On Canaan’s Side

by Barry, Sebastian

  He was very startled to see me, I thought. I had knocked on his porch door, but hearing no answer, ventured in. The old cream paint was peeling off the wooden-panelled walls. There wasn’t a picture hanging in the place, nothing.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, when I told him why I had come. I believe he had offered himself for work a few weeks before, but that place was already taken by Mr Cuffee, the Shinnecock man. But Mr Cuffee had gone off, taking a violent dislike to the large new mowing machine, which he deemed ‘no damn good’. So now the Wolohans did need a man after all, to follow the mower around their acres of grass, and a thousand other tasks. ‘I was just wondering, did I need to be thinking of moving on.’

  In those days it was said work was more plentiful, but work always needs to be gone looked for, no matter what they say.

  ‘I’m really glad,’ he said. ‘I guess you work there in the house?’

  ‘I cook for the Wolohans,’ I said.

  ‘And I bet you’re a fine cook.’

  ‘Not so bad,’ I said.

  ‘You an Irish woman?’ he said. ‘Just going by the accent?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘long ago. Long, long ago.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Tennessee myself, but – you know. Nolan. Inishmore, my grandpa was from there. I couldn’t say I’m just certain where that is. Ireland somewhere.’

  ‘You can come Monday, anyhow. Grass is coming up round our ears.’

  ‘You tell Mr Wolohan I’ll be there, bright early. Really good to meet you, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  So I was remembering that. Nothing really, chit-chat, although vital to Mr Nolan’s well-being, or so I imagined at the time. It is a nice task to go over to someone and tell them they have a job. Work is the oil of the soul.

  *

  We ride to our doom, like the cowboys, we surely do. But not that time.

  ‘This is my sister Maria, the saint,’ said Mike, when we got to her little apartment in Washington.

  ‘Now, that’s what he says, Lilly,’ said Maria. She was wearing a lace-trimmed skirt and a lacy blouse. Her hair was in a motionless perm. ‘Me, I’m no saint. I never met a saint. I suppose some saints did good things. Our mama, she loved St Agatha of Sicily, whose breasts were cut off by the Romans. You can see her, Lilly, in her paintings, with her little breasts on a plate in front of her. They look like two baked buns. And that’s why she is patron saint of bakers, which was our father’s trade. Sensible work.’

  ‘Now I hear about myself, how stupido I am to be in this line of work,’ said Mike. ‘But it’s good work.’

  ‘Cheating couples. That’s not good work.’

  ‘Aiye …’

  They were already rowing, brother and sister fashion, and I was hardly in the door of her apartment. Even as she spoke, turning her head to me, appealing to me as a woman for sense, like a little volcano of energy she had taken my baby, and was changing him on her kitchen table. She had already been primed up to get napkins for Ed, who right enough was wearing one so heavy with pee it was as big as the rest of him. Tiny and soft, as gentle-looking as the first thing in God’s creation to be called gentle, he made a miniature murmur under her ministrations.

  ‘And you can have your bath, Lilly, I have so much hot water in the cistern I could set out to sea with it like in a steamship. My God, I wait and wait. How long it take to drive down from Cleveland?’

  ‘A long, long, long, long time,’ said Mike, and I knew, exhausted as I was, that he was also in the deeps of exhaustion, the endless great river of headlamps on the highway having poured so much light into his brain he must have felt like he was permanently in the heart of an explosion. Ed had slept and fed, slept and fed, and I had followed suit, inescapably, but when I woke, every time, I said a prayer to God to thank him for sending me Mike Scopello, who seemed to me a winged man that time.

  *

  And I think the Sicilians could pray to St Maria of Washington if they wished. I bet she would get their prayers answered, double-quick time.

  *

  I must have been with Maria three years, and when I was fit and well, after a month, worked with her in the great fruit market outside the city, where the enterprising women there kept a crèche for the babies. There were lots of babies, Italian babies, and one Irish, or whatever Ed might be.

  I was all the world for Ed, and hardly knew it. There was a carousel he loved set up in a wide street of lofty trees that had the breeze living in their leaves like birds. The low roofs of the city made me think it was a pristine Dublin. All the great buildings ranged about, and me and Ed among them, in the half-noticed paradise of his childhood. Half-noticed by me, because my mind was often on other things, and half-noticed by him, because he seemed to have forgotten so much of it when he was grown. ‘Ed, do you remember when you loved to roll down the sloping gardens?’ ‘No, Ma, I don’t remember that.’ ‘We did it every Sunday, Ed, without fail. You were mad keen for it.’ ‘Maybe I remember it, a little, Ma.’ That hand in mine, that woundable hand, the woundable hand of every child, us moving through the gentle public gardens of Washington. My hand stained permanently yellow from packing the pears and the apples in the market. A woman approaching fifty, and a little neat boy with close-cut hair. Our smiles mostly for each other, and every stranger a possible demon or bear, till they proved otherwise. Then reaching the fabled carousel, and waiting till his favourite horse came free, he would ride no other, then round and round to the tinny music, swelling up into the dry trees, and when the carousel man held out the token in the shape of a ring, all the children would fiercely try to spear it with the sticks provided, Ed’s face the most fiery and determined of all. The great days when he bagged a free ride, the triumph in his face, and the darkening street rescued by the lamps coming on, one by one, with their electric ping. I see that carousel in my dreams, it goes round and round, and Ed rides there eternally.

  *

  Then I got work with Mrs Wolohan’s mother. I don’t know where I had earned the luck for that. Maria was so pleased for me. It was she who saw the notice in the paper, Situations Vacant, and that an Irish woman was preferred. There was going to be fancy cooking involved, said Maria, I could bet my hat, and she had borrowed some books from the library, so I could brush up. The biggest one was called The White House Cook Book, which was all the recipes that the wives of the White House had put together over the decades of American history. What they had been cooking while the story of America progressed.

  ‘This family,’ said Maria, ‘big high-up people, and they will be used to cooking like that. You get this job, you can spit on my head, from on high.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t think I will want to spit on your head.’

  ‘No, but you could, if you get this job. From on high.’

  It wasn’t anything to Mrs Wolohan’s mother that I had a child. In fact it was almost a good thing. Mrs Wolohan’s mother believed in good deeds, without the colossal molasses of nonsense that usually goes with them. She believed in Fairness, with a capital F, and people making their way, and the principle of the Helping Hand.

  I gave my name as Bere, not Kinderman. She liked that my name was Lilly, because she was a very Catholic woman, and grew Madonna Lilies religiously. She had an old painting in her house of the angel Gabriel presenting a lily to the Blessed Virgin. It’s a strange name, because some years later Mr Eugenides said he liked it because in Greek weddings the bride wears a crown of lilies. Mr Dillinger liked it because in the old Greek story Zeus slept with Alcmene, a mortal person, and put the resulting baby at the breast of his wife Hera while she slept, so that the child would be more divine. She woke up and cast the baby from her, and the spray of milk from her breast became the Milky Way, and the drops that fell to earth became the lilies. Mr Eugenides never mentioned that story though, even though he gave a book of Homer to Bill.

  ‘When my son was killed in the war,’ Mrs Wolohan’s mother said once, ‘I thought of the Blessed V
irgin at the cross.’ I have thought of that often. She sitting in her smart suit, at her elegant table, saying a thing like that, to pull the heart out of your chest.

  I cooked for that woman like I would cook for God, if He were ever so human as to be hungry. She was mistress of a vast American mansion, with marble pillars and pink walls and cushions with scenes of men hunting deer in France. Porcelain ladies danced on her high mantelpieces. Presidents and emperors and kings and dukes had dined at her table, including Michael Collins and de Valera, years before.

  ‘But not on the same night, Lilly,’ she said, rightly laughing at her own wit.

  She professed to like my cooking but it didn’t stop her bringing in a French chef, two of them, three of them, when she thought she needed them. Her grown-up sons and daughters glimmered in the house on family gatherings. One of her sons was a senator just up the hill in the Senate house.

  It’s a fact that once upon a time one of the richest women in America was also one of the nicest.

  When my Mrs Wolohan, her daughter, married, I followed her up to the Hamptons. That must have been the mid-1950s. I was sad to leave her mother, but life was lived at such a speed in her house I was also a bit relieved to reach the quietness of Bridgehampton.

  It was nearly the wide open spaces that Ed seemed to dream of, even as a little boy. He loved books that showed the lost places of Texas, the Rockies, the deserts of the western coast. At least the great beach was there to entrance him. There were no red escarpments like west Texas, but there were mighty heaped-up yellow dunes for his nine-year-old legs to conquer.

  There was the little school locally for his lessons. In his white shirt and blue shorts.

  There was a lot of happiness, and then there was a lot of sadness.

  When I see photographs of the fifties, everything is always so clean. The sidewalks are clean, the tar on the highways is clean, the shirts of the men are starched, the women’s skirts haven’t a pleat out of place. I don’t know if it was like that. I hardly remember. Maybe. Everyone wanted to do well, live better, after the war, which had eaten up so many sons, including one of the sons of Mrs Wolohan’s mother. The world had come to an end like in the Bible, and now it was to be created anew.

  But as they used to say in Ireland, The devil only comes into good things.

  *

  But it was good for a long time. It was also the mid-fifties, I suppose, when Mr Nolan showed up in the locale. As soon as he was working in the same house, or in the same grounds at any rate, he would drive Ed back and forth to school. We strolled down, the three of us, to the picture show, a thousand times. We stuffed Ed with Mr Eugenides’ soda and pie.

  Mr Nolan threaded himself into our lives. I suppose it befits a handyman to be constitutionally helpful. It was curious how deeply he entered into my life, and yet how lightly. It was a sort of fact of life. Mr Nolan, a presence, like the sparrows in an Irish town. It was Mrs Wolohan of course paying him for his work, but for me everything was done gratis, so lightly and almost invisibly that I never thought twice about it. I liked him, but did I see him? Was he not almost not there, a lot of the time, even when he was there? He applied himself to Ed. No task seemed too much for him. He had a beat-up old auto, that he loved more than he did himself. Himself he tried to poison, many times over, with mammoth drinking bouts. He fought his own soul and spirit, gloves off, with alcohol. Mr Nolan.

  He used to read to Ed at night. He possessed an old volume of Winnie the Pooh, and they liked to read that together. I would hear them, in the American evenings, so unlike Irish ones.

  One night, when Ed was about eleven, going in to give him his kiss goodnight, I found Mr Nolan sitting on Ed’s bed. The both of them were weeping. Or rather, Mr Nolan was shedding a dark tear, and Ed looking blank and stunned. They had just got to the end of the book. Christopher Robin, Ed told me, was going off to boarding school, and Pooh wanted to know if he would still exist when Christopher Robin was gone.

  ‘It’s about the end of childhood,’ said Mr Nolan, inconsolably.

  He was a good man for things like that. He was also, now I think of it, a connoisseur of birthdays. I had forgotten that. He liked to give you store-bought flowers that day, and chocolates he used to get from the chocolate-maker in Sag Harbor. One particular birthday, he went to Mrs Wolohan and begged a free day, and drove me all the way down to Cape May, starting at first light, on our own, without Ed, ‘to see the lighthouse’. There was an old concrete gun emplacement in the sand there, still waiting for Hitler. Mr Nolan put himself in the water for a swim. It was so deathly cold he was only under for a second.

  ‘Well,’ he cried, ‘that is the end of the Nolan dynasty!’

  We climbed to the top of the lighthouse, up a cramped stone stairway, and at the top we were speechless with exhaustion. Mr Nolan admired the stonework, admired the scorched vista of the sea, and kept smiling and smiling.

  We came in home in the small hours, with that weariness in the corpse than only a long auto journey can give. Mrs Wolohan to my astonishment had with her own hands made sandwiches for us, beef sandwiches indeed, waiting for us on the kitchen table with a note, on one of her blue windmill plates.

  And Ed, who knew Mrs Wolohan nearly all his life, loved her. He was never the least bit shy of her, in her own shyness, and I must confess she put manners on him. I suppose he could have dined at his ease with kings by the time she was finished with him.

  This was all in the context of little meals sometimes, rarely enough I suppose, with her, when the table was put out under the colonnades in the summertime, with the lake brought a little closer therefore to Mrs Wolohan’s blue-slippered feet. When she was eating, she was at her wittiest, and she teased Ed into a magnitude of good manners, as if she were preparing him for the diplomatic corps.

  But in his deepest heart Ed loved those big spaces. That’s where he was trying to get to, all his life. He loved all the cowboy films we saw with Mr Nolan, and that the old film house owner loved too, and delighted to show to the good people of Bridgehampton, even though we were a little short of endless expanses of American landscape, with cattle and cowboys in them. He was a small dark man called Mart Pelowski, who had swapped his potato farm for the cinema, off a man called Billy Waldron. Mr Pelowski had trouble getting prints of the new films in those years, but he got them. He would go down to the New Jersey distributors, and beg the prints off them. His little premises only had a hundred seats, and therefore in the good weather, and for a popular film, he would move everything outdoors, and people would bring their chairs in the back of their pick-ups and station-wagons, and he would show The Man of the West and Last Train from Gun Hill on the gable wall of the building. The whole town, workers and nobs and in between, and especially every man jack child among them, would exult in our island of perfected peace, watching the wondrous mayhem on Mr Pelowski’s wall. Next morning everyone would have red bites on their ankles, from the mosquitoes, and the wide plains of Texas in their hearts.

  All the summers he was down on the beach, growing brown as a chestnut. The dunes were his Himalayas, the sands his Sahara. Mr Nolan would be there on a Sunday decked out in his ancient chequered shorts, and myself in my sensible bathing-suit, with a touch of gay colour, but that would nearly stop the blood in your veins with its wires and bones and gusset.

  Mr Nolan’s body hard-looking as dried logs. Myself getting older, that strange map of blue veins on my upper legs, a map to nowhere.

  As Ed got older I sat further away from him on the dunes, so he could revel in a new aloneness, the fake aloneness of childhood, rich and intoxicating. His joys could be tiny. Nothing more wondrous to him, more desirable, than to hop, skip and jump over the burning sand to the ice-box man, a nice Shinnecock called Charlie Heat, and bring back the treasure of a Coca-Cola, so cold it was a form of heat, that he could hardly hold in his paw, and sitting on the merciless sand, and defeating the half-death of the summer by downing the icy liquid. Then in his mind he was a desperate tr
aveller across Death Valley, who had found a sudden oasis in the realm of doom.

  That was Ed’s vision of America, all in all, and when he finished high school, he wanted to go there working. And when that season was eventually approaching, I found an agricultural college in New York that would take him. We were all set. My hope for him was boundless.

  But that was the decade of assassinations, and Ed was young in it. Like a good youngster, he took it all to heart, he took it all personally. No one was shot without Ed feeling the bullet go through his own self. Medgar Evers was the first one, and then all that rosary of death after, with every bead a soul.

  *

  It was one of those deep dark summer nights. In Ireland in the high summer the light stays good till eleven. On rare hot days, people would linger down at the Shelly Banks till the last moment of daylight, strolling along the butter-yellow stones of the Great South Wall, the children flinging themselves into the shallow oily sea. But even in summer the Bridgehampton night seems to come early.

  Mrs Wolohan’s brother the senator had driven up for dinner, and with him had come the famous preacher Dr King. Mr Dillinger was also there, and the four of them talked quietly under the gathering darkness, the flowers of the wisteria slowly fading above their heads as the night blotted everything out. I had cooked scallops for them, and I had been asked by Mrs Wolohan to make pecan pie. I was worried, because I had never made it before. It wasn’t even mentioned in my White House Cook Book. Making something for the first time can have evil consequences. But I made something that at least looked like the illustration on the recipe Mr Nolan dug out for me.