After the Rising

1995-5

“Sure. I get that.”

It’s true. There is a great deal about being single that I like. Or that I will like again, once I find my way back to myself. Back to the kinds of days I used to have when I first went to San Francisco — when I had lovers, not pick-ups, when I had joys, not dubious pleasures. When I had Richard.

Well Richard is gone, forever, and I have spent too long wishing he wasn’t. I have to learn how to create myself – by myself, for myself – the colour and excitement he used to bring to my life. That much I’ve worked out.

“Look, I won’t stay long, Jo. I dropped up here because I need to talk to you about your mother’s will.”

“Rory, I’ve already told Maeve. I don’t give a fiddler’s about—”

He holds up his hand. “I know that, Dev. We all know that. But can you just listen for a minute? Last January, your mother said to me, ‘I’m not long for this world. I won’t last the year.’ I laughed it off, the way you do, but she started making plans and she hired me to carry them out. So this is business. And this,” he says, reaching across to place the white envelope he has been holding onto the bedspread, “is for you.”

An A4 envelope with my name written on the outside in blue ink: Siobhán. Mrs D.’s handwriting, still small and neat and tight as print. At the centre, between the folds of paper: something hard.

“Siobhán,” I say. “Nobody ever calls me that. Nobody ever did, except Mrs D.”

“Don’t open the letter yet,” he says, getting up. “There’s something else you have to be given first. Wait here.”

He goes out of the room and returns with a battered blue suitcase. I recognise it immediately. Six times a year, I used to fill it with blankets and sheets and uniform, and be driven with it from Mucknamore to my convent boarding school, or back.

He heaves it onto the bed where it lands at my feet with a bounce. “Jesus, it’s heavy,” he says, puffing. “I’m always surprised by the weight of paper.”

“Paper?”

“It’s full of documents. Family papers, photographs, newspaper cuttings, that sort of thing. The key is in that sealed envelope you’ve got there. You are the only one who is to have access.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m just following instructions. I was to make sure to give this to you myself and I was to tell you that the contents are for your eyes only, nobody else’s. She was very clear about that.”

I take out the key, pull the case towards me. The locks must have recently been oiled because one twist of the key and – click, click – they snap open. It is crammed with all kinds of documents. Packets of letters tied with faded ribbon. A stack of shop ledger diaries (author: Granny Peg). Sheaves of paper, close covered in black ink, tied with string (author: Auntie Norah). And a smell of yesterday as strong as bottled scent.

Half of me wants to recoil, but the other half wins, and I find myself picking through the photographs: heavy daguerreotypes, stiff sepias from the early part of the century, black-and-whites from the 40s and 50s and from around the time when I was born, colorful prints that bring us all the way up to now, to these pictures on top which were presumably taken by Donal, of Mrs D. – smaller and more wrinkled than I remember – clasped in Maeve’s arms while together they watch Ria blow out the candles on a birthday cake.

Beneath the pictures are pamphlets and booklets, song-sheets with the words of old ballads, and pink files full of notes about what seem to be IRA matters, dispatches to and from various officers of Mucknamore IRA, written by somebody called Máire Parle.

Wasn’t that the name of Gran’s mother?

My great-grandmother.

Damn you, Mrs D., I think as I rummage through, reluctantly first, then greedily, until I become aware again of Rory looking at me looking, which is all too much for me. I replace the papers, close the lid of the case, snap the clasps on tight. “What was she up to?” I ask him.

“I honestly don’t know. Apart from the fact that it meant meeting up with you” – that grin again – “I treated it as if she was just another client. I’ve had stranger requests.”

“How was she so certain I’d come back?”

“If you didn’t, I was to get your address and bring the suitcase and the letter across to you in the States. Make sure to put it into your hand myself.”

I imagine myself in my San Francisco apartment, answering my buzzer one ordinary day and hearing Rory O’Donovan’s voice coming through the speaker at me. At the behest of Mrs D. What the hell was she playing at? And him too, with his hair touching and his “never say never”, and “you haven’t changed a bit”. I was crazy to have come here, to have delivered myself up to this.

“You can take it back,” I say. “I don’t want it.”

“Ah, Dev…”

“Family papers. Can’t you just imagine? Uncle Barney, the IRA hero. Fianna Fáil the fabulous. Spare me, please. Take it back to wherever it came from.”

6th February 1995

Dear Siobhán,

A letter from beyond the grave, what do you think of that? I got one from your Granny Peg when she passed on so I can imagine some of your feelings as you read this. By now you’ll have had the suitcase and seen what’s in it. Most of these letters and records were kept by your Granny Peg – I don’t think that woman ever threw away a piece of paper.

It was always in my mind that we should sort out those papers some day, destroy the rubbish and the private stuff, and give the rest to somebody who could put together a family history. When your gran died, she suggested, among other things, that the person should be you.

As you know, Siobhán, you come from a family that played no small part in Ireland’s fight for freedom. I believe the stories of those who died for their country should be preserved and passed on to the younger generations who, I have to say, seem to take so much for granted these days. Some time ago, I sat down to tackle the task, but I found it impossible. Everything was all mixed up together and one thing seemed to hang on another. I couldn’t work out what to leave in and what to take out.

After days of shuffling bits of paper in and out of different piles, I came round to agreeing with your gran. You are used to writing and would be much better up to the task.

So that is what I want you to do, Siobhán – the Parle family history. Focus on the part our family played in the Easter Rising of 1916, there is where you’ll find our glory.

Contrary to what you’d think if you were to listen only to Dubliners, the glorious uprising that won Ireland its freedom took place in other parts of the country besides the capital. That Enniscorthy here in Co. Wexford was one such is down to your maternal ancestors. That is something of which you can be proud, I think, don’t you?

There is so much ignorance today about the sacrifices endured by that great generation. Sacrifices made so that those who came after them (yourself included, I might add) could grow up in a free country.

Those men and women who worked and died for Ireland are half-forgotten now. The 75-year commemoration of the Rising in ’91 was an unholy disgrace. It nearly killed your gran, how they failed to honour our origins. It’s time someone reminded the young people that not too long ago, there were Irish men and women who had interests beyond the raking in of money, who had principles and ideals they were prepared to die for.

You come from such a family.

There’s a danger in me doing this, Siobhán, I won’t pretend I don’t know it. I’m afraid of what you might write, what you might choose to highlight. But your gran thought you and Maeve should know all, now that the knowing can do no harm, and I’ve come round to thinking maybe she was right. So I’ve destroyed nothing, not even Auntie Norah’s ramblings and inventions, most of which no sane person could read anyhow, her handwriting so bad and her thoughts all over the place.

I’m putting three generations of Parles into your hands, Siobhan, trusting you not to make public anything we would prefer to remain private.

I’m also hoping when you read these papers you’ll understand better why it was so terrible for me that time when you got yourself mixed up with an O’Donovan. I’ve played that last evening in our kitchen so many times in my mind and I greatly regret the pity of how we both overreacted. At the beginning, I was afraid that if we did make up and you came back home, you’d take up with him again. Your grandmother feared that too, I know. It might be hard to understand now but, at the time, the fear was very real.

Yet I was always expecting something to happen that would bring you back to us. Always, until Mammy died. When you didn’t come back for your Granny Peg’s funeral, I knew I’d go to my own grave without seeing you again. That’s a hard thing to do to a parent, Siobhán, but I forgive you, as I hope my will makes clear. Everything I have, I leave equally to you and Maeve. I’m sure you agree it’s a tidy sum. Invested wisely, you’ll be free from money worries and able to do whatever you want. You could afford to take time off from writing in those magazines or, better still, give up that kind of thing entirely.

So there you are: the only thing I’ve ever asked you to do. Make us a family history that makes us all proud, something that can be passed on to little Ria and her children and your own, if you’re so blessed. Don’t write anything that would make me regret I didn’t destroy the lot and take their secrets to the grave.

Think of it as a way of making amends, of putting things right between us. I regret that I won’t be here to guide you but I’ll be looking down from Heaven. (Keep that in your mind as you write and you won’t go too far wrong.) I’ll be praying for you as I always have.

Always, Siobhan. I want you to know that.

That through it all I was always

Your loving

Mammy

My mind has cracked around that letter. For months now, I’ve been back in the place I thought I had conquered, where thoughts hold me staring open-eyed into the dark, where self-pity has me spinning scenarios about what would happen if I ended it all. How, if I did, it could be days before anybody would know. Not until I failed to return enough phone calls, or missed my next deadline, would somebody – Dee, or Gary, or Lauren, my editor – grow anxious enough to want to check.

How they wouldn’t be able to get in. Since Richard died, mine has been a one-key-to-the-apartment kind of life. So the building super would have to be called. In the hallway, their eyes would fasten immediately on my shut bedroom door. Wordlessly, they would move across to open it and…

It’s been bad in San Francisco, this imagining the worst. Now this evening, in Mrs D.’s house, with her letter, and its unanswerable questions and unspeakable schemes, burning in my hand, it’s unbearable. Outside, daylight is stretching itself into a long dusk. I’d forgotten how, at this time of year, an Irish evening doesn’t fade until well after ten.

Barely have I thought the thought but I’m up, out of bed and opening my suitcase, not the big blue one that still lies, looming, on the bed where Rory lobbed it, but my own, all-the-way-from-San Francisco suitcase that Maeve must have brought up here for me while I slept.

I pull on my jeans and walking shoes and sneak down the back stairs. From the front room, the sound of the party continues, muted now. Only the stragglers – those who cared most for Mrs D. and those who cared least, turned out only for the free drink — are left. I get out the back door without being seen. The cool, summer evening is like a gentle splash of water on my face. Once I’m down the path and across the long lawn, far enough away from the house, I stop to gulp in lungfuls of fresh air.