Dissolve to a winter evening on the farm. Marie-Thérèse has summoned Milo to help her with the job of pickling cucumbers. The kitchen air is opaque with steam.
Seated next to the wall, at the farthest end of the long maple wood table, Milo carefully pours vinegar into jars as his aunt peels and chops garlic across from him. Suddenly she looks up at him.
Marie-Thérèse's voice begins to rise.
The child's stubborn silence makes her see red.
Taking the receiver off its hook on the wall, she clobbers him over the head with it.
you . . .) She hits him again.
Milo's head is on the table amidst the pickle jars. Since his arms are crossed over it for protection, Marie-Thérèse sometimes smashes his hands with the receiver. She's out of control.
Just then the door bursts open and Régis stomps into the house, his boots covered in snow. A freezing gust of wind enters the room with him.
Seeing herself as he must see her, sweating, shouting and disheveled, towering over the cowering child, Marie-Thérèse freezes.
Régis treads out of the room, exhausted, and Marie-Thérèse sits down next to Milo on the bench.
She pulls him close, but he goes so rag-doll limp that all she can do with his body is release it.
Passivity! The greatest force in human history!
things—doubtless wired together in our reptilian brains—survival and group acceptance.
No, love, I'm not talking about you—I know you're no more passive than a possum. But you're the one who got me interested in the subject, and . . . Okay, Astuto, okay, I'll stop speechifying. No need to rub it in. I know I'm in no state to write a book.
our young hero hunched over his desk in a corner of his bedroom. Sun streams through the frilly white curtains to his left, making the blankness of his pages painfully bright. Behind him, the maid is loudly plumping up the pillows on the bed.
"Yes, sir," repeats Daisy. And she beats a retreat with a false obsequiousness that verges on insolence, moving backward, curtsying and waving her feather duster, finally pulling the door to behind her.
?" fumes Neil, swerving angrily back to the blank page on the table in front of him.
There were numerous truths of the Easter Rising, depending upon one's vantage point.
. Crosses out everything, crumples the page and tosses it into the wastebasket.
we hear him say to himself.
Though a thousand things were indeed occurring simultaneously in different parts of the city, we have no choice but to recount them successively. No blah blah, no holding forth. We must be in the action. In, for instance, the body of the young Sinn Féiner shot to death by the sniper on the roof of Trinity College. No, that's no good . . . He died on Tuesday; his chapter would be far too short. Well, how about a seagull, then, watching events unfold from above? No, ridiculous. Gulls cannot fathom human behavior, let alone human speech. Thom, I want to do this for you. You lost your life and I did not, so it's serious now. I need to do it. All right, let's just start somewhere, anywhere, it doesn't matter where; we can correct it later.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, his sister pops her head through the door.
Neil doesn't deign to turn toward her.
And, with a peal of laughter as intolerably bright as the sunlight, Dorothy vanishes.
His nerves at snapping point, Neil grips his pen tightly and we hear his inner voice . . .
The question is not only how to be in different places at the same time, but how to be in the same place at different times. The place, assuredly, is Dublin City. But we cannot talk about the Easter Rising of 1916 if we do not understand the strikes of 1913–1914 . . . the rise and fall of Parnell in the 1890s . . . or the six-hundred-year history of the British occupation. And we must go not only backward but forward in time as well. Show how the people of Dublin, though not supportive of the rebellion during Easter Week itself, gradually came to espouse the rebels' cause as, day after day, early in May, their leaders were cruelly and systematically executed by British firing squads. Pearse, Plunkett, MacDonagh, Connolly . . . sixteen in all, including the one whom I personally denounced, Major John MacBride. A swaggerer to the end: boasting that he'd faced British fire before, he met his death without the customary blindfold. And then I was denounced. By whom? Must have been that blond kid in the bushes. To whom? I'm still not sure—both ways? To the government and the rebels? A two-way traitor, I became. Traitor to my class—the bar defrocked me. Traitor to my cause—the Sinn Féin cast me out. But it's not my own tale I want to tell, it's the tale of my city. The upheaval of Easter 1916 left dear dark Dublin ruined and ravished but renewed. Ripe for revolution.
Neil's knuckles are white from squeezing the pen too tightly.
Three loud, swift knocks at the door.
"What now? Who is it?" he shouts, leaping to his feet.
"Your mother," comes the icy answer.
Yanking the door open, he sees fear in his mother's eyes and realizes he must be a sight: hair on end, rumpled shirttails, wrinkled trousers, suspenders awry; he hasn't slept a wink.
"Your father would like to have a word with you," says Mrs. Kerrigan stiffly, advancing not so much as the pointed toe of her pink velvet mule beyond his threshhold.
CUT to Judge Kerrigan's den, replete with all the symbols of virile wealth and power: leather-bound books serried on bookshelves, framed diplomas, green lampshades, polished oak desk, gilt leather blotters and paperweights . . . you get the picture. The man's success is ostentatious not to say ferocious, and any one of our potential spectators could probably write the ensuing dialogue as well as we can, Milo.