congregation is on its knees, heads bowed. It is the Consecration, the holiest part of the Mass. The quietest part of the Mass. Which makes the click of my heels on the tiles sound louder than it should.
People turn and nudge each other, loosening the holy silence. As whispers begin to swirl in my wake, Father Performer senses the loss of his audience and looks up. Seeing me, his eyes narrow, two specks of stone. Again I’m gripped by the urge to flee, but the pull of my mother’s coffin sitting there on the trolley between us, all polished wood and burnished trimmings, is stronger. It is covered in glossy flowers. Funeral flowers, grown to be cut, already dying
I walk on.
The priest stops the ceremony and stands with his hands together in the prayer position, a column of forbearance. The other two clerics behind him imitate the pose, censuring me with that loaded, condescending silence they must get taught at religious school.
I am almost at the top pew, where my family is sitting. I can see Maeve now, looking thin, too thin, almost gaunt. She follows the eyes of the priest, turns to see what’s causing the disruption and when she finds it is me, pure exasperation breaks across her face. Now, Jo? it says, before she turns her head on its long, elegant neck away from me, back towards the altar. Now?
I don’t blame her. It must look so careless, so uncaring, to crash in like this, turning our mother’s funeral into the latest act in the long-running Parle drama. And my sister will be grieving Mrs D.’s death sorely. I don’t want to add to that.
At the same time I do blame her. I blame them all – Maeve, Mrs D., Daddy, even Granny Peg. These scenes I bring upon the family are never just my doing, though I get the starring role. They all play their part, though they live and die pretending the stage is not even there.
That girl standing between Maeve and her husband Donal must be Ria, my eight-year-old niece. She stares at me with Maeve’s eyes from behind a veil of red hair not unlike my own. Her expression tells me she has heard all about her Auntie Jo.
She and Donal push down to make a place for me but Maeve, in one of her childish gestures, kneels firm. I squeeze into the pew.
The priest begins again: “Heavenly Father, you gave your only son…”
The wood is hard against my kneecaps. The smell of incense sends another wave of nausea undulating but I kneel and stand and sit through the half-forgotten rites waiting, as I have waited out so many a day in Mucknamore, for it to be over.
Why am I here? All the way back – through the black night flight from San Francisco, in the taxi from Dublin Airport to Connolly Railway Station, through every chug of the rickety three-hour trip down south, and in the final cab ride from Wexford town out here to Mucknamore – I’ve been nursing the same question: why?
Why, when I spent twenty years not making this journey, when I had left it so late that I was unlikely to arrive on time anyway, had I nonetheless organised a last-minute ticket? Why did I feel I had to come?
And it wasn’t just me. Why had Maeve, who so long ago gave up trying to get me back to Mucknamore while our mother lived, made such frantic efforts to contact me once it was clear she was dying?
Why does death demand such attentions?
What would Maeve say if she knew I had heard the first words of her first frantic message last Friday? That I was halfway out my apartment door when stopped by my telephone’s ringing and that I stood in the open doorway, letting the answer-machine pick up the call? That as soon as I’d heard her first words, “Hello, Jo, it’s me. It’s about Mammy…”, I had answered aloud. “No Maeve, sorry. Not tonight,” and slammed the door on the rest.
If I had waited for her next words (“It’s bad news. I think you should come home…”), or if I had called her back later that evening, or even the following morning, I might have got back to Ireland on Saturday or Sunday morning. I might have been in time.
But in time for what, I ask? To visit the hospital and be confronted with a new Mrs D.: twenty years older, weak and wretched, dying? To snatch a few words from her, say something myself, then watch her go? What difference would that have made?
I know how Maeve imagines the scene: our mother looking up to see one of her girls ushering in the other, meaningful looks passing between us all, a clasping of hands and forgiveness all round. Then the two daughters together, watching her die, smiles and tears ushering her out of the world.
No, Maeve, too much was left to curdle for too long. No words, not even deathbed words, would have been strong enough to hold it all.
No. It was better the way it happened. Believe me.
The organ springs into sound for the last time and an elderly voice begins a quavering ‘Ave Maria’. I look up to the balcony: it is Mrs Redmond, my mother’s friend, chins a-wobble. While she struggles with the top notes, an undertaker steps up to release the brake and glides the coffin down the aisle. Maeve is crying, curling her sobs into her husband.
Outside, the heat crawls over us. Maeve is immediately engulfed by sympathizers, a wall of backs around her. Seeing me alone, Donal steps across and bends to bestow a kiss on my cheek. “So,” he says in that cod-sardonic tone he affects. “The prodigal returns.”
I have met Donal only a handful of times in the many years he has been married to my sister. When they were first engaged, Maeve brought him to meet me in London and that first encounter has always stayed with me: how he enfolded her as the two of them sat opposite me in the restaurant, her hand heavy with his ring.
“How is Maeve doing?” I ask, ignoring the jibe.
“Wearing herself to a frazzle. Your mother had very definite ideas about this funeral and Maeve, being Maeve, is carrying them out to the nth degree.” This time the scorn’s unmistakable. Maeve always claimed that Donal and Mrs D. were fond of each other, but when it comes to family relationships, my sister is prone to whitewash.
“Is she annoyed with me?”
“Your mother wanted to see you and Maeve promised her she’d track you down. When she wasn’t able to…Well…”
I can’t give him the response that leaps into my mind and find I can’t think of anything to say instead. Maeve is the single thing we have in common; communication is strained when she is not with us. Just as the silence is stretching towards awkwardness, we are rescued by a loud shriek.
“Ahhh,” says Donal, turning. “Our keening friends again.”
At the church door are four young women in costume, made up to look old, with black wrinkles painted across their foreheads and around their eyes and shawls drawn up over grey wigs. I resist the impulse to cover my ears. “Keeners? What the…?”
“Professional mourners, one of your mother’s many special requests. She left pages of instructions, practically a guidebook. How To Have A Good Old Irish Send-Off. We had a wake last night, complete with those four weeping and wailing and flinging themselves on the floor.”
I look across at my sister, explaining to everybody what the sideshow is about and wonder how she can bear it. While planning all this, Mrs D. would have been imagining her celestial self scrutinizing proceedings from above, watching and weighing who did what so she’d know how to treat them when they eventually caught up with her. She wouldn’t have been thinking about Maeve at all.
I feel a hand on my back and turn to see Eileen standing there with her husband, Séamus.
“Jo,” she says. “Jo, I’m so sorry.”
Eileen worked in our shop while we were growing up and lived with us until she married. I let her hold me. Her hug seems to give the others permission to approach and now people I haven’t seen for years are coming across to grab my hand.
Faces I remember, names I’ve forgotten. Names I remember, faces I’ve forgotten.
My mother was a great character, they tell me. She was gone to a better place. God would give me comfort.
Only one old woman tells me anything that sounds like the truth and she gets herself dragged away by the arm for it. “Who are you?” she says. “I never heard Máirín mention you at all.”
Then, out of the mass of well-wishers comes a particular hand and a particular voice, one I do know.
“Jo,” he says, and my heart skips in recognition as I take the proffered hand. A second one comes to encircle mine in warmth and then he is there in front of me. Rory. Rory O’Donovan. All of him, looking down on me, our hands conjoined.
