The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

Inviolata to the Blessed Virgin …

      Inviolata, integra et casta es, Maria … Stainless, inviolate, and chaste art thou, O Mary … Nostra ut pura pectora sint et corpora … That pure our minds and hearts may be …

      Nobody ‘forbade the banns’ – read out on three consecutive Sundays at Holy Cross. Each week she sat through their reading, mortified lest somebody would shout out objecting to her intended marriage. Worse still that without her knowing it, some prudish biddy would slink around to the sacristy after Mass and coat the ear of the priest with poisoned whisperings about her. Then she would be quietly summoned, the reading of the banns suspended, she and her children shamed.

      When the day finally came, the wedding was grander than anything she could have had back home. Much grander – and in a hotel too. While she was against wasting too much money on frippery, there was a sense of statement, as Lavelle had put it, ‘That we’re not paupers any more. That we’re no longer the Famine Irish!’

      So she had relented, rigging the children in new outfits, had cut for herself a dress from a foulard of silk, thin and soft and cream in colour. Lavelle too, hatted, cravatted, looked every inch the fine Boston gentleman. The day itself was a great success and seemed to spin out for ever. As indeed it did – into the next morning. ‘It’s in danger of turning into a wake …’ she whispered to Lavelle, in a private moment, ‘… if it goes on any longer!’

      And she had sung, especially for him, ‘Úna Bhán – ‘Fair-haired Úna’, one of the great love songs, not as she should have, she felt. She hadn’t spoken a syllable of Irish for eight months. Now the words felt clumsy in her mouth so she trimmed the song from its forty-odd verses down to a dozen or so.

      Peabody, whom they’d invited but didn’t think would attend, to her delight, if not wholly to Lavelle’s, presented himself for the after-wedding festivities.

      ‘I might as well close up shop completely if I was observed entering a Roman church,’ he confided to her jokingly. ‘It reminds me, Ellen – it reminds me …’ He started to tell her something after she’d sung, then changed course. ‘That song – what does it say?’ he instead asked.

      ‘It’s a song from Connemara, two hundred years old,’ she explained, ‘composed for the woman Úna, whose father would not let her marry beneath herself. Being kept from her beloved, she died. He seeing her laid out, remembers her beauty – like the music of the harp always on the road before him. His love for her so great that it had come between him and God. There, that’s all forty verses of it in Irish, in one in English!’ she laughed.

      Peabody, after he had thought for a moment, remarked, ‘Isn’t it a strange song to sing on your wedding-day, Ellen – a song about death?’

      ‘Oh no, Jacob! That’s the beauty of the song – it’s not of death, it’s of great love. He would lose God for her,’ she answered, impassioned.

      Peabody looked away from her into the revelry beyond. ‘I suppose a life without great love is like that – a losing of God,’ he said. He was speaking of his own life; she waited, silent. ‘The tenacity of true passion is terrible; it will stand against the hosts of Heaven, rather than surrender its aim, and must be crushed, sent to the lowest pit, before it will ever succumb – something I heard once,’ he mumbled, by way of explanation.

      ‘Jacob – were you ever …?’ she started, wanting to ask him.

      ‘It’s something I have observed, Ellen,’ he interrupted, deflecting her, ‘about the Irish. How at once happiness and sadness can co-exist. Your wakes are laced with merriment, your weddings with lament. It is a peculiar twist of character. Little wonder the English find you a disconcerting race to govern.’ Peabody laughed a little.

      ‘We’re no different from any other peoples,’ she said gently, thinking of him, rather than the Irish or the English.

      ‘Oh, but you are, Ellen!’ he said, rising to the argument. ‘There’s a blackness within your race, a perversity. Nothing is allowed to be as it is. Love must be death. Death must be love. Everything turned on itself.’

      ‘Jacob, come along. This is most unlike you to be so dark, on such a day.’

      He apologized, and she was drawn back into the merriment, sorry she had started it all by explaining the song to him.

      She had some difficulty pulling the children away from all the excitement and settling them down across the hall from where she and Lavelle would spend their wedding-night. Later, as she undressed, thinking about the day, waiting for Lavelle, the song came back to her. ‘Úna, wasn’t it you that went between me and God?’ What a thing for a person to live with! It was unimaginable to her – throwing over God for love.

      She hiked up her nightdress, knelt by the bedside. She’d shorten the prayers a bit tonight, didn’t want to be still out of bed when Lavelle came up.

      Besides, Boston in springtime had yet quite a nip to it.

       11

      The very next day they moved into the new quarters Lavelle had found for them in Pleasant Street. They had decided they should rent, until they were better fitted to buy a place of their own. The fear always being with them both, that if overstretched with borrowings, things took a turn, the banks would then tumble them out of the house, evict them. She and the children already carried that scar. It was something she’d never put them through again. With the rent it was less of a risk. They’d still have a bit aside to tide them over, if a reversal of fortune came about.

      She had hated leaving Washington Street, thinking how in the end it was marriage, not commerce snapping up every parcel of space which had forced them out.

      The Pleasant Street house was in a neat terrace, with its own hall-door and a shiny letterbox low down – while Washington Street was never her own hall-door. A slab of granite stone stepped up to this one, which Mary thought ‘very grand’. Louisa meanwhile was fascinated by the brass lettering, running her finger around the welcoming curvature of the number that would be her new home, 29.

      Inside there was a short hallway, a kitchen, a parlour and a ‘good room’, as Ellen regarded it. Upstairs three bedrooms, two commodious, one less so. ‘That one’s for you, Patrick,’ Mary couldn’t resist teasing. Out back was a small yard and a cabbage patch. It was all perfectly adequate. She could do a lot with it, and at least they wouldn’t be crowded in on top of each other.

      They were hardly in the door, solid and black apart from the two light-giving panels of frosted glass, when it resounded to a vigorous knocking. On the step outside, Mrs Harriet Brophy fixed the tilt of her snug hat, pushed back an unbiddable wisp of hair and waited to present herself to her new neighbours. A trim dart of a woman from the Donegal-Derry border, she had already espied them.

      ‘Newlyweds,’ she had heard, ‘with three grown-up children,’ she had exclaimed to ‘himself’, hand to her mouth. ‘What’s the Christian world coming to at all, Hector?’ ‘Himself’ wasn’t much interested. ‘Bringing down the neighbourhood, that’s what. What have we got to leave our children, if not a decent neighbourhood?’

      ‘I’d just like to welcome you all.’ Harriet Brophy beamed as Ellen opened the door. ‘I’m your neighbour – a few doors up.’ Ellen bade in the woman, who sparrow-hopped over the threshold. She had a paper with her, something wrapped inside. ‘For luck,’ she said, ‘for the house.’ Ellen opened it. ‘A piece of anthracite to keep winters warm,’ the woman said. ‘A handful of salt, to keep the table laden.’ And in a small bluish bottle, ‘A sup of holy water to sanctify the home.’

      Ellen thanked her, moved by the woman’s thought-fulness, but Harriet Brophy wouldn’t hear of it.

      ‘Och, for nothing at all – I think the custom came from Scotland first, except it was a sod of turf then,