My Buried Life

by Doreen Finn

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Bay Ridge.’ His accent is unmistakably Brooklyn. ‘But I live in midtown. Have done for years.’ He coughs, pauses. ‘Eva, I knew your father.’

  Impossible. My father barely left the flat midlands. ‘How?’

  ‘I lived here when I was younger. Well, not here, not Dublin, but Ireland. Shanrath.’

  My confusion must be visible, for he talks rapidly again.

  ‘My parents were immigrants. You know the story, they left in the forties, spent the rest of their lives longing for the place, then all their dreams came true when I decided to come back for a while, try it out, find a place to fit in.’

  There is nothing in his story I haven’t heard before from the scores of Irish Americans I’ve encountered in my years in New York. What I’ve never understood is this yearning they have for the homeland, the old country. Now, all I can think about is getting out again. It’s all illusion, of course, all romance about a place that doesn’t exist.

  ‘I met Tom shortly after I arrived. His family farmed the neighbouring land.’

  To hear my father’s name mentioned so casually, as though he were someone I was used to discussing, is shocking. My mother, when she mentioned him, something she rarely did, only ever referred to him as your father. Your father. Her lip curled palpably around the words, as though the taste were too disgusting to bear.

  ‘Did you know my mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She died last September.’ Has it already been that long? Six months. Something has happened to time since my arrival in Dublin, an undetected slipping away of all those weeks and months. Six months.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  Music tinkles from a piano in the corner of the room, a welcome spill of sound. I recognise Liszt, the soft notes of a piano concerto. ‘But why are you here now?’

  Sunlight suddenly dazzles the table between us. I look out the window. ‘Crazy climate, right?’ Peter laughs. ‘Four seasons in one day.’

  I’m tired of it, tired of it all. It’s time for me to go, leave Dublin, and probably never come back. I crave consistency, knowing where I am, what kind of day it’s going to be.

  I live in New York, I tell Peter. His shock is disproportionate to such a small piece of information.

  ‘What?’

  I explain about the house, but don’t give any details of my sabbatical. I’m going back, I say. This is temporary.

  He runs a hand over his face. ‘If we’d known,’ he says. ‘If we’d only known.’

  I shift in my seat. Something is off here. There’s something unsaid that I can’t put my finger on, a whole part of this that is hovering beyond my comprehension. Something, a shadow maybe, lingers, obscuring the finer details. There is a sense of the conversation being waterlogged. I’m missing a component but I have no idea what it is.

  The waitress lingers behind us. Peter points to my empty cup, which is wordlessly refilled. He points to pastries on the plates of the people at the next table, and within a moment croissants appear, small white pots of butter, others of jam. This is a man used to ordering. How like Isaac he is in his confident ability to ask for exactly what he wants, barely pausing his conversation.

  Peter mentions a new exhibit at the Whitney, construction that’s causing huge traffic problems in midtown, a concert hall scheduled for opening next week in Brooklyn, just over the bridge. The New York Phil will inaugurate the new building. Isaac and I went a few times to see the Phil at Avery Fisher Hall. An hour in a cab in the crush of rush hour, the day’s work left behind us downtown. Once, the traffic was so bad we jumped out half way and took the subway to 66th Street. Isaac didn’t like the subway, and it took quite some convincing to get him underground. But Isaac has no place here, not in my head and not in my life. He belongs firmly in the past.

  I lean forward. ‘Peter.’

  He pauses, sips from his cup. The people at the next table leave and are replaced seamlessly by a couple with a sleeping baby.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  He coughs. ‘I knew your father.’

  A flash of irritation crackles inside me, flushing my cheeks. ‘I know. You said. But he’s been dead since I was a small child. Why are you telling me this now?’

  The baby next to us wakes with a bawl. Her father shushes her, jiggling her on his lap and kissing her. She responds by arching her back and screaming even louder.

  Peter shifts in his seat. He looks at his hands. They are good hands, the nails square, the skin smooth.

  ‘Eva.’

  A vein throbs in my temple. A drink would be nice, because I realise I don’t want to hear whatever it is this man has travelled to Ireland to tell me. I’m in a hotel, for God’s sake. There is booze all around me, oceans of it, enough to drown me several times over. Glasses play their tinkling music everywhere, despite the early hour. Ice chinks, soda fizzes, even a champagne cork pops. In this precise moment I think I could murder the man in front of me for a drink.

  In the end, after all the pauses, the procrastinating, Peter rushes the words out. ‘Your father didn’t die when you were a child. There was no heart attack or tumour or whatever your mother told you.’ He inhales, a shuddering breath. ‘He only died six weeks ago.’

  The rest of what he says is a blur. Some words surface through the garbled, bloated mass. My father didn’t die when I was a child. He died recently. In New York City. A few miles from where I live.

  I sit on my hands. They are shaking.

  My father and this man were friends. My mother disapproved. No surprises there. Peter recounts walks in the evenings, pints in the nearest pub, three miles away. Then the marriage, and Esther’s cold eye of censure cast over her new husband’s friend.

  ‘I don’t know what way to say all this to you.’

  ‘Just say it. You and my father rendezvoused in the evenings. What was it, pints of stout and talk of milk quotas?’ My bitterness sounds childish. I’m jealous, I suppose. Someone knew my father and I never did.

  ‘We were friends, yes. Good friends. We were both isolated, I suppose, cut off from everything. And I was miserable, missing New York.’

  ‘You could’ve joined the football club.’ Wasn’t that what country boys did back then? Played sports, turned up at the local dance blitzed on cheap whiskey and tried to grope the other farmers’ daughters. All loud talk, no action guaranteed.

  ‘Do I look like a football player?’ He smiles. ‘Believe me, I couldn’t be further from it.’

  I understand my father’s loneliness, his need for a friend. His elderly parents were dead by the time he met my mother. No siblings. My mother had to have been the one who moved in on him, because my father was the quietest person I’d known.

  I remember his humble collection of jazz records. I remember his hands, rough from labour, dirt filling in the grooves. But mostly I remember the way he treated me, like I was some sort of rare bird. His opaque delightfulness.

  My nose prickles, and I wonder if I’m going to cry. I haven’t wept in a very long time. There’s simply too much to cry over, and I’m not sure I’d even know where to start.After the abortion I thought about stabbing needles in my flesh, stubbing cigarettes out on my thighs, or sticking my hands in fire. I tried to focus on physical pain because the other pain was simply unendurable. There were no tears to cry. That well of release had long since run dry, evaporated by a grief too enormous to conquer.

  Something is wrong with Peter’s story. Something doesn’t gel, doesn’t make real sense. My mother had been many things, but one way I couldn’t see her was in the role of monopoliser, demanding all of my father’s attention for herself. She was too self-sufficient for that, too severed from warmth.

  Peter sighed, a huge intake of breath. He rubs his palms on h
is knees. ‘Esther took you and Andrew away. She told Tom that if he went near either of you, or tried to stay in touch with you, that she’d go to the police.’ He rubs both of his eyes. ‘It was Ireland in the seventies. It was easier to believe such threats, to take them seriously.’

  ‘So, what, he pretended to be dead?’ Why am I listening to this man, wasting my morning when I could be outside, running by the canal, reading a book with only fictional people and events unfolding in front of me? I could be preparing a short bio for the new textbook of poems that will include five of mine for the next school year. Anything but listen to this.

  ‘He didn’t pretend anything. It was Esther’s idea.’

  ‘And he just went along with it.’

  ‘He didn’t feel he had any choice,’ Peter says, sadly.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He came to New York with me. Esther said he’d died, told everyone he was dead, including you and Andrew. We went to New York. He sent her money for the two of you every month, and she never told anyone the truth. I think eventually she’d even convinced herself he was dead.’

  Suddenly the hotel erupts into sound. Phones ring at the reception desk, glasses clink in the bar, the piano music crashes in thunderous waves of drama, people’s voices scream in high-octane conversation. In my head I sweep the cups and coffee pot to the floor in an arc of liquid and shattered china. In reality, I do no such thing.

  My father, alive and in New York. All those years. And me, living nearby. Walking the streets, hailing cabs, sitting at patios, hiding in jazz clubs. Lying in Sheep’s Meadow, the buildings a horseshoe around the park. How many times had I come close to him, overlooked him on the street, wandered near where he was?

  Did he pass me on the subway as the trains screamed and rattled their way along their endless circling track? Were we seated at the same moment on the edge of the Bethesda fountain, watching children throw balls around? Maybe we both gave money to the homeless man in the Knicks cap who waited, paper coffee cup in hand, outside the deli on Prince Street, day after day. Had we been to the same movies at Film Forum at the same time? Or walked by each other in Washington Square Park, stood watching the same street artists perform or chess games unfold?

  ‘I’m sorry, Eva. I am. It wasn’t Tom’s wish.’

  So why do it then? Why pretend to be dead? Who would do such a thing? Of course, even I could answer that. My mother.

  ‘What does my mother have to do with all this?’

  ‘Everything.’

  My mother had been in love with Peter. She wanted him out of her sight because she couldn’t have him. She forbade him to call to the little farmhouse, denied him hospitality because she wanted him for herself. Her upbringing, her religion, her own repressed nature would have conspired against her desires, so she put him away from her. It was easier to send my father packing, to spirit her children away under cover of summer darkness, than to have the man she wanted two miles away, single and for the taking, and utterly, utterly forbidden.

  ‘She was in love with you.’

  Peter’s hands are joined on his lap. He shuts his eyes.

  ‘Wasn’t she? In love with you?’

  A slow shake of his head. No.

  No? It’s the only thing that makes sense. ‘Yes she was. She was in love with you, and you knew it.’ Jesus Christ, is Peter my father? Is that what this is about, what he’s attempting to tell me through all this clumsy fumbling?My eyes dart about the room, alighting on anything that isn’t this man sitting erect in front of me. A bus thunders by outside, rattling the window in its pane. Even though I’m seated, my legs feel wobbly. I might never stand up again. ‘My mother was in love with you.’ If I repeated it enough times he’d have to take ownership of the truth. I needed to hear him admit it.

  Again that slow shake of his head. His eyes, navy with intensity, swung to meet mine. ‘Your father was.’

  The coffee and the croissants slosh in my stomach. Bile bites my throat, and the noisy hotel drawing room tilts on its side. I expect everyone to slide in one direction, but no one seems to notice except me. They carry on answering phones and mixing drinks, stirring sugar into coffee and laughing at each other’s jokes.

  My mother knew. She created a story, her own invention, out of it, but she’d known all along. She conjured up a house of silent ghosts and a buried life, never to be unearthed.

  Deception, like steel, holds the cold forever.

  Suspended above it all, I hover, shivering, my teeth rattling like cups on a silver tray. Peter’s hands obscure his face.

  Patterns bloom black in front of my eyes. My father and this man. My father and the American. My father and Peter.

  The world dims its lights. My mind abruptly blanks, vacates itself, and the floor reaches out, gathering me into an empty embrace.

  CHAPTER 30

  The new motorway out of Dublin is strangled, even on a Tuesday morning in April. Each tiny town that has been bypassed hosts an unparalleled vista of the barely moving snake of vehicles winding its way, minute by aching minute, along the new road.

  How the Americans would laugh at our vision of progress. A road that’s been decades in the making has swallowed enough money to fund developing countries, sliced open historic sites and destroyed the countryside, all in the name of getting people to where they wanted to go, faster. And still it crawls.

  Adam has loaned me his car, his vegetable-oil Merc. The smell of doughnuts is at times too much, and I have to roll the window down when it threatens to overpower me. The nausea has subsided, though, so it’s easier.

  This trip is the return leg of the journey I made over thirty years before, aged 4, with my mother driving and my brother asleep in the front seat. Now the small towns are signposts instead of milestones, bypassed and built up beyond recognition. New housing estates have been conjured out of developers’ hats, turning everywhere into a suburb of Dublin. Names like Brook, Manor, Court, Vale have been tacked on in some misguided attempt to convince people that they’re living in the city. The desperate need for uniformity.

  What’s so wrong with being different? Why is individuality feared? Although I can admit to sometimes imagining my life in a parallel world, one where I don’t have to dwell on the inner life, where I’m happy to work in an office job and come home to my suburb each evening, nothing more pressing on my mind than what to cook for dinner. Maybe my golf-playing husband and I would watch television after the children are put to bed, some nonsense singing competition where we could be truly concerned about what the outcome would be. We could read cheap thrillers and romance novels on a package holiday to some overcrowded costa, not know a line of poetry or a beat of jazz, name our children after celebrities or obscure Irish heroes.

  I’ve chased the unattainable, and look where it has got me. In a borrowed Mercedes, a plastic drum of used vegetable oil rolling around on the back seat in case of an emergency, returning for the first time to the place of my birth. I should have done it years ago. What have I been waiting for, my mother’s permission? Her approval? Other than vanishing after my birth, I doubted there was much I could have achieved that my mother would have approved of.

  Traffic inches along the motorway, each lane stuffed with cars and freight trucks. Exhaust shimmers in the air, poisoning the banks of daffodils that flourish on either side of the road. The faces of the drivers I see are blank with boredom. Some yak on phones, other tap their fingers on the steering wheel. Most are probably doing the same journey every day. Welcome to the new Ireland. Let us squeeze you out of the cities and into featureless housing developments, and let’s hope you’re too fatigued from commuting, too worried about money and your massive mortgage to stop and think that you’re being done from every angle.

  A listless child waves to me from the car in front. A police motorcycle weaves among the gridlock. Cows graze in
distant fields. The sun reveals itself in jagged bursts from behind clouds, an intermittent spotlight on the green surroundings.

  I revealed nothing to Adam about Peter, or the trip I needed to take, the inheritance I’d uncovered when I finally dragged myself into Charles Bergin’s office, and Adam was enough of a man not to ask. His week with his daughter was a success, and I discovered how interesting it can be to spend time with a child. I need the practice.

  My father has left me the farm. When he moved to New York he locked the door of the house and kept the key. It wasn’t sold or rented. The land was leased to another farmer until the end of last year. The house is probably in ruins.

  Charles Bergin assured me that he knew nothing of my father’s recent death.

  ‘I have a letter from a firm of American lawyers, with instructions for you,’ he said, as we sat in his office on a bright day at the end of March, and he read me what I owned. The farmhouse, the land, any equipment or animals or crops that are still there.

  He quoted from codicils, explained what I needed to do in order to take hold of my inheritance. My father also left me money. The business he owned with Peter in Manhattan was very successful. The money resides in a bank in New York, and requires my signature plus my presence before it can be accessed.

  So either way I’m returning to New York. Back to the city of a thousand languages, self-absorbed and consumed, eating itself up in a vortex of around-the-clock noise. The city that never sleeps. What an understatement. The city that never even blinks in case it misses something, some new trend or piece of art, something that hasn’t happened anywhere else. How exhausting to be so constantly chasing after the tail of your own reputation, never to be able to draw breath in case it occurs somewhere else instead. I love New York, even though its self-awareness grates at times. All those movies, all the art and stories, none of it comes close to capturing the real city, because a city is a constantly shifting landscape, and to try and pin it down to a few characteristics is to keep its flame in a jar. I understand that much about New York, but I’ve met few other people who did. Maybe my father felt that way about it. I like to think he did.