The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
heart had gone out to the young woman, her hopes dashed once again, yet still full of faith, still resolved to finding her sister.
‘Thanks, ma’am – this one is very like her,’ she said of Louisa, ‘but it’s not her. She’s a fine child, God bless her, I hope you find her people.’
She spoke to Lavelle about it. ‘There are thousands upon thousands of them still searching for their lost ones, still hoping to find some trace. It’s heartbreaking.’
‘They’ve done a right good job, the Westminster government,’ he replied, scathingly, ‘scattering the Celts to the four corners of the globe. Keeping us on the move, wandering, like a divided army trying to find itself. One day that army will regroup –’
‘Oh, Lavelle!’ she had chided him. ‘I’m not talking about armies or the British Empire. You should’ve seen the look on that poor girl’s face – she will search all of America, search till the day she dies. Louisburgh, and all that’s in it, will have long since disappeared before she finds her sister.’
As the months passed the number of enquiries about Louisa, originally from Boston and the greater Massachusetts area, reduced. Then a trickle from the further-flung regions of New York, Montana, Wisconsin and even Louisiana, found their way to her door clutching old issues of the Pilot, clinging on to even older hopes. Eventually the stream of people calling dried up completely. Only then did Ellen allow herself to be fully at ease, previously having measured out to herself only small, fragile rations of relief as each month had slipped by.
Louisa herself bore all of this with apparent equanimity, Ellen having assured her in advance that this course of action was not an attempt to get rid of her. Again reassuring her, each time someone called, of how much both she and the others loved her. Some callers took just one look at her, knowing immediately she wasn’t the girl they sought. Others inspected her more intently, peering into her face, asking questions: ‘Does she ever utter a sound at all?’ or ‘What name has she?’
Always, Ellen had the feeling that Louisa understood. Once or twice she had faced her, asking, ‘Louisa, can you hear me – tell me if you can hear me?’
The girl had just looked at her lips as she spoke, so that Ellen didn’t know whether she was avoiding looking directly at her, or merely trying to understand in that manner. Either way she got no response, only the killing smile.
Although Louisa did not converse with anybody she was yet such a part of their lives; always there, soaking up everything. If not, indeed, through her ears, then through her eyes, and, in some strange way Ellen couldn’t define, just through her presence. She resolved to take Louisa to a doctor.
‘I can find no physical defect in the child, Mrs O’Malley,’ Doctor Hazlett confided in her after examining Louisa. ‘It may be that the abject circumstances in which you found her have locked a portion of her mind, a portion in which she still remains,’ he offered, referring to their pre-examination discussion.
‘What am I to do, Doctor?’ she asked.
‘The answer lies not with me,’ he replied, ‘but the answer, if anywhere to be found, will be found in Boston – the cradle of the sciences. I propose sending you to Professor Hitchborn for further consultation.’
‘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 …’