“There’s the shopping center,” Charles William called out. “There’s the record store. There it is.” He pulled into a parking place and we all piled out and went into the store and were introduced to the owner. Then Charles William took my arm and pulled me around a corner and into a soundproof room with a turntable and bins full of classical records and Caedmon recordings of poets reading their poetry. At that time customers were allowed to play records before they bought them. “I’ve been dying to play this for you,” Charles William said. “I can’t wait till you hear it.” He took a recording out of its cover and put it on the turntable. “Listen, Dee, just listen to this.” He dropped the needle into its groove and Siobhan McKenna’s incomparable voice began to speak the Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses. “Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice …” I was gasping with delight. It was the book Sarah Worley’s sister had studied at Wellesley. It was the book about Ireland. “Oh, God, Charles William, I’ve been looking for that. I can’t believe it’s on a record. Let me see the cover.”

“It’s Siobhan McKenna, Dee. Someday we’ll go to London and hear all these people and see them on the stage. We’ll go and spend a summer and hear all the great people of the world and talk to them. We won’t always be here, in this little place where we were born. But, listen, listen to it.”

“. . . O, tragic and the dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with her old maids voice …”

“Oh, God, I can’t believe you found this.”