Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [31]
“What about the scholarship?” Nora asked.
“That didn’t work out or he never tried; I’m not too sure which, but anyways he settled for whatever work was about, just so as he’d have money enough to get out of the house and go to the bar of an evenin’. There were rackets all the time. His only joy back then was his few books.” She took a deep breath. “By and by, the mother took things in hand and hooked him up with Sadie Dolan, the one he married: that’s your grandmother. The mother and the young one’s brother, Mickey Dolan, set it all up.”
Nora drew in a quick breath. She could barely fathom what she was hearing. So this Sadie Dolan was her grandmother. She’d never heard the name spoken before. She said it again, under her breath. It didn’t rest easy with her. “Mickey Dolan.” She said that name. Already she hated it. She hated the very sound of it.
Peg forged ahead, speaking rapidly, her voice strong, tinged with a hint of bitterness. “Indeed she wasn’t that much of a young one, seven years older than Matt, she was. She’d been passed over in the marriage department, it would seem, and Matt, not knowin’ too much what he was about, was easily led. God love him, he was only a youngster at the time, twenty-one years old.”
She poured another drink, held the bottle out to Nora, saw the quick nod and poured.
“One night a few months after they’d met, the Dolan woman tells him she’s in the family way and there’s nothin’ for it but that he do the right thing by her and get married. Yes, my dear, he was on the hook and hauled over the side before he knew it. Just like that!”
“Stupid fool!” Nora could no longer contain her irritation.
“And if he were standing here in the room this minute, you know something? He’d say exactly the same thing. He told me one time, ‘Peg,’ he said, ‘I’m a clever man by all accounts, but I’m a fool.’ I was shocked he’d say such a thing but I soon come to know what he was talking about. It had to do with plain old common sense. Ordinary things, little problems you’d have from day to day. Oftentimes he just couldn’t decide what was the best thing to do, so in the end he’d head off and do something right foolish. Same when it come to the big things! My dear, he’d look at the facts, up and down and round about, again and again, enough to drive you right cracked, but still he wouldn’t know what to be at.”
“Reminds me of my father,” Nora said bitterly.
Peg picked up her glass and studied the contents for a moment. “I’m sorry to have to be sayin’ all this to you, Nora. It can’t be too nice to be hearin’ all this old stuff, but still and all, it has to be said.” She took another sip of her whiskey and hurried on. “Whatever the reasons, he managed to get himself hooked up to a wife in a hurry.”
“And a child!” Nora was thinking of her father, the stalwart Catholic family man, conceived out of wedlock, without love. She stared into her glass.
Darkness had slipped quietly into the room, closing tightly around the two women. In stark contrast against the sky and the sea, the black headland appeared large and brooding. A trickle of silvery light dodged playfully on the water.
“It wasn’t even that simple.”
Nora’s head came around with a start. “What do you mean?”
“There was no child, not then anyways. The child didn’t arrive for twelve months or more after they married.”
“What?”
“The way it was, Matt didn’t even realize that the time had passed for the child to be born. Until one night in the bar, didn’t he hear talk from behind a wooden partition. Two women were hard at it, talkin’about him. Tis high time she dropped that youngster,’ one was saying. ‘Sure, wasn’t she up the pole way before they ever went near the altar?’ ‘Aye, indeed. I’d say she’d want to be puttin’ a bit of a spurt on or that babby’ll be arrivin’ with whiskers on!’ When Matt heard that, it was only then it came to him that he’d been fooled and that everyone knew but himself.”
“God in heaven, don’t tell me his own mother was part of that deception? Surely not, who could do the like