Dennis O’Hearn wasn’t bad-looking when you saw him up close, she decided, but she would never have taken him for an Irishman. There was a hangdog look to him, big sad eyes that reminded her of the dog Mary wanted to bring into the house when they lived together. Now he picked up on a tune Margaret hummed for him and put the words to it. Norah had not heard it before, a nursery song, nor had she heard a voice like his, deep and dark and soft as velvet. Her love for music was the truest thing in Norah’s life. It drew her to High Mass on Sundays, and prompted her to buy a piano as soon as she had money. It stood mute in her living room save for the few chords she had taught herself to play so that she might know there was music in it.
It was strange the way Dennis O’Hearn’s and her gaze met and locked as though their eyes had got accidentally tangled. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand to hide a smile, she felt. And she sensed her color rising to the roots of her hair. She caught at the foot of the girl stretched on the couch. She’d had to push it aside to make room for herself. The young one pulled her foot away so fast Norah almost lost her balance. She flashed her a smile when she’d rather have pinched her. The upstart mimicked her smile back at her.
The room was stuffy and smelled of the men, sweat and tobacco smoke and the cow barn, and a whiff of Mary’s liniment. Mary called this one big room her parlor. Norah always thought it resembled a gypsy’s nest. To be sure, she’d never seen one. But, for example, instead of a door to the kitchen, the frame was hung with a curtain of beads Mary had bought off a peddler’s wagon. The beads rattled if a wind came up or when someone passed from room to room. Mary’s nook of a bedroom was to one side, chopped out of the kitchen. If Dennis O’Hearn roamed through the house at night, it occurred to Norah, Mary would hear him part the curtain. Would she call him in to the side of her bed and ask him to rub liniment into her knees? Surely not. But Mary was that way. She was as easy with men as she was with women.
The songs they sang came, most of them, out of The Golden Book of Songs. Norah had a pristine copy of it on her piano at home. Mary’s copy looked like an old prayer book that had lost its covers. She tried to picture how this lot would fit in her parlor, where the piano took so much of the room. Mary, when first she’d seen it, let out a whoop. ‘‘Holy Mother of God! It looks just like Reverend Mother!’’ They wouldn’t fit at all, Norah decided. They just didn’t belong there.
‘‘Can you sing ‘Mother Machree,’ Dennis?’’ Rossa asked. ‘‘I don’t think it’s in the book. ‘There’s a place in my heart which no colleen can own,’ ’’ he started, not waiting for Dennis to answer. Suppose Dennis could play the piano, she thought. There were people who played by ear and he might. He picked up on ‘‘Mother Machree’’ and he knew the words by heart. Before he could finish, Rossa demanded ‘‘That Old Irish Mother of Mine.’’
‘‘Give me a minute,’’ Dennis said.
‘‘Let the man wet his whistle,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Isn’t there a drop left in the bottle?’’
Rossa sent his wife out to the car for the spare he kept hidden there.
‘‘Norah.’’ The girl’s mother leaned toward her. She’d seen what happened between her and the upstart, but that wasn’t on her mind at all. ‘‘Do you remember the queer woman at home who’d come out on the castle grounds just before dark? She’d sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ Don’t you remember? A veil round her head so you couldn’t see her face. But every night she’d be there…’’
‘‘You know better than ask Norah about something back home,’’ Mary said. ‘‘She’d turn to salt if she said the word ‘Ireland.’ ’’
That was Mary.
‘‘I remember-I remember the roses on the castle grounds,’’ Norah said. ‘‘And the wreath they sent of them for our mother’s funeral.’’
‘‘Oh, for the love of God!’’ Mary said, out of patience.
Dennis sang ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer.’’
There was no beat Mary could thump to liven ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer’’ and she felt the party turning into slop. She pulled herself up from her chair and announced she was going to fire up the kitchen stove and make tea. She swiped at the curtain with her stick and set it jingling.
‘‘I think I’ll go home now,’’ Norah said. ‘‘It’s been such a grand evening.’’
Dennis was on his feet before she was. ‘‘I’ll walk you home, Miss Lavery,’’ he said.
‘‘Then you don’t need to come back,’’ Mary snapped, quick as a dart.
You could hear the chirp of the crickets.
‘‘Oh dear, dear me,’’ Rossa said then.
Tom Dixon added treacle. ‘‘Stay a while longer, Norah, and we’ll all go out together.’’
Mary would have as soon seen them all go out then. A man as fond of the military as Tom was known to be, you wouldn’t have thought such an appeaser.
But it was Dennis O’Hearn who set things right again. ‘‘Please come back and sit down, Aunt Mary. I know how to fire up the stove, and I’ll put on the kettle for you.’’
‘‘Denny, will you put the kettle on?’’ took on a familiar ring in the next few days, and finding that it pleased her, he brought her a cup of tea every morning as soon as he heard the creak of her bedstead. It was what he had done for his own mother till the day she died.
‘‘She never wanted more than a half cup. She’d send me to spill it out if there was more, and it had to be hot as blazes. Then she’d let it cool off before she drank it.’’
‘‘She wanted you more than she did the tea,’’ Mary told him.
Denny shrugged. If it was so he didn’t understand it.
Mary did not lie long abed on these harvest days- or many others, for that matter-but with morning tea and afternoon tea and the cup she would say she was perishing for in the evening, she learned enough about Denny to know why he had come to her. The last of four boys and by ten years the youngest, he could remember his father saying he should have drowned him the day he was born, the runt of the litter. Until he discovered, when Denny started to school with the sisters, that he had a voice the nuns called sacred. ‘‘He’d hire me out for weddings or funerals for a dollar or two. He’d give me a nickel and spend the rest before my mother got her hand out.’’
It was not the first time Mary had heard a story like it.
‘‘Would you like to hear me sing the ‘Dies Irae’?’’ he offered.
‘‘I would not.’’
Most of Mary’s necessities were obtained through barter, and while she was frugal she was not miserly. But Denny wasn’t long with her before she began to calculate the toll it took of her preserves and garden produce to bring home a pound of bacon. The first time Donel Rossa stopped by after the night of Dennis’ arrival, she broached the possibility of finding a job for Denny in the valley.
‘‘So you’ve decided to keep him,’’ Rossa said. ‘‘You’re a soft touch, Mary.’’
Mary caught something in his tone too intimate for her taste. ‘‘Did you have something to do with him coming, Donel?’’
‘‘Whatever makes you ask a question like that?’’
‘‘It struck me he might be something else that came with my pension.’’
Rossa found a place clear of their feet to spit. ‘‘You’re sharp as a tack this morning, Mary.’’
‘‘I should be. I’ve sat on a few.’’
Rossa laughed. He toed the spittle into the ground. ‘‘You know, Mary, the holy water is going to run dry. I’m not saying the state’ll go dry. God forbid. The Dutchmen have a powerful thirst for their beer, and they’ve a throttle on the legislature.’’