“I hope it’s strong enough,” Edward said. “Will you be able to hear what is said?”
“Oh yes, I shall,” she said.
He watched her vanish beyond the doorway, stood with book in hand conjuring his own seventeenth-century forebears: more than two centuries gone since the ancestral Daughertys’ lands were taken in Donegal, the clan reduced to lowly cottiers tilling the land of others; some of them turning into the plundering rapparees who preferred the pike to the hoe; but, in time, all of them thrust into the barrens of western Connacht like flung dogs.
Whether my people were marked because they had slaughtered English landholders in the bloody rebellion of 1641, or were unslaughtered remnants-in-arms after Cromwell’s 1649 conquest, it matters not, for they go into exile by Cromwellian fiat — the transplanting, he called it — to the far western part of Ireland’s most desolate province, without houses, adequate clothing, cattle, or farm implements, prohibited from living within five miles of the River Shannon or the sea. Women and children perished in ditches, dead of starvation or eaten by wolves. In their desolation the Irish fed upon dead bodies dug from graves, the survivors condemned to till the earth of Connacht’s hellish landscape and discover its essence: ubiquitous rock.
How goes the family lineage?
It hardens.
And how grows the rock’s foetus?
With neither tongue, nor brain, nor souclass="underline" doomed creature mutilated in the womb, conceived with one foot, webbed arm, vertical eyes, a row of teeth in its belly, suitable for frightening devils, born on a rock so wide the people of Connacht made it the altar of Jesus, worshiped it in Gaelic prayer, lived off its might, starving as they prayed, their priests axed or hanged, their young men and maidens sent to slavery in the Tobacco Islands where they toiled at a level below the Negro bondsmen; the leftover faithful withering by the tens of thousands, living amid a world of rock fences, those man-high sculptures that ride the contours of hills and valleys still, lace-made to foil the wind, an endless, timeless memorializing of rock in order to live free of it: fences visible for miles, miles, and miles beyond that, each rock a gravestone, each fence testament to the ingenuity of survivaclass="underline" leaving, where the rocks were liftable out of the earth, scrubby patches of soil for planting.
The lineage leads from Connacht’s fences forward to famine, when even potatoes die, then into modern exile on Connacht Block in Albany, raucous overcrowded neighborhood at Madison Avenue and Quay Street, where greenhorns cluster till they find footing, send money away for others to quit the rock, then move uptown, to the North End like the Daugherty brothers, Owen and Davy first, then Emmett, or they rise like you, Edward Daugherty, to heights where you can court the modern get of an ancient devil.
I am demonizing my love, Edward thought, to make her the equal of what her parents think I am.
He returned the Irish books to their shelves, and he waited. Fletcher brought sherry and three glasses. Edward stared at it: Waterford crystal, brought here by Lyman.
“The Master thought you might like a bit of sherry,” said Fletcher, setting one glass apart.
“They are going to see me,” Edward said.
“They will be along presently,” said Fletcher, nodding.
“I’ve already read all the books.”
“You are accomplished at many things, Mr. Daugherty.” And Fletcher left the room.
Edward knew what Jacob and Geraldine would say to him, had long absorbed their hostility in the foreshortened glance, the abrupt tone, the bristling at his closeness to Lyman: for that closeness differed in kind from Lyman’s behavior toward his children. It was Lyman’s duty as an unmurdered man to see that Edward escaped what fate had ordained at birth for his kind. Edward was transformed, and Lyman lived to know his godson had grown and flourished, would even publish a novel, though Lyman would not live to hold it in his hand. But what Edward’s transformation would win him remains to be seen. Now here he sits, waiting to be judged, and he feels his brain on fire with ancient yearnings for justice and comprehension.
But I will not kiss their foot.
Well enough. Do you know what they’ll say to you?
They’ll say the disparity between families and religions will cause friction among friends and relatives, be a curse on the marriage. They will never mention the Irish or that they see us as a race of beasts.
They will imply, with exquisite finesse, that you are of lowly financial status, that Katrina stands to inherit great wealth, and that this wealth has given her her life as she knows it. You, a writer, could you, in a lifetime, ever earn enough to preserve her birthright? Not likely.
They will praise you as a cultured man and wish you well in your literary pursuits, but they will continue to believe Katrina’s attentions should be from a suitor of an established profession. You, Edward, being no such thing, stand as a living impediment to a harmonious marriage, in Katrina’s mind if not in your own.
He poured himself a sherry, bolted it. It tasted like the Irish Sea.
He leaned back in the leather chair, considered his position, moved a straight chair to a point where it would face the two leather chairs. He sat in the straight chair and leaned forward — no, too close — moved the chair back a foot, poured another sherry, bolted it.
They came in together, Geraldine still growing wide with age, wearing a long black dress that covered her from throat to toe and could have passed for a mourning vestment (anticipating the death-like eventuation of losing Katrina to this man?). Jacob came in with his high white collar and his unruly graying hair, and Edward stood to greet them, blocking Jacob’s access to his desk chair.
“You have something to tell us?” Jacob asked.
“I do,” Edward said.
The Taylors made no move to sit down.
“Jake, Geraldine, please sit,” Edward said. “I have a few things to say, no sense standing.”
Geraldine sat in one of the leather armchairs, and Jacob, not taking his eye off Edward, sat warily beside her. Edward reseated himself on the hardback, facing his captive audience.
“I’m here,” he said, “to say directly to you that I’ve asked Katrina repeatedly to marry me, and she has not said no, but neither has she said yes. I know she’s indecisive because you have questions and uncertainties about such a marriage, and about me, which is natural.”
Jacob moved as if to speak, but Edward pressed on.
“I don’t want to trouble either of you to speak of this now. I want only to reveal to you who I am, for even though you think you know me, you truly do not.
“I begin with this room, where the worlds of your family and mine exist side by side on your bookshelves: Dickens and Thackeray, giants in the world I aspire to, alongside chronicles of your exalted ancestral civilization. I’ll live my life writing, books now, perhaps plays in the future, a noble profession, playwriting, as you know from Shakespeare on your shelves.
“I’m sure you’ve heard what the gossips say about Katrina and me, that I’m aiming above my station. I don’t answer such gossip and Katrina admires me for it. After all, who’s to say what my station is? Am I fresh from the low life of the Dublin slums? Am I a rude peasant late off the stony fields of Connacht? These things may have been part of my ancestry, just as you two derive from a culture of avaricious land barons who kept farmers in unspeakable peonage for two centuries, from generations of soulless men who grew rich off the slave trade. Is that low life, or—”
“What’s that about the slave trade?” Jacob asked. “If you’re implying—”
“Don’t reduce yourself, Jake, don’t give it a second thought. I don’t,” and Edward quickened his speech, eliminated pauses, breathed on the run.