Trinity: A Novel of Ireland

  The marriage of Mr. Ingram to Miss Enid Lockhart came as no surprise at all. Conor and I were invited to the wedding and reception and did not attend for obvious reasons, but we did watch the ceremony from outside the church. A reception was held afterward at Hubble Manor where Mr. Ingram had become a great favorite of Lady Caroline. We watched everyone going in through the main gates. I must admit that Lady Caroline was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. When they returned from their honeymoon in Scotland, Conor and I went to see him. Conor made the most beautiful set of wrought-iron bookends you'd ever hope to see, which he gave as a wedding present in both our names. I think Mr. Ingram was sincerely moved. He never asked us why we didn't come because he knew. There were a lot of things between us we never exactly put into words because they were understood.

  "I should like to give you something too," he told us. "Miss Enid . . . Mrs. Ingram has a surplus of family Bibles so I should like you to have mine." Both Conor and I stared at it as he set it on his desk, for it was the most dangerous contraband imaginable for the likes of us.

  "The farmers of Scotland are a very poor and hardworking lot," Mr. Ingram said.

  "Things were never as bad for them as they've been for you, but it's been no picnic, either."

  He ran his hand over Conor's bookends and smiled, then walked to the window and put his hands behind him as I'd seen him do so many times in class. "No one knew how to read very well except for the holy book. Every night before retiring was a time of special joy. We'd gather around my father before the fire, four sons and four daughters, and he would read from the Bible. The tradition from his father was so deep that he and most of the others could recite it by heart It is the wellspring of our language."

  He turned from the window. "I've come to learn that it's not quite as rich a language as yours, but it's not so poor either. . . see, I even speak a bit like you now. If I had my wish you'd be able to learn the Bible in your own language. You see, lads, there is no more beautiful way that words have been used and thoughts expressed."

  Conor nodded that he understood. I leaned in front of him as he opened the cover. It was very, very old, with each new son who inherited it placing down his name. From Adair Ingram it was over two hundred years to Andrew.

  "We're very honored," I said, "but I think we don't deserve it."

  "I want you and Conor to have it in particular because I believe you've a gift from the fairies with your own words. Father Lynch notwithstanding, would you accept it in the spirit of learning?"

  *

  Conor and I like to died from the pain of it when Andrew Ingram and his darling wife left Ballyutogue. On the nomination of Lady Caroline he was appointed to run the largest school in Derry.

  From the time we returned from the booley house Conor and Tomas went into a silent spell. Conor was allowed to return to Mr. Lambe's forge and he studied as hard as ever but it was a soiled game they played. Tomas continued to pretend that Conor would remain in Ballyutogue and take up the farm and Conor never came right out and said anything to the contrary.

  Their silence was finally broken with the news that Daddo Friel had gotten away. Daddo was a long ways up the road but even so it came as a terrible sorrow. Along with Mr. Ingram, he had been the important teacher in our lives. We traveled up to his village of Crockadaw to what was to be the last great wake on Inishowen.

  Kevin O'Garvey came from Derry and delivered a eulogy that would have made the old Fenian stand up in his grave. The night was filled with many stories of Daddo and the circle of his closest friends were weeping out loud in their poteen.

  By the second dawn Kevin broke down and babbled his anguish over the political strife that had torn the fabric of the Irish Party. Charles Stewart Parnell had been driven from the leadership and Kevin, being among his own, spilled his overfull heart on our ears.

  Parnell’s enemies had long been a pack of jackals eternally on the prowl for the great man's throat. They had thrown him into that hall of Irish martyrs, Kilmainham Jail, years before when the Land League was declared illegal. The British ended up with their foot in their mouth over that one, redeclaring it legal.

  Later, Parnell was accused of taking part in the political assassination of the British First Secretary in Dublin. Only in the courtroom under cross-examination did his accuser, Richard Piggot, break and admit the letter of accusation was a forgery. Piggot fled to Spain afterward and killed himself.

  No sooner had Parnell weathered one political storm than the British were after him again. He was finally destroyed by the dragging up of an ancient affair. Early in his career, Captain W. H. O'Shea was a trusted associate. O'Shea had long been estranged from his wife, Kitty. She became Parnell’s mistress and over the years bore him three children, one of whom died. It was not until after a decade of Parnell's life with Kitty O'Shea that her husband saw fit to sue for divorce and name Parnell as co-respondent in an act of cold-blooded vengeance. After an uncontested decree, Parnell married his beloved, but the gates of wrath had opened.

  At first the Irish Party and the people rallied to him but soon every Catholic pulpit in the land rained damnation on the adulterers with our own Father Lynch not being the least among them. As the bishops raged and the scandal deepened, Gladstone, that shining Liberal knight, demanded Parnell step down from leadership of the Irish Party as the price for introducing another Home Rule Bill.

  The Irish Party members of Parliament convened in a room in Westminster. In the battle that ensued, Kevin O'Garvey was with the twenty-six who remained loyal to Parnell. Among the leaders of the opposition who ousted him was the selfsame Michael Roche who had once exhorted us from Celtic Hall in Derry.

  Parnell returned to Ireland with Kevin O'Garvey and made a futile attempt to regain control. On the first night of Daddo Friel's wake Kevin confided to us that Parnell was exhausted from fourteen years of unabated warfare. Kevin was deeply concerned over the man's health.

  "He's half crippled with rheumatism and rancid over his defeat. I begged him to rest himself but he wouldn't listen."

  Hearing such words was frightening. For Conor and me, Parnell was like a god. Tomas fed the fires of Kevin's bitterness, saying over and over that freedom was a mirage and the only logical end was the hanging tree. I knew, of course, those words were for Conor's consumption.

  Kevin was called away from the graveyard the instant Daddo was put into the earth. The caller was a messenger from the General Post Office carrying a telegram, which often as not was a harbinger of death. We went looking for Kevin frantically as soon as we could get away, and found him on the edge of the village, salted with tears, sobbing convulsively, unable to speak. Conor took the message from his hand and I saw the desire of life drain from him.

  "Parnell is dead."

  We were to discover that he had gone to his deathbed during a short visit to England. Kitty was at his side. His body was returned to Dublin where Irish leaders are profaned in life but exalted in death. The outpouring of genuine and hypocritical grief had never been duplicated as he was laid to rest near Daniel O'Connell. It all took place in the year of eighteen and ninety-one. Parnell left us at the age of forty-five.

  The magnificent Irish Party he had forged, and which became a menace to the British, now fragmented and knuckled under to British demands. With Parnell gone, much of the Irish aspiration went with him. What seemed to go out of Conor and myself went out of the Irish people. The great thrust for freedom came to a sudden, confused halt. We were croppies again, standing out in the cold and freezing with our noses pressed hungrily against the window . . . waiting . . . waiting … waiting . . .

  CHAPTER TEN

  "I came as quickly as I could," Roger said. "How is he?"

  "He has cancer, Roger," Clara answered calmly, having called into play her full theatrical skills for the final ritual. "He's in and out of intense pain. At any rate, you have to know it is fatal."

  "Why didn't you let me know sooner, for God's sake?"

  "Arthu
r is good at pretending that what is real isn't real. It makes little difference now."

  His father looked frightful. Roger feigned that it was reassuring to see him more fit than he had anticipated. Lord Arthur was propped up with pillows, sucking at a cigarette and holding a snifter of cognac in his other hand. Roger protested the excesses but his father answered it really didn't matter and he'd just as soon slip under with a decent taste in his mouth.

  "Clara trimmed my hair up just for you. At least you haven't had to pay my barber bills on top of everything else."

  "Father, I don't find that very amusing."

  "You'll have to forgive my newly found sense of humor. It becomes downright diabolical at times."

  "Now you listen to me, you're going to be all right."

  "Roger, this blasted thing is awful, really awful. Let's both dispense with any pretense that I'll get out alive. Now tell me, how are Caroline and the boys?"

  "Frightfully worried. She's on her way back from England now. She'll be down as soon as she can fetch the boys. Sir Frederick is sending his private car so we can take you back to the Manor."

  "No, I shan't go. Only this time I mean I shan't."

  "I have to insist, Father."

  "If Caroline can have her sons on the kitchen table at Hubble Manor, I am entitled to die in Daars. Fear not, dear boy, you'll have the corpse soon enough for pomp and solemn occasion. But, Roger, no Orange bands, no matter how important it is to family interests. I shall not be entombed in that family vault with the strains of "The Old Orange Flute' ringing in my ears. I should prefer something more dignified, the garrison band from Belfast playing an old regimental requiem. Perhaps Caroline can whip together a chamber orchestra. She's got such smashing taste, that girl, I'm putting it in her hands . . ."

  "Father, that's quite enough!"

  "I told you about my sense of humor."

  Roger gritted teeth and twitched face muscles, seeing no object in argument and disliking the torrent of self-abuse from his father.

  "Roger, you and I have managed to tolerate each other all these years. That shows good breeding." He gnashed his own teeth and moaned, waving the cigarette. "Put this bloody thing out."

  "Is there anything that can be done about the pain?"

  "No, I'm quite doped up. Clara has even slipped me an opium pipe obtained from one of her old stage mates. Helps a bit. The rumor is that you and Caroline do a bit of that on the Continent. Smashing woman, Caroline. The Chinese are terribly civilized. They put the ailing elders off in a corner when they've got this thing and give them a pipe and let them just drift away. How're the boys?"

  Knocked out from the opening amenities, Lord Arthur drifted for a time. His eyes opened hard, as though jarringly frightened, from his trance. "One does a lot of moralizing, lying here day after day. Know what I'd do if I were you?

  "What, Father?"

  "Sell everything and get out of Ireland. God knows how many little Parnells have been spawned in the gutters of Dublin. The quaint folk are all rested from the famine by now and you can be sure their dirty little back rooms are seething with rebellion . . ."

  After medication, Arthur wearied and spoke in semi-coherent patches as his son took up the death watch. He and Clara had tea without words, then she left to rest at his insistence.

  Arthur groaned to consciousness halfway through the night.

  "I'm here," Roger said.

  "Roger?"

  "Yes."

  "Good of you to come. How are the boys?"

  "They're fine, Father. On the way to Daars."

  "Good. You know, Roger, I've been thinking a lot these days. The new century is bound to be ushered in with an insurrection by these people. You ought to get out of Ulster."

  "It's our home," Roger whispered harshly.

  "Is it? Has it ever really been?"

  Roger walked to the foot of his father's bed and spoke, as though to himself. "In every game one has to consider if the rewards are worth the risk. I suppose colonization is a high-risk game, like shark fishing out of Kinsale here. Frankly, we should be the last to complain over the rewards."

  "Hear, hear, well said. Rampart of the Empire and all that. I feel though . . . the Crown is about to abandon me they won't care to follow where I'm going . . ."

  "I don't want you to be frightened."

  ". . . and in the end . . . they may not choose to follow where Ulster leads them . . ." Another scorching pain convulsed him. Roger took his father's emaciated hand, startled by the sweeping wetness and cold.

  "I give you," Arthur rasped, "the legacy of colonists. After three hundred years of attachment to the homeland with all the feelings of inferiority that are aroused by looking back over the shoulder . . . sometimes wistfully sometimes defiantly . . . but always . . . always as an outsider. We are as a stranger to those who sent us here. We are strangers to those whom we have usurped and exploited. And now. . . we are strangers to ourselves . . ."

  Roger pulled the service cord trembling. The door opened fast, knowingly. The end came mercifully swift.

  After communicating arrangements for a proper funeral, Roger, Caroline and their sons set out to accompany the body back to Ulster.

  "I'm frightfully sorry," Roger said to Clara, "but you'll have to say farewell to Father here."

  "I quite understand. I was never comfortable at Hubble Manor. Daars was our home. At any rate, I'll be moving out in a week or so."

  "No hurry, of course. Can I help you with any plans, Clara?"

  She shrugged.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Wherever old whores go."

  "Come now, none of that. There are a number of bequests in accordance with Father's wishes. I think you'll find everything . . . quite . . . generous."

  "In payment for services rendered," she said acidly.

  "I know how much the two of you loved each other and I've never for a single moment begrudged your relationship. Now, please . . ."

  The impact of coming loneliness hit her, the bitterness of total abandonment, of being placed forever on the outside. She reared up like a monumental bitch. "Some of our most amusing hours were spent trying to figure out ways to torture you. From time to time, since Caroline, you seem almost human, but of course we all know better."

  Roger's eyes turned dully expressionless.

  "He often used to speak of who was the worst of the Hubbles, you, he, or his father. He loathed himself but, as you know, he was too weak to do anything about it. His own father was suddenly faced with a crisis not of his creation, the famine. He reacted viciously for his survival. But you, Roger, you are coldly, carefully planning what it's going to be like twenty years from now. You are the calculator, the creator of a new era of tragedy. Oh, Arthur envied your strength and your craft. He would say, "The boy's a marvel, see how he contains all that cruelty behind a facade of English pleasantness."

  "Yes," Roger answered blandly, "one can see how amusing you were with Father."

  "Well, you and Ulster deserve each other," she hissed, "and I can think of no greater curse. Now get out and leave us to what time we have left."

  Roger walked to the door and opened it.

  "Roger! Oh, God . . . I'm sorry . . ."

  "Well, one cannot deny an old whore her curtain speech. That would be poor form indeed," he said, and left.

  The mourning Hubbles, arm banded in black, returned Lord Arthur's remains to the land of their ancestors. The principal public ceremony was held at Londonderry's Guild Hall, a quasi-Gothic symbol of the "Crown's everlasting power and presence. It was London, clear to the four-faced clock, an imitation of Big Ben in her namesake mother city. The Queen sent high envoy to pay homage to one of her great earls of Ireland.

  In a quiet but noted ceremony some time after the funeral, Roger Hubble was declared the Eleventh Earl of Foyle and his eldest son Jeremy was named the new Viscount Coleraine.

  *

  Two years after veto of the second Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords, th
ere was another death of note. Lord Randolph Churchill, the would-be creator of a new kind of imperial conservatism, met his end. Having been the master orator who played the Orange card and masterminded the fall of a Gladstone government, he had been rewarded at first with high offices but his early instability degenerated into debility and then madness. He died, insane, at the age of forty-six of syphilis.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1895

  As I went into my twenty-first year the Larkins had settled into that all too familiar family pattern in which affection between parents was replaced by indifference. A devouring sense of possession by Finola for Dary stretched normalcy and reason. Finola had joined the majority of Ballyutogue mothers who had long lost any physical and esoteric sensations of love-making. Her home became like all the others in that her husband was a boarder and the sons treated as gentry.

  Dary seemed more and more certain to fulfill Conor's prediction of priesthood. A woman living beyond the memory of carnal pleasure fails to understand why anyone else would crave or miss it. These women were more than willing to push a son into a life of celibacy, which was in the purest Irish tradition. Dary was his mother's precious child, smothered and fitted with blinders that would allow him to see only in the direction of the seminary. By eighteen and ninety-five at the age of ten, he was indulging in a full range of priestly behaviors. Finola did everything to encourage him short of addressing him as "Father."

  Tomas lost the will to combat his wife's obsession and gave her a wide berth. He often burst into uncharacteristic flashes of hostility against Dary but remained too proud to apologize after.

  Conor alone preserved a precarious balance within the family. He stepped into the vacuum left by Tomas to become a surrogate father to Dary. Ignoring Finola's entreaties, Conor took his brother hunting and fishing, and shared the long walks and philosophies that went with them. Often as not, fair day would be spent in great part with Dary riding on his big brother's shoulders. At the same time Conor understood Tomas' dilemma and kept his daddy from slipping under. Without him the Larkins would have fallen to the Irish curse of family warfare.