On a Sunday evening, I still think ‘I must phone Mum’ and realise with a dunt that she’s no longer at home in the Mall to take the call. She’s no longer there at the centre of the family to weld us together, her pledge of responsibility in the case of a familial default. The catastrophe of the concluding act of the drama, that fracaso which develops if the torero has failed to impose his will on the bull during the initial cape-work, is becoming clearer. And yet through this new gift of discernment and clarity from writing out the words and seeing where I can find my bearings, I’m being led to accept that the wrongness, which I don’t want, is the truth; and like everything else in my life, it must be assumed, and heroically borne. After some inspired cape-work with the muleta, I now stride out into the very centre of the arena for the suerte de matar, the kill. It’s a battle that has begun in the evening of my life, at five in the afternoon.
My mother is seated at the piano in the nursing home, effortlessly playing a medley of Al Jolson songs: ‘Swanee’, ‘The Camp Town Races’, ‘California Here I Come’. One song follows the other, tumbling out, expressing joy. She has a smile on her face as she inhabits this world of musical feeling. Then to my astonishment, she switches to ‘Black and White Rag’, and ‘Twelfth Street Rag’. We used to listen together to Winifred Atwell play these pieces, tuned in to Radio Luxemburg, waiting for Dad to come for his tea. Mum looks across at me as if she knows what she’s doing, sharing with me these memories, handing me a present, as much as to say, ‘I’m still here. Listen to what I have to say in the music, Michael, listen to the music, which was always our language.’
I join her at the piano, and pick out a duet on the high notes. It’s the piano music which can continue on.
Part Seven
Terry’s Mother
Terry no longer receives birthday cards in the post, because his mother and all of his immediate family are dead. On the morning of his last birthday, he was delighted to receive a large letter addressed to him at home: ‘Isn’t this great!’ he exclaimed, as he eagerly tore open the envelope. He unfolded the page, and held the letter in his hand. He was staring at it uncomprehendingly. Eventually he said ‘It’s from the Health Service Executive. “Dear Mr O’Sullivan, we are searching for the son of Sarah and James O’Sullivan …”’
I continued to watch him carefully: ‘That’s you.’
‘We would like you to contact this office.’
‘What does it mean?’ I asked.
He looked at the heading address. ‘It’s from the tracing office.’
‘The tracing office? Maybe somebody has died and left you an inheritance.’
‘I’ve a feeling I’ve got family I don’t know about.’
I was astonished. ‘But how could that be?’
‘A cousin down in Laois was trying to get in touch with me a month ago, and I hadn’t been able to contact him; I’ve a feeling this must be what it was about.’ He glanced at his watch ‘There’s a number here – a woman called Martha – I’ll ring her after nine.’
We continued to speculate about the import of the letter, and what it could be about to carry into Terry’s life on the morning of his fifty-ninth birthday. From our work in analytical psychology, we know that anniversaries are important dates not only in the lives of the individuals concerned, but also in the wider collective unconscious of the family. They order events to come forth in due time, in a synchronous relativisation of time and space that cannot be explained causally.
Terry took a morning off to travel across the city to meet with Martha, as she had requested. In her office, he received the definitive, bewildering news from her that he had an older half brother, now in his seventies, who had recently arrived in London from a lifetime spent in Canada. Martha treated the matter with great sensitivity, mediating the fact that this man now wished to get in touch with Terry, his remaining family. Terry was very shocked. ‘He’s not my family,’ he stated unsteadily, ‘all of my family are dead.’ For whatever reason, the man’s existence was a secret that Terry’s mother, Sarah, had taken to the grave, although Terry suddenly recalled a bitter row down in the home-place in Laois when he was little, and Sarah’s twin sister, Aunt Nan, had called his mother ‘a whore’. It was likely that his aunt knew, because the sisters had always been particularly close. In the ensuing discussion with Martha, it emerged that the man had been raised in an orphanage in Cork, always believing that his mother was dead, and afterwards he’d emigrated to Canada. It wasn’t until the institution by the government of the redress board that he learned the truth: Sarah had been eighty-four years old when she’d died. The man had brought his family back on a visit to Ireland some fifteen years before. They’d stayed in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, which is less than a kilometre from where Sarah was living in Hatch Street.
‘Wasn’t my mother a warm and generous person?’ Terry asked me, despairing. ‘I know that she was undemonstrative: she’d never volunteer a kiss, but I believe she was a loving mother. She was non-judgemental and very liberal in her outlook. She always took the part of the underdog. When my cousin Maura was fighting with her mother, she’d travel into Hatch Street to confide in Aunt Sarah, who immediately got on the phone to defend her. I just can’t reconcile the loving mother that I’ve known all of my life, with the callous treatment meted out to her son.’ And the man was indeed Sarah’s son: Terry had viewed a copy of his birth certificate. He’d been born in the Stella Maris nursing home in 1935, three years before Sarah met and married Terry’s father.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘you don’t know the circumstances surrounding this man’s birth.’
‘But to surround the man with silence … I can’t get over it!’ Terry shook his head. ‘I can’t forgive her that.’
For several weeks following that meeting with Martha, Terry was destabilised emotionally. The foundational premise on which he’d constructed his life had been undermined. He no longer recognised the picture he had of his mother: ‘Not my mother …’ he said, incredulous, denying, sometimes laying the emphasis on the ‘my’, more often on the ‘not’. Day after day, Terry combed through the archive of his memories to find reassurance and a place of security, but as the search continued he became more and more anguished. Far from the expansion he sought, there was a narrowing of perspective that pressed in upon him, and the distress with which he was afflicted, the pain and the sorrow brought anger in its wake. The comforting unity of the family he’d grown up in – father, mother, his eldest brother, Joe, and Eileen, his older sister who protected him as the youngest – had been irremediably altered by the sudden intrusion of this interloper, who’d introduced himself into social circles where he doesn’t belong: ‘He’s my relative, not my brother. I didn’t grow up in his family, just as he didn’t grow up in mine.’ The fact that his mother hadn’t entrusted Terry with this information during her lifetime hurt him grievously. ‘She’d have known that I wouldn’t judge her. I think the only time that I slapped my mother was when I charged her with not really wanting me, and she admitted that she didn’t. I wonder now was that a transference from not wanting her first baby? Or maybe not?’
Over the years, he and his mother had coped with the blight that living with an alcoholic father, and a sister who suffered from manic depression, had brought to the door of the family home in Lower Hatch Street. They grieved together when Terry’s eldest brother Joe was killed in a car crash. ‘He crashed his car into a lamppost on Upper Leeson Street (I remember it was one of the first BMWs sold in Ireland), and he ended up entangled in the railings of the house, from where Joe had to be given away to be temporarily fostered for his own safety. My father was a significant threat to his firstborn, an established phenomenon in some alcoholic men. He’d threatened to throw him out the window onto the railings below, and my mother wasn’t able to protect her baby. And then I was forcibly taken away from my mother’s lap by the nurse, to spend two years in hospital when I suffered polio at four years of age.’ He reflected, ‘That was the law of the
land, which you had to abide by. Still is,’ he added, trying to understand a fracture that seemed to be repeating in his family’s history, aiming towards a conscious acceptance of the horror. ‘They held onto Eileen because she was my father’s favourite.’
Sarah was an enterprising woman, who worked successfully all her life to provide her three children with the best, private education. The continual dramas caused by her husband’s violent alcoholic behaviour and her daughter’s illness didn’t prevent her from always trying her best to create ‘a happy home: I want everyone to be happy!’ Terry still suffered from residual guilt that he took himself out of that situation in a mighty bid for freedom, to set up home with me. Since their deaths, at least he wasn’t compelled by the anxiety that a phone call from Hatch Street could trigger. ‘After Eileen’s death, which was the last one, I remember taking off on a flight to Spain, and realising that I didn’t have to ring anybody about it, and that I didn’t feel guilty. It was the first time that I knew my sense of obligation was officially retired.’ He was angry with his mother for leaving her baby on his doorstep, this time from beyond the grave. She’d made certain choices in her life, for which he couldn’t be held responsible. And he was also angry, however irrationally, with the half brother he’d never met, because he didn’t want to have to deal with him. He was feeling stalked by the ghosts that had once haunted Hatch Street, ‘the madnesses of my family’ as he termed them. From the terror he was now feeling, they seemed to have kidnapped him once again.
Terry was immensely sad for what had befallen his mother when she was barely twenty-one years old. The Ireland that she lived in immediately following independence from England was a cruel and repressive place, where the religious orders of the Catholic Church had moved into the big houses to take the place of the ruling landed gentry. They set up novitiates and schools and orphanages in them, which sometimes became places of cruelty and sexual abuse, from which Christ was excluded. When Sarah found herself pregnant, she lost her job in the civil service, and was also banished from the tranquil farm in Laois where she’d grown up, condemned to a life of exile. Terry deduced that the man who’d made her pregnant came from a nearby farm, because in her speech, his mother always had expressed a soft spot for this particular man down through the years. Terry had heard that he went off unexpectedly to join the priesthood, perhaps absolved in confession of his sin of the flesh, and his name doesn’t appear on the baby’s birth certificate. Terry said that from the photographs he’d viewed in Martha’s office, the stalwart man in his burly build must look very like his father, more so than resembling his mother, although he does have her chin. He was surprised to see that Sarah had called her baby Redmond after her only brother. He was the eldest in Sarah’s family, but he’d died in his early twenties.
Sarah nursed her infant for six weeks, at which time she was sent away from the nursing home. And in a pitiless move, the case notes reveal that she had to be prevented from attempting to make visits to see her baby afterwards. The 1930s was an era of deference and of obedience to the authorities in the new Irish state, and despite Sarah’s repeated best efforts to make contact with her baby at the time, she’d ultimately complied with what was demanded of her, and she never made contact with Redmond again, so that the child had to make his way in the world all alone, without the support of a family.
‘Isn’t it awful to think that she never heard her own child speak?’ Terry surmised, ‘My mother must have been terribly ashamed of her pregnancy never to speak of it. Or maybe the pain of having to give up her baby was so severe that she just had to cut off from her emotions. Or maybe the truth is a mixture of both? What I find hard to understand is why my mother didn’t trace her son in the more liberal era of the 1980s and ’90s, particularly as my dad was dead by this time. Although he surely would have known: when he was drunk, he used to call me a “cur” and a “tinker’s breed”. It all makes some sort of grotesque sense now, although the meaning of what happened escapes me entirely.’ As Terry began to settle, he was full of empathy for his mother. ‘Those were the impossible choices that Sarah had made, and lived by.’
Martha was encouraging of Terry to make contact with Redmond, who subsequently wrote him a short letter, enclosing some further photographs. His life had paralleled his mother’s to the extent that both of them had married alcoholics. Terry’s mother had married his father on the promise of him giving up the drink. He lasted as a teetotaller for a fortnight, and she remained married to him for forty years. ‘At least Redmond had taken the further step of divorcing his wife. Our lives in Hatch Street would have been so much better if my mother had had the courage to do the same: the courage to face up to the truth on many levels.’ Terry took Redmond’s letter and his photographs with him on that ill-fated holiday to Italy, from where he expected to have the leisure to write him a considered reply. They were stolen, together with some photographs he’d assembled of his mother, in the robbery of the hire car at Fiumicino airport in Rome, the eternal city. So he decided to let the matter drop.
Fully a year later in Spain, I was working at my computer, swimming in the 27 degree heat of a very early August morning. It wasn’t yet light. All of the windows were open, letting the slight breeze move over my skin and circulate throughout La Mairena. At that time of day before dawn, it’s easy to be spooked in the stealthy silence. A gust of wind can billow the toldos, the awnings over the terrace, so that they creak harshly, or a door will slam shut, even throw a piece of furniture about like a poltergeist: nature is on the move. I thought I heard a footfall, and turned to make out a figure suddenly stand motionless in the darkness at the far end of the room. I got a surge of shock.
‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ said Terry, ‘but I had a terrible dream.’
‘What is it?’ I enquired gently.
Terry approached me until he stood in the circle of light spilling out from around the desk. ‘My brother Joe was in it, and I was very anxious lest he find out accidentally that he was no longer the eldest in the family.’ He sat down heavily into the couch.
‘What do you think it means?’
‘I wanted to be the one to tell him: controlling the mess in Hatch Street, which was my usual position in the family. There’s obviously a part of me, since I’m now the oldest surviving member of my family, which is grossly offended, outraged really by the news that I have family I knew nothing about, that I’m the eldest survivor no longer. There’s also something there about a loss of status, a loss of rank from the position of being keeper of the flame, the protector, the educator, almost being in the fatherly position, really: they looked to me to save them, and I failed …’ He reached for the television zapper. ‘It was a very vivid dream,’ he said. ‘I think what it means initially is that it’s time I wrote that letter to Redmond.’
Over the next few days, Terry talked about his feelings. The dream was on his mind, and we clarified in those ongoing discussions what Terry wanted to say to Redmond. He analysed the dream in greater detail, allowing it to work through his consciousness so that he was able come up with a position which honoured the truth, and the life he’d had with his family in Hatch Street. While the dream proposed a position desired by his eternal unconscious, he was very aware that there was a third position to be arrived at, which also partook of what he consciously wanted, so that justice could be done to both presentations. He parsed and discussed every word.
‘Dear Redmond,
‘It was a shock to hear from you, because your mother never revealed her secret to a soul.’
Terry begins his letter factually. Despite Sarah’s silence surrounding the birth, he was acknowledging that she was Redmond’s mother. In the same breath, he was keeping himself outside of that particular mother/son configuration.
‘Nobody can condone what happened to you at an abusive time in Ireland’s history. I’m finding it hard to reconcile the cruelty you experienced, with the unwavering kindness of the mother I knew.’
Terry is s
ympathetic towards Redmond. He’s saying that eighty years ago, the zeitgeist, the attitudes of people in Ireland were repressive and punishing and shaming. Even so, he makes the big statement that he can’t condone what his mother did to Redmond in abandoning him to an orphanage, and he labels his mother’s treatment of Redmond as cruel. However, he also defends his experience of his mother. He didn’t want to say that he can’t reconcile these two conflicting sides of her; rather, with Terry’s penetrating understanding of human nature, what he said was that he’s still finding it hard to reconcile them.
‘She named you Redmond after her eldest brother, whom I know she had loved.’
In concluding that opening paragraph, he goes on to reassure Redmond that through his naming, not only was he acknowledged as the first born, but that his mother had loved him.
‘I believe you were told your mother was dead. When you discovered the truth recently, you must have been full of expectation.’
The nuns lied to the orphans of Ireland on behalf of the state, torturing them further by telling them that their mothers were dead. Terry could see that if you were made to live out such a lie, then you’d be very angry at that abuse of power. His mother had lied to Terry by omission in not telling him about Redmond’s existence, and he was furious with her about that.
I’d pointed out to Terry, ‘If you’ve lived all of your life as a solitary with nobody there to lend support, then the natural expectation from finding family after such a lifetime, is driven a desire which is unmediated by reality, and unboundaried.’
Terry was acutely aware that these two reactions of anger and expectation are without limits when evoked in a child. They can never be satisfied, although they can be tempered over time and brought into alignment with the present reality of the adult. It’s a position Terry had been caught in with his family for fifty years due to the inadequacies of his father, and Terry is adamant that he no longer wants to live in such a bind: he values his freedom, which was late in coming. The encounter with Redmond had the potential to be fraught. ‘I wish my sister, Eileen, were alive. It’s too demanding a burden to be landed upon the sole remaining relative, without the support of other family members there to absorb it.’ Terry was gaining a deeper understanding of what it means to be orphaned. He was also grounding himself in his understanding that he, too, has rights in this situation.
The House of Pure Being Page 12