The Death of a Joyce Scholar (27 page)

McGarr turned to Holderness. “Well…?”

“Well, what?”

“Don’t you have anything to say?”

“I don’t know
what
to say, except that we’ll see how it plays in court.” Holderness even managed to flash his smile.

WITH A FEELING that was much like loss, Bresnahan read the last words and closed the book nearly a year after first having begun. It had taken her that long to finish
Ulysses,
but at least now no know-it-all American exchange student or Japanese tourist who could scarcely speak the language, or worse, a pint-sized pugilist detective inspector, could presume to explain to her one of the high points of the country’s culture.

It was Sunday, and she was sitting up in bed in her new “mews” apartment off the fashionable Morehampton Road, which she had
bought,
mind, with her own money and a small mortgage on the idea—cunningly formed in childhood in her native Kerry—that a woman should possess a place of her own and not be kept unless and until there arose a binding contract which also entailed a change of name.

Ward himself had been gone from the bed when she awoke, and had left a note saying he had jogged into town to the gym for a workout, after which he’d probably have a jar
with the lads and “catch the action” while he was at it. He meant the boxing on the telly, which was a feature of nearly every weekend; she’d thought she’d like it, but had actually found it boring when Ward wasn’t in the ring, pointless when he was and risked getting his lovely body or head smashed, brutal when he did, which—thank St. Alyoisius, patron saint of the thick and dumb—wasn’t often. It was also a Nelson’s Pillar-sized pain in the bottom every bleeding weekend, though she’d never let on and had never seen it. Not a “cute” culchie like her.

It—the pillar, which was mentioned at least a half-dozen times in
Ulysses
—had been blown up by some anti-British patriots as a “symbolic gesture” when she was still a little girl, and she understood that if she let Ward have his way in a few big things, like boxing and anything else “physical”—he always had to be moving, the little tyke—she could toss him around mostly on the rest, which was gratifying.

Hefting
Ulysses,
she fanned the pages. All those words in so many different voices of so many characters. As the paper flowed under her thumb in a white-edged blur, she thought of water tumbling over a weir, of streams and rivers, of the Liffey and Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea beyond. And of the ocean, and how the book was like an island in the river of the mind. She had read somewhere in one of the innumerable trots she’d bought to get through the thing that to read and understand even a part of
Ulysses,
but mostly to enjoy it, was to become a Dubliner, the experience marked and stayed with one so.

But was the experience of the book different from the Dublin she lived in every day? She thought for a while, looking out the narrow-paned casement windows onto the flagstone courtyard with the imminence of the grand house—of which her apartment had once been the stable loft—in the distance, and decided that it was. Everything in
the book seemed constantly moving, changing, flowing, and wasn’t her life that only a year before seemed like something out of Gerty MacDowell, now more the class of thing that a Mrs. Bandman Palmer might enjoy, what with the way she was now being accepted by the Squad and all Ward’s up-market friends?

And then, just as it was hard to get a hold on the characters in
Ulysses
—they seemed so slippery—so too were the people she knew in the here and now, and what they did. The reality of things—
how it was
—kept changing right before her eyes almost as much as though to make her out a fool or, worse, an ejit who
couldn’t
know what was going on. She pushed herself up in the pillows and reached for the thermos pitcher of hot coffee that Ward had left on the night stand, the imp.

Take the Coyle case, for instance, which had been in court the past five weeks and was now awaiting a verdict. She herself had been called to testify, and was astounded at how Mr. Seamus Donaghy—aped slavishly in the papers—could make David Holderness out to be an innocent university intellectual and pacifist, and his brother Jammer a lout and a thug of the type who were making the city unlivable for law-abiding Dubliners, especially after dark. The Holderness she knew of wasn’t the Holderness that was presented in court, and Donaghy then proceeded to raise three other veils of illusion. Bresnahan glanced down at the book and smiled, congratulating herself on the felicity of the thought.

Donaghy made it seem as though Jammer were such a vile wretch that he was now fingering his own brother to save himself from being convicted of a murder which was without a doubt only one of his many. Hadn’t he beat Ward over the head with a truncheon and left him for dead? Hadn’t he later pulled a knife in a public place and tried to finish him a second time? Hadn’t Jammer’s “mates” dese
crated St. Michan’s church? And weren’t there three other unsolved murders in Dublin this year alone?

Second, Donaghy made it seem that it wasn’t so much a man who was on trial but rather Trinity College itself, which had been doubly wronged by the—what were Donaghy’s words?—“scum and
canaille
” of the city, first in the loss of Coyle and then in the “attempted character assassination of his colleague and friend, David Holderness, which I shan’t allow to continue.”

The third veil was Donaghy himself. He was a big, handsome, winning man who, after one look, you said to yourself you’d like to know. And he made it seem that in a very direct way he, not Holderness, was on trial, charged by Jammer through the State with an even higher crime than murder—that of false perceptions in regard to the reality of the murder of Kevin Coyle. In such a way Jammer and his accomplice, the easy-to-hate-and-always-suspect State, were impugning Donaghy’s motives. As well, they were standing in the way of the progress of his career, and it would be a world darkening miscarriage of all that was right and holy were Seamus Donaghy (that is to say, David Holderness) convicted of anything.

He even stated that he would bring a civil action against the state to compensate Mr. Holderness for the way “his name has been dragged through the mud,” thus promising to further attenuate the Coyle affair to the delight of the press and Donaghy’s purse. One million pounds was the asked sum, which nobody thought fantastic coming from Donaghy, “the ballocks-befriending barrister,” as McKeon called him. “He’s a bigger liar than Shames Choice, and the bard’s modern-day equivalent more than Kevin Coyle ever thought of being. Sure, we don’t have poetry anymore, we don’t even have literature. All we have is the theatre of the law. When Donaghy comes to write his memoirs, one guess what he’ll
call it. Not
Ulysses
but…?” None of the staff had a clue. “
Y’ all-asses.
Donaghy’s from the South. Cork, I believe.”

The State was no match for him. Under the weight of his tongue, Catty Doyle, whom Bresnahan had thought sophisticated, capable, and worldly, appeared a confused, immature person who had recently been sacked from her job and was probably a consort of Jammer’s. Donaghy pointedly asked her about the pink wig and leather items she had in her wardrobe. No mention was made of the fact that she had lost her coveted position with the publishing company
because
of her relationship with Holderness.

Then there was Katie Coyle, who had seemed so plain and matronly. Well, sir (and ms.), wasn’t she now on tour with her husband’s book, continent-hopping from one talk show to another and appearing at the trial looking like a refugee from the West End. She was being heralded as a veritable Molly Bloom. To be fair, she could talk, but so could everybody else in Dublin, and the drill was to sit her down and let her babble in Libertese.

Who else had changed? Mary Sittonn? Well—there was really no changing Mary, who was committed, but she surely established herself as a good friend to Catty, too good perhaps. She accompanied her to and from court, shoving the press out of the way, parking her immensely filmable vintage Jag up on the footpath, where it got ticketed and finally towed away, and with her short haircut, denim jacket, and infantry boots, generally “butchering the prosecution.” (McKeon again.)

Flood? Because of the murder and the thunderous reception of Coyle’s book, Joyce’s Ireland and Bloomsday Tours had received much free publicity at home and abroad and was thriving. Flood was divorcing his wife, and rumor had it that he would marry a former student who was employed as office manager of Bloomsday Tours. She was a dark little
thing who looked no older than twelve. The difficult wife and daughter were presently on a long holiday in France. Her family, it seemed, had money which had recently passed to her, and she told the
Sunday Tribune
that she was tired of “things self-consciously Irish,” which was interpreted to mean her immigrant husband himself.

Even Chief Super McGarr had changed. Far from suffering through the trial and all its distortions, he actually seemed to enjoy it. Even though his wife had given birth to a baby girl a month or so before, he seemed almost glad to have to be in the courtroom, waiting to testify, and he insisted on having lunch in places where there was no phone.

Hers now began ringing.

“Rut’ie—getcha out of bed, did I?” It was Ward.

“You must have a crystal ball.”

“I thought for sure you’d be up by now.”

The implication was that he had already put miles on his Pumas and hours on the small bag and the big bag and on somebody’s baggy frame. She could tell from the elation in his voice he had just given somebody a good drubbing.

“Look—for tonight, something’s come up.”

She didn’t allow herself to suspicion what. Like emotional rot, jealousy was insidious, and once begun, it corrupted everything. And then other tactics worked better.

“Could I meet you later—say, around half-eight for a drink?”

“Sure. Or why don’t we leave it that I’ll see you at the Castle tomorrow?”

Bresnahan savored the pause, before he said, “Why?” There was a certain sweet note of consternation in the question.

“Well, I might be tied up.”

He waited.

After counting to five, Bresnahan went on. “Maire
called.” She was a new stylish friend to whom Ward had introduced her. “She thought we might slap on the war paint and trot over to Sachs for the afternoon.” A nearby hotel which for years had presented jazz bands in its lounge bar on Sunday afternoons, Sachs was frequented by post-match ruggers and other sportsmen and women.

“And…?”

“Well, who knows? We thought we’d ramble on to that tidy little Moroccan restaurant she likes so much.” And the tidy, not-so-little Moroccan restaurateur Maire had told everybody she liked even better, though after Sachs they might have other offers to dinner. Ward, of all people, was acquainted with the possibilities.

“Suit yourself.” The tone was harsh. He hung up.

Bresnahan debated waiting for his second call in bed or actually getting up and bathing and dressing for Sachs. She decided on the latter course, since the date with Maire was real, and she didn’t want Ward to think she wasn’t a woman of her word.

Slipping
Ulysses
onto the shelf with her other books, she thought of Molly Bloom saying, “a woman wants to be embraced twenty times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody…” Well, twenty times was perhaps asking too much, and Bresnahan wasn’t sure she agreed with the “no matter by who.” But it was the reassurance that was comforting, even if her “somebody” was a cagey little fella who had to be cajoled into admitting his true feelings.

Was that the phone? Bresnahan opened the door to the loo, where she was running the bath.

“Turns out it’s off anyway.”

“What’s off?”

“Me bit of business,” Ward said, as though she’d been
privy to his every thought which he kept vague, ostensibly because of their off-again, on-again rivalry at the Castle. “Let’s not go to Sachs.” It was familiar turf, and he was known there all too well. “Hungry?”

Now that she thought about it, she was famished.

“Why don’t we pop down to the Greystones Hotel. They’ve a brunch on Sundays I hear is excellent.” He forgot that she too had overheard McGarr say as much to O’Shaughnessy. “Phone and ask for a table by the window, and I’ll be by in about an hour.”

Bresnahan didn’t know what that meant, but she was learning.

“What about Maire?”

“What about her?”

“What do I tell her—about Sachs and all?”

“Tell her you have a legitimate date, and you’ve no need to go out collecting scalps. Oh, and I’ve got some news.”

“About what?”

“The Coyle case.”

“Have they decided?”

He hung up.

Men were too intense, she decided, setting the alarm on the chair by the tub and slipping into her bath. They went at everything hammers and tongs or, in Ward’s case, with fists clenched, when life was best approached on the carom—gently, obliquely, with some understanding of the movement of other spheres. The Coyle case was much in the news, and she could switch on the radio or the television, which were doubtless full of it, if she were of a mind. But where was the hurry? And more, the need? Would her knowing the verdict forty-five minutes sooner in any way change Holderness’s fate or alter the fact that Kevin Coyle was dead?

Again Molly’s voice came to her,

Bresnahan let the hot water pool up around her breasts and, slipping deeper into the tub, closed her eyes and thought of all the things in her life that Ward would never know of: Kerry and the farm and the sea beyond the wall on the other side of the road where they still went for the kelp for fertilizer near the caves where seals mated and the strand where once a whale beached and died and, like a kind of miracle, got carried off on a high tide and was seen no more.

And the high pastures, every stone in the walls of which she once knew from helping her father lift and tug and rebuild the gray line that seemed to rise right up to heaven. And the mountain with the sheep they “left out to God” and collected every now and again and how on a good day on one spin of heel you could see Tralee, Castlemaine, Killarney, Cahersiveen, and Dingle.