by Frank Gannon
The big red book turned out to be a computer-generated list of everyone who had ever had anything to do with Saint Peter’s of Athlone: their birth, baptism, First Holy Communion, wedding, divorces (a decidedly un-Catholic-Irish bit of information), all of their addresses, their death, and, in bold computer print, their yearly contributions to Saint Peter’s, before and after death. I was wondering how they could give money after they were dead. Did someone give it in their name? What’s the point there? Does the dead guy want a tax deduction? A big computer-generated page always makes me start thinking like that.
The big red book consisted, I noticed with quiet amazement, of just the letters “G,” “H,” and “I.” A thirty-five-pound book. They kept good records here at Athlone. I had thought it was a sleepy little hamlet, but it was really data headquarters, Ireland central.
But there was absolutely nothing in the big red book about Bernard Gannon. There were a few Bernard Gannons, but not the Bernard Gannon. Not the Bernard Gannon with enormous hands. Not the Bernard Gannon who had left Athlone and sailed to America and married Anne Forde and had several children, one of whom was a remarkable literary figure who was really good sexually and a credit to his race.
When we walked out of the church the little guy with the bulbous nose was still there praying. He looked at me. He looked as if he felt sorry for me.
After that, the afternoon turned fouler and fouler and testier and testier, as did the general mood. We started walking a few steps apart. It was slowly becoming one of those afternoons that are best erased from the memory bank. I had experienced a thousand afternoons like that, but this was the first in Ireland.
Finally I stopped, excused myself, and went and got an ice cream cone. That, oddly, was the last straw. When I returned to Paulette, slurping my cone (very good butter pecan in a sugar cone, by the way), things got ugly.
“You had to get that, didn’t you?”
“No,” I said, reaching back for my reserve sarcasm, “I didn’t have to do that. I chose to do that.” I knew I was fanning the flames, but I was far beyond caring.
Now we walked along in sullen silence. Blocks of Ireland were passed without comment. I thought, randomly, that it reminded me, somehow, of the Newark airport.
Finally, after a sullen eternity, we got to our tiny automobile, our wretched Punta. Paulette got in what would be, in America, the passenger door, a sign that she desired to drive. I was in no mood to say otherwise. We drove out of Athlone. “I got the music in me,” was playing on the radio.
The traffic, as you would figure, was terrible. It started to rain. I looked at the guy in the car next to us. He looked as if he belonged on the New Jersey Turnpike. People were honking their horns and passing on the impossibly narrow streets. Paulette got a little too close to the curb and severely mangled a hubcap.
Somehow, as it was interpreted, the mangling was all my fault. I welcomed the responsibility. Mangle the other one, woman. I’ll take the blame for that one too. When someone blamed my mother for something that wasn’t her fault, she always said, Go ahead, put it on me. I’ve got broad shoulders.
I didn’t say that to Paulette but I was thinking it.
Now things got ugly. The horrible weather (it started, on cue, to pour, the first hard rain we had seen in Ireland). The terrible, aggressive Athlone drivers. The sullen florist. The bitter ice cream cone purchase. The mangled hubcap.
Silence fell.
Ireland sucks, I thought.
We drove like statues in the front seat of our tiny red car to an Irish Heritage Center, the sort of remote outpost that desperate, suicidal tourists seeking their ancestral roots go in times of desperate need.
The Irish Heritage Center was an ugly, squat, white brick building set in an unpromising empty lot. It had a sign that advertised lessons in traditional “Riverdance” stepping. Sure, stop here. This is the right place for our foul, nihilistic mood. No place could be better. Let’s all riverdance. I can be lord of the motherless dance. I’m a Mick. Bite me.
Soon, I thought, there may be gunplay. In a final confrontation between Paulette and me, I felt that I would emerge triumphant. I was much larger and I felt confident that, if it came to it, I would prove to be the better man.
The last act of La Boheme is cheerier than the mood we brought with us to the Irish Heritage Center. But it was there that things, blissfully and surprisingly, started to look up. The lady at the Heritage Center listened to our story about looking for my dad’s roots. Her eyes said that she had heard this story many, many times, and the last time was ten minutes ago. She gave us a form, told us where to send it, told us what it would cost in American dollars to do a computer check on all the Gannons in the area, yadda, yadda, and was about to bid us goodbye. I was thinking about the desultory road back to Athlone. I asked myself, “What would Samuel Beckett do?”
Then the heritage lady furrowed her brow. She raised her chin slightly.
“So the name is Gannon?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “and Turley.” Turley was my grandmother’s maiden name, a fact I picked up from a trip to the Mormon website.
“You know, there’s an old gent a few miles from here, Noel Turley. And I believe there’s some Gannon in him. Let me give you directions.”
It was hard to believe. Something not completely bad.
We drove down a little road: a left turn from the road to Moate, a village about ten miles from Athlone. The houses were few and far between, but they were pretty nice houses. It looked as if some of them were larger, renovated versions of the Quiet Man house, with the thatched roof replaced with slate.
We drove past an old man in a suit. We stopped.
“Excuse me, sir,” I asked. “Do you know Noel Turley?”
“Noel Turley?” he said. He said it as if shocked that I would ask him such an obvious question.
“He’s about five kilometers away. There’s an old caved-in-house, and a railroad, and a new house. Turley’s in the new house.”
Now we were cooking. We drove along happily, the misery of Athlone happily beginning to crumble. It stopped raining. The sun, a rare thing in Ireland, started to peep through the gray clouds. Our bleak Samuel Beckett afternoon mood was slowly beginning to dissipate.
We passed a caved-in house. I didn’t notice a railroad. There was an old gent with a friendly looking red face. He was stumbling in his yard. There was something mysteriously familiar about him. We stopped the car.
“Excuse me, do you know Noel Turley?” I asked.
“Speaking,” he said.
Noel Turley invited us in and we walked into his house. He acted as if we lived next door and had last visited the house yesterday. He introduced us to his wife, who was very gracious and friendly. Noel directed us to our seats. We sat down in his living room. Yes, he had holy water fonts.
Noel Turley, it turned out, was related to me in some obscure way, but it was such a complex, tangled line of aunts, and cousins, and grandmothers, that I cannot say exactly what that way was without consulting sources. I can diagram it more easily than I can explain it. But, after talking with Noel for a while, it really felt as if I knew him, as if I had known him for a very long time, since I was a kid. He seemed as if he had been at all those Saint Patrick’s Day Hibernian parties at my cousin’s restaurant.
Noel Turley knew a great deal about the Gannons. He knew all three of the brothers, Bill Gannon, Johnny Gannon, and my dad, Bernie Gannon. Johnny was the character, but Bernie was the tough one. He told me a little story about my dad and some potatoes. This is a story that depended a lot on the performance, but it was, told by Noel, a great story, but an Irish story without a plot. I had heard many of them from my mother. I thought that it is a great tale, but essentially unrepeatable because it depends more on the performance than the details. Anyway, here it is, sans performance.
“I had some spuds. And this man told me to sell ’em. I asked him, ‘Are they good?’ and he said, ‘They’re fair.’ Now ‘fair�
� isn’t ‘good.’ It’s worse than good. So ‘fair’ is another way of saying ‘bad.’ So I tasted one. And it was worse than ‘bad.’ You’d do better eating the dirt it grew in. So I was walking around with the sack of spuds, and I saw your dad. And I knew he was headed off to America in a few days. And I asked him to sell the spuds for me. And he said, ‘Are they good?’ And I said, ‘They’re fair.’ So I went off to mass. When I came back I saw Bernie. And the spuds weren’t with him. And I asked him if he sold them. He said, ‘I did.’ And I said, ‘Who did you sell them to?’ And he said, ‘A lady.’ And I split the money with him. And I asked him, ‘Do you know what “fair” means?’ And he said, ‘I think it means “bad.” ’ And I said, ‘Do you know the lady?’ And he said, ‘I do.’ And I said, ‘What are you going to tell her when she sees you again?’ And he said, ‘When she sees me again, I’ll look different.’ And then he went to America.”
Noel took me on an amazing tour of the world my dad saw when he first saw the world. The house my dad was born in was still standing, sort of. Next to it was a little barn, which was also still standing. Sort of. My dad’s place was six acres. They didn’t “own” the land. They “rented” it from somebody they rarely saw. It looked impossible to farm.
They did farm it. It was almost a living when everyone was alive. You are what you grew. It is the sort of place that looks beautiful in a photo, but would be mind-numbingly hard to work. They got by until the bad things happened.
Noel then showed me the cemetery that he thought some of my people might be buried in. This was within easy walking distance. Noel was an easy man to talk with. If you couldn’t think of anything to say, no problem. Talking was like shooting a water pistol standing in a lake. There were no Pinteresque moments.
We finally came to the cemetery. It was very small, a square twenty feet on a side. There were maybe ten graves there. A lot of the writing on the tombstones was worn away, but right in the front I saw it. The grave of the grandpa I never saw. I never heard my father talk about him.
JOSEPH GANNON
DIED MARCH 15, 1916, AGED 45 YEARS
And under that.
FRANCIS GANNON
BELOVED SON
DIED DECEMBER 21, 1916
Francis was the brother I was named after.
So my dad was seven years old when his dad died and eight when his big brother died. Bernie was eight years old, but he was the man of the house. He had to start making a living. On six “leased” rocky acres in Ireland. He quit school and worked.
I asked a few questions and tried to put together something like my dad’s typical day when he was very young. He had told me that he had always worked, that he had been forced to quit school when he was a little kid. He would get up early and take the horse out. He would walk from farm to farm, attempting to get a farmer interested in sort of “renting” the horse for a day. When my dad did get somebody interested, he would stick around and help him hitch up the horse and plow.
When he got home, he wasn’t finished yet. As the man of the house, he had to do most of the chores as well as help look after his little brothers and sister. He would fall into his bed hungry, tired, and sore. Tomorrow he would get up and do it again. And again.
I looked again at the little house with the caved-in room. At the thick walls. I looked out the window, the view my dad saw every morning. I remember some few comments that my dad did make about those years. “The animals got fed better than I did.” “We didn’t have enough money to be poor.” I realized why he didn’t laugh when he said those things.
I thought of looking at my old man sleeping on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. I remember, as a little kid, being amazed at all the little scars all over his back and legs. I remember looking at his huge hands, how his fingernails were all broken. I remember asking him how they got that way. I remember him telling me that I didn’t want to know.
And I understood why my dad mowed down my tomato plants.
The greatest Irish play may be The Playboy of the Western World. The theme of the play is a very familiar Irish motif: The son, to earn the respect of both himself and those around him, must, in some way, symbolic or literal, kill the father.
I have written a lot of boxing journalism, and I vividly remember an old trainer telling me, “Irish fighters? Their first go is always their old man.”
I could never imagine hitting my dad, but I guess, in some subconscious Freudian way, I saw him as a rival for my mom. This whole thing remained subliminal, but I do remember the quiet satisfaction I took in showing him how much better I was at certain sports than he could ever be. Of course he never saw a basketball until he was in his thirties, and he was utterly clueless at golf (we played once) and bowling (we played many times). I do remember sitting there watching him sit in his big chair reading his newspaper, and I remember thinking, after he punished me for something, I will do things that you can’t do, old man.
So I guess he was, on some Oedipal level, the guy I had to overcome. I remember one incident that seemed to encompass all this.
I had just come home from college. I was twenty. I weighed 205. I was “almost as big as your old man” to guys at the bar. (I worked on vacations.) I had lifted weights every day for about a year. My dad and I sat alone at our kitchen table. We had consumed two or three beers. No one was anywhere near drunk, but I felt a little buzzed. I don’t know how it started, but we decided to arm wrestle.
His hand was like a catcher’s mitt with calluses. He was, at that point, over sixty. He was wearing bifocals. We began.
It took about five minutes. I won. I was not surprised. I had won my dormitory bench press contest. I could bench 325. I was a very dangerous person. I had menacing veins.
He stood up and walked to the refrigerator. He came back with two long-neck bottles of Budweiser. I tried to be graceful in victory. Yeah, Dad, you’re really strong for your age. I’ve been working out a lot.
Near the end of the beer he wanted to try it again. I rolled my eyes a little. Sure. Why not? I won’t rub it in. But I would not, I firmly decided, lose. No way.
It took less than thirty seconds. I never had a chance. He had gotten a lot stronger since the walk to the kitchen. My hand hurt. I felt like saying, “No fair!” but I couldn’t think of anything to claim. I felt like my shoulder was dislocated. I had that injury before and now I had it again.
He went to bed.
My dad died on June 2, 1974. He died from cancer. He knew he had cancer for several years but he didn’t do anything to treat it. At his funeral I asked an old friend if my dad had said anything when he found out he had cancer. He could remember my dad saying only one thing: “That figures.”
He died at home. The last time I saw him, he weighed about 170 pounds. My dad’s bones probably weighed 160. He rolled up his sleeve, looked at his thin yellowish arm, and said, “I can’t believe that’s my arm.” He shook his head and stared straight ahead.
“Me,” he said. “I can’t get used to this.”
At his wake a lot of people that I didn’t know showed up. Some of them told stories about how my dad kicked various people’s asses. Two old guys discussed how far he threw a guy out of his bar.
He was buried in a cemetery across the street from where we went bowling. He was an inconsistent bowler. He’d bowl 250 and then bowl 120. He was the only person I ever saw who used a bowling ball with only two holes. Two big holes.
“That’s best for me,” he told me.
My dad’s funeral was held on a very sunny day. Then we drove in the hearse to the graveyard. On the way over someone made a joke. We laughed politely.
We got out of the hearse and stood around in our black clothes and sunglasses. While the priest read the “Thou art ashes” part, I thought about how, when we rode past the cemetery after work, he would say the same lame joke.
“That’s the most popular place in town. People are dying to get into it.”
He told me that about fifty times—every time
there was somebody else in the car with us.
My cousin Bill, the only priest in the family, read the service. My mom always wanted me to be a priest. She wanted my brother Bud to be a priest. Bud got a lot closer, but we didn’t make it.
She didn’t look at Bill while he read. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at my dad’s casket. She looked at the parking lot. At the end I walked over to my mom. I didn’t know what to say. She looked at me.
“Are you hot?” she asked.
FIFTEEN
Mom
We awoke in our larger-than-usual bed and breakfast room in a place just outside Athlone. I looked around the room and decided to count the religious artifacts in the room. There were nine, not counting the cross over the other side of the door.
This seemed like a good jumping-off point for our search for Mom.
Athlone is about fifty miles due west from my mom’s home. So, after the massive breakfast, we knew that we wouldn’t be driving more than an hour or two. The day was pretty clear (by Irish standards). The Punta had a little minor dent on one of the wheel covers (a by-product of Athlone), but otherwise it was still capable of attaining the mind-jarring speed of forty-five miles per hour, and we were in no big hurry. We had a lot more information about my mom. Compared to the Athlone search, this was going to be easy.
We had, of course, been very near “Mom Land” earlier in our trip. But on our way back out to the west, we intentionally meandered even more than our usual meandering. No matter where you drive in the West of Ireland, you feel you were somehow meant to go there. If you make some wrong turns they aren’t really wrong.