him young. They had their own family secrets, he and Maeve Rourke. Their own buried sins.
His mother waved the fan between them, while the sky lightened from cinder gray to ash. He thought he should tell her about Charles St. Claire’s bad death and that Remy Lelourie had probably killed him.
“Give her over to me,” he said instead. “I’ll put her back to bed.”
His daughter felt heavy in his arms as he lifted her. A solid and yet giving warmth, wondrously alive. At the door, he looked back to where his mother still sat on the bench. He knew it was only the way the vines were casting their shadows across her face, but in that moment she appeared strangely stricken and sad.
The first time Maeve Rourke looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, it was over the prostrate body of the Virgin Mary.
Later, she would decide that the moment must have seduced her with its whimsy. For until then she had always arranged her life as it ought to be: laying it out for herself on a road, straight and well marked by signposts, so easy to follow. So true. She was nineteen that day her own heart played a trick on her, teaching her that it had a free will and a sense of direction all its own.
She had been six when she decided that she had better plan her life very carefully, otherwise it was likely to go seriously awry. She’d lived in Ireland then, and though she had grown to womanhood holding little of that time in her heart, she could always remember every warp and weave of one particular morning.
In her memories, turf smoke from the fire fills the tiny shibeen, with its solid mud walls and thatched roof. She sits on a stool with a bowl of potato gruel in her lap, gruel so thin she can see through it easier than she can see through the water that collected in the rain barrel in the yard. Her da lies sprawled on his tailbone before the hearth, his mouth pulling on a jar of poitín, and in her memories the harsh, peaty smell of it bites at her nose.
And always, in her memories, her mem shuffles across the beaten dirt floor in her bare feet and opens the door, so that sunlight spills inside the windowless hut, warm and white. Chasing out the darkness and the smoke, and the other, brutal memories of the night before.
Her mother lived her life in the dark. It weighed on her soul like a pile of heavy stones put there one by one. Even at six, Maeve could mark the way the stones had mounted. One for every day black crepe hung over the door for another babe born and buried. One for every day her mother dug for potatoes in a stubble field, heavy-bellied with another child that would die. One for every winter night when no turf burned on the fire, and the wind blew cold across the bleak bogs and the black hills. Stone by stone for those other nights when Da, lying on the pile of straw in the corner, rutted and grunted over her mother’s body, and her mother wept.
Stone by stone, one at a time, and so her mother was always seeking the sunlight, even on the coldest of days.
But that morning Da had wanted none of the sun. He stared at the wash of light that poured through the door, his mouth hanging slack, his red eyes blinking.
“Shut the bloody door,” her da had said, only that, but her mem obeyed with shoulders bowed and her mouth pulled in tight. In the instant before the shibeen was plunged once more into smoky murkiness, Maeve had been looking at her father’s big hand where it was wrapped around his jar of poitín. At the way the wiry red hair curled over his thick knuckles and the dark freckles on his skin might have been splashes of her mother’s blood.
And she thought, I will never marry a redheaded, freckled-face man with hands as big and heavy and thick as peat bricks that are always ready and willing to be made into fists.
No, she hadn’t really thought such a thing, not in concrete words like that—she had been too young. Yet, still, the promise had been made to herself that morning, arriving full-blown in her heart. Even then she had known the strength of her will, and the shape of it.
She was never going to live her mother’s life.
On the day Maeve Rourke first looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, she had come into the St. Louis Cathedral to get out of the bruising summer sun. Four years already gone from Ireland, four summers lived in New Orleans, and she still hadn’t become used to the terrible heat.
She sat down on a pew near the altar of the Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary not to pray, but because her feet were hurting like the very devil. She did say a couple of Hail Marys, though, as penance for what she was about to do. No sooner was the last amen past her lips than she was unhooking her stiff new high-button shoes and wrenching them off, along with her black lisle stockings.
She wriggled her bare toes as she leaned over to rub the ache out of her blisters, and saw a pair of plaster feet hanging off the end of the pew in front of hers.
She half stood up and peered over the pew’s high round wooden back. The Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary lay stretched out the length of the seat, as if she had just climbed down off her marble-slabbed altar to take a little nap.
A heel scraped on stone, and Maeve looked up. A man stood in the aisle and he, too, was staring at the statue lying on the pew. He raised his head, and their eyes met, and they shared a slow smile.
Maeve’s gaze fell back down to the prostrate virgin. Her white plaster hands were folded in prayer on her plaster chest, her plaster blue eyes stared up at the vaulted ceiling. She had, Maeve noticed now that she was getting such a good up-close look at her, a rather pink and prissy plaster mouth, but then she had probably never suffered from blisters.
The thought nearly startled a laugh out of Maeve. She bit her lip and swallowed hard. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer and covered her face.
The man in the aisle did laugh, trying at the last moment to turn the noise into a cough. Maeve snorted.
She snatched up her shoes and stockings and her shopping basket, and she ran, banging her hip on the pew arm so hard she would find a bruise a couple of days later and wonder how it had come to be there. She was laughing so by the time she burst back out into the sun-drenched square that she couldn’t stand up anymore, and she had to sit down on a wrought-iron bench and grab at the stitch in her side.
He followed her out; well, she had known he would. His face was flushed and slightly damp. His eyes, looking down at her where she sat, gasping, on the bench, were bright with his own laugh tears. It hadn’t been that funny, surely, the sight of the Virgin Mary taking a nap on one of the pews. Maeve couldn’t imagine why they both had carried on laughing so, two strangers together.
He was still smiling as he waved a hand back at the cathedral. “How do you suppose she …?”
Maeve shook her head and pressed her lips together to keep from smiling back at him. “Oh, the saints do preserve us. It must’ve been the sight of my bare feet what did her in.”
He laughed and that set her off again too, and their laughter mixed with the jingle of streetcar bells, the ring of mule hooves on cobblestones, and the echoing booms of ships unloading bananas at the wharf.
When their laughter died, it seemed all the world hushed as well. The quiet that followed held a weight to it that came from the intimacy the shared moment had stirred.
She slanted a look up at him. He was jauntily dressed in a tight-buttoned linen jacket with a high collar. He had the look of the
