Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Queens Hotel in Ennis.
    The nuns were stronger than the garda sergeant and swiftly got word to a superior and the garda sergeant was transferred to a border county, where the football team wore ox-blood red, when Lord Haw Haw who was from the Lough Corrib country of north Galway, who’d disparaged the naval vessel Muirchu on German radio in a nasal voice the result of a broken nose at school, was executed in Wandsworth Prison, and more or less never heard of again except for a sighting by some Claremen who’d accompanied Canon Hamilton of Clare at the Polo Grounds, home of a baseball team, when on the only occasion ever, for the centenary of the Great Famine of 1847, the All-Ireland football final was played outside Ireland.
    He was also fleetingly seen at the Commodore Hotel afterwards among the swing dancers, in a hat with the crown flattened into pork-pie shape, with a young man who had a butch cut.
    Others said he was sighted on Jones Beach, Long Island, where Walt Whitman used to go with an eighteen-year-old Irish boy, Peter Doyle, to look at the sea fowl, in 1949, which would lead one to believe he decided to settle in the United States.
    A garda sergeant in Ennis, a vigilant agent for the Censorship of Publications Board, ambushed Garda Sergeant Clohessy’s friend in Ennis, leaping out of hens’ and chickens’ shrubbery at him, and seized a major part of Garda Sergeant Clohessy’s archives, which also included a picture of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane, a golden-haired boy-child and an ape seated on the branch of a tree, and they were never seen again.
    From the end of the war people dared only swim in the swimming hole in full regalia, except for an English painter with a Vandyke beard, who’d sit on the rocks in nothing but a rag hat and who referred to the sea by the Greek word thalassa .
    Young married Traveller boys, many with hair dyed sow-thistle yellow, meet in the town now the first week of August each year, parking their caravans by a football field or on a cliff head, swimming together last thing each evening in the swimming hole in mini-bikini briefs, or boxer shorts with Fiorentina players, or cerulean moons, or in cowboy-faded denim shorts, joining the elderly men who come here in safari shorts, ankle socks, baseball caps, before they move their English-registered caravans to the Killorglin Puck Fair.

Belle

    I first made her acquaintance in the cabin the little man who worked on the railway lived in, when I was eleven.
    On his wall was an advertisement for Y-fronts based on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans —Hawkeye and Uncas with butch cuts, in Y-fronts, marching alongside one another, with a turkey in long johns bearing a mace on the front of them; a photograph of Cardinal Tien, Archbishop of Peking and exiled Primate of China; Margaret Mitchell in a black antebellum dress with an aigrette of gems at her neck; a photograph of a boy with sideburns in nothing but a peach waisted coat and brothel creepers; and his sterling possession—a postcard of Belle Brinklow, the London music-hall artiste who’d married the young earl of the local manor—red cinnamon hair, heliotrope eyes, mousseline Gibson girl dress with scarlet flannel belt, the words, ‘To the Idol of My Heart,’ underneath.
    The manor was now a boys’ school and when I started there boys had pudding-bowl Beatles’ haircuts and wore dun-and-wine turtleneck jerseys and Australian bush shoes with elasticated sides.
    There were three mementoes of the Belle still in the school:
    A lunette-shaped daguerreotype of her music-hall colleague, Maude Branscombe, clinging to the Cross of Christ.
    A Worcester coffee pot with tulip trees and quail on it she and Bracebridge, the young earl, used to have their hot chocolate from.
    A portrait Sarah Purser did of the Belle when she was working on the stained-glass windows of Loughrea Cathedral nearby—for which the Belle donned her music-hall apparel: shepherdess hat with a demi-wreath of cornflowers, ostrich-feather boa, seed-pearl choker, tea-rose pink dress with double puff sleeves, bouquet of lavender and asters from the autumn garden in her hand.
    Belle Brinklow, who was from Bishop’s Stortford, used to perform in theatres with names like the Globe, Royal Alfred, Britannia, Surrey, Creswick, Trocadero, Standard, and in sing-song halls of pubs like the Black Horse in Piccadilly and the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane.
    An orchestra in