Hugo didn’t grin back; instead he gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Perhaps,” he said, turning his attention back to his food. “I’d like to think so, too. So much less uncomfortable to think about. But until I know, you see, I have to pursue all the avenues.”
He ate with the thorough, methodical enjoyment of a laborer, leaning forwards over his plate. “I’m not a DNA specialist,” he said, between mouthfuls, “but I can make a decent fist of analyzing results—or at any rate better than someone like Mrs. Wozniak, who’s never done it before. She was born in 1945, and the percentage of matching DNA puts the McNamara connection two or three generations back. So we’re talking about somewhere between, say, 1850 and 1910. It would be easier if I had the census records, but . . .” An exasperated, familiar shrug. A combination of government logic, World War I paper shortage and fire destroyed basically all the nineteenth-century Irish census records; I had heard Hugo complain about it plenty of times before. “So I can’t just go and check if one of the ancestors was on the census with a wife and three children before he emigrated, or if someone vanishes from the home address and pops up in a Magdalene laundry, or if the next-door neighbor happened to be a McNamara. Instead I’m going at it sideways. Parish records, mostly, but I’ve also been checking the passenger lists of emigrant ships—”
I was losing hold of the conversation—too many possibilities and tributaries, the words had stopped meaning much—but the run of Hugo’s voice was peaceful as a river. The standing lamp, on against the dim underwater light, gave the room a sanctified golden glow. Rain pattering at the windowpane, bindings worn at the edges. Bird-dropped twigs in the grate of the little iron fireplace. I ate and nodded.
“Would you like to give me a hand?” Hugo asked suddenly.
He had straightened up and was blinking hopefully at me. “Well,” I said, taken aback, “um, I don’t know how much use I’d be. It’s not really my—”
“It’s nothing fancy. Just the same stuff you and your cousins used to help me with: going through records looking for the right names. I know it’s not very exciting, but it does have its moments—do you remember that nice Canadian whose great-grandmother turned out to have run off with the music teacher and the family silver?”
I was trying to come up with a good excuse—I couldn’t read a news article without forgetting what was going on halfway through, what were the chances I could keep track of half a dozen names while I deciphered page after page of Victorian handwriting?—when I realized, duhhh, with a sharp prickle of shame: Hugo wasn’t charitably trying to keep the poor unfortunate gimp busy. He wanted to know the answer to Mrs. Wozniak’s mystery, and he didn’t have a lot of time to find it. “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, sure. Absolutely. That’d be great.”
“Oh, marvelous,” he said happily, pushing his empty plate aside. “It’s been too long since I had company at this. Do you want anything else to eat, or shall we get stuck in?”
We cleared the plates (“Oh, just put them in that corner for now, we’ll take them downstairs later”—I had a sharp flash of wondering whether Hugo had noticed my dragging leg and wanted to spare me the stairs, but his face was turned away from me as he stacked the tray, I couldn’t find anything there) and he set the printer to churn out a stack of ships’ manifests while he fixed me up with the armchair and the side table and a year-old phone bill to run down the pages so I wouldn’t miss a line. “Check all the names, won’t you, not just the ones marked as Irish? You never know, there could be an error, or someone could have found a way to pass himself off as English—being Irish wasn’t exactly an advantage back then . . .” When I wrote down the names I was looking for and put the piece of paper beside the stack, he didn’t comment. “Ah,” he said, turning his chair to his desk and pulling the laptop closer with a sigh of satisfaction. And then—exactly like when we were kids, blast from the forgotten past: “Happy foraging.”
It was very peaceful. In my spaced-out state, my mind couldn’t manage to snag on my problems or Hugo’s, or on anything really except the lines of type appearing like magic above the moving edge of the phone bill: Mr. Robt Harding 22 M Gent England, Miss S. L. Sullivan 25 F Spinster Ireland, Mr. Thos Donahue 36 M Farmer Ireland . . . The rhythm, once I found it, was hypnotic: three lines of the list, eyes swinging right to remind myself of the names I wanted, left again to the list for three more lines, tick tock tick tock, steady and solid as a pendulum. When I got down to steerage class, the passengers lost their titles and the occupations changed: Sarah Dempsey 22 F Servant Ireland, George Jennings 30 M Laborer Scotland, Patk Costello 28 M Ironmonger Ireland . . . I could have stayed there all day, all week, lulled by the quaint old terms—Hostler, Dye Sinker, Furman—only half-hearing the rain and the clicking of Hugo’s keyboard. It came as a shock when I heard the cheerful rat-a-tat-tat of the door knocker, downstairs, and—lifting my head notch by notch on my stiff neck, blinking at the reappearing room—realized slowly that the light had shifted; that that must be Melissa at the door; that I had spent hours like this, without either my concentration or my head or my eyes going to shite; that, for the first time in a long time, I was starving.
* * *
?Somewhere during the evening before—while I was out on the terrace with my cousins?—Melissa and Hugo had apparently become friends. They had met before, at my family birthday party back in January, and had liked each other, but now all of a sudden they were easy as old pals, sharing in-jokes—Melissa pulling a bag of sweet potatoes out of one overloaded shopping bag to brandish it at Hugo, “Look, see? I told you!” and Hugo throwing back his shaggy head in a big crack of laughter; him resting a hand briefly on her shoulder as he passed her, the same way he did to me.
“I like Hugo,” Melissa said, later, leaning against my bedroom window to look out at the garden. The bedroom light was off; she was only a silhouette against the faint colorless glow of the outside. “A lot.”
“I know,” I said. I went to stand beside her. The rain was still going, a steady busy patter working away in the darkness. “Me too.”
Melissa took one hand off the windowpane and held it out to me, palm up. I put my hand in hers and we stood there like that for a long time, watching the light from Hugo’s window illuminating a slanted rectangle of pale grass and weeds far below, the fine rain falling on and on through the beam and vanishing into the dark.
* * *