The Celtic Riddle

The face on the videotape leaned toward the camera, blurred, then lurched back into focus, the camera adjusted by some invisible hand. It was not an easy face to look at, sunken cheeks and eyes, an oxygen tube extending from one nostril, gray hair plastered to his head, but I could see the shadow of a proud and once handsome man.

"I'm amazed he'd allow himself to be videotaped in this state," I whispered to Alex.

Alex inclined his head toward me again. "I never had the impression he much cared what people thought, Lara. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact." As he spoke, a foot-long tortoise inched its way across the oriental carpet.

"Shhhh," the pinched-faced woman in the row in front of us hissed over her shoulder. Two other like-faced women in the same row turned at the first's admonition to glare at us, mother and daughters, like three peas in a pod, the family resemblance that pronounced. I resisted the temptation of saying something unkind, and contented myself with glaring back and thinking uncharitable thoughts.

It was an unpleasant little group, I thought: the three women, and seated between them, like spacers of some kind, two men. The men had taken their jackets off, the oppressive heat and staleness of the room vanquishing any attempt at acknowledging the solemnity of the occasion. They slouched in their chairs, two white shirts and pale necks topped by fair hair, as much as I could see of them. For a moment they made me think of the cotton batting they stick between your toes when you're having a pedicure to keep you from messing up the wet nail polish. It was a surprisingly apt metaphor I was later to learn, not just because of what it said about the two men, but because of the way they divided the women of the family in life.

To our left, the big toe, was the mother, Margaret, tall, fair and stylishly thin, neat in a suitably black nubbly-wool suit, with the short, boxy jacket and braid that one associates with Chanel. She was justifiably proud of her legs, good for her age, which she crossed and uncrossed at regular intervals. Next to her sat the first ball of white fluff, her son-in-law, Sean McHugh, then his wife, Eithne, Margaret's eldest daughter, also tall, fair and thin, with an edginess about her that suggested she was the worrier of the family; then the next ball of cotton, Conail O'Connor, seated next to his wife Fionuala, the second daughter, who looked much like the others, except not quite so tall and with a certain blousiness that marked her as the vamp of the threesome. The women were united by both a rigidity in the spine and a bitterness of outlook that had carved itself into the features in their faces, most noticeably for the mother, who looked as if she had a chronic bad taste in her mouth, but already, too soon, for her daughters. The men, on the other hand, were characterized by a softness about the chin and belly that matched what I saw to be, in the very short time I'd known them, a propensity to indolence.

The next toe, had she chosen to sit with the others, would have been Breeta, the youngest daughter. Instead, she sat slouched in an armchair, as far away as she could, in that crowded room, from her mother and siblings. She seemed a bit younger than her sisters, mid-twenties, I would have said. While the older sisters were the usual two or three years apart, there were at least six or seven years between Breeta and the next youngest, Fionuala. Breeta was, perhaps, the little surprise at the end of the childbearing years, or a last ditch effort to save her parents' marriage. If it were the latter, it was unsuccessful, I'd warrant a guess. Overweight, with a rather pouty demeanor, but pretty nonetheless, she took after her father, I thought, looking at the face on the TV screen, with her dark hair and pale eyes, and bore only passing resemblance to the other three women. Her attitude was one I'd seen in others of her generation, a kind of studied indifference to the world around her. Whether this total lack of interest in the day's proceedings was feigned or genuine, I couldn't begin to guess.

The only person in the room who showed any evidence of regret for the passing of the deceased was a young man with flaming red hair, his face, flushed by the sun and sprinkled with freckles, genuinely solemn, I thought. He looked to be a man who did physical labor outdoors, his muscles straining the seams of his plain but neat suit jacket, his worn shirt collar tight around his neck. His name was Michael Davis, I'd learned, and in addition to being one of the few in the room who mourned Eamon Byrne, he was also one of the two people in the room treated with the same coolness by the rest of them as was Alex. Appropriately enough, Michael was stuffed into the back row with Alex and me, along with the other social outcast, a man I had been told was a lawyer representing an as yet unidentified person.