“No.” She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to see you about boats.” She hesitated. “Doesn’t my name mean anything?”
“Donovan?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, no. The only Donovan I ever knew was a priest in Fort Lauderdale, and the whiskey killed him twelve years ago.”
She looked stricken, almost as though I had struck her hard about the face. “I had an older sister,” she explained to me, then corrected her tense, “I have an older sister called Roisin. I think you knew her. In fact I’m sure you knew her.”
Knew her? My God, but they were hardly the adequate words. The first moment I had ever seen Roisin was in a Dublin pub and I had known I would never be happy until I loved her, and when I loved her I suspected I would never be happy again. After she had left me a friend said there was such a woman for every man, but most men were lucky and never met their fate. But I had, and Roisin and I had loved in a sudden incandescent blaze of lust, until, just as suddenly, she had stalked away from me for another man. Later, months later, I had watched her die, and her ghost had haunted my life ever since. Now her younger sister was asking if I had ever known her. “I’m very sorry,” I said calmly, “but I’ve never even heard of her. What did you say her name was? Rosheen? How do you spell it?”
Kathleen Donovan ignored my questions. Instead, for a few seconds, she just stared at me as she tried to gauge the innocence in my voice, then she tried to jog my memory. “She lived in Ireland for a while,” she said, “in Belfast. Just off the Malone Road.”
“She was a student?” I asked. Lots of students lived near the Malone Road.
“No, not really.” Kathleen began searching through her handbag and I watched her, marveling at the resemblance. Roisin had been thinner than Kathleen, and had harbored a pent-up energy that could be terrifying in its intensity, but the two sisters had the same Irish green eyes and the same pale, vulnerable skin, though Kathleen seemed much calmer, more at peace with herself. Her eyes seemed to hold wisdom where Roisin’s had held nothing but an unpredictable wildness. Indeed, I suddenly thought with a pang of dread, Kathleen was just what I had hoped Roisin might become, and I uttered a silent prayer to a merciful God that he would keep me form falling in love. Especially now, for this was a time when I needed to be like Michael Herlihy, a sexless monk, devoted to the cause and to death; but I knew my weakness, and no one had exposed that weakness more ruthlessly than Roisin Donovan. “Here’s a picture of her.” Kathleen held a snapshot toward me.
I glanced down at the photograph, forced my gaze away and sipped whiskey. “I’m sorry,” I tried to sound careless, “but I’ve never seen her.”
“You lived in Belfast, didn’t you?” Kathleen asked me.
“Yes, but that was ten years ago.”
“In Malone Avenue?” she asked.
“Near enough,” I said vaguely, “but so what? People were always coming and going in that area. It was a place for students, nurses, itinerants. I didn’t live there long, but I do assure you I lived there alone.” I forced myself to pick up the photograph. It showed a younger Roisin than I remembered, but the camera had perfectly caught the blazing intensity of her hunter’s eyes. “Sorry,” I said again, and tossed the picture down. I found I had finished my whiskey so poured myself another.
Kathleen momentarily closed her eyes as though what she was about to say was very difficult and needed all her concentration if she were to articulate it properly. “Mr. Shanahan,” she said at last, “I know it must be hard, because I know what Roisin was, is, and that means you can’t tell me everything, but I want you to understand that our mother is dying and she wants to know if Roisin is alive or dead. That’s all.” She stared at me with her huge green eyes that were sheened with tears. “Is it so very much to ask?”
I swallowed whiskey. A car sped down the street outside, its tires splashing on the wet tarmac. I was feeling foully uncomfortable and wishing that I had never given up smoking. “Tell me about your sister,” I said, “and I’ll see if anything jogs my memory.” I knew I should dismiss this girl, that I should send her unhappy and dissatisfied into the rain, but another part of me, the insidious part, wanted to keep her here so that I could torture myself with this revenant of Roisin.
Kathleen bit her lip, took a breath, talked. “We grew up in Baltimore, but our parents were born in Ireland. In County Kerry. They emigrated in 1950. My father’s a plasterer, a good one, but there wasn’t work in Ireland.” She hesitated, as if knowing that she was straying off the subject. “Mom and Dad never regretted moving to the States. They wanted to forget Ireland, really, but Roisin was obsessed by it. I mean, really obsessed. I don’t know when it started, back in high school, I guess, but she was really mad at Mom and Dad for living in America. She wanted to be Irish, you see.”
“I know the syndrome,” I said.
“She learned Gaelic, she learned Irish history, and she learned Irish hatreds. Then she went to live in Ireland.” Kathleen hesitated and frowned up at me. A tear showed at the corner of one eye. “You know all this, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “I told you. I know nothing.”
Kathleen began to cry very softly. She made no noise, the tears simply brimmed from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She fished in her coat pocket, found a shred of tissue, and angrily cuffed the tears away. “I’m so tired,” she said, “and I just want to know what happened to her. I want to know if she’s alive.”
I tried to sound sympathetic. “I wish I could help.”
“You can help!” Kathleen insisted. “She mentioned you in her letters! She said you had a house on Cape Cod! She said you were a yachtsman!” She sniffed and wiped away her tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
“Paul Shanahan isn’t such an unusual name,” I said.
She dismissed that feeble evasion with an abrupt shake of her head. “I’ve spent three weeks in Ireland, talking to people who knew Roisin. They kept mentioning you. They said—” She checked.
“They said what?” I encouraged her.
“They said you might have had links with the IRA.” She spoke defiantly, challenging me with her unlikely truth. “They said that’s why Roisin wanted to be with you, because you were her introduction to the IRA.”
“Me?” I sounded wonderfully astonished.
“And one person I spoke with,” Kathleen pressed nobly on against my obduracy, “said you were in the IRA for sure. He said you were one of their best-kept secrets.”
“Oh, Lord help us.” I turned to pull the drapes aside and to stare down into the wet street. “The Irish do like their stories. They love to gossip, Miss Donovan, and they do it better than anyone in the world, but it’s only in Dublin bars and bad novels that Americans play heroic roles in the IRA. I went to Ireland to learn about traditional boatbuilding skills, and I stayed there because I liked the country, but I moved on here because I couldn’t make a living in Ireland.” I let the drapes fall and turned back to her. “I’m a marine engineer and surveyor. I’m not in the IRA, I never was, and I never knew your sister.”
Kathleen stared at me, her eyes huge, and I wanted to cross the room and hold her tight and tell her all the truth and beg her forgiveness for that truth, but instead I stayed where I was. I could see the struggle on her face, the struggle of belief and disbelief. On the one hand I had sounded so very convincing, while on the other she had a mass of evidence that contradicted me. “I heard another story,” she said.