The Celtic Knot

A Plan

By the middle of the term, Kathleen can do slip jigs, sailor’s hornpipes, and hard reels, the whole lot of them. She learns fast because she loves it, and the more difficult the steps get, the greater the effort she puts in to master them. The hornpipe is Kathleen’s favorite. She wears hard shoes for the hornpipe, and she loves both the leisurely pace and the rap of the hard shoes on the boards. It feels nearly like tap dancing, and she can let all the energy drain down into her feet and let her body go loose, instead of having to keep the top half of herself completely rigid the way the jigs demand, to get the kicks and rocks exactly right.

Tess O’Hara teases Kathleen and mocks her every chance she gets. Kathleen thinks she’s jealous because she’s doing so well, even though she is still new to it all. Every now and again, Mrs. Maguire brings both arms crashing down onto the piano keys, right up to the elbows, making a terrible crashing sound. Everyone stops dead with their feet still in the air, and she yells out, as if in pain, Tess O’Hara’s full name, ordering her to please leave Kathleen Murphy alone. Kathleen only gives a pained little smile in return. In the end, she gets so used to Tess and her carrying on that she stops noticing it at all, the way a person gets used to flies in the summertime, or to chilblains in the winter.

Mrs. Maguire has picked her team for the feis by now, and Kathleen is one of the first to get a place on it. She tells Kathleen that she is relying on her to do well, chun glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann, which she explains means “to the glory of God and the honor of Ireland.” That makes Kathleen nervous and proud at the same time, the honor and the glory of it all, but she simply nods and promises she will do her best.

Brigid was entered in the feis, too, but Mrs. Maguire said she isn’t sure that Tess and Annie are up to scratch yet; she will give them a chance to prove themselves over the next few weeks and see. Tess and Annie mutter a great deal about that, complaining that Mrs. Maguire has it in for them and that she only enters dancers she thinks can win medals. They glare at Kathleen as if the whole thing were somehow her fault, but Kathleen has to admit, though only to herself, that the reasoning makes perfect sense. What would be the point of cluttering up the competitions with dancers who haven’t a hope of placing?

Just as they’re leaving that day, Mrs. Maguire makes another announcement that sends Kathleen’s heart sinking down into her boots. Addressing them all as “a chailíní,” she declares she wants every one of their mothers to see that they get the finest Irish dancing costumes in Dublin, so that when Maguire girls get up on that stage, they look absolutely splendid. No ankle socks, please, since those only go baggy and dirty; they are all young ladies now, and it’s nice costumes and black lisle stockings she wants to see, green if possible, since that’s the most fitting color for Irish girls, being the color of Ireland, their native land. The dress itself should be knee-length or a little shorter, with Celtic decorations and a brat. Mrs. Maguire will lend every girl two of the Maguire School of Irish Dancing pins she’s had made specially in the style of the beautiful Tara brooch, to pin the brat to the shoulders of the dress, so that each girl goes out there wearing both the insignia of the dancing school and a symbol of Old Ireland. But the costume itself, she makes clear, is each family’s own responsibility.

Then she asks, “Ceist ag éinne? Any questions?” Everyone else has already danced in feiseanna before and has no need to ask anything. Kathleen is the only one new to it all, and she doesn’t dare open her mouth.

As they clatter down the stairs from Mrs. Maguire’s room, Tess O’Hara gives Kathleen a smirk and says, “Well, so now!” She doesn’t need to say another word. She knows perfectly well, and Kathleen knows it, too, that Kathleen hasn’t a hope in the wide world of getting hold of a costume good enough to represent Mrs. Maguire at the feis, not to mention God and Ireland.

Kathleen stumbles home, going over and over in her mind what Mrs. Maguire had said, trying to find some solution to the costume problem. By the time she reaches the front door, she has made up her mind. She will say nothing to Mam about the dancing costume or the feis. It would only annoy and upset her, and Kathleen doesn’t know which would be worse. She won’t breathe a word of it to anyone else just yet, either. But Kathleen has a plan. She isn’t sure if it will work, but it’s the best she can think of.