“Now I know that I’m home,” he said. “It takes an Irish rain to make me certain of it. It always rains in Ireland, you know. Not even the sun can stop it. In Tanzania it was either hot and dry, or else the heavens opened up in a cloudburst. Here it always rains but never pours. You never drown and you’re never dry.”
In the airport, they queued up to wait for their luggage. Her suitcase turned up quickly, but when the last of the carts of luggage was brought in she still could not find her guitar.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t left in London.”
“I’m sure they’ll find it.”
“Oh, I suppose I could buy another if I have to, but I don’t — oh, I hope...”
The priest laid a hand on her shoulder. “Now isn’t this a fine way to welcome you to Ireland?” He took her arm. “Just let me make it a bit easier for you, my child. Let me have your passport and luggage checks, will you? And then you take yourself over to the counter there for a cup of hot tea, and by the time you’ve finished it I’ll have your guitar for you. Just you relax and let me take care of everything for you.”
She handed over her passport and luggage checks, then let him lead her to a lunch counter. She ordered two cups of tea, set one aside for Father Farrell, and added milk and sugar to her own. The tea was strong and rich, and she sat sipping it and wondering what could have happened to her guitar. What would she do if they couldn’t find it? She had had the same guitar for almost four years, had paid almost a hundred dollars for it in a Third Avenue pawn shop, and had felt lucky to get it for that price. How could she replace it? And how could she possibly perform at Berlin with an inferior, unfamiliar instrument?
She had just about managed to get herself profoundly worked up over the matter, when the priest appeared, his own suitcase in one hand, her guitar in the other. She let out a great sigh of relief, then found herself laughing at her own discomfiture.
“You see?” he told her. “No problem at all. They were afraid it might be damaged in the regular luggage compartment, so they had it riding right up with us in the passenger area. It was probably no more than a few feet from us throughout the trip. Open the case, why don’t you, and make sure that it’s in good condition.”
She unsnapped the case and took out the guitar. The fingers of her left hand automatically positioned themselves on the strings, and she strummed a few chords. “Out of tune,” she said, “but that’s nothing new. Close enough for folk music, anyway. That’s a joke among folk singers.”
“Not as private a joke as you might imagine. When the organ is a shade out of tune, we say it’s close enough for the six o’clock mass.”
“Really? I never heard that.”
“And I never heard your version, but perhaps one private world is much like another. Here’s your passport, you won’t want to forget that. Oh, you ordered a cup of tea for me. That’s kind of you. You can go straight through customs now, if you wish. Or if you care to wait, I’ll make sure you get to your hotel.”
“Oh, I’m sure I can get there without any trouble. I’ll just take a taxi.”
“Would you like me to come with you? If there’s any trouble over your reservation, I might be able to help.”
“I’m sure there won’t be any trouble. And I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way.”
“I’ve plenty of time.”
She got to her feet. “No, it’s quite all right.” She slung the guitar case over her shoulder, then picked up the tape recorder and the suitcase. “I do want to thank you,” she said earnestly. “Not just for getting my guitar for me, but for being ...oh, for being so very nice. I enjoyed our conversation very much.”
“No more than I did, I assure you.”
“Thank you. And I ...I’m sure I’ll love Ireland.”
“I hope you do,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again. It’s a small country, you know. A tiny little island. I’ll be at home in County Clare, and I may get down to Kerry for a bit. I’ve friends and family there. We may encounter each other again before you leave.”
“Oh, I hope so.”
“And if not” — he smiled — “I do hope you enjoy your stay here. And I wish you all the luck in the world in Berlin.”
Three
As she had expected, there was no trouble about her room. The woman at The White House, slender, with a heart-shaped face and a soft Dublin brogue, led her up a flight of stairs to a spacious room with a window facing out on Amiens Street. The price was a pound a day, with breakfast included. Ellen said that the room was fine and signed the guest register in the hall downstairs. She glanced over the other entries in the old ledger. Most of the guests were English, with a few Canadians and some Irish from cities like Cork and Galway. She was the first American to stay at The White House in almost three months.
She went to her room, unpacked, and took her guitar from its case. She struck a few chords, then went through the laborious process of tuning the instrument by ear. In the course of this her high E-string broke, and she had to replace it. Fortunately she had half a dozen spares for each of the six strings of the guitar. She had heard enough horror stories of performers stranded in out-of-the-way spots with a broken guitar string, and she was not likely to forget to carry a spare. A blues singer had told her of one such time, a nightclub date in East St. Louis. His G-string broke, and he replaced it, and the replacement snapped while he was tuning up. “And every store in town closed, and I didn’t know another guitar player within fifty miles.” He had wound up playing the entire evening with five strings on the guitar.
“Ellen,” he had told her, “I was about as good without that G-string as a stripper would have been. Everybody in the place got too drunk to know whether I was good or not, but I was stone sober, and I heard everything I played, and you better believe it was bad.” So she had brought plenty of spares. She might make her raincoat double in brass as a bathrobe, and she might make do with only two purses and two dresses and three skirt-and-sweater combinations, but her guitar was going to stay in good shape.
She replaced the broken string, tuned it, kicked off her shoes, sat on the very soft bed, and began to play. She closed her eyes and let her fingers work on the strings without consciously selecting a tune. She had been playing the guitar for almost ten years, and for almost half that time the instrument had functioned as an extension of her own self. She had heard all the jokes about folk musicians who took their instruments to bed with them, about musicians who felt literally naked when they left their guitars or banjos at home, and she knew now that the jokes had a very real truth to them. She did feel incomplete without the guitar. It was a part of her, one of her private voices, and the thought of losing it at the airport, of being forcibly parted from it, had held an almost surgical terror for her.
Her fingers picked out chords and melodies. She did not select songs consciously but sat with her eyes closed and let the guitar speak for her. She was in Dublin, and she thought about the songs that had come out of Dublin, songs of the Easter Rising of 1916, songs of an earlier rising in Dublin, when a Dublin boy named Robert Emmet tried to start an insurrection in 1803, just five years after the glorious rebellion of ’98. Spies and informers infiltrated his movement, and the British let it gather just enough momentum so that they could have an excuse to crush it once and for all, and hang Emmet in the bargain.
She remembered his speech from the dock. “I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is the charity of silence. Let no man write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor ignorance disperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written. I have done!”