The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

and buyers picked aimlessly at faded merchandise. In the city’s shops housewives counted pennies against purchase. In the city’s banks, no great IBM machines clattered. Instead, clerkly men wrote small sums in long black ledgers.
    Mid-morning. James Patrick Madden walked into town, favouring his bad leg, home, back home in a land where all dreams were calculable and only the football pools offered outrageous fortune. A returned Yank who hadn’t made his pile, a forgotten face in the great field of Times Square, an Irishman, self-exiled from the damp hills and barren rocky places of his native Donegal. No lucky break, now or ever. Nothing to do.
    Before the accident he had worked twenty-nine years in New York and at no time had more than three hundred dollars to his name. On the credit side, he had educated his motherless daughter, sent her to a convent, seen that she never wanted. On the credit side, America had always found him jobs: subway cleaner, ticket taker in a stadium, counter help in a cafeteria, janitor, hall porter, club bouncer, and, last and best, hotel doorman. A good job, with good tips.
    There had been other comforts. Drink to warm and cheer, the odd fast buck, joyfully spent, the blowhard talk, passed
     
    hopefully among the boys. Companionship in a land of lonely joiners. And being Irish, you could wear it like a badge in New York City. Religion, a comfort for the next world, not this. And good to know you were on the winning team.
    And then there was the dream. The dream of all Donegal men when they first came across the water. The dream that some day the pile will be made, the little piece of land back home will be bought and the last years spent there in peace and comfort. A dream soon forgotten by most. Making good means buying goods. Goods attach, they master dreams and change them. The piece of land in County Donegal becomes a two-tone convertible. The little farm that Uncle Sean might let go changes to a little place in Queen’s. Making your pile means making your peace with the great new land. But the dream still has its uses. And its addicts. It serves for the others, for the men under the el on a December night, for the hundreds of thousands of Irish who never had a gimmick, a good connection, a htmdred dollar bill, or a piece of a business. For them, for Madden, the dream was there for warming over with beer or bourbon. The little place went Hollywood in the mind. The fields grew green, the cottage was always milk white, the technicoloured corn was for ever stooked, ready for harvest.
    The harvest never came. But it had come for him, for James Patrick Madden, a lucky sonofabitch. It had come out of nowhere on a City bus, making a quick getaway in traffic against a changing light. It had come with sudden pain, then vomit and oblivion in a careening, screaming ambulance headed through all lights for Bellevue. It had come fast in an out-of-court settlement. Ten thousand dollars in his fist and a chance to make the hom.ecoming dream come true.
    And so, James Patrick Madden, home, reached the centre of the city and stood there undecided. Behind him, Donegall Place and the formal pomposity of City Hall; before him, Royal Avenue, Fifth Avenue of the city, a jumble of large buildings, small to his eye. The centre, where he stood, Castle Junction, to him a streetcar re-routing stop, an insignificance, an insult to senses attuned to immensity.
     
    He boarded an Antrim Road bus, escaping his disappointment, and sat up top on the double-deck, thinking of Fifth, of the parades, of the clear brilliant fall weather, the hot reek of summer, the crisp delightful nip of winter. But saw the grimy half-tones of this ugly town, saw the inevitable rain obscure the window-pane, felt the steamy sodden warmth rise from the clothes of his fellow passengers.
    His destination was Bellevue, a municipal park under the shadow of Cave Hill. The park, formal, unlovely, its amusements a mere glimmer of Palisades or Coney