Midlife Irish

by Frank Gannon

  Half of the stuff she told me, I didn’t understand. There was a lot of Irish stuff and church stuff that went right over my head. With my mom everything went by very fast. I didn’t ask for clarification. There was, however, one detail that, to her, was horrible. It caused her, even fifty years later, enormous emotional pain. The black shoes.

  When she got to the shoes, she paused, and she never paused. She swallowed or something. Then she went on. The river flowed on, just like usual. But then she repeated the thing. The detail. The shoes. The words stopped.

  I was amazed. My mom was crying. Very quietly.

  She recovered almost immediately and went on. But my attention was focused on the thing that made her stop instead of the rest of the story. It seemed to me a very small thing that made my mom cry, almost nothing at all really. The shoes? The sort of thing you forget quickly. She didn’t forget quickly. Her parents, she told me, refused to buy her white shoes for the big day. The white shoes cost too much money, and First Holy Communion, while a big thing and a sacred day in Ireland, is only one day. They decided against the white shoes. That’s a lot to spend for one day, Anne, they told her. Think of how much food you can buy with a pound, Annie. Think of that. So we can’t get the shoes, Anne. Sorry, Anne. No white shoes.

  “So we can’t get the shoes, Anne. You’ll get over it.” That’s what they told her, and that sentence burned its way into my heart. When she told me the story of the First Holy Communion and the black shoes in our kitchen in New Jersey, I could still feel how much those words had hurt her.

  “So we can’t get the shoes, Anne.”

  She said it again and looked out the window. Her face was set, accepting the way things go. But I could see that she was thinking back to the day she had heard the words. And her eyes showed that she had never really forgotten how much that hurt, how much it crushed her.

  She looked out the window for a minute. Then she dabbed her eyes with a dishtowel, and she went back to whatever else there was.

  I try to picture that scene. My mom had to receive her first communion with the “wrong shoes.” First Holy Communion was held in the village church, the most important place in town, and Mom was there, wearing the same white dress her mother had worn, but she had to be in a long line of little girls in white dresses, the only one without white shoes. The only one with big ugly black shoes.

  “I had to wear big ugly black shoes with laces.” She put it that way, “Big ugly black shoes with laces.” That was the part of the story that crushed her. She told me this story only once or twice. She couldn’t get through it without crying at the memory of that distant humiliation.

  I really don’t believe she told anybody except my brother and sister and me the story. To be honest, I find that I cannot tell it now without feeling empty and bleak and very, very sad.

  That was the one single major image I had of my mom’s childhood—the black, ugly shoes and First Holy Communion, so I had, in my mind’s eye, always imagined Ballyhaunis as a place of desperate poverty, a place where saving a pound was worth hurting a little girl. But when we drove into the little town of Ballyhaunis, I was quite stunned by what I saw on the way in. Ballyhaunis was doing very well. There were handsome homes and BMWs and handsomer, half-built homes and Mercedes Benzes and Jaguars and manicured lawns. Automatic sprinklers and cell phones and winding drives and high-school kids in convertible Beemers and smiling well-dressed people with really good haircuts.

  No one seemed to be having difficulty coming up with the dough for the white shoes around there, the suburbs around the town.

  The town itself looked exactly like every other little Irish town. Two banks, two pharmacies, an off-track betting place, three or four B&Bs, and a few pubs. Every place, of course, had a freshly painted sign.

  Ballyhaunis was the first town I saw in Ireland with the names from my family tree on signs. Forde and Turley owned a lot of stuff here. Forde and Turley were doing well. We decided to stay at a B&B right in the town. The first one we saw was called The Avondale. It was a beautiful old place run by a very nice lady named Bridie Levins. I talked with her for a few moments and discovered that she not only knew my mom’s family, she was actually related to me. Her uncle was my mom’s cousin. I was going to say, “That means that you are my…” but I stopped myself because I knew that I could never finish the sentence until I drew one of those little family-tree charts and stared at it for about an hour and a half. Then I would be able to say, “You are my second cousin, once-removed,” or something.

  Bridie Levins told us that there was a pub named the Hazel, which was run by a Margaret Hopkins. Margaret Hopkins was Jimmy Hopkins’s daughter, and Jimmy Hopkins, I had learned, was very close to the Forde girls. I had thought that this would be a major mystery, but once I got to Ballyhaunis, it wasn’t.

  Bridie said that my mom and her sisters liked to laugh a lot when they were young. That was not a big surprise. They liked dances. I remembered seeing an old yellow picture of my mom all dressed up in what looked like one of the Untouchables speakeasy scenes. In the picture she’s laughing and her arm is around some guy who looks like the young Victor Mature. My mom must have had a few laughs hanging around with the young Victor Mature.

  That night we went to the Hazel, which is a very nice pub: polished brass and dark wood and beautiful old pictures on the wallpapered walls. We found seats and asked for Margaret Hopkins. She came over right away. Margaret Hopkins was a very attractive woman in her forties. She was extremely open and gracious and talking to her was as easy as breathing.

  She told us that yes, indeed, she knew my mom’s sisters very well because they actually were, for a time, her babysitters. I tried to picture that. She didn’t remember my mom much, but she had vivid memories of my mom’s two sisters, Delia and Mary.

  “Mary had that Yank accent,” she said.

  Margaret Hopkins told us about the sisters, who never married, living out there in the little house. They farmed a little. They didn’t go out much, but when they did, they really liked to get dressed up. She also told us something totally surprising: My mother had a sister I had never heard of. She was never mentioned in any kind of family thing, and I had never heard a single word spoken about her.

  She had been born with severe birth defects. My mom’s sister could never walk. She had to be cared for all her life, and she died young, and she was not afterward discussed.

  It amazed me, for a moment, that no one had ever mentioned my mom’s sister. How could a detail that large go unmentioned for all those years? Wouldn’t my mom, a woman of a thousand words, have referred to this sister at least once? (I asked my brother and my sister. To the best of their knowledge, my mom never said a single word about this sister.) I was amazed again at how some Irish people avoid talking about something they aren’t comfortable with. They avoid it for lifetimes. My mom, who had said probably a million words in my presence, had never mentioned this sister.

  The horror of life, the shared tragedy that all Irish people in some way share, this is a given. The nightmare is not a surprise; the absence of the nightmare is. If you are lucky enough to avoid the nightmares, above all, do not talk about them. Talking about them, even mentioning them, only encourages them. So any crippling, horrible malady is not to be talked about. Do you want it to approach?

  In talking with the people in Ireland, I always knew, after a while, which subjects were verboten. There was always a look that told me. Sometimes a silence would fall and someone would say, in a low voice, “There’s no luck in that.”

  Or just, “Not that.”

  I had been told this, sometimes in code, many times when I was in Ireland. “If you talk about bad things,” I was told by a little man in a pub near Spanish Point, “the bad things hear their name, and they come because they’ve been called. Like a dog. So you never mention anything really horrible. If you get drunk or something and just mention them, they come. They hear their name and they come. And you don’t want that,” he adde
d emphatically.

  The man from Spanish Point who said that was not smiling. He was very drunk, but I believe that he thought that he was speaking nothing but the truth, and I think, in a way, he was. In American baseball you do not mention it when somebody is pitching a no-hitter. In Ireland, you do not talk about the “bad things.”

  So my mom’s sister, my aunt, my crippled aunt, was never mentioned.

  We made an arrangement to talk with Jimmy Hopkins at eight the next night. Jimmy knew the sisters Forde very well. After all those years, I was going to go back to where everything began for my mother.

  That night I tried to picture it as I fell asleep. I was now going to see the place that had always seemed like a place in a strange old fairy tale. The little house out in the woods. The house where they didn’t buy the little girl the white shoes. The place where they broke the little girl’s heart, a place like Hansel and Gretel’s house. I was going to visit a place that had occupied a little place in my mind since I was a kid. But now it would have walls and a door and floors and windows. And real ghosts: little girls who fall asleep sobbing as they gaze through the dim light at the ugly black shoes on the floor next to the bed.

  We arrived at the house at the appointed time. A little girl, maybe Jimmy’s daughter, went with us as a sort of guide. It was very windy, but as clear as it gets in Ireland. It felt a little spooky walking out to find the house. I don’t know why, but I felt extremely nervous and tight. My mouth was very dry.

  My mom’s house was about as big as our garage in our old house back in New Jersey. It was a tiny house, but much larger and nicer than my dad’s place outside Athlone. It was white and yellow and the door was brown. It wasn’t hard to see that, at one time, this had been a very nice little house. The little girl opened the door and I walked inside. I thought of Anne Forde as a little girl.

  No one had been in the house for a long time. There were piles of cardboard and dirt and little metal parts that used to hold shelves and half-collapsed tables and strange wild plants growing up through the holes in the floor. There was so much of this overgrowth that it was difficult to walk. I shuffled along through the refuse, trying as well as I could to move from room to room. There seemed to be four rooms in the house, but it was hard to tell where one room ended and another began because there was so much stuff on the floor. I couldn’t see the actual floor for the weeds and the junk.

  I moved into a room that at one time must have been the kitchen. There was a big pile of shelves that had collapsed. I saw something shiny underneath them and I bent and grabbed the end of the shelf. I moved it back and saw that there were several shiny things under there but they were covered with dirt and pieces of something that seemed to be sheetrock and I shifted that over to the other side and I saw that there was another little stack of something, some square things with metal edges. I moved the sheetrock and saw that there was a pile of stuff that looked like a stack of pictures in cheap metal frames.

  So I got the pile of metal frames in my hand and pulled them out from underneath. I nicked my finger doing this and it started bleeding. I ignored the blood from my finger, and I got the stack out and held it in my hands.

  There on top, covered with dirt, there was something, a picture. So I brushed the dirt off and pulled it out and held it up and took my sleeve and wiped it off and I saw what it was.

  What it was shocked me. It was me, a picture of me. During the disco era, smiling a stupid-looking grin. I had big, thick, grotesque sideburns. I had forgotten just how bad they looked. Now, three thousand miles from America, I was reminded. I tried to figure out just where I had been when that unfortunate picture was taken. Where was I? Some wedding in New Jersey? Yes, that was it. I couldn’t remember who got married, but I remembered the wedding. Who took it? My sister. What was it doing here?

  My mom had it enlarged and then sent it to her sister. A long time ago. Back when I was “stayin’ alive.”

  Now, many years later, I stood there with the picture of me with the shirt with the widest collar in America in my mom’s half-fallen-apart house in Loganboy. I looked at the picture and I thought about my mom and her handicapped sister and the three Forde girls, and getting on the boat, and coming back with a Yank accent, and how brief and strange human life can be.

  I thought about that out in this house in the middle of a field in County Mayo, Ireland, and that made a chill run up my back.

  I try to think of my mom’s childhood. About Anne Forde and her sisters living in that little house and trying to make a living off the little land they farmed. And the one sister they never talked about. Someone would always have to be taking care of her. And my mom would be thinking of the future and its two choices. Go to America or become a nun. If she had become a nun of course I wouldn’t even be here. Something happened to stop her every time. She thought that it was God stopping her. Maybe it was. She was absolutely certain that God decided what would happen in her life. For a long time, she thought that God was going to make my life very short. He didn’t have that in mind. But when my mom got cancer and died she was absolutely certain that God decided it all, and she never questioned his judgment. She had sixty-plus years here and that was enough.

  The last time I saw her alive, I told her how people often recover from cancer. She looked at me and said, “My life is over.” She smiled.

  Coda

  We have done all right in the land of opportunity. Most of us have nice houses. My cousin Billy has a hotel with a pool on the roof. I have a cousin who is a lawyer (doesn’t everybody). I also have a cousin who is a priest. If I were a priest, my mom would be happier with me, but if she’s looking down at me she can see that I’m not doing anything seriously wrong. My dad is probably happy that I have a job. I can hear him say, “Considering what you have for brains it could be worse.”

  We’ve had a few tragedies. One cousin’s son got heavily involved in drugs and spent some time in prison. I have a nephew who attempted suicide. I love him very much.

  I have another nephew who became a big-shot in the motion picture business. Once I called him and his secretary told me he “was between his office and his car.” If my mom were around she might refer to him as “Lord Muck from Shit Hill.” I love him too.

  A lot of the Irish blood is diluted. I married a girl whose dad is from France. As far as I know, only one of the first generation married an Irish girl. We are just about melted into the melting pot. My son doesn’t even like U2; he prefers someone named Andrew W. Kay. His music sounds like a car accident to me. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  I guess I’m an American. But I think a lot about the little house in Mayo and the little house near Athlone. I know where I came from now, and I’m not forgetting until six of my friends are carrying me out to a big black car.

  I went over to Ireland looking for my roots. I found them, but I also found something else. It sounds strange, but I’ll say it: In Ireland I found God. When I got back to America, which is the only place that I can ever really call “home,” I found that He came with me. How can I say something like that? How can I rationalize that one? The truth is, I can’t. If I sound crazy to you, I understand. It sounds crazy to me too.

  All I know is, things are permanently different now, and that is what the Old Country did to me. I don’t feel the ground I’m walking on is all I’m going to experience anymore. I think that I’ve taken a number from the rack, and I’m waiting for it to be called. But I’m not tense about it. I’m calm. Let me amuse myself until it’s my time. Maybe I’ll do a crossword puzzle or raise children or write books. Let them call it when it’s time. I felt like that in Ireland—as if someone were in the next room waiting for me—and the feeling came with me when I returned to America. I had never felt this way before, but I do now. I feel like there is somebody waiting for me. I don’t go around screaming it. I don’t knock on doors and tell people, but I feel it just the same. Maybe it’s a delusion, but if it is, it’s a darling illusion. It’s a brilliant illusion;
it is…if you want to feel this way, maybe you will. The plane is ready. Bring warm clothes. Good luck.

  “Growing up, I knew that I was Irish in much the same way I knew I had asthma. I knew I had it but I didn’t know anything about it…”

  Immigrants Bernard and Annie Gannon never talked about their Irish past. So when Francis Xavier Gannon was growing up in 1950s New Jersey, his parents’ native land was but a dim, distant mystery…

  MIDLIFE IRISH

  Today Gannon is a middle-aged, irreverent Catholic who prefers Springsteen to Celtic Moods, can’t dance a jig, and hates eating potatoes. Does that make him a bad Irish American? Or a typical one? With both parents dead, there’s only one place Gannon could go to answer this question and find the missing pieces of his own heritage—Planet Green. Eire.

  In a moving and uniquely entertaining memoir, popular essayist Frank Gannon uncovers a twenty-first-century Ireland full of beauty and paradox. And he offers a stirring, poignant, yet often hilarious look at the bonds of family, and—from the Garden State Parkway to the wave-battered cliffs of the Emerald Isle—the ties of home.

  “An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny account.”

  —DENVER POST

  “A charming and poignant travelogue…an entertaining and enlightening mixture of humor, history, and heartbreak.”

  —ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION