The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  ‘I have to deliver a lecture in London before Christmas, and we could meet up then if that timing suits you.’

  This next paragraph sets a limit to the effort Terry was prepared to make in his acceptance of Redmond. It was a business that required his attention. Terry didn’t want to open himself up to collecting long-lost relatives he didn’t need. Apart from his beloved cousin Maura in Dublin, Terry isn’t in touch with his relatives in Laois. The purpose of the meeting would be to give information to Redmond about his mother, and also his father, although information on the latter would have to be speculative. And he was wary of offering information in a letter, since he didn’t know how it would be received: Redmond was a stranger to him. From his psychoanalytic experience of dealing with these matters, Terry anticipated the differences in each other’s upbringing and outlook on life would prove too great to forge an alliance.

  ‘The least you are owed is information about your mother, and I shall facilitate you briefly in sharing what I know. I don’t want to cause you further hurt, but opening up the family archive poses many complications. My mother married an alcoholic, which brought difficulties that I believe you can understand. The final decade up to the death of my sister was another trying time for us. When all of my family had died, as well as suffering grief, I was relieved.’

  In this section, Terry is acknowledging Redmond’s legitimate hurt, and he’s making his attempt at healing a wound, which he knows is impossible to salve. There were aspects to Terry’s family life that he has found difficult, and doubly difficult being forced to confront them again in these circumstances. He suffered anxieties and responsibilities down through the years that Redmond had been spared. Terry deliberately understates the damage that living with an active alcoholic, wife or father, causes to the family through wryly acknowledging their shared experience. Terry also implied that his sister was troublesome. I know from listening to him that there were times when life in Hatch Street was hell on earth. In his mind, these two experiences add up to a lifetime of family hurt. In stating that he was happy to be freed from the obligation he felt towards his family, Terry was implying he didn’t want to revive another familial situation with Redmond, who was a shadow stalking him from out of a dream.

  ‘Today would have been Sarah’s 97th birthday. Did I ever really know her? I know now that she made decisions about her life which had nothing to do with me.’

  The revelation that Redmond was Sarah’s son has fatally undermined the image Terry had of his mother, a violence that appals him. He accepts no responsibility for the choices that she made at the time, about which he has no personal record. Coincidentally, the letter to Redmond was being written on Sarah’s birthday, so that in keeping with anniversaries which register in the collective unconscious, she too was having a hand in the direction of this process: Redmond would be receiving a letter inspired by his mother. In a very real sense, Terry was giving her voice.

  ‘With every good wish, Terry O’Sullivan.’

  He ended on a formal, but warm note, wishing Redmond well. This was an important statement, because Terry could have reacted differently. The period of reflection caused him to regard this situation in the way that he specified in his letter. However, Terry is conscious that this is the first letter that Redmond will have received from a family member, and his intention is to be kind. At no stage does Terry refer to Redmond as his half brother. The fact that he names himself signing his full name re-emphasises the fact that up to a year ago, Terry was a member of different family. It further demonstrates his intention that Redmond’s existence isn’t going to alter the position that has prevailed for the past sixty years, although in truth, he doubts whether that will ever be possible.

  Terry has meditated deeply on the nature of family. The experience he had of growing up in Hatch Street has had to be re-imagined by him. The feelings from that time have been submitted to a process of thought that has grappled with the concept of the stranger, who is an unrecognised part of himself. In the dream, a stranger can pose a threat, but it also brings new or unused qualities whose potentiality can be mobilised to help the dreamer. And Redmond, whom he has never met before, is a character that has come to Terry in a dream, or even a nightmare, calling for his attention. He brings with him a more penetrating understanding into the emotional restraint of his mother, who suffered the unbearable hurt of being separated from her child shortly after birth.

  Terry recalled that on her deathbed, there was a moment of closeness where they both had trembled on the brink of truth. He had posed a question to his mother: ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Mum?’

  Sarah had hesitated. He could see that she wanted to tell him something, and at the same instant he realised she was so heavily dosed with medication, it would have been unfair to take advantage of her vulnerability, so he pulled back. He moved her on to other matters, not realising that there was a revelation to be disclosed by his mother, and the moment had passed. He told me he’d often wondered what she would have said had he been prepared to wait, and not bring matters to a premature conclusion. He also speculated whether the hesitation was, in fact, his own.

  Terry didn’t hear his mother’s answer at that time. She has spoken now, some years after her death, as if the past and the future are equivalent, and somehow part of the present moment. By way of his response, Terry mobilized within himself the resources he needed to deal with the birth of Redmond on the day of his mother’s birthday, a birth which had been announced on his own birth date.

  It would be invidious to term Terry’s early December meeting with Redmond in London an anticlimax, because for both of them, it was a momentous event. Terry had steeled himself to meet Redmond for the first and possibly only time to tell him about his mother, but Redmond had arrived armed with photographs to tell Terry about himself. It was as if the absence surrounding his birth had made Redmond determined to insist on the actuality of his existence. The many photographs from various periods of his life in Canada and in Britain that he spread out across the table in the hotel lounge were an additional, visual proof of that. Terry recounted, ‘He didn’t ask much about Mum: I don’t think he knew the questions to ask. Don’t get me wrong: he had excellent verbal skills. He informed me that he’d had no firsthand experience of having a mother, or of growing up in a family. If you’ve never had a mother, how would you know what questions were the right ones? For over three quarters of a century he thought that his name was Patrick, until he was given his birth certificate and read his actual name for the first time a year or two ago. Redmond has lived his whole life as someone else. It was a very sad, a very tragic situation for all concerned, and I felt deeply for him. He had an idealised picture of his mother. At one stage he said that it’d be nice if Mum was here to witness this event, and I said if she were here I’d want to kill her!’

  Redmond was shocked, and said, ‘Oh, don’t say that!’

  And I said, ‘It’s alright: it’s just a figure of speech … But still I’d like to kill her!’

  The following morning, when Terry got into the taxi to take him to Paddington station, in the ten minutes it took to get there, I was surprised to observe that he told the whole story of his mother and of Redmond and his reason for being in London to the driver. As I was hauling the case along the platform towards the Heathrow Express, without me saying anything about what had just occurred, Terry turned towards me, stopped and took a rest. Waving his walking stick towards the heavens, he explained, ‘It’s like throwing confetti into the air: let the wind take the words where it will …’

  I understood then that he was handing over the encounter with Redmond into the maternal care of the metropolis, which seemed appropriate. For Terry had known his mother, Sarah, all his life, but he hadn’t ever met Sarah, the woman, until now; she’d been a stranger to him, until she pulled aside the curtain of her reticence, and inhabited her rightful place, which was now complete: a filling up of pure being. And as we sped out of the darkness
in the station and into the light, the air seemed to be alive with falling particles of dust, or seeds blowing in the wind, or maybe they were droplets of mist or hail drifting down like the lightest snowfall changing the appearance of everything. We didn’t speak of it again.

  Part Eight

  That Dingle Day

  ‘Dingle no longer exists by law.’ Those words of a former Minister for the Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking area, expressed the sense of dislocation we felt three hundred kilometres south-west of Dublin city in County Kerry, as we wandered in the wind through the streets of, what was officially known after a local plebiscite five years ago, as An Daingean. Dressed in dark suits and ties, swishing overcoats and shiny urban shoes, the solitary winter visitors drew bemused glances from the locals, layered in woollens. We bought two ice creams at Murphy’s ice cream parlour, passing time, waiting for the funeral of my publisher, Steve MacDonogh, to start. The incongruity between the business of living and the waking of the dead sparked a memory. When Terry’s cousin had died in Laois, he and his mother were late into the house, and the recitation of the rosary was in full swing when they’d arrived. As the prayers swirled around them, Sarah made her way through the throng over to the coffin, knocked on it to make sure it was made of oak, and then stood transfixed: ‘Is that an apple tart I see on the table there?’

  ‘Shhh Mammy,’ whispered Terry, indicating the body, ‘remember Kathleen!’

  ‘Oh, she won’t mind: she’s dead, and I’m famished!’ said Sarah, valuing the living over the dead, and heading directly for the table.

  The death notice in the newspaper had said that Steve’s body would lie in the funeral home for two hours, between three and five o’ clock, before its cremation elsewhere. We’d driven past the utilitarian building standing proud on the outskirts of the pretty fishing village, on our way in from the county-town of Tralee, where we’d lit a candle for the happy repose of Steve’s soul in the Dominican church a few hours earlier. Less than two years ago, at our first meeting in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, during one of the only extended conversations we’d had with him, Steve had mentioned that he was the son of a Protestant clergyman. He also alluded to the fact that when he’d published the memoir of Gerry Adams, the republican leader, it had caused trouble for him with members of his family. ‘Somebody had to do it,’ he’d said. ‘Freedom of expression must be upheld!’ The manuscript of At Five in the Afternoon had contained a chapter about my great-grandfather’s fight for Irish freedom in the 1880s, at the time of the Land League. So maybe that was one of the reasons Steve had warmed to my book.

  While we were standing in the way of the wind and whipping white foam of Derrymore Strand, scattering Terry’s sister’s ashes over Tralee Bay some two years previously, Steve had phoned us, offering to publish the book. ‘You’re a wonderful writer,’ he’d said to me in the only time that he’d betrayed his feelings, ‘but your book is all over the place. Would you be prepared to work with an editor?’ I’d been a Senior Producer/Director in RTÉ for over a decade, so my experience of editing the beginning, middle and ending of every programme I’d ever worked on was extensive, and I took umbrage at his criticism of my skills. ‘I’ll think about it and get back to you,’ I said to him loftily with the confidence of the novice, ‘but thank you for your offer, which I appreciate.’ And I clicked off the mobile phone.

  Terry was looking at me aghast.

  ‘What?’ I asked him.

  ‘You’ve sent that manuscript to thirteen publishers already, and it’s taken over a year to get to this stage,’ he said.

  ‘So? What d’you think?’

  ‘I think you should get over yourself!’

  I rang Steve back immediately to say that I’d be happy to work with an editor, if that’s what it took to get my book published. I could appreciate submitting to unexpected requirements from my experience of working in the allied field of television production, where the necessities for getting a programme onto air were various, and often surprising. As we consigned the small packet of Eileen’s ashes to the waves in the birthplace of her beloved father, having first had to break open the sealed wooden casket with a car jack (‘She was always stubborn,’ remarked Terry), we gave thanks to his sister for having looked after us, and having found for us someone who’d finally agreed to publish the book, as the wind blew her ashes over the frothing waves, and her spirit moved like a queen across Corcha Dhuibhne and Uíbh Ráthach, before a gathering of the souls of the dead screamed out over the Beara peninsula. Now we were back on a visit to Kerry once again, where Death still seemed to hold sway.

  My book was shortlisted by the Irish Book Academy in two categories of the National Book Awards: the RTÉ Radio John Murray Show Listeners’ Choice Award, and Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. Despite my misgivings, Terry and I felt obligated to attend, not only because Steve had bought the tickets and invited us to the gala dinner as his guests, but primarily because of his shocking death the week beforehand. My book was the only publication of his Brandon imprint to have made the shortlist. I heard he’d been visiting Morocco, and that on his way home to Dingle, he’d been driving erratically through Limerick city, when the Gardaí had pulled him over. They realised at once that something was badly wrong, and Steve was admitted to hospital, where he went into a coma. Subsequently, he was airlifted to Cork University Hospital. One lunchtime, midweek, I received a phone call from my literary agent, Emma, who seemed to be in a state of shock: I had to ask her to repeat what she was saying because it sounded so garbled, so incredible: ‘Steve MacDonogh has died in hospital of a brain haemorrhage.’ It was hard to take in such unthinkable news. Steve was a relatively young man, barely sixty years of age, younger than me. He was in charge of my book: it was his production. Suddenly, he was dead.

  I’d found Steve to be an intense and shyly reticent man, who had protective boundaries in place. When he spoke in his hesitating, guttural voice, the words seemed to be wrenched from him. He gave the impression of being watchful about what he was saying. I was unable to read the absence of emotion I experienced in his presence, other than to conclude that he neither liked nor disliked me, and I was unnerved by that neutrality. It was my writing that he was interested in, and I found such a compartmentalising split difficult to handle. I believed that my soul was written out into my book, that the words therein were expressive of my being. After the initial flush of support around publication, there was little contact between us. The tragedy of his awful, sudden death confirmed me in my feeling of having been cut adrift.

  Over the course of that day, the shocking jolt of hearing about what had happened to Steve brought into focus random thoughts about the vigour with which we live our lives, as if there’s no tomorrow. While the big question about the meaning of life seems to be answered by the simple, existentialist practice of living it, I was cast down, afflicted by obsessive thoughts of whether a particular life – Steve’s, my own life – mattered that much in the end: whether it had any value whatsoever, other than to swell the chorus of the living. I was visiting my brother Kie in his hospital room where he lay dying from cancer, and he’d said, ‘Nobody will care when I’m dead.’

  I argued back instinctively, ‘Your family loves you,’ which seemed to be a non-sequitur, almost as if love were some sort of protective tether that could fasten him to the living. We stared at each other in silence, overwhelmed by the fright of our helplessness, and the import of our doomed love one for the other, still unexpressed. That was fully fifteen years ago.

  The Dingle day was to hold many surprises. At three o’clock in the afternoon, a hearse followed by a line of cars drove slowly down the hill from out of the green, patch-worked countryside, and pulled up in front of the funeral home. The low light levels in November, the cold, foot-stamping feel of the weather that day, contributed to the dismal mood of the groups of people chatting in hushed tones who were scattered round about. A people mover following directly behind the hearse had peeled off and turned int
o the car park by the sea where Terry and I were standing in the way of the wind, and came to a halt. Several people got out, including a tall, strikingly beautiful young woman in her early thirties, with a luxuriant mane of well-cared-for black hair. She was wearing high-heeled boots, and was glamorously clad in expensive black suede and leather clothes; she carried a young child in her arms. Our friends, Jen and Garrett, had met Steve before in Morocco, so we’d known he had a place there in the hills beyond Essouira, where my writing hero, the sainted Jean Genet, lay buried in the Spanish graveyard. The death notice had mentioned his wife’s name Maryam, and also referred to his daughter Lilya, so I guessed that the woman who looked like a model was Steve’s wife from Morocco, and the pretty little girl would be his two-year-old child, who was clutching a soft toy in her hand.

  We all made our way towards the funeral home, and crowded together under the covered terrace at the front of the building. A local fife and drum band had materialised as if conjured up from out of the depths, and they began to play a lament. A man in a raincoat standing in front of them held aloft the tricolour, which swayed fitfully to the swirl of the music, in the breezes blowing in off the sea. I could see that the northern politician and President of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, was one of those who were lifting the coffin out from the hearse.