•
I go with my father to the store and as he parks the car, I say, “Daddy, do you remember when we used to have parties in Yonkers and you would sing and recite poems?”
He smiles and furrows his brow. “You remember that?”
“Yes. Everyone wanted you to sing and recite. Everyone clapped for you.”
He turns off the car, then nods, staring at the steering wheel.
“Why don’t you do that anymore?”
“Oh, people do that kind of thing back East, not here. It’s an Irish thing.”
But then he is quiet. He gives me money and asks me to go in and get the things from the store.
•
In spite of my sore throat and headache, I take a walk alone on the island through the narrow, turning pathways between the ancient unmortared walls, which protect small fields from the gales. Many of these little fields, I notice, have gone out of cultivation.
Because of the wind, the mist moves in big drifts like smoke, but it is so thick, I can see only a few feet ahead of me at a time. At a sudden turn, my heart jumps, as I find myself confronted by a figure seated on the wall, a red-haired boy, about eleven or twelve, with an elongated face, his eyes strange and pale behind red eyelashes. He wears a shirt and vest, and gray flannel pants much too large for him and rolled up, exposing his bare, dirty shins and callused feet.
I gasp, “You surprised me.”
My own voice makes me self-conscious, and my words sound high-pitched and off-key, as I imagine he must perceive them. By the baffled stare on his face I am sure he speaks only Irish.
I move past him through the maze, turning back to see if he is still visible, but he is hidden in the mist.
On a storm beach level with the ocean, a massive weather-worn freighter leans to one side, beached on rocks, a few shreds of disintegrating rope still twisted on the masts. Except for big patches of rust, it is the same gray color as the sea and the stones it is beached on.
I walk as close to it as I dare, the low rocky shore at my feet, the inexhaustible sea roaring with tremendous force, beating at everything around it. I remain awhile, taking in the sweep of isolation and the wild, unexpected strangeness of all of it. As I stand in the wind, the boy’s face haunts me.
•
On a Saturday morning, Jerry drives me to Tito’s Market to get groceries. He waits in the car while I run in and when I come back and put the bags in the backseat, the air is filled with pot smoke. He doesn’t talk to me much anymore. At home he stays in his room listening to records.
As he turns out of the parking lot onto Cerrillos Road, I ask him to stop at the Rock Shop, the place he was always pleading to go to when he was little. He seems reluctant and wants to know why.
“C’mon!” I say. “We haven’t been there in such a long time.”
It’s colder inside than I remember it, with its cement floors and horned sheep skulls displayed on the walls. No one else is inside but a man in a cowboy hat sitting in a chair behind the cash register.
“Look, Jer,” I say, and show him the fossil of a fish, its spine intricate, each rib clearly delineated. He looks at it with hazy, indifferent eyes.
•
Dad drives to Manny’s Lounge, and parks. “I’ll only be a minute,” he says and goes in.
After fifteen minutes I am worried and tired of waiting. I get out of the car and go up to the entrance of the bar, gather my courage, grasp hold of the door, and pull. The air inside is shadowy and cool, almost chilly, and smells of maraschino cherries and whiskey. A multitude of bottles glimmer against a long mirror beneath a dark wood and red vinyl wall. I step inside and some of the men hunched over their stools turn and stare, the blurred shine of alcohol in their eyes. My father is among them but doesn’t turn. I touch his shoulder. He looks up surprised and smiles at me.
“C’mon, Dad. You’re taking too long.”
An extra layer of light gleams on his eyes. “Crummy kid,” he teases. “Why don’t you have a Coke? Manny, give my daughter a Coke, and throw some cherries in it.”
A man with a big red smirking face sits two barstools to the left of my father.
“Tony, this is my daughter Regina.” He says my name slowly and musically.
“Hello, Regina,” the man says, mimicking the way my father said it, like my name is a lyric in a song. His tiny, wet eyes rake my body. “Beautiful girl,” he says.
“You hear that, Regina, you crummy kid?”
I turn and face my father, but I can feel the man’s eyes on my back.
“Daddy, I don’t want the Coke. Let’s go,” I urge.
“All right, all right,” he says, still smiling, and stands, throwing cash on the bar.
Driving home, my father seems hardly there at all, coated in a glassy numbness.
“Don’t tell your mother I stopped,” he says as we pull into the driveway.
•
It is Mom’s birthday and we give her a pair of pajamas and the album from the musical Coco. It must have been Dad who bought these things and Tracy and Sheila who wrapped them, because this is the first I know about them. After we give her the presents, she calls us all into the den and tells us to sit down. She brings a kitchen chair into the middle of the room, then drapes the new pajamas over the chair. Taking a bottle of iodine out of her pocket, she splashes it all over the pajamas. Tracy gets up to run out of the room and Mom screams at her to sit down, that she isn’t finished. She then takes the record album out of its sleeve and smashes it over the back of the chair.
“Barbara, for the love of Almighty God!” Dad says.
She turns and looks up at him, then reaches for his face, her fingernails penetrating, tearing his cheeks. Blood runs down in four streams on each side.
I wonder if it is happening quickly or slowly. Is it happening so fast that he can’t get away?
•
In second-grade religion class, I raise my hand. “I saw a sign that said God is dead.”
“Don’t even repeat that!” Sister Concetta cries and shakes her head. But I can tell that she’s heard it before.
I realize it is not a secret, this idea that God is dead.
•
Dad is still not home. I think of the four deep cuts on each cheek, how he stood still, blood dripping down, staining his white shirt. He left the house without cleaning himself up.
The whole day passes and my father does not come back. I notice that he left his wallet on the side table. He has no money, wherever he is. But he has to come back for this. He has to come back. Out the window, the street is dark, except for the occasional headlights of passing cars, visible through the leaves of the poplars.
My father’s wallet smells of tobacco, metal, and dull leather. The soft, worn wallet grows warm in my hands. I put it down on the coffee table and it seems to sleep there.
•
In the evening, I scale the hill to the pub, where I sit alone at a table near a window. Mrs. Flaherty has given me aspirin, and the pounding in my head is less. Now and then I remember the fifty pounds and wonder if Laura might have taken it. My pulses thrum with anger at the idea.
It is not yet dark out, but already the islanders who do not use electricity are lighting their kerosene lamps.
I wave to a Dublin couple, Finbar and Eileen, who are also staying at Flaherty’s. They join me. They have been here three days, and Finbar, lanky and sandy-haired, talks about the ruggedness of the isles and the fact that there are no trees, only the maidenhair ferns that grow between the stones. Eileen, who has a heart-shaped face and curly dark hair, says that Connemara, the mainland shore east of the big island, is also treeless and barren, all rock. She quotes someone famous who said that the rough-hewn Aran Islands are “fragments of Connemara, flung offshore.”
When I tell them that I am an actress and I’ll soon be moving to Dublin, they describe the pubs in Temple Bar near the quays, where the theater people gather, and tell me about the Project Arts Centre, which does innovative
Irish theater. I write these things down on a piece of paper and put it in my purse.
“You’re flushed,” Eileen says and puts her hand on my forehead the way my mother used to when she thought I might be feverish. When she orders me a hot toddy for my sore throat—Irish whiskey, boiling water, a spoonful of sugar, and four or five cloves—and promises it will also help my headache, I am convinced that she is one of the warmest people I’ve met in Ireland and tell her so. She smiles and when she puts her arm around me a moment, I rest my head on her shoulder.
•
It is morning when Dad comes back looking frazzled and exhausted. “I’m only here to get my things,” he says. The cuts on his face have formed thick, dark scabs. He is shaking, and I think it must have to do with the fact that he is about to see my mother, and like all of us, from moment to moment, doesn’t know what he will encounter.
“Don’t go,” I say to him and he meets my eyes.
He seems as lost as I am about what to do, as uncertain about what is ahead.
“Stay home, Daddy, please.”
It seems to matter to him, my saying this. I put my arms around him and hold hard. His breath pauses. I sense, with a shock, his awareness of my breasts, of my body, and I am flooded with shame. Impending womanhood makes me desperately sad.
I break the hug and to hide what I am feeling, repeat the word, “Stay!”
We stand in silence. His eyes are heavy with exhaustion.
My mother comes calmly down the hall.
“You should get some sleep,” she says.
My father sighs, the suspense over.
He sleeps in their bedroom with the door closed, while my mother sits in the living room drinking coffee.
Later in the afternoon, I look into my parents’ room. There are four thin streaks of blood on the pillowcase where the scabs must have opened while he slept.
•
Eileen and Finbar speak Irish to some locals, a dark-haired woman named Macha, who looks to be in her midtwenties, a quiet man I take to be her husband, and two other men, both talkative, probably in their thirties. Eileen explains that I’m American, and they regard me with interest.
Macha invites us along to a cottage set on the rocks over a pounding sea. There is no electricity and the only illumination comes from the burning hearth fire and a few kerosene lamps. The room is austere, the floor stone and earth. I imagine it is the cottage where Denis and I live in Tír na nÓg.
•
We sit in a circle on rough cane chairs, the backs tied and formed of some kind of sinewy rope. A fresh salmon boils in a black pot hanging from a crane over the fire. I am the first to be given a piece when it is cut, and the first to be given a bottle of Guinness, which Macha’s husband distributes.
“They’re so gracious,” I say to Eileen and Finbar. “But particularly to me.”
“We’re strangers, too,” Finbar says, “but you’re from a far shore and don’t speak the language so you’re the real guest.”
“Only the crude and lowborn would be ungracious to a guest,” Eileen adds.
“You never know with whom you break bread,” Finbar says and winks. “For all they know, you could be a saint.”
One of the talkative men sings a ballad in Irish while the other man holds his hand, turning his arm over and over in a circle as if he were winding him up. Everyone listens with absorption. Eileen translates for me in a whisper. The song is about fifteen Aran men who are fishing for black pollock from a high rock terrace in August 1852 on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin. A monstrous wave rises from the sea and swallows all of them, a consequence, some believe, for working on the holy day.
Macha’s husband tells a story in Irish. In a whisper, Eileen explains, “He says he met an archangel on the road in Kilronan.”
Macha tells us that earlier in the century, and not that many years since, when Aran people left to immigrate to America, wakes were held for them because in most cases they’d never return to Aran, and so never be seen again. But the emigrant ships that sailed out of Galway Bay for America had to wait sometimes for days in the lee in the southeast part of the big island for a favorable wind. And so the loved one might be seen again on the ship, but at a distance, visible but untouchable, waving to those being left behind.
“Like seeing a ghost,” Eileen whispers.
•
I don’t go home on my seventeenth birthday. I hear from different people at the college that my mother and father have been looking for me.
I’m sitting in a Pizza Hut, sharing a pizza with another girl, Hattie, whose dorm room I sometimes stay in, when my father appears.
“Come home, Regina. Let’s go,” he says.
“But look, Dad. We just got this pizza.”
“I’ll wait in the car while you finish,” he says.
I ask the waiter if there is a back way and escape. I stand behind a building farther up Cerrillos Road and see my father go inside again. A few minutes later he storms out, gets in his car, and drives away.
Later when I am back in Hattie’s dorm room, the phone rings.
“It’s your father,” she whispers.
“Hello,” I say.
“Don’t ever come home,” he says. “I never want to see you again.”
I go home an hour later and apologize to him. With little energy, he accepts.
•
“There’s a mosquito somewhere in the car,” Dad tells me.
As he turns onto Cerrillos Road, I notice the mosquito on my wrist, but before I can slap it, it’s gone.
“It bit me,” I cry.
Dad is giving me a ride to the college, and we drive the short distance in silence. I think of how I betrayed him only days before, made a fool of him. First Nanny treated him horribly, then Mom, and now me. I know he is still hurt, that he hasn’t forgiven me. There is an awful resignation in him. I want to say something to fix what I’ve done.
He pulls over in front of the building where my first class is, then says, “Look!” He gestures with his head to his hand, which clutches the steering wheel. The mosquito is poised on his finger.
“Why are you letting it bite you?” I ask.
He doesn’t react, but watches it. On impulse, I lean over and slap the mosquito, still on his finger. Dad winces. The mosquito is crushed, blood smeared on his knuckle and on the palm of my hand.
He stares at the blood. “Some of that is your blood,” he says, waiting a few moments before reaching into his pocket and taking out his handkerchief, then wiping the blood and dead mosquito off his hand. He crumples the handkerchief with the smashed mosquito still inside it, and puts it back in his shirt pocket. “There’s a poem by John Donne called ‘The Flea,’ about two people bitten by the same flea.”
His mood lightens as he tries to remember the words. “We are met and cloistered in these living walls of jet . . .”
I tremble with hopefulness, the lines suggesting a closeness between the poet and the person being addressed. A poem might help heal the rift between us.
“One blood . . . made of two . . .”
About to continue, he takes in a breath, his mood still elevating.
“The flea is . . . our marriage . . .” He stops, not completing the line, as if he’s run into a wall. He drops his eyes and seems not to breathe.
It isn’t me in the poem with him anymore.
I reach for the handle of the door, but I don’t open it. A cloud crosses the sun so we are left in shadow. It seems a long time we sit this way. When the cloud passes, the sun is so bright that the metal on one of the windshield wipers glints and briefly blinds me. I want to break the spell but don’t feel able to. Finally he coughs and turns on the radio.
One blood made of two . . .
It requires great effort to reach into the backseat for my bag. He keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead through the windshield. I picture a tiny pinpoint of blood leaking through the pocket of his thin white shirt where the crumpled handkerchief is stuffed.
I go through the card catalog in the college library and find a volume of John Donne’s poems that contains “The Flea,” then look for an isolated place to sit and read. At the very back of the library, a vast window faces out across a long stretch of wild grass. I can see passing cars and hear the distant noise of engines.
I find the words that broke my father down:
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
I close my eyes and picture the tiny pinpoint of blood on my father’s shirt pocket.
•
I leave the library and walk. I cannot stop thinking of the mosquito, a fragile and intricate creature, poised so purposefully on my father’s finger. How easily, how negligently I crushed it.
•
Back at Flaherty’s, my sore throat keeps me another night from sleep. Throughout the dark hours I hear a dog barking without urgency.
•
My father’s four brothers, big, gently inscrutable figures, arrive from back East for the funeral.
I gather the facts I have about my father: He was the youngest of five boys. His father died when he was four, and his mother supported them by working as a cleaning woman during the Great Depression. John, the oldest, six years older than my father, virtually raised him.
I press them for more details. I learn that because my father’s intelligence scores were so high, he worked during the Korean War breaking enemy codes. I want more, more personal memories of him, more details of his life, but all I get are vague abstractions, things I already know: Your father was well-read. He was a very erudite man. He was charismatic.
“Are there any memories you have? Any important things you can tell me about my father?”
Ghost Songs Page 15