The Celtic Knot

The Letter

The next day, it is all over the school. Tess O’Hara never wastes a chance to make a fool of someone, and she wastes no time announcing to anyone who will listen that the best part is how Kathleen actually thought the lessons were free. What is poor Mrs. Maguire supposed to live on, Tess wants to know, if she doesn’t charge for the classes? Of course it’s free for her, and for Annie Ruane and Brigid Mullane, too, because their daddies work for Guinness’s, and Guinness’s pays for it. But it’s not free to all comers. Tess isn’t about to let anyone off the street wander in and learn for nothing.

Angela and Nell are full of sympathy. They even hold the skipping rope for Kathleen all through sos as a special treat. They turn it and turn it while Kathleen counts in Irish, AON, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht, her plaits flying up around her shoulders with each jump.

Tess and her pals have a right laugh watching, taking off the counting and making a great show of bouncing a ball to a rhyme about a packet of soap flakes, loud enough to drown out the sound of Kathleen counting.

Kathleen tries to tell herself she doesn’t mind. It’s true enough that Tess and the others setting her up doesn’t bother her the way it might have once. What she minds is missing the dancing lessons, not the trick that got her thrown out of them. It isn’t the other girls’ opinion of her that she wants back. It’s the dancing itself, and the feeling it gives her, like flying.

The following Wednesday is Irish dancing day again, though Kathleen no longer has anywhere to go once school lets out. It’s her turn, along with Nell, to stay behind and help right the desk seats, sweep the floor, and empty the rubbish bins, the way the girls always help each other out when their turn comes around. Kathleen is just putting her coat on to go home when Brigid Mullane comes back into the classroom, holding out a note. Brigid says it’s from Mrs. Maguire. She wants Kathleen back.

The note isn’t even sealed in an envelope, just folded over, and it’s obvious Brigid read it on her way back from the dancing school. Kathleen can’t blame her. She would have done exactly the same thing herself.

Kathleen stares at Brigid with her mouth hanging open, unable to believe it. When she finally asks why, Brigid just shrugs. Mrs. Brady’s dancing school won loads of medals at the feis last year, and the year before that as well, and Mrs. Maguire is dying to win more this year. But a couple of her best dancers have left her. Liz O’Brien was great, Brigid recalls, but she just sort of disappeared. Now Mrs. Maguire is on the lookout for new talent. Kathleen protests that she can barely manage the baby reel, but Brigid tells her that being light on her feet is the most important thing of all.

Kathleen isn’t sure what that even means. As far as she knows, she carries the same weight on her feet as she does sitting down. Nell tells her to close her mouth before she catches flies, then gives her a wink and a hearty grin, and Angela echoes the same, adding that of course they’d always known Kathleen was great. When Kathleen hesitates, Angela shoos her out the door, promising to call in on Kathleen’s Mam on the way home and explain that she’ll be late. Still half-dazed, Kathleen mutters her thanks and follows Brigid out of the classroom and down the stairs, turning the words “light on her feet” over and over in her head the whole way to Mrs. Maguire’s, puzzling over what they could possibly mean.

But when they reach the classroom and the music starts up, and Kathleen counts the opening bars under her breath, waiting for the downbeat of her dance to begin, it comes to her all at once. The rough, warped floorboards seem to disappear out from under her. She flies. It is all airy and feathery, like skimming over water, twirling into a new element altogether, into a world where gravity doesn’t matter and weight doesn’t exist. For those few bars, she isn’t Kathleen Murphy, the poor girl from the tenements, with a hole worn through her stocking and chilblains between her toes, the girl her own family’s poverty embarrasses, whom Sister Eucharia belittles and Tess O’Hara’s gang mocks. She is a Celtic princess, dancing her way to the stars on airy-fairy feet, light as air, and free as a bird.

It doesn’t stay that way forever, of course. Kathleen never again feels quite as light-footed as she did that first afternoon. But her love for dancing keeps growing, even as the lessons get harder. The steps grow more intricate, and the order of them is harder to remember, and lesson after lesson, Mrs. Maguire grinds through the same two or three basic tunes until the class can manage them foot-perfect, and the music itself starts to feel dull.

At home, Kathleen dances her way through getting dressed in the mornings and wrestles the tangles out of her hair as she goes, skipping and turning round and round the bedroom. Her sisters throw pillows and shoes at her, trying to knock her off the beat, anything to make her stop. Kathleen feels like the little girl in the story whose shoes won’t let her be still. Her feet seem enchanted. She doesn’t walk across a room anymore; she dances across it. She doesn’t climb the stairs; she dances her way up them. Even at night, her feet twitch through the steps in her sleep, until Patsy and Lily reach across the bed, grab her by the toes, and tickle the soles of her feet until she chokes with laughter and has to promise to stop. Still, whenever she makes her best effort to keep her feet still, she goes on dancing inside her head, listening to a tune only she can hear.