Brendan Graham - The Element of Fire

‘What kind of professor?’ Ellen worried.

‘Professor Hitchborn is a doctor of medicine – a graduate of the Harvard School, but shall we say he deals more with what the eye cannot see and the ear cannot hear, rather than with what they can.’ With this conundrum still ringing in her ears, he bade her ‘Good-day!’

Professor Hitchborn failed to elicit any utterance from Louisa after four visits. Ellen hated going back to ‘the old stiff-neck’, as she called him, but continued to do so for Louisa’s sake. Always, Ellen seemed to leave these visits with the feeling that she herself was somehow to blame. That her own motives in first saving, then adopting Louisa, were not morally pure, thus causing Louisa’s condition. It troubled her. If Louisa felt that she was a burden on them, they had only held on to her out of guilt and a sense of duty and not out of love, then maybe Louisa’s silence was fear. Fear that if she was found to be able to hear and speak, to be not so dependent on them, she would be packed off again, to an orphanage, or worse, to the streets.

Finally, it was Mary who decided for Ellen what to do regarding Louisa. ‘Send Louisa to school with me, I’ll look after her!’ she appealed to her mother. Ellen had at first been doubtful of this solution and considered keeping Louisa at home, giving of her own time to the girl’s education. It would be difficult, but somehow she would manage. Mary’s entreaties of ‘Please let her come – I can help her!’ won the day. After consultation with the Mother Superior, it was agreed the two would be put side by side in the classroom at the Notre Dame de Namur School for Girls.

Ellen delivered them on Louisa’s first day, both girls bursting with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Ellen herself was every bit on edge as they were, the day being for her not without its tinge of sadness, too.

‘The last leaving the nest,’ she said to Lavelle when he called to see her that evening.

He perked her up, telling of his escapades as a young scholar, and asking about her own schooldays.

‘They were spent in timeless wonder with my teacher – my father,’ she told him, falling into ‘remembering’ for once.

Mostly though, she was ‘forgetting’. She read with an appetite Lavelle found hard to understand. Newspapers, periodicals, handbills, anything from which she could glean more information for herself and her children about Boston and ‘America-life’.

Though he could still raise a smile, even a laugh from her, Lavelle thought she had gone into herself a bit since returning to Boston. It was to be expected, he supposed, added to by the preoccupation with getting the children settled into their new environs.

At times, she teased him about Boston’s belles, and while there were many among them who Hashed their eyes at the handsome Mr Lavelle, none caught his in return, as he expected she knew.

Lavelle, since she had left, had been busy in more ways than one. His geniality and easy manner had led him to form acquaintances with some of Boston’s more go-ahead Irish community. He prevailed upon her to visit the gathering places with him, thinking she had ‘rarefied herself from all things Irish’. This she had agreed to on occasion but only for his company. She couldn’t say she enjoyed hearing the endless stories of ‘Old Ireland’ – and in the old language. Steadfastly she refused to sing the times when song and dancing broke out, even when Lavelle himself, armed with his fiddle, hurtled the bow across its strings. At the first of such gatherings, he had introduced her as ‘Ellen Rua’. Afterwards, she had corrected him.

‘It’s just “Ellen”, Lavelle, plain “Ellen”!’

‘Why?’ he challenged.

‘It just is. “Ellen Rua” is in the past,’ she answered.

‘I understand your wish to forget the past,’ he said, ‘but this is something more than that.’

‘What is it then, Lavelle?’

‘It’s a denial of who you are,’ he stated matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve been known since a child as “Ellen Rua”, your parents … Michael … your neighbours …’

‘Well, they are all of them gone now and so is “Ellen Rua”,’ she insisted. But he would not be put off.

‘You’re also denying your Irishness, the language, everything … Since the moment you set foot back here, you don’t want any part of it.’ he accused.

‘Would you blame me?’ she retorted. ‘And you, Lavelle, what do you want?’ she challenged in return. ‘Only your notion of a red-haired Irish colleen – a Kathleen Ní Houlihan – who you can hold on to as your dream of Ireland?’

‘An Ireland that’s dead and gone …’ she continued, the blue-green eyes firing up. He watched, saw the furrow between her lips and nostrils rise and fall like he remembered. Deepening its well, swelling its narrow ridges. ‘… and in the Famine grave. An Ireland that all of you are trying to hang on to, filled with mist and grog and dewy-eyed comeallyes. Living for the day when you’ll all rise up and send an army home to rout “the auld enemy”!’

‘And why shouldn’t we?’ he answered calmly, taking no small delight at seeing her in such an impassioned state. ‘Isn’t it the English that have us the way we are?’ he added, giving as good as he got.

With the children now settled in their respective schools, she had, as she had hoped for, more time to devote to the business of the New England Wine Company, so taking some of the load from Lavelle’s shoulders.

Coming up to Christmas was their busiest time; Peabody was demanding and irritable, wanting stocks early, pressing for replacement stock immediately, arguing that with the large volumes he was now taking for two stores, rather than one, she should be ‘beating down the French with their high prices’. Lavelle made extra shelving to try and appease him. He looked after all activities related to shipping, warehousing and deliveries. She saw to the ordering, the banking and the documentation, being, as Lavelle put it, ‘better able to hurl the pen’ than he was.

Twice weekly she called on Peabody at Quincy Market, soothing his irascibility, he wanting to hold her hand at every turn, still referring to Lavelle as ‘that young helper of yours, not much between the ears’. Mockingly he asked her to ‘make an old man happy this Christmas and marry me, Ellen!’

She, in turn, telling him, ‘Don’t be exciting yourself, Jacob, with all that talk or you’ll get a heart attack and never see the Christmas. I’ll be neither an old man’s sweetheart, nor a young man’s slave.’

Jacob feigned hurt, ‘rejected again’… then laughter … ‘Ah Ellen, what would I do without you to brighten the day?’

What was it about men, she wondered, that they were distracted so easily? If they had a few children to bear and rear, it would soon soften their coughs. Always thinking about their ‘scythe-stones’! She’d heard the valley women, when they huddled to talk, often laugh that – ‘It’s the last thing to die in a man – the scythe-stone – if it was ever any good for anything but sharpening a blade in the first place!’

She loved the way that in the Gaelic you could talk ‘round’ a thing, with everybody still knowing what you meant. Say it without saying it. The Americans never talked in the ‘roundabout talk’ – she missed that, much and all as she tried to distance herself from her previous life.

Despite everything, getting the children settled, easing once again into the business, she hadn’t really fitted back into Boston life as she would have hoped. She didn’t know what it was. She still grieved for Katie, guilt always suffusing the grief. Once started her thoughts would then run to Annie and Michael, until she would have to go and hide in the dark of Holy Cross Cathedral, or slip away to sit in the cold of the Common under the Great Elm. No matter how busy she was, how she was furthering their lives, there was always the void, the big aching void, always waiting to claim her.