So we were happy to see Owen enjoying his moment of untarnished devotion. His neat little uniform helped set a tone of order to his school day, and that was fine, too. American teachers were struggling to control classrooms with fifteen ten-year-olds inside – half the size of many pin-drop quiet Irish ones. Never once in Ireland did we see any of the widespread “public order” offences in the classroom. It wasn’t screaming or corporal punishment that achieved the workable peace – the banshee in the boys’ school had been sacked in a few weeks, after all – it was parentally supported respect for the educational process. So the reverie with which the First Communicants embraced their sacrament seemed uplifting, an expression of able stewardship and loving concern.
How long this young piety would endure was another question. Henry Sidney, a sixteenth-century lord deputy of Ireland and father of the poet Philip Sidney, dismissed Irish Catholicism as but a veneer with which the natives dressed up their essential evilness.
“Thei regarde no other, thei blaspheme, thei murder, commit whoredome, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience,” he reported home. “You would rather think them atheists or infidels.”
His contemporary Barnaby Rich chipped in with the comment that the Irish lived “like beastes, voide of all lawe and all good order” and were “more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous and more brutish in their customs and demeanures, than in any other part of the world that is known.”
The legacy of oppression that resulted from such bigotry was enough to make me sign my kids up for Catholicism on political grounds alone. But the inherent contradictions of Irish life always have their twists. Once our little Owen’s sacrament of First Communion was done, the “wantone,” if still loving, secular aspects of this day became manifest. In Ireland, the Catholic rites of childhood – both First Communion and Confirmation – produce a stupendous outpouring of beneficence, which is spelled C-A-S-H. The kids lift their hands to God with fervor, then keep them outstretched afterward.
No sooner did Owen unite with God than the money envelopes started fluttering into his palms from kindly neighbors and friends. Within two hours, the boy had over £400 in his pocket. Burkie chuckled at this haul as being pitiful, however. “Is that all? One of my friend’s kids picked up £1500.”
The first twenty guests at our celebration party said their goodbyes by seven o’clock. Very civilized. But then the next dozen hit the doorbell and Shaun Higgins sang his “Maggie,” and we shoved some heretofore well-behaved neighbors out the door sometime after 3 a.m.
“Getting to be one of us, for better or worse,” the ever-watchful Shaun chortled devilishly the next afternoon.
We had the threads of something wonderful in our fingers. We were having the time of our lives whenever we paused to think about it. Every day had patterns of easy belonging, serendipity, and surprise that our over-earnest friends in the U.S. would pay thousands of dollars for on a summer holiday and talk about for the rest of their years. Craic, as the natives call great fun, was so readily available that one had to hide from it during the week, lest one’s whole life become a burst of laughter. People at every turn said that they were starting to forget that we didn’t actually hail from Cork. Frightening was that notion. We had executed the most dangerous of midlife casts and caught something live and quicksilver.
But . . . the guilt was always nipping. We kept picking at the slightest knots in our routines and worrying the skeins, trying to re-create the happy routines our children enjoyed back at home. We would fret about them and our distant families so much that we occasionally lost sight of the fact that this Irish safari had made us all larger than we’d been just a year earlier. The seasons had turned and it was time to make plans.
“It sounds like you’re having a great life there, no matter what hardships you’ve weathered. I’d dwell upon that if I were you, because you both were complaining before you left. If you as parents aren’t happy together, your children will pay a price that is heavier than whatever geographic dislocation they are suffering,” a friend from the States sagely wrote.
Hmmh. And our kids scarcely looked like they were hurting, what with the boys dragging four friends into the house or garden every day, and Laura consorting every other weekend with the daughters of yacht designers and horse breeders, of sherry-soaked Brit ambassadors and New Zealand and American romantics and executives who had all ended up in Cork for one reason – they were fishing for dreams themselves.
Our lives were full. So what was there to lament? I went fishing for trout when I could and kept writing, while Jamie threw herself into her expanding responsibilities.
In mid-May, I went to Dublin to present my magazine proposal to the courtly John McCann of Ulster Television. A few years previously, that outfit wouldn’t have had a prayer of flexing its muscles in the Republic, where any enterprise doing business with the Brits was despised. But these were new days. John McCann decided to run the proposal by UTV’s new Cork office with all its resident Corkonians – an idea akin to sending a bee back into an incestuously gossiping hive.
The feet kept moving to the sunny side of the street. A couple of weeks later, the manager of UTV’s Cork operations called to say that he admired the proposal, but was not in a position to back the magazine. Ouch.
The consultants organized another meeting, then called a second to cap the first one off, and set up a third for the hell of it – as tick, tick went their hourly meter. After a few days, they arranged a presentation before the managing director of one of the biggest newspaper conglomerates in Ireland, the Cork-based Thomas Crosbie Holdings. Once again, the headman there expressed keen interest, though he used few words and held a poker face. He would get back to us on Monday – though which Monday was not immediately clear.
Return to beginning of chapter
Chapter 24
The Mondays passed, the mellow evenings lengthened, and the kids’ schools were all closed at the very beginning of June. Collecting children on their last day of classes is always a touching rite of passage, especially when it serves as a benchmark of a year on foreign shores. Our three were scarcely the same kids we had dropped off in the eagerness of early September, countless uniform stains ago. They were inches taller, their accents had altered, and their presences were larger as they stood in their schoolyards surrounded by beaming friends who were no longer foreign but as familiar as those left behind in Connecticut. The eyes moistened at the thought of all this, and the fact that they would be on our hands nonstop – for three months.
A wonderful sailing camp near Kinsale launched their summer happily, and we proudly watched Laura tack across the jeweled bay, handling this challenge as if it were an easy metaphor for the much larger voyage upon which she and her brothers had embarked. In the evenings we played chess, the kids having gotten quite shrewd at that pastime, as phenomenal numbers of children do in Ireland, what with the country’s affinity for caginess of all kinds.
Eventually, the time came for a follow-up meeting with another exec at Thomas Crosbie Holdings. In most places, an interview of similar importance would be fraught with straightforward probes to challenge and inspire personal revelations about why one felt qualified for a particular job. But nothing about this session and this individual squared with my expectations. His longish hair was parted in the middle, his spectacles horn-rimmed, his fingers worrying at the knot of a stylish silk tie knotted above an academically plaid shirt – as if the point of the meeting was to discuss Joyce or Yeats. Adding to the confusion was the fact the man was formerly the editor of the town’s afternoon tabloid newspaper, the Evening Echo, whose paperboys sing the name through Cork’s streets with a skip in their voices that is meant to, well, echo and echo. “I imagine you’re quite well versed in Cork culture by now,” he feinted. This wasn’t phrased as a question, yet I wondered whether I was supposed to recite some list of bona fides, or perhaps launch into a personal rendition of “Maggie.”
“I’ve met a tremendous number of people here,” I started. “I love Cork, and this magazine will be a tribute to the town and county’s dynamism.”
“Your enthusiasm is apparent. But how do you envision the ownership structure being formulated?”
Hold on there, I hadn’t finished responding to the opening gambit, and already we were galloping off on a new tangent.
I just smiled and laid out my plans for the great publishing venture. The paid consultants nodded and settled into their chairs while their billing meters whirled.
“We think the idea is worthy of further consideration,” the interviewer concluded, disappearing before my elaborate portfolio of sample covers and articles could be presented.
Attempts to arrange a casual follow-up lunch failed. Phone calls and emails were not returned. So there was no surprise when June ended with a runic note indicating that, for reasons unexplained, windfalls of investment capital, sometimes called “dosh” in Ireland, would not be blowing my way. The subtext seemed to say that I was not yet long enough in Cork to be considered bankable. It felt as if my shiny new Irish identity was still painfully tentative. Back in the U.S. I could walk into a business presentation and confidently anticipate every nuance. But in Ireland there remained a slipperiness underfoot, as if some part of myself had still not arrived across the sea. The question nagged as to whether I could provide for my family, with this or any project here. Had I perhaps been pursuing a fantasy all the Irish while? Was our excursion nothing more than a lark now needing to be curtailed so that we could return to the stability of our previous lives? Night after night, Jamie and I pondered and talked. I fretted that Ireland was doing to us what it had done to every invader, seafarer, and planter who had landed over the centuries – dizzying our bearings, and confusing our direction.
“There are other fish in the sea. You’ve got to give this thing more time,” Jamie said. “We’ve only played half our hand here.”
She was right.
We made plans for a holiday in the U.S., while in the meantime squeezing in various lunches and get-togethers with Irish friends who might offer words of wisdom. “You absolutely must stay; we’re only just getting to know you, and look, you’re all doing beautifully,” said the raven-haired Mary Lynch, whose warm sentiments were seconded by many others.
To add fresh italics to our lives, the Courtmacsherry lifeboat crew took the family out for a voyage far along the coast of West Cork – past the Seven Heads where starving locals used to race to the stony shore to retrieve the barrels of maize and rum that washed in from Famine-era shipwrecks, but now blithely lolled about in the summer sun; past Galley Head with its gleaming cliffs topped by timeless pastures and newly hatched holiday haciendas; past Glandore with its spectacular yacht-dotted bay where a few commercial fishermen still plied their ancient trade. The light on the water was heaven-sent, the journey a reverie of Ireland old and new.
That evening a great throng materialized on Courtmac’s main street. It was time for the village’s annual horse race on the mudflats exposed by the ebbing tide. Shafts of silver flooded through the clouds as the riders in green-and-gold jackets walked their steeds forward. As if out of nowhere, country men with tweed caps and rugged, time-worn faces gathered in clumps, while gnomic bookmakers unfolded slate tote boards on which to offer their odds. Freckled children wheeled about with fistfuls of sweets, and suddenly it looked as if Ireland had never changed. The first contestants gathered beside a huge oval that a tractor had traced in the wet sand, and Laura shouted, “That’s Gavin! He’s from my school!”
So we wagered a fiver on the young jockey just before the starter’s pistol fired. What unfolded was spellbinding, the galloping steeds hurtling beside incandescent waters, the sand flying at their heels, a rainbow exploding overhead to create the aura of a dream. We lost our dosh, but won something else.
As the sun set and the moon rolled on high, I walked along the strand, reflecting back over our year now finished. Inevitably I thought of Bun, and could almost feel his presence, like a shade, keeping a brisk stride beside me in the twilight, pointing toward discoveries large and small. “Good man yourself, you haven’t done a bad job, not at all,” I could almost hear him whisper. Without Bun I would never have embraced Ireland so long ago, would never have been so mesmerized by this island and pursued our improbable adventure. I stepped down that lonely Irish beach and suddenly began to rejoice, thinking my transplanted family had completed a great circle of becoming on these shores, with profound indebtedness to my old friend.
“Every person I meet makes me larger,” Bun once said to me. Well, I was immeasurably larger for having known him, and now thanks to so many new friends in Ireland, my wife and kids were too. When each of us befriended another person here, when we were astonished by the outpourings of imagination and mirth that this society of storytellers tossed around like goblets of inspiration – well, we were passing on gifts first presented from Bun to myself, and in some not insignificant way passed ineluctably forward.
“Only enough to kill a hardened sinner,” Bun had said of his magic carrot elixir, but of course he was speaking of the incarnate spirit of Ireland, which by now seemed to be our element, too.
I wandered back to the village and found my family caught up in a sidewalk conversation with Gavin and his parents and many siblings. Looking back over everything that had happened, I could only conclude that we had done the right thing. But our departure to revisit the States loomed.
Our return to the U.S. in late July brought many reckonings, some salutary and some not. True, certain accents encountered on our first stop in Jamie’s New Jersey turf were grating enough to send one running for the nearest earplugs, if only the heat wasn’t so hellishly torpid as to discourage walking to the next room. “It’s a scorcher,” they say in Cork when the temperature is about as mild as an April breeze. An American “scorcher” could reduce an Irishman to a puddle, and I was gasping for the more moderate, albeit fickle, weather of our adopted land. But the ocean in New Jersey, while not remotely as beautiful as the coast of Cork, can be swum in for as long as one likes, without shrieking for the warmth of terra firma. The grilled hamburgers and steaks, the clams, sweet corn, ice cream, pizza, bagels, nachos, and junk food beyond naming were all much more indulgently satisfying, even if the strip developments that purveyed the stuff looked more nightmarishly ugly than anything Ireland has yet produced. Jamie’s family surrounded us with warmth, and even our young German shepherd, whom the in-laws had nurtured during our absence, responded as if we had only left the week before.
Our house in Connecticut, the next stop, seemed like a haven only fools could have ever left. By day, the kids swam in the lake, and in the evenings we had a string of those leisurely, mosquito-ridden barbecues that are the hallmark of an American summer – sixteen nights in a row featured visits by friends close and far, and my side of the family. Young Owen, who seemed to never eat in Ireland, suddenly wouldn’t stop. “I only grow in America,” he explained.
Yet many aspects of life there remained disenchanting. At the beach, the different cliques assembled in their usual spots, with invisible lines drawn in the sand around each one, and hardly a smile passed between the locals and the New York weekenders. Things work like that in present-day America, where people can let you know with one turn of the head that your conversation will be a burden, rather than joining together in the free-flowing exchange that is Irish life. I myself grew introspective.
One night we drove thirteen miles to the nearest watering hole in a chintz-bedecked New England inn – a distance that anywhere in Cork would offer a dozen talk-filled pubs. Several people inside well knew that we had returned from an unusual experience, but studiously paid little heed, indifference being one way to show superiority in our part of the States. A great Irish-American talker who had made a killing on Wall Street cast a wan smile our way before mouthing, “How ya doing?”
“Great. We’re just back from a year in I
reland.”
“Really? Must have been interesting,” he perfunctorily muttered before retreating to his table of fancy friends.
“Book the next flight,” I said to Jamie. In Ireland, people with whom one has only passing familiarity scuttle forward with enthusiastic salutations and earnest questions after an absence of mere weeks. The climate is not remotely as chilly as in New England, at any season. I got scolded for parking at the wrong angle at the dump, of all places. In Ireland, there is no such angle.
Children, at least, are free of such adult games. Ours rejoiced in the kids’ amenities that flourish in America – miniature golf and mighty amusement parks, frog-jumping contests, swimming races, and bicycle parades around the town green; so many indulgences of childhood that the Irish have not yet organized. So we worried about a potential insurrection as our return to Cork neared. But our young travelers barely complained when we headed off for Year Two. After such a huge summer, they actually pined to return to the other half of their dual lives.
Return to beginning of chapter
Chapter 25
“It’s my go,” screeched Owen as Feidhlim booted a ball down the street toward Harris. The boys had been back on their Cork pavement for mere minutes but the thread was effortlessly rejoined. Laura, meanwhile, had her beak in a phone – excitedly calling her scattered West Cork friends.
Jaywalking with the Irish Page 23