Redemption - Leon Uris [91]
On this Wednesday, Atty was in rehearsal, tense rehearsal. This play was the Abbey Theatre’s most ambitious product to date, and as opening night grew near, everyone seemed on edge.
Rachael came in with Emma in tow, waved to their mother on the stage, and found seats. Rachael’s seat was near the lobby, where she could sink into her homework. Emma found her place in the third row so as not to miss a syllable.
There was quibbling on the stage. The director tenderly allowed, in carefully couched words, that Atty had been a bitch all day and the leading man concurred. She had been fumbling her lines and had been otherwise unpleasant. Undoubtedly, she was about to begin her period, was having her period, or just getting over her period.
She spruced up at the sight of her girls, gave her leading man a friendly elbow to the ribs, her manner of apologizing, and the director called places.
Again she muffed lines. The director took her aside.
“You’re not being very Atty-like,” he soothed. “What’s the matter, darlin’?”
“I don’t know,” Atty whispered. “’T was like I saw a banshee last night. Someone’s dead…I don’t know.”
“Want to quit for the day?”
“God, no. Give me five.”
“Sure.”
She took a chair and wiped a sudden flash of perspiration from her forehead and took a glass of water from a stage assistant. She was dry. The water felt good going down.
Come on, Atty, she prodded herself, you’re acting like an old whore.
She came to her feet, but her legs were unsteady. At that instant Theo burst into the theatre gasping and disheveled from a short hard run from the Four Courts.
“It’s Da!” he screamed running up to the stage. “It’s Da!”
Desmond Fitzpatrick had collapsed of a massive heart attack in the courtroom. By the time the family reached the hospital, he had been pronounced dead. Desmond was a few days short of his thirty-ninth birthday.
The rush of moods that tore through Atty Fitzpatrick solidified into a tight-lipped silence. Bare whispers to friends, bare words to her children. Never had she stood so tall as at the graveside with her children and five thousand stunned Irishmen about her.
Oratory wailed like ancient Gaelic pipes. A kind of sudden loss that shocks, yes, and frightens when a hero has fallen. A subdued wake of the stunned followed at 34 Garville Avenue. Atty remained all but wordless at the outpouring of sympathy.
When it was done, she locked herself in the library on the top floor seeing only Theo, Rachael, and Emma. A fortnight after Des was set down, she returned to the Abbey stage and carried off a performance that threw all Ireland into tears of admiration. She had taken the moment without bravado….
And then she collapsed and retired with the children to Lough Clara.
Had it all been worth it, Des? she begged.
And he answered what he had answered many times before: “We are innocent victims, you and I, of vast compulsions. Insatiable forces squander us. Aye, all men and women battle the forces that create evil, laziness, vanity, lust to conquer, greed to own, hurt others. And all men and women, save you and me, find an accommodation with our compulsions, come to control them, and try to live as normal people. With Des and Atty, it is consumption by a foul ferocity to either win or drop dead in the attempt. We know nothing else. Did we do the right thing by bringing innocent children into our maniacal kingdom?”
She sat with the elegance of a mourning queen before the fireplace and the magic came to her. Theo, Emma, and Rachael did not hunker back in fear. They rallied about, immediate and strong, showing the tough stuff and idealism of their raising. And Atty rallied to them.
Theo had already strolled a bit in his father’s shoes and showed the legal claws and brain of his father. He gestured like Des, lashed out with Des’s biting wit. He let Atty know that despite