Free Of Irish Blood by Mary Pat Kelly

all, and that she’d marry and bring her kids over to me. Plenty of babies to cuddle then send home.
    But at seventeen, Agnella joined the BVMs, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. Over the moon Henrietta was. The whole family celebrated.
    “Your mam would be proud and your granny Honora would have been so pleased,” Ed’s mother, Aunt Nelly, said to me. “She always said the Kellys owed a daughter to the convent, what with her changing her mind about becoming a nun when your grandfather came to her naked out of the waves of Galway Bay.”
    “What?” I said. “Now that’s a story she never told me!”
    I wondered if I could have talked to Granny Honora about Tim McShane were she alive. Surely, Aunt Máire would’ve understood. I remember the night Henrietta accused me of having Aunt Máire’s bad blood in me. I must have been seventeen or eighteen. Henrietta had caught me kissing Kevin Connelly in the gangway. I only did it because Kevin was such a gormless fellow, and I knew he’d be over the moon if I gave him the slightest peck and really what harm? Late and Mam and Granny Honora asleep—Henrietta too I thought but she saw us from the window and began screaming: “You harlot! You’re disgracing your family!” and then, “It’s Máire’s bad blood!!” A warm night and every house on Hillock with their windows open listening to her screech and looking down on us. Kevin had run away, left me turning around like a rabbit on a spit, cooked in the stares of the neighbors. I came upstairs, ready for Mam’s scolding, but she got angry at Henrietta. “You would not be living right now except for your great-aunt Máire and the help she gave Granny Honora. Two women running for their lives with eight children and Granny Honora expecting.”
    Aunt Máire must have been in her seventies then. She lived away from Bridgeport in her own wonderful place on Michigan Avenue but she heard about my disgrace soon enough and came to the house the next night with a package wrapped in brown paper. She brought me up to the attic storage space way at the top of the house and we sat there, the two of us, smoking one of her cigarettes. “Never let what other people do or say push through to your real self,” she told me. In Ireland she’d been forced to work in the Big House. Have sex—she said it right out—with the landlord’s son. I knew he was my cousin Thomas’s father, and Daniel and Grace were his children too. She said that the landlords of Ireland made a practice of taking a bride’s first night. “They had a fancy French name for it, ‘droit du seigneur,’ but it was rape,” she said.
    “And no one stopped them, Aunt Máire?”
    “Who would?” she said. “Anyone who raised a hand against the landlord would be evicted or worse. One more weapon they used to keep us in our place.”
    “Oh God, Aunt Máire, how did you survive it?”
    “Survive?” she said. “I didn’t just survive. I beat him. We won, Nora. Your granny and me, we’re the victors and you are the proof. We got out. We spit in their eye, Nora. We truly did.”
    “You are so brave, Aunt Máire,” I said.
    Still are, I thought, because I knew there were some women in Bridgeport who’d objected to Máire living on her own and even now whispered about her “past” and her “gentlemen friends.” Máire took no notice. Then she unwrapped the package and shook out a red silk shawl, the fringe floating through the air. She told me that the colored nun who’d taken the family in when they arrived in New Orleans from Ireland gave it to her.
    After Aunt Máire left I went into the bedroom, wrapped myself in the shawl, and walked into the parlor. When she saw me Henrietta screamed herself hoarse. Me flaunting myself. Shaming her. I started crying until Mam took her into the bedroom. Granny Honora made me a cup of tea, and told me if I was going to wear Aunt Máire’s shawl I’d best show a little of her spirit,