Page 54 of Road Trip
She blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling and flicked ash onto the basket of fries. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Therese gave her a sunny smile. “Although I think you might enjoy Savannah, where I grew up. It’s really beautiful, and full of history.”
“Crossing the Atlantic at my age? No thank you. We’ve plenty of history right here in Ireland. Thousands and thousands of years of it.”
She really was a prickly old bitch, Therese thought appreciatively. No apologies, no pretense at fake manners. So very un-Southern. And so very refreshing.
“What d’ya want, then?”
Their server arrived and set her Guinness and dinner on the table. Therese sandwiched a slab of cheese between two slices of breadand took a bite. She chewed slowly, which she could tell irritated the older woman.
Finally, she dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin.
“Maeve, that’s my sister’s name, and I visited a sort of cousin today. She’s pretty elderly, lives in a nursing home, but she’s still got all her marbles. Her father was my great-grandmother’s baby brother. Tommy Connor. My great-grandmother’s name was Kathleen. The rest of their family, both their parents and their two little sisters, died when their farmhouse burned down. Somehow, Tommy escaped. After he was orphaned, he went to live with a family named Boylan on a nearby farm.”
Therese nibbled at the end of a cornichon and sipped her beer. The pause was for dramatic effect.
“But my great-grandmother, Kathleen, didn’t live with her family. For some reason nobody can explain, she was sent, as a very young girl, to live with your people. At Tarrymore.”
“Fascinating,” Esme said. Her face telegraphed indifference, or maybe it was dishonesty. Therese wasn’t sure.
“What’d you say the girl’s name was?” Esme picked up the racing form and pretended to study it. She might be good at handicapping horses, Therese thought, but she had a lousy poker face.
“Kathleen Connor. According to our cousin, Kathleen had been informally adopted by one of your relatives, Lady Delia, who became her benefactress. I love that word, don’t you? It has such a Gothic ring to it. Like something out ofJane Eyre. Or maybe Jane Austen.”
Esme took another drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the basket holding the remains of her dinner. “That’s why you’re here, then? Another American looking up your long-lost relatives in Ireland? I’m afraid I don’t have any useful information for you. Or your sister.”
“Hold on. Let me finish telling about Kathleen. She left Tarrymore, pretty abruptly, in 1926, when she was eighteen, and immigrated to the States, where she landed at Ellis Island. Can you imagine, leaving your home and family at that age, getting on a ship, and landing in a strange country where you don’t know a soul?”
“Millions made the same trip,” Esme said with a careless shrug. “It was called the potato famine, in case you haven’t heard.”
“But the famine was long over by the time Kathleen left for the States,” Therese pointed out. “Anyway, when we visited our cousin Isabel, she gave us a really priceless gift.”
Esme looked up, waiting.
“Her dad, Tommy, saved all the letters Kathleen sent him from America. I’ve only gotten to read a few so far, but they’re fascinating. I’m just sorry my mother didn’t live long enough to make this trip and read these letters her grandmother wrote.”
“My condolences.”
Therese forged ahead with her narrative. “As I said, Lady Delia had made all the arrangements. Paid for Kathleen’s passage, gave her instructions to go see a priest in New York City who’d help her. So that’s what happened. This Father McInerney helped get her a room in a tenement building, where lots of other Irish immigrants lived. She shared a room with a woman and her little daughter, whom she’d befriended on the ship. At first she worked at a shirt factory, until her friend helped her get a job working as a maid for a family in Geneva, which is in upstate New York. Which is where she apparently met my great-grandfather, Patrick John Murphy.”
“I see,” Esme said, looking bored. “Is there a point to this long-winded family saga of yours?”
“There is, and that’s sort of where you come in,” Therese said. “Yesterday, I started to ask you about that IRA robbery that happened at Tarrymore back in the 1970s. Wow, talk about a story! Your parents must have been terrified.”
“My father and stepmother,” Esme corrected her.
Therese shook her head in sympathy. “Awful. According to my sister Maeve, the tour guide mentioned that ‘most’ of the stolen art was recovered shortly afterward. I did a quick online search and read several different accounts that said all the art was recovered.”
“Stupid journos. Can’t trust anything you read in those tabloid rags.”
“What about the portrait of Lady Geraldine Rossington? By Valerian DeJongh? I understand he was a pretty celebrated artist.”
Esme’s eyelids flickered rapidly. “No,” she said finally. “I think that was the only painting that wasn’t found. I remember my father was beside himself. That painting wasn’t nearly as valuable as the Turner or the Goya, but Lady Geraldine was a legend in our family. Very beloved.”
“Were the paintings insured?”
The older woman sat back in her chair and frowned. “What an extraordinary, impertinent question! Why on earth would you be interested in something that happened fifty years ago?”
