*
I forget whether it was J. B. Priestley or V. S. Pritchett who wrote that, to children, their parents’ friends can look like comic monsters. The dispiriting thing is that it is when the adults’ brains start to fail and they struggle to hide this that the comedy can turn monstrous – or, at best, depressing. Seán, in his last years, hoping to keep Lauro and me from being upset by his slip-ups, turned these into anecdotes. He had, one letter confessed, poured boiling water into a freshly filled tea-caddy instead of the teapot, and another admitted having astounded his barber by offering him sixpence for a haircut, which had not been the going rate for years. Then, when I was visiting him in a hospital not far from Dún Laoghaire, where he was having tests, he asked whether we should let Eileen know that he was in Ennis.
I marvelled. Ennis was the small, western town where he had got his first teaching job back in the Twenties, when the IRA Civil War fizzled out and he, like the rest of the defeated side, was scrabbling for any work he could get.
When I got back to Eileen that day, I reported thoughtlessly, ‘He thinks he’s in Ennis.’
She was horribly upset. Being used to taking her worries with a pinch of salt, I had failed to notice that she was now hiding them – especially Seán’s gaffes, for which she provided cover when she could.
‘Dan Binchy’, she told me, ‘wants you to phone him. Seán is too ashamed of his deafness to go to the phone when Dan rings. My excuses are sounding thin, and Dan is hurt.’
I had by then given up taking Seán to see ear specialists, who insisted that they could do nothing for him.
But when I phoned Binchy to say Seán was in hospital, I could tell he took this for a fib. ‘He dodges me,’ Binchy accused. ‘If he does that with everyone, his mind will close down.’
The truth, Eileen guessed, was that Seán couldn’t bear to be pitied by a clever old friend like Binchy, whereas people who meant less to him were welcome to drop in and chatter.
Both Seán and she were now showing their age. His chief symptom was an incipient mental decline, and hers was rheumatoid arthritis. When this became unbearable, she needed two wheelchairs, one upstairs and one below, and, to enable her to move between them, a lift shaped like a vertical coffin which had the look of a theatrical prop. This was not in Knockaderry, which they had reluctantly sold in the early Seventies after it had been burgled several times. They would, they had promised, stay on if there was any chance of my coming back to live there. But I said there was none, and persuaded them that they would be better off in a smaller, more manageable house close to doctors and shops. So they bought one, near both the sea and the centre of Dún Laoghaire, and put down a green carpet in their living room which, in certain lights, so exactly mimicked the grass outside, that the garden seemed to have crept indoors.
*
The first time I looked up to see Eileen descend, feet first, in her lift, I was shaken. Knowing that those feet were deformed by arthritis sharpened my distress, when I thought of the medals she had won for Irish dancing as a girl or remembered that I had not always been patient when she grew difficult, as invalids do. On our last trip to Italy, for instance, when we were booking into a hotel on a hot evening in Taranto, she had urged me to ensure that there would be no air-conditioning, as she couldn’t stand draughts.
Missing the point, the receptionist replied with a smile that of course the hotel had excellent air-conditioning.
‘Can it be turned off?’
‘No, no,’ the girl assured happily. ‘It’s centrally controlled.’
‘Not even in my mother’s room?’ I pleaded. ‘She has bad arthritis.’
But plainly the process functioned like the bag of winds in the Odyssey and could not be modified.
In the end Seán and I had to leave Eileen alone in the hotel lobby, cocooned in a shiver of shawls, while we trudged from one hotel to the next, proffering our troublesome request. As the hours passed, I wondered what people thought a couple like ours was doing looking for a room after midnight.
‘Have you really got no room without air-conditioning?’ I kept pleading, only to be told snootily that if there had been one, it would be no cheaper. That wasn’t the point, I argued – then, on realising that to hotel employees it was the only point, I asked to be directed to somewhere sufficiently unimproved to use ceiling fans equipped with a switch or plug. This, when found, solved our problem.
The next year we went to Mouriès in Provence, a pretty village in the hills, and took rooms in a hotel there which suited us perfectly, being within driving distance of Aphonse Daudet’s windmill, and Avignon and Arles, in whose Roman amphitheatre we guiltily watched a riveting bull fight. I don’t remember the air-conditioning trouble recurring, but was mindful of it when, a year or so later, Kick Erlanger’s daughter, Sally, generously offered us the loan of a villa she owned in Portugal.
Kick had died in 1969 and Seán, who clearly needed to talk about this, told me that for years he had secretly been her lover. I suppose I could have guessed, but hadn’t let myself do so – as was perhaps the case, too, for Eileen. Indeed given that she favoured accepting the loan of the villa, maybe she never guessed at all. I, however, refused to join them on this jaunt – which, as they had come to rely on me to be their guide, translator and driver, scuppered it. I was sorry to disappoint them, but, remembering Taranto could all too easily imagine myself failing to cope in Portuguese with whatever hitches might arise. To my ears, Portuguese sounded intractable.
I fear that Eileen may have died holding this refusal against me. Seán, though, thought this unlikely.
She was, he reminded me, a lot tougher than she seemed. After all, her childhood, in her own accounts of it, sounded like Huckleberry Finn’s. In one memory of when she must have been about seven, her brothers, who had stolen a pile of apples but had no way to carry them, had taken off her dress to use as a bag and made her walk home in her underwear. In another, they killed wood pigeons, covered them with clay, then baked and knocked this off so that the feathers came with it. Fictions? Perhaps. Eileen liked to enhance things. Her maiden name, Gould, for instance – in Irish gall rhyming with ‘owl’ – meant, she chose to think, ‘Norse’ or, better still, ‘Viking’. Wild ways appealed to her, though it is fair to add that Seán, whose own childhood had been dull, agreed that hers had been eccentric. Her mother had died when she was three, leaving her to the care of her father, an ex-seaman who, in his youth, had gone round the world picking up foreign tastes. One of these was for snails which he fed on lettuce leaves, then purged and cooked himself.
Eileen, who adored him, may or may not have shared his culinary tastes, but sadly she did inherit his susceptibility to bad flares of arthritis, which led to them both being bedridden for long periods during their final years.
PORTLAND, OREGON
Watching friends wonder at my concern about Eileen, I suspected them of thinking me retarded. No doubt they themselves had snapped the umbilical chord faster than people did in my generation. Rather than react against our parents, we admired them for having fought both the English and the compromisers in the Civil War, whereas we, who had fought nobody, felt untested.
*
Memories of Oregon had led me to think the US dull, but Los Angeles in the Sixties proved different. Having rented a house in Venice, LA’s equivalent of Haight-Ashbury, Lauro and I were soon living in a carnival where identities were shifty and the most ragged people you saw on the boardwalk were often the very rich, while the poor lived unimaginable lives.
My Mexican cleaner, Señora G, was one of these, and, to me, her view of Catholicism was astounding. Mention of priests made her titter. Los curitos! Who could take them seriously, she marvelled, but wouldn’t say what they had done to amuse her. Grabbed her? Teased her? Made her, who was as fat as a corn dolly, feel desirable? Ah dear! Diosito! What a laugh!
She may have been an illegal immigrant or even a small-time smuggler of illegals. When not working for me, she was employed for less
than the minimum legal wage, ironing trousers in a sweatshop where she had to stand with her weight on her varicosed legs for up to ten hours at a stretch.
Her laugh could also be set off too by mention of her husband. Señor G, the villain of an ongoing saga, pursued a resilient taste for under-age girls up and down the US–Mexico border. He had been jailed on both sides of it, beaten up by outraged fathers, and almost forced into bigamy on several occasions.
‘But’, said the Señora, ‘none of the marriages could come off because he’s married to me!’
The humour of this broke her up. Machismo and concern for the honour of daughters were trumped. Exploited she might be, but she foiled these fine principles by simply existing. Titters swelled. I saw tears. Was this sorrow? Glee? She must have been the fattest skeleton any Don Juan kept in his conjugal cupboard. I laughed, too, sharing her ambiguous outlet, and drank thin beer with her at the end of her charring afternoons. We were both homesick.
‘Mi tierra …’ she sometimes sighed. She made frequent trips to its border, driving there in a nephew’s truck to pick up coloured cakes, ceramic pots and other oddments. Sometimes there would be new nephews when she came back: alert young men whom I might glimpse once or twice, and then no more. Illegal immigrants? If so, she wasn’t making much from them. Her small house was built, like those of the less provident of the three pigs, from unreliable materials. It was cheek by jowl to the one we were renting, for Venice, which had not yet become fashionable, mixed up social classes, just as the Stiozzi-Ridolfi palazzo had done.
Once she invited Lucien and me to her daughter’s birthday party and fed us excellent home-made enchiladas, tortillas, refried pinto beans and bright green guacamole, and there, while playing some game, I looked through a crack in a shed and saw two bewildered eyes blink out at me. Another nephew? The party rioted on and, presumably, whoever the eyes belonged to went back to sleep.
‘Learn English so as to live better,’ nagged an ad on a Spanish-language radio station: Radio Amor. Señora G hadn’t time to learn English, but her daughter spoke like a little Californian. Conchita, who got straight As in school, looked like a mini model of her mother and was the focus of her hopes. She hoped to become a doctor so that the two could return in pride to Mexico: a long haul. She was twelve the year we attended her birthday party, and didn’t laugh the way her mother did. She was grave, half a gringa already, responsibly grappling with life and, unlike her mother, in need neither of irony nor alienation.
When the sweatshop was raided, Señora G and other indocumentadas were rushed out the back. Later, to make up for time lost, they were obliged to take stimulants and work through the night.
*
When I was leaving for Europe, she gave me a delicately hand-painted water pot which I still have, and a glass necklace which might have suited a child of six. Then she brought a nephew with a truck to collect whatever household gear I wouldn’t be taking. Her last bit of advice, given over our goodbye drink, was that I should one day visit Mexico.
‘You’ll like it,’ she said.
I knew that. Long before I went there, it figured in my geography of romance, just as Spain, Scotland and Italy did for eighteenth-century travellers. Prejudice is potent, and the appeal of my chosen heartlands is rooted in an education whose message was that victims may be godlike. Our first role models – Celts and Christ – had been losers, so in pious moments we saw loss as noble. In practical ones we were, need I say, as competitive as anyone.
Countries known for their ruined grandeur offer a paradoxical thrill. Featuring among them for me were Egypt, Mexico, Peru and, in its small way, Ireland, where picnics often climaxed, once we had tidied away our rugs and thermos flask, in a search for some half-overgrown fothrach.
This Gaelic word is best said fortissimo, lest breath whistle through without registering any consonants. It means ‘ruin’.
*
Seán didn’t frequent what has sometimes been called ‘Dublin’s literary underworld’, meaning, I suppose, McDaid’s, a grubby near-Hogarthian den. He did, though, like meeting old friends in restaurants quiet enough for him to hear them and would bring home reports about the activities in which they were still engaging. Sometimes, when Eileen’s poor health kept her from such outings, he took me instead, with the result that the Dublin I first knew belonged to his generation rather than mine. This started when I was a schoolgirl and lasted into the Seventies when I flew from LA to join him at a festival in the Playboy Club in Chicago, where V. S. Pritchett, Alex Haley, Alberto Moravia, Dacia Maraini, James Dicky, Kenneth Galbraith and Seán himself read from their work. I forget who else was there, but remember the event as manic, and only mildly marred by VSP’s and Seán’s chagrin when told not to talk to the bunnies whose chaperons – ‘bunny mothers’ – took their role seriously.
*
Another slightly odd gathering to which I was bidden, this time in Minnesota, featured the brilliant New Yorker humorist, J. F. Powers, whom I had seen once or twice in Knockaderry and whose short stories anatomise the predicaments confronting RC priests in the land of Mammon. Rereading them now leaves me wondering whether the carnal innocence of the clerics depicted represents what Jim Powers actually saw around him. Pride and covetousness were the sins he flagellated. But, as we would all learn later, worse was going on.
On the evening in Minnesota he, Seán, and several well-heeled clerics, flashing cufflinks the size of quarters, dined with a gusto that, if Powers had himself been chronicling the occasion, might have augured a sobering outcome. I wondered if he was harvesting copy by stealth and, if so, who – hunter or prey – was footing the bill?
*
I was reminded of an earlier occasion in Dublin, when Peadar O’Donnell invited Seán and me, again as Eileen’s proxy, to dine in what was then the city’s best restaurant, Jammets, to meet a man whom Peadar took to be a US Communist. A chill descended when it emerged that the guest, Max Eastman, was on the contrary a Trotskyist. In the Spanish Civil War, where Trots and Commies had bloodily confronted each other, Peadar had been responsible for raising a small anti-Franco contingent from Ireland, so squandering pieces of silver to feed a Judas must have rankled.
*
Once when I missed an interesting lunch, Seán later described it so fully that even now I can summon up the scene.
‘That’s what he says,’ I heard him tell Eileen, that evening, as we came down to supper.
‘Who?’ I asked, taking my place at the table.
‘The actor, Michael Mac Liammóir’, Seán told us cheerfully – not to say gaily! – ‘wants me to write what he calls “an Irish Corydon”. I’ll be counting on you for tips if I agree. I hope you’ve read the original? By André Gide? No? So why did we waste our spondulicks sending you to Savoy?’
I reminded him that my hosts there, the Morandys, would have refused house-room to books by Mauriac, let alone Gide.
Next, mimicking the actor’s diction, Seán reported that Mac Liammóir, whose birth name was Alfie Willmore, had come to lunch wearing greasepaint. ‘I’ll supply the background,’ he had apparently promised. ‘We could start our dialogue with you and me sitting here whispering. What’s wrong with us? I’ll tell you what. The confessional has the country ruined – though there are rum stories about what can go on there. Wishful thinking I’d say. Mostly we lack nerve.’
‘So why’, Seán claimed to have challenged, ‘ask me to write what you could do better yourself?’
His flattery was sincere. Mac Liammóir was multitalented and in the Sixties was to devise, deliver and tour around the US a one-man show about Wilde entitled The Importance of Being Oscar. This was both a pleasing reminder of Charles Dickens’s successful readings of his own works, and a discreet defence and illustration of a way of life which would stop short – wisely in those years – of revealing that it was Michael’s as well as Oscar’s.
‘Why do you need me at all?’ Seán said he had asked.
‘To help us find our nerv
e,’ he was told. ‘To challenge people to defend a way of life that is losing its best camouflage which in the old days was people’s ignorance. I had a landlady one time in Cork City who told me that, though she wouldn’t let a fine-looking man like myself share a room with a girl, boys were OK. Now, aul ones like her are getting so savvy that we need to defend our right to be as God made us.’
‘God?’
‘He’s the homophobes’ big asset.’
‘But I’m not …’
Eileen had gone out to the kitchen.
‘… one of us.’ Seán lowered his voice to let me know that he was now speaking as Mac Lammóir. ‘Of course you’re not, which is why, for you, defending those who are is no risk. Being a known ladies’ man, you can afford to show that your choice is more risqué than ours.’
In a fusion of fancy and memory, I see the two revel in their topic. Light gleams on Seán’s specs, and the actor’s greasepaint is as bright as a blush. Notoriously, he wears it off-stage as well as on. ‘I was twelve,’ he confides sadly, ‘when I made my first conquests. I was a beautiful youth.’ He wears a wig. Indeed, Dublin gossip claims that he wears several, one when he wants to look as though he has recently had a haircut, others when the hair must seem to have grown.
‘Tell me’, Seán teases, ‘how you know what goes on in confession boxes.’
Michael mentions a fling he had with a young policeman. ‘Tell me, Donal,’ he says he asked once when they were in bed together, ‘when next you go to confession, will you confess what we just did?’
‘Oi,’ replied the cop in an indignant, singsong Cork accent, ‘wouldn’t tell a priesht a dirrty ting like dat.’
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