Until the fire, nobody much cared for the McCrutchens. They just weren’t used to living in a town. The children were rowdy and unkempt and walked five abreast along the pavement, laughing at the old, and shouting silly things at other people’s children.
Mr and Mrs McCrutchen had been married since they were teenagers. The service took place in a stone church outside Mullingar. Maggie was a young bride, even by country standards. Standing barefoot in white, she concentrated on what the priest was saying, without truly understanding.
The groom’s mother gave her a piece of silver jewelry and she wore it around her neck. The groom arrived with his friends. He wore a gold hoop in one ear. The sleeves of a dark suit fell over his knuckles.
They rode away on a chestnut horse.
To be a McCrutchen child meant knowing every detail of the story.
”It’s just a matter o’ time...” their mother would sometimes say when she put them to bed, “Before the lot o’ you start falling in love, one by one, like bottles knocked off a wall.”
They moved to the village of Douglas because the school was known for being good. Mr and Mrs McCrutchen dreamed their children might get on in life. But then their house burned down.
Some said it was a cigarette or an unattended toaster. Others believed it was a candle blown into net curtains by wind.
There had not been a fire like this in Douglas for 30 years. The street had to be blocked off with orange cones. The neighbours were told to move their cars and stay far back. The McCrutchens bunched together on the glistening tarmac in their nightclothes. Firemen rushed about with hoses and ladders, trying to save the other houses.
Maggie McCrutchen was crying in front of everybody. The money her husband gave her to get insurance a year before, she had paid to the dentist. Her daughter had crooked teeth and people at school were laughing.
The children stayed with different neighbours, as no one had room for all seven. The next morning their blackened, dripping things were carried into the street. The Guards put up fences to keep people out. The youngest had left her doll in the panic to escape, so one of the fire inspectors came back after his shift to look for it, but had a new one in his pocket, just in case.
Then a month after the fire, very early, a fleet of workmen’s trucks drove slowly up the street then parked outside the charred ruin. The fences came down, and there were workers from Cork, and engineers from Dublin tramping about in their boots with charts and cameras and special equipment that was yellow and orange.
The McCrutchens were living in a bungalow owned by the Church, near the quarry – a place empty for years and riddled with damp. But it cost nothing more than a regular appearance at Mass.
When the McCrutchen children heard at school about the workmen and the ladders going up, they thought it was a joke. Eventually, a woman from the building department showed up at the bungalow. Signatures were needed so work could proceed.
At first everyone thought the Church had called in a favour from Rome, the Pope himself. But one of the workmen on his tea break said it was a neighbour, who’d arranged everything through Dublin lawyers as they wished to remain anonymous. All the McCrutchens had to do was pick the tiles, choose the paint, and find carpet with a pattern they liked.
Dogs who’d barely left the hearth in years, were now being dragged around the block several times a day. The hunger for gossip was insatiable. A few neighbours pretended they knew who it was, but had been sworn to secrecy. Husbands coming home late from the pub on Friday night woke their wives to confess secret hordes of euro.
Eventually someone on the street did find out. A woman called Penny Carr, known for her chrysanthemums.
This is how it happened.
About 12 months after the fire, an old lady named Kitty O’Donnell, who lived at number 77, got fairly ill and was most of the time propped up in bed with the television on and something hot to drink.
She was a local woman, who’d grown up in the city of Cork nearby, then moved to Douglas with her husband when they got married. After he died she was alone.
About the time of Kitty’s demise, the McCrutchens moved into their rebuilt home. They had a party and invited the neighbours, the Guards, the fire crew, the priest and even some of the workers. Everyone had to take their shoes off, and the youngest McCrutchen children were charged with arranging them in size order by the front door.
There was a rumour the identity of the benefactor would be revealed at the party, and so the whole street packed the McCrutchen house with drinking, eating, singing, dogs and children running over the new carpet in their bare feet.
The only person not in attendance was Kitty O’Donnell. The day after the McCrutchens’ housewarming, Penny took some cake to her elderly neighbour. They had a nice talk. Mostly things on the news and the weather in Ireland. The old woman kept patting Penny’s hand, over and over.
As Penny’s husband was at work in the day, and their one daughter at the prestigious college in Dublin, she decided to go over again at the weekend with a pan of bread. She called first on the telephone, and Kitty said to use a key under the flowerpot.
”It’s so very kind of you, Mrs Carr, to bring these things. There’s no fool like an old fool, eh?”
”Will you stop...and call me Penny, please.”
The room was always dim because of net curtains, now yellow with age. Mrs O’Donnell said they had been from the time of her wedding. There were photographs of her husband in pretty frames, looking as Penny remembered him from their long and happy life together. And it had been a good life. Better than most. Kitty knew that and was grateful for it.
The visits from her neighbour became regular. One day Kitty sat up too quickly and knocked her tea. The mug didn’t break, but the carpet was wet. Penny got down and soaked as much as she could into a hand towel.
”It was me you know...” Mrs. O’Donnell said as her neighbour pushed on the stain, “what paid for the McCrutchens’ house.”
Penny laughed. “You, Kitty?”
”Aye.”
”I never would have guessed it was you.”
”Well now you know.”
”You’re the secret millionaire on the street?”
”That’s right.”
Penny looked up, wondering if the old woman’s mind was starting to falter. “Where do you keep it then? Under the mattress?”
”Down in the town, locked up in a bank for safekeeping.”
When Penny thought the stain was faint enough she stopped rubbing and put the towel on the tray to go downstairs.
”I’m not joking Penny, do you promise to keep it under your hat?”
”Well if you’re the secret millionaire, Kitty, at least tell me how you came to have such a fortune. Lottery was it?”
”You really want to know?”
”Aye.”
”Because it’s a long story and a sad one, so.”
”I’m all ears, Kitty.”
”Maybe on your next visit.”
Penny laughed with some awkwardness. “If you want I can make some lunch and you can tell me after we’ve eaten?”
Mrs O’Donnell couldn’t resist. “You afraid I’ll die before you come round again?”
Her neighbour’s cheeks burned.
”I’ll be 92 in the spring, Penny.”
”I know, that’s a grand age, so it is.”
After opening a can of soup, then pouring it into a silver pot to heat, Penny looked around at all Kitty’s things, searching for some clue to her wealth. But the interior of number 77 was like every other home on the street. A sturdy kitchen table. Bills stacked behind a small, battery-operated clock. A bread bin full of small, hard crumbs. A cold fireplace in the sitting room, and a cabinet of ceramic figures painted in old clothes that were supposed to have value.
After eating the soup and brewing another pot of tea, Mrs O’Donnell said she was ready. The story began in 1901. A little girl has just been born on a farm outside Douglas. Her name is Celia Riley. She had a nice time growing up, wandering the fields, walking her father to the pub, fetching water in buckets, the smell of green grass in summer, hay in winter. When she was 15 years old she met someone. A boy, just a little older than herself, from a village in the north of Ireland. He was down helping in the fields, earning money in the warm weather.
After glancing at each other a few times, Celia and the young man took walks. They weren’t supposed to be alone, but could always find a quiet path outside the village. At the end of the summer the boy went with his brother to fight in France against the Kaiser. They both died in the first week. Why they went, nobody really knows. It might have been the adventure. Or an excuse to see Paris and hear a foreign tongue.
At first Celia thought it was sickness in her body from the shock of his violent death. She stayed in bed for several days being looked after by her mother.
Later on, it was clear to her what was happening. She sat her parents down in the kitchen and told them everything, the walks, the soft words, his promises, the brutal but honourable way he died – and lastly that inside her body was all that remained of him in the world.
Her mother studied the floorboards without moving. Then her father stood in his clean, heavy boots, and went to the cupboard. The key was in his waistcoat pocket. Celia thought she was going to be given some money. But he took down his shotgun. Celia’s mother rushed over and put her hands on it, but his mind was made up.
She was allowed to go upstairs and pack a few of her things. It was hard to see through such wet eyes.
He waited for her downstairs with the front door wide open; the gun over his arm, the twin barrels like hard, eyeless sockets. She could hear her mother’s voice. A long, low petitioning whisper, then nothing.
Celia’s father walked her to the edge of the village. People who were out stopped to look.
After he had gone back, she sat by the roadside and looked at things without really seeing them. Then her mother came. She sat with her and then held one another. Then they walked the long road into Cork. There was a convent with spiked gates that accepted girls in her situation. After a week, it was all arranged. Celia would carry the child. Then once it was born she would hand it over. The sisters already knew who the parents would be.
Celia could live at the convent and work for the nuns, but over the years, Celia’s mother had saved money from the odd scrap of sewing, and it was used for a ticket to America. There she could forget her mistake.
Nine months later, Celia gave birth to a girl. She had worked at the convent all that time and learned to live inside the person everyone saw and spoke to.
During delivery, she was allowed to look at the baby, but not hold it, nor touch its red face.
Oh, she was lucky, the Sister said. Most girls had to stay in the convent and work for the Church the rest of their lives to atone for their sin against Him.
The voyage seemed to take a very long time. Celia met some nice people on the ship, who gave her advice about what to do when she got to America – what to say to the immigration men, and how to behave.
Her mother arranged for work as a maid in a big house in lower Manhattan. She could receive letters from home, but could not send them.
It was hard work, but there was lots to eat in the evenings when the family went out and Celia could pretend it was her house.
After a few months, an earring went missing. Celia looked everywhere. The woman said that stealing was like lying to God. Celia didn’t realise she was being accused, and agreed that it was a terrible sin to steal.
By that time, though, she had made a few friends. One of them lived in a house for girls run by a former school teacher, who agreed to give Celia a week or two of lodging until she could find a new situation.
But without a reference it was not easy. Celia imagined her former mistress discovering the earring, perhaps in the bedding. Then begging her to come back.
One day she noticed a sign in the window of a restaurant. It was where the Italian section began, but in the evenings, Celia liked to walk all over.
Help was wanted making dough. The restaurant was dark, with burgundy drapes and oil paintings of ruined castles and shipwrecks. It was outside regular eating hours, but in the kitchen, men were sitting on crates playing cards. When she told them she wanted to help make the dough, they took cigarettes out of their mouths and laughed. But one of them, a stocky Sicilian called Reggie, got up and asked what experience she had. Celia told them how as a girl she had made the family bread with her mother, and knew all the tricks. When he spoke the other men were quiet. He had very dark skin and a barrel chest.
After a few months, she had learned a few words of Italian, and Reggie knew a folk song in Irish. As he was several inches shorter than Celia, they drew glances as he walked her back to the boarding house every night. Then he waited by the gate until the door had opened and she was inside.
A year later Reggie had saved and borrowed enough to open his own place. Would Celia work for him? She could be in charge, he said. Wasn’t that what she wanted?
All this time Celia had been trying to keep away from her feelings, but she left her job to work with the ambitious Sicilian. He was right – she wanted to be in charge.
After another year, on one of their walks home, Reggie asked Celia to marry him. She quickly told him she couldn’t, but when they got to her boarding house he waited at the gate like always, to make sure she got safely inside. And because of this, she accepted his proposal the next day.
Three years later they had four restaurants with a factory in the Bronx making pasta to supply other eating houses in the city. They were best friends as much as husband and wife, and while she knew about his temper, Reggie had never once raised his voice or spoken harshly in her presence.
Eventually, of course, she told him.
She had to.
It was too hard, she said, living out a marriage with a lie underneath. She feared her husband would be upset, and he was upset, but not for the reason she thought. He stood with his hands flat on the walnut desk.
”You gotta go back to eyeland and get her.”
”And bring her here, Reggie?”
”That’s right, but don’t be surprised if she’s taller than me.”
”But what will people think, Reggie? What will they say when I return with a child?”
”To hell with people!”
”Will you come with me?”
He said that he would not. That it was something she needed to do alone.
A few days later, Celia Fidanzati sailed first class on the Blue Stork. For most of the trip she stood on deck in her long coat. But sometimes she went down to the shared quarters and made friends with girls who were alone.
It was a week before Kitty O’Donnell’s 82nd birthday when a lawyer came from Dublin to see her. He was a partner at the law firm, and from his briefcase took a folder with copies of Celia’s marriage and death certificates stamped by the New York authorities. He also had photocopies of a newspaper article. Something from the obituary section of the New York Times. At the bottom of the article was a photograph of Celia and Reggie when they were first married, when the company was just the two of them.
Also in the lawyer’s possession was a letter, written by Celia, that he offered to read aloud because Mrs O’Donnell’s hands were shaking.
The things written in the letter were difficult to accept.
The lawyer sat there and let her take it in. When she cried he gave her a tissue. When she really wept, he stepped outside and waited until she was ready to go on.
”It’s a hard thing to find out so late you were adopted,” the lawyer told Kitty, “you’re not alone.”
”I think the worst of it,” Kitty said, her voice faltering, “was that I never got to thank my parents, the ones who adopted me. I would like to have thanked them for making me believe I was theirs.”
The lawyer was good-natured. “You were theirs.”
”Oh, how I loved them,” Kitty said. “And I would like to have told my husband – not that it would have mattered much, but we told each other everything, you know.”
Soon it was time for the lawyer to leave. “Now don’t you rush, Mrs O’Donnell, and don’t give a thought to the money until you’ve made peace with yourself, that’s just my advice. Take it or leave it.”
She didn’t move for a long time.
Until it was dark, and one by one, things in the kitchen began to disappear.
With the papers still spread out before her on the table, a memory came back. It was something deep and hidden, which the day’s events must have dislodged.
When Kitty was nine or 10 years old, she saw a woman standing at the end of her street. She had on a long coat with a belt, and her hair was pinned neatly under a hat. The street was full of children running and shouting, but the woman was looking at her. She was sure of it. Just standing there at the end of the road, staring at her. She remembers that she stopped jumping and the rope fell slack. The woman stood out against the gray, wet houses.
Kitty remembered that in the pocket of her old housedress was a marble. She had found the marble, and wondered if it belonged to the woman, and that she had come to claim it.
Then it started to rain. But the woman in the long coat did not move. She just stood there, at the end of the road, staring as the heavy drops soaked into her clothes and the other children disappeared, one-by-one, into their homes.
There was family in America, the lawyer had told her, but Kitty felt it was too late, just too late for anything to be changed – except of course in her heart. That was very changed. She felt open now, to the world, to the people suffering and the places outside the village that she heard about on the news. The terrible things they went through, were the things her mother must have felt too.
But as she aged, Kitty O'Donnell found herself thinking mostly about her grandfather – the man who had marched his child to the edge of the village with a gun. She thought about him a lot. She even went and found where he was buried, then lay down on the ground and put her arms around the stone where his name was written.
This story is from Simon van Booy's debut collection, provisionally titled The Sadness of Beautiful Things, coming out with Penguin USA in autumn 2018
